“Mind before mines ought to be the motto…of every educated Californian.”
—Reverend H. W. Bellows
TO THINK of its power and influence,” marveled Horace Greeley at San Francisco's pioneer literary journal, the Golden Era, “when the population is so sparse and the mail facilities so poor.” The Era's youthful founders, Rollin M. Dagget, who was only nineteen years old when he arrived on the Coast, and J. MacDonough Foard, who was only twenty-one, had followed Greeley's own advice: “Go West, young man!” The phenomenal success of their attempt to spread enlightenment on such matters as education, literature, and the fine arts through the Era's columns, beginning in 1852 when the infant city could not yet supply itself with even the common necessities of life, was indicative of that hunger for all the arts and refinements of civilization which inspired the Argonauts almost as much, it would seem, as the quest for gold. “To encourage virtue and literature” had been one of the announced objectives of the founders of the Bear Flag Republic in 1846. Certain it is that “virtue and literature”—and art, and learning, and architecture—have received rare encouragement in the cities around San Francisco Bay. Even the earliest saloons insisted on hanging paintings on their walls and providing musicales for their patrons! The Gold Rush may have swept San Francisco's first public schoolmaster, Thomas Douglas, off to the mines six weeks after he called his first class to order, but countless others who took his place would demonstrate a steadier adherence to the motto the Reverend Bellows framed for “every educated Californian.”
To trace the pioneer impetus in the educational field is like watching the man in the old story who brought water on mule-back from the ocean to the Colorado River. One disbelieves, and yet one sees the thing happening: individual after individual carrying obstacles before him that look insurmountable, impelled by nothing but his own belief and courage. There is Colonel Thomas J. Nevins, who first revealed to the Common Council of San Francisco that children were among the products of the gold-bearing State. The council, in those days when only the color of gold could put a man in action, was inclined to distrust Colonel Nevins’ report until he thrust under their noses a census of his own taking, and illustrated it by samples of both sexes. The result was an ordinance for the establishing of the free common school system. That was in 1851. Nevins had earlier, of his own accord, set up a school in Happy Valley, south of Market Street, and could be seen each day following an express wagon along San Francisco streets, gathering up children and expressing them to the Happy Valley schoolhouse. And even earlier yet, Yale graduate Thomas Douglas had opened on April 3, 1848 California's first public school in a small shack on Portsmouth Square, beginning with six pupils, whom he taught until the Gold Rush, following shortly afterward, bore him off to the mines.
There is John G. Pelton, who came around Cape Horn from Andover, Massachusetts, determined to lay the foundations of a public school system in the illiterate West. Pelton even brought a school bell with him, which was tied to the mast and rang the watches on the tedious voyage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He arrived with $1.50 in his pockets, not enough to remove books, globes, maps, and bell from the sandy beach where they had been landed. Some unnamed visionary rescued him and his wife. As soon as a boarding house opened by Mrs. Pelton was under way, he started a free school in the basement of the Baptist Church.
Writes John Swett, who became principal of one of the schools established after the ordinance of 1851: “This school [the Rincon School] was…in a small rented house planted in the middle of a sandbank on the corner of First and Folsom Streets.… There was neither a blackboard nor map.… The only apparatus consisted of a wooden water pail and a battered tin dipper, from which the children drank water brought from a well not far distant, the owner of which allowed the boys to draw one bucket of water a day.” An early teacher is pictured scooping the drifted sand from under the pot outside his tent door, proceeding to boil his potatoes and brew his kettle of tea for a solitary supper after his day's work.
Ambitious in the face of difficulties is a list of geography questions propounded by an early school board president who prided himself on being able to teach more in one day than any teacher in San Francisco. The questions were (1) name all the rivers of the globe; (2) name all the bays, gulfs, seas, lakes and other bodies of water on the globe; (3) name all the countries of the world; (4) name all the cities of the world. It is told that when a young man from Texas had worried through the questions in arithmetic and had come to these on geography, he examined them carefully, then walked up to the chairman's table and handed them to him, saying, “If the Board wants me to prepare a primary geography, they must pay me for it.”
The first kindergarten was opened in September 1863, by “Professor” Charles and Madame Weil, at 41 South Park Street. Schools sprang up quickly in imitation of the first successful private children's school, and by the end of the century there were easily a hundred of them in the city. Child education, however, did not receive mature attention until the advent of Miss Emma Marwedel in 1878. Miss Marwedel was one of the earliest child educators in the East to teach story-telling and drawing to children, and she left a highly successful school in the Nation's capital to organize a kindergarten in Los Angeles. During this period of teaching and training she instructed Kate Douglas Wiggin in kindergarten work.
Later Miss Marwedel and Mrs. Wiggin were associated in conducting San Francisco's famous Silver Street Kindergarten, parent institution of all Pacific Coast kindergartens. It was located in the notorious Tar Flat district around Second and Harrison Streets where “…life is sodden and aimless…children are often born of drunken mothers, and show deformities and mental deficiencies and inherited diseases…kindergarten teachers in their visiting sometimes find mothers helpless with drink…”
Fighting against such conditions, Miss Marwedel and Mrs. Wiggin taught the ever-increasing classes games, music, and the elements of cultural education, and with the help of other assistants made their school one of the most active educational forces in the history of Western child training. When Mrs. Wiggin later gained international fame by writing such books as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, she continued the crusade for child education. In San Francisco during her last few hours of intolerable illness, Miss Marwedel said to followers: “Have faith in the kindergarten… I believe in its power to reform the world.”
Jean Parker, who believed the education of a child should include more than arithmetic, history, grammar, and other basic studies, first introduced useful and practical accomplishments—such as domestic science classes, school luncheons, girls’ and boys’ clubs, manual arts, and physical culture—to California juvenile education. The Jean Parker Grammar School in San Francisco not only follows her now-famous “learning by doing” method, but is a living memorial to the woman about whom was said: “She knew the new education before it poured in a beneficent flood over the land, and she created while others evolved laboratory schemes of advancement…”
The rise of colleges and universities followed the same impulse which broke through the apathy of a raw and materialistic civilization to establish the common schools. On the eastern side of the Bay, at a time when Oakland was a cluster of houses and Berkeley but an expanse of neighboring fields, when the first transcontinental railroad had not reached California, and Tiburcio Vasquez was harassing honest men in the San Joaquin Valley, the University of California was opened in 1868.
Leland Stanford came to California in 1852, penniless, to sell salt pork and miners’ sieves in a store at Michigan Bluff. After a while he was able to bring his wife out from the East, and for a time they made their own furniture from drygoods boxes—but only for a time. On a November morning in 1885, Senator and Mrs. Stanford gathered a group of men in their Nob Hill home in San Francisco and presented to them the founding grant of Stanford University. Without ostentation and seemingly the least impressed of all present, the Senator deeded over to this board of trustees 83,200 acres of the richest farmlands in California, and declared his intention of bequeathing to the institution the bulk of his estate, then estimated at $30,000,000. The world gasped. Never before had an educational institution come into existence on foundations so munificent. But that was the least cause for astonishment. There was not even a flag stop where the doors of the university were to open, nothing but unbroken stretches of grain. Furthermore, the university at Berkeley had not yet reached the 400 mark in its graduating classes, and, as the New York Mail and Express remarked, the need for another university at such close quarters was about as urgent as for “an asylum of decayed sea captains in Switzerland.”
