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The Postwar Struggle
for Civil Rights
Studies in African American
History and Culture
GRAHAM HODGES, General Editor

New York’s Black Regiments During Slavery in the Cherokee Nation

the Civil War The Keetoowah Society and the
William Seraile Defining of a People 1855–1867
Patrick N. Minges
Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland,
1717–1838 Troubling Beginnings
Thomas Murphy, S.J. Trans(per)forming African American
History and Identity
“White” Americans in “Black” Africa Maurice E. Stevens
Black and White American Methodist
Missionaries in Liberia, 1820–1875 The Social Teachings of the
Eunjin Park Progressive National Baptist
Convention, Inc., Since 1961
The Origins of the African American A Critical Analysis of the Least, the
Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1956 Lost, and the Left-out
Aimin Zhang Albert A. Avant, Jr.

Religiosity, Cosmology, and Folklore Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

The African Influence in the Novels of Four Pioneering Black Women
Toni Morrison Journalists
Therese E. Higgins Jinx Coleman Broussard

Something Better for Our Children Constructing Belonging

Black Organizing in Chicago Public Class, Race, and Harlem’s
Schools, 1963–1971 Professional Workers
Dionne Danns Sabiyha Prince

Teach the Nation Contesting the Terrain of the

Public School, Racial Uplift, and Ivory Tower
Women’s Writing in the 1890s Spiritual Leadership of African-
Anne-Elizabeth Murdy American Women in the Academy
Rochelle Garner
The Art of the Black Essay
From Meditation to Transcendence Post-Soul Black Cinema
Cheryl B. Butler Discontinuities, Innovations, and
Breakpoints, 1970–1995
Emerging Afrikan Survivals William R. Grant, IV
An Afrocentric Critical Theory
Kamau Kemayó
The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, When to Stop the Cheering?
Marie Laveaux The Black Press, the Black
A Study of Powerful Female Community, and the Integration of
Leadership in Nineteenth-Century Professional Baseball
New Orleans Brian Carroll
Ina Johanna Fandrich
The Rise and Fall of the Garvey
Race and Masculinity in Movement in the Urban South,
Contemporary American 1918–1942
Prison Narratives Claudrena N. Harold
Auli Ek
The Black Panthers in the Midwest
Swinging the Vernacular The Community Programs and
Jazz and African American Services of the Black Panther Party
Modernist Literature in Milwaukee, 1966–1977
Michael Borshuk Andrew Witt

Boys, Boyz, Bois Words and Songs of Bessie Smith,

An Ethics of Black Masculinity in Billie Holiday, and Nina Simone
Film and Popular Media Sound Motion, Blues Spirit, and
Keith M. Harris African Memory
Melanie E. Bratcher
Movement Matters
American Antiapartheid Activism and Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s
the Rise of Multicultural Politics Blackness and Genre
David L. Hostetter Novotny Lawrence

Slavery, Southern Culture, and Womanism, Literature, and the

Education in Little Dixie, Missouri, Transformation of the Black
1820–1860 Community, 1965–1980
Jeffrey C. Stone Kalenda Eaton

Courting Communities Racial Discourse and

Black Female Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Twentieth-
“Syncre-Nationalism” in the Century African American Writing
Nineteenth-Century North Tania Friedel
Kathy L. Glass
Audience, Agency and Identity in
The Selling of Civil Rights Black Popular Culture
The Student Nonviolent Shawan M. Worsley
Coordinating Committee and the
Use of Public Relations The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
Vanessa Murphree African Americans in San Francisco,
1945–1975
Black Liberation in the Midwest Paul T. Miller
The Struggle in St. Louis, Missouri,
1964–1970
Kenneth S. Jolly
The Postwar Struggle
for Civil Rights
African Americans in
San Francisco, 1945–1975

Paul T. Miller

New York London

First published 2010
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2010 Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereaf-
ter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade-

marks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miller, Paul T.
The postwar struggle for civil rights : African Americans in San Francisco,
1945–1975 / by Paul T. Miller.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. African Americans—California—San Francisco—History—20th century.
2. African Americans—Civil rights—California—San Francisco—History—20th
century. 3. Civil rights movements—California—San Francisco—History—20th
century. 4. Race discrimination—California—San Francisco—History—20th century.
5. Discrimination in housing—California—San Francisco—History—20th century.
6. San Francisco (Calif.)—Race relations. I. Title.
F869.S39N46 2009
323.1196'073079461—dc22
2009019419

ISBN 0-203-86612-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-80601-1 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-203-86612-6 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-80601-5 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-86612-2 (ebk)
To Dr. D. Philip McGee and Samuel Mark Hopkins
for inspiring this book and to Penny Fong and
Marcus Wells, Jr. for providing the drive to finish it.
Contents

List of Figures xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
Acknowledgments xv

Introduction 1

1 The Postwar 1940s 6

2 Challenges of the 1950s: Discrimination, Employment

and Crime 26

3 Housing in the 1950s 48

4 Protest and Struggle, 1960–1964 62

5 Rights and Repression, 1965–1969 88

6 Housing in the 1960s 106

7 The 1970s, Progress and Setbacks 127

Conclusion 149

Bibliography 155
Index 165
Figures

1.1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett, 1963. 18

1.2 Uptown Theater at Sutter and Steiner Streets, 1964. 23

2.1 Dr. Daniel A. Collins, 1963. 34

3.1 This is one room of a two-room ‘apartment’ on Geary

Street where a family of six lived, 1952. 49

3.2 Pickets march before offices of the Standard Building

Co., 2222 19th Avenue in protest against alleged racial
discrimination, 1961. 60

4.1 C.O.R.E. shop-in at Lucky grocery store located at 1201

Gough Street, 1964. 63

4.2 Tracy Sims, secretary of the San Francisco W.E.B.

DuBois Club and leader of the Ad Hoc Committee to End
Discrimination, 1964. 78

4.3 Dr. Thomas Burbridge (right) and attorney Terry Francois

(left), 1964. 80

4.4 Protest at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel resulting in 123

arrests, 1964. 82

4.5 NAACP sponsored picket at the Cadillac dealership on

Van Ness Avenue, 1964. 84

5.1 Bill Bradley, Rev. T. R. Provost and Pug Kilpatric (left

to right) announce racial agreement on food stores, 1963. 89

6.1 First construction in Western Addition Redevelopment

area widening Geary Street and directing it into an
underpass at Fillmore Street, 1960. 115
xii Figures
6.2 Miss Frances Fletcher, Berkeley teacher, details racial
discrimination in housing sales and rentals in San
Francisco, 1962. 118
Abbreviations

BBA Black Businessmen Association

BPWC Business and Professional Women’s Club

BWOA Black Women Organized for Action

CLC Church-Labor Conference

CCU Council for Civic Unity

CORE Congress for Racial Equality

CP-USA American Communist Party

FEPC Fair Employment Practices Commission

HUD Housing and Urban Development

ILGWU International Ladies Garment Workers Union

ILWU International Longshore and Warehouse Union

MCS Marine Cooks and Stewards Union

NAACP National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People

NICB National Industrial Conference Board

NLC Negro Labor Council

OFJ Officers For Justice

SF-AAHCS San Francisco African American Historical and

Cultural Society

SFFD San Francisco Fire Department

xiv Abbreviations
SFHA San Francisco Housing Authority

SFNLAF San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance

Foundation

SFPD San Francisco Police Department

SFRA San Francisco Redevelopment Agency

SNCC Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee

SPUR San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association

SUP Sailors’ Union of the Pacific

UMF United Freedom Movement

WACO Western Addition Community Organization

WAPAC Western Addition Project Area Committee

YMCA Young Men’s Christian Association

YOC Youth Opportunities Center

Acknowledgments

A book such as this one where there was little previous work to go on and
few people with whom to consult must be the author’s passion if it is to
be completed. That is the case here. Countless hours were spent comb-
ing through library archives and examining microfilm. Having read every
single copy of the San Francisco Sun Reporter from 1951–1976, some more
than once, I can testify to just what an important source of information
for and about the Black community it was during this time. Without the
journalists and staff that produced that newspaper this book would have
never been possible.
As with any work that requires detailed research, this book relied on
some very skilled and knowledgeable library staff to help guide me to the
right spots. For their time, energy and willingness to make sure I got as
much information as possible, I owe a debt of gratitude to Catherine Powell
at the San Francisco State University Labor Archives, David Kessler at UC
Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Mary Manning at the San Francisco African
American Historical and Culture Society and the staff too numerous to
name at the San Francisco Public Library. Though everyone was generous
with his or her time I owe a special thank you to the folks on the 6th floor
at the public library’s San Francisco History Center who went beyond the
call of duty on more than one occasion to help me locate information in one
collection or another.
This book emerged out of the compelling stories that fuelled the civil
rights struggle in San Francisco and the necessity to commit these stories
and this history to memory in the long view. African American San Fran-
ciscans were both dignified and determined to take their places as fi rst class
citizens in a city that, although it did not always live up to its reputation,
was world-renowned for its cosmopolitan attitude and social tolerance. It is
their stories that this book tells, stories about racial discrimination running
up against the will to overcome it. I feel fortunate to have had the opportu-
nity to write this history and hope that it sheds light on the lives and accom-
plishments of San Francisco’s postwar African American community.
It is important that I acknowledge and thank some individuals whose
help with this project, although indispensable, went far beyond it as well.
xvi Acknowledgments
First, without Dr. D. Philip McGee’s (Dean of Ethnic Studies at San Fran-
cisco State University, 1980–1999) no-nonsense brand of encouragement
not only would this book have never been realized, I would never have even
considered going to graduate school. He set me on the path of research and
study and instilled in me the drive to pursue my passion. With Phil now
among them, I acknowledge the debt I owe to him and the ancestors for it
is their work before me that made this work possible.
Next, Dr. Sonja Peterson-Lewis of Temple University challenged my
assumptions, taught me how to conduct rigorous research and never let me
settle for anything less than the very best effort I was capable of producing.
She made me understand the value of staying true to myself and pushed me
to become a better researcher and, more importantly, a better person. I am
still in awe of her limitless energy and tireless commitment to her students.
I know of no better teacher and no harder worker than Dr. S P-L.
Dr. Grant D. Venerable, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
at Lincoln University, deserves special mention. Grant has taught, advised
and mentored me since I met him when I was an undergraduate student
at SF State in 1988. Over the course of 20 years he has provided me with
much needed critiques of my work, written me countless letters of recom-
mendation, counseled me in personal matters and even served as the offici-
ate at my wedding. Grant and his family were intricately involved in the
civil rights struggle in California and he has many personal connections to
people mentioned in this book. In that respect, his insights were invaluable
to this work. It is with an appreciation that words cannot express deeply
enough that I thank him for all he has done.
A significant part of this work relied on information I received from four
men who I interviewed during 2005 and 2006. I thank Thomas Fleming,
David Johnson, Dr. Daniel Collins and Gerald Johnson for sharing their
lives and helping to ensure that such an important piece of San Francisco’s
African American history was committed to the historical record. Their
contributions have made this work more valuable and compelling than it
would have been without them.
Although I am grateful for the guidance I received along the way to
completing this book, I should note that any errors of fact or interpretation
herein are entirely my own responsibility.
Introduction

