The Suede Shirt

Reassuring the public in San Francisco in June 27, 1899

I lived in San Francisco, California for four years, and for a while I was an interpretive guide on local historical topics. In those days I was attuned to notice when current events called upon San Francisco residents' knowledge of their own history. A June 1, 2012, San Francisco Chronicle article reported on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's (SFMOMA) acquisition and exhibit of Robert Arneson's controversial "Portrait of George," an irreverently styled bust of the late San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. On November 27, 1978, Moscone was a victim, as was gay San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, of the assassin Dan White, a former San Francisco policeman and fireman and himself an elected San Francisco supervisor and political adversary of Moscone and Milk. White had resigned his supervisor seat 17 days prior, but he had changed his mind and wanted Moscone to reappoint him to his prior position. Moscone had announced that we would not do so and was in the process of choosing someone to fill White's seat. White entered City Hall through an unsecured basement window and shot Moscone and Milk in their respective offices.

Months later a jury convicted White of voluntary manslaughter, though he had been charged originally with first-degree (that is, premeditated) murder. On the evening of May 21, 1979, hours after the verdict was announced, members of the public vented their anger at the verdict during the events known as the White Night Riots. That night, an estimated 5,000 San Franciscans marched from the Castro District down Market Street to Civic Center Plaza and inflicted hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage on the exterior of City Hall and on San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) assets deployed at the scene. Not long after the riot subsided, SFPD conducted at least one retaliatory raid against a Castro District bar, the Elephant Walk. According to Wikipedia, at least 61 police officers and an estimated 100 civilians were hospitalized during the riots.

In the Chronicle article of June 1, 2012, SFMOMA's director Neal Benezra discussed the significance of the Moscone bust, and he remarked upon the Moscone and Milk killings and their aftermath, "After the 1906 earthquake, this was probably the most traumatic moment in the history of San Francisco." As I read Benezra's words, my thoughts hop-scotched backward into San Francisco's history to recall accounts of other difficult situations that the city got itself into. I began to consider what are the worst man-made events in San Francisco history, not the unpredictable natural events such as the catastrophic 1906 earthquake and fire.

So the question is: what man-made event in San Francisco's history caused more trauma--that is, more observed loss--for more San Franciscans than the 1979 White Night Riots? Here are six candidates.

Great Fire of May 4, 1851

The earliest incident that quickly came to mind is the fire of May 4, 1851, which destroyed around 1,500 Gold Rush-era buildings, or about three-fourths of the fast-growing "Instant City" (population approximately 25,000). This was the fifth, and most destructive, of six significant fires that San Francisco suffered between December 1849 and June 1851. Beyond the $100 million loss imposed on the city, the longest-lasting visible consequence of the May 4 fire was the rebuilding of most of the city's old waterfront and business district using brick rather than wood, as evidenced by the oldest buildings standing today in the Jackson Square Historic District.

Also destroyed on May 4 were the "storeships" NIANTIC and GENERAL HARRISON, whose charred hulls were rediscovered in the twentieth century more than a dozen feet below street level. At the time of the fire, they sat beached among planked walkways and former piers on filled land. Landowners along the waterfront were steadily adding new fill, including rubble from the city's previous fires, to extend their holdings into the bay. In this map that shows the extent of the burned district, you can see that in 1851 downtown San Francisco's grid of streets extended into Yerba Buena Cove as far as Battery Street.

After an investigation showed that the May 4 fire's likely cause was arson, local merchants and their political allies organized in secret to capture and punish the city's most distateful criminals. Led by then-newspaper publisher Samuel Brannan and a few others, they created a new kind of law enforcement body, the self-appointed and extra-legal Committee of Vigilance (also known as the First Committee of Vigilance, or Committee of Vigilance of 1851), with a self-claimed membership of 700 persons. During its three months of existence, the Committee was responsible for hanging four persons and banishing from the city for 12 months around a dozen more (mostly ethnic Irish immigrants from Australia).

