Roots of Urban Resistance, 1998 - Revision history

Ccarlsson: added photo

2020-05-12T22:43:41Z

added photo

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	Behind this liberalism lies a political culture forged out of the class standoff between capital and labor in the early twentieth century. That political culture includes high voter turnout, political clubs, freewheeling initiatives, and weak mayors. Capital could not vanquish labor from the political landscape of the city, so it has had to go through progressive Republicans such as Sunny Jim Rolph and Warren Christopher or pro-growth Democrats such as Joe Alioto and Willie Brown to get its business done without mobilizing class opposition. At the same time, a liberal Democratic party apparatus could be stitched together that owed little to capital, as was done by Harvey Milk’s Gay Democratic Club, and Phil Burton, who became a civic, state, and national power from the 1950s to the 1980s.		Behind this liberalism lies a political culture forged out of the class standoff between capital and labor in the early twentieth century. That political culture includes high voter turnout, political clubs, freewheeling initiatives, and weak mayors. Capital could not vanquish labor from the political landscape of the city, so it has had to go through progressive Republicans such as Sunny Jim Rolph and Warren Christopher or pro-growth Democrats such as Joe Alioto and Willie Brown to get its business done without mobilizing class opposition. At the same time, a liberal Democratic party apparatus could be stitched together that owed little to capital, as was done by Harvey Milk’s Gay Democratic Club, and Phil Burton, who became a civic, state, and national power from the 1950s to the 1980s.

			[[Image:Burton-Statue-at-sunset 20180907 191451.jpg]]

			'''Statue of Philip Burton at Fort Mason, beckoning us to enjoy the spectacular view of the Golden Gate.'''

			''Photo: Chris Carlsson''

	Part of the aims and accomplishments of this political culture has been to dispose middle-class people toward organized labor and to weaken their allegiance to the burghers of Pacific Heights. This sort of position is rarely rationalized in terms of class, but rather as libertarian independence from all power blocs and sympathy toward the oppressed. As a result, any number of transgressive political bridges were constructed in the postwar era across conventional boundaries of class and race formation. Harvey Milk organized gay men across the class spectrum, turning personal liberation into political power. Burton got his start by uniting Chinatown and white workers of the hotel districts, then brought in middle- and upper-class liberals from the eastern half of the city. Civil Rights activists and the Burton machine forged alliances between African Americans protesting black removal and white liberals opposing Downtown expansion. Meanwhile, the beats and hippies contributed by their rebellious race-mixing and incorporation of black culture into their practical critique of the oppressions of bourgeois expression and repression.		Part of the aims and accomplishments of this political culture has been to dispose middle-class people toward organized labor and to weaken their allegiance to the burghers of Pacific Heights. This sort of position is rarely rationalized in terms of class, but rather as libertarian independence from all power blocs and sympathy toward the oppressed. As a result, any number of transgressive political bridges were constructed in the postwar era across conventional boundaries of class and race formation. Harvey Milk organized gay men across the class spectrum, turning personal liberation into political power. Burton got his start by uniting Chinatown and white workers of the hotel districts, then brought in middle- and upper-class liberals from the eastern half of the city. Civil Rights activists and the Burton machine forged alliances between African Americans protesting black removal and white liberals opposing Downtown expansion. Meanwhile, the beats and hippies contributed by their rebellious race-mixing and incorporation of black culture into their practical critique of the oppressions of bourgeois expression and repression.

Jeff: Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"

2018-10-16T15:09:10Z

Text replacement - "category:Gay and Lesbian" to "category:LGBTQI"

← Older revision		Revision as of 08:09, 16 October 2018
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	[[category:Labor]][[category:~~Gay and Lesbian~~]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Redevelopment]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:1950s]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:Downtown]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Transit]]		[[category:Labor]][[category:LGBTQI]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Redevelopment]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:1950s]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:Downtown]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Transit]]

Ccarlsson at 06:55, 11 November 2015

2015-11-11T06:55:25Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 23:55, 10 November 2015
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	ONE HAS TO BE CAREFUL not to romanticize a social order that was accompanied by vicious racism. On this see Alexander Saxton, ''The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), Susan Craddock, “Sewers and Scapegoats: Spatial Metaphors of Smallpox in Nineteenth Century San Francisco,” ''Social Science and Medicine'' (1995) 41/7: pp. 957–68, Albert Broussard, ''Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954'' (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), and Kazin, ''Barons of Labor''. The civil rights movement was relatively strong in the Bay Area; however, there is little documentation on this.		ONE HAS TO BE CAREFUL not to romanticize a social order that was accompanied by vicious racism. On this see Alexander Saxton, ''The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California'' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), Susan Craddock, “Sewers and Scapegoats: Spatial Metaphors of Smallpox in Nineteenth Century San Francisco,” ''Social Science and Medicine'' (1995) 41/7: pp. 957–68, Albert Broussard, ''Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954'' (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), and Kazin, ''Barons of Labor''. The civil rights movement was relatively strong in the Bay Area; however, there is little documentation on this.

