SHOCKS TO THE SYSTEM: THE POLITICS OF DECISION MAKING IN SANFRANCISCO PUBLIC SCHOOLS
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREEE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSPHY
Michael Dunson May 2010
© 2010 by Michael Leon Dunson. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/cj379jt8818
ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Joy Williamson, Primary Adviser
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
David Labaree, Co-Adviser
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Samuel Wineburg
Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education
This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.
iii ABSTRACT
I trace the history of two education policies in San Francisco that flared into public controversy during the onset of a major crisis. The first controversy, which transpired in the wake of the 1906 Earthquake, involved the San Francisco Board of
Education’s attempt to segregate Japanese students. The second was the drive for school construction during the Great Depression. School officials and other political actors resiliently pursued their agendas even when faced with the turmoil caused by the crises. Politics did not subside; in fact, politics gave meaning to chaos. Two generalizations help to explain this finding. First, political actors searched for opportunities in crisis. When crises radically altered the physical and material infrastructure of the school department, people seized whatever resources they could to achieve their goals. Second, crises forced political actors to adjust their rhetoric by adapting their language to fit the circumstances. Prior to the earthquake and depression, political actors attempted to sway the public in their favor by defining the core values involved in segregation and school construction. The crises generated a new set of values. Political actors adjusted their rhetoric by integrating new values into the old political discourse.
iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Earning a Ph.D. brings many personal accolades, but this accomplishment was a true community effort. Without the help and support of numerous people, I would not have completed the degree. I begin with special thanks to the Stanford University
Teacher Education Program (STEP). From the beginning, STEP supported me financially, intellectually, and emotionally. In particular Ruth Ann Costanzo, your support and understanding helped me work through some difficult times. And Rachel,
I’m not going to try to summarize in one sentence all you’ve done for me. You’re amazing.
The history of education family is an amazing collection of brilliant scholars and genuinely wonderful people. Larry Cuban, Leah Gordon, Jack Schneider, thank you for all your support. Lori, we came in together and that’s how we’re leaving. It was great to have you as a partner. To David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, thank you so much for your mentorship and friendship. I cherish our lunches and conversations.
One reason I’m excited to stay in the Bay Area is that we will be able to spend more time together.
I want to send a special thank you to the Stanford IT staff, Debbie, Chris, Paul, and Tom. You four are awesome. To Tami Suzuki and the archivists at the San
Francisco Public Library History Room, you helped make research a pleasant experience. You all do a great job.
Most graduate students are lucky to have an amazing advisor; I was blessed with two, David Labaree and Joy Williamson. David, you never gave up on me. You
v trained me and patiently let me grow into a better writer and researcher. Joy, you brought me to Stanford and encouraged me every step of the way. I am so thankful to have you as a mentor and as a friend. And Sam Wineburg, you pretty much adopted me as an advisee. When my aunt passed away and I wanted to quit the program, I called and you answered. Thank you all. I’m a better scholar, teacher, and person because of you.
I am blessed with an amazing collection of friends and family. My first reading group: Django, Laurie, and Heather. We’ve all made it through. Nathalie,
Ross, and Jeanette, you adopted me into the family and helped make the Bay Area feel like home. To the Ashby crew: You opened your doors to me. Thank you so much.
Heather, you’re a spark of life. Cullen and Jay, I would not have survived the first four years without you. The support, jokes, and encouragement gave me a way to escape the stress. Adrian and Carl, my guys. I can’t wait to come home and watch a game (graduate school stress free) with y’all. Wes, Simone, Camden, and Jacobi.
You have no idea how much I relied on you. On many occasions, I entered your home stress out and depressed, but each time, I left with my spirits up and recharged. Thank you so much.
Mr. and Mrs. Norment. You practically raised me. I love you both so much.
Dave and Mike, we’re at 30 years together. That’s crazy when you think about it.
We’ve been through it all. You two are my brothers. Coach you helped me become a man. Todd thanks for the constant check-ins and support. You made sure I stayed connected to home. Allen Temple: Ralph and Kathi, Reg, Willie, Mike and Judy.
From the first time we met, you embraced me and you haven’t let go yet. To class 5,
vi your spirit, faith and fellowship guided me through the final stretch. To my 2003-
2007 BGSA crew, most especially Faruq, Christen, Jide, and Erica. You stayed with me through the craziness and long silences. Thank You.
Salina, you’ve seen me at my best and worst; you have the full picture. I thank you and IS for keeping me stable and giving me something to believe in beyond the research. I love you dearly. To my aunts, uncles, and cousins, “It’s good to be a
Johnson.” My sister, Joy D., we’ve been through a lot over the last few years and we’re still here. Love you so much. To my ladies, Carol, Shacole, and Sennice, you are my heart. On my saddest days, thinking of you made me smile. Dad, thank you for all your support and help. You keep pressing forward. Love you. Reg, my big brother, my mentor, my role model. When I see you, I see mom: her strength, her spirit. Love you with all my heart.
Over the course of this journey, much as changed. Many wonderful people have entered my life; many I hold dear are no longer with me. Steve and Spankie, even in spirit, I know you’re still fixing cars and painting graffiti. Joe, I still see your smile and hear your laugh. Mr. Weiner, a survivor in every sense of the word (Karen you are a beautiful person and you embody the spirit and strength of your father). Mr.
Buckley, thanks for the great times at Jones Beach.
Aunt Gloria, the perfect Godmother. You believed in me more than I believed in myself. Mom, you and Aunt Gloria wanted to see me walk across the stage to accept the degree. I know you are looking down on me. I’m fighting to be the man that you raised, and even though I often fall short, I keep going because of you. I miss you so much.
vii
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
The Politics of Segregation: Japanese Segregation and the “Great Calamity” 19
Politics of School Construction: Progressive Reform and the Great Depression 76
Conclusion 154
Bibliography 170
viii Introduction
Education and politics have historically made a volatile mixture. At the end of
the 19th century, politics were branded as the scourge of education. Americans
criticized school officials for letting politics corrupt their decision making. Decisions
ranging from school construction to hiring personnel were viewed as tainted by the
twin evils of politics and patronage. In response, educational reformers proclaimed
their intent to exorcize politics from the public schools. They vowed to create school
systems that rejected self-interested politicians and embraced rational experts.
Nationwide, reformers erected bureaucracies to shield education from the
vagaries of politics. Hierarchical systems of governance became the standard model
for decision making in urban school districts. Bureaucracies were designed to
establish boundaries and place constraints on participation. By restricting access,
reformers hoped to streamline the decision making process by putting experts in
charge and shunning laypersons. With experts making the decisions, reformers
presumed that research and science would replace politics as the mechanism for
deciding educational policy. Reformers were certain that a corporate model of
governance would transform urban school systems into rational, efficient, well-
managed enterprises.1
The reformers were widely successful. By the middle of the twentieth century, they upheld bureaucracy as the preeminent model for urban school governance.
Political scientists Michael Kirst and Frederick Wirt explain that educational bureaucracies established a uniform pattern of school governance across the country, a
1 David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820- 1980, (New York: Basic Books, 1982).
1 pattern so prevalent that it resulted in the establishment of a separate system of government. “Although few Americans realize it” state Kirst and Wirt, “the nation long has maintained one government for schools—comprised mainly of local and state boards of education and superintendents—and another for everything else.”2
The reformers, however, failed in one important aspect: while the rules of the game changed, the politics continued. Although formal structures were supposed to limit access to the decision making process, American citizens never relented their right to participate. Schools remained the site of contentious battles, as interest groups of various social classes, races, and religions continued to fight to control educational policy. School boards and superintendents, the formal decision makers within the bureaucracy, were responsible for converting demands into policy. Their decisions were contingent on numerous factors that included the formal rules of the system, the power and influence of various interest groups, the availability of resources, and in general, the communities political will toward a particular policy. These were the components of educational decision making. The contours of school politics were shaped by the fluid interaction between the formal bureaucracy and interest groups, as well as the fluctuating availability of resources.
Under normal conditions, decision making is messy. Educational leaders
struggle to function within a system that contains an array of divergent and conflicting
groups, each insisting their needs, more than anyone other group, are most urgent.
Superintendents and school boards face a steady stream of dilemmas requiring them to
make trade-offs in how resources are distributed. The range and variety of issues are
2 Mike Kirst and Frederick Wirt, The Political Dynamics of American Education, 3rd ed. (Richmond: McCutchan Publishing Corporation, 2005), 32.
2 vast. Problems can be limited to a specific classroom, or they can be systemic, involving the entire teaching force or several schools across the district. But regardless of the variety and scope of the issues, they can be classified as part of the normal state of affairs; they are events that rightfully fall within the purview of the superintendent and school board.3
My study examines the educational system, but with a twist. The focus of the study is when the normal abruptly becomes abnormal, when educational policies are altered by the onset of a major crisis. The study is guided by three questions. How is decision making affected by a major shock, a shock that dramatically alters the emotional and mental consciousness of the community? How do dramatic changes to the flow of resources caused by the crises affect the way policies are enacted? Lastly, how do people make sense of crisis and use their understandings to promote their point of view on educational policy?
To address the questions, I present a historical study of educational politics in
San Francisco in the aftermath of the 1906 Earthquake and during the early years of the Great Depression. This is not a comprehensive study of San Francisco schools during each of these events. Instead, I trace the history of two longstanding policy issues that flared into public controversy during each crisis, and I examine how the crisis affected the decision making process. The first controversy, which transpired in the wake of the 1906 Earthquake, involved the SFUSD’s attempt to segregate
Japanese students. The second was the drive for school construction during the Great
Depression.
3 Philip Cusick, The Education System: Its Nature and Logic, (New York: McGraw-Hill, inc., 1992).
3 In each case, I portray the school board as the central political actor. As the official representatives of the bureaucracy, they were supposed to be the gatekeepers of the decision making process, but their control over the process was never secure.
James March and Johan Olsen explain that bureaucratic organizations can be simultaneously portrayed as coherent, autonomous political actors, as well as “arenas for contending social forces.”4 Even with the establishment of centralized bureaucracies, urban schools continued to be shaped by political conflict. As stated earlier, reformers failed to achieve their main goal, which was to insulate schools from politics and turn decision making into non-political process. Bureaucracies, however, were not a wholly ineffectual buffer. While reformers failed to remove politics from education, their bureaucracies set up mechanisms—formal rules and procedures—that at least defined the boundaries between the formal organization of school governance and the people and interest groups external to the decision making process. March and
Olsen argue that standard operating procedures do not completely insulate an organization from its social context or from individuals driven by personal motives, but the formal rules and structures of a bureaucracy can effectively bind together a group of people into an organization that can defend itself against outside interests.
During the controversies over Japanese segregation and school construction, the school board pursued a definitive course of action, but it constantly had to leverage its powers against the demands of competing interest groups.
The main storyline of the thesis is that school officials and other political actors resiliently pursued their agendas even when faced with the turmoil caused by
4 James March and Johan Olsen, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life,” 78, no. 3 (September 1984): 738.
4 the crises. Politics did not subside; in fact, politics gave meaning to chaos. Two generalizations help to explain this finding. First, political actors searched for opportunities in crisis. When crises radically altered the physical and material infrastructure of the school department, people seized whatever resources they could to achieve their goals. The shift in resources reconfigured the political environment for one or several groups by changing their relationship to the bureaucracy. For some groups, bureaucratic obstacles were removed as opportunities to control decision making opened; and for others, opportunities closed as they encountered new constraints on their power. Second, crises forced political actors to adjust their rhetoric by adapting their language to fit the circumstances. Prior to the earthquake and depression, political actors attempted to sway the public in their favor by defining the core values involved in segregation and school construction. The crises generated a new set of values. Political actors adjusted their rhetoric by integrating new values into the old political discourse.
Educational Bureaucracy in San Francisco
Urban educational bureaucracy is central to both cases. Several scholars have traced the demise of decentralized urban school systems and the rise of hierarchical bureaucracies. Pioneering studies conducted by Joseph Cronin, Michael Katz, and
David Tyack examine the history of urban school governance at the turn of the twentieth century. Each study focuses on reformers who grew concerned that urban education was controlled by unqualified, unscrupulous men who made decisions based on ideology and politics instead of scientific research. Cronin looks at the change
5 from ward-based to central school boards. Before the 1900s, school boards were comprised of members elected by individual wards or neighborhoods throughout the city. In a few cities, school boards grew to well over one hundred members, each representing a particular constituency. After the turn of the century, school boards were centralized and their size reduced, with members appointed by the mayor or selected through citywide elections. The intent was to make board members accountable to the entire city rather than specific neighborhoods. Katz and Tyack study the same trend, but arrive at different motives. Katz argues that bureaucracy was used by the elite to strip the working class of their power to influence educational policy. Tyack acknowledges the class tension, but argues that the growing size and complexity of urban schools necessitated action to make school governance more efficient and manageable. He argues the reformers mistakenly assumed there was a one-size-fits-all solution to the complexity of problems facing urban schools.
In San Francisco, during the first thirty years of the twentieth century, the school board gradually evolved into the bureaucratic model. Beginning in the late
1800s, San Francisco’s board of education underwent several changes to its formal structure. Prior to 1872, the city was divided into twelve wards and each ward elected one representative to serve on the school board. The superintendent was selected through city-wide elections. Reformers viewed the ward-based election system as corrupt. They argued the ward system was flawed because school officials were chosen based on politics instead of merit. School board members and teachers were selected because they were loyal to whatever faction controlled a particular ward instead of their qualifications for the job. Patronage was the rule of the day. In 1872,
6 San Francisco ended the practice of independent elections within each ward; the twelve school board members, along with the superintendent, were elected at-large.
The reforms of 1872 reduced the influence individual wards and neighborhoods could have on educational policy.
In 1898, a movement to reform the structure of municipal government would have important consequences for the school department. Nationwide, municipal reforms during the 1890s were guided by the idea that cities should adapt a corporate style of governance. Reformers believe the corporate model would eliminate corruption rampant throughout the city. In San Francisco, reformers influenced by the idea of the corporate model re-wrote the city charter. A feature of the new charter was to increase the power of the mayor by giving him the authority to select directors of city departments instead of having them elected directly by the people. One of his new responsibilities would be to appoint the school board. His appointment would then have to be ratified by the people, but citizens would no longer directly choose their representatives. A provision in the charter made the school board less accessible to the people by reducing the number of board members from twelve to four. The smaller board was supposed to represent the city and not the partisan interests of neighborhoods or political factions. To avoid partisan politics, the charter include a provision that stated, “The board shall never be so constituted as to consist of more than two members of the same political party.”5 Leaders of the charter movement trusted that the mayor would appoint a board comprised of men and women of high standing and character, people who were beyond the corrupting influence of politics.
5 Charter of the City and County of San Francisco, art 7. chapter 1.
7 The charter did not alter the selection process for the superintendent. He continued to be chosen through direct vote of the people. The new charter, adopted in 1900, initiated the process of creating a school board modeled after corporate management.
In 1901, Ellwood P. Cubberley, a leading progressive educational reformer, praised the charter as a good start. He reported that under the new charter the school department was more efficient and modern in its operation and practices. But he warned that the charter was severely flawed because it created two systems of leadership: a school board beholden to the mayor and a superintendent beholden to the people.6 The superintendent was the key to establishing a corporate model of city governance. It was crucial that he be the technical expert for the school board, much like a chief executive was the technical expert for the board of directors of a company.
Without such, Cubberley and others predicted the school department would be hampered by disharmony between the superintendent and board of education. Such was the structure of governance that presided over the Japanese segregation controversy.
This “dual-headed” system, with a publicly elected superintendent and appointed school board, persisted until 1923. But from the beginning, progressive reformers were skeptical of the new charter. Criticism continued until it reached a high point around 1914, when a report was released that condemned the school department for being disorganized and inefficient. A group of citizens organized and commissioned a federal survey on the school department. The survey, known as the
Claxton Report, found that San Francisco lacked the administrative capacity to
6 Elwood P. Cubberley, “The School Situation in San Francisco,” Educational Review 21 (January-May 1901), 364-381.
8 manage effectively a large urban bureaucracy. The report recommended several reforms including a change to the overall structure of governance. Spurred by the report, prominent citizens led a movement to amend the city charter. Amendment 37 proposed radical changes to the structure of the school district. Under the amendment, the board of education would be expanded from four to seven people and their term of office increased from four to seven years. The most dramatic change was that the superintendent would be appointed by the school board instead of elected by the people. By making the superintendent an appointee of the school board, reformers wanted the superintendent to be accountable to the board of education, just as the board of education was accountable to the mayor. Furthermore, reformers assumed the board of education would select a superintendent based on merit and not personality or political savvy. In a city wide election, it was more likely the people would vote for a good politician instead of a competent educational leader. In 1920 the amendment was passed and the following year a new school board—including two incumbents from the previous board—was appointed by the mayor. In 1923, the previously elected superintendent completed his term of office and the new superintendent was selected by the board. It was the first time in sixty-eight years that
San Francisco had an appointed superintendent.7 These reforms culminated the movement to establish a corporate model of governance in San Francisco. The bureaucracy was in place. It was hierarchically structured with the school board on
7 Victor Shrader, “Ethnic Politics, Religion, and the Public School of San Francisco, 1849-1933” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1974), 123-133; Lee Dolson, “The Administration of the San Francisco Public Schools” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1964), 406-422.