When it disbanded, the First Committee of Vigilance announced that it would leave in place a secret "Committee of Thirteen" to monitor the enforcement of law and order in the city. (After 1851, the Committee of Thirteen placed only one or two notices in city newspapers and did not communicate with the public from 1854 to 1856.) No member of the First Committee of Vigilance was charged with any infraction by city authorities.

The leaders of the First Committee of Vigilance had also been active in 1849 to rid San Francisco of a relatively small group of ruffians, known locally as the Hounds, that were known to harass and assault foreign-born city residents and were believed at that time to commit arsons. So, the longest-lasting INvisible consequence of the May 1851 fire was the second precedent of the merchant class's brusque disavowal of elected politicians' authority to conserve law and order.

Second Committee of Vigilance hangs Cora and Casey at "Fort Gunnybags" before thousands of spectators on May 22, 1856

The pace of growth in San Francisco during the early 1850's, unprecedented in United States history, placed great strains on the city's political and commercial institutions. The yearly yield from the California gold fields peaked in 1852, while the city's (and region's) population and scale of commerce continued to expand. By 1856, with a population of about 50,000 persons, San Francisco had become the most ethnically diverse city in the United States and for some time had surpassed New Orleans as the nation's gambling hub.

As San Francisco's population and commercial activity grew, local politics became ever more of a battleground. By 1856, members of the Democrat Party held most of the elected offices. In the early 1850's an East Coast-style political "machine" had been emplaced in San Francisco under the leadership of David Broderick, who later was elected United States Senator from California. All but a very few of the city's 20-plus newspapers, all funded by advertising from merchants, were overtly (or covertly) friendly to the city's capitalists, so any sensational news relating to local politics, including accusations of election irregularities, was readily published. And the content of these newspapers offered little distinction in tone between hard news and opinion pieces.

Near the end of 1855, a sensational murder case had attracted the city's attention. The successful professional gambler Charles Cora, whose consort was the most famous "madam" in San Francisco, had been arrested for shooting to death the local U.S. Marshal William H. Richardson. In early 1856, his murder trial attracted huge publicity but had ended in a hung jury, and thereafter Cora remained in the county jail awaiting a new trail.

On May 14, 1856, newspaperman and local politician James Casey shot and killed the newspaper editor James King of William in broad daylight in downtown San Francisco. That day an ongoing public (and private) feud between the two men came to a head over King of William's published item about Casey's previous career in the New York state prison at Sing Sing. A failed banker with a massive chip on his shoulder, King of William had turned the seven-month-old EVENING BULLETIN into the city's most popular newspaper by publishing venomous critiques of the local political status quo (namely, local Democrat politicians). His funeral procession attracted many thousands of the city's residents. The perpetrator Casey had quickly turned himself in to the police, and he was jailed in the same building with Charles Cora.

The brazenness of the King of William murder shocked the city, and immediately the newspapers called for swift punishment of the accused. The same day, a notice authored by the Committee of Thirteen appeared in San Francisco newspapers that called for reconstitution of the Committee of Vigilance (that is, the Second Committee of Vigilance, or Committee of Vigilance of 1856). New members were received by word-of-mouth recommendations, and the names of its executives and rank-and-file members were kept secret.

Within two days, over 3,000 men were received into the Committee, but no women members were allowed. The Committee had a 19-person Executive Committee (led by businessman William Tell Coleman) and an Assembly of Delegates (around 40 members) whose role was to approve or disapprove the decisions of the executives. The number of the Committee's rank-and-file members eventually grew to over 8,000 men, most of whom were armed with rifles and muskets purchased in the city. The city's arms merchants were in business to supply weapons to filibustering expeditions being outfitted in San Francisco to illegally enter Mexico or the nations of Central America. One journalist of the day (James O'Meara) who was critical of the Second Vigilance Committee reported that thousands of rank-and-file members were not American citizens and did not speak English. A few years prior to 1856, the notorious American filibuster William Walker led two different private armies outfitted in San Francisco into northwestern Mexico and, more infamously, into Nicaragua.