			[[INS Building-Old Produce Mkt \|Prev. Document]] [[Dr Weirde on Dirty Harry \| Next Document]]

	<hr>		<hr>

	[[Image:Reclaiming-san-francisco.jpg\|170px\|left]] This article is excerpted from "Appetite for the City," originally published in [http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100049340 ''Reclaiming San Francisco: History Politics Culture'', a City Lights anthology] edited by James Brook, Chris Carlsson, & Nancy J. Peters (City Lights Books, San Francisco: 1998)		[[Image:Reclaiming-san-francisco.jpg\|170px\|left]] This article is excerpted from "Appetite for the City," originally published in [http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100049340 ''Reclaiming San Francisco: History Politics Culture'', a City Lights anthology] edited by James Brook, Chris Carlsson, & Nancy J. Peters (City Lights Books, San Francisco: 1998)



	~~[[INS Building-Old Produce Mkt \|Prev. Document]] [[Dr Weirde on Dirty Harry \| Next Document]]~~


	[[category:Labor]][[category:Gay and Lesbian]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Redevelopment]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:1950s]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:Downtown]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Transit]]		[[category:Labor]][[category:Gay and Lesbian]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Redevelopment]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:1950s]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]] [[category:Downtown]] [[category:1910s]] [[category:Transit]]

Ccarlsson at 06:54, 11 November 2015

2015-11-11T06:54:07Z

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 The contrariness of San Franciscans to the annihilation of their city has been exceptional, as has the success of antidevelopment politics. Simple defense of living space and neighborhoods against the wrecking ball has played its part, to be sure, and so have the organizing efforts of dedicated radicals and the peculiarities of local political structures. But these visible parts of civic resistance need roots and soil to grow in, and here San Francisco demonstrated for a time a most favorable economic, political, and cultural substratum.
 <font size=4>Under the Economic Volcano</font size>
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 The first meek turning away came as San Francisco’s second generation bourgeoisie sought to erase its ragtag origins in the mining districts and create a semblance of civilized urbanism modeled after eastern cities. San Francisco’s burghers eschewed the sinewy modernism of Chicago in favor of Victorian fiddle-faddle (though such buildings were thoroughly modern in construction). A second turning away came at the end of the century, when third-generation burghers rejected Victoriania but also refused the modernism of Prairie or Bauhaus for the historicism of the Shingle, Renaissance, and Mediterranean styles. More generally, they fell under the sway of the Arts and Crafts movement; nowhere was the radical romanticism of William Morris embraced more fervently than in California. So dominant was the cultivated rusticity propagated by Bernard Maybeck that modernism finally came to the Bay Area in the 1930s clad in redwood and rough-hewn planks suitable to the regional myth of the naturalized city. Contrast this with Los Angeles, which abandoned historicism in favor of high modernism in the 1920s, and never looked back.
 The leading contrarian of the Progressive era was John Muir, a mechanic and naturalist turned rustic bohemian and transcendental mystic, whose crusading zeal and savvy propaganda for the mountains of California launched the American environmental movement. The most popular writer of the time was Jack London, and Frank Norris was not far behind. Both made nature the backdrop for their greatest novels, while pushing the critical reach of literary realism to the limits of respectability. And both, despite their contrasting social origins, were thoroughly imbued with the petty bourgeois streak of independence and self-righteousness of their home city. Journalists Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair were cut of the same cloth, one moving east and the other west in the course of their careers.
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 [[Image:Reclaiming-san-francisco.jpg|170px|left]] This article is excerpted from "Appetite for the City," originally published in [http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100049340 ''Reclaiming San Francisco: History Politics Culture'', a City Lights anthology] edited by James Brook, Chris Carlsson, & Nancy J. Peters (City Lights Books, San Francisco: 1998)
 [[category:Labor]][[category:Gay and Lesbian]] [[category:Power and Money]] [[category:Redevelopment]] [[category:Dissent]] [[category:1950s]] [[category:1960s]] [[category:1970s]] [[category:1980s]] [[category:1990s]]

Ccarlsson: Created page with '''' Historical Essay ''' ''by Richard Walker, 1998'' ''This is an excerpt from "Appetite for the ...'

2015-11-11T06:46:21Z

Created page with '''' Historical Essay ''' ''by Richard Walker, 1998'' ''This is an excerpt from "Appetite for the ...'

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