9 top as directors of the department and the superintendent acting as their executive officer.
As far as the school board’s powers and responsibilities, those will be defined in detail as they relate to each case. In general, the school board, as a formal governing body, functioned in between two different political contexts and each furnished a different set of powers and constraints. The school board was first and foremost a state institution. As stated in San Francisco’s charter, “The Board of
Education of the City and County of San Francisco is a creature of the legislature and has such powers as have been conferred upon it.”8 Education was the responsibility of the state of California and school boards were controlled by the rules laid out in the state constitution. In addition to state law, the school board was subject to the authority was the city charter. The charter detailed the day to day operations of the school department. It also defined the school board’s relationship to the city administration and other municipal agencies.
Beyond the formal rules and procedures dictated by state and local laws, the school board was a central actor in San Francisco politics. They worked with and against the city administration, local interest groups, and other municipal departments.
During the controversies over Japanese segregation and school construction, the school board had to perform a balancing act between their role as a state institution, their official duties as a municipal department, and their local status as a political organization. The school board’s authority fluctuated depending on how well they manipulated the powers and constraints established by state and local laws as well as
8 Charter of the City and County of San Francisco, art. 7, chapter. 3.
10 their ability to adjust to changes within the local political environment. Japanese segregation and school construction showcase how the school board attempted to manage these different political contexts and how the 1906 Earthquake and Great
Depression provided opportunities for actions that were previously ineffectual. The following section provides an overview of each case and an introduction to the main characters and factors involved in the controversies.
Segregation and School Construction
Japanese segregation and school construction were troublesome policy issues in San Francisco for more than a decade before the earthquake and Great Depression, respectively. In each case, the school board struggled to enact their policy agendas under the formal protocols of decision making. Local interest groups, who functioned outside the bureaucracy, vied for attention, calling for segregation and school construction to be resolved in accordance with their goals. The political impact of earthquake and depression was revealed as everyone involved adapted their strategies and rhetoric to reflect the context established by the crises. In different ways, the earthquake and depression dramatically expanded the policy issues beyond San
Francisco’s boarders by severely altering resources within the city and by introducing new political actors and resources from the federal level. Local actors—including the school board and interest groups—remained stalwart toward their goals, but they had to adjust to a new set of constraints and opportunities created by the crises and by the federal government’s involvement.
11 In the controversy over Japanese segregation, most historians downplay the school board and superintendent. Historians typically frame the case as a moment when race and labor politics clashed with federal policy. Members of the school board are cast as pawns used by San Francisco’s powerful labor union, which, at the time, controlled the city government. I describe a different school board, a more active and autonomous school board than other scholars present.
The controversy began on October 11, 1906 when the San Francisco Board of
Education passed a resolution to expel Japanese students who attended school with white children. Japanese children were ordered to enroll in the Chinese School, a school established exclusively to segregate Chinese students. What started as a local decision would explode into an international incident. The statistics belie the magnitude of the controversy. Of the 24,549 students enrolled in the SFUSD, only ninety-three were Japanese. When expelled, the Japanese balked, refusing to attend the Chinese school. They enlisted the service of the Japanese consul, and with the backing of Japan’s national government, they fought to rescind the school board’s order. The Japanese consul appealed to the federal government, asking the
Whitehouse to intervene on behalf of the expelled Japanese students. President
Theodore Roosevelt agreed and demanded that the school board readmit the Japanese into the public schools. The controversy continued for approximately five months, until February 15, 1907, when the San Francisco school board and the governments of the United States and Japan settled on the Gentlemen’s Agreement. As a provision of the settlement, the school board conceded its position and agreed to integrate white
12 and Japanese students, while Japan agreed to restrict emigration of its nationals to
America.
Historian Roger Daniels argues that the school board passed the resolution because they were under mounting pressure from anti-Asian labor politicians. Daniels explains that school segregation was a first step to labor’s main goal which was to ban
Japanese immigrants from entering the country. The school board makes a brief appearance in his narrative—only to expel the Japanese students—as he devotes most of the chapter to President Roosevelt and actions taken by his administration.9 Charles
Wollenberg portrays the case as an example of how non-white people responded to laws that were enacted to consolidate their subordinate status. The civil rights angle classifies the Japanese with other groups who attempted to fight discrimination in court. This case is extraordinary because no other non-white group who suffered discrimination could rally the support of a mother country that was an international power, but law suits were a common tactic used by non-whites, and this case represents an odd, but nonetheless relevant example. Like Daniels, Wollenberg drops the school board from the story after the resolution and focuses on the White House as well as the federal court case that was initiated to resolve the matter.10 Thomas Bailey wrote the definitive text of the event. Bailey gets right to the point. The first sentence of his book reads “Our story is one of race prejudice.”11 To prove his thesis,
Bailey considers the various claims articulated by the school board to justify their
9 Roger Daniels, Pride and Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 31-45. 10 Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855- 1975 (Berkeley: University of California, 1976), 48-68. 11 Thomas Bailey, Theodore Roosevelt and The Japanese-American Crises: An Account of the International Complications Arising from the Race Problem of the Pacific Coast (Stanford: Stanford university Press, 1934), 1.
13 decision, and one by one, he debunks them all by arguing the claims were either half- truths or outright lies. After dismissing several explanations, the one left standing was race prejudice.
All three historians tell a similar story. They argue that race prejudice and labor politics were the most important factors influencing the school board’s decision to segregate the Japanese. I argue there is a story yet told, a story that makes the school board a central player, an independent actor instead of a mere pawn. I view the school board as a group trying to deal with numerous demands hurled at them from competing interest groups. While race and class explain the board’s motives, the constructs do not address the school board’s ability and inability to act. I reinterpret the board as a legitimate political actor struggling to negotiate the constraints imposed by bureaucratic procedures. The earthquake and fire served as a powerful context that influenced the school board’s options for acting on their desire to segregate Japanese students. At the same time, the school board had to factor the effects of the disaster into their reasons for segregating the Japanese.
The 1906 Earthquake sowed the seeds for the controversy over school construction. At the time of the earthquake and fire, most schools were one to three- story wooden structures that if set ablaze would quickly be engulfed in flames. As early as 1908, San Franciscans called for the so-called fire traps to be renovated to make them safe for school children. Clamor against school facilities increased during the 1920s when people complained that several schools were overcrowded and in poor condition. School board members, city officials and local interest groups generally agreed that the school department had not recovered from the damage of 1906 and
14 they initiated a massive program to build new schools. In the drive to build schools, there emerge a number of groups who disagreed about the processes and goals of school construction. When the national economy declined between 1929 and 1931, the politics of school construction were entrenched and hostile. The school board competed against other interest groups to control the goals and processes involved in the building program.
Several scholars have examined the effect of the Great Depression on schools.
David Tyack, Robert Lowe, and Elisabeth Hansot argue that public education remained remarkably consistent during the Depression. They describe the depression as a “short-term dislocation” and the history of public school as “long term continuity.”12 With the trauma caused by the depression, schools districts, for the most part, maintained their funding, systems of governance, and public support.
Jeffrey Mirel and Dorothy Shipps present a different story. Both argue the depression was a drastic turning point in educational politics. In Mirel’s history of Detroit, he pays close attention to the flow of resources. When depression, war, and other catastrophic events alter the availability of resources, school politics change. Mirel shows how the depression brought about the collapse of an educational coalition that controlled the school district throughout the 1920s.13 Shipps tells a similar story in
Chicago. At the onset of the depression, Shipps argues the economic downturn disrupted longstanding policies and set in motion a fifty year period in which a
12 David Tyack, Robert Lowe, Elisabeth Hansot, Public Schools in Hard Times: The Great Depression and Recent Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 190. 13 Jeff Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1907-81 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), xii, 89-137.
15 democratic political machine dominated the city.14 My story traces the history of the building program and examines how the depression acted as a “short term dislocation,” but as Mirel and Shipps suggest, resources play an important part in the story. When resources fluctuate, so do the political alliances. Similar to the earthquake and fire, the Great Depression became a powerful context in which various political actors had to adjust their strategies and rhetoric to account for radical changes in the availability of resources. Even within a slumping economy, the school board, as well as their allies and rivals, stayed alert to take advantage of opportunities they could use to advance their plans.
Beyond the Local Context: Federal and State Involvement
The relationship between the bureaucracy and its external environment forms the narrative arc of both cases. In each case the bureaucracy, represented by the school board, is the center piece of the story. As Philip Cusick argues in his book The
Education System, the bureaucracy is the foundation of the school system. Interest groups circle the school board, poking and prodding to influence decision making, but the formal roles, rules, and regulations of the bureaucracy give a sense of stability to the decision making process. Cusick warns that stability should not be confused with control. While the process of decision making is governed by a codified set of procedures, the question of who controls of the process is uncertain.15
14 Dorothy Shipps, School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago Style, 1880-2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 49-52. 15 Cusick, The Education System.
16 One factor that weakens the control of local decision makers is increased involvement from state and federal governments. Historically education has been a local endeavor. While common school reform in the 1830s initiated a movement of state oversight, local officials continued to control most of the decisions. According to
Mike Kirst and Frederick Wirt, district leaders continued to dictate educational policy until the 1950s, when interference from state and federal authorities reduced local control over educational policy. Kirst and Wirt considered the years between 1920 and 1950 to be a high point of local control, a period they refers to as the “golden era of superintendents."16 After 1950, control shifted from local communities to state legislatures and the nation’s capital.
David Cohen argues that federal and state policies make decision making more confusing and unpredictable. Local school boards and superintendents have the burden of coordinating a broad range of local, state, and federal policies and adapting those policies to fit a particular context. Problems are exacerbated when local, state, and federal policies conflict. Greater interdependence between local, state, and federal officials, according to Cohen, does not lead to more harmony between the three levels of government. Instead, the pace of decision making at the local level is slowed down and complicated because district leaders have to align their policies with those coming from federal and state officials.17
Elements of the above theories play out in the both cases. One theme throughout the study was that San Francisco’s board of Education attempted to
16 Kirst and Wirt, The Political Dynamics, 27. 17 David Cohen, “Policy and Organization: the Impact of State and Federal Educational Policy on School Governance,” Harvard Educational Review 52 (November 1982), 474-99.
17 coordinate a cross section of local, state, and federal policies. While Kirst and Wirt argue that local school officials maintained significant control until the 1950s, this study examines the influence of state and federal involvement during an earlier period.
To resolve the problems of Japanese segregation and school construction, the school board had to align its local agenda and powers with state laws. At different times, the school board was able to use its role as a state institution to strengthen its position against local interest groups. At other times, the supremacy of state law constrained the school board’s power. Additionally, in each case, the federal government became an important factor after the onset of the two crises. After the earthquake, the school board had to defend their policy of segregation against the federal government’s demand to rescind the order. In the midst of the Great Depression, the school board had to reexamine their plan for school construction in light of federal money offered through the New Deal. In each event, understanding who controlled decision making defies a neat formula. Decision making was an unstable process, contingent on the relationship between a formal set of procedures, an unpredictable unfolding of events, as well as the tenacity and cunning of political actors.
What stands out, however, is the persistence of education politics regardless of the circumstances. After each crisis, for all the groups involved, it was politics as usual. That does not mean things stayed the same. Politics as usual meant that political agendas conceived before the crises were adapted. All interest groups had to revaluate their positions based on the crises and articulate a message that somehow reconciled their agenda with the current conditions.
18 Chapter One The Politics of Segregation: Japanese Segregation and the “Great Calamity”
On October 11, 1906, the San Francisco board of education convened at 3pm at Pine and Larkin Streets, their third headquarters since April 18th. On April 18th,
City Hall, their official meeting place, was destroyed in the earthquake and fire that laid waste to most of the city. Besides possibly the location, nothing about the meeting seemed out of the ordinary. Several weeks prior to the meeting, the board announced it was accepting estimates from construction companies interested in razing and reconstructing a school irreparably damaged by the earthquake. The board’s first task on the 11th was to discuss bids received in response to the announcement. Next, they instructed the secretary to tell unassigned teachers to be ready to serve as emergency substitutes. The following two agenda items involved teachers who requested leaves of absence and a principal who asked to be transferred to another school. The board granted the teachers their leave and the principal his transfer. Next, the board passed the following resolution: “That in accordance with
Article X, Section 1662 of the School Law of California, principals are hereby directed to send all Chinese, Japanese, or Korean Children to the Oriental Public
School, situated on the south side of Clay Street, between Powell and Mason streets, on and after Monday, October 15, 1906.” Following the resolution, the board continued their meeting, transferring several janitors and granting a leave of absence
19 to “Mrs. L. Andrews, Janitress of the Jefferson Primary school.”1 Then, the meeting adjourned.
The resolution to send all Asian students to the Oriental School was a routine decision carried out in routine fashion. The next day, three of the local newspapers reported the meeting with little fanfare. Each circular buried reports of the meeting deep inside the paper, and between all three, the report of the resolution had its most prominent position on page eleven. While the San Francisco Chronicle gave scant attention to the board meeting, it was the only paper to warn the resolution “may arouse protest.” The Chronicle reported that the Oriental School, which was built to replace the Chinese School that burned in the fire, had a capacity of four hundred students. “When the order of the Board is carried into effect” explained the article, “it is probable that there will be a congestion of students. It is also possible the confusion which will naturally ensue will arouse opposition from the consuls of the Japanese,
Corean [sic], and Chinese governments, and questions may arise which will call for an inquiring by the department of state.”2 Events would show the Chronicle was prescient in its prediction.
What began as a local decision would explode into an international incident.
From the boardroom at Pine and Larkin in San Francisco to the halls of Congress and the White House in Washington D.C., local and federal officials would debate the legality of Japanese segregation. Press from around the world would follow the story,
1San Francisco Unified School District, Minutes of the Board of Education (San Francisco, October 11, 1906). 2 San Francisco Chronicle, October 12, 1906; Thomas Bailey, Theodore Roosevelt and the Japanese- American crises; an account of the international complications arising from the race problem on the Pacific Coast (Stanford: Stanford University, 1934)
20 offering their perspective of the issue. In Great Britain, the press expressed faith that
America would resolve the issue without conflict; in France, they predicted war.3 It is one of the more remarkable episodes of educational politics in American history.
When taking the earthquake and fire into account, the segregation controversy can be divided into two acts. Act one begans with the resolution and ends with the
Metcalf report, which was written by the Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Victor
Metcalf, who was sent to investigate the matter by President Theodore Roosevelt.
During the first act, the disaster enabled the school board to circumvent legal and political obstacles that prevented them from enforcing previous resolutions to segregate the Japanese. For approximately three months, the school board and federal authorities articulated competing viewpoints of the controversy. The earthquake and fire were critical factors because both groups had to account for the disaster—or as
San Franciscans referred to it, the “great calamity”—in order to bolster their arguments. In act two, the earthquake and fire was dropped from the discussion as the plot shifts to Washington and direct negotiations began between the board of education and President Roosevelt. While this chapter is mostly concerned with the first act, I will give a brief sketch of the events in Washington to conclude the chapter.
Japan and the West
The period 1850 and 1906 were critical years in the histories of both Japan and
San Francisco. During this time, each locale underwent extraordinary change. Much of the action that instigated the resolution was rooted in the growth and development
3 San Francisco Chronicle, October 12, 1906.
21 of Japan and San Francisco. In 1850, Japan and San Francisco were essentially isolated areas devoid of modern technology. By 1906, San Francisco had transformed into a booming metropolis, Japan, a world power. Japan modernized to fend off encroaching western powers, but ironically, as Japan developed the capacity to defend its borders, thousands of Japanese traveled west to find opportunities in the United
States. The following section recounts Japan’s rise as a modern power and the establishment of a Japanese community in San Francisco.
Fifty-three years before the school board’s resolution, Commodore Matthew
Perry traveled to Japan to negotiate trade on behalf of the United States. The Japanese government was aware of the peril it might face when dealing with the West. Before
Perry’s arrival, Japan saw how western powers forced the Chinese empire to comply with unfair trade agreements. The Japanese heard rumors about the discrimination
Chinese nationals suffered overseas and interpreted that discrimination as an indicator of China’s incapacity to demand better treatment for its people. Between 1854 and
1874, Japan experienced the menace first hand when they were coerced into signing unequal treaties with several western powers. The treaties required Japan to surrender control of its ports and to relinquish legal and political power within its own territory.