The war industries associated with World War II brought unparalleled

employment opportunities for African Americans in California’s port cit-
ies. Nowhere was this more evident than in San Francisco, a city whose
African American population grew by over 650% between 1940 and 1945.
With this population increase also came an increase in racial discrimina-
tion directed at African Americans, the most pernicious of which was in
the employment and housing sectors. The situation would only get worse
throughout the 1950s and 1960s as manufacturing jobs moved to the
East Bay where race restrictive housing policies kept African Americans
from moving with them. In San Francisco, most African Americans were
effectively barred from renting or buying homes in all but a few neighbor-
hoods, neighborhoods often characterized by dilapidated structures and
over-crowded conditions. Except for the well educated and lucky, employ-
ment opportunities for African Americans were open only at entry levels
for white collar positions that required little public contact or in unskilled
and semi-skilled blue collar positions. Despite such challenges, San Francis-
co’s African American population nearly doubled between 1950 and 1960.
This community would push hard against the doors of discrimination and
fi nd that with concerted effort they would give way. During the 1960s and
1970s, civil rights groups formed coalitions to picket and protest thereby
effectively expanding job opportunities and opening the housing market for
African American San Franciscans. This book examines the challenges and
exigencies of San Francisco’s growing African American community from
the end of World War II through 1975 in areas such as housing, employ-
ment and education as it struggled to secure civil rights in what was largely
and sometimes erroneously considered one of the most progressive cities in
the nation.
This book is not a comparative analysis of Bay Area cities as many
books about San Francisco turn out to be. Rather, it focuses narrowly on
San Francisco to the exclusion of other cities with sizable African Ameri-
can populations such as Oakland, Berkeley or Richmond so that the reader
might get the clearest picture possible of this important population at this
critical juncture in history. It is an effort to examine San Francisco’s African
2 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
American population in specific detail so that we can begin to discern the
distinguishing characteristics of that population and where it holds paral-
lels with other cities in the Bay Area and beyond. Although this book tells
the story of the African American community’s struggle for civil rights,
it goes much further than that. This book reveals the circumstances that
everyday African American San Franciscans encountered directly after
World War II on through the early 1970s. It is a story about coping with
inadequate housing, about trying to fi nd a job in the face of blatant insti-
tutional discrimination and about standing tall in the face of racially moti-
vated violence and police brutality. It is also, of course, the story of protest
and progress.
This work contributes not only to the body of scholarship in African
American Studies and history but also intersects with research in urban
studies and sociology. Its ethnographic component, consisting of four long
interviews with people who were residents of the city between 1946 and
1975, gives readers a fi rst-hand account of how some African Americans
experienced San Francisco after World War II and uncovers socio-cultural
nuance that archival research alone could not provide. With a detailed
account of San Francisco’s postwar African American community, this
experience can now be compared and contrasted with the experience of
other African Americans living in urban centers in order to discern impor-
tant similarities and differences across time and geography.
Three factors differentiate the experiences of African American migrants
to San Francisco from other African American urban migrants to Northern
or Western cities. It is thus particularly important to examine the hows and
whys of San Francisco’s African American community if one is to under-
stand the larger picture of the city’s history. First, unlike many Northern
cities that experienced episodes of racial violence during and after the fi rst
“Great Migration,” San Francisco experienced a relative degree of social
harmony between African Americans and European Americans until after
the World War II (Broussard; 1993, 2–3). In fact, during the 1930s and
1940s, activists of all ethnic groups formed interracial organizations spe-
cifically to head off racial strife (Broussard, 1993 & Melendy, 1999). Sec-
ond, San Francisco’s African American population remained under 1% of
the total population until after 1940. From very early on, the city’s preoc-
cupation with its large Chinese population, a population that experienced
the brunt of the city’s racism until the late 1940s, meant that most African
Americans were shielded from the violence that occurred in other cities such
as Chicago, Tulsa and Detroit during the fi rst half of the twentieth century
(Pfaelzer, 2007). Third, because tens of thousands of African Americans
migrated to the Bay Area to fi ll war industry jobs, San Francisco’s African
American population increased markedly faster—over 900% by 1950—
than it did in other West Coast cities. Such an enormous influx over such
a short period of time led to increasingly frequent instances of racial intol-
erance and discrimination directed at African Americans. By the early
 Introduction 3
1950s, as San Francisco’s African American community grew ever larger,
it came under more frequent attack by racist individuals, the police depart-
ment, the real estate industry and both public and private employers.
The spectacular growth of San Francisco’s African American population
was led by an influx of people who came to the Bay Area from Texas, Loui-
siana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri and Mississippi to fi nd war-work,
often securing jobs in shipyards or on the waterfront (Daniels; 1986, 165).
However, at the conclusion of World War II, thousands of African Ameri-
cans were laid off and consequently faced with a difficult decision—return
home to the racist South or make the best of it in a city where housing
was rigidly segregated and the employment market was contracting. Over-
whelmingly the newcomers chose the latter.
Problems continued to compound into the next decade. Most postwar
African American San Franciscans found themselves locked in one of two
enclaves: Bay View-Hunters Point or the Western Addition, also known as
the Fillmore. In addition, during the 1950s and 1960s, mirroring a national
trend in urban redevelopment projects, the San Francisco Redevelopment
Agency carried out an urban renewal policy that would uproot thousands
of families from their homes in the Western Addition, the hub of the Afri-
can American community. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency’s A-1
and A-2 projects were opportunities for business elites to reclaim poten-
tially valuable land while moving out what they considered an undesirable
segment of the neighborhood, the African American population. As Hart-
man (1984) notes, “It was becoming apparent that urban renewal could
be used to displace the city’s minorities and recapture the centrally located
residential areas they had inherited after whites moved out” (17). Further-
more, beginning in the 1950s, many local manufacturing jobs previously
held by African Americans during the war were relocated to East Bay cities
like Oakland, San Leandro and Newark and fi lled almost exclusively by a
white work force.
Excluded from jobs and often denied even poor quality housing, it was
only logical that San Francisco’s African American community would orga-
nize to make improvements in their lives. Although civil rights activism in
San Francisco had prewar roots, the 1960s gave birth to a more vigorous
and demanding activism that placed African Americans at the forefront of
the struggle for racial equality. By the mid-1960s, civil rights organizations
agitated for equality in employment and better living conditions. One case
in point was the 1964 protest movement led by a young African Ameri-
can woman, Tracy Sims, and the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimina-
tion. Under the Ad Hoc Committee’s multi-coalition banner, activists of all
ages and ethnic groups protested against job discrimination at high profile
locales including the Sheraton-Palace Hotel and Cadillac Row, a stretch of
Van Ness Avenue that was home to several automobile showrooms.
Chapter one examines the experiences of San Francisco’s growing Afri-
can American community directly after World War II. With housing in
4 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
short supply and rigidly segregated, African Americans faced the dual
challenge of securing a place to live while also trying to fi nd or maintain
employment in a city where jobs, once plentiful in the war industries, began
to evaporate. The lack of employment opportunities led to a mixed bag of
outcomes. For example, some people turned to crime to support themselves
while others, seeing the obvious racial discrimination in employment, pro-
tested to force businesses, especially those located in the Black community,
to hire more African Americans.
Chapters two and three describe the concrete conditions for African
American San Franciscans during the 1950s. In particular, chapter two
notes the growing number of incidents of police brutality directed against
African Americans, the exclusion of African Americans from union jobs
and the increasing problem of crime in the African American community.
Chapter two also details the problems many people had while trying to fi nd
employment and the ways they coped with such problems. Chapter three
examines the city’s housing crisis as it impacted African Americans during
the 1950s. Specifically, chapter three shows how policies implemented by
the San Francisco Housing Authority excluded African Americans from
public housing until 1954 and how race restrictive covenants and redlining
barred them from renting or buying in predominately white areas.
Chapters four and five focus on civil rights, issues of employment and
police/community relations. Chapter four illustrates how San Francisco’s
African American community organized to fight against employment dis-
crimination climaxing with a series of 1964 direct action campaigns that
targeted high profi le establishments including the Sheraton-Palace Hotel
and automobile dealerships along San Francisco’s famous “Cadillac Row.”
Chapter five explains how urban renewal under the direction of the San
Francisco Redevelopment Agency acted to displace thousands of African
American families in the Western Addition under the A-1 and A-2 plans.
Condemning hundreds of buildings as “blighted,” the SFRA was able to
destroy thousands of low-cost housing units and replace them with higher
rent units intended for working-class white professionals. Chapter five also
describes the African American community’s continued civil rights activ-
ism and the rise of a more radical approach for demanding equal rights
including the 1968 student strike at San Francisco State University that
resulted in the formation of the nation’s fist Black Studies Department.
Chapter six focuses on housing issues facing African American San
Franciscans during the 1960s. This chapter evidences how urban renewal
removed swaths of some of the only housing that was affordable and open
to African American families and displaced scores of African American-
owned business from the Fillmore district. Most of these businesses would
never return. Chapter six also shows that while the rental market for Afri-
can Americans was still characterized by racist practices, some headway
was being made and property owners were increasingly held accountable in
court for denying prospective tenants units based on race.
 Introduction 5
Chapter seven presents a picture of the African American community in
the fi rst half of the 1970s. Although San Francisco was declining in terms
of total population, its African American population continued to grow.
This continued growth ran up against a decline in blue-collar jobs, many of
which moved to smaller cities in the East Bay that excluded African Ameri-
cans from housing on the basis of race. At the same time, San Francisco was
becoming the West Coast’s center for administrative and fi nancial work
creating jobs for which many African American San Franciscans were not
adequately trained or were excluded from based on race. Although African
Americans had made significant progress in being considered for jobs previ-
ously unavailable to them—jobs such as those in the building trades—the
shrinking stock of manufacturing and industrial employment opportuni-
ties in the City made fi nding such jobs difficult at best. Chapter seven also
shows that African Americans faced a similarly grim situation with respect
to housing. Despite a less racially restrictive housing market, the dwindling
stock of affordable housing due in part to redevelopment project demoli-
tions and the continued racism on the part of many property owners still
made fi nding housing in the fi rst half of the 1970s an arduous task for
many of the City’s African American residents.
1 The Postwar 1940s

World War II brought with it tens of thousands of migrants to West Coast

cities such as Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Many migrants were
escaping grinding poverty in states like Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas and
came looking for employment in the aircraft industry or Naval shipyards
from Seattle down to San Diego. This war-time boom precipitated the larg-
est westward movement of African Americans in US history and nowhere
was this migratory movement more evident than in San Francisco, a city
whose pre-war African American population was 4,846 or less than 1% of
the City’s total population (Taylor; 1998, 254).
Historian Nathan Huggins, who lived in San Francisco during the 1940s,
notes, “Before 1942, the Fillmore had a few hundred black families scat-
tered throughout an essentially multi-ethnic, working class neighborhood”
(San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle, 1982, Marinship). Joseph James
(1945), who moved to San Francisco in 1939 and was the local NAACP
president from 1943–1946 recalls that:

Negroes were so widely scattered that the visitor to San Francisco at

that time would have easily received the impression that there were
almost no Negroes in the city. There was only one point of relatively
high concentration of Negro residence—the well-known Fillmore Dis-
trict; but even this was in no sense a Negro area. Here white people
were most numerous, with the Japanese ancestry group second with
upwards of five thousand. There were, also, small numbers of Filipinos
and Chinese. Negroes did not number more than one thousand. (166)

Getting to San Francisco was no easy task in the early 1940s but the
lure of high-paying war-time jobs and greater civil rights drew people
who were often young and had little to lose by moving. When they did
move, the most common mode of transportation was by bus or train
(Broussard; 1993, 141). Daniel Collins, one of the few African American
professionals to move to San Francisco in the early 1940s, was onboard
Union Pacific Railroad’s “The Challenger” in 1942 and described the
scene as such:
 The Postwar 1940s 7
They were people looking for a job, who could take a one-way ticket
to California, with no destination in mind except to California. You
knew there were war jobs out here, knowing you could get a job. And
on the Challenger, on that train, there was not a single seat, every seat
was taken. And, in fact, the men’s room, there were two or three seats
around the men’s room, they were fi lled. There was a guy sittin’ on the
can so if you had to go, he had to get up. That’s how crowded that train
was. (Collins, personal interview, 2006)

James (1945) notes that many of the newcomers migrated from Texas, Loui-
siana, Oklahoma and Arkansas to take advantage of employment opportu-
nities and to escape racial hostilities in the south (168). Typical of a migrant’s
story, a 36-year-old mechanic explains how he came to San Francisco noting,
“I was working on a farm down around Atlanta and making $23 a week,
sometimes less, sometimes with no job at all . . .” “Then I saw the newspaper
ads. ‘Jobs in San Francisco,’ they said. They said they’d train me, give me
work, more pay; I knew I’d get more freedom” (San Francisco News; 1956,
. . . To Be Black). The article goes on to note that he and his wife, like many
other families, then moved to California to take advantage of the employ-
ment opportunities in the shipyards and factories of the Bay Area.
Less ordinary is David Johnson’s reason for coming to the City. Johnson
came to San Francisco from Jacksonville, FL for the fi rst time as a Navy
seaman in 1944 on his way to the Philippines. He describes this fi rst brief
stay, noting, “I happened to meet some people in San Francisco and so I
fell in love with the city. And I had a strange feeling about the city, that
somehow this city would play an important part in my whole life” (D.
Johnson, personal interview, 2005). After being released from the Navy
Johnson went back to Jacksonville to resume life but he would bristle under
the segregated nature of the South and, armed with the GI Bill, decided to
strike out and make a better way for himself. He notes,

I knew I wanted to be a photographer; that was clear. But I wasn’t sure

where I would get the training given the fact that the schools in Florida
were segregated and I had very little resources. Except the most impor-
tant resource I had was the GI Bill. So I had my tuition no matter where
I chose to go to school. (D. Johnson, personal interview, 2005)

Johnson had been interested in photography since he was a kid and even
spent what little money he saved on a subscription to Popular Photographer
magazine. In one issue he read that a photographer named Ansel Adams
was going to be the director of the Photography Department at the Califor-
nia School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Johnson recalls,

So I wrote him a letter indicating that I was interested in coming to San

Francisco to study photography and that I was a Negro. I wasn’t sure
8 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
what the racial climate was in San Francisco. Three thousand miles was
a long ways to come to say ‘Sorry bud, we’re not interested’ even if I had
the GI Bill. It turned out fine. (D. Johnson, personal interview, 2005)

Not only did the school part turn out well for Johnson, Adams also arranged
for him to stay at his home with Minor White, Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Mar-
ion Baruch in the exclusive Sea Cliff neighborhood so that he would not have
to look for an apartment when he first arrived. With that, David Johnson
became the first African American student to study with Ansel Adams, one
of the most famous landscape photographers of the twentieth century.
Even though David Johnson’s move to San Francisco was more extraor-
dinary than that of most African American migrants, one commonalty that
he had with most newcomers was his Southern roots. It was perhaps these
geo-cultural ties, ties that came with different customs and behaviors than
San Francisco’s long-time African American residents were used to, that
would create some social tension within the City’s African American com-
munity. Among the established residents’ complaints were that the migrants
were loud, vulgar, lingered on street corners and dressed sloppily (Brous-
sard; 1993, 170). Broussard (1993) states that “Established black residents
were often condescending toward black migrants or criticized their behav-
ior as uncivil or countrified,” in some instances even blaming the newly
arrived for increased racial discrimination (170). As one long-time resident
would note, “We never had any prejudice until late years when the Negroes
started the flack and flocking in here and raising hell” (Daniels; 1990, 173).
Dr. Daniel Collins observed this very phenomenon when he fi rst arrived in
San Francisco. As he tells it:

But there were . . . about 2,500, maybe 3,000 old San Francisco people,
Blacks who were comfortable with San Francisco. They had worked
out a nice living pattern for themselves. In fact, those old-timers, for
the most part, were very hostile to the new-comers. The new-comers
were rather boisterous, you know, and they had not been tamed. (Col-
lins, personal interview, 2006)

It came as no surprise that white residents were less than thrilled with
the City’s burgeoning African American community and once newcomers
established themselves in San Francisco there was no hiding from racial
antimony. In 1948 Enola Maxwell and her two siblings took a train from
Baton Rouge to join their mother who was working in a San Francisco
laundry. She notes, “We heard San Francisco was so wonderful, having
just come from the South. But there wasn’t a lot of difference between here
and there. Segregation, discrimination, but it was subtle” (SF Chronicle;
2002, Civil Wrongs Inspire). Additionally, profiling the City at the war’s
end, Joseph James (1945) states, “After a brief period of bewilderment at
the sudden appearance of thousands of articulate Negroes quoting from
 The Postwar 1940s 9
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States,
Caucasian San Francisco turned to the machinery already at hand for the
subjugation of the Oriental and applied it to the Negro” (168).
Most of the newcomers moved into war-time housing in the Hunters
Point neighborhood near the shipyards or into the Western Addition, an
area also known as the Fillmore district. France (1962) notes that “In the
early part of 1942, nearly all the Japanese were removed from the West
Coast, and the housing they had occupied became available to the new war
workers. Negroes were the most direct beneficiaries of this newly available
housing,” moving into the Western Addition area once known as “Little
Osaka” (59–60). By 1943, about 9,000 African Americans were crowded
into the same area previously occupied by 5,000 Japanese and city health
officials classified over half of the Fillmore’s housing stock as substandard
(SF Examiner; 1982, Marinship). More generally, city planners reflecting
back over several decades noted what African Americans and many other
San Franciscans could have told them then when they wrote, “From the
early 1930’s until the end of WW II, San Francisco did little to improve
or even maintain its community facilities. As a result, the city entered the
postwar years with a physical plant that was inadequate for the needs of
a growing and vigorous community (Shelley Papers; box 4). However, the
newcomers were, if nothing else, practical about the circumstances they
found themselves in and made the best of what they had. For example, in
response to the housing situation France (1962) states, “Already this area
[the Fillmore District] was overcrowded and many of the dwellings were
substandard, yet the shelter afforded was better than none at all” (60).
It was not that African Americans wanted to be sequestered in racially
homogenous areas. Such confi nement was, at least in part, the result of
restrictive covenants, agreements meant to keep African Americans penned
in only a few well-defi ned neighborhoods. The problem was so acute that in
1945 the American Council on Race Relations released a pamphlet entitled
“Hemmed In: ABC’s of Race Restrictive Housing Covenants” in an effort
to explain the deleterious effects of this practice and how to combat it.
In it, the Council’s Community Services Director Robert Weaver defi nes
race restrictive covenants as “compacts entered into by a group of property
owners, subdivision developers, or real estate operators in a given neigh-
borhood binding them not to sell, rent, lease or otherwise convey their
property to specified groups (usually colored people) for a defi nite period
unless all agree to the transaction” (2). James (1945) asserts that in San
Francisco, “local real-estate operators imported a special type of restrictive
covenant from St. Louis for use against Negroes” (168).
Although the influx of African Americans was new, discrimination in
San Francisco’s housing market was all too familiar. Daniels (1990) indi-
cates that the discriminatory practices used against African Americans
were initially developed to thwart an entirely different ethnic group—the
Chinese. He notes that
10 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
Restrictive covenants played an important role in preventing migrants
from locating in certain neighborhoods of the city. White property
owners agreed not to sell to non-Caucasians, in covenants that were
part of an old San Francisco tradition, first developed to keep the Chi-
nese in Chinatown. (169)

Indeed, once this old prejudice was revised to fit the new circumstances, it
was very effective in limiting the housing choices and thus living conditions
of African Americans.
A prime example of restrictive covenants in action occurred in Portola
Heights, a district in the southeastern section of the city. In 1946 this area was
newly developed and comprised mostly of small individually owned homes
that cost around $6,000. In February of that year, local residents were urged
to attend a meeting of the Portola Heights Boosters Club to discuss the resi-
dential restrictive covenant of the district. The following note, printed on a
handbill that was left in mailboxes, urged white residents to action. It read:

The master deed of this area states that only members of the white
Caucasian race are allowed to reside in this district, except as servants.
These Restrictions Have Been Violated. If you are interested in main-
taining the value of your property, it will be to your advantage to be
present at this meeting. (Selvin Collection, SFSU Labor Archives)

Though none of the “violators” identified were African American, it seems

that two Filipino men married to white women and a Chinese couple were
more than their white neighbors could tolerate.
Whether the convenants were imported from St. Louis or elsewhere,
whether enacted against Filipinos, Chinese or African Americans, Robert
Weaver firmly opposed such discrimination. He notes that “Of all the instru-
ments which effect this residential segregation, race restrictive covenants are
the most dangerous,” and further indicates that this is because, “Such cov-
enants give legal sanction and the appearance of respectability to residential
segregation” (Weaver; 1945, 3).
Such dramatic and rapid growth in San Francisco’s African American
community prompted the local Y.W.C.A., the Race Relations Division of
the American Missionary Association and the Rosenwald Fund to under-
take a study that would assess race relations and recommend changes it
deemed necessary. In the Fall of 1943, under the leadership of Fisk Univer-
sity sociologist Charles Johnson, some 150 agencies and individuals set out
to collect data and in the Spring of 1944 their results were published in The
Negro War Worker in San Francisco. A report of the Interim Steering Com-
mittee of the Johnson Survey published in the Summer of 1944 concluded
that each of the six study sections, “registered an emphatic judgment that
existing agencies are not adequate to meet the problem, and that a separate
community-wide committee is needed to carry through the basic purpose
 The Postwar 1940s 11
of the Survey” (1). The report admonishes that because it is in the vanguard
of progressive leadership nation-wide,

