On a cool morning in late February 1915, 150,000 people massed in downtown San Francisco to participate in the parade celebrating the grand opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE).1 Local newspapers lauded the democratic nature of the event. The San Francisco Chronicle noted, “It was the people’s day,” since the people of San Francisco and California had built the exposition with their own funds, imbuing the event with true “San Francisco spirit.”2 Yet fair officials scripted this seemingly democratic display, carefully delineating meeting places and the order of march for participating groups. Once en route, however, the parade was out of the officials’ control. This apparent contradiction reveals much about the PPIE. Although fair planners carefully planned the exposition, the fair could not exist without the millions of local residents and tourists who spilled onto the fairgrounds for sixteen hours a day during its nine-month run.3 Nor could the fair succeed without the cooperation of foreign governments, federal officials, and national and international business interests. Together, these varied interests created the fair.
Outside the gates of the fair, social and political conflicts wracked the nation. The newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) boycotted the immensely popular white supremacist film Birth of a Nation. Woman suffragists advocated for a federal suffrage amendment. Young women worked in ever-larger numbers outside the home, while their fearful parents worried about the rumored rings of white slavers sweeping the nation. Labor leaders clung to the gains they had made in the past decades. The growing anti-immigrant movement angered foreign leaders who resented American restrictions on immigration. American businessmen and missionaries in China worked to convince officials to cooperate with American interests. At home, newspapers published ever more serious reports about the war in Europe and the bloody revolution in nearby Mexico. In April, horrified Americans read about the sinking of RMS Lusitania and increasing German submarine warfare as the war raging in Europe reached closer to Americans.
Racial violence. Social unrest. Sex. Immigration. War. The 1910s were a time of great upheaval. Technological changes facilitated better communication and transportation, speeding the nation’s move toward modernity. Progressive reformers tried to impose order on the nation’s unruly social milieu and faced resistance at every turn. Anti-immigrant voices grew more powerful and targeted the excluded Chinese and Japanese, as well as supposed inferior “races” of southern and eastern Europe: Jews, Italians, Portuguese, Poles, and Czechs, among others. Others targeted Catholics, continuing to argue that they could never truly be loyal Americans while practicing their faith. And the United States continued to flex its diplomatic and military muscle in demonstrations of its imperial ambitions.
From February to December 1915 visitors could ostensibly escape this disorder by visiting the carefully planned avenues of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The 635-acre fairgrounds offered visitors a host of attractions. Nations ranging from Siam to Honduras to China showed off their history and culture in elaborate pavilions. A huge display of modern art greeted visitors to the Palace of Fine Arts. Films on topics including immigration and social hygiene played in the different buildings across the grounds. The varied entertainments of the Joy Zone, or amusement section, promised something for everyone. The fair brought millions of visitors to San Francisco and conveyed visions of California, the United States, and the Pacific world to all who entered its gates. Held just before the full impact of World War I was unleashed on the world, the fair has largely vanished from American historical memory. San Franciscans and world’s fair enthusiasts remember it, but it has never held the same significance in the American historical narrative as the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago or even the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.4
World’s fairs and expositions emerged as some of the most significant international and national cultural events at home and abroad during the Victorian and Progressive Eras. They offered unparalleled opportunities for nations to present themselves to the world, for businesses to show off their latest products to consumers, and for entertainers to dazzle and shock audiences with ever more exciting amusements. The PPIE was the largest pre–World War I world’s fair held on the Pacific coast and therefore deserves closer scholarly attention. Its reliance on local rather than federal funding, combined with its location in an urban western U.S. city and its attention to the Pacific world, renders it unique for the time. With these characteristics the PPIE offers us new insights into the Progressive Era’s political and social dynamics in the urban West.
