A lot of what I’ve read about its history in the first half of the 20th century seems to suggest that while the city did have sort of a wild west mentality, it was actually pretty conservative in its politics.
So how did the place come to be a synonym for Heathen Liberal Mecca?
It might be somewhat related to how it became a gay mecca - in WW II the city was the base for the Pacific command of the Army and Navy. When people were kicked out of the Army and Navy in the Pacific theater they were sent back to SF. For gay people many of them did not want to head back home to face their family so they just stayed in SF. Not everyone who got kicked out was gay so maybe others who were liberal also stayed in SF.
Could it be because Stanford and Berkeley are close by? Generally, the more educated one is, the higher the tendency to be liberal.
There is a chicken and egg problem there but it also doesn’t hold true everywhere. Stanford and Berkeley are great schools but the U.S. is awash in those. Harvard is in Cambridge, MA which is also notoriously liberal but Dartmouth in Hanover, NH is pretty conservative as far as the Ivy’s go. Duke in North Carolina isn’t overly liberal either. The examples and counterexamples go on and on.
Duke is in Durham which is a liberal city. About 10 years ago a developer said “If it wasn’t for guys like me, this town would be nothing but lesbians eating tofu”
If you look at cities, they are traditionally liberal. They support immigrants, tend to hold the very rich and very poor, two liberal groups.
NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and St Louis were the key cities in America until after WWII. Baltimore once had almost a million people.
Now once you get west of St Louis, what cities are like that? None except for San Francisco. It is the only Western City of any size that was developed in the same way as the big East Coast Cities. Indeed until the 1920s, San Francisco not L.A. was the biggest West Coast city.
I think this is WHY San Francisco is liberal. It is the only very small, urban dense city in the west. L.A. is huge in terms of area, more than twice the size of Chicago. Houston, San Antonio and Phoenix and the like are huge in terms of area. The census actually classifies parts of the land area within those city limits, as rural. Yet San Francisco with it’s 46 square miles contrasts to L.A 469 square miles (LA is TEN TIMES the land area of SF)
Until the car became popular in the 20s, the only city outside of the Midwest and East that was in the top 10 population wise was San Francisco and New Orleans, surprise another liberal city, small and dense.
If you want to live in “warm” climate, and not own a car, San Francisco is really the only place where you can do this easily, like Chicago or New York.
So I think small dense urban areas produce liberalism. And San Francisco is the on only city west of St Louis that developed in an “east coast” way
You also have what I call the Distance Effect. From the outside San Francisco, New York, or Boston may look like stereotypically liberal cities. From the inside, the cities look like a collection of neighborhoods, some extremely liberal and some conservative and deadly enemies of the residents elsewhere. The Southies in Boston notoriously defied integration and busing in the 70s. The hippie inhabitants of Greenwich Village couldn’t wander freely through all lower Manhattan let alone working-class areas of Queens. If you saw the movie Milk, you saw how the conservative neighborhoods surrounding the Castro hated and feared what they saw as an invasion of queers.
The history of all these cities is that, as said, cities in general are historically more liberal than smaller towns. You have a combination of factors. More population means a wider range of humanity. People are on a bell curve like most everything else. The arms of the bell are longer on each side with more data points. (People are multi-dimensional and so you have more of all sorts of arms, but I’m simplifying.) Not only are the arms longer but more densely populated. You can find more weirdos, er, people of different persuasions in cities. Disproportionately so, because cities offer more anonymity and those unlike their neighbors leave the unrelenting eye of villages for the safer venues of cities. Arts and other luxury trades also prosper in cities because there is more money there and the sufficient concentration of patrons willing to spend.
So cities have always had enclaves of those who were outsiders by any number of measures. Outsiders tend to be more liberal because they have less to lose. They don’t have property, or extended families, or revered names. They don’t belong to the dominant religions or political groups or societies. They usually don’t even have money. Those are all factors that make people conservative. Outsider enclaves in cities are almost always liberal. If conservative outsiders get together they tend to do so away from cities, which is why you read about them in Montana or rural Texas.
American society tends to grow more liberal and accepting of outsiders over time, probably in large part due to the simple accumulation of more people in cities. America has gone from 95% farm in the early days of the republic to having two-thirds of the population live in metro areas today. Even so, the larger, older, denser cities with more time to accumulate neighborhoods of outsiders are still going to be relatively more liberal as a whole than the newer, physically larger, predominately suburban cities of the south and southwest. They have a hundred-year head start in attracting outsiders. And also a hundred years of being singled out for their outsider status, either positively or negatively.
