San Francisco - Alison Bing [13]
When the party ended, Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts was the one temporary exhibit San Franciscans couldn’t bear to see torn down. The structure was recast in concrete in the 1960s and in the spirit of the Expo it now hosts the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s hands-on museum of weird science.
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THE LEFT COAST
With new piers and the fanfare of the Panama Expo, San Francisco became the major West Coast port, but the morning lineup at the docks told another story. Only longshoremen known for toughness, speed and readiness to pay bribes were hired to unload heavy cargo onto perilously slippery docks from 8am to midnight. And they did this for pay that hardly put dinner on the table. On May 9, 1934, longshoremen gathered down by the piers and, one by one, refused work.
As shiploads of food spoiled dockside in the summer sun, shipping companies frantically scoured first the bay, then ports all along the West Coast for substitute dockworkers. No one was available: San Francisco’s longshoremen had coordinated their strikes with 35,000 workers all along the West Coast. They held out for an unprecedented 83 days, until police, hired guns and finally the National Guard forcibly ended the strike, killing two longshoremen. In the ensuing riots, 34 strikers and sympathizers were shot and another 40 beaten.
In a silent funeral procession that marched down Market St on July 9, thousands of San Franciscans stood shoulder to shoulder with longshoremen. Word of a general strike spread throughout the city, and for four days even San Francisco’s nightclubs and movie palaces were closed in solidarity and draped in black. The ship owners met the longshoremen’s demands, cementing San Francisco’s reputation as the organizing headquarters of the ‘Left Coast.’
When WWII brought a shipbuilding boom to town, women and 40,000 African American arrivals claimed key roles in San Francisco’s workforce. But with misplaced anxiety about possible attacks from the Pacific, Japanese San Franciscans became convenient targets for public animosity. Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 ordering the relocation of 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps. The San Francisco–based Japanese American Citizens League immediately challenged the grounds for internment, and lobbied tirelessly for more than 40 years to overturn Executive Order 9066, gain symbolic reparations for internees, and restore the community’s standing with a formal letter of apology signed by President George HW Bush in 1988.
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BEATS: FREE SPEECH, FREE SPIRITS
Members of the armed services dismissed from service for homosexuality and other ‘subversive’ behavior during WWII were discharged onto the streets of San Francisco, as if that would teach them a lesson. Instead, the new arrivals found themselves at home in the low-rent, laissez-faire neighborhoods of North Beach and the Haight. So when the rest of the country took a sharp right turn with McCarthyism in the 1950s, rebels and romantics headed for San Francisco – including one Jack Kerouac. By the time On the Road was published in 1957 chronicling his westward journey, the motley crowd of writers, artists, dreamers and unclassifiable characters Kerouac called ‘the mad ones’ had found their way to like-minded San Francisco.
San Francisco didn’t always take kindly to the nonconformists derisively referred to in the press as ‘beatniks,’ and police and poets were increasingly at odds on the streets of North Beach.