Nevertheless, the very daring of the enterprise, and the beauty and fitness of the Romanesque buildings as they arose, arcade on arcade, against the low tawny hills, together with the word broadcast by Dr. David Starr Jordan, “The winds of freedom blow!”, drew a student body of 465 in the first year. Among that first generation were Herbert Hoover, Ray Lyman Wilbur, Vernon Kellogg, Holbrook Blinn, Will and Wallace Irwin, and Charles K. Field. It was Senator Stanford's idea that the university he had founded should be a place for specialization, with the primary emphasis on usefulness. In terms of this ideal the growth of the university has been molded, with the gradual elimination of work of general and elementary nature and the expansion of research and graduate studies. On the other hand, Mrs. Stanford's insistence was on the spirit of democracy, an objective aided by the fact that both students and faculty were necessarily resident on the campus, from the very earliest days when the great iron triangle sounded for communal “Grub!” As a consequence, it has become a Stanford claim that no student can consider his college career a success if, when he graduates, he is not known by his first name to at least three professors.
But pioneer education was not reserved for men only. On an acreage in the foothills of Alameda County, ideals of manners and “lady-hood” were taught young women who had no designation to set beside their names but some vague territorial address such as “Nevada.” In a society founded by adventurers, this was indeed stemming the stream. Dr. Cyrus Taggart Mills had reached California in the 1860’s, then a man of middle age, his only fortune a small one acquired by missionary toil and close saving. Purchasing the ground where Mills College now stands, he transported to it Benicia Seminary, and under mansard roof and cupola “beautifully frescoed” within with well-meaning cherubs, garlands of roses, and be-ribboned musical instruments, Dr. Mills and his wife taught the daughters of miners “to spell correctly, to read naturally, to write legibly, and to converse intelligently.”
Numerous other educational institutions arose during the 20 years after Mrs. Olive Mann Isbell taught her youngsters in a stable where she saw her wedding handkerchief used as a flag of truce to the Mexicans. In 1850 the Sisters of St. Dominic opened St. Catherine's Academy at Benicia; today as the Dominican College of San Rafael, it is particularly noted for its school of music. The University of San Francisco had its beginning five years later as St. Ignatius College, built on land described as “the sand dunes near the little town of San Francisco”—the present site of the Emporium. In 1863 Archbishop Alemany founded St. Mary's College, since transferred from San Francisco to Oakland and more recently to Moraga.
It is primarily in scientific discovery that the pioneer spirit now evinces itself, and it is in science that California scholars have made their greatest mark. In the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California stands a gigantic contrivance that looks like a Brobdingnagian cheese, but has been compared more appropriately to a huge machine gun. This cyclotron Dr. E. O. Lawrence directs against atoms—objects so small that the entire population of the world would require 10,000 years to count the number of them in a drop of water. Before Dr. Lawrence's experiments the only bullets powerful enough, and at the same time tiny enough, to crack through the nucleus of the atom were the natural emanations of radium, an extremely expensive commodity and one available in very small quantity. By means of the cyclotron the nuclei of a special type of hydrogen atom may be utilized for the same purpose. These nuclei, fired at the rate of a hundred thousand billion a second against whatever element is exposed to the machine, satisfy both the necessity for tremendous force and the necessity for infinitesimal smallness.
The reason for this vindictive effort to break up the innocent atom lies in the tremendous energies released by the cracking open of the atomic nuclei, energies which are the most tantalizing forces known to man. Already the atoms of all the available (some 30 different) elements have been blasted by the stream of so-called “deuterons” emitted by the machine. The rearrangement in pattern and size of the atomic nuclei of these elements has resulted in the realization of the old dream of the alchemists—the transmutation of one element into another, of platinum into iridium and gold, of bismuth into polonium and lead. It has resulted also in the creation of substances never yet found in nature, substances whose common characteristic is the fact that they are all radio-active. Several of these new forms show promise in the treatment of certain radio sensitive diseases. Even more sensational is the liberation of the “neutron ray,” a ray similar to X-ray but far more effective in the treatment of tumorous and cancerous tissue, and now regarded as one of the most promising developments in the scientific fight against cancer.
Dr. Ernest Linwood Walker, quiet and sincere student, professor of tropical medicine in the University of California Medical School, some years ago swept aside the veil of superstition and fear which for thousands of years had blinded men to the real nature of leprosy. He was able to identify the bacterium cultivable from leprosy as a soil-growing organism, and he suggests, as an alternative hypothesis to contagion, the entrance of this soil bacterium into the human body through soil-contaminated wounds as the primary mode of infection in leprosy. Wild rats are subject to a leprosy-like disease, from which the same soil organism can be cultivated and for which a similar mode of infection is suggested. No longer were bells to be rung as the leper approached, and the dreadful cry, “Unclean!” go from mouth to mouth.
A housewife who opens a can of peaches is protected by a long series of intensive researches carried on in the university laboratories. Dr. Carl Meyer and his assistants, after working on the subject of botulism (food poisoning), were able to reduce poisoning from commercially packed foods to the extent that now there is actually more danger from foods preserved in the home.
In the Engineering Materials Laboratory, preparatory to the building of Hoover Dam, concrete was accorded unusual attention. It was tested by delicate instruments, in turn lovingly coddled and lovingly smashed and given ideal conditions and the worst conditions—in order that one of the engineering projects of the modern world might guard the waters of the Colorado. River. Within adiabatic calorimeters—cork-lined rooms with doors like those of the refrigerator of a butcher shop—samples of various types of concrete were housed in cylindrical compartments; electrical resistance thermometers were imbedded in the concrete. The concrete was tested under various stages of dampness, with and without loads; its strength was measured in a universal testing machine of 4,000,000-pound capacity. Its durability was gauged under artificial weather conditions duplicating those to which the dam would be subjected. This testing laboratory has been concerned in an advisory capacity with engineering projects including the Colorado River Aqueduct into Los Angeles, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge, Pine Canyon Dam, and Oakland's Broadway Tunnel.
At Stanford University aeronautical research has been carried on since the eve of America's entry into the World War, when Professors Durand and Lesley built their wind tunnel on the campus and started experimentation with airplane propellers on reduced scale models. This was real pioneering, for the problems were then virtually unattacked. Stanford is now recognized as the leading center in the United States for propeller research.
In the same way that research is integrated with the commercial life of the State, so also is it integrated with the life of California farmers, returning to them millions of dollars, saved through improved agricultural methods. In more than one curious instance, experiments carried on for the benefit of agriculture have had their effects in a totally different field of industry. When Charles B. Lipman, now Dean of the Graduate Division, and Dr. Aaron Gordon were engaged in the problem of treating pear-blight by injecting a poisonous solution in the trunks of the trees, it was hoped the solution would act on the bacteria causing the blight. Unfortunately it was not successful with pear trees, but it was remarkably successful with telephone poles. The problem now became a totally different one, that of protecting piles and timbers, used in marine construction and by power companies, from the depredations of various types of borers. The process, which is like embalming, consists in injection of the poisonous solution into the circulatory system of the living tree or cut pole. Practical tests on telephone poles and piles before they are cut have shown it to be a cheap and efficient method of protecting them from marauding organisms, fungi, and molds.
These are a few of the values immediately accessible and easily visualized by the layman who is interested in “results” from the State's educational system. Yet even in the liberal arts department, there is the eternal individual with warmly giving hands and heart fixed on the future. Josiah Royce, one of the truly great “great men” who have come from the University of California, speaks of climbing around under the eaves of Bacon Hall, where the books belonging to the old College of California were stored. There, where deep dust stood on ancient theological and scientific treatises, he gathered, according to his own statement, the most profound intellectual impressions of his life.
The immense collections of the present University Library came into being, step by step, with the gifts of individuals who had felt a similar debt to “book-learning.” One of the most delightful of these collections is lodged in the Morrison Library, on the ground floor of the building. The story of its foundation parallels Walter Scott's preface to Quentin Durward. Just as Sir Walter was introduced by the fantastic Marquis de Hautlieu, with many apologies for tattered tapestry and tenant owls, to the turret room of a ruined castle where were deposited “the precious relics of a most splendid library,” so, demurring in housewifely fashion for the untidiness of the attic, the widow of Alexander F. Morrison led her guests, one evening after dinner, to a garret lit up like an Aladdin's cave with the splendor of 15,000 books which she wished to give to the university as a memorial to her husband. These books, so vital a part of her own life, were not to be swallowed in the catacombs of the stacks, but were to form a room of their own where students, sans notebooks, might genuinely recreate themselves intellectually.