San Francisco, of all cities in the United States, can least afford to drift
along without facing the crisis in race relations. Not only is our imme-
diate problem the most serious in the country, not only are we sowing
seeds of disaster, but our particular responsibility for progressive lead-
ership in this matter is unique in America. (2)

It concludes, “Therefore, real racial equality, and the elimination of segre-

gation and discrimination in any form, must be our positive ultimate goal,
here in San Francisco above all” (2).
Though there were six sections of the Interim Steering Committee’s
report, housing stood out as the most glaring need. Among other things,
the Housing section recommended, that “there shall be no housing plans or
policies of any kind which tend to establish or maintain segregated projects,
areas, districts, or administrative offices”; that 2,500 public war housing
units in addition to the existing units in Hunters Point be made available to
African American war workers in particular; that there be “fair and legal
rent levels in areas occupied by Negroes” and that there be “positive legal
and educational steps toward elimination of deed restrictions and covenants
involving racial discrimination” (2). In addition, the “Family, School, and
Recreation” section noted that “The need for better housing was stressed
by all groups and its bearing on the problems of family, school, and recre-
ation is obvious and desperate” (3). Douglas Daniels (1990), whose book
Pioneer Urbanites was one of the fi rst about San Francisco’s African Amer-
ican community, echos the conclusions of the Johnson Study by noting,
“The need for adequate housing was the single most pressing—and most
frequently articulated—problem of the migrants” (168).
Dentist Daniel Collins, who had arrived in San Francisco in 1942 to take
a post teaching at the University of California’s Dental School, saw clearly
what many newcomers were up against. He explains that

Because there weren’t [sic] enough housing for every newcomer to have
a new place so they doubled up. A whole family was living in an apart-
ment. And they could work around the clock because the war industry
was going 24 hours a day. So you could have what they call hot-seating.
People were renting rooms, you could have the room in the mornings.

Collins continues,

Half a day. In fact, you know, we laugh about it now but I knew one
guy who was a very small old man named Merle Gadles. He was a
wise, wise old-timer. Merle Gadles rented some guy a big chifforobe.
The guy stayed in a big chifforobe. That was just a big enough drawer
12 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
for a guy to sleep in. Well that was the circumstances on the ground
level. (Collins, personal interview, 2006)

The circumstances got even worse when, in July of 1946, a four-alarm

fi re raged through five buildings in the Western Addition. The fi re ignited
among newspapers and trash that had collected under the steps of a court-
yard lightwell at 1565 Octavia Street. Two hundred tenants, mostly Black
and white servicemen and war workers and their families, were forced
to flee their homes. One paper reported that half the tenants were Afri-
can American and that in the end, 77 people were left homeless (People’s
World, 1945, Fillmore Fire).
Collins would have a more personal experience with housing difficulties
when he went to fi nd housing for his wife and family. In the late 1940s,
once his expectant wife and infant son joined him in San Francisco, Collins
attempted to fi nd a larger place that would accommodate them all comfort-
ably. As he tells it,

I had a letter in my hand from Dean Fleming verifying me as a member

of the [UCSF School of Dentistry] faculty saying he’s clean and he’s
decent, he’s an upright citizen, please help him. And I carried that letter
around I guess 20 or 30 places where I saw signs around the university,
up around the university, all that whole area. I spent all my lunch hours
and on my way home. I’d stop by wherever I saw signs for rent. And as
soon as I’d show my face, “No, I can’t rent to you. No, people wouldn’t
like it,” or whatever. (Collins, personal interview, 2006)

Determined to fi nd a place, Dr. Collins placed an ad in the paper. However,

this time he described exactly who was looking for the place to avoid any
more “misunderstandings.” As Collins notes, “So I put an ad in the news-
paper and described it. I named it out in the paper. You know I didn’t want
to be disappointed again. Negro doctor with wife and baby, two children,
needs a place” (Collins, personal interview, 2006). In contrast to his other
attempts, the answer to Collins’ ad would prove that sometimes there was
an element of goodwill among races in San Francisco. In fact, the response
to his ad fundamentally changed the way Collins thought about people.
Collins describes what happened when Mrs. Lillian Brown phoned him
to come over and discuss renting the bottom flat of her house in the Fill-
more district. After talking the circumstances over, Collins notes, “She said
come live with me. She’s a white woman whom I had never met. She just
picked up an ad and decides to see what happens.” Collins goes on,

She gave us the downstairs to live in and we stayed with Mrs. Brown
for about a year, a year and a half. And then she decided to move, she
wanted a smaller quarters. She was getting older. She wanted to move just
across the street to a brick apartment building. They were small units,
 The Postwar 1940s 13
everything, first floor and whatnot. And she sold us the house for $5,000.
Pay for it however you want to. (Collins, personal interview, 2006)

Reflecting back on that episode in his life Dr. Collins suggests that this
ended up being an important lesson in life. He notes that “She had no con-
nections. She was not a member of any organization. She was no big liberal
or no big ILWU, just an ordinary white citizen. So one makes a big mistake
when you prejudge everybody with the same brush. So Mrs. Brown taught
me a big lesson” (Collins, personal interview, 2006).
Mrs. Brown’s example of goodwill notwithstanding, by the end of the war
even San Francisco’s mayor Roger Lapham was nonplused about the expand-
ing African American community. In a 1944 press conference the mayor asked
Tom Fleming, a well-known African American reporter, how long it would
be until the African American migrants went home. Fleming’s response: “Mr.
Mayor, you know how permanent the Golden Gate is? Well Blacks are just
as permanent as the Golden Gate.” Inflaming the mayor further, he contin-
ued, “You might expect to see many more coming out here” (Fleming; 1999).
Unfortunately, Mayor Lapham was not the only bigoted city official. In
November of 1945, a city newspaper reported that Russel Westover, assistant
director of the San Francisco Housing Administration, let Herbert Nugent, a
candidate for the Board of Supervisors, know “that Negroes in need of hous-
ing should leave town” (People’s World; 1945, Nugent Leads).
Irrespective of the wishes of any city officials, San Francisco’s African
American population had grown by over 665% during the war years alone
and it was easy to see why African Americans would want to move there.
Not only were there an abundance of jobs with high wages there were also
a plethora of social, entertainment and business outlets that made for an
exciting way of life. For example, Maya Angelou describes the Fillmore
district during the War years as follows:

On Post Street, where our house was, the hill skidded slowly down
to Fillmore, the market heart of our district. In the two short blocks
before it reached its destination, the street housed two day-and-night
restaurants, two pool halls, four Chinese restaurants, two gambling
houses, plus diners, shoeshine shops, beauty salons, barber shops and
at least four churches. To fully grasp the never-ending activity in San
Francisco’s Negro neighborhood during the war, one need only know
that the two blocks described were side streets that were duplicated
many times over in the eight-to-ten-square-block area. (Angelou;
1971, 179)

In addition, once the war ended not only did the majority of these newcomers
stay in their new-found home, but many more would follow and San Fran-
cisco’s African American population would continue to grow, increasing by
11,000 between 1945 and 1950 (Broussard; 1993, 190 & Taylor; 1998, 254).
14 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
The situation was hardly perfect however. Shortly after the war ended,
R. J. Reynolds, an assistant District Attorney for the City, submitted a
report noting,

One of the things badly needed is better housing accommodations

for Negroes in San Francisco. Much of their infractions of the law as
disturbers of the peace, disruptions in their family life, and fighting
amongst themselves has defi nite relation to the overcrowded, deterio-
rated quarters in which they live, and the tendency of real estate fi rms
to rent or sell to them only in certain areas, the most prominent being
the Fillmore area. This situation is aggravated by the spread of restric-
tive covenant agreements within the city against the Negro and other
minority groups, not only in California but all over the nation, and the
overwhelming tendency of the courts to uphold them. (Reynolds; 1947,
The Negro and Crime in San Francisco)

City officials also took note of the compounding problems and, in the
Spring of 1945, Mayor Lapham and the San Francisco Community Chest
became the first city in the nation to seek aid other than financial when
they invited 32-year-old Charlotte Moton, a recreation representative for
the Office of Community War Services and daughter of Tuskegee President
Robert Moton, to study the basic needs of the City’s African American popu-
lation. The study was to be aimed at “the intelligent integration of this city’s
40,000 Negro people into the community life.” To this end Miss Moton
stated, “Any problems that do exist are not to be solved by Negroes alone.
Nor are they to be solved by whites alone. The only fundamental answer lies
in working together—and we can work together” (People’s World, 1945,
Charlotte Moton). However, in San Francisco, as it was in many postwar
West Coast cities, the situation was not so black and white. For example, one
seemingly overlooked aspect racial integration was the reintegration of San
Francisco’s returning Japanese population who came back to the Western
Addition and often found African American families living in their homes.
As Broussard notes, “When the Japanese returned in 1945, not surprisingly,
there was a fair amount of tension between the Japanese and the African
Americans” (The Fillmore; www.pbs.org/kqed/fillmore).
Surely Moton’s work uncovered veiled racism that, although as perni-
cious as that in the South, was more difficult to detect. Moton, who had
worked all over the country, noted that working outside the South was often
more difficult than working in it because, “The south is honest. They don’t
like us, they tell us so and they do things about it that are clearly evident”
(People’s World, 1945, Charlotte Moton). Longtime San Francisco resi-
dent and Jazz great Vernon Alley corroborated Moton’s claim saying, “The
racism wasn’t as up-front as in the South, but it was here” (SF Chronicle;
1998, Jazz Helped Break). Further, Ralph Friedman described an example
of what Moton was up against when he recalled an incident that occurred
 The Postwar 1940s 15
on a bus in San Francisco. Friedman, a white man, tells how, as the bus
pulled away from the curb, he steadied a young African American girl on
his lap until her mother could get situated. He notes, “While this was hap-
pening someone behind me gave my leg a poke. I turned to see a woman of
about sixty letting herself down in the next seat. As she did, she gave me an
ugly look and hissed, “Nigger-lover!” She said it so quietly no one but I had
heard it” (The Voice, 1949, It Happened).
There were also encouraging signs of racial harmony in the city. In what
was likely an over-statement of optimism but certainly a step in a posi-
tive direction for African American residents, a 1945 issue of The People’s
World reported that the San Francisco Board of Education’s childcare pro-
gram, under the direction of Marian Turner, “had achieved the almost
complete removal of racial discrimination.” The article reveals that “Even
quite benighted people are usually not too shocked to see Negro, Chinese
and white toddlers playing happily together, but to behold teachers of these
races supervising the youngsters TOGETHER usually sets them back on
their heels. ‘Why you can’t DO that,’ they scream, ‘Think of Racial Ten-
sions!’.” The article also notes that the extended day-care centers operated
successfully with integrated staffs where both Blacks and whites were in
supervisory positions over the other (People’s World, 1945, The Answer).
Furthermore, there were pro-active attempts to create and sustain racial
amity. The Marine Cooks and Stewards Union paper, The Voice, reported
on a mass meeting at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium featuring, among
others, Paul Robeson. The event, endorsed by the CIO and sponsored by
the Council for Civic Unity (CCU), was intended to “cement good will
amongst races.” The article continues, “Walter Houston and a number of
other Hollywood celebrities will appear with Robeson in a program stress-
ing the necessity for continued harmony between all races and groups now
and in peacetime” (The Voice; 1945, Mass Meeting).
While Ralph Friedman’s bus incident was an example of individual
bigotry, San Francisco also grappled with institutional racism. This was
clearly evidenced in the uneasy relationship between San Francisco’s Afri-
can American community and the police force. To begin, San Francisco’s
police department did not hire African American officers. Bassist Vernon
Alley, who was a high school track and football star, recounts that he was
unable to get a job with the SFPD during the 1940s because he was African
American (SF Chronicle; 2004, Vernon Alley). Next, prior to World War II
there was relatively little confl ict between the police and the African Ameri-
can community; however, reports of police brutality became increasingly
common as the fi rst postwar decade drew to a close.
One specific example of such police brutality involved Willie Guiden.
Guiden, who had arranged to pay his weekly rent mid-week, returned to his
Yukon Hotel room on Third Street to find that the landlord had padlocked
the door. After a brief conversation about the unpaid rent, the landlord called
the police on Guiden. The officers escorted him out of the hotel and told him,
16 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
“Remember, if you try to go back in there you’ll get the hell beaten out of
you.” Guiden replied, “I was only thinking. You don’t mind a guy thinking,
do you?” According to the People’s World, after that comment the police
clubbed him in the back of the head, beat him with blackjacks and knocked
out some of his teeth. They then handcuffed Guiden, drew their guns and
stated, “We ought to blow his brains out.” A plainclothes policeman who
happened by convinced the officers to take Guiden to the hospital where he
received stitches and was then transported to jail. Guiden told reporters that
“They kept pushing me around,” asking, “Where that nigger? What have you
been doing, nigger? Stand up straight, nigger.” At his trial, the officers admit-
ted that Guiden was not drunk nor had he hit them but that he had resisted
arrest. Proving that institutional racism did not stop at the rank and file of the
police force the judge presiding over Guiden’s case found him guilty and, after
issuing him a six-month suspended sentence, quipped, “I don’t know what to
think about you guys. I ought to have a jail just to put you in and keep you”
(People’s World, 1945, This Happened).
Unfortunately, the above incident may have been only one occurrence in
a pattern of police harassment directed at African American men. In some
instances evidence suggests union workers were at particular risk of police
harassment. For example, in an August 18, 1949 article entitled “Union
Demands End to Frisco Police Attack on Negroes” it was reported that five
different African American Marine Cooks and Stewards (MCS) members
were picked up on vagrancy charges while in front of or near the MCS
union hall on August 2, 1949. Though one of the men was let go, four were
booked. The article notes that “When the case came to trial the next day,
Officer Cottrell left the courtroom when he learned that MCS Attorney
Harold Sawyer was representing the members. Sawyer declared to the court
that the Police Department was deliberately persecuting Negroes, and that
this was the reason for the arrest” (The Voice, 1949, Union Demands).
Despite Judge O’Day’s denial of police harassment, a MCS member’s letter
to the Police Commission would state,

The intimidation of Negroes by members of the Police Department is

a scandalous prostitution of the legitimate functions of the police. In
the cases of the four men referred to above, there was not the slightest
evidence of vagrancy. As soon as the arresting officers learned that the
four men would be defended, and by lawyers who could not be in-
timidated, they did not dare even to attempt to justify the arrests. (The
Voice, 1949, Union Demands)

Strongly worded letters and a good legal defense team would not always
be enough however. Just two weeks later MCS member Johnnie Lampkin
was arrested while eating dinner at the American Cafe. An article describes
the scene: “They arrested him, for no reason as far as he or anyone in the
restaurant could see, but when they learned he was an MCS member they
let him go. ‘Oh, MCS,’ one of the cops said. ‘We’ve been having a little
 The Postwar 1940s 17
trouble with that outfit’ (The Voice, 1949, Attack on Negro). The article
notes further,

The owners and customers of the American Cafe signed a letter pro-
testing the police attack on Brother Lampkin. ‘He comes regularly into
our restaurant to eat,’ the letter said. ‘We know him to be always sober,
very dignified and respectable at all times.’ ‘We resent very much police
officers molesting, bothering and giving any of our customers or any
persons who’re conducting themselves in a dignified manner in this
restaurant a bad time, such as was given Mr. Lampkin’. (The Voice,
1949, Attack on Negro)

The letter goes on to indicate that the reason Lampkin was singled out may
have been because he was an African American seaman.
Although he never had problems with the police himself, veteran reporter
Tom Fleming also testified to the pervasive brutality that the African Amer-
ican community suffered at the hands of the San Francisco Police Depart-
ment. He states,

Well, I knew that the police department, that they could beat you up
on the streets and do whatever they wanted to do and get away with
it. But I never did have any problems myself. Maybe because a lot of
‘em knew me because I was a newspaper man. That could have had
a lot to do with it too. And they talked to me differently to the other
Blacks because they knew they couldn’t get away with a lot of nonsense
with me ‘cause I didn’t take no bullshit. ‘Cause I’d go tell the goddamn
Chief ‘bout what they were trying to do and they knew I could do that.
(Fleming, personal interview, 2005)

Notoriety, prestige and social standing were not always enough to get
African Americans out of difficult situations and certainly not enough
to garner a dignified and respectful encounter. In what is one of the
most well known instances of police harassment during this era, NAACP
president and well-known civil rights leader Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett was
pulled over by a police officer one evening in 1947. As Tom Fleming
recalls it:

He was driving out California Street. I guess he had a patient way out
there, you know. And this cop pulled him over and said he’d been fol-
lowing him for so many blocks and he’d gone through the stop signs. So
Goodlett said, “Well, why didn’t you stop me when I did that the fi rst
time?” And they got into something on this so he said, “Well let me see
your driver’s license Carlton.” So Goodlett said, “Listen, Mr. Officer.
I don’t know your name but my name is Dr. Goodlett to you and ev-
erybody else.” He [the officer] said, “Get outta the car.” Goodlett said,
“I ain’t movin’.” He [the officer] grabbed him and pulled him outta the
18 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
goddamn car and said, “You under arrest.” (Fleming, personal inter-
view, 2005)

The next morning citizens in support of Goodlett packed the courtroom

and when the arresting officer failed to appear the charges were dropped
(Fleming; 1999, www.freepress.org). As Fleming recollects, “Goodlett
walked out and the cops avoided him from then on. They didn’t want any
part of him at all” (Fleming, personal interview, 2005).

