Recommended Reading: Chris Carlsson on the History of the San Francisco Bay Area
Editor’s note: As part of our ongoing series of “Recommended Readings,” we asked AK author Chris Carlsson to share his thoughts about the best books on the history and politics of the San Francisco Bay Area. Chris is the author or editor of numerous books, including Nowtopia, Critical Mass, The Political Edge, and After the Deluge. Below is his response to our question. Thanks, Chris!
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There is no book comparable to Gray Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (UC Press). Brechin’s history is rooted in geography and political economy and takes us from the founding myths of the city up to contemporary power structures. A good augmentation of Brechin’s analysis is a collection of broad-ranging “contrarian” essays published in1998 by City Lights Books, Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture (ed. James Brook, Chris Carlsson and Nancy J. Peters). A later volume based on the quixotic 2003 mayoral campaign of Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez called The Political Edge (City Lights Foundation, 2004) continues the contrarian analyses of Reclaiming San Francisco and looks broadly at dissident politics in early twenty-first century San Francisco.
For a study of the city’s growth since the late 1960s, particularly the planning and redevelopment processes, City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester Hartmann is indispensable. Hollow City by Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg closely examines the gutting of urban life in the U.S. that became particularly visible during the Dot-com boom and bust in San Francisco, 1999-2000. In The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906: How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself, Philip L. Fradkin gives a scintillating account of the disaster and how the powers-that-be used it to unravel the unusual working class city government of the time under the Union Labor Party.
Today’s city politics are still dominated by local utility monopoly PG&E, and annually the weekly SF Bay Guardian raises the calls for municipalization of the electrical system, based on a federal law requiring public ownership of the Hetch Hetchy system and its output. A very good book on the bitter controversy at its point of origin is The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America’s Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism by Robert W. Righter. Those interested in a broader look at local nature and how the area became urbanized will find a good starting point in The Natural World of San Francisco by Harold Gilliam and Michael Bry. Saving the Marin-Sonoma Coast by L. Martin Griffin is a fascinating insider account of how a bunch of Marin County doctors managed to stay a step ahead of the Calif. Dept. of Highways and real estate speculators to buy up crucial plots of land that stopped freeway and urban development north of the Golden Gate on the western coast. Richard Walker’s latest book, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area, is an even more comprehensive history of how the greater Bay Area managed to save so much of its natural landscape and biological diversity. The remarkable saga of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and its unlikely creation, expansion, and maintenance is told by an savvy insider, Amy Meyer, in her inspiring New Guardians for the Golden Gate: How America Got a Great National Park.
To understand the relationship between labor and Indian genocide, black slavery, and vicious anti-Chinese racism, you can dig up the 1935 A History of the Labor Movement in California by Ira Cross and check out Alexander Saxton’s 1970 The Indispensible Enemy; Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. One of the best summaries of the 1934 Big Strike is A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco by David F. Selvin. An amazing lost chapter of labor history is the saga of Tom Mooney and how he was put away by the local ruling class, who feared that he would lead a workers movement against them in the mid-1910s. Read about it in Frame-up: The Incredible Case of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings by Curt Gentry. Other radical threads can be pursued too: Co-Operative Dreams: A History of the Kaweah Colony by Jay O’Connell tells about the disillusioned labor radicals of the 1880s who went to the mountains to start a commune and how their land was turned into a national park right under them! In San Francisco in 1915-1916 famous anarchists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman lived along Dolores Park where they edited and published The Blast, which AK Press has happily released in a facsimile edition. And one of the most vital bridges for the radical movements in the twentieth century was writer, philosopher, radio personality, and all around Renaissance man Kenneth Rexroth. His An Autobiographical Novel is full of great insights into life in San Francisco and the U.S. from the late 1920s into the 1960s.
A study of the destruction of the dozens of tribes that once occupied the Bay Area can be found in A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area 1769-1810 by Randall T. Milliken and The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area by Macolm Margolin.
African-American history in San Francisco can be discovered in a new historiography The Making of Mammy Pleasant: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco by Lynn Hudson. Pleasant’s story was also the subject of Michelle Cliff’s novel Free Enterprise: A Novel of Mary Ellen Pleasant.
For transportation history in San Francisco check out my Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration by Chris Carlsson, The White Front Cars of San Francisco by Charles Smallwood, The Ferry Building: Witness to a Century of Change by Nancy Olmsted, The Big Four by Oscar Lewis, and Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West by Dee Brown.