Western powers guaranteed their own rights in Japan, but denied the same privileges to Japanese nationals who traveled to the United States and participating European countries. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan sought to advance its
22 position relative to the West. Their goal was to be a player and not a victim of international politics; their plan was to westernize.4
Between 1868 and 1905 Japan embarked on a program of westernization. This period, known as the Meiji Restoration, marked Japan’s entrance into modern, international politics. The Meiji government paid European and American advisors to come to Japan and introduce the most current technology. The government sent
Japanese students abroad, expecting them to return and form the basis of an indigenous, academic community that would steer the countries economic and cultural transformation. One of the most significant accomplishments of the Meiji period was
Japan’s diplomatic efforts too revise the unequal treaties. By acquiring the latest technology and selectively adopting some aspects of western culture, Japan’s imperial government wanted to prove that it deserved to be ranked with the elite western powers. In July 1894 Japan’s foreign minister began formal treaty negotiations with
Great Britain that culminated with Japan being granted most favored nation status. In
November the United States signed a similar treaty. The new treaties restored Japan’s sovereignty over its ports and promised that fair treatment of nationals traveling abroad would be reciprocated. Over the next decade Japan strengthened its diplomatic position on the battlefield. Japan demonstrated its military prowess by defeating
China in 1895 and decimating Russia’s navy a decade later. Russia’s defeat challenged the notion that Europe held superiority over all non-white people. The
4Richard Storry, Japan and the Decline of the West in Asia, 1894-1943 (New York: ST. Martin’s Press, 1979), 14-32; Louis Perez, Japan Comes of Age: Mutsu Munemitsu and the Revision of Unequal Treaties (London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 47-63.
23 world was put on notice: Japan was a military power capable of not only defending its homeland but also acting on its imperial ambitions.5
Increased diplomatic and military power was an intended consequence of the
Meiji period. One unexpected side-effect was that after 1884, the Meiji Restoration also marked a period of accelerated emigration. Between 1868 and 1884, the government maintained strict control over passports, which were rarely issued to contract laborers. The Meiji government did not want laborers traveling overseas only to suffer the same fate that befell the Chinese. Protecting the welfare of Japanese immigrants was tantamount to safeguarding Japan’s international reputation. If laborers were degraded abroad, they might cast shame on their homeland.
The Meiji government was forced to reconsider its emigration policy because of its expensive modernization program. To pay the cost of modernizing, the government imposed heavy taxes, causing financial hardship for many of its people.
One way families could relieve their tax burden was to have someone travel overseas and send remittances. The government loosened its policies for granting passports to contract labors, enabling thousands to relocate. Another factor that increased emigration was the 1873 draft law, which could force males between the ages of seventeen and forty into military service. Moving abroad became a viable option for
Japanese men who did not want to serve in the military. Thousands of Japanese relocated to the United States and its territories. Initially, the majority went to Hawaii, but thousands more would go to the mainland’s west coast. San Francisco became a
5 Richard Storry, Japan and the Decline, 53-86 ; Okazaki Hisahiko, From Uraga to San Francisco : A Century of Japanese diplomacy, 1853-1952 (Tokyo: Japan Echo, 2007), 49-64; Louis Perez, Japan Comes of Age, 154-175.
24 popular destination for many Japanese. Between 1850 and 1900, San Francisco, much like Japan, underwent its own transformation that made it an attractive locale for
Japanese immigrants.6
Japanese in America
In the first half of the nineteenth century, San Francisco was a Mexican trading post where a few businessmen from New England traded furs and other goods with
Mexicans. In the 1830s and early 1840s, Congress and the White House recognized the potential value of San Francisco Bay. Leaders such as President Andrew Jackson and Senators Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun wanted to acquire the Bay Area, with Calhoun predicting that San Francisco would become the “New York of the
Pacific.”7 In 1848, America defeated Mexico in the Mexican-American War and the spoils of victory included San Francisco. In January 1848, one month before
America’s victory, gold was discovered in Coloma, California, approximately one hundred and forty miles northeast of San Francisco. San Francisco became a port of call for gold miners. Merchants established businesses to sell equipment and supplies to the miners. Financial institutions were founded to provide merchants the capital to establish their businesses. And the city was born. In 1869, San Francisco achieved ascendancy over commerce and finance along the west coast when the transcontinental railroad was completed. Although Oakland was the terminus, San Francisco was the
6 Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, the Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 1-15; Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924 (New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1988), 7-56. 7 Cited in William Issel and Robert Cherney, San Francisco, 1865-1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 11.
25 main beneficiary. By 1880, San Francisco was the nerve-center for commerce and finance from Seattle to Los Angeles and from China to New York City. San Francisco assumed the mantle of being America’s gateway to the Pacific. In 1891, when the
Japanese began to arrive in significant numbers, San Francisco was the United States’ eighth largest city with a population of 298,997.
Before 1891, Japanese immigrants trickled into San Francisco. During the
1870s and early 1880s, San Francisco was home to fewer than a hundred Japanese immigrants. By the 1890s a steady stream of Japanese came to American each year.
The majority of Japanese immigrants who came to America between 1891 and 1900 were men. The 1900 census tallied 1,791 Japanese in San Francisco of which 84% were males. Most of them were single. The immigrants were young men and women whose median ages were 24 and 25 respectively. Alexander Yamato in his dissertation on the Japanese in San Francisco suggests that even with this group of predominantly single men, Japanese immigrants began to establish families and lay the foundation for a permanent community. Out of 1422 men only 15% were married.
But 58.1% of a total 222 Japanese women married.8
Japanese immigrants varied in their reasons for coming to America. Historian
Eiichiro Azuma divides the immigrants into three categories: mercantilists, colonialists, and laborers. Mercantilists and colonialists came to America intent on bringing glory to imperial Japan. Some of the first emigrants to leave Japan were mercantilists. They were educated, middle-class merchants who wanted to expand
Japan’s empire by establishing business outposts across the world. Leaders in Japan
8 Alexander Yoshikazu Yamato, “Socioeconomic Changes Among Japanese Americans in the San Francisco bay Area” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkely, 1986), 181-182.
26 trusted this educated elite to remain loyal and conduct business to strengthen the empire. In the early 1890s colonialists came to American on a mission to own land.
Azuma explains that this class of emigrant perceived America as a new frontier and they wanted to claim land for the empire. He quotes Japanese youth who tell their compatriots to go to American “…to create the second, new Japan…, which also helps enhance the interest and prestige of the imperial government and our nation.”9 The colonialist formed a class of entrepreneurs in America who took advantage of the demand for Japanese labor. Many colonialists became boardinghouse owners and labor contractors who acted as middle men between white employers and poor
Japanese immigrants.
Azuma describes the third class of immigrant as more self-serving than the previous two. They were laborers who began moving to America in the mid 1890s.
Many of them left home to escape hardship endured in Japan. Most were poor rural immigrants who suffered under the Meiji Restoration when they were forced to pay exorbitant taxes. Others left to avoid the military draft. Azuma explains that some were loyal to the empire while others were not. Those who fervently supported the empire viewed their success as a show of strength for all Japanese people. For those who did not, success in America was a sign of personal achievement. Japanese leaders in Japan and America were not comfortable with the poor emigrants. They expressed concern that the rural masses, unlike the educated mercantilist and colonists,
9 Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 24. Claire Jean Kim offers a similar theory on the relationship between Asian immigrants and their homeland. See Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” in Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects, ed. Gordon Chang (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001), 39-78.
27 did not have the intelligence and sophistication to remain loyal, dignified subjects of the empire.10
The rural poor were drawn to America by stories of opportunity and success.
One man in particular was extremely persuasive. Katayama Sen left Japan and earned a high school degree in San Francisco while he worked as a domestic servant. After high school he attended Yale University. Katayama returned to Japan and published magazines and other advertisements extolling San Francisco for the opportunities the city offered to immigrants. He also helped to establish Christian missions to help newcomers adjust to San Francisco. The missions provided room, board, and English classes for new arrivals. The classes helped newcomers acclimate to their new environment and become proficient enough in English to apply for work or enroll in public school.
Katayama’s life was a dream for hundreds of emigrants. Their plans were to study, return to Japan, and reap the benefits of a western education. When they arrived, they divided their time between work and school. Like Katayama, their primary occupation was domestic service. Japanese domestic servants were unique in that they became known around the Bay Area as schoolboys. Schoolboys negotiated specific terms of service with affluent San Franciscan homeowners. In most cases, schoolboys were given room, board and a small stipend in exchange for doing chores around the house. As part of the deal, they were allowed to work in the morning and
10 Azuma, Between Two Empires, 24-26.
28 evening and attend school during the day. Schoolboys would become the cornerstone of San Francisco’s Japanese community. 11
Over the next two decades, schoolboys became part of San Francisco culture.
Newspapers, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, advertised their services. In the situation section of the San Francisco Chronicle it was common to see postings such as “Japanese young student wants half-day work in nice house; could cook, wait, everything; speaks good English.”12 The title schoolboy, however, did not reflect the actual experience of most domestic servants. By 1900, only a small percentage of
Japanese immigrants were schoolboys in the sense of domestic servants who also attended school. Out of approximately 1,000 single males, only 2% were schoolboys.
Most domestic servants took classes offered in the Christian missions, but only a few actually enrolled in public schools and for most of them, their education was brief.13
The majority left school to find gainful employment, but a few matriculated. This small group of students would have a big impact on school policy. Their presence in the public schools would play a major role in the segregation controversy.
Racial Hierarchy in San Francisco
In the 1890s, when the Japanese arrived in greater numbers, they represented a hitch in San Francisco’s historic campaign to maintain a stratified but stable racial hierarchy. When California was admitted to the union in 1850, one question white
Californians pondered was what to do with non-whites. Like the rest of America,
11 Ichioka, The Issei, 7-19. 12San Francisco Chronicle, February 10, 1905; Roger Daniels, Pride and Prejudice, 11. 13 Ichioka, The Issei, 7-19; Daniels, Pride and Prejudice,11; Yamoto, “Socioeconomic Change,” 179- 182.
29 black people concerned white Californians, but it was the Chinese who would rouse their ire, and the most rabid expressions of anti-Chinese sentiment came from San
Francisco. Between 1870 and 1906, labor, politics and race were closely associated in
San Francisco. Over this period, labor emerged as an integral player in municipal politics and they would periodically form political parties capable of sweeping elections to take control of city government. Without exception, politicians vying for the labor vote spewed anti-Asian rhetoric and promised to support policies restricting
Asian immigration. In the late 1870s, the Workingman’s Party became the first political party organized by labor to win the mayoralty. Their success was achieved in part through a platform that championed banning Chinese immigration. It was the
Workingman’s Party leader, Dennis Kearny, who vociferously announced “the
Chinese must go.”14 The anti-Chinese movement, bolstered by the Workingman’s
Party, culminated in May 1882, when the United States Congress passed the Chinese- exclusion Act, the first national law to exclude a particular ethnic group.
Initially, the Japanese were received with mixed reviews. Dennis Kearny was quick to sound the alarm. He warned the Japanese were “another breed of Asiatic slaves to fill up the gap made vacant by the Chinese who are shut out by our law.”15
“The Japanese must go” became his new slogan.16 But some employers disagreed, as they viewed the Japanese favorably when compared to Chinese laborers. The
Japanese, for their part, tried to distinguish themselves from the Chinese. The
14 Roger Daniels, Asian Americans: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 111. 15 Daniels, Pride and Prejudice, 20. 16 Cited in Roger Daniels, Asian Americans: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 111.
30 Chinese, since their arrival, had virtually been cordoned off into Chinatown.17
Ironically, it was located in close vicinity to the downtown and financial district, so to
San Franciscans, it was like having a foreign country in the middle of the city. When whites walked the streets of Chinatown, they viewed signs written with foreign symbols, smelled the aroma of foreign cuisine, and listened to people converse in a foreign tongue. Additionally, Chinatown essentially had its own government in the
Chinese Six Companies. The Companies were a coalition of Chinatown’s most powerful associations. They acted as liaisons between Chinatown and city authorities, as well as arbiters of disputes between community members. Many white San
Franciscans viewed the Six Companies as a foreign government within their city.
The Japanese tried to live in stark contrast to the Chinese. The Japanese elite in America cautioned against adopting what they perceived to be the uncivilized traits of the Chinese—a process Eiichiro Azuma calls “Sinification.” One indicator of civilization was the ease with which a group could assimilate American customs. A
Japanese Newspaper in 1892 illustrated how the Japanese viewed themselves as different from the Chinese. It stated, “Chinese were so backward and stubborn that they refuse the American way. The Japanese on the other hand, are so progressive and competent as to fit into the American way of life…. In no way do we, energetic and brilliant Japanese men, stand below those lowly Chinese.”18 Most Japanese men dressed in western style suits.19 They were dispersed across the city; many of them living in Christian missions, in boardinghouses, or with whites as domestic servants.
17 Out of 13,000 Chinese living in San Francisco, at least 10,000 lived in Chinatown. 18 Azuma, Between Two Empire, 37. 19 Amy Sueyoshi, “Mindful Masquerades: Que(e)rying Japanese Immigrant Dress in Turn-of-the- Century San Francisco,” Frontiers 26, no. 3 (Winter 2005): 67-70
31 Additionally, tension existed between the two groups. After Japan defeated China in
1894, one newspaper reported hundreds of Japanese celebrating in Sacramento. Just outside of San Francisco, some Japanese were concerned that the Chinese might seek retribution, so they trained to fend of an attack.20 Japanese rural labors competed with the Chinese and often demanded and received more pay. In the city, Japanese merchants began selling Asian arts, a market previously dominated by Chinese merchants.
Yet, despite the immigrants desire to portray themselves as distinct from the
Chinese, whites harbored ill will toward the Japanese. Japanese newcomers alarmed
Californians just when their concerns about the Chinese were subsiding. San
Franciscans never accepted the Chinese, but the Exclusion Act reduced their anxiety.
In 1890, the census reported 25,833 Chinese in San Francisco. That number dropped steeply to 13,954 in 1900. While the Japanese had significantly less people, their increase over the decade concerned whites. From 1890 to 1900 the Japanese population rose from 590 to 1,781. Whites had to make sense of this new group of
Asian immigrants. In rural areas, white employees who initially favored the Japanese soon turned against them. After the Exclusion Act, the Chinese labor force gradually diminished and without the competition, Japanese laborers gained more leverage against their employers. When Japanese workers became more assertive and demanded more pay, employers reversed their earlier opinions: the Chinese were described as passive and subservient, while the Japanese were now aggressive and
20 Joan Wang, “The Double Burdens of Immigrant Nationalism: The Relationship between Chinese and Japanese in the American West, 1880-1920s,” Journal of American Ethnic History 27, no 2 (2008).
32 defiant.21 For the Japanese living in San Francisco, 1900 proved to be an ominous year; it marked a turning point in their relations with the city. That year, Japanese immigrants had their fate conjoined with the Chinese. In March, Japanese and
Chinese immigrants were blamed for a bubonic plague epidemic. Although the
Chinese suffered the harshest condemnation, the Japanese were viewed with repugnance. In May San Francisco held its first anti-Japanese mass rally that featured the city’s most prominent citizens including Mayor James Phelan.22 Additionally, they were linked to vice commonly associated with the Chinese, as Japanese men entered the gambling trade and Japanese women became a more prevalent commodity within Chinatown’s brothels.
During the first decade of the 20th century, the Japanese were caught in between two competing political movements—progressives on one side, labor on the other—that used anti-Japanese rhetoric to sway votes in their favor. Progressive politicians like James Phelan and other wealthy San Franciscans promised to rid their city of graft and make government more efficient. A central part of the progressive platform was a plan to address Japanese immigration. Phelan echoed Dennis Kearney by insisting the Japanese were the “same tide of immigration” that had supposedly been checked by the Exclusion Act. “Personally we have nothing against the
Japanese,” stated Phelan, “but as they will not assimilate with us and their social life is so different from ours, let them keep a respectful distance.”23 In 1901, labor organized the Union Labor Party to opposed Phelan and the progressives. Unions in San
21 Daniels, Pride and Prejudice, 9. 22 Daniels, Pride and Prejudice, 21; Robert Barde, “Prelude to the Plague: Pubic Health and Politics at America’s Pacific Gateway, 1899,” Journal of the History of Medicine 58 (April 2003): 180 23 Cited in Roger Daniels, Politics of Prejudice, 21
33 Francisco were some of the strongest in the country and their influence was significant. Labor disagreed with progressives on most issues, but they found common ground on Japanese immigration. Like the progressives, union leaders courted the labor vote through anti-Japanese rhetoric. Between 1901 and 1906, the
Union Labor Party maintained firm control over municipal government. During their reign, anti-Japanese sentiments would simmer, intermittently erupting to extreme levels, like it did in 1905.
