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Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War
Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War
Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War
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Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War

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This lively history immerses the reader in San Francisco’s musical life during the first half of the twentieth century, showing how a fractious community overcame virulent partisanship to establish cultural monuments such as the San Francisco Symphony (1911) and Opera (1923). Leta E. Miller draws on primary source material and first-hand knowledge of the music to argue that a utopian vision counterbalanced partisan interests and inspired cultural endeavors, including the San Francisco Conservatory, two world fairs, and America’s first municipally owned opera house. Miller demonstrates that rampant racism, initially directed against Chinese laborers (and their music), reappeared during the 1930s in the guise of labor unrest as WPA music activities exploded in vicious battles between administrators and artists, and African American and white jazz musicians competed for jobs in nightclubs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 4, 2011
ISBN9780520950092
Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War
Author

Leta E. Miller

Leta E. Miller is Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is coauthor (with Fredric Lieberman) of Composing a World: Lou Harrison, Musical Wayfarer and Lou Harrison.

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    Music and Politics in San Francisco - Leta E. Miller

    f000a-01.jpg

    Michael P. Roth

    and Sukey Garcetti

    have endowed this

    imprint to honor the

    memory of their parents,

    Julia and Harry Roth,

    whose deep love of music

    they wish to share

    with others.

    The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous

    support of the Music in America Endowment Fund

    of the University of California Press Foundation, which was

    established by a major gift from Sukey and Gil Garcetti,

    Michael P. Roth, and the Roth Family Foundation.

    The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous

    contribution to this book provided by the Dragan Plamenac

    Endowment of the American Musicological Society.

    Music and Politics in San Francisco

    CALIFORNIA STUDIES IN 20TH-CENTURY MUSIC

    Richard Taruskin, General Editor

    1. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, by W. Anthony Sheppard

    2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison

    3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch

    4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, by Amy Beal

    5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider

    6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis

    7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier

    8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Art Music, by Klára Móricz

    9. Brecht at the Opera, by Joy H. Calico

    10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, by Michael Long

    11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, by Benjamin Piekut

    12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981, by Eric Drott

    13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, by Leta E. Miller

    14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth E. Levy

    Music and Politics

    in San Francisco

    From the 1906 Quake

    to the Second World War

    line.jpg

    Leta E. Miller

    pub.jpg

    University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

    University of California Press

    Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

    University of California Press,

    Ltd. London, England

    © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Miller, Leta E.

    Music and politics in San Francisco : from the 1906 quake to the

    Second World War / Leta E. Miller.

    p.    cm. — (California studies in 20th-century music ; 13)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-520-26891-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

    1. Music—Political aspects—California—San Francisco—

    History—20th century.   I. Title.

    ML3917.U6M55 2012

    780.9794′6109041—dc22                                          2011013960

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    21   20   19   18   17   16   15   14   13   12

    10   9   8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

    This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

    To the memory of my dear friend and colleague

    Catherine Parsons Smith

    who first encouraged me to focus my research on music in the

    United States, and whose book on the musical life of Los Angeles

    served as an inspiration for the present volume

    CONTENTS

    List of Illustrations

    Acknowledgments

    Abbreviations

    1. The Paris of the West: San Francisco at the Turn of the Century

    PART ONE. FROM THE QUAKE TO THE CRASH

    2. The Politics of Class: The San Francisco Symphony, the People’s Philharmonic, and the Lure of European Culture (1911–1930)

    3. The Politics of Race: Chinatown, Forbidden and Alluring

    INTERLUDE 1. Two Musical Tributes to San Francisco’s Chinatown

    4. The Politics of Labor: The Union(s), the Clubs and Theaters, and the Predicament of Black Musicians

    5. Musical Utopias: Ada Clement, Ernest Bloch, and the San Francisco Conservatory

    6. Opera: The People’s Music or a Diversion for the Rich?

    PART TWO. THE DEPRESSION AND BEYOND

    7. The Despair of the Depression and the Clash of Race

    8. Ultramodernism and Other Contemporary Offerings: Looking West, Challenging the East

    9. The Politics of Work: Idealism Confronts Bureaucracy in the Federal Music Project

    INTERLUDE 2. Highlights from San Francisco’s Federal Music Project: Take Your Choice and Keeton’s Concert Spirituals

