Unsplash Photo Credit: DaiWei Lu
San Francisco is a city that has a special place in my heart. I made many weekend treks there during my time living in the Sacramento area. Even went to graduate school at The University of San Francisco.
But honestly, I knew very little about its history. That is, until I interviewed author, geographer, and architectural historian Gray Brechin who I had the pleasure of interviewing for this piece.
Brechin is the founder and Project Scholar of “The Living New Deal” based at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography. He is a popular presenter on themes tied to the history and legacy of the New Deal and the city of San Francisco.
In his book “Imperial San Francisco, With a New Preface: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin” which was first published in 1999, Brechin chronicles the celebrated history of San Francisco by tracing the exploitative ways of several prominent families including the Hearsts, de Youngs, and Spreckelses. These families had amassed power through mining, ranching, water, energy, transportation, real estate, weapons, and the mass media.
The story unearthed by Gray Brechin highlights one of greed and ambition on an epic scale. In this context, his book offers a profoundly important look at urban history and the interconnections that ultimately led to the creation of the atomic bomb and nuclear arms race. In a new preface, Brechin explores the vulnerability of cities in the post-9/11 twenty-first century.
Please share a little about your life journey and what led you to write Imperial San Francisco.
GB: Thanks to my friend the planning historian Mel Scott, I had the opportunity to spend the winter of 1985 in Venice walking around and reading about the history of that remarkable city. Among the books I read was Jan Morris’s The Venetian Empire.
I began to think about how even the most beautiful and ingenious of cities become that way by parasitizing an expansive hinterland for the sake of those who own and run the city (although Lewis Mumford’s writings had already set me down that path).
I then decided to apply what I learned there to the city I know best — San Francisco — and to use it as a template for how all cities that aspire to imperial dominion, grandeur, and loot operate. So I wrote it as a doctoral dissertation in the UC Berkeley Department of Geography. UC Press published it in 1999 when I was 52 years old, and it became an instant best-seller.
What fueled your interest in writing about this theme?
GB: I had, in the 1980s, worked as an environmental journalist and TV producer in San Francisco. During that period I became interested in who owns the mass media that paid my salary and to ask what’s in it for them. So the core of the book is titled “The Thought-Shapers.”
It’s about four wealthy families who controlled the city’s press (and in William Randolph Hearst’s case, an enormous media empire that grew out of San Francisco.) The book is full of seldom-seen period graphics that inculcated jingoism and racism in the minds of readers that were often inimical to their own self-interests but profitable for the owners of the city’s newspapers and magazines (and now electronic media.) Some of those illustrations are in the accompanying website.
In what ways is your book still relevant to present day San Francisco?
GB: San Francisco — like all great cities — continues to use remote control technology to extract resources from an immense hinterland and to produce in turn a corresponding flood of waste products of which its residents are largely unaware.
Lewis Mumford claimed that war and the city were born together, and that remains true to the present: the Iraq War and occupation briefly revealed the extent to which the Bay Area — including Silicon Valley — is the nation’s hi-tech arsenal upon which its prosperity largely depends.
What has been most surprising to you in terms of the city’s post pandemic evolution?
What I did not anticipate was that the hi-tech industry upon which the city leaders staked so much of its economy would develop the means by which the industry could leave the city when covid arrived. As a result the complex business ecosystem that gives vitality to financial and retail districts is unraveling in the so-called “doom loop.”
Nineteenth century observers such as Frederick Law Olmsted likened San Francisco to an immense wooden mining town itself largely dependent on the gold, silver, and mercury mines of its hinterland for its prosperity. It is hardly surprising then that as tech pulls out, many are likening its downtown to a ghost town while others explicitly liken artificial intelligence to the next gold rush that will revive its flagging fortunes.
Can you share a few esoteric facts about San Francisco that the average everyday person is unaware of? And what are some of the biggest misconceptions about the city that you hear bantered about?
The biggest misconception about San Francisco is that it has always been a liberal town when, in fact, it was largely Republican until the 1960s despite the presence of powerful labor unions that often opposed its business leaders. The owners of its major newspapers and magazines were politically conservative and shaped communal thought through their control of mass media.
Nonetheless, the city’s incomparable setting, its summer fog, and a few civic leaders such as architect Timothy Pflueger and Mayor “Sunny Jim” Rolph created a theatrical city beloved around the world which reached its apogee as the site of the U.N. organizational meeting in 1945.
In what ways do you believe your book can spark a whole new set of conversations about San Francisco and the Bay Area?
By looking honestly at the city’s past — the hidden costs of building an empire including the city's reliance upon military force and its starring role in the development of atomic and thermonuclear weapons — I would hope that it raises the question of how large should cities be lest they foul and destroy the environments that sustain them.
Imperial San Francisco shows how those costs — the overhead of development behind the profits of exploitation— are passed downwind, downstream, and downtime. We and the environment too often are today paying the compounding costs of the city’s past growth.
What one thing do you want readers to continue to take away from reading your book?
Despite talk of building sustainable and resilient cities, their ceaseless growth is consuming a shrinking resource base and generating the wastes that endanger their very existence in the 21st century.
Imperial San Francisco made a huge impression on me as a San Francisco native, and a graduate of the UC Berkeley Department of Geography (1997). Gotta dig my copy out of the box and give it some love again!