Church and State in the City: Catholics and Politics in Twentieth-Century San Francisco

Acknowledgments

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CKNOWLEDGMENTS A mong the many people I want to thank, David Selvin and Robert W. Cherny stand out. On a blustery February day in 1993, I drove across the bridge from San Francisco to the Berkeley hills for an interview with David Selvin, a retired labor journalist and historian. I had recently cowritten a book with Cherny about politics, power, and urban development in San Francisco from the Civil War to 1932 and had started oral history interviews for a sequel that would take the story up to the 1990s. Selvin had been an eyewitness to the San Francisco general strike in 1934 and was writing his book A Terrible Anger, a work that many today consider to be the single best treatment of the topic.* I asked him to give me his recollections of the role of the various nongovernmental interest groups during the strike. He began his reply by saying that it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the role played by the Catholic Church. He claimed that this was generally true in San Francisco throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In early 1941, Selvin went to work for the anti–Nazi Bund Jewish Survey Committee; his charge was to set up a new civil rights group in the city, the Bay Area Council against Discrimination . When he presented his outline proposal for the project to his boss, Eugene Block, Block read it over and asked, “Have you talked to Franklin Street about this?” It turns out that this particular phrase, with its reference to the chancery office located behind St. Mary’s Cathedral, was widely used at the time by San Franciscans doing work related to social and economic policy. Given the *David F. Selvin, A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996). viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS influence and power of the church in the city, they wanted to get the nod from “Franklin Street” before going public with their projects. My interview with Selvin and subsequent discussions with Cherny convinced me that the existing narrative of San Francisco history required a thorough reconsideration. Thanks to the generous cooperation of Jeffrey M. Burns, director of the Chancery Archives of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, I expanded my previous research into the role of Catholics in the labor movement and immersed myself in the archival records of the church and other institutions . I discovered that the Catholic Church and Catholic laypeople—in complex relations with business, labor, and city officials—had played key roles in shaping politics and public policy. This book is the product of that research. It describes how, from the early 1890s through the 1970s, Catholic faith–based politics shaped the language and the outcome of debates over how to define the common good and how to implement the public interest in San Francisco. In addition to my debt to Selvin and Cherny for their quintessential contributions to this book, I am indebted to the many scholars who have discussed San Francisco politics with me, graciously shared information, replied to queries , and critiqued my research on San Francisco since I presented my paper on Catholic critics of capitalism at the Urban Change and Conflict conference organized by the University of London’s Centre for Environmental Studies in 1977. Since then, a growing number of urban studies scholars have addressed the role of Catholics and other religious communities in the political cultures of American cities. Their work has contributed to an urban studies literature that is informed by contemporary thinking about the relationship between urban politics and the American constitutional order, as well as grounded in evidence about religion, class dynamics, ethno-racial differences, gender, and sexuality. The extensive references to these scholars in my endnotes makes clear my indebtedness to the rich literature they have produced and that has helped to clarify my thinking about San Francisco and its place in the national urban community. Special thanks go to Carl Abbott, Christopher Agee, Edward Dyanand Asregadoo, Steven Avella, Martin Benjamin, Barbara Berglund, Shana Bernstein , Allan Bérubé, Rodger Birt, Graeme Bowman, Gray Brechin, Albert S. Broussard, Kenneth Burt, Andrew Canepa, Rose Marie Cleese, Catherine Collomp , Carlos B. Cordova, Carol Cuenod, Peter D’Agostino, Wilhelm Damberg, David Dalin, Philip J. Davies, Mike Davis, Richard DeLeon, John P. Diggins, Roy Domenico, Philip J. Dreyfus, Philip J. Ethington, Robert A. Fung, Daniel P. Gonzales, Archie Green, Richard Gribble, Chester Hartman, Michael J. Heale, Ava Kahn...