    10. Welcoming the World: San Francisco’s Fairs of 1915 and 1939–1940

    11. Aftermath

    Notes

    References

    Index

    ILLUSTRATIONS

    MAPS

    1. San Francisco in 1913

    2. Historical map of San Francisco dated 1909, showing pre-1906 street configuration

    3. The stages in the location of the opera house, 1912–1932

    FIGURES

    1. Lobby of the Palace Hotel before 1906

    2. San Francisco’s old city hall before the 1906 quake

    3. The old city hall and Larkin Street after the 1906 quake

    4. Woodcut of Henry Kimball Hadley

    5. Herman Perlet

    6. Caricature of Alfred Hertz

    7. Women’s gallery, Jackson Street Chinese Theater, mid-1880s

    8. Chinese instruments: erhu and dizi

    9. Inside the Jackson Street Chinese Theater before 1906

    10. Paderewski and Marsick listening to Chinese music at a merchants’ club

    11. Postcard of the Mandarin Theatre, ca. 1940

    12. Sid LeProtti’s So Different Orchestra, 1915

    13. Ada Clement

    14. Albert Elkus, 1946

    15. Ernest Bloch, 1928

    16. Luisa Tetrazzini performing on Christmas Eve, 1910

    17. Tivoli Theater, ca. 1880

    18. Columbia Theater

    19. Wilbert Baranco and his jazz trio

    20. Henry Cowell, ca. 1923–24

    21. Lou Harrison in the 1930s

    22. The Northwestern University Band, 1905

    23. W. Elmer Keeton and his FMP chorus

    24. Sculpture of a Chinese musician by Helen Phillips

    25. Justitia Davis and Everett Boucré in Run Little Chillun

    TABLES

    1. Population comparison of the country’s largest cities, 1900–1920

    2. The original members of the Board of Governors of the Musical Association

    3. Compositions by Henry Hadley programmed during his tenure as conductor of the San Francisco Symphony

    4. Financial summary for the San Francisco Symphony’s first three seasons

    5. Repertoire of the Metropolitan Opera in San Francisco, 1900 and 1901

    6. Cities and number of performances on the Metropolitan Opera’s 1901 tour

    7. Some of the major subscribers to the opera house project, 1912

    8. Bohemian Club Grove Plays, 1902–1933

    9. Henry Cowell’s New Music Society concerts

    10. San Francisco Federal Music Project concerts, March 1937

    11. San Francisco Federal Music Project classes, March 1937

    12. Comparison of the musical offerings on two days of the PPIE and GGIE

    13. San Francisco’s population in 1940, 1950, and 2000

    For additional images related to this book, visit www.ucpress.edu/go/letamiller

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    This book could not have been written without the invaluable help of friends, colleagues, librarians, and assistants. Jonathan Elkus, David Nicholls, and Wayne Shirley read the entire manuscript. Bell Yung and Nancy Rao read the chapter on Chinese music. Paul Machlin and David Brackett commented on portions of chapter 4 dealing with jazz. Larry Rothe read material on the San Francisco Symphony. John Koegel sent extensive comments on the original proposal. The observations of all of these generous colleagues were very much welcome and have found their way into the final version of the text.

    Yen-ling Liu provided a wonderful service by searching through Chinese-language newspapers and translating relevant articles. Daniel Brown and Danny Driver worked with me on the transcription of the Keeton choir recordings. The examples presented in Interlude 2 reflect this joint work. Other colleagues, too, lent their ears to evaluating these recordings: Anatole Leikin, Patrice Maginnis, and Brian Staufenbiel.

    I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to interview several people who could shed light on topics of interest by relating their personal experiences. I particularly thank in this regard Jonathan Elkus, who has been an inspiration and a continuous source of new observations for the past three years. Earl Watkins (who died in 2007) provided fascinating observations on the musical labor unions, and Carmen Fraetis and Caesar Caiati kindly provided information relating to the early years of the San Francisco Opera. Lou Harrison was the inspiration that launched this project in the first place, and my numerous interviews and conversations with him continue to inspire my work.

    Among the many librarians and archivists who have helped with this project, I particularly thank Jason Gibbs, head of the music division of the San Francisco Public Library. He was always available for consultation, and his extensive knowledge proved crucial to my research. Jeff Thomas, the library’s photo archivist, located the amazing photo shown as figure 16 and arranged for my use of selections from the library’s rich collection of visual images. Joseph Evans, archivist with the San Francisco Symphony, graciously provided me with information and images, as did the staff at the California Historical Society. Shannon McQueen at the African American Museum and Library in Oakland, and Janet Olson at Northwestern University, helped me track down background information about Elmer Keeton, and Charlotte Brown at the University of California, Los Angeles, helped locate information on Harlé Jervis. The staff at the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound, and members of the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation (particularly Bill Carter and Leon Oakley), kindly provided me with access to the interview tapes and photos featuring pianist Sid LeProtti. Manuel Erviti, Matthew Weber, and John Shepard at the University of California, Berkeley, and Kevin McLaughlin at the San Francisco Conservatory welcomed me and aided with my research on Hertz, Bloch, and Perlet. Kate Rivers and other staff members at the Library of Congress were extremely gracious and efficient. And the constantly friendly service and encouragement of the library staff at the University of California, Santa Cruz, made this project possible.