The Bancroft Library is, of course, one of the most important of the individual collections, and becomes each year increasingly the center of research for students of the history of the Pacific Slope and Hispanic America. Scholars in constantly larger numbers come from the East and abroad to consult these rich manuscripts and printed materials. Similarly unique in its own field is the Hoover Library on War, Revolution, and Peace, at Stanford, containing documents relating to the World War—government reports, unofficial publications, periodicals, books, pamphlets, and manuscripts, some of so confidential a nature that they will not be available for use for 40 years.
It has been said that the degree of civilization attained by any nation may be estimated from the provision it makes for study of the stars. Certainly, paradoxical as it may seem, no one has ever asked that Lick Observatory show its credentials in the shape of “practical” benefits. The discovery of a fifth moon in Jupiter or a shadowy duplicate streak across Mars has satisfied the public mind as much as an honest piece of cement or the last meal of a mealy-bug issuing from the university laboratories. This tolerance for sidereal phenomena is, as a matter of fact, a good deal more respectable than the tolerance which James Lick himself felt for starry matters. It is said of him that he “had never looked through anything larger than a ship's spy-glass,” and when he was consulted at his Alviso flour mill in 1887 on the subject of a university foundation for scientific studies, he “listened patiently, but it made no more impression on him than on the fruit trees” he was walking under. Yet he founded—for what reason no one can surmise—the observatory on Mount Hamilton, one of the seven branches of the University of California. There, in the base of the pier on which the observatory rests, rests also the body of James Lick.
And there, through telescopes a good deal larger than a ship's spyglass, have been discovered the several satellites of Jupiter additional to the four discovered by Galileo in 1610. There have occurred the first great successes in photographing comets and the Milky Way, teaching more about the structure, formation, and dissolution of the comet's tail than had been learned in all previous time. There the sulky steps of the young blue stars have been measured, the staid stride of the middle-aged yellow stars, and the fine gallop of the old red stars. There the advance through space of our own solar system has been set at 12.2 miles per second in the direction of the constellation of Hercules. Whether this would have meant much or little to James Lick, no one can say, for he “wot not of it” under his fruit trees at Alviso.
Notoriously unexciting as is the history of education, the hardihood of those first California educators—considered now from a safe distance in time—seems no less awe-inspiring than the hardihood of their contemporaries who forged across the Sierra Nevada, seeking gold. For the apathy they faced and overcame was no less cold and cruel than the Sierra. Nevertheless they opened school in stable and tent. And it is still their day—the day of the pioneer—in the halls now decently clad with stucco and adorned with drinking fountains, while the chimes of Berkeley's Campanile proclaim the international frontiers of education, ringing out, slowly and liquidly, a tune from Heine or an old English carol or “The Goden Bear.”
In 1864 an earthquake damaged San Francisco but left Oakland unharmed. Discussion ensued as to the reason for Oakland's invulnerability. Bret Harte, citing “Schwappelfurt, the celebrated German geologist,” endeavored to explain the singular fact by suggesting that there are some things the earth cannot swallow. Whether Harte's affection for Oakland was paralleled by a similar affection for San Francisco is a question; he was given a job in the mint so that he could write stories, but as soon as he had written the stories he left and went to wear his green gloves in Boston and to part his Dundreary whiskers in London.
Bret Harte is not the only writer who, wearing the local label, conducted himself with an astonishing resistance toward this geographical section. Harte left it bodily. Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller, and others found the city's frank money grubbing and social vulgarity unbearable. Boston and New York, London and Paris seemed to offer a more soothing atmosphere for artistic nerves jangled by such excesses of gross materialism. And yet Harte endowed California with its earliest literary prestige. He discovered and romanticized the Argonauts, at a time when it could be said of the urban intellectuals of whom he was one, that, like the Hangtown girls,
“They're dreadful shy of forty-niners,
Turn their noses up at miners.”
And there is ironic justice in the fact that once he had created the Argonaut of California fiction, he tucked up his mustachios and departed.
It is the California setting, particularly the setting of San Francisco—its place on the sea, facing the Orient, with its back to the mines—which alone has inspired in its writers a continuity of tradition. The region gave elbow room for the unpredictable expansion of certain individual writers, elbow room they would not have had elsewhere. The effect has been what some critics call the “virility” of Californian literature. This is the one tradition to which it is possible to point—the defining effect of the region on its writers.
San Francisco's literary beginnings were its pioneer journals—the first of which, the Golden Era, was founded in 1852 by J. MacDonough Foard and Rollin M. Daggett. In March 1857 the Golden Era printed a slight, sentimental poem, “The Valentine,” signed “Bret.” Its author followed with more verses and sketches. Another contributor was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a young Missourian, signing himself Mark Twain. The two men met soon after May 1864, while Clemens was employed on the Call, which shared a building with the local United States Mint. Later Harte became temporary editor of the Californian, and engaged Clemens to write regularly for the publication. Harte laid the foundation for Western romance, and Twain crystallized Western humor.
Harte played the more irrational, the more unpredictable part, and in this way the more truly “Californian” part; for scarcely a year before the appearance of The Luck of Roaring Camp, he was writing editorials (as editor of The Overland Monthly) on the unromantic ugliness of such place names as Poker Flat and Red Dog Gulch, advising young writers to steer away from the appellation “honest miner,” since “the less said about the motives of some of our pioneers the better; very many were more concerned in getting away from where they were, than in going to any particular place.” And in his editorial in the second number of The Overland Monthly he prophesied that it would be 300 years before the red shirts of the pioneers would become romantic and their high boots heroic. One of the worst of prophets, he had just finished writing the story that would do more than anything else to make the red shirts romantic and the high boots heroic. It was contained in the same issue.
The Luck of Roaring Camp had more than its author's own resistance to his environment to overcome. The resistance of proofreader and printer was so strenuous that it was almost still-born—and American local-color with it. Cherokee Sal's profession shocked the young lady who read proof. A reference to obstetrics threw her into hysterics. And finally Kentuck's exclamation over the baby—”The d—d little cuss!”—brought her hurriedly to the printer, who shared her appalled conviction that the story should never see the light. Dictatorial interference alone saved it for the August number of the Overland. What happened then was a publishing miracle, which brought offers from the Atlantic Monthly, a letter from Charles Dickens, and an announcement from Henry Adams that there was just one hopeful thing in a hopeless world—Bret Harte.
Harte is usually associated with the Argonauts of ‘49 and ‘50, whereas he is a writer of the later fifties and the sixties, writing of “the disused ditches, the scarred flats, the discarded levels, ruined flumes, and roofless cabins.” His Yuba Bill he very probably rode beside, on some dusty stagecoach, but as he himself says in A Lonely Ride: “The road from Wingdam to Slumgullion (that is, in the heart of the mining country) knew no other banditti than the regularly licensed hotel-keepers.” Harte's Indians were the Indians whose carcasses he saw floated by the raft-load down to Uniontown after a cutthroat revel of some upstanding citizens inspired by whisky and manifest destiny. His “heathen Chinee,” who “for ways that are dark and for tricks that are vain” was so very peculiar, was one of the unfortunates who were being attacked with all the violence of anti-oriental chauvinism.