Figure 1.1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett, 1963. Goodlett held both an M.D. and Ph.D.,
owned San Francisco’s most influential African American newspaper—the Sun-Re-
porter—and was a member of the World Peace Council. San Francisco History Cen-
ter, San Francisco Public Library.
 The Postwar 1940s 19
However, the police were not the only ones to perpetrate crimes against
African American San Franciscans. In a special report to Edmund G. Brown,
San Francisco’s District Attorney, R. J. Reynolds indicated that a combina-
tion of wartime lay-offs and lower-class migrants contributed to the increased
crime rate. Reynolds notes, “It appears that at the peak of San Francisco’s
war-time production Negro elements with pronounced criminal backgrounds
were brought in to help do the job, and the projection of their criminal activi-
ties into this area is still apparent” (Reynolds; 1947, The Negro and Crime in
San Francisco). Placing the burden squarely on Southern newcomers, he con-
tinued, “In checking over the arrests, it is readily seen that most of the Negroes
arrested are not natives of San Francisco or of California. The most common
background is upbringing in the State of Texas, followed by Louisiana and
Oklahoma” (Reynolds; 1947, The Negro and Crime in San Francisco).
It seems intuitive that given the sheer number of African American
migrants coming to San Francisco for wartime employment that any uptick
in crime would disproportionately involve these newcomers, especially
once the employment boom itself began to bust. Making this point himself,
Reynolds indicates,

So prominent among the crimes that the Negro has frequency in are
those which enrich him with fi nancial gain. I talked with Judge Daniel
Shoemaker one day and he was of the opinion that much of this crime
is defi nitely a reaction to much economic frustration along legitimate
avenues of employment. Without this sense of economic frustration in-
fluencing his [the Negro] decisions, he would be much less inclined to-
ward criminal activity for financial gain. (Reynolds; 1947, The Negro
and Crime in San Francisco)

The end of World War II meant the end of the job-boom for many Afri-
can American San Franciscans. Newcomers, returning veterans and recent
hires were all in jeopardy as the shipyards laid-off workers and factories
shed jobs. Recalling the postwar bust, one long time resident of Hunters
Point, an area of San Francisco that was comprised almost exclusively of
war workers at this time, noted that

There have been many changes since I came to San Francisco in 1944; it
was in the height of the war at the time and the people really didn’t think
about what actually was going to happen to them later on. A lot of people
thought they were going back where they came from or would be settling
here. And then at the end of the war in ‘46, came a terrible thing. People
were being let out of their jobs in masses—and when I said masses, I
mean like working at the shipyards, they would say today so many hun-
dred would be laid off. So it left people without work again—particularly
Negro people in the Hunters Point area. (Carmicael; 1968, 45)

A state employment official put it even more bluntly saying, “What hap-
pened when the war was over should have been expected. Given a chance to
20 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
choose between workmen of equal skills, employers began to discriminate
again” (San Francisco News; 1956, . . . To Be Black). Furthermore, Broussard
(1993) notes that “Nearly half of the 100 leading San Francisco industries
did not employ a single black worker in 1944,” and that “Ninety percent of
black workers were employed by 10% of all industries” (150). Quick to rec-
ognize the precipitous decline in jobs for African Americans, in 1946 the San
Francisco Urban League released a pamphlet entitled “So You’re Looking For
a Job?.” It was geared toward helping people find employment and offered
tips for job seekers. In part, it states, “Now that the war is over jobs are not
as plentiful. War industries have closed down or are operating with greatly
reduced forces. Veterans have come back to claim their old jobs or to look
around for new ones. The competition is keen and the chances are that it will
become keener” (So You’re Looking, 1946). Among the organizations listed
in this pamphlet that had signed on to help with job searches were: the local
offices of the U.S. Employment Service, the San Francisco branches of the
NAACP and Urban League, the Booker T. Washington Community Center
and the Council for Civic Unity.
However, even with help from such venerable institutions, the prospects
for many African Americans looking for work were often grim. Gerald John-
son noticed this immediately when, upon being discharged in San Francisco
from the navy, he found few Black faces working in what was the hub of
the African American community, the Fillmore district. He observed, “And
when I got back I had a chance to look around and I walked up Fillmore
Street and I said, ‘How come there ain’t no Blacks workin’ in none of those
stores?’ They had a Longs Drug Store and Petaluma Poultry, meat markets,
clothing stores, and nothing” (Johnson, 2005, personal interview). When
fi nding a job working for someone else proved nearly impossible there were
people who decided that going into business for themselves might be more
secure or at least more satisfying. One such person was a returning Army
veteran named Julian Richardson. However, he found that even small busi-
ness owners faced an up-hill battle when he tried to open a print shop. He
notes, “A black person in 1946 could not rent a space between Sutter and
Fulton on Fillmore. Only two black people were even employed in that
area” (San Francisco Focus; 1993, The Legacy).
Although bright spots for African American job hunters were less com-
mon, some shown through the postwar bust. Such was the case with Mat-
tie Jackson. Like many others, she and her husband, John P. Jackson, left
Texas for San Francisco in 1942 because Mr. Jackson had secured a job
at the Hunters Point Shipyard. Once situated, Mrs. Jackson began look-
ing for work and, upon seeing a “cashier wanted” sign at a Hunters Point
cafeteria, applied for the job. Mrs. Jackson and a white woman were both
given a try out and much to her surprise and delight she was offered the
position. Recalling this time Mrs. Jackson notes, “In Texas, I never would
have applied, and if I had, I wouldn’t have gotten the job. This fair kind of
treatment is one of the reasons I’m sold on San Francisco” (SF Chronicle;
2009, Mattie Jackson). Her good fortune would continue after the war as
 The Postwar 1940s 21
well. By the late 1940s, when many African American women were scour-
ing the City for work, Mrs. Jackson had taken a job at a local textile com-
pany where she would eventually move on to serve as a union shop steward
and manager of Pacific Northwest District Council of the International
Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). When she went on to become
international vice president on the General Executive Board of the ILGWU
she would be the fi rst African American women to hold an executive office
for that union (SF Chronicle; 2009, Mattie Jackson).
When it came to union work for postwar African American San Francis-
cans, Mrs. Jackson’s case proved to be more the exception than the rule how-
ever. For example, seventy percent of African Americans who migrated to the
Bay Area worked in the shipyards during World War II and of those shipyard
workers 70% were represented by the Boilermakers union (NAACP WCRF;
carton 5). However, in 1937 the Boilermakers authorized the establishment of
all-Black auxiliaries, organizations that African American were forced to join
if they were to secure employment but in which they had no power, not even
a vote, in union business (NAACP WCRF; carton 5). The 1945 California
Supreme Court decision in James vs. Marinship ended the segregated auxiliary
arrangement in California and made it illegal to discriminate against African
American workers (Broussard; 1993, 164–65). Citing Executive Order 9346
which encouraged full participation in the war effort and outlawed discrimi-
nation in the employment of any person in the war industries on the basis of
race, creed, color or national origin, the court ruled that African Americans
“must be admitted to membership under the same terms and conditions appli-
cable to non-Negroes unless the union and the employer refrain from enforc-
ing the closed shop agreement against them” (Broussard; 1993, 164). France
(1962) indicates that this was a major turning point for African American
labor in California as companies and unions all over the Bay Area relaxed
race restrictions on employment (131). Such was the case with the Boilermak-
ers, who, as a 1948 study shows, had integrated their lodges after the Marin-
ship decision (NAACP WCRF; carton 5). The irony was that, just months
after the Marinship ruling, the war came to a close and, as Broussard (1993)
notes, “As fate would have it, black shipyard workers never realized the full
potential of the California Supreme Court’s decision” (165).
In many cases however, even when African Americans were able to crack
open a union Laurence Maes (1948) points out that

A direct result of the predominance of craft union organization has

been a stratification of occupations available to Negroes. Even though
the Negro penetrates a new fi rm or industry, he may fi nd many oc-
cupations therein closed to him as a result of union job control. An
equally far-reaching effect of the high degree of unionization has been
the exclusion of Negroes from certain ‘traditional’ occupations such as
hotel bellmen, waiters, elevator operators, and to some extent, janito-
rial work. Early unionization of such occupations by conservative craft
unions has had an adverse effect on Negro penetration. (19)
22 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
Maes also indicates that not only was it difficult for African Americans
to fi nd and maintain jobs, but they suffered from unemployment more so
than did their white counterparts as well. He writes,

Not only have Negroes experienced a disproportionate amount of un-

employment since the war, but the effect of this unemployment is more
severe. Unemployment of white workers during this period of relatively
high demand for labor has been characterized by a rapid turnover and
relatively short period of unemployment for each individual. Negroes,
on the other hand, have been unemployed for longer periods and have
frequently exhausted their unemployment benefits as evidenced by in-
creasing non-white loads being carried by local relief agencies. (Maes;
1948, 24)

There was, however, a spirit of activism in San Francisco’s African

American community when it came time to demand equal employment
opportunities, especially among the newcomers. Gerald Johnson, who had
grown up questioning racism in New Orleans as a teen, was surely not
going to stand for it in San Francisco as an adult. Noticing the paucity of
African Americans working in shops on Fillmore Street, Johnson and some
friends of his decided that picketing those stores was the best way to force
them to hire African Americans. Only, as was sometimes the case back
home in Louisiana, Johnson had to act as the catalyst to get the ball rolling.
He recollects his fi rst picket to encourage a Fillmore district meat market to
hire African American employees noting,

So we got the signs all made and then we decided to form the Civic
Progressive Union. And so we were going to hit the bricks at 7 o’clock
to picket. So I’m there at 7 o’clock looking to see who else is there. No-
body. Ain’t anybody. They weren’t there. So I just picked a sign up and
started marching in front of this Petaluma Poultry. And then they came
out and they all excited. And I said, “Hey, you don’t have any Black
people working here. (G. Johnson, personal interview, 2005)

Although the owners of the shop called the police on Mr. Johnson, he was
allowed to continue picketing. Johnson’s singular picket expanded through-
out the day and, as he notes,

But by the time they came we had shut that place down. Cause nobody
went in it. And then later in the day a few went in it and they wished
they hadn’t because we knocked all the food out they came out with. I
guess it was two days and they hired a Black to start working there. (G.
Johnson, personal interview, 2005)

Tasting success, Johnson and his compatriots went after the Uptown and
American theaters, but this time they would have the support of a more
diverse and larger group. He explains,
 The Postwar 1940s 23
So when we picket the American theater, up until then we had not had
any whites on the picket line. But we went to the American theater,
the fi rst day we picket the picket line was two or three blocks long full
of whites. While I later found out that they were, part of ‘em from the
union, part of ‘em from the Communist Party and so on. So we had
one heck of a picket line. So we decided to expand it to the American
theater and one other, I forget what it was. Three we picket at the same
time. (G. Johnson, personal interview, 2005)

Johnson was nearly two decades before his time. Such commitment and
energy put into direct action for civil rights would not occur regularly in
San Francisco until the 1960s.

Figure 1.2 Uptown Theater at Sutter and Steiner Streets, 1964. San Francisco His-
tory Center, San Francisco Public Library.
24 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
Gerald Johnson’s involvement in the Communist Party (CP-USA) after
World War II surely had something to do with, as Drake and Cayton (1970)
put it, the Party’s appeal to African Americans. They note, “The Reds had
a plan. They won the admiration of Negroes by default. They were the
only white people who seemed to really care what happened to the Negro”
(735–736). For Johnson, the matter was about enabling African Americans
to gain access to employment opportunities that were previously closed to
them. He describes his participation in the CP-USA saying,

As a matter of fact, after the fi rst picket line at the Uptown Theater I
met an individual from the Communist Party. And we talked for quite
a while and he asked me to join and I joined the Communist Party. And
I was very active in the Party for I think about ten years. I was active
in the unions organizing, in the labor union in trying to get Black busi-
ness agents, in the carpenter’s union trying to get Black business agents
and expanding Black participation operating as a member of the Com-
munist Party. (G. Johnson, personal interview, 2005)

However, the Communist Party’s help was not always welcomed. Brous-
sard (1993) indicates that the efforts of the John Brown Club to picket
theaters that refused to hire African Americans in San Francisco in 1946
marked the beginning of the struggle between the SF NAACP and the CP-
USA, a struggle that would extend into the 1950s (227). The minutes of a
December 1946 meeting of the NAACP Board of Directors indicates that
the local NAACP branch voted to assist the John Brown Club with the
theater picket in an effort to force the theater’s management to hire African
Americans. However, they also cautioned that

This incident has been played up by the daily press, and in each case
the name of the Association is given in connection with the Communist
Party apparently in an effort to place the Association and the Com-
munist Party in the same category before the public. The membership
at large in San Francisco is apparently awakening to this situation and
seems to show more concern now than has previously been the case.
It possibly will take steps to limit much of this influence. (NAACP
WCRF; carton 24)

By 1947, the relationship between the SF-NAACP and the CP-USA had
not improved. In a section of the minutes of the meeting of the Board of
Directors from June of that year entitled “San Francisco Branch Situation,”
Mrs. Anthony Hart, an NAACP Executive Board member, and Dr. Buell
Gallagher, member of the Board of Directors, complained that the San
Francisco branch of the NAACP was “in support of the Communist Party
line.” Mrs. Hart noted specifically that branch President Dr. Carlton Good-
lett permitted copies of the Communist newspaper The People’s World to
 The Postwar 1940s 25
be distributed at a San Francisco NAACP meeting. In response, the Assis-
tant Secretary noted the National Office did not approve the distribution
of The People’s World or any other political literature of any party within
branch meetings and it was then resolved that any political literature was
forbidden at branch meetings (NAACP WCRF; carton 24).
However, not all SF-NAACP members were hostile to the Communist
Party. Harry Williams, a member of both the NAACP and the CP-USA,
warned that anti-communism would lead to “the destruction of more and
more civil liberties and to an increase in police brutality and lynching”
(People’s World; 1951, NAACP Warned of Witchhunt). This warning came
when the SF-NAACP postponed its regularly scheduled elections because
Williams, the CP-USA’s chairman in the Fillmore district, was a member
of the nomination committee. Noting that the constitution of the NAACP
did not prohibit Communists from either membership or holding office,
Williams stated, “The Negro people and their organizations cannot afford
the luxury of red-baiting, since anti-communism is a smoke screen used
by Dixiecrats and their friends behind which to practice discrimination
and segregation” (People’s World; 1951, NAACP Warned of Witchhunt).
After indicating that the CP-USA was not responsible for racist policies in
housing, education or voting rights, Williams proposed a program of posi-
tive action and concluded that the Communist Party, “never has and does
not now seek to take over or control any organization by open or secret
means.” The relationship between the NAACP and the CP-USA would
remain contentious for years to come.
2 Challenges of the 1950s
Discrimination, Employment
and Crime

