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2 “THE HE NEED FOR EED FOR COOPERATION OOPERATION” The Origins of the Liberal Growth Regime O n September 1, 1941, a small crowd of curious bystanders and committed union members gathered under sunny skies in the small park at the foot of Market Street for the unveiling and dedication of the memorial to Andrew Furuseth. The Norwegian-born Furuseth, president of the International Seamen’s Union, had achieved legendary status long before his death in January 1938. Now the larger-than-life bronze bust, which faithfully captured his hawk-like profile and craggy features, stood watch atop a marble pedestal across from the city’s Ferry Building. The white-capped sailors who gathered around the memorial with their sleeves rolled up ready for work may have appreciated the symbolism implicit in Furuseth’s placement facing up Market Street toward City Hall, as if on the lookout for dangerous waters ahead. Joining Harry Lundeberg, president of the Seafarers International Union, at the microphone was Angelo J. Rossi, who had become the mayor of San Francisco in January 1931. Rossi was the son of Gold Rush–era Italian immigrants, and Lundeberg had left Norway when he went to sea at fourteen. They both took pride in their families and boasted that they were proud to be American citizens . Rossi’s most recent campaign, in 1939, was a hard-fought affair during which he was accused of being a fascist sympathizer by the newly established Communist Party newspaper the People’s World. Lundeberg’s seafarers’ union, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), was battling attempts by a communist-influenced Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) rival, which was determined to bring all West Coast sailors under its auspices.1 Lundeberg’s and Rossi’s anticommunist sentiments existed side by side with their dedication to a premise that their Communist Party rivals regarded 26 CHAPTER 2 as anathema, given the party’s commitment to spreading the Stalinist gospel of socialist transformation. Rossi and Lundeberg believed that the future progress of the San Francisco Bay Area could best be achieved by reforming American capitalism along the lines of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The New Deal was a Democratic Party program, but some of Roosevelt’s innovations were compatible with, and some were expanded versions of, the policies of his Republican Party predecessor, Herbert Hoover, including Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. These programs were meant to help end the worst economic depression in the nation’s history by putting the federal government in the business of stimulating the economy of cities and regions, thereby restoring confidence among investors and putting the unemployed back to work. The onlookers at the dedication of the Furuseth memorial needed only to raise their eyes to see one of the tangible results of such innovation: the five-year-old San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. That the bridge, and the adjacent Trans-Bay Terminal, completed in 1939, existed at all was the result of a deliberate bipartisan effort by business leaders of the local Republican and Democratic parties to create a pro-growth coalition with the support of anticommunist unionists and the backing of city voters. They resolved to work their way out of the crisis of the Great Depression by downplaying their partisan and class differences, emphasizing the benefits to the region and its residents that could come with economic growth, and stressing the patriotic American character of their efforts. They created a liberal growth regime in San Francisco that was a politically centrist and moderately liberal enterprise. It developed incrementally in a contested and conflicted manner during the 1930s and wartime years, and it was influenced by local as well as national dynamics and by wartime sentiment and war-related events.2 At the time of the Wall Street crash in 1929, San Francisco was still showing the signs of its relative loss of economic power to Los Angeles and nearby Bay Area counties. Alameda and Contra Costa counties were outdistancing San Francisco in manufacturing output, and the value of trade to other San Francisco Bay ports ranked higher than that loaded and unloaded on the city’s finger piers. But San Francisco still far outstripped the rest of the Bay Area as a wholesaler, and it still unquestionably deserved its title “Wall Street of the West.” Fifth in the United States in the dollar value of its bank clearings, behind New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Boston, the city had seventeen state banks with 171 branches...

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