The Committee skillfully used newspapers in San Francisco and other California cities to legitimize their activities in the eyes of the public. They began by criticizing local politicians for an inability to prosecute and convict perpetrators of serious crimes, such as the murder of King of William. The Committee's newspaper notices also publicized its principles, agenda, and occasional public events such as parade marches of its rank-and-file members, ad hoc rallies, and, later, the four hangings that it performed during its 99-day existence.

As King of William's mortal wound was being cared for, the Committee began negotiating with the mayor and sheriff to hand over Cora and Casey, so they could receive the Committee's peremptory justice. On May 18, after the negotiations stalled, the Committee produced a cannon, which was escorted by several hundred armed committeemen to the jailhouse and aimed point black at its front door. The commanding officer of the escort demanded that the sheriff produce Cora and Casey (he did), and they were transported by carriage to Committee headquarters in the Truett & Jones wholesale liquor warehouse on lower Sacramento Street, soon to be named "Fort Gunnybags" for the barrier of sandbags that committeemen had stacked around the building's entrance.

King of William died of his gunshot wound on May 20. After a secret "trial" the same day inside Fort Gunnybags, on May 22 Cora and Casey were publicly hanged outside the Fort before an "immense crowd."

During the Second Committee of Vigilance's brief season of power, it:

Ignored the lawful orders of California's governor and San Francisco's mayor
Demanded the resignation of several duly elected San Francisco government officials, including the mayor and district attorney
Investigated, hunted, apprehended, removed from lawful custody, detained, and questioned persons accused of certain crimes, and also persons the Committee believed to be witnesses to those crimes, as well as selected members of the local Democrat party
Detained and banished from San Francisco (usually to Hawaii) several American citizens, two of whom later brought successful civil lawsuits against Committee members and the ship captains who transported them
Arrested and detained David S. Terry, a justice of the California Supreme Court
Detained and questioned David Broderick, a United States Senator from California
Without authorization, appropriated firearms from the San Francisco armories of California state militia companies
Intercepted transit of, and appropriated, a shipment of Federal firearms to San Francisco
Threatened a Federal judge with civil unrest during the trial in San Francisco of two Committee members for intercepting transit of, and appropriating, Federal firearms
Announced the formation of a "Peoples Party" and secret committee to nominate persons for public office in San Francisco (People's Party candidates won elections in San Francisco from 1856 through 1867, after which time the party's activities merged into the Republican Party.)
Paraded its rank-and-file members in a muster-out celebration with a greater number of men at arms than the U.S. Army marched into Mexico City at the end of the 1846-48 Mexican War

In a memoir, Edward McGowan, a former San Francisco city judge and a key Democrat political operative, describes how he was sought by the Committee in San Francisco, but fled the city in disguise and lived in hiding for weeks as far away as Santa Barbara while being hunted by Committee members who arrived in southern California aboard rented schooners.

Any one of these actions by the Second Committee of Vigilance might be considered a serious illegality, yet no member of the Committee was convicted of any crime. Among all of the Committee's actions, I chose the hanging of Cora and Casey as a candidate for next-to-worst day in San Francisco history because it was the culmination of the Committee's seizure of political power by force as well as the first demonstration of the Committee's success in persuading the citizens of San Francisco of the legitimacy of their extra-legal actions.

(Many eyewitnesses, journalists, historians, and social scientists have written about the motives, activities, and legacy of the Second Committee of Vigilance, and I plan to write more about this episode in San Francisco history. I believe that it is incomplete history to explain the Committee's activities solely as an effort to improve the effectiveness of San Francisco's institutions of criminal justice.)

Workingmen's Party Riots of July 1877

The next man-made incident that created unusual turmoil for large numbers of San Franciscans was the rioting in late July 1877 by hundreds of members and sympathizers of the Workingmen's Party. The unrest lasted for seven days, including the two-day anti-Chinese riot of July 23 and 24, which was the worst public rampage seen in San Francisco up to that time.