Much of the agitation in 1905 was instigated by Japan’s victory over the
Russian navy. In February, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a series of stories that warned “the problem of the hour” for the United States was the threat of “Japanese invasion.”24 Union Labor Party officials made several speeches about the eminent threat posed by the Japanese. One product of this moment was the founding of the
Japanese and Korean Exclusion League. As implied by the name, the Exclusion
League’s main goal was to lobby for legislation that banned Japanese immigration. At the inaugural meeting on May 7, one speaker declared that “unrestricted immigration of the Japanese would seriously lower our standards of living, and as a natural consequence, deteriorate our civilization.”25 The league consisted of prominent labor politicians whose influence spanned from San Francisco to the state legislature in
Sacramento. But their influence was more rhetorical than material. They failed to pass any legislative proposals locally or nationally, but their persistence helped to sustain a high level of public malevolence toward the Japanese.
24 San Francisco Chronicle, February 23, 1905. 25 San Francisco Chronicle, May 7, 1905.
34 Race and Schools
A corresponding history of racial politics can be observed in San Francisco
Public schools. For school leaders, race was a problem to be solved. Who should and who should not be allowed to attend school with white children was an important question to be answered. For most white San Franciscans, the answer was simple; segregating non-whites was the best alternative. To segregate a particular race of students, school leaders had to comply with the guidelines mandated by the state constitution. In San Francisco, the model for effective segregation was the Chinese school. The Chinese had been segregated for over fifty years before the October 1906 resolution. To understand Japanese segregation, it is important to examine how San
Francisco dealt with Chinese students and how the school board gradually decided to apply the same treatment to the Japanese.
From the first day of statehood, Californians favored separate schools for non- white students. School segregation was legally challenged in 1874 and ruled constitutional by the California State Supreme Court. The court upheld segregation, but stipulated that districts must provide schooling for racial groups with at least ten children who were of age to attend school. In such cases, the alternatives were to permit non-white students to attend school with whites or to build separate schools for specific racial groups. In August 1875, the San Francisco board of education voted to enroll black students and bar the Chinese. Historian Charles Wollenberg suggests that possibly the school board did not want to incur the expense of constructing and maintaining a separate school for blacks who represented a small percentage of the population. They may have reasoned it was more economical to integrate black
35 students.26 The Chinese were another matter. They were a more conspicuous minority. Between 1870 and 1880, the black population increased from 1,330 to
1,628, while their percentage of the total population of San Francisco decreased from
.8% to .7%. At the same time, the Chinese population increased from 11,728 to
21,213 and their percentage of the total population increased from 7.8% to 9.1%.27
Whites, alarmed at the increase, perceived the Chinese as permanent aliens who could never assimilate into American culture. Blacks tried to leverage their social standing against this image of the Chinese as perpetual foreigners. Blacks across the state of
California appealed to whites for more civil rights because they, unlike the Chinese, adhered to Christian values. They also lobbied for the Chinese to be denied the right to vote and attend public schools because the Chinese did not show they were willing to adopt American ways and customs.
For several years, Chinese parents were uncertain if their children would be allowed to attend school. A school was temporarily opened for them in September
1859 when the board of education, at the behest of Chinese parents, opened the first public school for Chinese students. Over the next eleven years, the board provided negligible support for the school. In February 1871, Superintendent James Denmen closed the school, stating that public funds should not be used to educate Chinese students. Chinese students would be shut out until 1885, when they took legal action to gain access. On March 3, 1885 the California State Supreme court ordered the board of education to enroll Chinese students, but the current superintendent, James
26 Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed, 25-26 27 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistics of Population, 1900 (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1900).
36 Moulder, took extraordinary steps to circumvent the court decision and prevent
Chinese students from attending school with whites. He anticipated the board would lose the March decision, so in January he began to lobby state legislators to draft a law mandating separate schools for the Chinese. On March 5, the State Senate passed a bill to amend section 1662 of the state school code. Before the change, the law stated,
Every school, unless otherwise provided by law, must be opened for the
admission of all children between five and twenty-one years of age residing in
the district, and the Board of Trustees or Board of Education have power to
admit adults and children not residing in the district, whenever good reasons
exist therefor. Trustees shall have the power to exclude children of filthy or
vicious habits, or children suffering from contagious or infectious disease.28
The California legislature amended the school law by re-writing the last sentence of section 1662. The new law stated that “Trustees shall have the power to exclude children of filthy and vicious habits, or children suffering from contagious or infectious diseases, and also to establish separate schools for children of Mongolian or Chinese descent. When such separate schools are established Chinese or
Mongolian children must not be admitted into any other schools [emphasis added].” 29
In April 1885 the board opened a school at Stockton and Powell streets in Chinatown and mandated all Chinese students had to attend. The new school meant segregation in San Francisco was constitutional under state law. When Japanese immigration
28 Low, The Unimpressible Race, 67. 29 Low, The Unimpressible Race, 67.
37 increased, school officials viewed them as the new “Asiatic problem.” But their experience with the Chinese gave them a solution. Proposals to segregate Japanese students would be considered for more than a decade as school officials figured out how to segregate the Japanese in compliance with the state constitution.
In the early 1890s, some board members did not distinguish between the
Chinese and Japanese; they simply applied section 1662 of the state code to Japanese students. On June 14, 1893 the board “introduced a resolution providing that hereafter all persons of the Japanese race seeking entrance to the public schools must attend what is known as the Chinese school.”30 Two months later, this order was rescinded when the board reconsidered there decision to classify the Japanese as Mongolians.
Some board members decided it was incorrect to lump the two groups because the
Japanese represented a distinct and more civilized race. Despite the fact that some board members were wary of treating the two groups as synonymous and understood the Japanese as a better class of Asians, they were still uneasy with Japanese students attending school with whites.
There is evidence that the school board gradually conflated their opinions about the Japanese and Chinese. Disdain for both groups reached beyond the classroom. As early as 1896 the school board prohibited the hiring of Japanese day workers. A circular from May 1896 stated, “It is the desire of the Board of Education that Chinese and Japanese be not employed in or about the school building belonging to this department, for the purpose of cleaning windows, scrubbing &c….”31 By 1900,
San Franciscans were in general agreement: the Japanese were a menace. Whites now
30 San Francisco Chronicle, June 14, 1893. 31 San Francisco Office of the Superintendent of Common Schools, circular, May 13, 1896.
38 seemed more willing to classify the Japanese as Mongolians. The question for the school board to solve was not if the Japanese should be segregated but how to build a separate school for them. In 1903, when the Chinese community petitioned the school board to increase spending on their school, the board of education denied their request and affirmed their commitment to segregating all Asians. The Chinese were told that state law clearly mandated segregation. The board president said, “…I would also like to see the same rule applied, were it possible, to the Japanese. That is not possible now, since there is no Japanese school; but with Chinese pupils, there is no reason why the law should not be carried out.” In the president’s opinion, he did not think
“…the general intermingling of Chinese children with white pupils would prove the advantage of the latter.”32 Keeping the races apart was central to the board’s reasoning for and their desire to segregate the schools, but in the case of the Japanese, the school board could not act on their race prejudice because they did not have a school for Japanese students.
Approximately one year before the earthquake, on April 2, 1905, a San
Francisco Chronicle headline warned that “Japs bring frightful disease.” The paper reported that Japanese students carried the infectious eye disease trachoma. “A danger lurked in the 300 brown men who are allowed by a mistaken liberality of the law to attend the public schools and sit side by side with native American children,” reported the Chronicle.33 On May 7, the board of education passed a resolution to build a school for Chinese and Japanese students. After repeated school inspections, the school board’s attention was drawn to the “attendance of children of Japanese
32 Cited in Low, The Unimpressible Race, 87. 33 San Francisco Chronicle, April 2, 1905.
39 descent…and to the evil consequences liable to result therefrom through the indiscriminate association of our children with those of the Mongolian race.” The goals of the resolution were two-fold. First, a separate building for Japanese and
Chinese students would serve the “purpose of relieving the congestation at present prevailing” in the schools. Second, the board stated its “higher end” goal was to prevent white students from being placed in a “position where their youthful impressions may be affected by association with pupils of the Mongolian race.” The board defended the resolution by explaining it was justified under section 1662 of the state code, which was “upheld and sustained by our Supreme Court.”34 The school, however, was never built. It was explained that “because the Board of Supervisors could not overstep the dictates of the charter regarding the dollar limit, they were unable to give up the money asked for this purpose.”35
Segregating the Japanese was an elusive goal. It was relatively easy with the
Chinese—just build a school in Chinatown where the vast majority of Chinese live.
But the Japanese were not concentrated in one neighborhood. Forcing them to attend the Chinese school was not an option because the school was filled to capacity. Local and state laws complicated the problem. The board of supervisors had the power to approve, reject, or revise the school board’s request to levy a special tax for school construction. One way the supervisors could reduce expenditures and keep the tax rate low was to closely regulate monies allocated specifically for building schools.
There was a history of tension over the special tax for school construction. In 1902 the school board, supervisors, and mayor agreed to levy a special tax to repair old
34 San Francisco Chronicle, May 7, 1905. 35 San Francisco Chronicle, October 30, 1906.
40 schools and build a new one. According to the school board, “when the tax was paid, a number of the largest taxpayers paid their taxes under protest,” and the city auditor reneged on his pledge to allocate the taxes for school construction.36 The school board had to suspend work and lay off several workers because without the money from the special tax, the department could not afford to pay laborers. The mayor tried to arbitrate the controversy but in the end, the auditor blocked the school board’s access to the funds. This controversy involved the construction of a school for white children, so under these monetary constraints, it was possible that a building for
Japanese students did not receive support from the auditor and the supervisors.
In addition to local ordinance, state law hamstrung the school board.
Ironically, the state law permitting segregation became an obstacle. Without an alternative facility, it was against the law to expel Japanese students from white schools. It goes back to the amendment ratified in 1885. Section 1662 of the state code mandated that all children must be admitted to school. The school board had the authority to segregate “Mongolian” students, but only when the district provided a school for them to attend.
Once again, in 1906, the school board lobbied the supervisors to build a separate school for all Asian students. “But before that body had been able to consider the matter, the calamity of April had overtaken us and not only were we unable to secure specific appropriations for the purpose of erecting a proper building for the accommodation of the Japanese pupils but we were not provided with sufficient funds
36 Thomas P. Woodward, Report of School Director in Charge of Buildings and Grounds: Why Our New School Houses are not Being Built and Why Painting and Repairs have been Stopped (San Francisco: September 1902). .
41 with which to carry on this department,” explained School Board President Aaron
Altmann.37 According to the Altmann, the budget and the earthquake and fire hindered their plans to segregated Japanese students. In late July 1906, approximately three months after the disaster, schools reopened, and approximately three months later the board segregated the Japanese. In the six month between April 18 and
October 11, the school department suffered extraordinary damage and the school board worked hard and fast to reconstruct the schools and restore the district to as normal a state of affairs as possible. During this time of destruction and renewal, school officials remained concerned about their Japanese problem. Even though lingering effects of the disaster complicated various operations of the school department, the school board remained vigilant for an opportunity to enforce their segregation policy.
Earthquake and Recovery
The “great calamity” of 1906 began at 5:12 am on Wednesday, April 18. A deep rumble signaled the onset of destruction that would engulf San Francisco. Many
San Franciscans were jarred awake. Those who were up staggered in vain to keep their footing. The sturdiest infrastructure became fragile. Steel rails buckled; skyscrapers swayed back and forth; streets rolled in violent waves and eventually cracked. The most immediate dangers could be heard, as glass cracked, wood foundations splintered, and brick walls and chimneys smashed against the street.
People inside buildings tried to get out before the structures collapsed. People on the
37 San Francisco Chronicle, October 30, 1906.
42 street dodged and weaved to avoid falling bricks and glass. When buildings and walls collapsed, they created large clouds of dust. From within the clouds, people could be heard choking and crying for help. When the shaking stopped, the fires began. In some way, the two worked in tandem. The earthquake ruptured gas lines and destroyed the city’s water system, leaving it defenseless against the conflagration.
And for three days the city burned.
The human cost was staggering. At least 3,000 people died. An area of 4.7 square miles was destroyed, which corresponded to over 500 city blocks. The fire gutted 28,000 buildings for which at least half were private residents. Entire neighborhoods, such as Chinatown, were razed, leaving more than 250,000 people homeless. Some would seek refuge in neighboring cities, while others found refuge in camps erected throughout San Francisco. The monetary cost exceeded four hundred million dollars in 1906 dollars.
Minutes after the quake, city authorities took drastic measures to maintain order. Mayor Eugene Schmitz told local police and federal soldiers “that anyone caught looting should not be arrested but should be shot.”38 Vigilante committees formed and issued public warnings “that any person found pilfering, stealing, robbing, or committing any act of lawless violence will be summarily hanged.” 39 When the fires were extinguished, concern shifted from restoring order to facing the challenges of an uncertain future. Before the catastrophe, San Franciscans of all social classes were proud of their city. They viewed San Francisco to be the preeminent city on the
38 Malcolm Barker, Three fearful Days: San Francisco Memoirs of the Earthquake and Fire (San Francisco: Londonborn Publications, 2006), 102. 39 Argonaut, April 1906.
43 west coast and the portal to America’s Pacific empire. After the disaster they wondered, “Will San Francisco’s scepter as a seaport be wrestled from her? Will her supremacy as Queen of the Pacific be taken from her?”40 Anxiety to preserve San
Francisco’s status as a great metropolis made a fast recovery paramount. A quick recovery became an opportunity for San Franciscans to confirm the city’s greatness by demonstrating their capacity to recover from seemingly insurmountable odds.
Like the rest of the city, the school department quickly began its own relief and recovery. A few hours after the earthquake, the board of education devised plans to protect school property from looters, to assist teachers in need of housing, and to work with other municipal departments in the citywide relief effort. Monday morning,
April 23, one day after the fires were extinguished, Superintendent Roncovieri convened a meeting at his house. Roncovieri organized several committees, including one to write a damage report. By the middle of May, the committee reported its findings. The department suffered an extraordinary amount of damage. The disaster divided San Francisco into two districts, “burned and unburned.” The burned district was boarded on the east and north by San Francisco Bay, on the west by VanNess
Street, and on the south by Townsend Street. Outside the burned district, damage was sporadic; inside, it was severe. In all, the department lost thirty-three out of seventy- five school buildings, twenty nine located in the burned district. Because most schools were made of wood, they stood little chance against the inferno. The total monetary loss was determined to be $1,586,000, and the cost for rebuilding was estimated at
$4,436,000. In addition to the monetary losses, the department’s administrative
40 Argonaut, April – May 1906.
44 capacity was in disarray. The board of education’s headquarters was destroyed. The disaster occurred about two months before summer vacation, so the school year was interrupted. The board was unable to complete a census report required for state funding. Destroyed in the fire were important documents such as historical records and teacher credentials. Roncovieri, who wanted schools to re-open as soon as possible, was convinced by the rest of the board to begin summer recess two months early. With the schools “in such an unsettled condition,” they decided to end the school year and focus solely on reconstruction. 41
The school department played a practical and emotional role in the city’s recovery. As the city’s largest department, it owned significant property left unscathed by the earthquake and fire. They granted the police, fire, and health departments permission to use classrooms or entire buildings as temporary offices.
The military and various relief agencies converted schools into hospitals and storehouses. Teachers, as a unit, expressed their desire to contribute to the recovery effort. At the April 23 meeting, over one hundred teachers “instructed” the superintendent to offer their “services to the proper authorities to be used by them in any way they deem best for the interest of our city.”42 The board helped the military care for refugees in Golden Gate Park by organizing “vacation school.” Military authorities donated tents and the board appointed teachers to plan and teach a curriculum for displaced children.
The school board gave the community an emotional lift by organizing what they described as “the greatest outdoor graduation ever witnessed” in the United
41 Board of Supervisors, Municipal Reports (San Francisco: Board of Supervisors, 1906), 466-470. 42 Municipal Report, 466-470.