California “romance” and California “savagery” of the sort that appeared in Harte's writing give striking point to the story told by Mark Twain of how Harte drew the railroad tracks under the grizzly bear for the Overland's title-page. A grizzly, the old grizzly that had been the State's totem ever since the Bear Flag days, had been selected as emblem for the Overland Monthly. The grizzly was drawn, engraved and printed, but he seemed a very lonely bear. “As a bear, he was a success—he was a good bear—” says Mark. “But then, he was an objectless bear—a bear that meant nothing in particular…simply stood there snarling over his shoulder at nothing… But presently Harte took a pencil and drew these two simple lines under his feet and behold he was a magnificent success! the ancient symbol of California savagery snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive Civilization, the first Overland locomotive!” This, however, was not the only significance of the symbol, as Harte would prove by his almost immediate departure down those tracks for an Eldorado that lay in the opposite direction, the direction of the East and Europe. He left California's “savagery” to John Muir, in whose gentle hands the mining camps were erased from the mountains; and California's “high and progressive Civilization” to Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty was to issue from San Francisco.
The unshorn gentry of the mining towns had at first provoked satire among San Francisco wits, and then, by Harte's unpredicted gesture, romance. But satire remained a strong undercurrent. Twain's description of the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County might be a typically monstrous understatement for the “honest miner” himself: “You never see a frog so modest and straightfor'ard as he was, for all he was so gifted. And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see.” Twain, who had adopted his pseudonym in 1863, mounted as a humorist on the back of this frog, for he wrote the sketch and won his first fame all in one leap. He remained in California from May 1864 until December 1866, and worked on the San Francisco Morning Call for a few months. Of the writers with whom he had contact, most were humorists: it was the typical humor of the Comstock Lode era that crystallized in his style at this time—coupling the tall tale of the barroom with excessive understatement. By the time he left California, his popularity in the East had become enormous. And like Harte, he sought those greener pastures.
Besides Harte and Mark Twain, the Golden Era, the Californian, and the Overland had other contributors whose fame spread beyond the local boundaries. Prentice Mulford's rollicking satire of frontier heroics found great favor. Charles Warren Stoddard, the poet, a close friend of Harte, later became the celebrated author of South Sea Idyls and The Lepers of Molokai. Ina Coolbrith, who contributed poems to the Californian under Harte's editorship, was many years afterward named the “poet laureate” of California. Songs from the Golden Gate contains many of her finest lyrics. Another distinguished contributor was Edward Rowland Sill, author of The Hermitage and other volumes of verse.
Joaquin (Cincinnatus Heine) Miller, “the Poet of the Sierras,” was deeply impressed by the city's literary atmosphere when he first came to San Francisco as a young man. “I have seen the world well since,” he said many years later, discussing the Golden Era, “yet those carpeted parlors, with Joe Lawrence and his brilliant satellites, outshine all things else, as I turn to look back.” His name, Joaquin—replacing the ridiculous Cincinnatus Heine—was derived from Joaquin Murrieta, the Mexican outlaw in California. Miller's fame, however, originated not in San Francisco but in London, where he became a nine days’ wonder as a fiery poet and a convincing representative of the “Wild West,” with his high top boots, red flannel shirt, a sombrero, and his long hair falling, Indian-fashion, upon his shoulders. In his grandiloquent poetry he celebrated the deeds of pioneers, Indians, and bandits amid the natural marvels of the West. Except for “Columbus,” which is still in the school boy's repertoire, he is remembered today for his attitudes rather than for his verse. In his hilltop eyrie, “The Hights” (sic), overlooking Oakland, he settled down, after his wanderings abroad, to practice his odd histrionics until his death in 1913.
Ambrose Bierce was another who found elbowroom for the development of an even more intense individuality, but the stamp of the region upon him was of a different sort. For a quarter of a century he was a literary figure, the local literary figure, and the years which he dominated stretched into an era vastly different from the era of the Argonauts as the “unutterably gorgeous” society of the 1860's gave way to the sand-lot crusades of “the terrible seventies.” This was the era of novels such as On the Verge, abounding in voluptuous ladies at the pianoforte, and in French quotations; of the poets such as Richard Realf, whose record for bigamy won as much sympathy as his record for bad verse; of essays on Petrarch and of editions of Heredia. It was the era of the false front, and it showed even worse propensities in the eighties—Greek porticos flanked by bay windows, Corinthian columns leading up flights of wooden steps, conical towers, and Queen Anne flourishes. From Nob Hill to Barbary Coast, barbarism and greed destroyed the possibility of good work in the arts.
This was Ambrose Bierce's domain. He declared himself in 1877 with the first issue of the Argonaut: “It is my intention,” he said, “to purify journalism in this town by instructing such writers as it is worth while to instruct, and assassinating those that it is not.” His column, appearing consecutively from 1868 to 1900, was a vivid experience in the lives of innumerable Westerners. He had deliberately set himself the task of direct attack on individuals. It was his moral function, and possibly the only function open to him in his time and in San Francisco. His style he had acquired in the beaver-hat age, an age of gesture and flourish; and he patched it together with ideas of “elegance” gained in London, and delivered his opinions with a bludgeon-like ponderosity suitable for denting the pates of a hoodlum citizenry. He himself summed up his literary proclivities in a fable: “A rattlesnake came home to its brood to die—I have been bitten by the editor of a partisan journal, it said.”
Irony indeed—and poetic justice, perhaps—in the career of this Titan who had San Francisco for his malfeasant Olympus, is the very name of the column which carried his “homicidal paragraphs”: Prattle. Another irony is his mysterious end in Mexico, trailed by apocryphal tales of an old man shot by a firing squad. Still another is the end met by those disciples who called him “Master”—Herman Scheffauer, who took his own life in a Berlin hotel, and George Sterling, who committed suicide in San Francisco's Bohemian Club. But these futilities cannot be laid at Bierce's door, by calling him, as some critics have done, a “death man.” The style of the time, in a community of contradictions, was morbid. Bierce's own style, if it is measured in terms of the resistance he put up to those contradictions, was one of tremendous vitality.
To combat those same contradictions required even more vitality of Bierce's successors. From an Oakland cannery, where ten hours a day of taut nerves prevented a moment's attention to the frequent victims who had their fingers snapped off by the machinery, Jack London was graduated to become “the prince of the oyster pirates.” He has indicated the reason for his choice of a profession: “Every raid…was a felony. The penalty was state imprisonment, the stripes and the lock-step. And what of that? The men in stripes worked a shorter day than I at my machine.” With Whiskey Bob, Joe Goose, Nicky the Greek, Soup and Stew Kennedy, Clam Bart, Irish and Oyster Kelly, Patsy Haggerty, Harmonica Joe, Hell and Blazes, and young Scratch Nelson of the monumental shoulders, he discovered the social conditions which fecundated his talent. Having nearly forfeited his life to a Chinese shrimp poacher who marooned him on an island off the Marin shore—a story he tells in Tales of the Fish Patrol—he learned enough wit to leave oyster pirating and seek the primitive salt in a three-topmast schooner bound for a larger universe.
The Sea-Wolf The Call of the Wild—these titles indicate not only London's place in space, on a bay crowded with ships that offered adventure far from “the man-city and its snarling roar”; they indicate also his place in time, when the romantic gesturer had to turn from Oscar Wilde's hothouse, and go hunting with “huskies” on the last big hunt before the world closed up its frontiers. Lonodon came back from the South Seas and wrote of nut-brown queens, who sat on swan-skins and greeted a chance traveler thus: “Stranger, I reckon you're sure the first white man that ever set foot in this valley. Set down an’ talk a spell, and then we'll have a bite to eat. Which way might you be comin’?” And of primitive Teutons in the clothes of James Ward of Ward, Knowles and Company, who dictated to their stenographers by day and chased coyotes on the hills of Mill Valley by night.
But California's most spectacular and widely read California author was much more than a romantic gesturer. London's social philosophy was direct and radical. And the themes he dealt with were those of elemental physical conflict. In the handling of swift action he has scarcely been surpassed. Superlatively strong men stalk through his books, which were based directly on his own experiences. Martin Eden and John Barleycorn are semi-fictionized accounts of his own life, alternating between infantile romanticism and profound disillusionment. Mostly self-educated, he wrote, in 16 years, 43 volumes, besides acting as war correspondent and cruising in his yacht, the Snark. He died at his ranch in Glen Ellen, California, in 1916, of uremia.
