Adventuring, Reminiscence, and Nostalgia: A Path to an Early California Identity

         In understanding San Francisco's urban collective identity in any one context requires the computation of multiple values of power and politics. Urban collective identity is the product of competing group's visions of the city vying for dominance within the public sphere (see my post). This competition often pits very divergent visions against each other. The Society of California Pioneers for instance competed as early as the 1850s to establish their vision of the city's history into the public narrative. Their vision, grounded in the romantic pre-American conquest Alta California, put particular historical significance on the cultural and economic seeds sown by California's first Anglo-American pioneers. The first pioneers the Society suggested, saw little to revere in the cosmopolitan mass that had developed on the cove of Yerba Buena or throughout California since statehood........

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Diploma given to members of the Society of California Pioneers.  Image courtesy of Online Archive of California.org

San Francisco and The City Beautiful

       

 To the Cloud: Pasted below is an excerpt from the introduction to my latest project. I believe it sums up my goals pretty well.

  In the late-19th century, San Francisco represented an almost imperial influence over northern California’s economy and culture. With the rise of progressivism and the maturation of cultural hierarchies in California, many of San Francisco’s commercial-civic elite displayed a particular vision of what they saw as the city’s collective identity. This vision, built out of the legacies of “California’s pioneer gold rush myth,” not only gave San Francisco’s elite classes a usable identity in a dramatically changing urban landscape, but also demonstrated their continual desire for social order and harmony.
          “Ordering the disorderly city” by San Francisco’s commercial-civic elite, according to Barbara Berglund, significantly structured the city’s social landscape. By controlling the discourse on public policy, public space, and politics, San Francisco’s elite overwhelming structured the lives of the city’s inhabitants. However, as Berglund points out, this “cultural ordering” is not a hegemonic force. In living in a 19th century city like San Francisco, residents and consumers demonstrated their own “consumer” structuring of the city. By residents living, consuming, and building their own private lives according to their own vision of the city’s identity, the elite’s “cultural ordering” was moderated, redirected, or blunted in ways that no one intended. It is in these inter and intra-class discourses, mediated significantly by market forces and individual consumption Berglund argues, that shape and mold how any one group (or theoretically any individual) perceives the city’s collective identity.
          For San Francisco of the 1890s, cultural ordering from above and consumptive ordering throughout represents a significant historical problem. How as historians are we to discern what vision of the city any one particular group believes? As David Glassberg has point out, detecting collective identity is easiest when it is being purposely deployed. Civic celebrations in the 19th and early 20th century in particular explicitly deploy a collective identity by its organizers or participants. To celebrate publicly in San Francisco California Admission Day for instance, those participants are not only declaring themselves Californian, but a particularly San Franciscan vision of being Californian.
         It is through these types of civic and public displays where group and collective identity can be investigated with some certainty. In San Francisco of the 1890s, civic and public displays were rich with symbolism, imagery, and dialogues of social power. It is in this vein where I hope to find the battle of San Francisco’s collective identity being played by various groups vying for their visions of the city being displayed to the public. The Native Sons’ of the Golden West for instance publicly displayed not only their hatred for the Chinese, but also demonstrated their own vision of San Francisco’s social order and thereby its collective identity. However no one group dominated the narrative of the city’s collective identity. Over time various group’s power to influence the collective narrative waxed and waned with the deployment of parallel and congruent forms of power such as political influence, economic dominance, or cultural leadership.
          How are we to measure an urban collective identity? Who determines what the outcome of this symbolic battle for an urban identity (the product of cultural ordering and consumptive ordering over time)? It is through memory, tradition, histories, literature, and art, ultimately that establishes any constant to urban collective awareness. As David Lowenthal suggests, collective self-awareness is constructed through weaving a “web of retrospection” through memories, histories, and relics. For San Francisco it would be Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, Hubert Howe Bancroft, John S. Hittell, Frank Norris and Jack London to only name a few, that created a collective continuity to San Francisco’s identity. Any challenge to the city’s collective identity, whether from the elite or from below, had to reconcile with the established narrative.
          As Glen Gendzel points out, San Francisco was dominated throughout the 19th century by a “Pioneer Gold Rush” narrative myth. In Lowenthal’s words, “all present awareness is grounded on past perceptions and acts.” The already fabled narrative of San Francisco’s “Pioneer” origin was thickly established and displayed in history books, public displays, and in the memories of inhabitants into the First World War. Any group’s challenge of that established narrative in writing, public displays, or in daily life, had to reconcile with the memories, histories, and relics of the city’s pioneer and mining past. And as Gendzel reminds us, challenges to the established narrative were numerous. Nevertheless, the competition between established and insurgent narratives of the city’s past and present narrative present a ripe landscape for understanding urban social power in the late-19th century city.
        San Francisco in particular, with a demographic legacy of cosmopolitanism, the struggle for ordering the city’s collective narrative was volatile, especially in the 1880s and 1890s. With the ascendance of James D. Phelan as Mayor in 1897, bringing with him a heavy progressive influence to the city’s collective identity. Phelan’s visions of a City Beautiful demonstrated how a single individual can mold the city’s image along his own vision. But few individual’s actions would converge with such power like James D. Phelan in the 1890s, Dennis Kearney in the 1870s. And even for ourselves as historians, Hubert Howe Bancroft who has had a dramatic impact on how historians understand California in the 19th century, has had great influence on perpetuating the Pioneer Gold Rush Myth of San Francisco and of California. How influential can one individual be on an urban collective identity? Does the concept of an “urban collective identity” even effective at understanding the past? My blog at Gilded Empire is an attempt to simply work through the influences on a collective narrative of San Francisco’s urban identity in the late-19th century.