45 States. 43 After prematurely ending the school year, the board decided to graduate students based on teacher evaluations. They instructed teachers to list all students eligible for graduation, and the plan was to have the ceremony on June 3, in Golden
Gate Park. With most of the city in ruins, the board intended to turn graduation into a celebration for the entire city. Approximately 15,000 attended. The school department’s music director organized a student choir, who sang songs proclaiming their love for city and country. Several dignitaries spoke. “Let the cowards and cry babies go east; the brave remain to build the city,” said University of California,
Berkeley professor Henry Morse Stephen. Mayor Eugene Schmitz told graduates their diplomas marked “the beginning of a new era and the rebuilding of the new and greater San Francisco, a San Francisco that shall rise from the ashes and stand forth as a glorious monument.”44
While the June graduation may have represented an emotional turning point for the school department, there was still a lot of work to be done. After graduation, the board of education began the daunting task of preparing the schools to reopen. They negotiated with state officials about how to calculate San Francisco’s share of state funding. They asked teachers to resubmit proof of their certificates and requested records from the state to confirm teacher qualifications. Most significantly, they began to repair and rebuild schools. On May 28, the board initiated a project to build temporary structures within the burned district. Board member Thomas Boyle, chair of the building committee, “was authorized to take the work in hand and to press it forward by all means in his power.” The “buildings will be constructed of wood, one
43 San Francisco Chronicle, May 24, 1906. 44 San Francisco Chronicle, June 3, 1906.
46 story in height, and will be covered with patent roofing material,” decided the board.45
The board estimated that schools would open the either the last week of July or the first week in August, leaving approximately two months to prepare. At the June 11th meeting, they agreed, “In view of the fact that the opening of the public schools has been fixed for July 23, 1906, it will be necessary to begin at once the work of repairing and cleaning up the school property so that the pupils may safely return to the same.”46
By the time school opened in July, the school board would construct 27 temporary buildings.
By July, public pressure mounted for schools to reopen. The extended summer vacation concerned adults who worried that children would become unruly if they were out of school too long. An editorial in the San Francisco Bulletin ascertained that “evil effects” have yet to develop from the “enforced vacation the children have had since the 18th of April. But any further freedom from wholesale discipline of the classroom would be dangerous.”47 Additionally, the board of education learned that hundreds of dollars worth of junk was “being pilfered from the burnt district by school children working in the interest of dealers.” Students were paid by junk dealers to sift through debris and pick out valuable metals that could be melted and sold. School officials were held partially responsible. “If the schools were open it would not be possible for the junk dealers to make use of little boys as looters, as they are doing at present,” stated an editorial in the San Francisco Call.48
45 San Francisco Examiner, May 29, 1906. 46 San Francisco Unified School District, Minutes of the Board of Education (San Francisco, June 11, 1906). 47 San Francisco Bulletin, July 13, 1906. 48 San Francisco Bulletin, July 13, 1906.
47 The San Francisco Bulletin, however, praised the “good work accomplished by the school directors.” According to the editorial, the “evil effects” of the vacation was prevented by the “untiring zeal” displayed by the board in preparing the schools to re-open. The board deserved “great praise for its activity during the last three months.” Schools in the unburned district, “in every instance,” were repaired and when students return to school, there would “be little or nothing to remind them of the disaster of April.”49 Other reports were more pessimistic. On July 21, the day before schools were slated to open, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “the board fears some of the buildings are not in safe condition.” The board of education blamed the board of public works for not officially inspecting schools that withstood the earthquake in the unburned district. The school board was “unwilling to take the responsibility of placing hundreds of school children in the building until inspected by competent men and declared to be safe,” reported the article.
When schools opened on Monday, July 23, they were safe, but the board proved to be ill prepared. They did not built enough temporary schools in the burned district and the unburned district was overwhelmed by heavy enrollments because thousands of San Franciscans relocated to neighborhoods that suffered less damage.
School directors pledged, however, that “no student will be turned away.”50 The board actually wanted to increase enrollments to get more money from the state. As late as October overcrowding continued to be a problem. “Since the disaster,” reported the Chronicle, “there has been a shifting in the population,” such that schools in the unburned district were overcrowded. On October 10, 1906, one day before the
49 San Francisco Bulletin, July 13, 1906 50 San Francisco Chronicle, July 25, 1906.
48 segregation order, school director Thomas Boyle issued a report proposing that
“accommodations should be provided immediately for at least 3500 school children who are compelled to remain at home because there is not at present seating capacity in the temporary buildings and others being used for school purposes.”51 Specifically,
Boyle was requesting extra classrooms for overcrowded schools in the unburned district, where twenty-one out of twenty-six schools mentioned in the report were located.
The population shift caused problems for the school department, but it also presented them with an opportunity. While many schools outside the burned district were overcrowded, inside, school enrollments were uneven. Five overcrowded schools in director Boyles’s report were located inside the burned district, but other temporary schools were below capacity. One school in particular was the Chinese
School. When the board decided to rebuild the school, they rebuilt it “with the view of bringing there not only Chinese children, but all children of Mongolian descent.”
By October, President Aaron Altmann was notified that attendance in the Chinese
School was low due to the “slow progress in rebuilding the Chinese section.” With attendance well below pre-earthquake numbers, Altmann and the rest of the board determined they had enough space at the Chinese School for Japanese students and
“having the classrooms,” it was decided “that the law must be complied with.”52
Moving Japanese students into the Chinese school was a classic case of killing two birds with one stone. It gave the school board a low cost solution to their “Asian
51 San Francisco Chronicle, October 11, 1906. 52 San Francisco Chronicle, October 30, 1906.
49 Problem” because they did not have to ask the supervisors for money to build a new school. And with a school available, they were now in accordance with state law.
For more than ten years, the school board grappled over the question of what to do with the Japanese. At first the school board could not agree over whether the
Japanese should be classified as Mongolians. At the turn of the century, when hostility towards the Japanese became more intense, concern about how to classify them subsided. Japanese students were portrayed as inferior children who endangered the moral and physical welfare of white students, yet the school board did nothing about the Japanese. They did nothing even though the vast majority of white San
Franciscans would have supported or at least remained indifferent to action against the
Japanese. They passed several resolutions to segregate the Japanese, and still, nothing. They could not enforce segregation until they complied with state law, and that opportunity arose after the earthquake and fire.
Local Policy becomes an International Incident
The October 11 resolution was different from previous resolutions to segregate
Japanese students for one particular reason: the board enforced the order. Expelled from school were ninety-three Japanese students; sixty-eight were born in Japan, twenty-five in America. The school board demanded the students be removed from the schools by Monday, October 15. On October 18, President Altmann announced that “all Japanese children attending the schools have finally been ejected from the buildings where white children were in attendance.” That day, the San Francisco Call
50 reported the students “were segregated…one by one, until at present there are none in attendance.”53
The Japanese were not “ejected” quietly. On October 12, the day after the resolution, Japanese Consul K. Uyeno sent a letter to the board threatening to challenge the segregation order in federal court. The board replied that it “can not comply with the request you have communicated in your letter,” and suggested the consul read the state school code on segregation.54 Between October 12 and 18 the
Japanese “clung on tenaciously and did not leave promptly.”55 Altmann stated the
Japanese protested vigorously and were not inclined to obey the order of the board.”
He added, “When they ascertained that we were in earnest, however, the order was obeyed.” 56
They may have obeyed the order to leave, but they refused to attend the
Chinese school. By October 18, only one out the ninety-three Japanese students attending public school transferred to the Oriental school. The rest stayed home. The principal of the Oriental school, Ms. Newhall, would later testify that Uyeno visited the Oriental School and attempted to dissuade two Japanese pupils from attending. It was reported that “despite her unfamiliarity with the Japanese language,” Newhall interpreted what she observed to be a contentious interaction between the consul and the two students. She testified the “consul was trying to persuade the two pupils to do something they were not inclined to.”57 Newhall’s testimony is questionable because
53 San Francisco Call, October 18 1906. 54 San Francisco Call, October 23, 1906. 55 San Francisco Call, October 18, 1906. 56 San Francisco Call, October 18, 1906. 57 San Francisco Call, December 10, 1906.
51 she could not speak Japanese, but what is definite is that after October 18, only one student, fourteen year old Frank Kobayashi, attended the Chinese school.
Initially the Japanese viewed the resolution within the context of anti-Japanese sentiments that were sparked by the disaster. “Since the Earthquake and fire” reported the Japanese Daily New World,58 “the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League has been taking every opportunity of persecuting our people.” The report continued, “For the past few months the league did its utmost to stir up the ignorant classes and young boys against the Japanese.”59 There is some evidence to support their claim. In a letter dated June 11, 1906, Professor George Davidson of the University of California,
Berkeley, objected to the “repeated insults which have been heapt upon the party of
Japanese scientists…by boys and hoodlum gangs in the streets.”60 Davidson reported that “insults…have been suffered by these gentlemen not less than a dozen times since they began their work in this city.” The insults Davidson complained about included boys throwing rocks and other objects at the Japanese scholars. In addition to sporadic acts of violence, Japanese immigrants reported that the Japanese and Korean
Exclusion League organized a campaign to boycott Japanese businesses.
From the viewpoint of Japanese immigrants, school segregation was the latest offense against their community at the behest of the Japanese and Korean Exclusion
League. The Japanese surmised their children were “excluded from the public school because of race prejudices and forgetfulness of true Americanism.” The Japanese
58 Japanese Daily New World was a Japanese newspaper published in San Francisco. 59 Cited in U.S. Senate, The Final Report of Secretary Metcalf on the Situation Affecting the Japanese in the City of San Francisco, Cal, 59th Cong., 2nd sess., 1906, 24. 60 George Davidson to The University of California, June 16, 1906 cited in U. S. Senate, Final Report, 38.
52 Daily News exclaimed, “if the board of education be controlled by the agitation of ignorant laborers rather than by true Americanism, then when the Japanese Exclusion
League ask them to exclude Japanese children permanently from the public school they will do it.”61
On October 18, at this time, there was no indication the board viewed the protest to be anything more than a minor stir. The decision to segregate the Japanese was fully within their power as designated by the state school code. “The board is merely carrying out the State law. It provides that Asiatic and white children shall not attend the same schools,” stated board president Altmann.62 The board’s confidence would be short lived. One week after the October 18th board meeting, the Empire of
Japan and the United States federal government would become full-fledge participants in the unfolding drama, expanding the controversy beyond city and state boarders.
How did the resolution become an international crisis? From the very beginning, the resolution had international implications. In 1906, the Japanese in San
Francisco were living between two worlds and only beginning to transition from sojourners to permanent residence. Their response can be understood through Eiichiro
Azuma’s framework of transnationalism. Transnationalism means that Japanese immigrants interpreted the school board’s resolution from two perspectives: as members of Japan’s empire and as residents in America. As stated earlier, many
Japanese considered themselves to be subjects of Japan. Their mission in America, whether through business or acquiring land, was to bolster the reputation and power of their homeland. For others, America represented an opportunity to start a new life and
61 Japanese Daily News cited in U. S. Senate, Final Report, 27. 62 San Francisco Call, October 18, 1906.
53 school played a critical role in helping them acclimate to their new home. One
Japanese paper, The Japanese American, considered the resolution to be a “virtual exclusion of Japanese from the only wholesome means of assimilating themselves to
American life.” The paper explained that “Japanese in this country want to adopt
American life in the best and most real spirit, and no better means can be had to this end than the association of children in schools.” Another article in the same paper stated, that a “separate school will greatly deter the Americanization of our children.”
The article described Americans as a “people composed of all the nationalities of the world, and the Japanese, too, since they have come to live on the American soil, will be and should be Americanized under the influence of American civilization.”63
For immigrants who were more concerned about the prestige of the empire, an insult against them was an insult against Japan. But not all insults were equal; some could be endured, while others could not be tolerated. The school board’s dismissal of the Japanese consul fell into the latter category. It was the school board’s refusal to hear the consul’s request that seemed to spark the most virulent responses. On October
24, over 1,200 members of the “Japanese colony” held a meeting at Jefferson Square
Hall “in order to institute a systemic fight against Japanese exclusion.”64 The next day, The Japanese American issued a headline that read, “Our National Dignity
Besmeard—To Arms our Countrymen!” According to the article, the Japanese had hoped that even though “members of the board have neither the intellectual or moral capacity to grasp the straight-formed wherefores of the consul’s protest…, the board would favor us at least with the formality of reconsideration.” But the Japanese were
63 Cited in U.S. Senate, The Final Report, 19, 22. 64 Cited in U.S. Senate, The Final Report, 25.
54 incensed that “not only did [the board] fail to give us a shadow of satisfaction…, they most insolently ignored the legitimate protestations of our imperial consul.” According to the paper, it was the boards haughty attitude toward the “Imperial Majesty’s consul” that made the resolution different from previous acts of discrimination. “The calamity of the poor little creatures may be bourne; the disgrace of Japanese residents in
American may be endured; but—but let none on earth or in heaven triffle with the honor of our beloved Empire.” As a result, the board’s actions could “no longer be confined to a handful of school children; it has assumed national proportions.” The newspaper implored the Japanese immigrants to be defiant, and “backed by the sympathetic outburst at home,” they were encouraged to oppose the resolution.65
The “sympathetic outburst at home” was born from actions originating in San
Francisco. On October 20, leaders within the immigrant community sent word to newspapers in Japan explaining the situation. One newspaper in Tokyo reported that
“our countrymen have been humiliated on the other side of the pacific” because the children have been expelled from the public schools by “the rascals of the United
States.”66 It did not take long for American diplomats in Japan to hear about the crisis.
On October 22, the United State’s ambassador to Japan, Luke Wright, notified the state department in Washington D.C. that a problem was brewing. Three days later,
Japan’s Ambassador, Viscount Aoki, held formal meetings in Washington D.C. with
Secretary of State Elihu Root. October 25 marked a turning point because thereafter, the question of whether the resolution violated the 1894 treaty between the United
States and Japan became the central focus of the controversy.
65 Japanese American cited in U. S. Senate, The Final Report, 20. 66 Cited in Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed,55.
55 It was not unprecedented for Japanese living abroad to make a plea for help through Japan’s newspapers. In the 1860s, Japan’s press reported on the mistreatment of immigrants in Hawaii and petitioned the government to defend its people abroad.
The government, however, was pragmatic in its response to situations involving
Japanese emigrants. It weighed the costs and benefits interference might have on their international status and trade. When it was prudent to not get involved, they did not.
In this case, Japan’s government would actively pursue the matter.
While the controversy over segregation provides some insight into the relationship between Japanese immigrants and their homeland, it may also indicate something about their political and economic standing in San Francisco. When compared to the Chinese, the Japanese were short on resources within the local political environment. A brief comparison between the Japanese and Chinese communities in San Francisco highlights alternative means of protest that were not available to Japanese immigrants.
Soon after the earthquake and fire, some politicians wanted to use the disaster as an opportunity to move Chinatown. Many San Franciscans argued that
Chinatown—which was said to be located in “one of the finest parts of San
Francisco”—had become an eyesore after the “yellow plague had made its way.” In their opinion, “the fire was not an unmixed evil, if it should drive out Chinatown.” 67
In particular, progressive politicians wanted to relocate Chinatown as part of their movement to clean up San Francisco. The relocation plans began in earnest on April
27 when an all-white committee was formed to discuss where Chinatown should be
67 Argonaut, April 1906.
56 reconstructed. In response, the Chinese did not present themselves as foreign nationals whose treaty rights had been violated. Instead, they argued against relocation on the basis that they were permanent residents and resident aliens who were entitled by the Constitution to live where they pleased. The Chinese could not rely on a mother country with a powerful navy, but they did have an established community that was fully integrated into San Francisco’s economy. Many Chinese were taxpaying business and home owners; others paid exorbitant rents to white landlords, rent the landlords were reluctant to forgo. In the previous year, approximately one-third of the import duties collected by San Francisco were paid by
Chinese merchants. Additionally, Chinatown was a lucrative tourist attraction. A
1904 tour guide book encouraged tourists to visit Chinatown to see the “foreigners in their picturesque costumes, the Joss houses, the restaurants with their elegant fronts and the beautifully decorated dining rooms….”68 Understanding their economic value, the Chinese orchestrated a successful campaign to gain support from white San
Franciscans. When the Chinese threatened to leave San Francisco, whites who had a vested economic interest in Chinatown rallied to their cause. Advocates of relocation faced growing scrutiny and by mid-June, attempts to relocate Chinatown had been quashed.
The Japanese in San Francisco had not yet developed the economic infrastructure and political savvy to wage such a campaign against local political officials. Although a few Japanese entrepreneurs opened small businesses, they did not possess the economic resources to leverage against city officials. Before the
68 The Commercial Pictorial and Tourist Map of San Francisco, 1st ed. (San Francisco: Aug. Chevalier, 1904), 4.
57 earthquake, most of the Japanese were dispersed throughout the city, living in missions, boardinghouses, or the homes of affluent whites. The Chinese, however, concentrated their wealth in Chinatown, making it an entrenched part of San
Francisco’s economy. Regardless of how much San Franciscans complained, they nevertheless valued Chinatown for the income it earned the city and private landlords.