San Francisco entered the 1950s a changed city, larger and more diverse than it
ever had been. Where once less than one percent of the population was African
American, by 1950 there were 43,502 African Americans, 5.6% of the total
population. This 800% increase in just one decade was by far the largest per-
centage increase in any major West Coast city. Oakland was next with a 460%
increase and Portland followed with a 400% increase (Taylor; 1998, 254).
With such a large and rapid increase in San Francisco’s African American pop-
ulation, it was nearly inevitable that there would be a corresponding increase
in racial discrimination. The situation was so bad in fact that the Council for
Civic Unity (CCU) claimed publicly that race relations in San Francisco, a city
well-known for its race-liberal ways, were no better than anywhere else in the
country (Broussard; 1993, 218). This sentiment was echoed by a UC Berkeley
Extension representative who, in a letter to the local branch of the NAACP,
wrote, “Because of the growing concern with the problem of race relations in
California, and more particularly in the Bay Area, University of California
Extension would like to clarify some of the issues involved by offering this
summer, both in Berkeley and in San Francisco, a short evening course, Race
and Ethnic Relations X102” (NAACP WCRF; carton 12).
Further describing the circumstances was an article that appeared in a
1956 edition of the San Francisco News. Under the caption “ . . . To Be
Black and Live in S.F.,” it painted a grim picture of living conditions for
African American San Franciscans noting,

Geographically, it is to live primarily in one of three neighborhoods known

roughly as Fillmore, Hunters Point and South of Market. Economically,
it is something to be without a job until there is full employment among
the remainder of the community and to earn less at that when one is
available. Socially, it is to be excluded from government, except for to-
ken appointments; from countless voluntary associations that make up
a democracy; and from the kind of housing, medical care and education
Americans expect. (San Francisco News; 1956, . . . To Be Black)

Not only was there a general sense that conditions for African American
San Franciscans were tough, there were also specific instances of overt racism
 Challenges of the 1950s 27
that made it clear the City still had a ways to go to live up to its reputation
as an open-minded liberal metropolis. In one example of unbridled bigotry,
Loren Repulski, a divorced cab driver who lost a custody battle to his ex-
wife, demanded that she “desist from association with persons of non-Cau-
casian ancestry in front of the child,” because he felt that such association
was detrimental to the character of his four-year-old daughter. A local news-
paper notes, “Repulski objects to Betty’s colored friends, especially a nurse
whom Mrs. Repulski has known for some time” (Sun-Reporter; 1953, Race
Hate Figures). In yet another example, some years later a journalist working
for the Sun-Reporter indicated that a man called the paper’s office and told
the associate editor, Edith Austin, “You ni—ers have gone too far. If you
don’t stop writing those stories about racial integration, you’ll find not only a
burning cross, but The Sun-Reporter building burning down when you come
to work tomorrow” (Sun-Reporter; 1958, Cross Burnings). Apparently the
thought of Black and white people even associating with one another was too
much for some close-minded residents to take.
Unfortunately, a few racist incidents went further than mere words,
proving that some people were willing to put their threats into action. First,
just three weeks after Mrs. Orelia Duncan and her adult son moved into
their newly purchased home at 1383 Rhode Island Street, Mrs. Duncan
found a one-foot tall kerosene-soaked cross burning on her front porch. A
newspaper indicated that it took police two and a half hours to arrive at
Mrs. Duncan’s house and when they fi nally came they advised her to forget
about the incident because it was only a “kiddish prank” (People’s World;
1951, Neighbors Back Negro Widow). Even though the event was horrify-
ing, the neighbors’ response was encouraging. The same article reported
that five of Mrs. Duncan’s white neighbors visited about a dozen homes
in the immediate area and polled more than 25 residents on whether they
thought she and her son had a right to live there. All but one agreed she
did and, despite the opinion of one bigot who thought African Americans
should be “kept in place,” the neighbors’ goodwill mission assuaged Mrs.
Duncan’s immediate concerns as she noted, “I’m no longer afraid, I really
feel good now” (People’s World; 1951, Neighbors Back Negro Widow).
Mrs. Duncan may have felt less assured when a little more than one year
later bystanders reported a burning cross bearing the letters “KKK” near the
intersection of Geary and Steiner—a location that was directly in the heart
of the Western Addition. Although many people witnessed the blazing cross,
no one could manage an explanation of just how it got there (Sun-Reporter;
1952, Cross Burned at Geary). Next, in what is the best known incident of
cross burnings in the city’s postwar history, the Sun-Reporter notes that
in June of 1958, as if it were a recreational pastime, two high school boys
claiming that they were restless and began tinkering with wood, wire and
tools were arrested for burning a cross on Assistant District Attorney Cecil
Poole’s lawn. Robert Bilafer and Edmund Hass, both members of prominent
San Francisco families, said they burned the cross at Poole’s house because
they knew a Black family lived at the residentce but denied knowing that
28 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
Assistant District Attorney Poole in particular lived there. Stating, “I simply
can’t pass this off as a teenage prank,” Poole was satisfied to let the juvenile
court handle the incident (Sun-Reporter; 1958, Cross Burnings).
However, not all cases of racism in San Francisco were the result of indi-
vidual bigotry. Institutional racism was also well established in professional
organizations, unions and private industry throughout the City. For exam-
ple, when Frances Glover, managing editor of the Sun-Reporter, applied for
membership to the San Francisco Business and Professional Women’s Club,
her application was rejected. Even though Glover’s qualifications were impec-
cable—she had both undergraduate and graduate degrees, served as a mem-
ber of the Board of Directors of the YWCA and was a member of the Board
of Trustees of Fellowship Church—her race kept her from being accepted
by the Professional Women’s Club. The Sun-Reporter noted that “Support-
ers of the proposal to bar Negroes from membership argued that the San
Francisco club should not set a precedent which might cause conflict with
other BPWCs throughout the nation,” thereby making it seem as if denying
Glover’s application was merely a matter of procedural necessity to stay in
line with their national standards (Sun-Reporter; 1953, Sun-Reporter Editor
Barred). Seeing the situation for what it truly was, Alice Kavanagh, president
of the BPWC, resigned stating, “I have been a member of the organization for
four years and have not once seen any indication of interest in working out
the employment problems of members of minority races. This incident bears
out that lack of interest” (Sun-Reporter; 1953, Sun-Reporter Editor Barred).
Informing the BPWC about what concerned African American women while
simultaneously pointing out the club’s myopic position Glover concluded,
“It probably comes as a surprise to many that a group of intelligent women
would take this attitude. Negro women are vitally interested in movements
which would insure better working conditions, and wider opportunities for
our sex” (Sun-Reporter; 1953, Sun-Reporter Editor Barred).
On the other hand, some institutions made breakthroughs during the
1950s as both San Francisco State College and San Francisco City College
would, for the fi rst time, elect African Americans as student body presi-
dents. At San Francisco State Bert Phillips, a 21 year-old star athlete and
student leader who aspired to a career with the California Adult Author-
ity, triumphed by 120 votes in a run-off election in 1953. Aware of the
significance of his victory, Phillips stated, “It’s truly a great honor for any-
body, and for a Negro it’s an even greater honor” (Sun-Reporter; 1953,
Students of San Francisco State). Five years later the City’s community col-
lege followed San Francisco State’s lead when 19 year-old Freddie Hicks
was elected the fi rst African American president of the Associated Students
(Sun-Reporter, 1958, Negro Elected Student Body President).
A further positive development was that in 1953 the Bay Area Service League
celebrated its tenth anniversary. Initially comprised of eleven charter members
all of whom were African American women, Sue Bailey Thurman noted, “Its
founder, Helen Stratten, will tell you that in 1943, a group of wives, lonely
 Challenges of the 1950s 29
for the life of active community service which they had left behind in the east,
and joined by certain native daughters, came together to form a civic orga-
nization through which they could function locally as a social service unit”
(Sun-Reporter; 1950, The Bay Area Service League). The program from their
tenth anniversary gala declares that the sudden influx of African Americans
to San Francisco during World War II created social problems with which
the eleven founding members of the Service League thought they could help.
By assisting already established agencies, “This group of women represented
community leaders from San Francisco and the East Bay whose training, pre-
vious experiences and key employment provided the ‘know-how’ to approach
the problems at hand” (SF-AAHCS; 1953, Bay Area Service League 10th
Anniversary Program). Although the League initially emphasized service to
the USO and to children, it became larger and more ambitious over the years
and divided into interest groups, each organizing its own projects. In addition,
it formed a junior auxiliary to teach teenaged girls etiquette and to provide
cultural opportunities otherwise unavailable to them (SF-AAHCS; 1953, Bay
Area Service League 10th Anniversary Program). Through the generous and
diligent work of these women, many under-privileged families received direct
financial assistance, holiday gifts and scholarships to schools and camps.
Although there were some positive advances for African American San
Franciscans during the 1950s, the prospect of being considered equally for
employment was not one of them. Broussard (1993) notes that by 1948 the
state unemployment rate for African Americans was 30%; for Black women
the figure was six times as great as the statewide level (210). Furthermore, jobs
for African Americans were consolidated among only a hand-full of employ-
ers. As Broussard (1993) indicates, “The leading industries in San Francisco
employed only a small percentage of the total Black workforce. For example,
90% of all minority workers in San Francisco had been employed by only
10% of the 100 leading firms,” and 40 of these firms employed no African
Americans at all (210). At the opening of the 1950s then, the employment pic-
ture was a virtual paradox. On the one hand, African Americans had gained
employment skills and opportunities during the war that qualified them for
a broader range a jobs than ever before; however, finding employers willing
to hire them was no easy task. Such was the situation on the ground when,
in 1951, San Francisco’s most established African American reporter, Tom
Fleming, editorialized that “Job discrimination based on color is, in my opin-
ion, more vicious in the city of San Francisco than it is in most parts of the
South. It is more subtle here, for they never come right out say this job can-
not be held by blacks. They give them the polite run-around” (Sun-Reporter;
1951, My Report).
Even the Board of Supervisors acknowledged that San Francisco had a
problem with employment discrimination when they debated but failed to
pass a Fair Employment Practices ordinance by a vote of 6–5 (Sun-Reporter;
1951, Supervisors Kill FEPC). Although the mandatory antidiscrimination
law failed, the Supervisors did adopt a voluntary plan. However, many civil
30 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
rights leaders opposed the plan including Urban League director Seaton Man-
ning who offered the following assessment of it: “The voluntary plan does
not call for much in the way of commitment by anyone” (Broussard; 1993,
213). As a result, Manning, along with other prominent civil rights activ-
ists, formed The San Francisco Citizens Committee for Equal Employment
Opportunity, an interracial organization dedicated to defeating the voluntary
plan. In the Committee’s “Summary of Findings and Conclusions” it noted
that “The voluntary plan has failed substantially to broaden job opportuni-
ties for minorities in San Francisco,” and that discrimination “continues as
widespread as before the adoption of the voluntary plan, though some of it
is more subtle and devious” (Broussard; 1993, 213).
One of the most progressive unions with respect to hiring African Ameri-
cans in the Bay Area, the Marine Cooks & Stewards Union (MCS), also
declared the voluntary plan to be a failure. In fact, by 1951 more than half
of the paid officials of MCS were from minority groups (The Voice; 1951,
Negro Leadership). Having attended several meetings, MCS member Charles
Sassoon declared, “Just as Truman’s civil rights program has been nothing
but empty words and promises so has the board of supervisors’ voluntary
FEP plan been a complete failure” (The Voice; 1951, For FEP in Frisco).
After six months under the voluntary plan, MCS member Ted Rolfs also
gave the plan a failing grade. Countering the proclamation of Almon Roth,
spokesman for an employer’s group who claimed that “the employers groups
were more than fair to the Negro people and that ‘oppressive laws’ were not
necessary to bring equality about,” Rolfs noted, “that there was terrible dis-
crimination in the city of San Francisco, that practically every San Francisco
firm, bank, oil company, etc., refused to hire Negroes and other members of
minority groups” (The Voice; 1951, Supervisors in S.F. Hear).
The discrimination did not stop at large companies. A series of 1952 Sun-
Reporter articles indicated that a “Port Security Program” functioned to
screen out African American union workers from work at Army and Navy
docks thus barring them from work while simultaneously weakening the two
most progressive waterfront unions, the MCS and the ILWU. In most cases,
the screened persons were active African American union members such as
Len Greer, a founding member of the Longshoremen’s Union, Local 10, who
estimated that he lost up to 50% of his potential work each week because of
the screening process. According to Greer, the screening process purposefully
punished African Americans for participating in unions and fighting for their
employment rights. He noted, “This has turned out to be another form of
discrimination and I think that certain backward right-wing officials of the
union have definitely been behind the screening program. The Negroes in the
union usually vote with the progressive side and have been strong supporters
of Harry Bridges” (Sun-Reporter; 1952, Unions With Least Bias Hit). The
newspaper reported that the African American members of the MCS union
and of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the only
two unions with contracts on the West Coast who had Negro members, were
 Challenges of the 1950s 31
the hardest hit, pointing out that between 60% and 70% of the screened men
were African American (Sun-Reporter; 1952, Unions With Least Bias Hit).
One union whose membership was not harassed was the all-white Sail-
ors’ Union of the Pacific (SUP) under the direction of Harry Lundeberg.
During the time African Americans were being screened from jobs on the
waterfront, the SUP was attempting to take over the MCS union. The Sun-
Reporter noted that “Lundeberg is hoping to take over if and when enough
Negroes and whites who stand up for unity and integration are driven off
the front. Men on the front say obviously the screening is to the advantage
of Lundeberg and Curran” [Joe Curran from the National Maritime Union
also had designs on taking over the MCS membership.] (Sun-Reporter;
1952, Fear Haunts Many Negro). The same article also reported that “All
seamen will tell you that a Negro dare not enter the hall of the SUP alone in
the daytime and the SUP has a long and disgraceful history of discrimina-
tion” (Sun-Reporter; 1952, Fear Haunts Many Negro).
Gerald Johnson, who moved to San Francisco after the war in 1946,
experienced the racism of the SUP fi rst hand when, attempting to ship out
from New Orleans, he went to the Custom House to sign up for a ship. As
Johnson tells it,

I go to the Custom House, walk up the steps and they have the union
people conducting they business in the Custom House. So all of a sud-
den I notice these guys looking at me with disdain and hate. So they
say, ‘What do you want?’ I say, ‘Well, I wanna ship out. I wanna sign
up to get a ship out.’ ‘Nigger, don’t you know you are not gonna be
shipping out in no union!’ And they sort of made a stand you know. (G.
Johnson, personal interview, 2005)

Once Johnson made it out to San Francisco he shipped out with the MCS
union, noting, “It was a very progressive union . . . real radical, just up my
alley” (G. Johnson, personal interview, 2005).
The last article in the Sun-Reporter series on the Port Security Program
illustrates how it worked to neutralize African Americans who were activ-
ists against discrimination. Twenty-seven year-old Ray Crawford related
that “I was screened because I’m a guy who is not willing to accept the
position offered the negro in this country. I’m not willing to be second
to anyone or allow my kids to grow up to be subservient because of my
inability to more [sic] forward” (Sun-Reporter, 1952, Fear Haunts Many
Negro). Further, John Flower, who led a picket against the screening pro-
cess when President Truman visited San Francisco, uncovered a multifac-
eted problem saying,

