“Nowhere in America is there less in evidence the cold theological eye, the cautious hand withheld, the lifted eyebrow, the distrust of playfulness…”
—GEORGE WEST
TO SHARE with San Franciscans their feeling for the city's elusive identity—that prevailing atmosphere which is to San Francisco what dynamic tempo is to New York, what Old World charm is to New Orleans—a visitor does best to wander about its streets. The city has a look of incredible venerability. What remains of the old San Francisco—the roaring boom town of the Argonauts, the Barbary Coast, and the bonanza days—consists mainly of a handful of once proud business buildings, crumbling and obscure, that somehow belie their conversion to modern usage by their appearance of having withstood the passage of an era of violence and romance. Elsewhere, in those parts of the city which survived the calamity of 1906, row on row of Eastlake wooden houses—with their bay windows, corner turrets, and fantastic scrollwork—are reminders of a fabulous past. But although San Francisco is more profoundly steeped in a tempestuous history than any other American city of its age of development, few landmarks of that history remain; the city, for the most part, is the city that rose from the debris of earthquake and fire. Even the rebuilt sections have a look of weathered age. Nor do those sprawling residential districts—real estate developments of more recent years—long escape the mellow tarnish of wind and weather. The very streets, cutting over hill and down valley with resolute forthrightness, are memorials to the men of the Gold Rush, whose roughshod surveys determined the city's main features, imposing on traffic a series of permanent inconveniences which are nevertheless excused for the dramatic vistas they provide. And the old-fashioned cable cars that lurch and sway with clanging bell up and down their precipitous slopes have long since brought to street transportation a spirit of almost festive novelty which it enjoys probably nowhere else.
A tradition which has behind it the most hectic and glamorous epoch of American pioneering is still the factor which determines much of the city's enigmatic charm and governs many of those political, economic, and cultural phenomena by which San Franciscans continue to astonish the world. Every principle of American democracy has been tested here, and what has emerged is a kind of collective wisdom by which public affairs may be administered with a minimum of interference with personal liberty. The average San Franciscan still adheres to the pioneer concept of government: the less of it the better. His Argonaut forbears tried to do without it altogether, but found themselves at the mercy of social evils which nothing short of a harsh popular tribunal could eradicate. Their subsequent experience with municipal administrations, reformist and otherwise, led them finally to devise a city charter of such elaborate checks and balances that corruption on a grand scale was forestalled. By resounding majorities bond issues of a dubious nature are voted down, but not appropriations for education, for parks and playgrounds—or for expositions and bridges.
What is supremely important to San Franciscans is that they be let alone to think and act as they please. Here the accent has always been on living, and however much the city has changed in other ways, 1940 sees no let-up in that vigorous search for experience by which San Franciscans have been enriching their lives since 1850. The difference nowadays lies in a certain refinement of critical faculties which is having its effect on all phases of the city's social life. The crowds who attend concerts and art exhibits, movies and cabarets, theatrical performances and the opera constitute audiences whose verdict is something to be respected. What San Franciscans like they applaud with a sensitive and overwhelming enthusiasm; what they believe will not please them they simply avoid. Rather than have a mediocre theater of their own, they still attend dramatic performances imported from New York. The cuisine of their hotels and restaurants is still renowned the world over; and every San Franciscan is something of an epicure. The thousand-and-one treasures of the city's shops find a sophisticated response among San Franciscans to whom luxuries are, and always have been, aids to graceful living rather than the accoutrements of fashion. All sorts of exotic importations, brought in by the city's various ethnic groups, contribute to the fun of being a San Franciscan. This universal delight in just being alive here, which has amazed so many outsiders, has its source very largely in a certain playfulness of spirit—a natural gusto—by which rich and poor alike are able to draw from some simple experience (a ride on a cable car or a dinner at Solari's) a sense of joie de vivre.
The Genteel Tradition was never able to take root here. The virile ethics of the Argonauts forbade it. San Franciscans have always shown an almost universal disregard for the haughtier privileges of great wealth. Nob Hill was not a social success: the city's sense of humor, its love of gaiety, its unfailing urbanity have excluded aristocratic exclusiveness. Its absentee aristocracy (descendants of the bonanza millionaires who have retired to estates down the Peninsula or in the Marin hills) continue to make “The City” the hub of their social whirl; but San Francisco itself has no recognizable “four hundred.” The city has not a single public place where formal attire is obligatory; almost the only social requirements are that one hold one's liquor well and behave like a gentleman—or a lady. The predominance of highly skilled workers, professional people, and technicians in its population—inevitable in a city which is much more a commercial than an industrial center—determines the social standard, outweighing even the labor movement's more highly publicized influence. But the middle-class influence is modified, not only by labor's strength, but also by the effects of the city's polyglot mixture of nationalities—its vast number of people who have come from every country under the sun, and while becoming citizens in all respects, have retained nonetheless the customs of their homelands.
The best way to insult a San Franciscan is to slap him on the back. Whatever violates his natural urbanity receives a chilly response. Like his Argonaut predecessors he continues to form friendships and choose business associates in the “partner” tradition of the Gold Rush. This delicate social process, which has repelled countless newcomers, has resulted in a population for whom individuality is the keynote; and those of a more gregarious nature quickly retire to places where their back-slapping propensities will be appreciated. Despite this unkind form of social selectivity, San Francisco is constantly acquiring new citizens from every state of the Union and from abroad. Those who remain partake inevitably of the city's social tradition; and so profoundly will it affect them that, though they may journey to the ends of the earth, this place will always be home to them. The citizen of San Francisco is a citizen of the world.