Additionally, the Chinese arrived in San Francisco at the dawn of the city’s development. Chinatown was one of San Francisco’s oldest communities and by
1906, most Chinese living there considered it to be home. Their fight over Chinatown was about saving their neighborhood, not about defending the honor of their ancestral homeland. As stated earlier, many Japanese viewed themselves to be citizens of
Japan. It was the Japanese consul who had the most influence over the community in
San Francisco. The Consul understood the White House wanted to maintain good relations with Japan in order to secure its economic interests in the Pacific. The
Japanese immigrant’s strongest position was to involve Japan and to make the 1894 treaty the focal point of their protest. Such a move involved the United States federal government and essentially made the White House a proxy for the Japanese in their struggle against the board of education.69
When the American Ambassador to Japan, Luke Wright, sent word to the
White House that Japan’s government was upset about the segregation of Japanese students in San Francisco, the state department responded promptly. Their immediate concern was to placate the Japanese by assuring them that segregating Japanese
69 Yumei Sun, “From Isolation to Participation: Chung Sai Yat Po [China West Daily] and San Francisco’s Chinatown, 1900-1920” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 1999); Ying Zi Pang, “The Impact of the 1906 Earthquake on San Francisco’s Chinatown,”
58 students was not an official policy of the federal government. To explain the resolution, the state department emphasized the impact and random occurrence of the earthquake. Secretary of State Elihu Root sent word to Japan through Ambassador
Wright that the resolution was an irrational act committed by men who were still recovering from extreme trauma. In a telegram to Wright, Root stated that his preliminary assessment of the situation revealed “nothing in San Francisco but an ordinary local labor controversy excited by the abnormal conditions resulting from the earthquake and fire.” He explained it was beyond the federal government’s power to prevent men who were “desirous of a labor vote,” from trying to gain the favor with voters by excluding the Japanese. The “trouble about schools appear to have arisen from the fact that the schools which the Japanese had attended were destroyed by the earthquake and have not yet been replaced.” Secretary Root said the president was aware of the situation and promised to take the appropriate measures to maintain the
“spirit of friendship and respect” between the United States and Japan. Root concluded, the “purely local and occasional nature of the San Francisco school question should be appreciated when the Japanese remember that the Japanese students are welcome in the hundreds of school and colleges all over the country”70
By isolating the problem in San Francisco and placing the blame on the random occurrence of the earthquake, the federal government absolved itself of wrongdoing and provided the framework for an explanation.
The telegram was followed by a meeting on October 25, in Washington D.C. between the Japanese Ambassador and the Secretary of State. In some ways the
70 San Francisco Chronicle, October 28, 1906.
59 Japanese and United States governments followed a similar approach. Each separated the interests and goals of their national governments from the views and actions of their constituents. In the case of the United States, the federal government separated itself from San Francisco. In the case of Japan, its national representative, Viscount
Aoki, underscored the difference between his government and the common people.
First he assured the United States that his purpose was to preserve peaceful relations between the two nations. He told Secretary Root that “the friendship between the
United States and Japan is too genuine and to long standing to justify any formal protest on the part of Japan because of wrongs her citizens may have suffered in some one locality in the United States.”71 But Aoki explained the trouble was not the government. He stated that although the government understands that the resolution is local policy, most Japanese do not. “Of course the Japanese government fully realized that the action against the Japanese children is local and not general in this country,” stated Aoki, “but all the Japanese do not understand the situation in this country, and the unfriendliness to Japan is regarded by many persons as a national action.” He continued, “Such action on the part of local authorities in this country is resented very bitterly by all Japanese.”72 By identifying the controversy as a local anomaly, both governments allayed concerns about open conflict between the two nations, yet they still communicated the seriousness of the issue and the urgency of federal intervention.
The New York Times dubbed the meeting a turning point because the “the invocation of treaty rights by the Mikado’s representative gives a more serious aspect to the recent anti-Japanese crusade in California and the anti-American outburst in
71 New York Times, October 26, 1906. 72 New York Times, October 26, 1906.
60 Japan.”73 One important consequence of focusing on Japan’s treaty rights was that it questioned the relationship between the federal government and state and local policy makers. How much jurisdiction did a treaty have over local decision makers? This question would hold the attention of San Francisco, the nation, and the world for the next two months. The federal government’s first act was to initiate an investigation to determine if the San Francisco’s school board was justified in segregating Japanese students. President Theodore Roosevelt decided to send a member of his cabinet to
San Francisco to show that he considered the controversy to be a serious matter. He selected the Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Victor Metcalf, to be his chief investigator. Metcalf, a native of the Bay Area, was dispatched from Washington on
October 28 with instructions to collect data and write a report summarizing his findings. He arrived in Oakland on the October 31, conducted his inquiry for two weeks, and returned to Washington D.C. His report would be handed to Congress on
December 18, 1906.
While Metcalf was researching and preparing his report, the board of education publicly detailed its reasons for passing the resolution. The school board and Metcalf would present different perspectives of the segregation controversy. The earthquake and fire would factor prominently in their arguments. Metcalf presented a cause and effect relationship between the disaster and the resolution: the disaster struck, anxiety and fear increased, and normal race prejudice reached abnormal levels. Metcalf depicted the school board as a group that was under the control of racist labor leaders and influenced by the shock of the disaster. The school board sought to portray
73 New York Times, October, 26 1906.
61 themselves as an independent organization with formal rules to follow and official duties to perform. The next two sections examine how the school board and Metcalf engaged in a political contest to shape the public’s image of the controversy.
The Politics of Crisis: The School Board
One accusation the board attempted to refute was that the resolution was spearheaded by racist, labor leaders in the aftermath of the earthquake and fire. As quoted earlier, the Japanese community was quick to assume a connection between the disaster, the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, and the resolution. It was not far-fetched to imagine such a combination of factors. At a school board meeting on
August 20, 1906, about two months before the resolution, the board received communication from the Exclusion League “protesting against the Japanese students occupying seats in various schools.”74 Although the board denied the League’s request to build a separate school for Asians because there were insufficient funds, the request could be interpreted as a presage of the actual enforcement of the October resolution.
The board insisted that it was not influenced by outside parties or events and that it was only carrying out state policy. While they admitted the earthquake and fire provided the opportunity to segregate the Japanese, they insisted the disaster was not the motivating factor. On October 31, the San Francisco Chronicle published an interview between University of California president Ide Wheeler and school board president Altmann. Wheeler asked if the resolution “was a movement that had
74 San Francisco Unified School District, Minutes of the Board of Education (San Francisco, August 23, 1906).
62 suddenly come up for consideration before the Board or whether it had anything to do with the conditions that have come about in this community since the calamity?”
Altmann answered no to both scenarios. “The board,” replied Altmann “had always felt in duty, bound to comply with the law.” 75 In November, the board sent a formal communication to Secretary Metcalf in which they restated Altmann’s position. “The law is on the statue books and it is within our province to enforce it. It is our duty,” wrote the school board. They explained that once a law is “passed by the legislature of a sovereign state, it is beyond our power to do other than obey the law.” The action taken on October 11, “was but a reiteration of similar resolutions which had been passed in previous years.” According to the board, “it was not feasible to effect a strict enforcement of the above mentioned school law” because of the “crowded conditions of the Oriental School prior to the calamity of April last.” But since the earthquake and fire, it “has become possible to enforce this law which the Board of
Education regards as mandatory.” In the same memo, the school board argued that if race was an issue, Japan’s ambition made it so. In the board’s view, segregation was
“not so much a question of education, but a matter of principle with [the Japanese].
As a nation they desire and practically demand that they equally be recognized along with the Caucasian nations.”76 Further, the school board argued the resolution did not violate the 1894 treaty because Japanese students were not excluded, just segregated; they still had access to school. It was only because the Japanese wanted to attend school with whites that they mistakenly equated segregation with exclusion.
75 San Francisco Chronicle, October 31, 1906 76 San Francisco Chronicle, November 10, 1906.
63 In the above argument, the board portrayed themselves as pragmatist who seized the moment created by the earthquake. The resolution was the responsible act of public servants who were entrusted to enforce the law. This portrayal runs in stark contrast to the image of being racist flunkies who were under great stress after the earthquake.
The school board expanded on the public servant argument by representing themselves as mid-level officials responding to orders from above and demands from below. Orders from above referred to section 1662 of the state code; demands from below referred to complaining parents. The main complaint, according to Altmann, was that several Japanese students were too old. The parents explained they did not want their young girls attending school with older Japanese males. In his interview with President Wheeler, Altmann claimed to have received complaints from across the city, but “more particularly from parents of children attending schools in the Western
Addition.” He explained, “The Japanese attending those schools were of ages above the average age of the oldest grammar grade pupils.”77 In another interview, Altmann provided a specific example. The Pacific Heights School78, explained Altmann, was located in “a residential section where many Japanese are employed as house servants.
Many of them attend classes in this school and would reach on average from three to four years more in age than other pupils.”79 Indeed, the majority of the nineteen
Japanese students in the Pacific Heights school were schoolboys and all of them were foreign born and overage. The students closest in age to their appropriate grade were
77 San Francisco Chronicle, October 30 1906. 78 Although Pacific Heights today is considered to be a separate neighborhood, in 1906 it was technically part of the Western Addition. 79 San Francisco Call, December 7, 1906.
64 two twelve year old third graders and one fifteen year old eighth grader. The most glaring mismatch was a twenty year old eighth grader. To Superintendent Roncovieri, the “national commotion” was a surprise because segregating Japanese students “was purely a local regulation for the good of San Francisco children whose parents urged us to action and which was easier to enforce after the fire than before.” Roncovieri explained it was within the board’s power to “object to an adult Japanese sitting beside a twelve-year old schoolgirl, and if this be prejudice, we are the most prejudiced people in the world on that point.”80
It is difficult to confirm how much the schoolboys worried San Franciscans or to judge the school board’s sincerity about responding to parents concerned about
Japanese men attending primary school. One reason to question the board’s argument is that they targeted all Japanese students regardless of age or nationality. American students of Japanese decent were expelled along with students born in Japan. Most of the Japanese born in American were enrolled in their appropriate grade. If the school board was concerned about overage students they should have limited their resolution to approximately forty-nine students, and less if they were concerned only with grown men, which if that was defined as someone older than eighteen, then the number of students was eleven. But they segregated all the Japanese students, giving the impression that race prejudice was the motivating factor.
Additionally, it is unclear how widespread the concern was over Japanese students. There is evidence that the school board had previously acted to expel overage Japanese students. Parents complained about the older students before the
80 Harper’s Weekly January 19, 1907.
65 earthquake and fire. They reported students between the ages of twenty-two and twenty four, but on the day of the resolution, the oldest Japanese student was twenty.
Apparently the school board dealt with the students who were over twenty years old.
The complaining parents were said to be relieved when some—but not all—of the older Japanese students withdrew from school.81 Reporter George Kennan insisted that the schoolboy issue was contrived by the board of education and the Exclusion
League to scare parents. He reported that some teachers praised Japanese students for their work ethic. Board president Altmann stated that “nothing can be said against the general character and deportment of Japanese Scholars.”82 And Kennan claimed that
Superintendent Roncovieri admitted he had never received a complaint about the conduct of Japanese students.
While the board’s argument about older students was questionable, it makes sense that parents within the Western Addition would be the most vocal after the earthquake and fire. The fire caused people to move south and west of the burned district. As people relocated they changed the dynamic of neighborhoods across the city. The Western Addition illustrates one example. The Western Addition suffered little damage from the fire as it was on the boundary of the burned district at the edge of Van Ness St. But actions taken to save the neighborhood foreshadowed its transformation. Prior to the disaster, the Western Addition was primarily a residential neighborhood of upper and upper-middle class homes. To stop the approaching fire from destroying the neighborhood, soldiers dynamited mansions along Van Ness St. to create a firebreak. After the disaster, the neighborhood shifted to working class homes
81 U.S. Senate, The Final Report, 4. 82 San Francisco Chronicle, December 9, 1906 cited in George Kennan, The Outlook, June 1, 1907.
66 and rentals as displaced San Franciscans began to relocate. The Japanese were among the migrants, and along Buchanan Street, between Geary and Pine Street, they began to establish what today is known as Japantown. Their concentration within the neighborhood drew attention. A 1907 real estate advertisement tried to entice white homebuyers to purchase property in neighboring Presidio Terrace by warning that
“Japs have invaded the Western Addition.” “Chinese and Japanese are way gaining foothold in the best parts of the Western Addition,” claimed the advertisement. Two schools in the western addition had the largest number of Japanese students. Pacific
Heights had nine-teen students and Redding Primary had twenty-three (only nine students were born in the United States but the students were closer to their proper grade than the students attending Pacific Heights). Additionally, the overcrowded conditions in the unburned district seemingly made the Japanese presence more apparent. Days after the resolution was passed, the San Francisco Call reported that
“since the April disaster the Japanese have attended primary and grammar schools in large numbers, crowding out the American Pupils.”83 It is possible the nascent
Japantown raised concern among whites about the Japanese in general and the students in particular. Whatever the reason—race prejudice or overage students—the school board could do nothing until they found a way to circumvent state law and local politics. The earthquake and fire provided a way.
83 San Francisco Call, October 18, 1906.
67 The Politics of Crisis: Metcalf’s Report
The city anxiously awaited Secretary of Commerce and Labor Victor Metcalf’s report. When Metcalf left the Bay Area to return to Washington, San Franciscans did not know what to expect from the report because he did not make any statements about his findings. But implicit signals from the secretary gave hints about his leanings. On the first day of his investigation, Metcalf asked Altmann if the Japanese were Mongols. The question identified a loop hole in the law that favored the
Japanese because section 1662 explicitly mentions only Chinese and Mongolian students. But nothing was certain because Metcalf refused to comment until he released the report. As Metcalf’s secrecy left the city unsure of the investigation’s outcome, so to did their suspicion of President Roosevelt. Before the resolution, relations between the White House and San Francisco were cool. In the wake of the earthquake and fire, President Roosevelt refused to accept relief money offered by foreign nations. Local newspapers and periodicals criticized Roosevelt for not being flexible in his foreign policy when San Francisco was in desperate need of help.
All questions were answered on December 18. The report denounced the
October resolution. On page three of the report, Metcalf set the tone for what was to follow. He wrote, “The action of the board in the passage of the resolutions of May 6,
1905, and October 11, 1906, was undoubtedly largely influence by the activity of the
Japanese and Korean Exclusion League.” Metcalf narrowed the scope of the federal government’s involvement. The federal government was interested only in the sixty- eight foreign born students. As for the twenty-five born in America, Metcalf
68 explained they were “subject to the laws of the Nation as well as of the state.”84
Additionally Metcalf had to be careful to center the controversy on treaty rights and not specifically segregation. Chinese students in San Francisco and blacks in the south were segregated and he did not want this case to have a spill over affect on schools across the country.
Metcalf addressed the school board’s argument about the older Japanese schoolboys. He acknowledged the students born in Japan were “very much older” than their classmates and he admitted that it was reasonable for citizens to complain about older male students attending primary school. But he insisted, “The objection to
Japanese men attending the primary grades could very readily be met by a simple rule limiting the ages of all children attending those grades.”85 He dismissed the Japanese schoolboy issue as a minor problem that did not require a resolution to segregate all
Japanese students. Furthermore, Metcalf argued that forcing the Japanese into the
Oriental School would essentially prevent several students from attending school. The problem was that adverse condition in the burned section made if difficult for Japanese students to get to the Oriental School. “Owing to the great conflagration,” wrote
Metcalf, “…it would not be possible even for grown children living at remote distances to attend this school.”86 This was probably Metcalf’s strongest counter argument because it attacked the heart of the school board’s rationale. Metcalf argued that if the Japanese lived at such a distance from Chinese school to make it impossible
84 U.S. Senate, The Final Report, 4. 85 U.S. Senate, The Final Report, 7. 86 U.S. Senate, The Final Report, 6
69 for them to attend, then those students had to be admitted to a white school closer their homes or the school board risked violating state code 1662.
