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Reviewed by:
  • Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906
  • Raymond W. Rast
Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906. By Barbara Berglund. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. 294 pages, $19.95.

Barbara Berglund's lively first book examines local elites' efforts to impose an "American" social order on nineteenth-century San Francisco via control over the city's semipublic spaces. The persuasiveness of Berglund's deceptively simple thesis—that such efforts were successful—is limited by abundant evidence of persistent defiance and disorder. The book's real value, however, lies in its innovative use of primary sources to reveal that racial, class, and gender dynamics permeated hotels, fairgrounds, and other semipublic spaces within the city. Even if these dynamics ultimately defied efforts to control them, their pervasiveness demands the kind of interrogation that Berglund's book provides. [End Page 328]

The key premise here is that San Francisco in the 1890s was less socially fluid and thus more American than it had been in the 1850s. Through five chapters organized around selected spaces and sites, Berglund argues that local elites orchestrated this change. The book's first chapter surveys the evolution of restaurants, hotels, and boardinghouses. The second chapter turns to three spaces of entertainment and edification: the city's Barbary Coast vice district, a recreational venue known as Woodward's Gardens, and a museum devoted to human anatomy. The third chapter traces social interactions within the restaurants, opium dens, and other sites that comprised Chinatown's tourist terrain. The book's fourth chapter examines the popular industrial exhibitions sponsored by the Mechanics' Institute every year between the 1850s and the 1890s. The final chapter focuses on the city's first World's Fair, the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894.

As Berglund shows, newcomers to San Francisco in the 1850s witnessed pervasive social mixing, especially in the city's restaurants, boardinghouses, and vice shops. Berglund argues that the persistence of such mixing created anxiety among the city's wealthy white men and women, who thus sought ways to teach members of different races and classes, as well as other men and women, their proper places in a hierarchical social order that they imported from the East and imposed on the West. Setting aside state laws and electoral politics, Berglund instead takes up the creation of vice districts, tourist terrains, and fairgrounds to see how local elites went about this work. Berglund's recognition of resistance leads her to label these urban spaces as "cultural frontiers."

Although hotels, vice districts, and fairgrounds became common in other western cities, the specific spaces and sites that Berglund analyzes were as unique as San Francisco itself. Indeed, as the largest city of the nineteenth-century West, San Francisco claimed the region's most profitable hotels and restaurants, most notorious vice district, and most populous Chinatown. The great strength of Berglund's book springs from her ability to reconstruct these spaces and sites and the social interactions that occurred within them. Berglund's prodigious research reveals a vibrant urban landscape of black men serving tea to white women at the Palace Hotel, young men viewing nude bodies purportedly ravaged by vice at Dr. Jordan's Pacific Museum of Anatomy and Science, tourists fumbling with chopsticks at a restaurant in Chinatown, couples promenading past the central fountain at the Mechanics' Institute Pavilion, and "gum girls" flirting with young men at the Midwinter Fair. Anyone seeking to comprehend the texture of everyday life in nineteenth-century San Francisco need look no further than the rich material in Berglund's book.

Other researchers of this same material might produce different interpretations than those suggested by the author's top-down perspective. To be sure, such a perspective is necessary for any understanding of elite culture's conceptualization, acquisition, and attempted uses of power. However, episodes of resistance to that power, especially in the abundance that Berglund's material suggests, should not be dismissed as mere exceptions to the rule. Resistance changes the entire equation. If San Francisco emerged as an American city, it was not because a group of wealthy white men and women willed it...

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