Didn’t the 1960’s counterculture movement play a part in shaping the way San Francisco is viewed/has become? Haight Ashbury and all that?
Yup, all these young people migrating to an enclave in the only real city in the West, to paraphrase the above posters.
They were a blip in the 150-year history of “counter-cultural” groups in the city.
Having lived in the Bay Area for almost forever, I think you’re pretty much spot on. However, it does not explain why a dense urban environment leans towards the left. The important factor that has not been mentioned so far is the diversity of the population. That is a key contributor to more progressive politics in SF. And diversity is more than race; it’s also religion, sexual orientation, and ethnic origin. When you have such diversity there is a tendency for tolerance and acceptance to develop. When you actually meet and interact with people of all kinds, you get to know them as people, period. Biases and bigotry can melt away as ignorance is fought. With greater acceptance comes a leaning to more progressive politics. Just my 2 cents worth.
I got distracted by a phone call. The hippies did undoubtedly play a part in the modern view, but don’t forget that they grew out of the Beat movement which was centered in SF and had wide cultural recognition in the 1950s.
What “counter culture” groups do you think existed in San Francisco in, oh, say, 1910?
Ha! Pie in the sky. Where has “tolerance and acceptance” developed anywhere else in the world close to that found in SF? And Berkeley doesn’t count.
I would think the inhabitants of diverse cities the world over would disagree with you on the old “diversity is our strength” saw. Race/religion/ethnic origin riots/terror go on all the time in “diverse” cities. Jewish v. Muslim v. Christian v. Hindu v. Sikh v. Buddhist, etc. SF is just different, it isn’t a working model for the rest of the world. Jerusalem, Sarajevo, Paris, Mumbai come to mind right off the bat as “diverse” cities where noone seems to have gotten all lovey dovey because of their proximity.
[QUOTE=Markxxx;11338073L.A. is huge in terms of area, more than twice the size of Chicago. Houston, San Antonio and Phoenix[/QUOTE]
Nitpick: A few years ago when Phoenix annexed a chunk of land north on the I-17, it became larger than L.A. I forget exactly, but somwhere around 460 square miles. Phoenix is now the 5th largest city in the U.S (for better or worse).
San Francisco has always had more liberals than conservatives since the gold rush. It was a metropolitan center and physically small. 49 square miles. About half the size of Manhattan, which is only one of New York’s five boroughs. It was also (and still is) relatively rich. So it has a lot of social services and always has, even before WWII. After WWII a lot of gay people stayed in SF. So many that because of the small size of The City (as if there is no other) of only 700k to 800k that the gay portion became a significant voting block, in a way that New York or LA never had percentage-wise. In the 1970s the gay rights movement got going and they have been an 800 pound gorilla in SF politics ever since. And that almost always means liberal.
How about weirdo artists?
(Later, Diego Rivera’s pinko friends & the North Beach Beats were associated with the SFAA.)
More SF history: John Muir founded the Sierra Club there in 1892. In 1898, the American Anti-Imperialist League was:
By 1910, San Francisco was stocked with artists, environmentalists & anti-imperialists. Bohemian San Francisco, written in 1914, was a restaurant guide–but had much to say about that beautiful city:
Being a port city helped San Francisco’s cultural development.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. There are plenty of groups all over the world that live together and know one another quite well and still hate each other to the point of killing each other. It is perfectly possible (and I would say more likely) for distinct groups that live in close proximity to one another to develop rivalries of any scale.
Thank you. I was going to remind people about the Bohemian movement. Greenwich Village was the center of it in the U.S. but it was worldwide. Heck, people were complaining in 1920 that the Village used to be great in the Old Days.
The Hippies didn’t invent the counterculture. Heck, the 20th century didn’t invent the counterculture. Even the Bohemians didn’t invent the counterculture. Think of Byron and his crowd of Romantics.
In a similar turn of history, the hippies didn’t invent Woodstock either. Woodstock NY has been a bastion of arts and culture for way over 100 years. Some places just seem to be more open like that, which is why I’m finding this thread so fascinating. Why that town or city and not the next one over? Why a few of them and not all of them? Why Greenwich Village and not somewhere in Queens?
(Yeah, I know, technically the hippies didn’t invent Bethel, NY. But you get my point.)