    Officials of the San Francisco Musicians’ Union Local No. 6 were very supportive of my work. I would particularly like to acknowledge Gretchen Elliott, Alex Walsh, and Melinda Wagner. Thanks are due as well to Charles Hanson, executor of the Harrison estate, and to Ellen Bacon, widow of Ernst Bacon, both of whom made photographs, documents, and permissions readily available. Richard Teitelbaum kindly provided permission for me to use Cowell materials. Peter-Gabriel de Loriol was an invaluable source of information on his godmother, Harlé Jervis. Rabbis Paula Marcus and Yitzhak Miller provided valuable advice relating to Ernest Bloch’s Abodah. David Kear was a wonderful help in typesetting the musical examples, and Bill Nelson helped create the lovely maps.

    This book was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of California, Santa Cruz (Committee on Research and Arts Research Institute). These grants provided funding for graduate student assistants Alissa Roedig, Mark Davidson, and Jessica Loranger. Victor Carvellas helped with the photographs.

    Mary Francis, music editor at the University of California Press, encouraged the project from the outset and was extremely patient with my many inquiries. Eric Schmidt rendered excellent advice regarding the text and photo images. Finally, I must thank my wonderful husband, Alan, who not only provided constant support through the long years of research but also contributed his own photography skills to enhancing the visual image of the book.

    ABBREVIATIONS

    1

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    The Paris of the West

    San Francisco at the Turn of the Century

    San Francisco is a mad city, wrote Rudyard Kipling of his visit in 1889, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people.¹ Indeed, San Francisco’s reputation as brash, exotic, offbeat, diverse, free-spirited, opinionated, self-confident, quirky, and above all, fun was well established by the end of the nineteenth century. By the 1870s, it was already known as the Paris of the West—a must-visit destination for tourists, mariners, sightseers, and fortune seekers, a city of mystery and intrigue, a gathering place for the world’s adventurers. San Francisco is not only the most interesting city in the Union and the hugest smelting-pot of races, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, but she keeps, besides, the doors of the Pacific, and is the port of entry to another world and an earlier epoch in man’s history.²

    The city had grown up haphazardly—with little or no urban planning—as the locus of the gold rush, and it boasted a fiercely independent population of adventurers hailing from Europe, Asia, and the eastern United States. These immigrants, of course, brought with them not only their material possessions but also their musical cultures, fostering a fascinating, if at times unrefined, sonic diversity.

    Among the early settlers who particularly prized music as a historical marker were the Germans, who came to San Francisco in large numbers and proudly built on their long-established tradition of instrumental music.³ From the 1850s through the early years of the twentieth century, a series of conductors—mostly German (or German-trained)—attempted to establish high-quality professional orchestras. Rudolph Herold, Louis Homeier, Gustav Hinrichs, Fritz Scheel, Paul Steindorff, Frederick Wolle, William Zech: all founded symphonic groups that flourished for short periods. All ultimately failed. When the San Francisco Symphony finally opened its first season in 1911, a U.S.-born conductor, Henry Hadley, was at the helm. Four years later, however, he was replaced by another German, Alfred Hertz, who built the orchestra into an outstanding ensemble and who remained in charge until the Depression.

    A large Italian contingent set up its own subcommunity in the North Beach area of the city and promoted opera so successfully that San Francisco became a magnet for traveling companies from the eastern United States, as well as from South America. The city’s first complete opera presentation took place in February 1851, only three years after James Marshall discovered gold at John Sutter’s mill.⁴ The establishment of a resident company, however, was hampered in the early twentieth century not only by the dearth of experienced singers, managers, and directors but also by the absence of a suitable venue. After April 1906, when all the major theaters were destroyed in the devastating earthquake and fire, political squabbling blocked the construction of an opera house for another twenty-six years. Nevertheless, an enterprising Italian, Gaetano Merola, managed to found the San Francisco Opera in the early 1920s; it performed in venues with frustratingly poor acoustics for a decade.