Scholars such as Robert Rydell have persuasively argued that fairs are best understood as hegemonic expressions of elite power, designed to accustom American citizens to the idea of modernization and empire.5 Fairs expressed power relationships through pageantry, symbols, and official recognition.6 These enormous events commemorated epic cultural achievements and showcased technological developments and cultural heritages in an attempt to “stave off political unrest at home and to build support for specific national imperial policies.”7 Visitors entered carefully landscaped imaginary cities whose palatial buildings held the thousands of exhibits sent by foreign nations and the U.S. government, manufacturers, states, and local, state, and national organizations. Fairs introduced visitors to new technologies, new foods, new peoples, and new amusements. They influenced city planners and architects, musicians, artists, and reformers.8
The PPIE succeeded in all of these aspects. It introduced visitors to new foods, technologies, and entertainment as Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican delicacies were all produced on the grounds; Model T Fords rolled off an assembly line every day; and Hawaiian entertainers launched a ukulele fad on the mainland after appearing at the fair. The fair celebrated naked evidence of U.S. imperial economic desires by commemorating both the completion of the Panama Canal and the four hundredth anniversary of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s sighting of the Pacific Ocean. Underlying this celebration lay the ambitions of San Francisco’s business elite, who hoped the fair would cement the city’s claim as the gateway to the Pacific. Boosters wanted the event to bring both national and international business to the region. Some hoped the opening of the canal would bring European rather than Asian immigrants to the shores of California. The fair seemed key to the region’s prosperity. Fair organizers attempted to build an ideal city on the shores of San Francisco Bay that eliminated the myriad political and social debates of 1915. Their chosen focus on service, education, and progress reflected their attempt to orient the fair forward, into the future, rather than to reflect on past challenges. Even the fair’s Pacific focus reoriented the nation away from war-torn Europe and west toward the economic possibilities of the Pacific Rim.
Fair organizers could never shield their 635-acre ideal city from the political and social realities of 1915. World conflicts over power and politics pervaded the grounds of the PPIE and suffused the site, its workforce, international participants, amusements, and celebrations of special days with an immediacy that belied its utopian visions. Woman suffragists launched a renewed political campaign for the vote at the fair, moral reformers criticized the attractions offered on the Zone, African Americans sought to claim rights as citizens on the grounds, and the Chinese and Japanese governments used the fair to negotiate better treatment for their citizens in California. These episodes confirm what many recent scholars, beginning with Stuart Hall, have argued: popular culture and cultural events, rather than being peripheral to political and social debates, are the canvases upon which such struggles unfold.9
The fair could not succeed without the cooperation of local, national, and international interests, whose goals did not always reflect those of the fair officials. Outside interests frequently foiled the best-laid plans of fair organizers.10 Fairs became spaces where competing groups vied for social and political power. The conflicts that emerged over their representation, space, and use of the fair demonstrate the many meanings that individuals attached to the fair. As James Gilbert argues regarding the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a world’s fair could mean many things to many people. Restricting our exploration of the fair’s significance to the motives of its organizers limits our ability to understand the complete event.11 Recent works by European scholars, including Alexander Geppert and Pieter van Wesemael, call for placing fairs in larger socio-historical context and recognizing the roles of expositions in displaying modernity for visitors. They call for scholarly recognition of the multilayered nature of expositions and for more rigorous interrogations of them, acknowledging, in Geppert’s words, that “expositions can be seen as closely knit textures spread over time that reveal multiple perspectives for interpretation. They were intended to represent contingent versions of the global in local contexts and constituted, in the words of Georg Simmel, ‘momentary centers of world civilization.’”12 Empress San Francisco builds on these arguments to more deeply explore the intersections of the local, national, and international interests that met in San Francisco in 1915.
Conflicts over city development, religious and ethnic identity formation, foreign affairs, immigration policy, labor relations, race relations, moral reform, and women’s political power plagued fair officials from the moment the city won the fair in 1911. The elite male businessmen who controlled San Francisco politics and composed the fair’s Board of Directors responded in ways consistent with their ultimate goal of maintaining the fair and the city’s image so as to make the event profitable. This effort often required compromising with groups that also had an interest in the fair. The resulting negotiations demonstrated the complexity of Progressive Era California political culture. California’s unique history, population, and economic conditions shaped political and social debates of the Progressive Era in ways that set the West apart from the East and Midwest. Regional priorities affected not only the shape of national-level debates but also the messages about California, the United States, and the Pacific world conveyed to visitors at this world’s fair. Rather than presenting to visitors an uncomplicated statement of U.S. masculinist imperialism, as others argue, the fair offered a stage for discussing a host of issues preoccupying the Progressive Era United States.13
San Francisco was no stranger to fairs. San Francisco Chronicle publisher Michael H. de Young brought the 1894 Midwinter International Exposition to the newly created Golden Gate Park with exhibits from the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The six-month-long Midwinter Expo was the first U.S. international exposition held west of Chicago. As with the later PPIE, it offered city boosters the opportunity to craft a new image of the city. As Barbara Berglund has eloquently argued, city leaders used the fair as one of many cultural projects to “make San Francisco American” by presenting San Francisco’s unique history within a framework that downplayed its disorderly roots.14 The PPIE continued this process, reshaping the city’s frontier past into a cosmopolitan present.