The question of my being screened is a twofold kind of thing. First

was the question of my work in the union of carrying out a program
for the brothers, fighting against the discrimination of the companies,
32 The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights
fighting for the enforcement of the contract. The other is the fact of
my participation in the Stockholm Peace campaign, where I collected
1400 signatures to outlaw the atom bomb. I’m of the opinion that
the increasing attacks against the Negro people as well as against the
two particular maritime unions on the West coast, the ILWU and the
MC&S and the so called investigation of subversive activity on the
waterfront which is supposed to be coming up in a few days, is only
to cover up the corruption on the part of the administration boys in
Washington and San Francisco. (Sun-Reporter; 1952, Fear Haunts
Many Negro)

Flower added, “It’s because of this kind of action on the part of the gov-
ernment that you force people into a position that they might do anything.
To deny people jobs is to deny life itself. That is the real seriousness of this
program.” [See Sun-Reporter articles “Unions With Least Bias Hit Hard-
est By Screening” and “Fear Haunts Many Negro Waterfront Workers” for
a detailed description of the Port Security Program and the politics of the
West Coast waterfront unions.]
In spite of such daunting circumstances, people kept chipping away at
discriminatory edifices, wearing down institutions and creating oppor-
tunities for themselves and others. Julian Richardson, who would go on
to found Marcus Books, one of the only Black-owned bookstores in San
Francisco, found that one way to combat such racism was to form a com-
mittee that made sure African American businesses would survive. By the
1950s, the Fillmore’s African American merchants formed the Committee
for Community Solidarity to help buoy Black businesses in the area. Rich-
ardson notes, “Every month, we picked one business and everyone agreed
to spend, say, ten dollars in that particular store. I remember once I had to
buy some olives and went to the grocery store of the month, and the owner
was already sold out of nearly everything. He was one happy guy” (San
Francisco Focus; 1993, The Legacy of the Fillmore).
In addition to its local Black-business purchasing campaign, the Com-
mittee for Community Solidarity published “The Success Directory”
which noted, “In seeking listing for this edition of The Success Directory
we recorded businesses that had Negroes participating in the net profits;
organizations that had elected Negroes to executive positions, and Negro
salesmen who operated on a commission basis regardless of the fi rm” (The
Success Directory; 1959, italics original). In its statement of policy, the
Committee was clear about the need for publishing the Directory stating,

Our aim is to picture certain sides of the Negro community here-

tofore obscured and neglected by all other existing organizations
which purportedly operated for the betterment of the cause of Negro
Americans. We hope to show the size of the community’s economic
efforts, encourage better service and “bigger thinking,” and most of
 Challenges of the 1950s 33
all, help the Negro community become aware of the potency of its
own buying power. We intend to prove that this purchasing power
can advance our cause as rapidly and as certainly as have our court
fights for civil rights and the wise use of our votes. With a free choice
of how and where to spend our money, we are not hampered as in
trying to attain our civil rights through the courts. (The Success Di-
rectory; 1959)

It is reasonable to assume that the Directory helped to increase sales

among African American owned businesses. As Richardson recalls, “We
had about twelve hundred black businesses here in San Francisco in 1959—
almost all in the Fillmore—about a hundred churches, two hundred social
clubs, doctors, lawyers, you name it” (San Francisco Focus; 1993, The
Legacy of the Fillmore). Among other business and organizations the 1959
Directory lists 130 social clubs, 128 churches, 13 food stores and 10 civic
clubs (The Success Directory; 1959). However, the authors of the Direc-
tory were clear that not enough was being done. The Directory included
a diagram that showed only three cents of each dollar spent by African
American San Franciscans went to support professionals and businessmen
in the community. It concludes,

Of the more than $60 million earned by Negroes in San Francisco in

1957, less than $2 million were spent with Negro businesses, profes-
sionals or donated to Negro churches. One major factor causing this
small return to the community is that food and clothing were not of-
fered for sale by Negroes on any appreciable scale. Another cause is
that many Negroes are disinclined to trade with their own. A few take
pride in the fact that they do not buy from Negroes. (The Success Di-
rectory; 1959, italics original)

