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1 “THE HE TRUE RUE INTERESTS OF A NTERESTS OF A CITY ITY” The Public Interest in a Divided City O n January 7, 1897, James Duval Phelan, the newly inaugurated mayor of San Francisco, walked into the office of the Merchants Association and asked its secretary “to prepare a list of names from which the Committee of 100 might be selected.”1 Three days before his visit, Phelan had promised to bring the city into the twentieth century with “a more scientific and satisfactory charter”—a new framework for municipal government that would be drafted by a committee of citizen volunteers and ratified by the electorate . Phelan turned to the Merchants Association for volunteers because he believed its members were especially qualified to set the future priorities and policies for the eighth-largest city in the nation. Phelan and his like-minded colleagues regarded themselves as prophets of modernity and progress and referred to their proposals as “Progressive.”2 The political process that eventually produced a new city charter in 1898 began a war of words as San Franciscans involved themselves in the national debate over the proper role of business and labor in community affairs, as well as in a series of conflicts over the meaning of social categories of gender, ethnicity , race, and religion, in defining the public interest. The contests between business and several competing claimants seeking to represent labor would especially define the city’s public life during this period. American Federation of Labor (AFL) unionists demanded a voice in public policy as well as in jobrelated matters; socialists and other leftists (many of whom belonged to AFL unions) claimed they best represented the community and pushed for fundamental changes in the economy and institutions of government. Women’s rights advocates rejected the cultural assumption of women’s inferiority, and 8 CHAPTER 1 supporters of women’s suffrage demanded the right to vote and hold public office. Once they achieved that right, they challenged the tradition that restricted women’s public roles to health care, education, and welfare. Catholic Church clerics and lay Catholic activists demanded a role for their faith-based moral principles in the setting of San Francisco’s priorities. Numerous Catholic businessmen, salaried professionals, and wage workers took the church’s emerging doctrines on social justice to heart and rejected both revolutionary socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. These Catholic activists insisted on a moral economy and worked to limit unilateral business power.3 Catholic support for economic reform did not translate into advocacy of social and cultural reform. Catholics, with few exceptions, also defended traditional hierarchical racialist definitions of gender, family, and community, thereby complicating the picture considerably. Among the Irish, German, and Italian Catholic residents, most men (and women) accepted ethno-religious traditions that specified inequality between the sexes as a feature of a God-given natural order that did not detract from the dignity and worth of women.4 These traditionalist opponents of feminist conceptions of women’s rights also supported policies to maintain white supremacy. Phelan, for instance, was a leader in campaign to keep out Chinese, Japanese, and other immigrants from Asia.5 A banker and cosmopolitan connoisseur of the arts, Phelan brought a genuine sense of noblesse oblige to his public activities as mayor, charter reformer, anticorruption crusader, U.S. senator, and cultural entrepreneur. He aspired to oversee San Francisco’s transformation into “The New San Francisco,” a Pacific Coast metropolis famous as a world-class destination.6 And like other business owners in the city who sought to create a “reawakening of the independent spirit of Pioneer days,” Phelan believed that civic wisdom in a democracy was more likely to be found among the male offspring of cultured capitalists of European descent than among other city residents, especially those from nonEuropean backgrounds, who toiled for wages or filled their hours with domestic work. His leading role in organizing the Merchants Association in 1894 put Phelan in the company of a number of businessmen reformers who turned to organized political effort during the 1890s with an enthusiasm that resembled religious revivalism. In 1892, these men, who were in their twenties and thirties, created the California League of Progress; they believed that “since the future was theirs, they were entitled, or even compelled, to take a hand in shaping it to their best advantage.” Frederick J. Koster assumed the presidency of the group in 1896, at age twenty-eight, and led a successful campaign for a bond issue...

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