American History

In regard to this, San Francisco had its own Haymarket Affair, the Preparedness Day bombing and trials of 1916-17, to compare with Chicagos famous events of thirty years earlier. But the circumstances which resulted to Tom Mooney and Warren Billings convictions which were markedly different from those in Chicago in the 1880s and 90s. In Chicagos history Haymarket affair is considered to be one of the darkest chapters that led to judicial killings not getting any better with the suppression of the Pullman strike of 1894 (Green, 2006). The reverberations of Haymarket across the landscape of industrial capitalism must seem to labor geographers to be redolent of the kinds of far- reaching connections forged among activists in the present era of globalism (Herod, 2001 Waterman  Wills, 2001). It should remind us, as well, of what one can expect in the way of containment of and control over the working class, union organizing, and radical dissent in the rapid industrialization now taking place in the rest of the world, from Turkey to China. The simple admonition to pay attention to geographical difference is not terribly earth-shaking, of course. The problem for geographers and urban historians is to show why places have gone separate ways, despite strong commonalities within national formations like the United States or across capitalist economies. Place matters, but how, and how much Thus we need more local histories, geographies, national surveys and comparative approaches that seek to tease out the sources of variation among cities. For example David Harveys Urbanization of capital (1985) tends to flatten the urban system into units competing for capital investment.

Moreover, it is worthwhile to reflect on the labor history of San Francisco, in comparison to that of Chicago. The trajectory of class struggle in the two places played out rather differently over the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The working class of San Francisco was successful in the quest to resist the start of the American convention from the Gilded Age to the McCarthy era which had significance for city politics that moved to Chicago where it remains to this date. San Francisco was different in many ways- smaller, less industrial and more isolated but one of the United States pivotal cities sharing the same scalar characteristics of Chicago a hub of a huge resource empire, center of finance and capital accumulation and major immigrant receiving area. In 1916, San Francisco suffered an incident named Preparedness Day Bombing that was similar that of Chicago thirty years earlier i.e. a mobilized working class, a capitalist counter offensive, anarchist agitators, pitched battles with police, a mystery bomber etc but workers had a greater political power. The legal outcomes were less draconian for the accused thus they suffered less of setback.
                         
Craddock plaques
1848-1855 Gold Rush ushered in a kind of republican moment not seen since the days of American Revolution, by the time Chicago was settling into order under William Ogden and his ilk. Politics in San Francisco came under David Broderick sway and his Tammany trained democrats and was the first freely elected Irish government in the world. Led by the merchant class, the vigilantes took down the popular pretensions and the Comstock Silver boom to set off another capital accumulation in the 1860s. (Senkewicz, 1985), that was erased by burghers of Gilded Age Francisco to build a proper Victorian city after the civil war. San Francisco city government was controlled by the workingmens party that had a radical critique of the railroads, land grabbers, and industrialists sent elected representatives to the legislature from around the state, thus winning the fight to call a second constitutional convention after which it died. San Francisco got its own branch of the knights of labor in that decade but was not as militant as the knights in the east. The 1870s politics meant that things were calmer than in Chicago during the Haymarket Affair. In 1890 the bourgeoisie organized to quell union springs and to bring San Francisco into the post-Victorian era in the process which they created one of the first employers associations in the United States. The capitalists found a political voice in James Phelan one of the new generations of college educated sons of the Gilded Age and led for three terms as democratic mayor. He invited Chicagos Daniel Burnham to come to San Francisco in 1901 to prepare a city plan (Kahn, 1979) which was never adopted because of its vision of radial avenues and classical monuments. (Knight, 1960, p 371).

The bourgeoisie were irritated by the breech of class and protocol and were not about to relent in securing political power again. The merchants reorganized in a merger with the merchants Association, Downtown Association and Board of trade into the chamber of commerce in the 1910s.  A new merchants and Manufacturers association was formed to confront the unions in 1914. Amidst a deadly strike in June 1916 on the waterfront, the chamber of commerce declared war on the open shop and created a law and order committee (echoes of the Vigilantes). The war mongers had organized a big parade for the so called Preparedness Day. Led by anarchists and trade unionists, part of a national opposition for which many radicals would pay dearly. Emma Goldman and her lover Alexander Berkman were both in the city which made the capitalists nervous. And in Chicago, the D.A. was able to convict on a weak case built around false testimony by police informers. (Gentry, 1967). The first Democratic Governor to be elected in state of California for not less than half century, Culbert Olson who pardoned the duo of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings in 1939. A huge parade in their honor filed up Market Street, as the working class celebrated the return of its martyrs and flexed its collective muscles to show that San Francisco was more than an imperial city of capital. It was their town.