Ten years after the success of the Midwinter Expo, Hale Brothers Department Store magnate Reuben Brooks Hale suggested that the city hold another fair. The construction of the Panama Canal and the publicity accorded the Louisiana Purchase Exposition no doubt inspired him. The event could “be advertised as the opening of San Francisco as the center of trade for the Pacific Ocean, or in commemoration of the completion of the Panama Canal,” he told fellow businessmen, since San Francisco was “the beginning of the east, and the ending of the west.”15 Hale and other supporters rallied interest until the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906 forced them to rethink their plans. As the recovery effort progressed, these boosters decided that the fair could be used also to prove San Francisco’s economic strength to the nation and the world. “People are more interested in California and San Francisco, its metropolis, than ever before,” argued one early piece of propaganda, “and there will be a great interest evinced in the progress San Francisco will have made seven years after the catastrophe . . . insuring . . . a large attendance from outside.”16 Rather than dissuading boosters, the earthquake and fire convinced them that staging the fair was necessary to demonstrate San Francisco’s strength to the world.
The campaign for the fair was intertwined with attempts to downplay the devastation wrought by the earthquake and fire. The 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck San Francisco in the early hours of April 18, 1906, killed thousands of people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. Devastating fires in the central city left 98 percent of the city’s most heavily populated 521 blocks in ruins.17 Andrea Rees Davies argues that despite the destruction wrought by the earthquake, city leaders created a narrative of the disaster in which they downplayed the earthquake and instead blamed the fire for the city’s destruction. Cities can recover from fires, but they cannot avoid earthquakes.18 Boosters worked hard to rebuild the city and demonstrate its economic and social vitality in the face of disaster. The fair quickly emerged as a panacea for the city’s ills as the city was wracked by a series of disputes over rebuilding and relief. Staging a successful fair would prove to the world that San Francisco was back on its feet.
Hale and fellow city leaders soon embarked on the lengthy project of generating the required local, and eventually national, support necessary to stage the fair. In December 1906, fourteen men, led by Bank of California president Homer S. King, created the Pacific Ocean Exposition Company, whose stated goal was “to inaugurate and hold an International or World’s Exposition in San Francisco commemorative of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the Pacific Ocean by Balboa, and in celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal.”19 The company quickly introduced a bill to the state legislature for an early bond act, but the national depression of 1907 threw a wrench in its plans and stalled preparations for the fair until 1909. That year, the city tested its ability to hold a fair by hosting the weeklong Gaspar de Portola Festival.
Gaspar de Portolà was the first Spanish governor of California and the supposed “discoverer” of San Francisco Bay. Although a figure of minor historical importance, he became a convenient figurehead for an event that organizers hoped would mark San Francisco’s renewal and emphasize the Spanish heritage of the city and the state. Extensive local financial support for the festival proved to boosters that the city could finance a fair. Donations from “every financial grade of citizen,” ranging from ten cents to a thousand dollars, poured in to the festival’s offices.20 Downtown businessmen and Chinese merchants bedecked their buildings with the colors of the event.21 Local civic organizations staged fund-raisers and musical programs in honor of the festival.22 The Portola Festival was no match for the later PPIE, but for boosters in 1909, it was enough to prove that the city could host such an event. Organizers negotiated with railroads to set reduced rates for the event, setting a precedent implemented during the PPIE.23 Hotel men rushed to reassure the public that they would have plenty of available hotel rooms.24 Almost half a million people poured into the city during the festival, demonstrating that the city could comfortably host an exposition.
The Portola Festival transformed San Francisco into an international cultural center and was a resounding success. Future PPIE president Charles C. Moore single-handedly convinced the nations of Italy, Japan, Holland, Germany, and Britain to send warships to San Francisco to join the celebration.25 Publicity lauded the city’s Spanish heritage, likening it to an old city of Europe, a place where “our own race, once here, soon yields to the spell of the Spanish carnival.”26 Chinatown, often of moral concern to reformers, became a key attraction for the Portola. Tours were offered for visitors, and the Chinese community participated in the festival’s parades en masse, with the largest dragon ever seen outside China.27 The Portola demonstrated that San Francisco could host a half million people and not appear crowded. It could put on a good show and provide visitors with a taste of Old Europe and the Pacific Rim, an intriguing mixture for the new century.