    Rival statues in Golden Gate Park mark the German and Italian musical territories. In 1914 the Italians erected a vibrant bronze tribute to Verdi at the climax of a grandiose operatic festival; it was unveiled in a ceremony that reportedly attracted twenty thousand people. Adult and children’s choirs sang, but the biggest attraction was San Francisco’s prized musical discovery—prima donna Luisa Tetrazzini, who had made her U.S. debut in the city in 1905.⁵ The following year the Germans weighed in with a sober tribute to Beethoven (a replica of the statue in New York’s Central Park), whose dedication inaugurated a three-day Beethoven Festival. A thousand people attended the statue’s unveiling and bared their heads as they listened to the band play the second movement of the Fifth Symphony. The dark-colored Beethoven, head bowed in deep contemplation, stands next to the park’s Temple of Music, an elegant stone shell and stage erected in 1900 with a donation from sugar king Claus Spreckels. In stark contrast, the gold-colored Verdi holds his head high, looking down on Beethoven and the music concourse from a hill behind the stage.

    Jewish entrepreneurs also arrived during San Francisco’s gold rush years and discovered a welcoming community in which to establish businesses that served the mining pioneers. By 1850 two synagogues (still functioning today) served the growing population: Temple Emanu-El, catering to the wealthy German Jews, and Sherith Israel, serving the eastern European immigrants. Among the early arrivals was Levi Strauss, who came to the city in March 1853. Two of his nephews, Jacob and Sigmund Stern—heirs to Strauss’s blue-jeans fortune—became particularly strong supporters of the arts, both visual and aural, as did numerous other members of the Jewish community.⁶ Among the founders of the San Francisco Symphony, Jewish names appear in far greater numbers than their proportion in the population: Ehrman, Esberg, Fleischhacker, Gerstle, Haas, Hecht, Hellman, Jacobi, Koshland, Lilienthal, Schloss, Sloss, Stern, to name but a few. In later years, many of these patrons continued to serve San Francisco’s cultural community. Sidney Ehrman was one of the principal supporters of local violin wunderkind Yehudi Menuhin (whose father was a San Francisco Hebrew-school teacher); the Fleischhackers founded the San Francisco Zoo; Cora Koshland delighted in hosting elaborate musicales at her Presidio Heights mansion—modeled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles and complete with pipe organ—in which she could seat an audience of a hundred or host informal gatherings three times that size;⁷ and Rosalie Stern, in the 1930s, donated to the city a thirty-three-and-a-half-acre grove near Golden Gate Park. The Sigmund Stern Grove, named in memory of her husband, continues to host operatic and orchestral outdoor music events that attract thousands of attendees.

    As early as 1849, Chinese gold-seekers began arriving in San Francisco in response to reports of the Sutter’s Mill discovery brought to China by U.S. sea traders. Thus began a virtual flood of Chinese immigrants to what they called Gam Saan (the Golden Mountains). By December of the following year, some 10,000 residents of the Guangdong (Canton) region had arrived in California to try their luck in the mining frenzy. Between 1848 and 1876, more than 200,000 Chinese arrived in the United States through San Francisco. Ineligible for citizenship, most came with the intention of making a quick fortune and returning to China; more than 90,000 returned to Asia in this same period.⁸ San Francisco became home to the largest community of Chinese in the nation. At the end of the century, there were twice as many Chinese in California as in the rest of the states combined. And within California, the largest community, by far, was in San Francisco. Out of 75,132 Chinese in California in 1880, for example, 21,745 lived in San Francisco, about four-and-a-half times the size of the next largest community (in Sacramento).⁹ San Francisco’s Chinese population—at first almost exclusively male—set up its own insular community, called Tangrenbu (Port of the People of Tang), occupying, by the century’s end, an area of about fifteen blocks in the heart of the city. Reviled by the surrounding white community, Chinatown provoked exaggerated tales of opium consumption, prostitution, and gambling in labyrinthine underground tunnels. At the same time, the area’s illicit reputation became a source of titillating curiosity, and Chinatown served, even in that era, as one of San Francisco’s main tourist attractions. Gullible visitors were led through the area by unscrupulous guides who staged street fights and paid residents to simulate drug havens. The Chinese opera, a link to these residents’ home culture, flourished in the era before the earthquake. Most white visitors—with some notable exceptions, as we will see—reported on the opera with disdain, describing rudimentary scenery, endless and uninteresting plots, inattentive audiences, ear-splitting percussion, and screeching string sounds. The costumes were the sole element consistently praised.

    By the 1890s other Asian immigrants had begun to seek their fortunes in California—particularly the Japanese, who years earlier had established a large community in Hawaii. Near the end of the century, thousands of Japanese began coming to the mainland; many of them chose to work as farmers. In 1890 there were only 2,039 Japanese on the U.S. mainland; two decades later there were more than 72,000. Among these, 4,500 lived in San Francisco, about half the number of Chinese residents in the city in the same year.¹⁰ Unlike most other immigrants from either Europe or Asia, the Japanese tended to be highly educated (the Japanese government screened its emigrants to assure that they would represent their country well in their new homes),¹¹ and at least some of them sympathized with the white vilification of the Chinese. They also brought their families, in contrast to the overwhelmingly male Chinese population.