Earlier in the 1870s, an economic downtown in the eastern United States caused an increase in the migration of workers into California while also triggering a nationwide railroad workers' strike. Passage by Congress of the 1868 Burlingame Treaty had resulted in almost a doubling of Chinese immigrants (to 21,000) in San Francisco during the decade of the 1870s. Their numbers and willingness to accept lower wages stoked the fires of nativism among San Francisco's white workers. The economic downturn had reached San Francisco by 1877, and thousands of workers were unemployed. The unprecedented level of worker dissatisfaction was harnessed by leaders of the existing Workingmen's Party of the United States, who sought to pressure members of the Democrat Party in the California Legislature. The political ambitions of Irish immigrant Denis Kearney, a small business owner, led him to speak and help organize for a more virulent Workingmen's Party platform. He regulary ended his speeches with the slogan "The Chinese must go!"

As the workers' dissatisfaction grew, the city's leaders recognized that the SFPD force was too small to protect law and order. They were joined by the citizen-manned Committee for Safety (formed in both Oakland and San Francisco) led by merchant William Tell Coleman, who had previously led the Second Committee of Vigilance. When authorities recognized that mob violence was imminent, Coleman's capitalist cadre armed its members with shortened pick handles, a "Pick-Handle Brigade," while the local National Guard protected the city's armories.

The first major turmoil took place after local leaders of the Workingmen's Party of the United States called for a public meeting on the evening of July 23 in the sand lots near San Francisco's City Hall. The goal of the rally was to show support for striking railroad workers in Pennsylvania. (A report had been received on July 21 that 40 strikers had been killed.) The invited speakers exhorted the crowd of several thousands to support an eight-hour workday and an end to wage reductions. However, after a small portion of the crowd pressed forward to the stage to insist that the white workers' "Chinese problem" be acknowledged from the podium, a band of around 50 hooligans broke out of the crowd, marched into Chinatown and began attacking Chinese laundries (20 were destroyed) and adjacent businesses, even the Chinese Methodist Mission. As the number of rioters increased, the police found themselves unable to squelch all the mayhem-producing ruffians. Fewer than 10 Chinese were killed, but more were injured. The next day, the rioters massed at the waterfront around the Pacific Mail Steamship docks at Brannan Street in Mission Bay. SFPD and the Committee of Safety's members prevented any burning of the ships, but other businesses were torched by the rioters. After several more days of sporadic rioting, the Committee's presence of around 5,000 men succeeded in stifling all further outbreaks. (After negotiations with business interests, the Board of Supervisors doubled the size of the SFPD force in a series of steps between 1877 and 1878.)

After being rebuffed by the Workingmen's Party of the United States, Kearney formed the new Workingmen's Party of California, which won significant electoral approval both in San Francisco and statewide and whose members filled one-third of the seats at the 1879 California Constitutional Convention. But by the end of 1880, Kearney's Workingmen's Party had fallen apart, and he took his crusade across the country, with one result being passage by Congress of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that, with later legislation, suspended virtually all Chinese immigration through 1943.

While accounted-for losses from the July 1877 riots were significant (around $100,000), ending Chinese immigration into the United States had a much greater negative social and economic impact on Chinese residents in the tens of thousands already in San Francisco and elsewhere in California and the Pacific Coast states.

Bubonic Plague Quarantines of Chinatown in March and May to June, 1900

For several decades beginning in the 1850's, a pandemic of bubonic plague pandemic killed millions of persons in southern and eastern Asia. By 1894 the disease was found among the residents of Hong Kong. Within a few years, commercial shipping from Hong Kong to Hawaii and to the Pacific ports of the United States brought the plague, spread by rats infested with disease-carrying fleas, to North America.

A combination of incompletely disseminated medical knowledge, the influence of California's state-wide railroad political interests, and San Francisco's anti-Chinese political climate contributed to the dreaded bubonic plague gaining its first footholds on the North American continent. Because of quarantine-related hardships twice imposed on tens of thousands of residents of San Francisco's Chinatown, the plague quarantines of 1900 are the next candidate for worst man-made event in the city's history.

