The Exposition is usually told as a story of buildings. It was also a city of people: the men who cast the statues and pumped the sand, the women who ran a board of their own, the visitors who came through the gates, the ones the fair invited and the ones it did not. This chapter is about them.
A city that had earned its flag
San Francisco's flag shows a phoenix rising from flames over the motto Oro en paz, fierro en guerra, gold in peace, iron in war. The bird had been on the city seal since the 1850s, for the fires that burned the Gold Rush town down again and again; the flag itself was adopted on April 14, 1900, after Mayor James D. Phelan put up fifty dollars for a design competition that the painter John M. Gamble won. Six years later the city earned the emblem for real. When the fair opened on the ground between the Presidio and Fort Mason, nine years after the earthquake and fire, the people who walked through the Scott Street gate were the people who had rebuilt the city behind them. That is the frame for everything that follows.
The builders
The fair employed a small city of its own before it opened. Todd counts, for the summer of 1913 alone, 57 men in the Department of Civil Engineering, 66 on architectural work including the blueprint plant, 69 in the Structural Engineering Bureau and 13 checking lumber and estimates, and calls these a few small sections of the Works organization. The Division of Works under Harris D. H. Connick let its first contract in 1912 and kept its own blueprint plant from January 1913 rather than send the drawings out.
The most unusual workplace was the sculpture shop, where Karl Bitter's program of some 820 figures was turned from small models into staff, the plaster-and-fiber skin of the whole fair. At its height, Todd says, over fifty men worked there: pointers, modelers, casters, molders, mold makers and plaster mixers, under A. Stirling Calder, with the Italian pointing-machine operatives Emilio Angelo and Beniamino Bufano among them. Todd's own visit to the shop is one of the best passages in his five volumes: "a world of stony giants growing by inches on these iron and timber skeletons," tended by "a lot of pigmies in nurses' aprons, who climbed on ladders about the knees of monstrous camels." Read the whole of it on the Sculpture page.
The color came from Paul Denivelle's staff, who cast the imitation travertine, and the gardens from John McLaren's, who moved full-grown trees onto the site and grew a living wall of ice plant along the south front. The palaces were wood on piles; the men who drove the piles and pumped the cove full of sand are the least recorded of all, and the dredge that did the pumping, the John McMullin, is on the History page.
Labor
Some gloomy prophets, Todd writes, expected the Panama-Pacific to have more trouble with labor than any exposition ever built in this country. No other had so little. There were no delays or losses of any importance from labor trouble in three years of building, and the whole work, he says, "ran as smoothly as though strikes and lock-outs had never been invented." That was not luck. During the fight in Washington, New Orleans had argued that San Francisco's unions were so strong that a fair here would be burdened with incessant strikes and fluctuating labor costs; P. H. McCarthy, the Building Trades leader who was then mayor, gave Congress his public assurance that no such thing would happen, and then sat on the Exposition's board to make it so. The terms were set down in a covenant with the public of sixteen articles, tendered by McCarthy and O. A. Tveitmoe for the Building Trades Council and by John P. McLaughlin and John I. Nolan for the San Francisco Labor Council, the two bodies that represented nearly every trade on the site.
The Exposition's own line was drawn by its president, Charles C. Moore. When the unions asked for a contract that would put every arrangement involving labor on a stable footing, he refused: the fair represented the Government of the United States, he said, and could not discriminate between organized and unorganized labor, between the closed shop and the open. It was not itself hiring the men; its contractors were. The Building Trades Council had put its name down for $5,000 of stock at the great subscription meeting of April 1910, and organized labor, through McCarthy, campaigned for the city bonds and the state tax that November. On opening day the one law that gave way was California's eight-hour law for women: the ticket sellers worked far past it, with the State Labor Commissioner's blessing, arranged two days before by Jay J. Bryan of the admissions department.
The Woman's Board
The Exposition had a Woman's Board, with Mrs. Frederick G. Sanborn as its president, and it was not decorative. Todd records it welcoming national congresses to the city, holding sub-committee meetings for months ahead of the shows it sponsored, and presiding as host at the California Building, which was the board's own headquarters and the fair's largest single structure after the palaces. The suffrage campaign found the fair useful too: the Congressional Union kept a booth, held meetings three times a week, and in September sent its envoys east with a petition gathered on the grounds. That story is on the People and Days page.
Who was invited, and who was not
The fair invited the world, and it drew a color line at home. Black Californians had hoped the Exposition would show their progress to the country, and were disappointed when it became clear that Jim Crow would limit their part in it, in the jobs on offer and in the shows on the Zone that traded in caricature. The Oakland journalist Delilah Beasley, who would later write The Negro Trail Blazers of California, took the Exposition to task for its degrading images of Black Americans and its segregationist policies, and helped organize boycotts of The Birth of a Nation when it played in the Bay Area. Members of the community nonetheless used the grounds for speeches, pageants and parades that asserted their standing as Americans. The official history does not mention any of this; the modern account is Lynn M. Hudson's West of Jim Crow: The Fight against California's Color Line (2020).