He had long been a victim of ill health, disappointments at the hands of his friends, overwork in order to maintain a large establishment, and that battle against drink described in John Barleycorn. As a voice of his time and region, a spinner of yarns, a furious prophet, London is remembered by an audience probably larger than that of any other American author.
In this period, Frank Norris comes closest to the accent of greatness. And misses it. While London wrote of James Ward, who puzzled philologists at the University of California by his chants in primitive Germanic, Norris wrote of McTeague of McTeague's Dental Parlors, whose ambition was to have projecting from the corner window over Polk Street “a huge gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something gorgeous and attractive.” While London wrote of Klondike huskies, Norris wrote of B Street Station:
“Near the station a bit of fence painted with a cigar advertisement reeled over into the mud, while under its lee lay an abandoned gravel wagon with dished wheels… Across the flats, at the fringe of the town, were the dump heaps, the figures of a few Chinese ragpickers moving over them… Across the railroad tracks, to seaward, one saw the long stretch of black mud bank left bare by the tide, which was far out, nearly half a mile. Clouds of seagulls were forever rising and settling upon this mud bank; a wrecked and abandoned wharf crawled over it on tottering legs; close in an old sailboat lay canted on her bilge…”
In the dynamic fictions of Frank Norris and Jack London an awareness of social forces is more evident than in any earlier Western writing. Norris, who came to California from Chicago at fourteen years of age, laid his early novels, Blix, Vandover and the Brute, and McTeague, in San Francisco. The essence of the city's life—at North Beach, Telegraph Hill, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, the Polk Street district—is reflected, although not without certain youthful exaggeration, in their pages. Norris determined to explore, on a large scale, the economic mainsprings of society. The Octopus and The Pit were the two first volumes of an intended trilogy, “The Epic of Wheat.” In The Octopus is depicted the stranglehold of a railroad on California wheat growers and the entire State. The Pit is placed in Chicago, the world's wheat market. The third volume, The Wolf, to have been an account of the consumers of wheat the world over, was never written. In the midst of his ambitious plans, Norris died at the age of 32. Although marred by melodramatic excesses, a confusing tinge of mysticism, and an apparent lack of clear understanding of the issues involved, his novels, in their search for truth, in their tone, stand as distinguished landmarks at the threshold of the era of realism in American letters.
The society which London attacked with merciless fury and Norris probed with surgical ruthlessness was gently scolded in The Lark, edited by Gelett Burgess in the nineties, which for the whole of its two years sustained a wondrous buoyancy. It was read throughout the country, though Burgess often mocked the staid with such ditties as:
“I love to go to Lectures,
And make the Audience Stare,
By walking ‘round upon their heads,
And spoiling People's hair!”
Conventional readers tolerated his nonsense because Burgess always kept it “clean” and because it was young as they never had been young; its more sophisticated comments escaped them, being whispered, as Albert Parry says, “in exquisite innuendo.” Its chief contributors were Ernest Peixotto, Bruce Porter, Florence Lundborg, Carolyn Wells, Yone Noguchi—besides Burgess, whose “Purple Cow” classic first appeared in its pages. The New York Times nicknamed the group Les Jeunes. It was abandoned while still thriving and making money because, as Burgess wrote to Carolyn Wells, “I wanted it to die young and in its full freshness.” Its whole staff, except Noguchi, moved to New York. But Burgess remembered San Francisco, for in The Heart Line he satirized both practitioners and victims of palmistry and astrology, cults which have always thrived in a city where so many have lived dangerously.
After the turn of the century an increasing number of young San Franciscans hoping for a career in literature yearned toward the cultural centers in the East and Europe; but many still received their impetus from the local scene. “The Man With the Hoe,” published in a San Francisco newspaper, made famous overnight the young San Jose poet, Edwin Markham. The coterie of writers who frequently met at Papa Coppa's restaurant during the years just preceding the earthquake and fire of 1906 included Jack London, Wallace and Will Irwin, the short-story writer James Hopper, the imperious and aging Ambrose Bierce and his two brilliant pupils, poets Herman Scheffauer and George Sterling. Having learned from Bierce nothing of that writer's Swiftian vigor but only his magniloquence, Sterling was invoking in such volumes as The Testimony of the Suns a Platonic idea of California scenery, largely in the colors of purple and crystal. The Irwins each celebrated the Chinatown of the pre-fire era—Will in Pictures of Old Chinatown and Wallace in Chinatown Ballads; after the fire, Will wrote a requiem for “The City That Was,” while Wallace, who had gained his early fame with such verses as Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum, turned to novel writing.
Charles Caldwell Dobie, 26 at the time of the fire—when he helped his mother transport the family treasures beyond the reach of the flames—was later to describe the more picturesque aspects of the city as it had been in San Francisco: A Pageant, San Francisco Tales, and San Francisco's Chinatown. Another of those for whom the “days of old, days of gold” have provided a rich vein to tap for literary purposes is Stewart Edward White, author of The Gray Dawn and The Forty-Niners.
Even before the turn of the century Gertrude Atherton's literary explorations had been leading her back to California's Spanish beginnings. She wrote of Magdalena Yorba, half-Spanish and born tongue-tied, and of her father, Don Roberto, a bank president, who practiced “hip-hip-hooray!” in his study and hanged himself with the American flag. From the Spanish period, which she celebrated in The Dooms-woman. The Californians, The Splendid Idle Forties, and Rezanov, she went on to the American era in Ancestors and Patience Sparhawk, and then, having covered California, shifted to Montana, Greece and Africa. Rezanov, love story of the visiting Russian officer and the San Francisco Presidio comandante's daughter, probably has remained her most popular novel. In Adventures of a Novelist (1932) she looks back on the five decades of her literary career.
Charles Norris, like his brother Frank, writes “to make people think.” Characteristic of his novels—conceived on a less ample scale than those of his brother—are Brass, an attempt to present different phases of “what we understand by marriage”; Pig-Iron, concerned with the materialistic influence on American life; and Bricks Without Straw, dealing with the ever recurring battle of ideals between parents and children. His wife, Kathleen Norris, who in her early youth was a San Francisco newspaper woman and a contributor to local periodicals, completes the noted family; since her first published volume, Mother (1911), which went into numerous editions, she has written almost 50 novels, all observing the proprieties of middle-class family life.
Even Gertrude Stein, when she turned to description of the local scene in The Making of Americans, wrote of a vanished yesterday—of her girlhood in an old-fashioned house with verandas amid the tangled rambler roses and eucalyptus trees of suburban Oakland. But the postwar writers have now been succeeded by post-post-war writers who have put nostalgia behind them. William Saroyan might have been born anywhere—anywhere that there was a colony of Armenians—but he happens to have been born in the San Joaquin Valley, and the majority of his earlier stories reflect his goings to and fro about the rich valley earth and that much of the cosmos located between Carl Street, San Francisco, and the Civic Center.
“I want you to know,” he writes, “that it is very cold in San Francisco today, and that I am freezing…” Or he tries it on another tack: “I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language things they already know.” Out of these trivia—blue fingers for the writer, things they already know for the readers—comes Theodore Badal, the Assyrian barber on Third Street; comes young “Iowa,” gone north with his yellow hair and hope; comes the daring young man himself, turning his “lost face to the empty sky.”
John Steinbeck has been gathering California local color all his life and has turned it to account in several books, most powerfully and angrily in his recent novel, The Grapes of Wrath. In a curious—but perhaps not an accidental—way, Saroyan and Steinbeck recall “with variations” some of the earlier phases of literature in the region. The he-man of the 1890 is re-born in William Saroyan, born with the proper cosmopolitan note of Armenian hair and with the genuine mid-century stamp of a depression-starvation appetite. A virility less flamboyant than Jack London's—because it had no Klondikes in which to exercise—none the less manifests itself in the immediacy of Saroyan's style, in his simple, undetailed human sympathies. And finally, John Steinbeck has made as disturbing a figure in the Nation's literary scene as any California writer by bringing to its culmination that “local-color” fiction for which Bret Harte—and California literature along with him—became famous.
