Making San Francisco American | Armendariz

Isabella Armendariz
Professor Hungate
History 270
17 May 2018

Book Review: Making San Francisco American

In Making San Francisco American Barbara Berglund begins her sprawling

commentary on the origins of San Francisco with a description of life in the city. The

introduction includes social hierarchies and the strain the city was under in assimilating

very diverse groups of immigrants, the jobs they held, as well as city spots such as the

International Hostel, the city’s first brick hostelry. It continues to survey demographics,

citing the Annals of San Francisco publication which described the city as having a

“strange mixed population.” After setting the scene with a description of the diversity,

disorderliness, and social division found in the city she describes the types of

entertainment offered. Opposing cultural forces put Victorian morality and capitalistic

work ethic (Berglund 64) against the type of promiscuous recreation offered at the time.

After detailing the different cultural factors and tensions that made San Francisco a

highly charged environment, she continues in Making Race in the City to discuss the

challenges and stereotypes the Chinese community faced in assimilating. While social

order was often stood on its head because of market demands, a sense of insecurity

and prejudice existed against the Chinese whose customs put them in violation of

health codes. In Celebrating the city and Imagining the City, Berglund explains how the

city developed into a part of the national story due to emphasis by elites. Berglund

argues that social, racial, and gender roles developed due to market pressures before

they were overshadowed by “nation-making” forces. She does this by showing

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examples of customs and taking entertainment from the time period to show how

imperialism can overshadow the voices of those in the minority when writing history.

Regarding gender and how it developed in early San Francisco, according to the

text, a state survey reported the ratio between men and women in 1852 as being six-to-

one. Over time it evened out to forty-five percent of the population being female which

caused problems as the development of nuclear families often contributes to the

stability of society. Prostitution was widespread and heavily frequented by men even

beyond their appropriate social class. Chinese women were visited by white men for

instance, despite the former’s reputation as being uncleanly and infested with venereal

diseases. But gender stereotypes in a larger sense were also changing in San

Francisco around the time of the ’49 mining camp as young women began gaining

some economic means they began exploring new unchaperoned social spaces (pg.

202) and creating an environment of flirtation and invitation that made men begin to

modify their behavior. This goes back to a point Berglund made about the market being

more of a determiner of behavior than government and politics. Throughout the

development of San Francisco different economic developments blurred social

boundaries and made women play a more masculine role and then overemphasize their

femininity as the “gum girls” did after the Panic of 1983 caused financial hardship. This

economic incentive and push to provide labor clashed and contrasted with the vision of

the female as pious, pure, submissive, and domestic. Though women were viewed as a

docile, civilizing force, their movement into the workforce caused a percentage of the

populace anxiety.
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Continuing on to race, what was as important as gender in Berglund’s analysis of

San Francisco was the race affected one’s access to respect, honor, and dignity.

Whites and Euro-Americans were at the top of the hierarchy, with Chinese and African-

Americans being at the bottom, and this affected everything from the way they were

perceived and treated in society to how they were mythologized and stereotyped.

Because San Francisco was one of the most heavily populated cities by immigrants or

people not born on American soil, a great amount of tension was created that required

the creation of narratives, rules, and prejudices. For example, the way in which food

was eaten reportedly reinforced the “articulation of social hierarchies” as Berglund

explains on page one-hundred and seventeen. The tension was created perhaps not so

much by skin color or appearance as much as different customs. When these customs

came to face each other, like water and oil, they alienated the other to an unacceptable

degree. In the Chinese temple for instance, where the Chinese lacked the kind of

doctrinal teachings and structure that the American’s were used to. This produces a gulf

where the arbitrariness of the dominant society’s customs is highlighted and this kind of

enlightenment startles onlookers.

The frontier was a place where minority voices could particularly be heard and

find themselves in positions of power, before being drowned out by elites. Several times

throughout the commentary on San Francisco’s culture, Berglund refers to a blurring in

the distinction between different normal social hierarchies. A doctor, for instance, and a

plumber were often seen as interchangeable as markets fluctuated and created an

environment where social class and status blended. “Dress,” he [Bayard Taylor] wrote,

“was no gauge of respectability, and no honest occupation, however menial in its

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character, affected a man’s standing. Lawyers, physicians, and ex-professors dug

cellars, drove ox-teams, sawed wood…” (Berglund 3) Social status took a back seat in

early San Francisco and exemplified a particularly beautiful aspect of the city. It

sounded almost utopian the way that people refused to uplift or put down others based

on their occupation. Others who visited found it remarkable how strange it was, and in

this way, San Francisco stood on its own at least for that moment in time.

In conclusion, the book was very strong in its sources cited and its broadness in

terms of the many aspects that it took into consideration to make its argument. Berglund

argues that the role of nation-making process in shaping categories of identity plays a

bigger role than one would think without examining the evidence provided. She would

say that it’s a larger driver of behavior than many would speculate at first, and this is

because there is a layered, sequential ordering that took place for San Francisco to

become what it did, and it’s important to recognize the evolution of social and gender

roles because they did not come about without undergoing some serious contention and

contests along the way. Rather than being a seamless “finished product,” so to speak,

the social, racial, and gender roles were widely shifting, transforming, and developing as

the economy and market demanded they did, and it was not until elites recast this

struggle into race, class, and gender hierarchies that the class conversation was

contained. The strengths of this argument rests on the evidence-based approach the

author took in finding market factors that forced racial and gender-based behaviors such

as the “gum girls” deviating from their stereotypical gender roles. What runs counter to

her theory is the lack of deference people had to social status. In a social democracy of
 Making San Francisco American | Armendariz

that kind gender and race roles would seem to be less impactful than in other states or

countries where it was highly prized.

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Bibliography

Berglund, Barbara. Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West,
1946-1906. University Pr Of Kansas, 2010.