Although it is difficult to determine just how much positive impact the Success
Directory had on Black-owned businesses in the City, it seems abundantly
clear that without the organization and action by people like Richardson and
members of the Committee for Community Solidarity, African Americans
would not have been as successful as they were in the Fillmore.
Daniel Collins provides one further example of what it took to be suc-
cessful in the Fillmore. Collins arrived in San Francisco in 1942 not for
war work but to take a faculty post at the University of California’s Dental
School. After just three years in the City, Collins not only opened his own
practice in the Fillmore district but also took real estate classes so that he
could learn enough about the real estate business to buy his own property.
Collins notes that while his income from dentistry put his kids through
college, his real estate investments were instrumental in affording him a
comfortable retirement. Collins was one of the more successful African
American residents of the City. Among his professional accomplishments
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 that there the perfections of human nature, wisdom, virtue, and piety
are fostered by excellent institutions, and are producing the delightful
fruits of domestic happiness, social order, and general prosperity.”
The majority of Americans took a different view of the subject;
but even those who most strongly agreed with Channing would have
been first to avow that their prejudice was inveterate, and its
consequences sweeping. Such a conviction admitted little room for
liberalism where politics were, directly or remotely, involved.
Literature bordered closely on politics, and the liberalism of Unitarian
Boston was bounded even in literature by the limits of British
sympathies. Buckminster’s Phi Beta Kappa Oration of 1809 was as
emphatic on this point as Channing’s Fast Day Sermon of 1810 was
outspoken in its political antipathies.
“It is our lot,” said Buckminster, “to have been born in an age of
tremendous revolution, and the world is yet covered with the wrecks
of its ancient glory, especially of its literary renown. The fury of that
storm which rose in France is passed and spent, but its effects have
been felt through the whole system of liberal education. The foul spirit
of innovation and sophistry has been seen wandering in the very
groves of the Lyceum, and is not yet completely exorcised, though the
spell is broken.”
The liberalism of Boston began in a protest against “the foul spirit
of innovation,” and could hardly begin at any point more advanced.
“Infidelity has had one triumph in our days, and we have seen
learning as well as virtue trampled under the hoofs of its infuriated
steeds, let loose by the hand of impiety.” From this attitude of
antipathy to innovation, the Unitarian movement began its attempts
to innovate, and with astonishing rapidity passed through phases
which might well have required ages of growth. In five years
Channing began open attack upon the foundation, or what had
hitherto been believed the foundation, of the Church; and from that
moment innovation could no longer be regarded as foul.
Of the intellectual movement in all its new directions, Harvard
College was the centre. Between 1805 and 1817 the college inspired
the worn-out Federalism of Boston with life till then unimagined. Not
only did it fill the pulpits with Buckminsters, Channings, and
Thachers, whose sermons were an unfailing interest, and whose
society was a constant stimulus, but it also maintained a rivalry
between the pulpit and the lecture-room. The choice of a new
professor was as important and as much discussed as the choice of
a new minister. No ordinary political event caused more social
interest than the appointment of Henry Ware as Professor of
Theology in 1805. In the following year J. Q. Adams was made
Professor of Rhetoric, and delivered a course of lectures, which
created the school of oratory to which Edward Everett’s generation
adhered. Four younger men, whose influence was greatly felt in their
branches of instruction, received professorships in the next few
years,—Jacob Bigelow, who was appointed Professor of Medicine in
1813; Edward Everett, Greek Professor in 1815; John Collins Warren,
Professor of Anatomy in the same year; and George Ticknor,
Professor of Belles Lettres in 1816. In the small society of Boston, a
city numbering hardly forty thousand persons, this activity of college
and church produced a new era. Where thirty-nine students a year
had entered the college before 1800, an average number of sixty-six
entered it during the war, and took degrees during the four or five
subsequent years. Among them were names familiar to the literature
and politics of the next half century. Besides Ticknor and Everett, in
1807 and 1811, Henry Ware graduated in 1812, and his brother
William, the author of “Zenobia,” in 1816; William Hickling Prescott,
in 1814; J. G. Palfrey, in 1815; in 1817, George Bancroft and Caleb
Cushing graduated, and Ralph Waldo Emerson entered the college.
Boston also drew resources from other quarters, and perhaps
showed no stronger proof of its vigor than when, in 1816, it
attracted Daniel Webster from New Hampshire to identify himself
with the intellect and interests of Massachusetts. Even by reaction
the Unitarians stimulated Boston,—as when, a few years afterward,
Lyman Beecher accepted the charge of a Boston church in order to
resist their encroachments.
The “Anthology,” which marked the birth of the new literary
school, came in a few years to a natural end, but was revived in
1815 under the name of the “North American Review,” by the
exertions of William Tudor. The life of the new Review belonged to a
later period, and was shaped by other influences than those that
surrounded the “Anthology.” With the beginning of the next epoch,
the provincial stage of the Boston school was closed. More and more
its influence tended to become national, and even to affect other
countries. Perhaps by a natural consequence rather than by
coincidence, the close of the old period was marked by the
appearance of a short original poem in the “North American Review”
for September, 1817:—
“... The hills,
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; the floods that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That wind among the meads and make them green,—
Are but the solemn declarations all,
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven
Are glowing on the sad abodes of death
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings
Of morning, and the Borean desert pierce;
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
That veil Oregan, where he hears no sound
Save his own dashings,—yet the dead are there;
And millions in these solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep: the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest: and what if thou shalt fall
Unnoticed by the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? Thousands more
Will share thy destiny. The tittering world
Dance to the grave. The busy brood of care
Plod on, and each one chases as before
His favorite phantom. Yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee.”
 The appearance of “Thanatopsis” and “Lines to a Waterfowl” in
the early numbers of the “North American Review,” while leaving no
doubt that a new national literature was close at hand, proved also
that it was not to be the product of a single source; for Bryant,
though greatly tempted to join the Emersons, Channing, Dana,
Allston, and Tudor in Boston, turned finally to New York, where
influences of a different kind surrounded him. The Unitarian school
could not but take a sober cast, and even its humor was sure to be
tinged with sadness, sarcasm, or irony, or some serious purpose or
passion; but New York contained no atmosphere in which such a
society could thrive. Busy with the charge of practical work,—the
development of industries continually exceeding their power of
control,—the people of New York wanted amusement, and shunned
what in Boston was considered as intellectual. Their tastes were
gratified by the appearance of a writer whose first book created a
school of literature as distinctly marked as the Unitarian school of
Boston, and more decidedly original. “The History of New York, by
Diedrich Knickerbocker,” appeared in 1809, and stood alone. Other
books of the time seemed to recognize some literary parentage.
Channing and Buckminster were links in a chain of theologians and
preachers. “Thanatopsis” evidently drew inspiration from
Wordsworth. Diedrich Knickerbocker owed nothing to any living
original.
The “History of New York” was worth more than passing notice.
In the development of a national character, as well as of the
literature that reflected it, humor was a trait of the utmost interest;
and Washington Irving was immediately recognized as a humorist
whose name, if he fulfilled the promise of his first attempt, would
have a chance of passing into the society of Rabelais, Cervantes,
Butler, and Sterne. Few literary tasks were more difficult than to
burlesque without vulgarizing, and to satirize without malignity; yet
Irving in his first effort succeeded in doing both. The old families,
and serious students of colonial history, never quite forgave Irving
for throwing an atmosphere of ridicule over the subject of their
interest; but Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History was so much more
entertaining than ordinary histories, that even historians could be
excused for regretting that it should not be true.
Yet the book reflected the political passions which marked the
period of the Embargo. Besides the burlesque, the “History”
contained satire; and perhaps its most marked trait was the good-
nature which, at a time when bitterness was universal in politics,
saved Irving’s political satire from malignity. Irving meant that no
one should mistake the character of the universal genius, Governor
Wilhelmus Kieft, surnamed the Testy, who as a youth had made
many curious investigations into the nature and operations of
windmills, and who came well-nigh being smothered in a slough of
unintelligible learning,—“a fearful peril, from the effects of which he
never perfectly recovered.”
“No sooner had this bustling little man been blown by a whiff of
fortune into the seat of government, than he called together his
council and delivered a very animated speech on the affairs of the
government; ... and here he soon worked himself into a fearful rage
against the Yankees, whom he compared to the Gauls who desolated
Rome, and to the Goths and Vandals who overran the fairest plains of
Europe.... Having thus artfully wrought up his tale of terror to a
climax, he assumed a self-satisfied look, and declared with a nod of
knowing import that he had taken measures to put a final stop to
these encroachments,—that he had been obliged to have recourse to
a dreadful engine of warfare, lately invented, awful in its effects but
authorized by direful necessity; in a word, he was resolved to conquer
the Yankees—by Proclamation.”
Washington Irving’s political relations were those commonly
known as Burrite, through his brother Peter, who edited in Burr’s
interest the “Morning Chronicle.” Antipathy to Jefferson was a natural
result, and Irving’s satire on the President was the more interesting
because the subject offered temptations for ill-tempered sarcasm
such as spoiled Federalist humor. The Knickerbocker sketch of
Jefferson was worth comparing with Federalist modes of expressing
the same ideas:—
“The great defect of Wilhelmus Kieft’s policy was that though no
man could be more ready to stand forth in an hour of emergency, yet
he was so intent upon guarding the national pocket that he suffered
 the enemy to break its head.... All this was a remote consequence of
his education at the Hague; where, having acquired a smattering of
knowledge, he was ever a great conner of indexes, continually dipping
into books without ever studying to the bottom of any subject, so that
he had the scum of all kinds of authors fermenting in his pericranium.
In some of these titlepage researches he unluckily stumbled over a
grand political cabalistic word, which with his customary facility he
immediately incorporated into his great scheme of government, to the
irretrievable injury and delusion of the honest province of Nieuw
Nederlands, and the eternal misleading of all experimental rulers.”
Little was wanting to make such a sketch bitter; but Irving
seemed to have the power of deadening venom by a mere trick of
hand. Readers of the “History,” after a few years had passed, rarely
remembered the satire, or supposed that the story contained it. The
humor and the style remained to characterize a school.
The originality of the Knickerbocker humor was the more
remarkable because it was allowed to stand alone. Irving published
nothing else of consequence until 1819, and then, abandoning his
early style, inclined to imitate Addison and Steele, although his work
was hardly the less original. Irving preceded Walter Scott, whose
“Waverley” appeared in 1814, and “Guy Mannering” in 1815; and if
either author could be said to influence the other, the influence of
Diedrich Knickerbocker on Scott was more evident than that of
“Waverley” on Irving.
In the face of the spontaneous burst of genius which at that
moment gave to English literature and art a character distinct even
in its own experience, Americans might have been excused for
making no figure at all. Other periods produced one poet at a time,
and measured originality by single poems; or satisfied their ambition
by prose or painting of occasional merit. The nineteenth century
began in England with genius as plenty as it was usually rare. To
Beattie, Cowper, and Burns, succeeded Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Scott, Byron, Crabbe, Campbell, Charles Lamb, Moore, Shelley, and
Keats. The splendor of this combination threw American and even
French talent into the shade, and defied hope of rivalry; but the
American mind, as far as it went, showed both freshness and
originality. The divergence of American from English standards
seemed insignificant to critics who required, as they commonly did, a
national literature founded on some new conception,—such as the
Shawanee or Aztecs could be supposed to suggest; but to those who
expected only a slow variation from European types, the difference
was well marked. Channing and Irving were American in literature,
as Calhoun and Webster were American in politics. They were the
product of influences as peculiar to the country as those which
produced Fulton and his steamboat.
While Bryant published “Thanatopsis” and Irving made his studies
for the “Sketch-Book,” another American of genius perhaps superior
to theirs—Washington Allston—was painting in London, before
returning to pass the remainder of his life in the neighborhood of
Boston and Harvard College. Between thirty and forty years of age,
Allston was then in the prime of his powers; and even in a circle of
artists which included Turner, Wilkie, Mulready, Constable, Callcott,
Crome, Cotman, and a swarm of others equally famous, Allston was
distinguished. Other Americans took rank in the same society. Leslie
and Stuart Newton were adopted into it, and Copley died only in
1815, while Trumbull painted in London till 1816; but remarkable
though they were for the quality of their art, they belonged to a
British school, and could be claimed as American only by blood.
Allston stood in a relation somewhat different. In part, his apparent
Americanism was due to his later return, and to his identification
with American society; but the return itself was probably caused by
a peculiar bent of character. His mind was not wholly English.
Allston’s art and his originality were not such as might have been
expected from an American, or such as Americans were likely to
admire; and the same might be said of Leslie and Stuart Newton.
Perhaps the strongest instance of all was Edward Malbone, whose
grace of execution was not more remarkable than his talent for
elevating the subject of his exquisite work. So far from sharing the
imagination of Shawanee Indians or even of Democrats, these men
instinctively reverted to the most refined and elevated schools of art.
Not only did Allston show from the beginning of his career a passion
for the nobler standards of his profession, but also for technical
quality,—a taste less usual. Washington Irving met him in Rome in
1805, when both were unknown; and they became warm friends.
“I do not think I have ever been more captivated on a first
acquaintance,” wrote Irving long afterward. “He was of a light and
graceful form, with large blue eyes and black silken hair. Everything
about him bespoke the man of intellect and refinement.... He was
exquisitely sensitive to the graceful and the beautiful, and took great
delight in paintings which excelled in color; yet he was strongly moved
and aroused by objects of grandeur. I well recollect the admiration
with which he contemplated the sublime statue of Moses, by Michael
Angelo.”
The same tastes characterized his life, and gave to his work a
distinction that might be Italian, but was certainly not English or
usual.
“It was Allston,” said Leslie, “who first awakened what little
sensibility I may possess to the beauties of color. For long time I
took the merit of the Venetians on trust, and if left to myself should
have preferred works which I now feel to be comparatively
worthless. I remember when the picture of ‘The Ages’ by Titian was
first pointed out to me by Allston as an exquisite work, I thought he
was laughing at me.” Leslie, if not a great colorist, was seldom
incorrect; Stuart Newton had a fine eye for color, and Malbone was
emphatically a colorist; but Allston’s sensibility to color was rare
among artists, and the refinement of his mind was as unusual as the
delicacy of his eye.
Allston was also singular in the liberality of his sympathies. “I am
by nature, as it respects the arts, a wide liker,” he said. In Rome he
became acquainted with Coleridge; and the remark of Coleridge
which seemed to make most impression on him in their walks “under
the pines of the Villa Borghese” was evidently agreeable because it
expressed his own feelings. “It was there he taught me this golden
rule: never to judge of any work of art by its defects.” His admiration
for the classics did not prevent him from admiring his
contemporaries; his journey through Switzerland not only showed
him a new world of Nature, but also “the truth of Turner’s Swiss
scenes,—the poetic truth,—which none before or since have given.”
For a young American art-student in 1804, such sympathies were
remarkable; not so much because they were correct, as because
they were neither American nor English. Neither in America nor in
Europe at that day could art-schools give to every young man, at the
age of twenty-five, eyes to see the color of Titian, or imagination to
feel the “poetic truth” of Turner.
Other painters, besides those whose names have been
mentioned, were American or worked in America, as other writers
besides Bryant and Irving, and other preachers besides Buckminster
and Channing, were active in their professions; but for national
comparisons, types alone serve. In the course of sixteen years
certain Americans became distinguished. Among these, suitable for
types, were Calhoun and Clay in Congress, Pinkney and Webster at
the bar, Buckminster and Channing in the pulpit, Bryant and Irving in
literature, Allston and Malbone in painting. These men varied greatly
in character and qualities. Some possessed strength, and some
showed more delicacy than vigor; some were humorists, and some
were incapable of a thought that was not serious; but all were
marked by a keen sense of form and style. So little was this quality
expected, that the world inclined to regard them as un-American
because of their refinement. Frenchmen and Italians, and even
Englishmen who knew nothing of America but its wildness, were
disappointed that American oratory should be only a variation from
Fox and Burke; that American literature should reproduce Steele and
Wordsworth; and that American art should, at its first bound, go
back to the ideals of Raphael and Titian. The incongruity was
evident. The Americans themselves called persistently for a
statesmanship, religion, literature, and art which should be
American; and they made a number of experiments to produce what
they thought their ideals. In substance they continued to approve
nothing which was not marked by style as its chief merit. The
oratory of Webster and Calhoun, and even of John Randolph, bore
the same general and common character of style. The poetry of
Bryant, the humor of Irving, the sermons of Channing, and the
painting of Allston were the objects of permanent approval to the
national mind. Style remained its admiration, even when every
newspaper protested against the imitation of outworn forms. Dennie
and Jefferson, agreeing in nothing else, agreed in this; the South
Carolinian Allston saw color as naturally as the New Englander
Bryant heard rhythm; and a people which seemed devoid of sense or
standards of beauty, showed more ambition than older societies to
acquire both.
Nothing seemed more certain than that the Americans were not
artistic, that they had as a people little instinct of beauty; but their
intelligence in its higher as in its lower forms was both quick and
refined. Such literature and art as they produced, showed qualities
akin to those which produced the swift-sailing schooner, the triumph
of naval architecture. If the artistic instinct weakened, the quickness
of intelligence increased.
 CHAPTER X.
Until 1815 nothing in the future of the American Union was
regarded as settled. As late as January, 1815, division into several
nationalities was still thought to be possible. Such a destiny,
repeating the usual experience of history, was not necessarily more
unfortunate than the career of a single nationality wholly American;
for if the effects of divided nationality were certain to be unhappy,
those of a single society with equal certainty defied experience or
sound speculation. One uniform and harmonious system appealed to
the imagination as a triumph of human progress, offering prospects
of peace and ease, contentment and philanthropy, such as the world
had not seen; but it invited dangers, formidable because unusual or
altogether unknown. The corruption of such a system might prove to
be proportionate with its dimensions, and uniformity might lead to
evils as serious as were commonly ascribed to diversity.
The laws of human progress were matter not for dogmatic faith,
but for study; and although society instinctively regarded small
States, with their clashing interests and incessant wars, as the chief
obstacle to improvement, such progress as the world knew had been
coupled with those drawbacks. The few examples offered by history
of great political societies, relieved from external competition or
rivalry, were not commonly thought encouraging. War had been the
severest test of political and social character, laying bare whatever
was feeble, and calling out whatever was strong; and the effect of
removing such a test was an untried problem.
In 1815 for the first time Americans ceased to doubt the path
they were to follow. Not only was the unity of their nation
established, but its probable divergence from older societies was
also well defined. Already in 1817 the difference between Europe
and America was decided. In politics the distinction was more
evident than in social, religious, literary, or scientific directions; and
the result was singular. For a time the aggressions of England and
France forced the United States into a path that seemed to lead
toward European methods of government; but the popular
resistance, or inertia, was so great that the most popular party
leaders failed to overcome it, and no sooner did foreign dangers
disappear than the system began to revert to American practices;
the national government tried to lay aside its assumed powers.
When Madison vetoed the bill for internal improvements he could
have had no other motive than that of restoring to the government,
as far as possible, its original American character.
The result was not easy to understand in theory or to make
efficient in practice; but while the drift of public opinion, and still
more of practical necessity, drew the government slowly toward the
European standard of true political sovereignty, nothing showed that
the compromise, which must probably serve the public purpose, was
to be European in form or feeling. As far as politics supplied a test,
the national character had already diverged from any foreign type.
Opinions might differ whether the political movement was
progressive or retrograde, but in any case the American, in his
political character, was a new variety of man.
The social movement was also decided. The war gave a severe
shock to the Anglican sympathies of society, and peace seemed to
widen the breach between European and American tastes. Interest
in Europe languished after Napoleon’s overthrow. France ceased to
affect American opinion. England became an object of less alarm.
Peace produced in the United States a social and economical
revolution which greatly curtailed the influence of New England, and
with it the social authority of Great Britain. The invention of the
steamboat counterbalanced ocean commerce. The South and West
gave to society a character more aggressively American than had
been known before. That Europe, within certain limits, might tend
toward American ideas was possible, but that America should under
any circumstances follow the experiences of European development
might thenceforward be reckoned as improbable. American character
was formed, if not fixed.
 The scientific interest of American history centred in national
character, and in the workings of a society destined to become vast,
in which individuals were important chiefly as types. Although this
kind of interest was different from that of European history, it was at
least as important to the world. Should history ever become a true
science, it must expect to establish its laws, not from the
complicated story of rival European nationalities, but from the
economical evolution of a great democracy. North America was the
most favorable field on the globe for the spread of a society so large,
uniform, and isolated as to answer the purposes of science. There a
single homogeneous society could easily attain proportions of three
or four hundred million persons, under conditions of undisturbed
growth.
In Europe or Asia, except perhaps in China, undisturbed social
evolution had been unknown. Without disturbance, evolution
seemed to cease. Wherever disturbance occurred, permanence was
impossible. Every people in turn adapted itself to the law of
necessity. Such a system as that of the United States could hardly
have existed for half a century in Europe except under the protection
of another power. In the fierce struggle characteristic of European
society, systems were permanent in nothing except in the general
law, that, whatever other character they might possess they must
always be chiefly military.
The want of permanence was not the only or the most confusing
obstacle to the treatment of European history as a science. The
intensity of the struggle gave prominence to the individual, until the
hero seemed all, society nothing; and what was worse for science,
the men were far more interesting than the societies. In the
dramatic view of history, the hero deserved more to be studied than
the community to which he belonged; in truth, he was the society,
which existed only to produce him and to perish with him. Against
such a view historians were among the last to protest, and protested
but faintly when they did so at all. They felt as strongly as their
audiences that the highest achievements were alone worth
remembering either in history or in art, and that a reiteration of
commonplaces was commonplace. With all the advantages of
European movement and color, few historians succeeded in
enlivening or dignifying the lack of motive, intelligence, and morality,
the helplessness characteristic of many long periods in the face of
crushing problems, and the futility of human efforts to escape from
difficulties religious, political, and social. In a period extending over
four or five thousand years, more or less capable of historical
treatment, historians were content to illustrate here and there the
most dramatic moments of the most striking communities. The hero
was their favorite. War was the chief field of heroic action, and even
the history of England was chiefly the story of war.
The history of the United States promised to be free from such
disturbances. War counted for little, the hero for less; on the people
alone the eye could permanently rest. The steady growth of a vast
population without the social distinctions that confused other
histories,—without kings, nobles, or armies; without church,
traditions, and prejudices,—seemed a subject for the man of science
rather than for dramatists or poets. To scientific treatment only one
great obstacle existed. Americans, like Europeans, were not disposed
to make of their history a mechanical evolution. They felt that they
even more than other nations needed the heroic element, because
they breathed an atmosphere of peace and industry where heroism
could seldom be displayed; and in unconscious protest against their
own social conditions they adorned with imaginary qualities scores of
supposed leaders, whose only merit was their faculty of reflecting a
popular trait. Instinctively they clung to ancient history as though
conscious that of all misfortunes that could befall the national
character, the greatest would be the loss of the established ideals
which alone ennobled human weakness. Without heroes, the
national character of the United States had few charms of
imagination even to Americans.
Historians and readers maintained Old-World standards. No
historian cared to hasten the coming of an epoch when man should
study his own history in the same spirit and by the same methods
with which he studied the formation of a crystal. Yet history had its
scientific as well as its human side, and in American history the
scientific interest was greater than the human. Elsewhere the
student could study under better conditions the evolution of the
individual, but nowhere could he study so well the evolution of a
race. The interest of such a subject exceeded that of any other
branch of science, for it brought mankind within sight of its own end.
Travellers in Switzerland who stepped across the Rhine where it
flowed from its glacier could follow its course among mediæval
towns and feudal ruins, until it became a highway for modern
industry, and at last arrived at a permanent equilibrium in the ocean.
American history followed the same course. With prehistoric glaciers
and mediæval feudalism the story had little to do; but from the
moment it came within sight of the ocean it acquired interest almost
painful. A child could find his way in a river-valley, and a hoy could
float on the waters of Holland; but science alone could sound the
depths of the ocean, measure its currents, foretell its storms, or fix
its relations to the system of Nature. In a democratic ocean science
could see something ultimate. Man could go no further. The atom
might move, but the general equilibrium could not change.
Whether the scientific or the heroic view were taken, in either
case the starting-point was the same, and the chief object of interest
was to define national character. Whether the figures of history were
treated as heroes or as types, they must be taken to represent the
people. American types were especially worth study if they were to
represent the greatest democratic evolution the world could know.
Readers might judge for themselves what share the individual
possessed in creating or shaping the nation; but whether it was
small or great, the nation could be understood only by studying the
individual. For that reason, in the story of Jefferson and Madison
individuals retained their old interest as types of character, if not as
sources of power.
In the American character antipathy to war ranked first among
political traits. The majority of Americans regarded war in a peculiar
light, the consequence of comparative security. No European nation
could have conducted a war, as the people of America conducted the
War of 1812. The possibility of doing so without destruction
explained the existence of the national trait, and assured its
continuance. In politics, the divergence of America from Europe
perpetuated itself in the popular instinct for peaceable methods. The
Union took shape originally on the general lines that divided the civil
from the military elements of the British constitution. The party of
Jefferson and Gallatin was founded on dislike of every function of
government necessary in a military system. Although Jefferson
carried his pacific theories to an extreme, and brought about a
military reaction, the reactionary movement was neither universal,
violent, nor lasting; and society showed no sign of changing its
convictions. With greater strength the country might acquire greater
familiarity with warlike methods, but in the same degree was less
likely to suffer any general change of habits. Nothing but prolonged
intestine contests could convert the population of an entire continent
into a race of warriors.
A people whose chief trait was antipathy to war, and to any
system organized with military energy, could scarcely develop great
results in national administration; yet the Americans prided
themselves chiefly on their political capacity. Even the war did not
undeceive them, although the incapacity brought into evidence by
the war was undisputed, and was most remarkable among the
communities which believed themselves to be most gifted with
political sagacity. Virginia and Massachusetts by turns admitted
failure in dealing with issues so simple that the newest societies, like
Tennessee and Ohio, understood them by instinct. That incapacity in
national politics should appear as a leading trait in American
character was unexpected by Americans, but might naturally result
from their conditions. The better test of American character was not
political but social, and was to be found not in the government but
in the people.
The sixteen years of Jefferson’s and Madison’s rule furnished
international tests of popular intelligence upon which Americans
could depend. The ocean was the only open field for competition
among nations. Americans enjoyed there no natural or artificial
advantages over Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Spaniards; indeed, all
these countries possessed navies, resources, and experience greater
than were to be found in the United States. Yet the Americans
developed, in the course of twenty years, a surprising degree of skill
in naval affairs. The evidence of their success was to be found
nowhere so complete as in the avowals of Englishmen who knew
best the history of naval progress. The American invention of the
fast-sailing schooner or clipper was the more remarkable because, of
all American inventions, this alone sprang from direct competition
with Europe. During ten centuries of struggle the nations of Europe
had labored to obtain superiority over each other in ship-
construction, yet Americans instantly made improvements which
gave them superiority, and which Europeans were unable
immediately to imitate even after seeing them. Not only were
American vessels better in model, faster in sailing, easier and quicker
in handling, and more economical in working than the European, but
they were also better equipped. The English complained as a
grievance that the Americans adopted new and unwarranted devices
in naval warfare; that their vessels were heavier and better
constructed, and their missiles of unusual shape and improper use.
The Americans resorted to expedients that had not been tried
before, and excited a mixture of irritation and respect in the English
service, until Yankee smartness became a national misdemeanor.
The English admitted themselves to be slow to change their
habits, but the French were both quick and scientific; yet Americans
did on the ocean what the French, under stronger inducements,
failed to do. The French privateer preyed upon British commerce for
twenty years without seriously injuring it; but no sooner did the
American privateer sail from French ports, than the rates of
insurance doubled in London, and an outcry for protection arose
among English shippers which the Admiralty could not calm. The
British newspapers were filled with assertions that the American
cruiser was the superior of any vessel of its class, and threatened to
overthrow England’s supremacy on the ocean.
 Another test of relative intelligence was furnished by the battles
at sea. Instantly after the loss of the “Guerriere” the English
discovered and complained that American gunnery was superior to
their own. They explained their inferiority by the length of time that
had elapsed since their navy had found on the ocean an enemy to
fight. Every vestige of hostile fleets had been swept away, until,
after the battle of Trafalgar, British frigates ceased practice with their
guns. Doubtless the British navy had become somewhat careless in
the absence of a dangerous enemy, but Englishmen were
themselves aware that some other cause must have affected their
losses. Nothing showed that Nelson’s line-of-battle ships, frigates, or
sloops were as a rule better fought than the “Macedonian” and
“Java,” the “Avon” and “Reindeer.” Sir Howard Douglas, the chief
authority on the subject, attempted in vain to explain British
reverses by the deterioration of British gunnery. His analysis showed
only that American gunnery was extraordinarily good. Of all vessels,
the sloop-of-war,—on account of its smallness, its quick motion, and
its more accurate armament of thirty-two-pound carronades,—
offered the best test of relative gunnery, and Sir Howard Douglas in
commenting upon the destruction of the “Peacock” and “Avon” could
only say,—
“In these two actions it is clear that the fire of the British vessels
was thrown too high, and that the ordnance of their opponents were
expressly and carefully aimed at and took effect chiefly in the hull.”
The battle of the “Hornet” and “Penguin” as well as those of the
“Reindeer” and “Avon,” showed that the excellence of American
gunnery continued till the close of the war. Whether at point-blank
range or at long-distance practice, the Americans used guns as they
had never been used at sea before.
None of the reports of former British victories showed that the
British fire had been more destructive at any previous time than in
1812, and no report of any commander since the British navy
existed showed so much damage inflicted on an opponent in so
short a time as was proved to have been inflicted on themselves by
the reports of British commanders in the American war. The
strongest proof of American superiority was given by the best British
officers, like Broke, who strained every nerve to maintain an equality
with American gunnery. So instantaneous and energetic was the
effort that, according to the British historian of the war, “a British
forty-six-gun frigate of 1813 was half as effective again as a British
forty-six-gun frigate of 1812;” and, as he justly said, “the
slaughtered crews and the shattered hulks” of the captured British
ships proved that no want of their old fighting qualities accounted
for their repeated and almost habitual mortifications.[165]
Unwilling as the English were to admit the superior skill of
Americans on the ocean, they did not hesitate to admit it, in certain
respects, on land. The American rifle in American hands was
affirmed to have no equal in the world. This admission could scarcely
be withheld after the lists of killed and wounded which followed
almost every battle; but the admission served to check a wider
inquiry. In truth, the rifle played but a small part in the war.
Winchester’s men at the river Raisin may have owed their over-
confidence, as the British Forty-first owed its losses, to that weapon,
and at New Orleans five or six hundred of Coffee’s men, who were
out of range, were armed with the rifle; but the surprising losses of
the British were commonly due to artillery and musketry fire. At New
Orleans the artillery was chiefly engaged. The artillery battle of
January 1, according to British accounts, amply proved the
superiority of American gunnery on that occasion, which was
probably the fairest test during the war. The battle of January 8 was
also chiefly an artillery battle; the main British column never arrived
within fair musket range; Pakenham was killed by a grape-shot, and
the main column of his troops halted more than one hundred yards
from the parapet.
The best test of British and American military qualities, both for
men and weapons, was Scott’s battle of Chippawa. Nothing
intervened to throw a doubt over the fairness of the trial. Two
parallel lines of regular soldiers, practically equal in numbers, armed
with similar weapons, moved in close order toward each other,
across a wide open plain, without cover or advantage of position,
stopping at intervals to load and fire, until one line broke and retired.
At the same time two three-gun batteries, the British being the
heavier, maintained a steady fire from positions opposite each other.
According to the reports, the two infantry lines in the centre never
came nearer than eighty yards. Major-General Riall reported that
then, owing to severe losses, his troops broke and could not be
rallied. Comparison of the official reports showed that the British lost
in killed and wounded four hundred and sixty-nine men; the
Americans, two hundred and ninety-six. Some doubts always affect
the returns of wounded, because the severity of the wound cannot
be known; but dead men tell their own tale. Riall reported one
hundred and forty-eight killed; Scott reported sixty-one. The severity
of the losses showed that the battle was sharply contested, and
proved the personal bravery of both armies. Marksmanship decided
the result, and the returns proved that the American fire was
superior to that of the British in the proportion of more than fifty per
cent if estimated by the entire loss, and of two hundred and forty-
two to one hundred if estimated by the deaths alone.
The conclusion seemed incredible, but it was supported by the
results of the naval battles. The Americans showed superiority
amounting in some cases to twice the efficiency of their enemies in
the use of weapons. The best French critic of the naval war, Jurien
de la Gravière said: “An enormous superiority in the rapidity and
precision of their fire can alone explain the difference in the losses
sustained by the combatants.”[166] So far from denying this
conclusion the British press constantly alleged it, and the British
officers complained of it. The discovery caused great surprise, and in
both British services much attention was at once directed to
improvement in artillery and musketry. Nothing could exceed the
frankness with which Englishmen avowed their inferiority. According
to Sir Francis Head, “gunnery was in naval warfare in the
extraordinary state of ignorance we have just described, when our
lean children, the American people, taught us, rod in hand, our first
lesson in the art.” The English textbook on Naval Gunnery, written by
Major-General Sir Howard Douglas immediately after the peace,
devoted more attention to the short American war than to all the
battles of Napoleon, and began by admitting that Great Britain had
“entered with too great confidence on war with a marine much more
expert than that of any of our European enemies.” The admission
appeared “objectionable” even to the author;[167] but he did not
add, what was equally true, that it applied as well to the land as to
the sea service.
No one questioned the bravery of the British forces, or the ease
with which they often routed larger bodies of militia; but the losses
they inflicted were rarely as great as those they suffered. Even at
Bladensburg, where they met little resistance, their loss was several
times greater than that of the Americans. At Plattsburg, where the
intelligence and quickness of Macdonough and his men alone won
the victory, his ships were in effect stationary batteries, and enjoyed
the same superiority in gunnery. “The ‘Saratoga,’” said his official
report, “had fifty-five round-shot in her hull; the ‘Confiance,’ one
hundred and five. The enemy’s shot passed principally just over our
heads, as there were not twenty whole hammocks in the nettings at
the close of the action.”
The greater skill of the Americans was not due to special training,
for the British service was better trained in gunnery, as in everything
else, than the motley armies and fleets that fought at New Orleans
and on the Lakes. Critics constantly said that every American had
learned from his childhood the use of the rifle, but he certainly had
not learned to use cannon in shooting birds or hunting deer, and he
know less than the Englishman about the handling of artillery and
muskets. As if to add unnecessary evidence, the battle of Chrystler’s
Farm proved only too well that this American efficiency was not
confined to citizens of the United States.
Another significant result of the war was the sudden development
of scientific engineering in the United States. This branch of the
military service owed its efficiency and almost its existence to the
military school at West Point, established in 1802. The school was at
first much neglected by government. The number of graduates
before the year 1812 was very small; but at the outbreak of the war
the corps of engineers was already efficient. Its chief was Colonel
Joseph Gardner Swift, of Massachusetts, the first graduate of the
academy: Colonel Swift planned the defences of New York harbor.
The lieutenant-colonel in 1812 was Walker Keith Armistead, of
Virginia,—the third graduate, who planned the defences of Norfolk.
Major William McRee, of North Carolina, became chief engineer to
General Brown, and constructed the fortifications at Fort Erie, which
cost the British General Gordon Drummond the loss of half his army,
besides the mortification of defeat. Captain Eleazer Derby Wood, of
New York, constructed Fort Meigs, which enabled Harrison to defeat
the attack of Proctor in May, 1813. Captain Joseph Gilbert Totten, of
New York, was chief engineer to General Izard at Plattsburg, where
he directed the fortifications that stopped the advance of Prevost’s
great army. None of the works constructed by a graduate of West
Point was captured by the enemy; and had an engineer been
employed at Washington by Armstrong and Winder, the city would
have been easily saved.
Perhaps without exaggeration the West Point Academy might be
said to have decided, next to the navy, the result of the war. The
works at New Orleans were simple in character, and as far as they
were due to engineering skill were directed by Major Latour, a
Frenchman; but the war was already ended when the battle of New
Orleans was fought. During the critical campaign of 1814, the West
Point engineers doubled the capacity of the little American army for
resistance, and introduced a new and scientific character into
American life.
In the application of science the steamboat was the most striking
success; but Fulton’s invention, however useful, was neither the
most original nor the most ingenious of American efforts, nor did it
offer the best example of popular characteristics. Perhaps Fulton’s
torpedo and Stevens’s screw-propeller showed more originality than
was proved by the “Clermont.” The fast-sailing schooner with its
pivot-gun—an invention that grew out of the common stock of
nautical intelligence—best illustrated the character of the people.
That the individual should rise to a higher order either of
intelligence or morality than had existed in former ages was not to
be expected, for the United States offered less field for the
development of individuality than had been offered by older and
smaller societies. The chief function of the American Union was to
raise the average standard of popular intelligence and well-being,
and at the close of the War of 1812 the superior average intelligence
of Americans was so far admitted that Yankee acuteness, or
smartness, became a national reproach; but much doubt remained
whether the intelligence belonged to a high order, or proved a high
morality. From the earliest ages, shrewdness was associated with
unscrupulousness; and Americans were freely charged with wanting
honesty. The charge could neither be proved nor disproved.
American morality was such as suited a people so endowed, and was
high when compared with the morality of many older societies; but,
like American intelligence, it discouraged excess. Probably the
political morality shown by the government and by public men
during the first sixteen years of the century offered a fair gauge of
social morality. Like the character of the popular inventions, the
character of the morals corresponded to the wants of a growing
democratic society; but time alone could decide whether it would
result in a high or a low national ideal.
Finer analysis showed other signs of divergence from ordinary
standards. If Englishmen took pride in one trait more than in
another, it was in the steady uniformity of their progress. The
innovating and revolutionary quality of the French mind irritated
them. America showed an un-English rapidity in movement. In
politics, the American people between 1787 and 1817 accepted
greater changes than had been known in England since 1688. In
religion, the Unitarian movement of Boston and Harvard College
would never have been possible in England, where the defection of
Oxford or Cambridge, and the best educated society in the United
Kingdom, would have shaken Church and State to their foundations.
In literature the American school was chiefly remarkable for the
rapidity with which it matured. The first book of Irving was a
successful burlesque of his own ancestral history; the first poem of
Bryant sang of the earth only as a universal tomb; the first
preaching of Channing assumed to overthrow the Trinity; and the
first paintings of Allston aspired to recover the ideal perfection of
Raphael and Titian. In all these directions the American mind
showed tendencies that surprised Englishmen more than they struck
Americans. Allston defended himself from the criticism of friends
who made complaint of his return to America. He found there, as he
maintained, not only a growing taste for art, but “a quicker
appreciation” of artistic effort than in any European land. If the
highest intelligence of American society were to move with such
rapidity, the time could not be far distant when it would pass into
regions which England never liked to contemplate.
Another intellectual trait, as has been already noticed, was the
disposition to relax severity. Between the theology of Jonathan
Edwards and that of William Ellery Channing was an enormous gap,
not only in doctrines but also in methods. Whatever might be
thought of the conclusions reached by Edwards and Hopkins, the
force of their reasoning commanded respect. Not often had a more
strenuous effort than theirs been made to ascertain God’s will, and
to follow it without regard to weaknesses of the flesh. The idea that
the nature of God’s attributes was to be preached only as
subordinate to the improvement of man, agreed little with the spirit
of their religion. The Unitarian and Universalist movements marked
the beginning of an epoch when ethical and humanitarian ideas took
the place of metaphysics, and even New England turned from
contemplating the omnipotence of the Deity in order to praise the
perfections of his creatures.
The spread of great popular sects like the Universalists and
Campbellites, founded on assumptions such as no Orthodox
theology could tolerate, showed a growing tendency to relaxation of
thought in that direction. The struggle for existence was already
mitigated, and the first effect of the change was seen in the
increasing cheerfulness of religion. Only when men found their
actual world almost a heaven, could they lose overpowering anxiety
about the world to come. Life had taken a softer aspect, and as a
consequence God was no longer terrible. Even the wicked became
less mischievous in an atmosphere where virtue was easier than
vice. Punishments seemed mild in a society where every offender
could cast off his past, and create a new career. For the first time in
history, great bodies of men turned away from their old religion,
giving no better reason than that it required them to believe in a
cruel Deity, and rejected necessary conclusions of theology because
they were inconsistent with human self-esteem.
The same optimism marked the political movement. Society was
weary of strife, and settled gladly into a political system which left
every disputed point undetermined. The public seemed obstinate
only in believing that all was for the best, as far as the United States
were concerned, in the affairs of mankind. The contrast was great
between this temper of mind and that in which the Constitution had
been framed; but it was no greater than the contrast in the religious
opinions of the two periods, while the same reaction against severity
marked the new literature. The rapid accumulation of wealth and
increase in physical comfort told the same story from the standpoint
of economy. On every side society showed that ease was for a time
to take the place of severity, and enjoyment was to have its full
share in the future national existence.
The traits of intelligence, rapidity, and mildness seemed fixed in
the national character as early as 1817, and were likely to become
more marked as time should pass. A vast amount of conservatism
still lingered among the people; but the future spirit of society could
hardly fail to be intelligent, rapid in movement, and mild in method.
Only in the distant future could serious change occur, and even then
no return to European characteristics seemed likely. The American
continent was happier in its conditions and easier in its resources
than the regions of Europe and Asia, where Nature revelled in
diversity and conflict. If at any time American character should
change, it might as probably become sluggish as revert to the
violence and extravagances of Old-World development. The inertia of
several hundred million people, all formed in a similar social mould,
was as likely to stifle energy as to stimulate evolution.