    A fortune could be made (and quickly lost) in San Francisco through gold and, later, silver mining and its related industries—as well as through enterprising business dealings, the most visible of which was the transcontinental railroad. The Big Four railroad entrepreneurs—Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker—made big money and built big houses on Nob Hill (derisively dubbed Snob Hill by the less fortunate). Their descendants, in many cases, also became big supporters of the arts.

    The railroad, of course, brought other, less affluent newcomers. African Americans, who found employment as porters on the trains (one of the few jobs available to them in this openly racist industry) settled in large numbers in Oakland, the line’s terminus. The black population of San Francisco itself, however, remained small (less than 1 percent) until the early 1940s. The Oakland jazz scene, on the other hand, gained a rich history from the activities of this community.¹² Discriminatory practices in the American Federation of Labor led black musicians to organize a separate colored local in the 1920s, covering the San Francisco and East Bay areas. Tensions with the far larger white local erupted during the next decade in a bitter legal battle.¹³

    These (and other) ethnic communities rubbed shoulders uneasily in a small geographical area: The city’s outward expansion was contained by water on three sides, and its internal development was challenged by steep hills in the east and sand dunes in the west (Map 1). The rich and the poor lived almost within arm’s length of one another. From the mansions of the Big Four atop Nob Hill to the heart of Chinatown is less than a half mile (nearly straight down).

    Adjoining Chinatown on the north and east and stretching to the waterfront was the Barbary Coast, a shabby area of high crime, prostitution, gambling, general debauchery, and lively music. Pacific Street, its most active area, was, for the most part, a solid mass of dance-halls, melodeons, cheap groggeries, wine and beer dens, which were popularly known as deadfalls; and concert saloons, which offered both dancing and entertainment.¹⁴ At the turn of the century this area was the toughest in town. Murders were commonplace, and saloons dominated the landscape. In 1890 alone, the city issued 3,117 liquor licenses (one for every ninety-six residents), and many other establishments served alcoholic beverages illegally. Some of the more reputable places, such as the Bella Union, offered low-brow variety shows, and a few performers who appeared there, such as Lotta Crabtree, later established stage careers. Featured artists near the end of the century included the original Little Egypt from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and Big Bertha, a sprightly lass of two hundred and eighty pounds who sang sentimental ballads in a squeaky soprano.¹⁵ Big Bertha achieved renown in the mid-1880s as a singer who couldn’t sing . . . and an actress who couldn’t act. Her acting, indeed, was so remarkably bad that she attracted audiences from all over San Francisco and brought to the Bella Union and the Barbary Coast hundreds of citizens who had never visited the quarter before and never did again.¹⁶ Prostitution was rampant and tolerated by authorities; in fact, one place that operated a lively flesh trade from 1904 to 1907 was dubbed the municipal crib: patronized by a number of upstanding citizens, it offered sizeable kickbacks to city officials.¹⁷ Chinatown and the Barbary Coast shared close access to Portsmouth Square, an open area at Kearny and Washington Streets that was the center of San Francisco’s life in the city’s earliest years and continues today to serve as a recreational park for Chinatown residents.

    f0005-01.jpg

    MAP 1. The northeastern part of San Francisco, based on an original map from 1913, showing areas of the city and some of the major hills and streets.

    San Francisco in 1900 boasted an ethnic diversity remarkable to its visitors, but religiously and politically the city would hardly be recognizable to today’s inhabitants: it was predominantly Catholic and Republican.¹⁸ The clamor of its political infighting, the outspoken independence of its residents, and the unbridled candor of its various factions were as apparent then as they are now, but the city’s current reputation as a standard-bearer of the U.S. Left was hardly in evidence. There was, of course, a vocal liberal contingent, but there was also rampant racism, particularly directed toward the Chinese. The depression of 1873–78 spawned the Workingmen’s Party of California (WPC), headed by Irish immigrant Denis Kearney. As part of its platform, the party promulgated a simpleminded, provocative, and contentious slogan: The Chinese must go! It even managed to elect a mayor, Isaac Kalloch, who served one two-year term (1879–81).¹⁹ By 1881, the WPC was largely defunct, but its racist message was not. Passage of the national Exclusion Act of 1882—directed at the Chinese and prompted by racist agitation in California—forbade entry of Chinese laborers into the United States for ten years and set restrictions on reentry for those who had returned to Asia. (The new California constitution, adopted two years earlier, had contained even more severe anti-Chinese provisions, declaring the Chinese dangerous to the well-being of the state, forbidding their employment by corporations and on public works projects, and excluding them from land ownership.) The national law, which was repeatedly extended, and whose restrictions were tightened before its ultimate repeal in 1943, effectively ended the massive influx of Chinese to San Francisco. The city’s Chinese population peaked in 1890 at 25,833.²⁰ By 1900 it had dropped by almost half, to 13,954, and it continued to decline for the next twenty years.