Of all Apollo's embattled stepchildren who have attempted to create works of artistic value amid the Bay region's turbulent economic development, few have achieved so much as its painters and sculptors. Enormous is the variety of their work—much of it derivative and mediocre, some of it distinguished by originality. If theirs is not yet a tradition of masterpieces, they nevertheless have put behind them almost a century of aesthetic ferment, of tireless experimentation.
San Franciscans, whatever their qualifications for aesthetic judgment, have always been outspoken critics of their city's art and artists. Before a monument may be erected or a mural finished, citizens from the mayor downwards must have their say. A minority opinion recently delivered by members of the Art Commission—the city's final arbiter of art works and public buildings—condemned the proposed erection of Beniamino Bufano's gigantic statue of St. Francis on Twin Peaks. “It looks like a holdup,” they said of the design for this 156-foot figure of stainless steel with arms upraised in supplication; and local factions were aroused anew by a syndicated columnist's Nation-wide crusade against what he termed “God-awful statuary” as represented by Bufano's unorthodox model. This controversy had been preceded by the public turmoil attending the painting of murals in the Coit Tower, which was marked by political tail-twisting such as Diego Rivera practiced on his patrons in his Rockefeller Center murals in New York. To bring this hectic tradition up to date, Hilaire Hiler threatened to leave uncompleted his murals in the lobby of Aquatic Park unless plans were abandoned to install furniture not in keeping with his decorative motif. The files of the Alta California, the Wasp, the Overland Monthly, and the News-Letter offer plentiful testimony, in saltier epithets of earlier decades, that such controversies are by no means confined to the present generation.
The plastic arts have been a product and a reflection of the cultural growth of the Bay region, and of San Francisco in particular. As the rough-and-ready decades of the Gold Rush passed, a kind of poker-faced conservatism settled on the metropolis dominated by the bonanza millionaires. Its culture froze in the urbane, ornamental, shock-proof mold of the 1880’s and remained always slightly out-of-date until rejuvenated after the calamity of 1906. Its painters, depending wholly on the patronage of a nouveau riche society, offered productions acceptable to a clientele whose tastes were dictated by extravagant notions that had nothing to do with art. In their imitation villas and chateaux the families of the bonanza elite wanted interior decoration that would be “elegant” and dazzling and grand, something flamboyant enough to impart an overwhelming impression of social prestige. Whenever these “cultural accoutrements” could not be produced locally in sufficient quantity, all Europe was ransacked for an astonishing assortment of paintings, sculpture, stained glass, tapestries, furniture, and bric-a-brac. The result, as that gaudy generation's sophisticated and refined descendants laughingly acknowledge, was hideous and absurd.
For those Bay region artists who had to put up with such nonsense this was an environment that sorely tested their professional integrity. But despite the perversion of public taste, which characterized American life generally during the nineteenth century, the majority of the Bay region's painters and sculptors devoted themselves to their work with uncompromising sincerity. And eventually, out of all the mass of spurious importations, were established those collections and exhibitions of both European and native art by which the public has been educated to appreciate the significance of local craftsmen and their colleagues abroad. Out of the aesthetic confusion of the bonanza era have evolved those art schools and museums which have helped to create a new synthesis of the welter of artistic influences.
If, as John P. Young's history of San Francisco points out, most of the city's literati in the 1860’s ignored the local scene, “no such accusation can be brought against the painters of the period, for their subjects were almost wholly Californian.” Pioneer of this California School was the artist of whom the Alta California's discerning critic observed: “Few men dare paint flesh, against a pink cushion, Nahl has dared, and won ( !)” This was with reference to Charles Christian Nahl's (1818-75) three separate renderings of The Rape of the Sabine Women. Painted in the pseudo-classical manner of the Düsseldorf School, this romantic work was long considered his masterpiece. Unfortunately for his reputation, many of his more relevant and minutely authentic studies of Gold Rush scenes have either been scattered among private collections or lost. Though the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum contains some of his paintings, his most representative works, including The Fandango and Sunday at the Mines, are in the E. B. Crocker Art Gallery at Sacramento. Descendant of a long line of German artists, Nahl was indebted to his ancestry for what talent he had. In subject matter and technique he was influenced by the classic revival and by his early studies under Horace Vernet in Paris.
Expert draughtsman that he was, Nahl revealed in his canvases a love of detail for its own sake which make them primarily exercises in careful documentation: genre paintings in which the sitter for a portrait, accompanied by his favorite domestic animals, appears against a bucolic background of his own countryside. His restless energy and versatility enabled him to make hundreds of drawings for engravers, supplying popular demands for illustrations depicting Gold Rush scenes. His designs for the 18 woodcuts in Alonzo Delano's The Idle and Industrious Miner, a Tale of California Life are a marvel of draughtmanship which enliven with droll humor that collection of melodramatic verses. “It was inevitable,” says Eugen Neuhaus in his appraisal of Nahl, “that a man of his innate endowments and extraordinary powers of observation should be inspired to depict in his own medium…the early California glorified by Bret Harte…; and it is from these pictorial records that we today get by far the best idea of those stirring times.… The Nahl who will live in the annals of art is not the painter of remote, academic historical scenes; it is the artist of the life in the California mines, as lived by an adventurous, polyglot society of Americans, Indians, Mexicans, and Europeans, of which he himself was a part.”
Painting in California would have remained a purely provincial art had not the literature of the Gold Rush with its wondrous accounts of the natural scenery of the West publicized for the Atlantic seaboard and for Europe the Sierra Nevada's fabulous grandeur. To the “increasing astonishment and reverential awe and rapture” of millions of Americans, the “California School” arose to rival those landscape painters who were glorifying the Hudson River Valley. Prodigious as these Hudson River wonders appeared, they presumably could be put to shame by more gigantic representations of the “magnificent scenery of that marvellous region, where the roar of the cataract and the roll of the thunder reverberate like the tread of the countless millions who evermore march to the westward.”
If today the vast landscapes painted by Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) seem impressive only in size, they nevertheless furnish a commentary on the popular taste which once acclaimed them as masterpieces. Their depiction of cyclopean gorges and mountain peaks—with every detail, down to the minutest leaf and pebble, described with an exactitude approaching photography—have also a certain expansive gusto which must have appealed to a public thrilled by the first full flowering of its national spirit. Bierstadt, born in Düsseldorf and brought to America as a child, came West with General Lander's expedition of 1858. His Rocky Mountains, a huge canvas of ponderous detail and uncertain perspective, “threw the people into an ecstasy of delight” and he “bounded at one step to celebrity.” S. G. W. Benjamin, whose Art in America confutes some of the prevailing artistic credos of his generation, remarks that since Bierstadt was “naturally an artist of great ability and large resources,” he “might easily have maintained a reputation as such if he had not grafted on the sensationalism of Düsseldorf a greater ambition for notoriety and money than for success in pure art.”
Bierstadt's contemporary, who succeeded him as “artist in waiting to the Yosemite Valley,” was Thomas Hill (1829-1908). Beginning his career as a coach painter, Hill depicted panoramic views of entire mountain ranges which constituted the reductio ad absurdum of the California School's approach to landscape painting. His celebrity, like Bierstadt's, was spectacular; but today the works of these two boosters of Western natural scenery are looked upon as curiosities of a fabulous epoch.