With the establishment of these conclusions, a new episode in

American history began in 1815. New subjects demanded new
treatment, no longer dramatic but steadily tending to become
scientific. The traits of American character were fixed; the rate of
physical and economical growth was established; and history, certain
that at a given distance of time the Union would contain so many
millions of people, with wealth valued at so many millions of dollars,
became thenceforward chiefly concerned to know what kind of
people these millions were to be. They were intelligent, but what
paths would their intelligence select? They were quick, but what
solution of insoluble problems would quickness hurry? They were
scientific, and what control would their science exercise over their
destiny? They were mild, but what corruptions would their
relaxations bring? They were peaceful, but by what machinery were
their corruptions to be purged? What interests were to vivify a
society so vast and uniform? What ideals were to ennoble it? What
object, besides physical content, must a democratic continent aspire
to attain? For the treatment of such questions, history required
another century of experience.
 GENERAL LISTS OF MAPS AND PLANS.
VOLUME I.
PAGE
The States of North Africa 244

VOLUME II.
The Coast of West Florida and Louisiana 1

VOLUME VI.
Indiana Territory 67
Seat of War about Lake Erie 299
Detroit River 312
Straits of Niagara from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario 336

VOLUME VII.
Battle of the Thames 137
East End of Lake Ontario and River St. Lawrence from Kingston to French
Mills 144
East End of Lake Ontario 164
River St. Lawrence from Williamsburg to Montreal 172
Seat of War among the Creeks 217
Attack on Craney Island 272

VOLUME VIII.
Battle of Chippawa 40
Battle of Lundy’s Lane, at Sunset 50
Battle of Lundy’s Lane, at Ten O’clock 56
Attack and Defence of Fort Erie 67
Naval Battle at Plattsburg 107
Position of British and American Armies at Plattsburg 111
Campaign of Washington and Baltimore 120
Battle of Bladensburg 139
Attack and Defence of Baltimore 168
Seat of War in Louisiana and West Florida 311
Attack on Fort Bowyer 322
Landing of British Army at New Orleans 337
Attack made by Major-General Jackson, Dec. 23, 1814 347
British and American Positions at New Orleans 359
Attack and Defence of the American Lines, Jan. 8, 1815 367
Capture of Fort Bowyer 383