    Aside from the overwhelming disdain directed at the Chinese, San Francisco otherwise heralded labor. Indeed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city was truly a union town. Its musicians, like workers in other professions, began organizing as early as 1869; a branch of the National League of Musicians (NLM), precursor to the present-day American Federation of Musicians (AFM), was established in 1886; and when the AFM was founded as an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1896, San Francisco musicians were among the first to join. AFM Local No. 6 dates from 1897.²¹

    In 1901 a massive waterfront strike closed the port of San Francisco for two months, prompted by a conflict between the newly founded Teamsters National Union and the Draymen’s Association.²² Furious at Democratic mayor James Phelan’s support for the employers, and disaffected as well by the Republicans, who were beholden to the railroad and business interests, organized labor decided to found its own political entity: the Union Labor Party. On a platform of radical labor policy (including public ownership of utilities) and reactionary social views (notably the exclusion of Asians), the ULP succeeded in electing a mayor, Eugene Schmitz, in 1901.²³

    Schmitz was the president of the local musicians’ union. A violinist and theater musician, he had also tried his hand at composition. The city’s musicians turned out in force to celebrate his victory: Local 6 members marched at the heads of parades, and whole orchestras joined them as soon as evening performances ended at the theaters.²⁴ The choice of Schmitz for mayor was an odd one from the standpoint of the traditional blue-collar union contingent: many of them saw the musicians as an elitist group unwilling to get its hands dirty. Among the broader public voter base, however, Schmitz’s nomination was a brilliant move. It was engineered by a smart, ambitious, and unscrupulous lawyer and Republican party operative named Abraham Ruef, who had graduated from the University of California and held a law degree from its Hastings College. Handsome Gene Schmitz—who had no prior political experience—cut an attractive figure, articulated the ULP’s platform with eloquence, and marshaled, through his mother’s ethnic background, the support of the city’s ninety-five thousand Irish Catholics. Unfortunately, his six years as mayor (spanning the devastating quake of 1906) were marked by rampant graft. During Schmitz’s three terms, Ruef found his way onto the regular payroll of most important corporations doing business with the city. (He was paid as a legal consultant, allowing him later to justify outrageously large attorney fees.) He split his fees with Schmitz and the members of the board of supervisors. Schmitz himself was not blameless; but Ruef appears to have been the propulsive force behind the escalating graft. (Some historians, however, have argued that Ruef’s crimes were no worse than those of officials in other cities at the time.)²⁵

    San Francisco’s factionalism was fueled by a boisterous and sensationalistic press. At the turn of the century, five major dailies dominated the newspaper scene. Three vied for the morning readership: the Chronicle, the Examiner, and the Call. The Call was the oldest of them, founded by James Joseph Ayers and partners in 1856. John D. Spreckels, eldest son of industrialist Claus (who established the Spreckels Sugar Company), bought the paper in 1897.

    The Chronicle began life in January 1865 as a theatrical promotional sheet; the Daily Dramatic Chronicle was founded by Charles de Young and his two younger brothers, sons of a Dutch Jewish family from Saint Louis.²⁶ By 1869, the paper, now called the Daily Morning Chronicle, boasted a circulation of sixteen thousand, stimulated by its blatant, tactless, and frequently unsubstantiated reports of scandalous gossip. Charles thrived on such controversy. By 1871 he had been sued for libel a dozen times and physically assaulted by two irate judges.²⁷ At first, Charles supported the Workingmen’s Party, but he became disaffected with the group after it failed to back his efforts to form his own New Constitution Party—with himself as party boss. After the WPC nominated Isaac Kalloch for mayor in 1879, Charles launched a barrage of anti-Kalloch propaganda, digging up a twenty-two-year-old trial in Boston in which Kalloch faced charges of adultery (but which ended in a hung jury). Kalloch, minister of San Francisco’s enormous Baptist Metropolitan Temple, had for years fended off accusations of debauchery. He returned Charles’s verbal abuse in kind from his pulpit—adding to it an inflammatory accusation that de Young’s mother was a prostitute—prompting de Young to shoot him at point-blank range on August 23, 1879. Kalloch miraculously survived, despite two bullet wounds (one in the chest), and he won the sympathy (and the votes) of the populace: in the mayoral election of September 3, he defeated his Republican challenger by 519 votes. Seven months later, Kalloch’s son returned de Young’s favor, fatally shooting the editor in his office. Milton Kalloch was acquitted in the subsequent trial. After this Wild West drama, Michael (M. H.) de Young took charge of a somewhat chastened Chronicle, remaining at its helm for the next forty-five years. (His name lives on in San Francisco’s cultural life in the form of the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park.)