As early as July 1899, the Japanese ship Nippon Maru had arrived in San Francisco Bay carrying two plague victims who had died at sea, and plague was detected in the remains of two stowaways of the same ship who drowned in the bay near Fort Point. By December 1899, residents of the Chinatown in Honolulu, Hawaii, were reporting plague symptoms. (Entering the year 1900, local Honolulu authorities had quarantined its Chinatown residents for four months and on January 20, 1900, inadvertently burned down 38 acres of the neighborhood's buildings during its program to halt the spread of the disease.) On January 30, 1900, the Japanese freighter S.S. Nanyo Maru arrived in Port Townsend, Washington, carrying the remains of three sailors who died at sea, among 17 confirmed plague cases found onboard.

Public health officials in San Francisco were confident that the spread of bubonic plague would not reach the people of San Francisco. In part of a notice in the San Francisco CALL of June 27, 1899, the unnamed writer quoted a Dr. Lawler, a "Health Officer" in San Francisco:

"The disease will not get a foothold here; it cannot," [Lawler] said. "To make the disease epidemic there must be the same conditions existing as obtain in Asiatic countries. The people here do not live together like pigs, and they know how to take care of themselves. In the countries where the plague flourishes the domestic animals occupy the house with the people. There is no idea of ever cleaning the floor, and when an appearance of cleanliness is desired all the people do is to put a new layer of matting on the floor. They have no idea of sanitary regulations and they foster the plague by the filthy way in which they live. If the quarantine regulations are properly enforced at this port there can be no danger of any case of the plague getting in here. With the quarantine at Honolulu [suspect ships were decontaminated and detained for 14 days] in addition to the local precautions, the entrance of the plague is impossible."

However, on March 6, 1900, the 41-year-old lumber yard owner Chick Gin (Chinese-born, though an American resident for 16 years) was San Francisco's first confirmed case of bubonic plague. He was diagnosed post-mortem after suffering four weeks in the basement room that he shared with as many as 40 other men in the Globe Hotel, a flophouse located at today's Grant Avenue and Jackson streets. As the sun rose on March 7, San Francisco authorities had encircled a 12-block area of Chinatown with ropes, and police prevented all access to the area except by non-Chinese. It is estimated that between 25,000 and 35,000 Chinatown residents were thus affected. The San Francisco Board of Health lifted the quarantine during its third day after Chinatown neighborhood officials filed suit on 14th Amendment grounds.

To the city's dismay, additional cases of plague continued turning up, with the next 38 cases (through July 1901) diagnosed post-mortem. A second quarantine of Chinatown was imposed, this time demarcated using barbed wire, from the second week of May to June 15, 1900, but was lifted after a judge approved an injunction related to a Chinatown resident's lawsuit filed June 5. On June 4, the Board of Health announced acquisition of space on Mission Rock to hold up to 1,500 Chinese.

Including the first non-Chinese victim announced on August 11, 1900, plague cases continued to be diagnosed in San Francisco through early 1904. In the meantime, during the remainder of his term ending in 1903, California's governor Henry Gage (the choice of California's "Railroad Republicans," who were controlled by the massive Southern Pacific corporation) denounced the findings of local, state, and Federal public health officials, fearing significant repercussions against California commerce. Before the end of 1902, Gage arranged for the reassignment of outspoken bacteriologist Dr. Joseph J. Kinyoun, chief quarantine officer of the U.S. Marine Health Service (MHS) in San Francisco, to the quarantine facility on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. However, in cooperation with the Board of Health, Kinyoun's successor at MHS, Rupert Blue, more quietly implemented a program to exterminate the city's rat population. By the end of 1904 there had been no new cases for six months, and thus Blue declared that the local epidemic had ended.

During the rebuilding of San Francisco after the massive earthquake and fire of April 1906, a second outbreak of bubonic plague occurred in San Francisco, with the first case reported in May 1907. Blue returned to San Francisco to lead a second program of rat extermination, this time with the public support of government officials. By the end of 1909, plague had disappeared again from San Francisco. The first outbreak had caused 121 cases and 113 deaths (mostly Chinese victims, but also including four white and four Japanese victims), and the second outbreak caused 160 cases and 78 deaths (almost all non-Chinese).