The report had a wider scope than just the schools. School segregation was only one-third of the report. The remaining two-thirds documented abuses—boycotts and violent assaults—suffered by the Japanese after the Earthquake and fire. The main theme of the report was that after the earthquake and fire, Japanese nationals living in San Francisco had been the targets of a malicious campaign, a campaign orchestrated by the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League and in violation of the
1894 Treaty. The tenor of the report was summarized in Metcalf’s concluding statement: “If, therefore, the police power of San Francisco is not sufficient to meet the situation and guard and protect Japanese residents in San Francisco, to whom under our treaty with Japan we guarantee ‘full and perfect protection for their persons and property,’ then, it seems to me, it is clearly the duty of the Federal Government to afford such protection.”87
The school board was quick to defend its position. On December 19, Altmann stated he was “sorry to see in Mr. Metcalf’s report to the President the statement that the Chinese, Japanese and Corean [sic] Exclusion League prompted the action of the
Board of Education in Segregating the Japanese pupils.” Altmann claimed to be perplexed as to how Metcalf could reach such a conclusion because “long before the
Japanese exclusion league came into existence the board had already taken action in this matter and was not dictated to by any outside influence.” Altmann recalled that two years prior to the resolution the supervisors denied the school board funding for a
87 U.S. Senate, The Final Report, 17.
70 new Asian school because they were concerned about the tax rate. Without adequate appropriations “it was left for this, the calamity year, to bring forth additional facilities for the Japanese pupils in the Rehabilitated Oriental school,” stated Altmann.88 Even though the previous resolutions to segregate the Japanese were not enforced, Altmann argued that proposals to build a school should prove that the school board’s decision was grounded in the state school code and not in city politics. In response to the question about the distance students had travel to get to the Oriental School, Altmann argued that white students had to walk as far or farther than Japanese students. He also claimed that the Japanese Consul rejected his offer “to have a class established” for the youngest primary students who had to travel more than fifteen blocks to attend the Oriental School.89
Metcalf’s report ended part one of the segregation crisis. After the report was released, attention shifted to Washington D.C. The onus was on the White House to act. President Roosevelt wanted to settle the controversy quickly. When Japan defeated Russia, Roosevelt recognized Japan as a legitimate power and wanted to avoid conflict between their navies in the Pacific. Before the segregation order, he was concerned about the actions of California’s legislature. In March 1905, the
California Senate and Assembly unanimously passed resolutions against the Japanese, including laws to ban them from the state. The resolutions were not enforced but they worried Roosevelt. He called the California legislature “idiots” for passing the resolutions and expressed frustration that California lawmakers might instigate trouble
88 San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 1906. 89 San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 1906.
71 with Japan.90 Japan had proven its military might and Roosevelt considered it unwise to antagonize a country with such a formidable navy. When the October 11 resolution was passed by the school board, Roosevelt responded quickly by sending Metcalf to investigate. His quick response was a message to Japan that he was aware and concerned about the situation.
Roosevelt’s stand against segregation was not based on an enlightened sense of racial equality toward the Japanese. Roosevelt’s views about race were conditioned by the racist, white supremacist beliefs prevalent in his day. He held disparaging views of blacks and Chinese, considering theme to be inferior to whites. Yet his racial views were such that he could admire particular non-white individuals—such as
Booker T. Washington—or particular non-white group. Japan had proven itself in battle, which in Roosevelt’s mind, made them worthy of respect. In his racial hierarchy, he placed them below whites and above blacks and Chinese. This racial classification implied that Blacks and Chinese could not compete with white laborers, but Japanese immigrants could. Because Japanese immigrants presented a direct challenge to white laborers, Roosevelt concluded that interactions between the two groups would remain volatile.91
On December 3, two weeks before Metcalf released his report, Roosevelt spoke in front of Congress and issued a public statement about the controversy. He conjectured that hostility against the Japanese might end if they were citizens and he proposed granting Japanese immigrants the right to become naturalized citizens. The
90 Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 34. 91 Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 198-200.
72 uproar in San Francisco was immediate. The city, aghast at Roosevelt’s pronouncement, rallied behind the school board. Roosevelt was disturbed by San
Francisco’s response. He wrote to a friend, “The San Franciscans are howling and wooping and embarrassing me in every way, their manners are inexcusable.”92 After the hostile response to his speech, Roosevelt decided that the only way to placate the
Californians and keep peace with Japan was to restrict Japanese immigration. He relented, “Whether we like it or not, I think we have to face the fact that the people of the Pacific slope….will become steadily more and more hostile to the Japanese if their laborers come here, and I am doing my best to bring about an agreement with Japan by which the laborers of each country shall be kept out of the other country.”93
To broker the agreement, Roosevelt had to negotiate three separate deals: one with the San Francisco school board, one with the California Legislature, and one with
Japan. First, he needed to convince the school board to rescind the segregation order.
Once that was done, then he could ask Japan to restrict immigration of its laborers.
And finally he had to try to persuade the California legislature to curb its hostility toward the Japanese. Roosevelt summoned the school board to Washington, D.C.
The school board, accompanied by Mayor Schmitz, arrived on February 8, 1907. On
February 15, the two sides reached a compromise. The school board agreed to repeal the resolution if the President promised to ban Japanese laborers from entering the
United States. Roosevelt explained that segregating Japanese students would make it harder to get Japan to agree to keep their laborers from emigrating, and the school board agreed that exclusion took precedence over segregation.
92 Bailey, Theodore Roosevelt, 125. 93 Bailey, Theodore Roosevelt, 124-125
73 Conclusion
The compromise ended the school board’s involvement in the controversy.
When the school board returned to San Francisco, they were greeted with harsh criticism. San Francisco’s labor leaders were unhappy with the compromise and accused the school board of capitulating to the president before getting a complete ban on Japanese immigrants. The school board, in a seeming show of strength, clarified their position by affirming their legal right to segregate Japanese students. According to the school board, they “did not concede or intend to concede that its action was in violation of any of the stipulations of the treaty between the United States or Japan.”
Furthermore, they insisted that if the treaty attempted to “circumscribe the Board or prevent it from regulating its own school affairs, as the exercise of local policy power, such provisions in said treaty are nugatory and void.”94 The school board framed the outcome as a logical concession. They explained the president convinced them to rescind the resolution in order to relieve tension between the two nations so the federal government could peacefully negotiate a deal with Japan to restrict the flow of
Japanese immigrants. Ultimately, the school board’s solution to the controversy only changed the status of the older Japanese students. Japanese students continued to enroll in school unless they were approximately three years older than their primary school classmates. The older students were transferred to ungraded schools.
The school board was consistent throughout the entire episode. From beginning to end, they stressed their independence as a decision making body. The arguments they presented to justify their decision were framed as choices based on
94 San Francisco Unified School District, Minutes, (San Francisco, October 11, 1906), 472.
74 their role as educational leaders. They insisted that before the disaster they went through proper channels to segregate the Japanese. Without adequate funding, they could not construct a building for the Japanese in order to comply with state law. The earthquake and fire presented an opportunity, and they took advantage of it. When they were questioned about the matter, they defended their position by affirming their role as non-partisan public officials. They claimed to be beyond the influence of politics—in the guise of racist labor leaders—and immune to the emotional trauma caused by the disaster. Segregation was a rational decision based on state law as well as their dutiful response to complaining parents. The Federal government attempted to portray the resolution as an oddity, just one of several irrational acts perpetrated against the Japanese after the earthquake and fire. Their goal was to appease Japan, to give the perception that racism against the Japanese was caused by the destruction wrought by the earthquake and fire. In essence, it was a battle over perspective: the school board sought to emphasize their evenness before and after the disaster. The federal government wanted to emphasize how the disaster inflamed racial hostility.
The earthquake and fire—a monstrous event that devastated the city—became a tool to be manipulated as a means to implement and interpret political goals.
75 Chapter Three
Politics of School Construction: Progressive Reform and the Great Depression
The date was April 27, 1933. While the nation was preoccupied with a stagnating economy, San Franciscans focused momentarily on the inferno burning at
McAllister Street, between Broderick and Baker Streets. It started at 3:45 pm. A painter, using his blow torch to remove old paint, inadvertently started the fire. It moved quickly to the roof and then spread to adjacent buildings. Residents ran from their homes, grabbing whatever items they could—clothes, furniture, bird cages, a typewriter. It had been years since San Francisco witnessed a blaze so intense, “the first five-alarm fire…since the Ewing Field conflagration of 1926.”95 More than 600 firemen—approximately half the department—responded to the call. During the struggle to extinguish the blaze, five firemen were hurt, one of them critically. In all, twenty nine buildings caught fire; three burned completely.
Yet, despite the damage, San Franciscans breathed a sigh of relief. If the fire had started one hour earlier, the outcome could have been much worse. The building the painter set ablaze was Fremont Primary School, and one hour before the fire, it was occupied by 456 children. “It seems an act of God that school had been dismissed when the fire broke out,” stated a concerned parent.96 Outcry ensued for several weeks after the fire. The community demanded that “firetrap schools” be torn down, and safe schools built, but school construction was a complicated matter in San
Francisco. It was a contentious policy issue prior to the earthquake and fire. After the disaster, no one questioned the need to build schools. Controversy centered on two
95 San Francisco Chronicle, April 28, 1899. 96 San Francisco News, April 28, 1933.
76 questions: how should the city pay the cost of construction and what should be the goals for construction? Conflict intensified during the 1920s, when opinions hardened and the city divided over two methods of funding. Debate ensued as interest groups tried to advance their plans for new schools. The clamor instigated by the Fremont school fire was the latest episode in a protracted and complicated drama about the politics of school construction in San Francisco.
The debate over school construction included myriads of local actors who for more than a decade struggled to gain political advantage in order to realize their own agendas. The board of education and the board of supervisors argued fiercely over how to fund construction. Women’s civic clubs and the Parent Teachers’ Association
(PTA) usually sided with whoever had the power to actually fund construction, but they differed with the school board over which schools to build. Lesser known but influential civic organizations, like the Public Education Society, challenged anyone who opposed their views about funding.
Already complex, the situation was complicated further by the Great
Depression. Between 1929 and 1933, the world economy collapsed. The Depression did not shock San Francisco with overwhelming force like the earthquake and fire of
1906; its onset was more subtle. After the stock market crashed in October 1929, San
Franciscans stayed optimistic until 1931. That year, the severity of the economic downturn—which for the previous two years had been viewed as a natural slump in the business cycle—was beyond doubt. No longer could rising unemployment be shrugged off, as the homeless multiplied and breadlines grew long. In 1933 the economy had reached bottom and no one could guess when things might improve. The
77 Great Depression acted as both an impediment and accelerant to the school department’s building program. Although the Depression initially dampened the public’s will to fund school construction, it also strengthened resolve by presenting some interest groups an opportunity to achieve their goals.
The focus of this chapter—the politics of school construction between 1914 and 1933—is a story about the persistence of local educational politics. The issue of school construction had built up a tremendous amount of energy in the decade preceding the Great Depression. The depression forced people to redefine the problem of school construction and rethink their proposed solutions. For all the people involved, the question became how to attain their goals during a period of severe economic distress. This chapter looks at the process through which people shifted their rhetoric according to the present context and stayed alert to any developments that might bolster their cause. The story begins in the 1914 with a report critical of the
SFUSD. It spurred a broad campaign of school reform, including a massive building program. Relations between the supervisors and the school board drive most of the action in this chapter until the onset of the Depression. When the economy declined other groups played a significant role as they took advantage of opportunities to influence the politics of school construction.
New Political Structure
The 1914 report was the outcome of complaints that the school department was not adequately training students for employment in San Francisco’s business and industrial sectors. The report was commissioned by Amy Steinhart, a woman of
78 prominence in city politics. She and her husband were part of an affluent family with political connections to Governor Hiram Johnson’s wing of the progressive party in
San Francisco. The report concluded that although San Francisco was one of the richest cities per capita compared to other American cities, it had one of the lowest tax rates and subsequently spent comparatively little money on education. Data revealed that San Francisco—along with Savannah, Georgia—appropriated less money to education than all other cities with a population over 30,000. Problems like overcrowding and shoddy equipment were attributed to inadequate funding. The report made two recommendations. First, it suggested the school board “introduce business methods” of bookkeeping and budgeting. Second, the report called for revisions to the city charter, specifically to eliminate the $1 limit on the special tax for schools. The recommendations, if carried out, would raise additional money for schools and turn the school board into efficient managers of the department’s resources.97
After the report was published, Steinhart was moved to action and founded the
Public Education Society. In December 1914, the Public Education Society petitioned the Chamber of Commerce to pay the Federal Bureau of Education, under the leadership of Commissioner Philander Claxton, to assess the school department.
Claxton released the report in 1917 and the Claxton Report—as it became known— would provided a blueprint for change that transformed school governance in San
Francisco.
97 Lee Dolson, “The Administration of the San Francisco Public Schools, 1847 to 1947,” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1964), 409.
79 The Claxton report was heavily influenced by the ideas of a network of progressive reformers. Historian David Tyack calls the reformers administrative progressives, and Herbert Kleibard refers to them as social efficiency educators.98
Their goal was to make urban school districts more efficient by eliminating wasteful practices and developing programs to train citizens for work within an industrial economy. One crucial part of their strategy was to adopt the science of corporate management and create a professional cadre of educational leaders who were qualified to manage large urban school districts. In their view, a successful school district was contingent on having technical experts who could make decisions based on research and not politics. Administrative progressives wanted professional educators skilled enough to run an urban school district like a corporation.
Claxton’s report found San Francisco’s administrative structure fundamentally flawed. San Francisco’s charter required the superintendent to be a savvy politician instead of an educational expert. Because the superintendent was elected by the people, he could act independent of the school board and do what he needed to do to curry favor with the voters. The report cited the advice of a pioneer administrative progressive, Franklin Bobbit. Bobbit drew a parallel between corporations and urban school districts. He compared the superintendent to the chief executive of a company and the school board was likened to the company’s board of directors. The superintendent was subordinate and accountable to the school board, but they worked as a team. The superintendent had the autonomy to select deputies and run the school
98 David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard), 126-147; Herbert Kleibard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 77-85.
80 department. The school board relied on the superintendent’s technical expertise when they made decisions about school policy.99
Using Bobbit’s framework as a guide, the Claxton commission made three important recommendations. Its first recommendation addressed their biggest concern, which was to end the “dual headed” system of governance and arrange for the superintendent to be appointed by the board of education. The next two recommendations were supposed to remedy two flaws identified with the school board. The first flaw was that the school board could not levy taxes. Each year they had to get their budget approved by the supervisors. Second, the school board did not control school construction. If the supervisors approved their budget, then the school board had to submit plans to the Board of Public Works, who could delay construction if they so desired. Such rules negated the purpose of appointing an expert superintendent. The school board was essentially hamstrung and forced to accept decisions from people who had no technical expertise in education. The report concluded,
“The board of education of San Francisco is not an independent body. It has
neither the final or full power, nor full and final responsibility in the
management and control of the public school system and of its business and
educational affairs. The board of supervisors, having full power under the
charter to revise the estimates of the board of education before setting the
99 Frankin Bobbit cited in the U. S. Department of the Interior, Report to the San Francisco Board of Education of a Survey made under the Direction of the United States Commissioner of Education (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1917), 83-88.
81 school levy, may or may not grant the amounts contained in the estimate. The
Board of Public Works may or may not see fit to carry out the plans of the
Board of Education for the erection and repair of buildings. In either case the
power of the Board of Education to carry out its plans for the extension of the
school system and for the improvement of its efficiency depends on the actions
of an independent coordinate body over which the board of education has no
control.100
Two recommendations followed from the commission’s analysis. First, the city charter and state constitution had to change to give the school board control over the tax levy. Second, the school board should be given control over school construction. The commission made an additional suggestion related to the second recommendation. They suggested the school board initiate a building program to transform the district from an eight-four plan to a six-three-three plan. The existing eight-four plan provided students eight years of primary school and four years of high school, while the six-three-three plan guaranteed students six years of primary school, three years of junior high school, and three years of high school. The commission advised the school board to proceed cautiously. “Because of the comparative newness of this plan of organization in American schools,” wrote the commission, “any city the size of San Francisco will want to try the experiment of such organization in a few schools before adopting it generally.” But they emphasized the importance of following through on the plan. The commission explained, “One reason—and a very
100 U. S. Department of the Interior, Report to the San Francisco, 83-88.
82 important one—why this plan of organization should be carefully considered now is found in the fact that the board must provide relief in the immediate future for the present congestion in both high schools and elementary schools, and for this purpose must reconstruct and enlarge many old buildings or erect new ones.”101
The commission’s most grave concern was addressed when San Franciscans voted to end the double-headed administration of the school department. In 1920 voters approved Amendment 37, which made the superintendent an appointee of the school board. One difference in having an appointed instead of elected superintendent was that the candidates for the position did not have to be well known within the city.
The school board could search outside the city, across the country, for the person they judged to be most qualified for the position. When the current superintendent, Alfred
Roncovieri, finished his term in 1923, Dr. Joseph Marr Gwinn, the former
Superintendent of New Orleans Public schools, became San Francisco’s first appointed superintendent in more than fifty years. Before Gwinn’s appointment,
Amendment 37 had more immediate effects. It also reconfigured the school board.
Prior to the Amendment, the school board consisted of four officers who held four year terms. The school board established by Amendment 37 consisted of seven members, each with a term of seven years. The new board—including two incumbents from the previous one—took office in January 1922.