Fig. 2. Second meeting of the PPIE at the Merchants Exchange Building, San Francisco. The April 1910 mass meeting demonstrated the enormous public support for the fair. (Library of Congress.)
Organizing for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition picked up steam after the Portola Festival. Chamber of Commerce president James McNab met with the heads of the city’s leading commercial enterprises to solidify the city’s claim to a fair celebrating the completion of the canal.28 Only four days after the festival ended, Hale hosted thirteen “prominent citizens” at the Bohemian Club, one of the most exclusive clubs in the city, in another attempt to stimulate support.29 The men present at that dinner included the nucleus of the exposition’s future Board of Directors.
Shortly thereafter, Moore pushed his fellow organizers to hold a public meeting from which to officially launch the fair. His actions demonstrated a canny understanding of the need to build public support for what would become an expensive and complicated enterprise. He called for a public declaration of the formal birth of the project, arguing that “if the public doesn’t want the Exposition . . . we shall make a mistake if we try to hold it.”30 Boosters spearheaded a survey of the city’s most elite men at the exclusive Bohemian Club, where they canvassed 2,500 residents to determine their support for the fair. Responses, according to fair historian Frank Morton Todd, were overwhelmingly positive. “Greatest chance San Francisco has ever had to promote her growth,” wrote one. Another simply stated: “Get busy.”31 Those responses convinced Moore and others to organize a public meeting, which was held in December 1909 at the Merchants Exchange. The approximately 150 men who attended that meeting became the core of the Ways and Means Committee, a group of eventually 300 local businessmen charged with raising support and funds for the project.32
These meetings jump-started an extensive public campaign to convince all San Franciscans, Californians, and eventually Congress that San Francisco must host the proposed exposition. April’s mass meeting demonstrated the effort’s success. Attendees filled the floor of the Merchants Exchange and raised more than $4 million in only an hour and fifty minutes. Governor James Gillett and a delegation of exposition supporters left two days later for Washington, where they lobbied on behalf of the fair.33 Boosters forged ahead with a campaign that included mass mailings, buttons, a “Shoe Leather Day” (in which volunteers solicited pledges from every local business in the city), and the passage of city and state bond issues.34 Outside challenges arose as approval for the project grew in San Francisco. Other cities vied for the right to hold an exposition celebrating the completion of the canal. Galveston, New Orleans, San Diego, and other cities began to lobby Congress for official recognition and backing. The San Diego challenge threatened to derail San Francisco’s plans, for it would divide the state’s congressmen when voting between the two sites. San Diego eventually gave up the fight after quite a bit of political maneuvering, which included a statewide meeting of the city leaders. Its boosters settled for hosting the Panama-California Exposition, a smaller-scale fair that also took place in 1915.35
The fight narrowed to a choice between San Francisco and New Orleans. Both cities claimed that their proximity to the canal made them the “logical point” for the location of the Panama Exposition.36 They launched lobbying efforts and public relations campaigns to convince Congress to choose their city. The barrage of propaganda produced included “illustrated booklets . . . argumentative statements . . . trunk labels, letter-heads and stickers for letters and envelopes, slips for outgoing fruit boxes, [and] cards for hotel guests.”37 The campaign grew increasingly aggressive, as representatives of both cities plied congressmen with such delicacies as fruit, wine, and gin fizzes.38 San Francisco’s eventual victory depended both on the organizers’ promise that they would require no federal financial funding for the exposition and on the city’s closer proximity to Asia.39 At long last, on January 31, 1911, the House of Representatives passed the resolution in favor of San Francisco, 189 to 159.40 San Franciscans rejoiced. The fair was on!
Congressional debates over the fair reveal that the goals of San Francisco’s businessmen resonated with national political leaders. Many congressmen agreed that holding the fair in San Francisco would be an important step toward cementing stronger trade relationships with Asia and present a fitting tribute to the genius of American expansionism. Congressman George Foss of Illinois remarked: “Westward the star of empire takes its way. Let this country keep step with the march of progress. Let us have an exposition on the Pacific coast of such grandeur as the indomitable American spirit of the people there alone can make; that will cause not only the Occident, but the Orient, to wonder at the marvelous resources, the power, and the influence of the American nation.”41 The issue of Asian trade surfaced repeatedly in the debates, demonstrating the relationship between the Panama Canal, the fair, and American economic interests in Asia. “The great field for exploitation lies in the Orient,” promised the report from the Congressional Committee on Industrial Expositions. Holding the exposition in San Francisco, the report continued, would allow America and Asia to stimulate “trade between the two countries [sic] and . . . cement . . . the ties of cordial friendship between America and the nations of the Far East.”42
Fig. 3. One of many pieces of propaganda that fair boosters for New Orleans issued in their attempt to win the fair. (Charles Petterson personal collection.)