The same spring, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation opened across the country, San Francisco included, and the six-year-old NAACP campaigned against it city by city. The Zone's ethnographic villages, the Somali village whose unpaid performers the Exposition had removed by its guards and deported through Angel Island, and the Samoan village that arrived in two hundred packages, are on the Zone page. The city's Chinese community, which had paraded for the new Republic in 1912, is represented at the fair by the Chinese Pavilion, dedicated in March 1915, and by the "Underground Chinatown" concession, whose name China's commissioner-general objected to: the Exposition upheld him, and the show carried on as "Underground Slumming."
Who bought the shares
Delilah Beasley's chapter on the Exposition opens not with exclusion but with investment. Among the heaviest purchasers of Exposition stock "in the colored race," she writes, were Walter A. Butler of Oakland and Mrs. Frazier of San Francisco, which she calls "a tremendous opening wedge for the Negro people in the building of this great exposition." Butler is the same man who called the public mass meeting in Oakland against The Birth of a Nation a few months later: a shareholder in the fair, protesting the film the fair's own city was showing.
Beasley also records a claim on the fair's nickname. Her book prints the portrait of a Black schoolgirl, Virginia Stephens, as "Sponsor for the name Jewel City": by Beasley's account the first of the readers who sent that name in. Her picture is on the Photographs page.
Race Betterment
Eugenics was not at the edge of this fair. Todd lists the National Conference on Race Betterment among the Exposition's congresses, sitting from August 4 to 8, 1915, and the calendar of special days gives August 6 as Race Betterment and Eugenics Day. The movement kept a booth in the Palace of Education, which Todd says "caught the eye of every visitor": plaster casts of Atlas, Venus and the Apollo Belvedere "to advertise the human race at its best," and, for its present, four "live" people, "not always nor for long the same four," sitting in vibrating chairs shaken by an electric motor. It stood in the same palace as the model playground and the child-welfare exhibits.
Who came
Fifty cents at the gate bought everyone the same courts, lights and music, and after that money sorted the crowd: the Inside Inn for those who could pay, boarding houses in the Western Addition for the rest; twenty-five-cent shows on the Zone, and dinners at the Old Faithful Inn for the people whose names were in the papers. There were school days for the children and Sundays for the people who worked the other six. Nearly nineteen million admissions were counted; thirteen million of them were paid.
Two of the visitors are worth naming. A San Francisco boy named Ansel Adams turned thirteen on opening day. His father had given up on schools for him and gave him a season ticket instead, with instructions to go every day; he did, for most of the year, to the palaces, the organ recitals in Festival Hall and the paintings, and counted it later among the most inspiring experiences of his life. Charlie Chaplin, making his first Essanay pictures across the Bay at Niles that spring, came over to see it. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Camille Saint-Saëns and John Philip Sousa are on the People and Days page.
May Day, 1914
The city began celebrating before there was a fair to celebrate in. On May 1, 1914, nine and a half months before the gates opened, it gave the children a day: a Maypole at the Zone plaza with dancing and singing, and Mayor Rolph crowning Supervisor Emmet Hayden's daughter Margaret Queen of the May, so that, Todd wrote, there should be no uncertainty about it. Concessionaires provided luncheons, and there were prizes and treasures buried in sand hills "to be dug for deliciously with little bare hands."
"And having satisfied the children and treated their resulting ailments and got their little digestions going again, the adult generation proceeded to try how much of this sort of thing it could stand itself."
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2 (1921)
The photographers
Almost everything anyone can see of the fair today comes from a handful of cameras. Arnold Genthe, who had photographed the earthquake, made autochromes of the courts in color; Willard Worden, whose landscape photographs Todd singles out in the Liberal Arts exhibit, made the night views of the Tower and the Arch of the Rising Sun; the airplane view of the unfinished grounds in Macomber's Jewel City, taken in 1914, is credited to Gabriel Moulin. The Photographs page gathers Worden's views and the plates taken from the air with the fair's own view books.
The other city
About a mile east of the Van Ness gate, over Russian Hill and down toward the old waterfront, the Barbary Coast was in its last years. The state had passed a Red-Light Abatement Act in 1913, in force from November 1914, and in February 1917 the police blockaded the quarter, closed 83 brothels and put more than a thousand women out of their rooms. But in 1915 the two cities ran at the same time in the same town: the Jewel City on the shore, lit by hidden light, and the Coast, lit by nothing hidden at all.
Sources
- Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vols. I and II (1921): the Works organization in 1913; the sculpture shops; the Woman's Board; ch. LXVI, "Labor Cooperates," for the covenant, McCarthy and Moore's position; vol. II on the eight-hour law on opening day.
- Lynn M. Hudson, West of Jim Crow: The Fight against California's Color Line (University of Illinois Press, 2020), on Black Californians and Delilah Beasley at the Exposition.
- Delilah L. Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles, 1919), ch. XXII, "History of the Negro at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition".
- Ansel Adams, An Autobiography (1985); PBS American Experience, "Ansel Adams and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition."
- San Francisco Silent Film Festival, "California Welcomes the World: The Centennial of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition," on Chaplin's visit.
- Ben Macomber, The Jewel City (1915), list of illustrations, which credits the "Aeroplane View of the Exposition" to Gabriel Moulin.
- Flag of San Francisco: the 1900 competition and John M. Gamble's design (San Francisco Chronicle, January 9 and April 15, 1900; city records).
- Red Light Abatement Act (California, 1913) and the February 1917 closure of the Barbary Coast.