    The Examiner was founded in June 1865 on the ruins of the Daily Democratic Press, a short-lived pro-Confederacy publication that folded in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Mining entrepreneur George Hearst (later a U.S. senator) bought the Examiner in 1880 and seven years later gave it to his son, William Randolph, whose parlaying of the paper into a national chain of sensationalistic rags and subsequent rise to fame and fortune are legendary. Hearst’s elegant mansion near Santa Barbara, with its priceless collection of art and furnishings, continues to attract thousands of visitors a year.

    The evening newspaper audience was dominated by the San Francisco Bulletin, founded in 1855 and boasting, in the early years of the twentieth century, an activist managing editor, Fremont Older, who strenuously crusaded against the graft-ridden Schmitz administration. The Bulletin competed with the smaller evening Post, controlled by Patrick Calhoun, grandson of John Calhoun, the former South Carolina senator and U.S. vice president who openly advocated for the preservation—and expansion—of slavery. Patrick Calhoun was president of United Railroads, the company that controlled San Francisco’s cable-car and streetcar system.

    Among the other periodicals in the city was the weekly Argonaut, founded in 1877 and featuring critical arts coverage. Various foreign language papers, too, attracted a local readership. The Oriental (Zhongxi hui bao), for instance, was one of the first Chinese language papers in the country. Other ethnic communities had their own papers: Two that figure prominently in San Francisco’s musical life targeted Italian residents: L’Italia, edited by Ettore Patrizi, and La Voce del Popolo, edited by Ottorino Ronchi. Of particular interest to the present study is the weekly Pacific Coast Musical Review (PCMR), founded in the early years of the century. From 1907 to 1924 the PCMR published every Saturday; it then continued less frequently (and increasingly irregularly) up to 1931. Its editor, Alfred Metzger, tried to document all of the classical music concerts in the city—and evaluate the majority of them. His (nonindexed) publication is thus a treasure trove of information, providing a portrait, during more than a quarter century, of the classical music scene.

    San Francisco experienced exponential expansion during its first fifty years—growing from about 500 inhabitants in 1847 to 342,782 in 1900—unrestricted by any coherent urban planning. Although largely unremarkable architecturally in this early period, the city could boast a few notable landmarks. Among the most prominent was a new ferry building, celebrating San Francisco’s most important business: shipping. Designed by local architect Arthur Page Brown (but not completed until after his tragic death at age thirty-six in 1896), the ferry building opened in 1898.²⁸ With its impressive clock tower, inspired by the Giralda bell tower in Seville, Spain, the ferry building still stands proudly at the base of Market Street, a 120-foot-wide thoroughfare that sweeps diagonally from the waterfront through the heart of the city’s commercial center (see Map 2).

    Proceeding down Market, away from the harbor, a visitor in the early years of the century would soon encounter the eleven-story flatiron Crocker Building, also designed by Brown, which distinctively marked the intersection of Market, Post, and Montgomery. Just ahead on the left was (and still is) the massive Palace Hotel, completed in 1875 at a cost of about $5 million.²⁹ Seven stories high, with 755 rooms (most with fifteen-foot ceilings), and potentially accommodating twelve hundred guests, the Palace, upon its completion, projected an image of ostentatious overabundance in a town that Oscar Lewis and Carroll Hall characterize as crude, noisy, unkempt, . . . its streets lined with buildings reflecting the worst features of the debased architectural taste of the period.³⁰ Indeed, photos taken at the time show the Palace to be the biggest structure in downtown, completely overshadowing anything around it. The prequake hotel featured a famous Grand Court (84 by 144 feet) covered by a skylight—originally a carriage entrance, but converted around the turn of the century into a luxurious lobby. Colonnaded balconies beneath this glass roof offered guests stunning views of the lobby’s opulent furniture and oversized potted palms. (Figure 1 shows the Palm Court in the lobby as well as several stories of rooms and balconies.) Reinforcing iron rods built into the Palace’s two-foot-thick brick walls protected the building from earthquakes, and a private water supply promised to forestall any possible damage by fire. A series of artesian wells with a capacity of 28,000 gallons per hour were drilled on the site, and a storage reservoir in the subbasement held 630,000 gallons of water. Another 130,000 gallons were held in seven tanks on the roof. Pumps in the basement, twenty thousand feet of fire hose, and five miles of pipe assured distribution of water throughout the building—a reflection of San Francisco’s many fires in its early years. The Palace proudly housed visiting nobility, including famous stars of opera and theater. Adelina Patti stayed there in 1884 and Sarah Bernhardt in 1887, Ignacy Paderewski in 1896, and Enrico Caruso in 1905 and 1906.