Congressmen may have paid tribute to the city’s “true, indomitable spirit” and its proximity to Asia, but it was the economics of San Francisco’s offer that won the city the contest.43 Legislators proved wary of committing U.S. dollars to an exposition after a string of federally funded expositions had lost money. San Francisco asked only for official recognition of the event and for the president to issue official invitations to foreign nations. The event’s organizers promised to fund the rest of the event with local dollars. Their pledge convinced Congress to vote in their favor and propelled fair officials into unknown territory. They would have to raise all the necessary money through state or city bond issues and through private investment. Practically, this promise profoundly affected the fair. The fair’s board was forced to cultivate public support for what was essentially a private venture.44 This reliance on local and state funding forced fair directors to balance the interests of local groups with both state interests and the desires of foreign nations, since ostracizing any of these bases of support risked the financial viability of the fair itself.
Fair officials assured city residents that the fair would be an economic stimulus, bringing new business, tourists, and potential settlers to the city. Rhetoric about civic unity echoed through many of the discussions in San Francisco concerning the fair. Boosters drew on desires to bring the city together after the upheavals of the previous decade. San Francisco attorney Gavin McNab promised the public during the first mass meeting that the exposition would showcase the city and cause “all differences among our people [to] . . . pass away. In its place will rise the genius of municipal unity. . . . We shall be only San Franciscans—one for all and all for one, and all for San Francisco.”45 Thousands of San Franciscans would go on to debate the location of the fair and admission prices and to participate in parades, exhibits, and other activities on the fairgrounds, demonstrating that they found his argument compelling.
McNab emphasized the need to unify San Francisco because political and social turmoil had beset the city over the past decade. The first years of the century had witnessed plague outbreaks that periodically terrified city residents and threatened the city’s and state’s economy.46 Not long after that threat was finally contained, the 1906 earthquake and fire had ravaged the city. Soon after, allegations of widespread graft and corruption at City Hall had brought national attention to the resulting graft trials. City leaders hoped the fair would be a way to unify warring economic and political interests in the city and to repair the city’s national reputation. Just as with the Midwinter Exposition, the PPIE seemed to offer city boosters a way to prove their city’s “Americanness” and to demonstrate its total incorporation into the American body politic. But the lingering conflicts of the previous decades proved difficult to overcome and underlay a number of the debates that emerged before and during the fair.
San Franciscans prided themselves on their city’s Gold Rush roots, but the city’s frontier reputation made potential visitors wary. The area that would eventually become San Francisco began as the site of a native village, then developed as a Spanish presidio and mission. The 1848 discovery of gold transformed it almost overnight into a booming entrepôt.47 The city’s access to the Pacific Ocean and the Sacramento River made it a logical hub for mining activities. Merchants also struck gold while outfitting eager miners and laid the groundwork for the city’s twentieth-century commercial activities. Saloon keepers, gamblers, and madams also set up shop, serving the thousands of single men who flowed through the city in search of wealth. The original “Barbary Coast” vice district remained a lively source of income and entertainment for San Franciscans into the twentieth century. Even in 1910, the city’s still uneven sex ratio contributed to the sense that the city was still slightly raw and seemingly uncivilized.48 The post–Gold Rush history of vigilante activities in the 1850s, a story that many San Franciscans valued as a part of their history, exacerbated visions of a lawless city.49
The Gold Rush created San Francisco’s economic and social world. Thousands of immigrants from around the world poured into the city, seeking their fortune and forming the basis for the cosmopolitan society that eventually would shape the PPIE. Catholics and Jews shared political power with local Protestants. By 1915 the city had elected mayors of all three faiths and Jewish state representatives and congressmen. Irish and German Catholics dominated city politics; thus the anti-Catholicism prevalent in other parts of the country had little effect on San Francisco politics or culture. The meeting of so many different peoples resulted in a city full of active ethnic communities. French, Germans, Italians, Irish, Russians, Norwegians, and Swedes—all had benevolent and fraternal organizations in the city that they could mobilize in support of the PPIE. The fair’s board contained Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, and they sponsored the creation of local PPIE auxiliaries for every immigrant community they could contact, helping to fashion an event with a particularly local feel.