The reputation of Thomas Moran (1837-1926) has suffered less from the refinement of popular taste than either of these flamboyant representatives of the California School. Having studied abroad, he enriched his canvases with the influence of Turner. If in his own time his works received less vociferous acclaim than inferior productions, his solid talent is today being appreciated. With William Keith's, the landscapes of Moran represent the best accomplishments—almost the sum and substance—of the California School.
Like Bierstadt, Hill, and Moran, Toby Edward Rosenthal (1848-1916) achieved celebrity abroad. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, he studied in San Francisco with the Mexican painter, Fortunato Arriola, in Munich at the Royal Academy, and with Raupp and Piloty. After gaining local fame, he maintained a studio in Munich, where he turned out excellent examples of the solid craftsmanship, the minuteness of literal detail, the sentiment and the “homely philosophy” of the Munich school of genre painters. His method of painting was laborious, scholarly; he spent three years in literary research, travel, and sketching to produce a single canvas, The Trial of Constance de Beverley (illustrating Scott's Marmion), now in the possession of Stanford University. “I have spared,” he wrote in 1882 while at work on it, “no labor, time, nor money in my endeavour to make Marmion my greatest work,” and the remark reveals his attitude toward painting; to him, it was related to archeology, literature, philosophy. Only incidentally, however, can Rosenthal be considered a Bay region painter. His The Cardinal's Portrait and the Seine Madonna, both at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, keep his curious local reputation alive.
It was only natural, once the novelty of wealth had begun to wear off and a new generation had been born to inherit it, that the patrons of art should take their cultural ambitions less casually. It was inevitable, too, that artists of the Bay area should forsake the old methods and adopt the technique of the Barbizon School—exemplified by such painters as Corot and Millet, who strove to render nature in her aspects of light and air rather than in pictorial detail. Yet of the San Francisco painters who came under the influence of the forerunners of Impressionism, only one seems to have gained a lasting distinction.
William Keith (1838-1911), born in Scotland, came to California in 1859. Eschewing the colossal marvels so loved by Bierstadt and Hill, he translated the more benign aspects of the lower altitudes into turgid, dreamy landscapes, painted with the molasses-like impasto that was a fault common to the Düsseldorf School, resulting from the use of bitumen. He was content to paint brooding and tranquil landscapes—the interplay of light and shade in groves of live oaks, forest glades, hillsides, and brooks. His style relates him somewhat to the Barbizon school; his lyric tranquillity, to George Inness, who was his intimate friend. His ambition, like Vincent Van Gogh's, was to achieve with paint the effect of music. Often he succeeded. Unfortunately, his use of bitumen to achieve subtlety of tone has caused many of the paintings to fade into indistinctness. Keith was the only California painter to whom a whole room was devoted in the United States section of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition's Fine Arts Galleries, yet until recently he has remained almost unknown outside the State. At the Keith Memorial Gallery in St. Mary's College at Moraga and at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco are many of his paintings.
The influence of Keith was strong on the minor painters who banded together in the Bohemian Club after its foundation in 1872. Little of the California sunlight is reflected in Arthur Mathews’ somber work, but his murals in the Mechanics’-Mercantile Library, in the Lane Medical Library, and in the Masonic Temple illustrate an architect's sense of values. Typical of Gottardo Piazzoni's conventionalized California seacoast and hill country landscapes are his Public Library murals, subdued in tone. A sincere and accomplished landscapist, Xavier Martinez settled in Piedmont to paint the quiet beauties of the East Bay hill country in a number of canvases owned by the Oakland Art Gallery. Other Bohemians were Bruce Porter, architect and mural painter; Charles Dickman and Henry Joseph Breuer, landscapists.
Twenty-three local artists organized in 1871 the San Francisco Art Association and the following year opened headquarters in a loft-like gallery over a market, where as a visitor to their spring exhibitions put it, “Art was pervaded with the aroma of fish and the sound of the butcher's cleaver was heard.” With a collection of casts of classic statuary—the gift of the Republic of France to this gallant undertaking of culture in the Far West—the association opened its school in 1874 with Virgil Williams as master. From such humble beginnings the association was elevated when Edward F. Searles, who had married Mark Hopkins’ widow, presented it in 1893 with the Nob Hill castle of the railroad tycoon. The house was described by Amelia Ransome Neville as “a mess of anachronisms. One entered portals of a feudal castle to pass into the court of a doge's palace, all carved Italian walnut with a gallery around the second story where murals of Venetian scenes were set between the arches. These were the work of Jules Tavernier, French artist, who stopped in California after a trip to the South Seas, where he painted long before Gaugin.” In gratitude, the association named its school the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art.
The first California sculptor whose name reached beyond the State was Douglas Tilden (1860-1935) who, himself deaf from the age of five, studied in Paris with the deaf-mute sculptor Paul Chopin. At intersections along San Francisco's Market Street, the heroic-style commemorative monuments for which he was famous overlook the passing traffic—the Mechanics’ Monument with its three brawny artisans straining to force a huge mechanical punch through a plate of metal, the Native Sons’ Monument with its bronze miner waving a flag, the Spanish War Monument with its young soldier marching beside an equestrian Victory. Public parks and squares are plentifully adorned with the sculpture of such pupils of Tilden's as Robert Ingersoll Aitken (1878—), sculptor of the Victory Monument in Union Square and the William McKinley Monument in Golden Gate Park, and M. Earl Cummings (1876-1936), sculptor of the Hall McAllister Monument beside the City Hall and the Robert Burns Monument in Golden Gate Park.
To the rest of the country until recent years, however, Tilden's self-taught younger contemporary, Arthur Putnam (1873-1930), was almost the personification of California sculpture. From youthful experience in riding, driving cattle, working in the forest, and laboring in a South San Francisco slaughterhouse, Putnam gained a remarkable knowledge of animal life, tamed and untamed. Masterful in composition, his bronze lions, leopards, and pumas show close observation, a thorough knowledge of animal anatomy, and a sensitive feeling for rhythm and movement. His figures of children, rabbits, and fish equal in charm his savage subjects. Among his best known works are The Snarling Jaguar in New York's Metropolitan Museum and The Death in the Boston Museum. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor has a collection of 130 of his works.
At the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 (where Putnam was represented only by an ornate mermaid fountain modelled from his designs—described by Sheldon Cheney as “typical of the fine strength of his work, and at the same time appealing by the grace of its sinuous lines”) one of his students, Ralph Stackpole, was exhibiting a variety of sculpture, including The Man with a Pick, which was “justly admired as a sincere portrayal of a simple laboring type,” and an unnamed kneeling figure by the Palace of Fine Arts lagoon, “one of the most appealing bits of all the Exposition sculpture, well expressing devotion and reverence.” Another young San Francisco sculptor represented was Haig Patigian, whose bas-relief friezes and four nude male figures—Steam Power, Invention, Electricity, and Imagination—for the Palace of Machinery served “to carry out the sense of immensity and strength that characterizes the entire building,” although “lacking the refinement that would make them interesting as something besides vigorous types.”
The wealth of sculpture and painting displayed at the 1915 exposition was to “focus the artistic expression” of San Francisco Bay region artists as the art of the Columbian Exposition at Chicago had done for the artists of the Nation. The “far-reaching effect” of the Panama-Pacific Exposition, wrote Cheney, was to show “the immense value of coordination of all the arts… The great thing here is the complete harmony of purpose, of design, and of color, in the combined work of architects, sculptors, painters, and landscape gardeners.” It had the farther-reaching effect, perhaps, of educating public taste to the point where for the first time local artists could begin to expect informed criticism of their work.
Judging “the first definite exposition of the new point of view crystallized by the influence of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” a critic of the San Francisco Art Association's Forty-second Annual Exhibition was pleased to note that at last “the noble lines of the California hills are being painted without pseudo-idealistic, romantic preconceptions.” Comparing the canvases on view at the latter exhibition with “previous Western ‘animals’,” a critic in The International Studio found “almost no vestige of the ‘brown sauce’ school of yesterday” and little which was “reminiscent of Keith, Whistler, and the Barbizon School—three influences which, but a very short time ago, dominated the California annual exhibitions.”
