The Money

St. Louis had built its fair of 1904 on three equal parts: five million dollars from private subscription, five million from city bonds, five million from the Government of the United States. San Francisco, Todd's own comparison shows, set out to do the same, and ended up doing it without Washington. The money came from the city and the state, and above all from the city's own people, who bought the fair by the share.

Fourteen thousand stockholders

On April 28, 1910, a mass meeting in the Merchants' Exchange subscribed $4,089,000 in two hours. The Building Trades Council was among the subscribers, for $5,000. On another day the Builders' Exchange added $43,800 in thirty-two minutes. By the Comptroller's first report, in December 1911, the stock list showed 14,290 subscriptions totaling $6,028,700, a little under the $6,156,840 announced in June 1910, since some pledges proved to be duplicates or unauthorized; in the final accounts public subscriptions came to $6,136,320, of which $420,000 was written off as uncollectable.

The shape of that list is the point:

The fair was owned, in name, by thirteen thousand small holders as well as by the banks.

The public's share

Subscriptions alone would not have been enough, and in the summer of 1910 the Exposition persuaded the Governor to call a special session of the Legislature for September 6. It proposed two constitutional amendments: one to raise $5,000,000 by a state tax, the other to let San Francisco bond itself for the same amount. The state voted on November 8, 1910: 174,513 to 50,857 for the tax, 180,043 to 34,723 for the city's authority to bond itself; and on November 15 San Francisco passed the charter amendment for the bonds, 42,040 to 2,122. Organized labor, through Mayor P. H. McCarthy, president of the State Building Trades Council, worked for them, and the campaign, Todd says, cost the Exposition very little considering the $10,000,000 at stake. One later appeal failed: on March 19, 1915, with the fair already open and money tight, Alameda County voters refused a bond issue in its support, although Alameda, Emeryville and Piedmont gave it their two-thirds.

The budget

The operating budget that the Exposition's comptroller, Rodney S. Durkee, brought to the Finance Committee put $2,275,000 into the Division of Works and gave the next largest allowance to music, $450,000, with $285,000 for special events; the Executive Council raised those to $586,300 and $348,700 and took the difference out of buildings and grounds. Other large items were $250,000 for exploitation, the fair's word for publicity, and $225,000 for livestock. Building the palaces cost $4,382,560 for the eleven exhibit buildings, at about $1.57 a square foot, the Palace of Machinery the most expensive at $655,336 and the Palace of Fine Arts with its annex $631,929.

What it cost and what it took in

The gate was fifty cents, and admissions were the largest single source of revenue. The concessions returned $1,238,106 net; the biggest earners were not shows but services, the Inside Inn with $675,727 gross, the Desmond Supply Company, the Yellowstone Park restaurant and its Old Faithful Inn, the Fadgl auto trains. Fifteen concessions took in more than $100,000 apiece.

Farran Zerbe's bad half dollar

The money exhibit in the Palace of Liberal Arts ran to about twenty thousand pieces, which Todd called the greatest index to money ever collectively displayed. It was there because of a mistake made years earlier by a boy in Pennsylvania.

Farran Zerbe had been a newsboy in Tyrone, proud of his bank account and of the neatness of his deposit slips, and one day he took a strange coin in change: silver, about the size of a dime, with words on it he could not read, but carrying the legend "50 cent." He counted it as a half dollar and took it to the bank. The cashier told him he was fifty cents short and that the thing was French and no good in this country. Zerbe, Todd writes, "was a numismatist, but he didn't know it yet." He started asking questions, then reading everything he could find about coins, and ended up assembling the fair's collection.

Selling it

One department existed to tell the country about the others. Todd's own history calls it the Propaganda Division, and from February 1913 the man in charge was George Hough Perry, who had been John Wanamaker's advertising manager and had founded Everybody's Magazine. His bureau ran like the local room of a daily paper. The fair was divided into four beats, with one writer on the grounds and the construction, one on the concessions, one on the exhibits and one on the executive offices; eight of them worked continuously from November 1912 to closing day.

Copy went to the metropolitan dailies by telegraph, to the small-town papers as casting plates, to the Sunday supplements as illustrated features, and to the foreign-language press, some of it, Todd says, labored into Londonese for British consumption. In a single week the bureau sent out more than thirteen million words. The rule was that the facts had to hold, because a department that loses the confidence of the press has worn out its welcome.

The public was enlisted too. The Exposition set aside days on which Californians were asked to write to friends in the East about the fair, supplying folding letter-sheets printed with views of the palaces to every stationery store on the coast; postmasters reckoned that over two million such letters left California on one of them. On Exposition Letter Day, December 15, 1914, businesses added postscripts to their correspondence and school children, Todd writes, wrote hundreds of thousands of letters about a fair that had not yet opened.

Where the surplus went

The season's surplus was real, but the company had spent more getting to opening day than it could ever recover: Todd's statements show a pre-Exposition deficit of $1,381,227 after the cost of the Exposition Auditorium, $1,089,780, which the company built in the Civic Center as its permanent memorial and gave to the city. Counting the Auditorium as what it was, a surplus spent on a building, the final surplus stood at $2,401,931, of which $1,312,151 remained in cash. Wrecking the fair returned a further $353,121 net; the best single bid for taking the whole thing down had been $4,755. The company was formally dissolved in Superior Court on August 1, 1920. What was left after the settlement with the State, something over $600,000 and part of it in real estate still to be sold, was to be divided among the stockholders, a small part of what they had paid in; Todd reports the division still under way as he finished writing.

Sources

• Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. I (1921): the subscription meetings, the special session of 1910 and the two amendments, the budget.
• Todd, vol. II: "Labor Cooperates"; the Alameda County bond election of March 19, 1915; construction costs.
• Todd, vol. V: the Comptroller's final statements A to D, the concessions returns, the salvage.