The city’s tolerance did not, however, extend to the Chinese residents within its bounds. Chinese immigrants had come to the state seeking the promise of gold or arrived as bound laborers. Many eventually settled in San Francisco, where they established the largest Chinatown on the West Coast. Despite building a strong immigrant community, they faced persistent discrimination and racism throughout California.50 Chinese immigrants were the victims of racially motivated legislation and acts of violence in the city and across the West.51 After the economic downturn of the 1870s, white labor leaders increasingly blamed the Chinese for their economic woes, spouting racially motivated anti-Asian rhetoric. San Francisco Irish immigrant Denis Kearney, for instance, cultivated support for his Workingmen’s Party by demanding anti-Chinese legislation. This pressure, primarily from white, working-class organized labor, culminated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which forbade the entry of Chinese laborers into the United States. Congress extended the act indefinitely in 1902.52 Despite this act, Chinese immigration continued, as did legal prosecution of the Chinese, creating an often tense situation for the local Chinese community.
The Exclusion Act did not quell anti-immigrant sentiment in the West or in San Francisco. When Chinese immigration declined in the late nineteenth century, Japanese immigrants began to enter the state. They too soon faced resentment from white California residents.53 Many Japanese settled in the state’s farming districts, but others made San Francisco their home, attracting some of the state’s wealthiest Japanese immigrants. They built a small Japantown community, where they formed religious and community organizations. Many whites continued to view Asians as unassimilable aliens and limited their employment opportunities in the city; therefore, Asians occupied the bottom rungs of the social and occupational ladders in San Francisco.
Racial tensions persisted throughout the early twentieth century. White San Franciscans seized upon both the plague outbreak and the earthquake and subsequent fire as a chance to lobby for the wholesale removal of Chinatown from its valuable downtown location. The powerful Chinese merchant community successfully resisted this campaign with the backing of the Chinese government. Their victory revealed the economic significance of the Chinese to the city, an issue that would shape the fair.54 Japanese residents also faced a racially motivated boycott and acts of violence on the streets of San Francisco in the months following the earthquake.55 The concerns over the presence of so many Japanese in the city eventually culminated in the school board’s effort to segregate the city’s Japanese students into an “Oriental” public school. The representatives of the deeply angry nation of Japan and President Theodore Roosevelt eventually negotiated the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 in which Japan agreed to end the emigration of laborers to the United States while the city promised to desegregate the school, but bitterness remained.56 The crisis brought national attention both to the city’s, and the state’s, anti-Asian attitudes, and to the presence of Asians in the city.
McNab’s concerns about civic unity also reflected the business community’s attempts to move past the 1907 graft trials. The conflict between labor and capital had long dominated San Francisco politics, and tensions increased after the election of musician and Union Labor Party leader Eugene Schmitz as mayor in 1902. Local political powerhouse Abe Ruef, a man often labeled as a “political boss” by both contemporaries and scholars, engineered Schmitz’s election, and the two men’s political strategies included a number of corrupt and unsavory practices.57 Glenn Gendzel argues that after Schmitz’s election in 1902, “word went out to owners of saloons, gambling halls, and brothels that a portion of their proceeds must now flow his [Ruef’s] way or else the police would shut down their establishments.”58 Local reformers soon attacked the Union Labor Party for its underhanded dealings, reflecting the national Progressive Era trend toward ridding urban politics of corruption.
Local reformer and newspaper editor Fremont Older began exposing Ruef and Schmitz’s corruption in editorials in the San Francisco Bulletin. Popular resentment grew, and soon former Democratic mayor James A. Phelan and businessman Rudolph Spreckels built on Older’s muckraking campaign to expose a series of backroom payoffs by city businessmen to supervisors. The resulting series of high-profile trials and a graft investigation drew national attention to San Francisco’s sordid political life and to its active vice district.59 Schmitz and the offending supervisors resigned in disgrace, and the prosecution replaced Schmitz with “good government” nonpartisan candidate Dr. Edward R. Taylor. After the first burst of enthusiasm, however, city interest in the trials waned, and elite businessmen withdrew their support of the effort after they became targets. These men, many of whom would go on to join the PPIE’s Board of Directors, turned the city’s attention away from class conflict and toward city development.60 The trial witnessed both the dramatic courtroom shooting of Assistant District Attorney Francis J. Heney, who was in charge of the graft prosecution, and the “kidnapping” (by Southern California sheriff deputies) of Older himself. The shooting and kidnapping only lent more credence to the city’s image as a rough-and-ready town.61 When McNab pointed out, then, that San Franciscans needed to unite behind the fair, he argued for putting the legacy of the graft trials in the past and working together to combat San Francisco’s national reputation as a corrupt and lawless place.