In the exposition's Palace of Fine Arts, the French section had exhibited “a number of examples of the new and ultra-new schools, from Monet and Degas to Redon and Puy.” During the quarter-century interval before San Francisco staged its next exposition, local artists began to modify their styles under influences even more revolutionary—Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Rousseau, di Chirico, Dali, and the other godfathers of modern art. Among others, Lucien Labaudt and Jane Berlandina were successful in grafting the best traditions of French art upon the local heritage. Some of the influences were first-hand ones. Henri Matisse, for example, spent some time in San Francisco painting the Steinhart Aquarium's tropical fish. Foujita came to teach some of modern Japanese art's pellucid quality to a group which was naturally receptive to an oriental treatment of local materials. When the Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, came to paint frescoes for the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts, his influence on many of the local painters—Victor Arnautoff, Ralph Stackpole, and Bernard Zakheim, among others—was tremendous. The visit of German exile Hans Hoffman, the Munich abstractionist, to teach summer classes at the University of California greatly inspired a group of the younger East Bay artists, including Vaclav Vytlacil, Beckford Young, Edgar Dorsey Taylor, and Florence Swift. Hoffman became virtually the spiritual godfather of the East Bay group.
Even the California School of Fine Arts (as the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art had been renamed upon its removal to new quarters on Russian Hill in 1926), which had hitherto exhibited an academic bias, responded suddenly to the new influences. Feeling that the kind of painting they had learned abroad from followers of impressionism or pointillism, of Puvis de Chavannes and Maurice Denis, offered no further promise of development, many of the painters associated with the school became devotees of Cézanne. Two of these, Lee Randolph and Spencer Macky, studied briefly in Paris in 1926 under André Lhote, teacher and exponent of Cézanne's methods. The courses given here by Arnold Blanch and Maurice Sterne furthered the spread of modern influences. Meticulous craftsmen, the painters associated with the School of Fine Arts have come to be characterized, as a group, by a style variously described as neo-classicism and modern realism. Characteristic of the group were the late Rinaldo Cuneo and the late Frank Van Sloun. Otis Oldfield, Randolph, and Macky are still associated with it. Ray Boynton, formerly a member of this group, is now teaching at the University of California.
Aside from a series of exhibitions held at the Palace of Fine Arts following the 1915 exposition, no public galleries presented really comprehensive collections of foreign masterpieces until 1930. Lloyd Le Page Rollins, appointed director of San Francisco's California Palace of the Legion of Honor, then made it his policy to secure traveling exhibits of international importance. After his resignation in 1933 his policies were continued, with certain unavoidable reservations, by Dr. Walter Heil In 1935 the San Francisco Art Museum in the Civic Center was opened under the competent, dynamic leadership of Dr. Grace McCann Morley. It has become a living center of education and appreciation of modern art. The response of the public has been remarkable; attendance figures at the shows brought from New York by the museum have approached, and in some instances exceeded, those of the larger city.
During the depression the earliest large government-supported mural job. the decoration of Coit Tower, undertaken by the Civil Works Administration in 1933, was a co-operative endeavor involving a number of San Francisco's best-known artists, including Ralph Stackpole, Bernard Zakheim, Lucien Labaudt, Victor Arnautoff, Otis Oldfield, Rinaldo Cuneo, John Langley Howard, William Hesthal, Jane Berlandina, Ray Boynton, and Maxine Albro. The murals, which show principally the influence of Diego Rivera, are as a whole distinguished by a high level of craftsmanship. The WPA Art Project's decoration of the Aquatic Park Casino lobby, the work of Hilaire Hiler and his associates, is, to date, one of the major accomplishments of the WPA Art Program in the West and one of its stellar achievements nationally. It is significant that people come daily to the building simply to look at the radiant fish depicted upon these walls and marvel at the technique by which they are made to seem not at rest, but alive with graceful movement.
Of Matthew Barnes, a San Francisco painter whose genius is now finally achieving national recognition, William Saroyan once wrote in the San Francisco Call-Bulletin: “As he sees it, the world is a place where all who live are no more than visitors… A lonely place. Earth and sea and sky, mountain and plain and tree. Sun and Moon. And then the places of men: road and gate and house… City and streets and the immortal visitor of the earth: yourself. Only when Matthew Barnes paints these places and things they begin to mean just a little more than they used to mean.” The ultimate sources of Barnes’ terrifying nocturnes, of the eerie realism of such studies as his Crime in Concrete, lie in childhood memories of Scottish folklore (he was born in Ayrshire in 1886) no less than in San Francisco streets seen through swirling fog and incandescent lamplight:
“…ghasties and ghoulies and four-legged beasties,
And things that go ‘whoosh’ in the night…”
Known for his “Westerns,” vividly delineating such subjects as the cattle ranch, wild mustangs, the red raw canyons, is Maynard Dixon. Examples of his mural decorations appear at the San Francisco Water Department, the Kit Carson Grill, the United States Building and Loan Association, and the “Room of the Dons” in the Mark Hopkins Hotel.
One of the most disconcerting of painters is Bernard Zakheim, whose paintings are crudely drawn, beautifully designed, at once complex and brutal—somewhat resembling the work of José Clemente Orozco. He has done a number of large murals for both public and private buildings, among the best known of which are those in Coit Tower, in the Jewish Community Center, and at the University of California Medical School.
Ralph Stackpole has been an influence of tremendous value on younger men; he is responsible for a notable local school of sculpture. Stackpole adapts the earthy simplicity of Mayan art to themes which are modern but nearly always elemental. Strong simple masses, figures with big hands, big hips, big feet—these are typical of his technique. His stylized, truly heroic proletarian figures cut in granite on bastions beside the entrance of the San Francisco Stock Exchange show his tendency to make sculpture an appurtenance of architecture. A dominant feature of the Golden Gate International Exposition was his gigantic figure, Pacifica.
Beniamino Bufano has been at work for more than a decade on a statue even more tremendous—his St. Francis, which has become almost a San Francisco legend. Bufano's use of color, of stainless steel, and other unorthodox media in his sculpture exhibits a daring which has gained him world-wide renown. An excellent example of his work is the majestic Sun Yat Sen, in stainless steel with a head of rose granite, which stands in St. Mary's Square in Chinatown.
The bas-reliefs—seen on the facade of the Aquatic Park Casino—and wood carvings of Sargent Johnson are simple and decorative, treating the human figure somewhat abstractly but without violent distortion. Other notable sculptors include Ruth Cravath, Adeline Kent, and Robert Howard, all represented by bas-reliefs at the San Francisco Stock Exchange.
Since the late 1930’s a group of East Bay artists—followers of the somewhat forbiddingly named Mural Conceptualist movement—has attempted to express a functional inter-relationship between the arts of painting, design, and architecture. This new idea seems likely to enter the lives of more people in a more direct way than any artistic development since the principles of functionalism were formulated. To the small home-owner this may mean that the materials of which a house is built can have a quality more interesting than that of keeping out the elements. A hitherto blank wall, for example, may be enlivened by a decoration of common bricks incised and arranged in ingenious patterns. Deserting the studio, the conceptualists work with architects, carpenters, and masons; and their materials are the materials of the building trades: concrete, metals, the new plastics, and many kinds of glass.
All this renascence of the plastic arts in the Bay region, while constituting a local “school” only in a geographical sense, exhibits a progressive spirit which is in the best traditions of European and American art. The standard of criticism and appreciation, among the public generally and in the local press, has been raised immeasurably. Encouraging is the atmosphere of healthy, if sometimes violent, discussion now going on among the artists and their public over problems of aesthetics and technique. There is hope for a sound cultural tradition when people can get excited and angry and form factions about the sanity and significance of Georges Braque's The Yellow Cloth.