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    MAP 2. Detail of a historical map of San Francisco, dated 1909, but showing the pre-1906 arrangement of streets in the northeastern part of the city. Note especially the city hall area, which was reconfigured after the quake as shown in map 1. (Original map at the University of California, Santa Cruz.)

    Nearly across the street from the Palace, at the intersection of Market, Kearny, Geary, and Third, was Lotta’s Fountain, donated to the city by actress-singer Lotta Crabtree and erected in the same year that the Palace opened. At that same intersection—dubbed newspaper corner—rose the tallest building in the city, the 315-foot Call tower, erected by John Spreckels in 1896 and adorned at the time with an ornate dome and four eight-sided corner turrets.³¹ The striking Chronicle building (begun in 1889 and completed in June 1890), with its distinctive clock tower, stood across the street; heralded as earthquake- and fireproof, the building was the first steel-framed skyscraper in the city. The more modest Hearst Building, housing the Examiner, was on the other side of Market.

    A block south—on Mission, between Third and Fourth—stood the Grand Opera House, which accommodated nearly four thousand patrons. The theater’s location proved highly convenient for visiting opera stars staying nearby at the Palace. Formerly called Wade’s Opera House (1873–76) and renamed the Grand in 1876, the theater was one of the largest opera houses in the country but, like the Palace, was too big for its locale. The Grand paid for itself only toward the end of its life, when it featured melodrama.³²

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    FIGURE 1. The Palm Court section of the lobby of the Palace Hotel, before 1906. The entire lobby was covered by a massive glass canopy. (Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the California Historical Society, FN-04771/CHS2010.354.tif.)

    About eight blocks farther from the wharves, Market Street intersects Van Ness Avenue at an angle of about forty-five degrees (see Map 2). Van Ness, at that time the site of numerous luxurious mansions, constitutes the main thoroughfare from downtown to Fort Mason at the entrance to the San Francisco Bay. Near this intersection, on a triangle of land bounded by McAllister, Larkin, and the no-longer-existing City Hall Avenue, stood San Francisco’s brand new city hall (Figure 2). The building’s cornerstone had been laid on February 22, 1872, but (in typical San Francisco fashion) political wrangling and graft delayed its construction for more than a quarter century.³³ The completed building, designed by Augustus Laver but modified by numerous profiteering ‘builders,’ ³⁴ featured an ostentatious dome that was dedicated on July 12, 1897, with two concerts of high-class music. A thirty-piece orchestra performed excerpts from operas by Bizet, Gounod, Wagner, and others.³⁵ Even then the building’s woes did not end: unfinished interiors, roof leaks, and a small fire delayed its completion until the turn of the century. The total cost for the structure, when it was finally finished, was $5,723,000.

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    FIGURE 2. San Francisco’s old city hall. The streets shown are McAllister and City Hall Avenue (see Map 2). The building’s dome was dedicated in 1897, and the entire structure collapsed in the 1906 quake. (Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library; photo AAB-7791.)

    West of Van Ness is the area called the Western Addition, inhabited in this era by an eclectic mix of racial groups and professional interests (see Map 1). Except in the case of the Chinese, residential segregation in San Francisco was rare, and many blacks moved into this part of the city during the 1920s. By 1930 this one-square-mile area—which later hosted the postwar, jazz-rich Fillmore district—became the hub of black life.³⁶ Farther west is the thousand-acre, rectangular Golden Gate Park, begun during the 1870s on outside lands composed of sand dunes. The Midwinter International Exhibition of 1894 destroyed a large portion of the newly developed park, despite the strenuous opposition of conservationists, but the area was subsequently restored and today hosts museums (including the de Young), the music concourse, and the ever-popular Japanese Tea Garden, whose caretaker during the 1894 fair, Makoto Hagiwara, invented the so-called Chinese fortune cookie.³⁷

    THREE DAYS THAT CHANGED SAN FRANCISCO

    In the wee hours of the morning of April 16, 1906, more than two hundred members of New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company arrived in San Francisco as part of a cross-country tour. They took up residence at the city’s luxury hotels, many of them at the Palace, including conductor Alfred Hertz, business manager Ernest Goerlitz, and famed Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. The trip was the Met’s fourth visit to San Francisco since the beginning of the century. A three-week season in November 1900 had been followed by a thirty-performance extravaganza the following fall. The 1905 season was shorter, but proved extremely lucrative: the ten-day residency generated a record-breaking income of nearly $120,000 (equivalent to about

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