The past decade of San Francisco’s history motivated city leaders to make the fair into a resounding success and to demonstrate the city’s recovery from disaster and political upheaval, while simultaneously reminding visitors of simmering urban social anxieties. Progressive Era politicians and social reformers frequently targeted cities for their corrupt governments, vice districts, and seemingly unassimilable immigrant populations. San Francisco’s history of government graft, active vice district, skewed male–female population, and relatively sizable Asian population meant that the city encapsulated a number of key social issues for concerned Americans. PPIE boosters wanted to create an event that was uniquely San Franciscan but that somehow also mitigated the social and political conflicts that threatened the city’s national reputation. They needed to find a way to reassure potential visitors that San Francisco was not controlled by corrupt labor bosses, that brothels did not lure unsuspecting young men into a life of vice, and that Asian immigrants and their children were tourist attractions rather than threats to the racial order. At the same time, fair officials had to keep local businesses, including saloon owners and prominent Chinese merchants, happy because their financial contributions were essential to the fair’s success. To complicate matters further, they needed to convince Asian nations—China and Japan, most notably—to devote resources to a fair held in a state with a strong anti-Asian movement. Without the participation of China and Japan, fair officials feared that the fair would be neither “international” nor representative of the Pacific and that it might fail completely. This task would keep the fair directors busy in the years ahead.
Those exposition directors represented the most prominent businesses in the city. The life and career of Charles C. Moore, first the finance chairman of the PPIE and eventually its president, was fairly typical of these men. Moore’s family moved to California when he was young, and he grew up in the Bay Area, attending high school in Benicia and later St. Augustine College. He entered the iron shops of the San Francisco Tool Company and eventually founded his own engineering firm. By 1915, his firm had installed steam and hydroelectric plants across the West and had branches throughout the West and in New York. Moore held positions on the boards of numerous other firms and served as president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, during which time he organized the Association of the Chambers of Commerce of the Pacific Coast. In the pre-fair years he assumed responsibility of convincing assorted foreign nations to send their warships to San Francisco and participate in the celebration of the Portola Festival. He was a man deeply familiar with administration and apparently quite adept at management.62
The other members of the fair’s thirty-man board were equally well connected and experienced. William H. Crocker, another director, was the son of Charles Crocker, one of the “Big Four” backers of the transcontinental railroad; a regent of the University of California; a vice president of Pacific Telephone and Telegraph; and the president of Crocker National Bank. Department store president Hale also served as director of both the Merchants’ Association and the Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco. Isaias Hellman, originally from Southern California, was president of the Union Trust Company and director of numerous other banks. He and fellow director Leon Sloss, president of the Northern Commercial Company and trustee of Stanford University, were prominent members of the San Francisco Jewish community, demonstrating the religious diversity of the fair’s board.63 Other members of the Board of Directors included the publishers of three major San Francisco daily newspapers—the Chronicle, Call, and Examiner—the vice president of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the president of the Spring Valley Water Company, the passenger traffic manager of the Southern Pacific Company, and the president of the Alaska Packers’ Association, one of the city’s most significant sources of commerce.64 James Rolph, Jr., president of the Merchants’ Association and the city’s mayor from 1912 until he became governor in 1931, was another key member of the board.
Fig. 4. Board of directors for the PPIE. (#1959.087—ALB, 1:3, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.)
The board did not fully represent other political interests in the city or the state. Despite the power of local labor unions, the only labor representative on the board was former mayor Patrick H. McCarthy. McCarthy’s service on the board represented his general pro-business sympathies and his relatively conservative leadership of the Building Trades Council. The men who backed the 1907 graft trials appear to have been deliberately excluded from membership on the board. Despite urging from leading progressive Chester Rowell, member of the State PPIE Commission, to include former mayor and Democrat James Phelan on the board, the officials were predominantly Republicans.65 No members of Chinese or Japanese communities participated in the board. Nor did any women participate as directors, although they did have a place in the fair’s administrative structure. The fair’s board represented the elite business class of San Francisco—that is, wealthy, Republican males of European descent. Religion offered the only element of diversity on the board.
