Let’s talk about progress. San Francisco is a progressive city. Everyone, from Kamala Harris and the YIMBYs and Chesa Boudin and preservationists get called progressive. It’s as close as we have to Mom and apple pie.
I’ve always thought this was a little strange. Not because it’s an imprecise and contested term. That’s normal. That’s how words work, especially words that carry ideological freight. Meaning is use, ideologies are dynamic, and mass opinion is contradictory. So far, so good.
But to see what has always surprised me about the label, we’ll need to look at this week’s book — 1855’s The Annals of San Francisco. Because this massive tome, one of the first history books written about the city, is filled with claims about what it means for San Francisco to represent progress. Not very long ago, progress meant capitalism, white supremacy, and the American empire, an ideology that justified subjugation, exploitation, and even genocide. As this essay by K. Maldetto in FoundSF points out, while it may be “the most important primary source of information regarding the Gold Rush period and the formation of the city,” it is also a “victor’s history,” which reflects the point of view of “the dominant class, the white, male Anglo-Saxons who controlled commerce and communications and ran most of the city affairs.”
How did we get from there to here?
There have been at least two major redefinitions of the term that stand between us and them — the progressives of Hiram Johnson’s era, who combined a faith in social science, good government, and anti-monopoly economics with racism, isolationism, and classism. Then there were the Baby Boomer progressives (Rich DeLeon writes about them in Left Coast City) for whom to be progressive meant to be socially liberal, skeptical about growth, and populist in terms of governing style. We may be in the middle of a third redefinition now, with racial and gender liberalism accepted as core progressive stances, while land use issues are increasingly contested. Whatever the case, when we look at what it meant to be progressive in San Francisco in the middle of the 19th century, it might make us wonder why the term ever stuck around.
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The Annals is a landmark, the most significant book we’ve encountered since Two Years Before the Mast. You find it in the footnotes of almost every other subsequent book of nonfiction and you can often see where it influenced works of fiction too. That’s for the simple reason that its authors spent much of their page count simply saying what was happening in the city.
Written by Frank Soul, John H. Gihon and James Nisbet and published in 1855, it serves as a basic repository of events in the city, all the way from the first European contact to the Gold Rush. Drawing on newspaper records and interviews, the book lays out all of the whos and whats and whens. If you want to know about the fires, the vigilantes, the mayors, and the like, this is the place to go. (It is also, I can’t lie to you, incredibly long. I’ve never finished reading it, and I doubt anyone else has either.)
It may be informative, but it is also baldly and straightforwardly racist, and links white racial supremacy tightly with progressive politics.
All in all, the word progress appears something like a hundred times in the book, in a variety of contexts. There is the progress of the American military over Mexico. The progress of the city rebuilding after its fire. The progress of commerce. The progress of legislation. Above all, there is the progress of the Anglo-Saxon race, which the book links to the country’s “manifest destiny.”
“Discontent and restlessness make the true spirit of ‘progress ‘ that is ever unsatisfied with the dull present, the practical and real. These are the characteristics of all great men and great races, and are the strongest signs of their superior intellect. The spirit of progress is probably a most unhappy one to individuals , although it tends to raise a nation to the height of wealth and glory. Knowledge is power, the attribute of a god; yet as the satirist says, increase of knowledge is only increase of sorrow. Knowledge - power- ‘progress,’ is the Anglo Saxon disposition, which has been developed on a large scale in the American character.”
The Annals describes Indigenous people as a “simple, honest, good-natured, stupid race of people.” The Spanish missionaries were “personally devout, self-denying, and beneficent in their own simple way,” but fundamentally “ignorant and unlettered men, knowing little more than the mechanical rites of their church, and what else their manuals of devotion and the treasuries of the lives of the saints taught them.” And so on.
Only one racial group comes in for praise. Could you guess which one?
“Another race was destined soon to blow aside the old mists of ignorance and stupidity, and to develop the exceeding riches of the land, which had lain, undisturbed and concealed, during so many ages. The Spaniards had scarcely proceeded any way in the great work — if they had not rather retarded it — when the Anglo-Saxons, the true and perhaps only type of modern progress, hastily stepped in, and unscrupulously swept away both their immediate forerunners as effete workers, and the aborigines of the land all as lumberers and nuisances in the great western highway of civilization.”
And if that weren’t bad enough, the book goes on to predict a coming global race war, in which white Americans will extend their conquest over “Indians, Spaniards of many provinces, Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Malays, Tartars and Russians, [who] must all give place to the resistless flood of Anglo-Saxon or American progress.”
According to the prediction of The Annals, the American Empire — with San Francisco as one of its most important nodes — will eventually extend from this city into Hawaii, Japan, Malaysia, and China. Here, the authors grow rhapsodic:
“A few more years, and a few millions of Americans on the Pacific may realize the gigantic scheme, which even our fathers on the Atlantic border would have laughed at as impossible and ridiculous. The railway across, or through the Snowy and Rocky Mountains, which will bind all North America with its iron arm into one mighty empire, will facilitate the operation. And then SAN FRANCISCO — in the execution and triumph of that scheme will assuredly become what Liverpool, or even London is to England, and what New York is to the Middle and Eastern States of America — a grand depot for numberless manufactures and produce, and a harbor for the fleets of every nation. Long before that time, the English and American peoples will have finished the last great struggle which must some day take place between them for the commercial and political supremacy of the world.”
(We’ll pick up a similar Hegelian vibe when we look at Josiah Royce, but that won’t be for several months still.)
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We may mean many different things when we call San Francisco progressive today, but certainly none of us mean any of that. Had I my druthers, I might retire the word altogether.
So why has the word persisted? Political terms are malleable. We change their meanings over time, as ideas fall in and out of favor.
Nevertheless, it is jarring to see what counted as progress in San Francisco in the 1850s. It also makes you wonder what some aspects of the city’s politics today might look like in a century or two. That’s progress for you — always moving on.
Next week: Part Three of Sherman’s Memoirs