West Coast Waterfront Strike of May to July 1934 and Vigilante Raids of July 17, 1934

The events known as the West Coast Waterfront Strike of 1934 took place within a broad and complex context of battles between labor organizers and employers across the United States during the worst years of the Great Depression. A key result of the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 was a new wave of union organizing across the country. Major strikes took place prior to May 1934 in Toledo and Pittsburgh, with dozens of casualties during skirmishes between strikers, police, and replacement workers.

By April 1934, labor activists in San Francisco had made strides to gain control of the negotiations agenda for the West Coast locals of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA). They called for a strike to begin on May 9, 1934, and on that day longshoremen in every West Coast port walked out, with the Sailors Union of the Pacific joining them several days later. Small-scale skirmishes between strikers and replacement workers broke out, and groups of Teamsters supported the strike (defying their own official leadership) by refusing to haul unloaded cargoes. By June 14, the shipping companies could no longer move goods off the docks in the Port of San Francisco.

On July 3, the shipping companies decided to end the stalemate by forcing a few trucks hauling goods through picket lines along the docks. Fights again broke out, and police fired tear gas and assaulted the strikers. After a day of rest due to the July 4 holiday, on July 5 a larger attempt to move goods was begun, and police turned firehoses on those blocking the way. Skirmishes broke out all along the waterfront as thousands looked on. On Rincon Hill there was a large skirmish accompanied by gunfire, after which the strikers, throwing bricks and large stones, fell back to the ILA headquarters on Steuert Street. The police closed in on the headquarters, and two men were shot in the back and killed. The day became known as "Bloody Thursday."

Workers called for a funeral procession down Market Street five days later to honor the two fallen strikers. An estimated 40,000 sympathizers attended the procession. The scene changed the tenor of the city's response to the violence. When the workers called for a general strike to begin on July 14, the entire city shut down in sympathy. Signs of sympathy appeared in restaurant windows reading "CLOSED TILL THE BOYS WIN." The general strike's success surprised even the overseeing strike committee.

However, on July 17, the third day of the general strike, a new escalation occurred. Guided by staffers of the shipping companies' Industrial Association, bands of "citizen" vigilantes, broke into union offices in several city neighborhoods, attacked those inside, and destroyed the offices' contents. In each case, soon thereafter, the police arrived to arrest for "vagrancy" any persons still on the premises. The National Guard blocked both ends of Jackson Street, between Drumm and Front streets with machine gun-mounted trucks, while vigilante gangs raided and ransacked the headquarters of the Marine Workers Industrial Union. Over 400 persons in total were arrested and jailed.

Also on July 17, city authorities took the initiative in the press. Mayor Rossi's statement that day was, "I pledge to you that as Chief Executive in San Francisco I will, to the full extent of my authority, run out of San Francisco every Communist agitator, and this is going to be a continuing policy in San Francisco." In the local press, "foreign-born worker" was equated with "Communist."

The vigilante raids scared off the small unions that had joined the larger strike, and the general strike collapsed after one more day. All strike activity that had been publicly announced by the unions ceased by July 30. However, in San Francisco, the Pacific Coast, and across the country, the major unions continued to make gains in benefits for their members during 1936 and 1937.

V-J Day Riot of August 14 to 17, 1945

The deadliest riots in San Francisco history occurred in response to the announcement on Tuesday, August 14, 1945, of the surrender of Japan to end World War Two. By the morning of Friday the 17th, 13 persons had been killed, over 1,000 were injured, six women were treated for rape, and immense property damage had occurred against businesses, streetcars, traffic lights, and so on. Ninety percent of the revelers were reported to be young Navy enlistees who had not yet served overseas. No charges were brought against any person for any crime.

The Suede Shirt

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What's the next-to-worst event in San Francisco's history?