The board reflected a fairly conservative perspective in the broader context of San Francisco and California politics. Their rejection of the members of the graft prosecution suggested a desire to unite and move past the discord of the trials and to reject the allegations of corruption that had been levied at that time. But graft prosecutor Hiram Johnson was elected governor in 1910, and the statewide Progressive Party gained strength over the years leading up to the fair. Johnson’s election meant that the State PPIE Commission, the body appointed to oversee distribution of the funds raised by the state’s bond issue, was composed of Rowell and other Progressive Party leaders. As this book reveals, the ensuing political conflict between the fair’s board and the California Progressive Party at times played out on the stage of the PPIE.
Local society women united to form their own board, which became an official part of the fair’s administrative structure. A group of white club women met in April 1911 at the St. Francis Hotel and discussed forming a PPIE women’s association. Three hundred local women soon chartered the Panama-Pacific International Association of Women, which later became the Woman’s Board. Officially, the members of the Woman’s Board acted as the fair hostesses. They ran the California State Building and hosted a variety of social events during and before the exposition. Their involvement in the fair was not atypical. Women had served on Boards of Lady Managers since the first U.S. world’s fair, the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia. These women, like those at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago devoted themselves to creating separate women’s buildings in which to house exhibits of women’s work. Historian Mary Frances Cordato argued that the women of both Philadelphia and Chicago saw their mission as using the Woman’s Building to further women’s culture and place in society. The Board of Lady Managers at the 1904 St. Louis exposition, however, urged the integration of women’s exhibits with those of their male counterparts. Their building was used only for hospitality and administrative purposes rather than for exhibiting women’s work.66 No official woman’s building existed at the PPIE. In some ways the California Building served that function, since it housed the offices of the Woman’s Board and was the site of their receptions and parties.
The composition of the PPIE’s Woman’s Board differed dramatically from those of earlier fairs. At earlier federally funded fairs, women from across the nation were appointed to honorary positions on the Woman’s Board, leaving much of the work to a small number of local women. At the PPIE, members mostly came from the Bay Area, or at least from California, and met in person on a regular basis. Honorary president Phoebe Hearst—widow of mining magnate George Hearst, mother of William Randolph Hearst, and a significant philanthropist and powerful member of the University of California Board of Regents in her own right—lent considerable status to the body. A staunch supporter of female reform efforts and the suffrage movement, Hearst involved other women with similar viewpoints in the fair. Helen Sanborn, for instance, brought her long history of working with social relief organizations in San Francisco to her service as practical head of the board.
The class and race bias of the board, however, was clear. Its members were from the wealthiest families in the Bay Area and were women who had the leisure time and energy to devote to volunteer causes. Some of them were suffragists, who in the fall of 1911 celebrated their victory in winning the vote for California women. Like Hearst, others had long-standing connections to female reform organizations, such as the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and at times were at odds with the male fair directors. During the fair the women hosted formal events to honor prominent visitors. They were thus officially placed in a customarily feminine role, a fact that has obscured the very real influence of women on the PPIE for previous historians. In reality, along with hundreds of other interested women, the board members engaged in political work as well, lobbying in favor of the exposition, drawing financial support from women across the state, and smoothing the way for women interested in the fair. Moreover, a number of women were appointed as assistants to various departments of the exposition’s administration, providing them an additional role in the fair’s bureaucracy and a voice in its planning and organization.67 Their effect on the fair is a key part of this narrative.
Fig. 5. Mrs. Phoebe Hearst, member of the National Advisory Council of Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and honorary president of the PPIE Woman’s Board. (Library of Congress.)
Elite San Francisco men and women staged the fair to assert both the city’s recovery and reunification after a decade of conflict and its place on the international stage. They promised to create a fair that would unify the city, profit all San Franciscans, and open Asian markets to U.S. businesses. To do so, they created a splendid 635-acre wonderland that entranced visitors and created a vision of California, and the Pacific, dominated by San Francisco. Fair directors created the texture of that world—its sights, sounds, and colors—in conjunction with a host of outside interests. Foreign nations, local organizations, and federal interests each had a hand in shaping the event. To understand the effect of those forces, we must begin with the fairgrounds themselves. Let us now turn to the world of the fair.