With a new school board and superintendent, the school department would embark on an agenda for school reform. School construction would become the symbol of progress as well as the crux of tension between the school board and
101 U. S. Department of the Interior, Report to the San Francisco, 99
83 supervisors. The two sides would fight to control the material resources needed to build schools and the public’s perception of school construction. Advantage would swing back and forth between the two groups as they used state and local statues to outmaneuver each other and gain control over decision making.
Politics of School Construction
About one year before the appointment of the new board and four years after the Claxton Commission predicted something had to be done to relieve overcrowding in the schools, the public demanded action. On March 24, 1921 a headline from the
San Francisco Examiner read, “City awakens to urgent need for schools.” The headline was part of a campaign that began in March and continued for several months. The campaign, spearheaded by columnists Oscar Fernbach and Annie Laurie, exposed the sordid condition of San Francisco’s public school buildings. The problems were numerous. Most glaring was the overcrowding. Fernbach harped on the fact that enrollments had exceeded capacity. “School houses—more school houses—still more school houses,” implored Fernbach. The city needed more schools
“to accommodate San Francisco’s children without forcing them to sit for hours like sardines jammed into tin.” Without additional buildings, Fernbach stated it would be impossible to provide “every youngster in the city a full day’s instruction, on each school day.”102 Fernbach was criticizing the school district’s policy of providing only a half-day of instruction to those students attending overcrowded schools: half the students went to school in the morning, the other half in the afternoon. Laurie insisted
102 San Francisco Examiner, March 21, 1921.
84 that half-days of school gave students only half a chance to succeed. “Odd way of managing things, isn’t it?” she wrote. Reflecting on the states compulsory education law, she wondered, “How are you going to ‘compulse’ children to go to school when there’s no school for them to go to—at least for more than half a day?”103
The problem, according to Fernbach and Laurie, was that the school department did not build enough schools to keep pace with the city’s rapidly expanding population. It lagged behind other institutions that successfully adjusted.
“Growing, Growing, growing the good old city,” stated Laurie. She continued, “More clubs, more churches, more theaters, more people going into business, more buying and selling, more building, more children than ever before dreamed of here in San
Francisco, but not more school houses.” Both reporters identify 1906 as the turning point. “Since 1906,” stated Fernbach, “the school attendance in this city has trebled.
School space has not trebled—far from it.” To some extent, statistics bear out his assertion. The 1900 federal census reported San Francisco’s population to be 342,782; by 1920, it was 506,676. Likewise, daily average attendance increased. In 1900,
35,004 students were reported, on average, to have attended school each day. By
1920, average daily attendance increased to 50,458. While daily attendance did not
“treble” as Laurie and Fernbach claimed, the increase was significant. From 1900 to
1920, the school department had to absorb approximately 15,000 new students. To be sure, schools were built after the 1906 disaster. Citizens passed school construction bonds in 1908 and 1917 for $8,000,000 and 3,500,000 respectively. The 1908 bond issue funded the construction or renovation of approximately forty structures but the
103 San Francisco Examiner, March 20, 1921. California passed a compulsory school law in 1874.
85 new buildings did not expand the school department’s infrastructure. In 1917 the district reported using ninety-two buildings, down from ninety-nine in 1907. The
1917 bond was supposed to reduce the overcrowding but it had little effect. Three years later, in 1920, only $500,000 of $3,500,000 in bonds had been sold. That school year, the board of education resorted to asking teachers and civic organizations for help selling the bonds.
The 1921 Examiner campaign indicated that conditions within some schools had become intolerable. In addition to crowded classrooms, Laurie and Fernbach criticized the unsanitary conditions in many of the schools. They reported children studying in damp basements, dilapidated shacks, and bungalow style buildings, some of which were intended for temporary use after the earthquake and fire. Laurie described classrooms in one school by stating, “The air is bad, the light is bad, and to come right down to plain English, the odor is so bad in these particular rooms that it makes you seasick to go into one of them and stay for even half an hour.”104 Laurie’s and Fernbach’s reporting seemed to be effective. By the end of March, the community responded. Several organizations expressed “unbounded gratification to
‘The Examiner’ for the campaign it is now making for more and better school houses.”105 With the problem exposed, city and school leaders searched for explanations and solutions.
What no one seemed willing to do was lay blame on a specific person or group. Laurie assigned blame to the people of San Francisco “who failed to keep awake to the growing needs of the community in the matter of school
104 San Francisco Examiner, March 22, 1921. 105 San Francisco Examiner, March 25, 1921.
86 development.”106 Her general reprimand was the exception, as most public officials attributed the situation to circumstance. Mayor James Rolph explained that several schools were built after the earthquake and fire, but construction was disrupted by
World War I. He insisted that no one should be surprised because “for years the board of education has been struggling against terrible odds to make the best of a bad situation.”107 School Superintendent Alfred Roncovieri, after returning from a trip to the East coast, confirmed that school construction across the country was hampered by the wartime economy. He made sure to note that unlike other cities, “San Francisco had been laboring under a double handicap,” due to the combined impact of the 1906 disaster and World War I.108 Ralph Mcleran, the chair of the board of supervisors’ finance committee, elaborated further. In his assessment San Francisco was “seven years behind in its school program.” He calculated that at least “four years were lost because of war and through the inability of the city to market its last school bonds.”109
Mcleran took the lead in proposing a plan of action. His solution was clear.
“There is but one way in which these school buildings can be built, and that is— increase the tax rate of the city and county of San Fran.” He proposed two options.
“The question to be decided is whether we shall have a bond issue or adopt a policy of pay-as-you-go,” said McLeran. Pay-as-you-go meant that funding for school construction would be raised annually by a special tax. To build enough schools to alleviate overcrowding, McLeran estimated that for the next four or five years, taxpayers would have to pay an additional fifty cents for each one hundred dollars of
106 San Francisco Examiner, March 25, 1921. 107 San Francisco Examiner, March 30, 1921. 108 San Francisco Call, April 12, 1921. 109 San Francisco Call, April 27 1921.
87 assessed property. The alternative, which Mcleran favored, was to issue a new set of bonds. McLeran supported a bond issue because it required a smaller annual tax increase than the pay-as-you-go plan and it placed some of the onus of debt on future taxpayers. By issuing a bond, “the future generation, which will enjoy these public improvements, will pay its portion of the burden,” said McLeran. 110
In May, McLeran and the rest of the supervisors reversed there position and supported the pay-as-you-go plan. They judged the bond market as too unpredictable and they chose instead to raise the money through taxes, money which would be available immediately. The supervisors proposed a special school construction tax of thirty cents on each one hundred dollars of assessed property. The tax would raise approximately $1,700,000 for new schools. The board of education rallied behind the pay-as-you-go plan, as did the city’s newspapers and civic organizations. On May 26,
1921, Oscar Fernbach declared, “the fight is won.”111 The supervisors unanimously approved the special tax and planned to levy a similar tax for the next four years.
In January 1922, when the new school board created under Amendment 37 took office, one of their most pressing issues became the building problem. Actions taken the previous year received mixed reviews. On March 11, 1922 the San
Francisco Examiner, praised its campaign of the previous year with a headline that read, “City Schools Win the Fight.” According to the article, the Examiner’s campaign had “reached the season of fruitage.” “In less than a year”, San Franciscans who were dubious about a tax hike, could see the “wisdom of their actions.” The article concluded that “children going to school in shacks are not all taken care of yet,
110 San Francisco Examiner, March 28, 1921. 111 San Francisco Examiner, May 26, 1921.
88 but they pass daily splendid new buildings in which they will soon be comfortably housed.”112 Other reports were less approving and skeptical of demands for new buildings. An article in the San Francisco News wrote that overcrowding in schools had been overstated, and the campaign for new schools amounted to "propaganda.”
The article noted that while some schools were indeed overcrowded, many were not.
Additionally, building costs were exorbitant. Tax payers were being “doubly robbed” because “they are taxed to erect buildings not actually needed and they pay more for work than it is worth,” stated the article. Concern about the cost of building schools would, in time, become an issue, but it was generally accepted that schools needed to be built. What emerged as the central point of contention in 1922 was whether school construction should be funded through bonds or taxes.113
The choice between bonds or taxes was a national debate. In the 1920s, cities across America had to bear the cost of an expanding list of municipal services, the most expensive being education. Most cities allocated the largest percentage of its revenue to the school department. To cover the cost, city officials had to decide whether to accrue deficits or raise taxes. Both choices violated two important political and economic goals of the 1920s: balanced budgets and low taxes. During a decade in which efficiency was highly valued, Americans were wary of high deficits. Balance budgets inspired confidence that government officials were fiscally responsible.
Taxes were a longstanding nuisance. In 1910 Californians revolted against high property taxes and pressured the legislature to pass an amendment to reduce the tax rate. A decade later people were still dissatisfied about the taxes they were required to
112 San Francisco Examiner, March 11, 1922. 113 San Francisco News Letter, March 4, 1922.
89 pay. The debate over school funding involved two broad groups who were willing to sacrifice one goal in favor of another. Some were willing to borrow money and incur debt in order to build schools; others were willing to pay for construction directly through taxes even if that meant raising tax levies.
The question of bonds or taxes became a point of contention in April 1922 when the school board submitted its budget for the 1922-1923 fiscal year. This was the first budget submitted by the new school board created under Amendment 37.
Their budget requested $1,750,000 for school construction. Such cost would require the supervisors to approve a special tax rate of twenty-five cents per $100 of assessed valuation of property. Initially, the supervisors’ finance committee refused to approve more than twenty cents, but their support for the pay-as-you-go plan had waned. In
May, they rejected the school boards request for a special tax and decided to raise revenue for school construction through a bond issue. The school board “was on principle very much opposed to a Bond Issue position, insisting that the proper method for financing the building program should and would be to furnish an amount of at least $1,750,000 per year out of annual taxes.”114 But the supervisors had completely soured on the idea of a special tax and viewed a bond issue “as the only feasible method of wiping out the shortage of school facilities….”115
Supporters of the bond issue continued to refer to the 1906 disaster. An editorial in the San Francisco Examiner informed readers that schools destroyed in
1906 had “not been replaced, although we have been building new schools each year.”
114 Frederick Dohrmann, Jr., Three Years on a Board: Being the Experiences of the San Francisco Board of Education, 1922-1923-1924 (San Francisco: F. Dohmann, Jr), 8. 115 San Francisco Examiner, May 6, 1922.
90 The editorial admonished the public. “We have played with this situation long enough. We have skirted the edge of the problem with our makeshift financial plans.”
It advised readers to roll up their sleeves and “go at the problem whole-heartedly.” It concluded, “Only a bond issue will do it. Then let’s have the bond issue.”116
Both sides of the debate argued their plan was more efficient. The chair of the committee, Ralph McLeran insisted his goal was faithfully to uphold a campaign promise to keep the tax rate low. Low taxes was a theme he other supervisors would harp on through out the 1920s. They constantly referred to the notion of “economies,” the idea of doing more with less that was manifest through low taxes and high efficiency. The idea was to provide the same quality of services without raising taxes.
To pass a bond would let the supervisors cut at least $1.5 million from the budget.
Critics accused the supervisors of being more concerned about their political futures than the welfare of the people. An editorial in the San Francisco Daily News warned readers they were about to be forced to swallow “a $10,000,000 pill.” The bond, according to the editorial, would be more costly and inefficient than the special tax.
$10,000,000 was too much money because the school board was not ready to build and “the money would have to remain idle.” The editorial noted that interest on the bonds would eventual cost more than the cost accrued if the money was appropriated annually in the budget. The editorial stated, “by not making the requested school appropriation, [the supervisors] can keep down the tax rate, to the benefit of future
116 San Francisco Examiner, May 17, 1922
91 electioneering.”117 It encouraged readers to reject the bond and support the school boards plan.
The supervisors downplayed the economics and politics of the debate. Their primary argument was grounded in state law. When the supervisors dashed the idea of a twenty cent tax in favor of a $10,000,000 bond issue, they claimed to be heeding the warning of San Francisco’s city attorney George Lull. Lull advised the board that
California State law limited special taxes for education to 15 cents per ever one hundred dollars of assessed property. The previous year’s thirty cent tax rate was unconstitutional, stated Lull. During May and July, the supervisors consulted with
Lull to confirm the state law regarding the special tax rate. On July 28, 1922, Lull gave his opinion. First the city attorney clarified the supervisor’s power relative to the state in regards to education. He explained that “Article IX of the [California] constitution makes education and the management and control of the public schools a matter of state care and supervision.” “Moreover,” he continued, “it should be emphasized that the power of a municipality in this regard can only run current with, and never counter to, the general laws of the state.” Given this provision, the special tax rendered last year was unconstitutional because section 1838 of the political code prohibited a special tax for education from exceeding fifteen cents per $100 of assessed valuation of property.
Next, Lull gave his opinion about an apparent contradiction within the state constitution. As recommended by the Claxton Commission, a new amendment, section 1612a, was added to the California State political code in 1921. The new law
117 San Francisco Daily News, May 26, 1922.
92 seemed to give school boards across the state the power to levy whatever amount of taxes they deemed necessary. Section 1612a stated that once the board of education proposed a budget,
“the supervisors of each county or city and county must [emphasis mine]
annually at the time and in the manner of levying county or city and county
taxes levy and cause to be collected a district tax for each school district whose
budget shows a district tax to be necessary, and to fix such a rate for such
district tax and will produced at least the amount of district tax necessary, and
to fix such a rate for such district taxes will produce at least the amount of
district money requested by the particular district.”118
The law also stipulated that if the supervisors refused to accept the board of education’s budget then the city auditor was authorized to overrule the supervisors.
The critical phrase to be interpreted was that the city and county must levy taxes requested by the school board. Lull had to decide if the supervisors had the right to reject the school board’s budget or if they were compelled by state law to pass the school board’s levy, even when it exceeded fifteen cents. Lull decided there was no contradiction between the sections 1838 and 1612a. He concluded the supervisors had full controlled over the municipal tax rate, but they had to adhere to the mandated limit on the special tax. In five years, section 1612a would be reconsidered, but for
118 Municipal Record, August 17, 1922.
93 the moment, Lull gave the supervisors legal sanction to resume their control over school funding.
The board of education did not challenge Lull’s interpretation, but they continued, unsuccessfully, to advocate for the pay-as you-go plan. When the school board realized the supervisors would not relent, the board struck a compromise. A letter, dated August 14, stipulated the conditions of the compromise. It was signed by board president Dohrmann and addressed to finance committee chair Mclearan. The letter reminded Mclearn that in addition to the $12,000,000 bond, “your Finance
Committee unanimously agreed, at the said conference, that there shall continued to be provided from the annual tax levy, for the purpose of taking care of the normal expansion of the School Department, a sum of not less than One Million Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand (1,250,000) Dollars, annually….” The letter stated explicitly that money raised by the bond issue was only to be used for the “catching up program,” which meant the “reconstruction and replacement of present obsolete schools.”
Under the above conditions, Dohrmann wrote to Mclearan, “Our Board, therefore, respectfully submits, through your Committee, to the Board of Supervisors, its hearty endorsement of the project to call for an election…to vote upon the issuance of
Twelve Million Dollars ($12,000,000) worth of bonds…devoted to the ‘catching-up,’ rebuilding or rehabilitating program.”119
With the school board’s endorsement, the supervisors resolved to hold a special election for the bonds on November 22. The bond issue received widespread support. An editorial in the San Francisco Examiner insisted that only a “good size
119 Dohrmann, Three Years, 10.
94 bond issue” could raise the money to build enough schools. The editorial condemned the pay-as-you-go plan because the special tax levies only “toyed with the problem.”120 Other newspapers, like Chronicle and the Bulletin, and organization like the Parent-teacher’s Association, Women’s Civic Clubs, and the Chamber of
Commerce endorsed the bond.
On Nov 9, with the vote less than two weeks away, the board of supervisors engineered a city wide campaign. They coupled the 10,000,000 school bond with a
$2,000,000 bond to build a shelter for sick, elderly men. The 12,000,000 bond was hyped as money to provide relief for the elderly and good schools for the young.
Proponents did not try to dodge the fact that the bond was a large debt to incur. “It sounds like a lot of money. It is a lot of money, but it isn’t one cent too much.
Twelve million isn’t too much to invest in the future of San Francisco,” stated one editorial.121
To promote the bond, the supervisors and their supporters stressed the urgency of the situation by emphasizing several longstanding problems. Schools were still congested and more than 1,000 students continued to attend school part-time. The school department was force to rent 106 extra buildings, many of which were unsanitary flats, basements, and shacks. Newspapers included several political cartoons that stoked concern about unsafe and overcrowded schools. They printed pictures of schools with titles such as “flimsy shacks that house pupils” or with captions that asked “would you send your children here?”122 Teacher had students
120 San Francisco Examiner, August 15, 1922. 121 San Francisco Chronicle, November 21, 1922. 122 San Francisco Examiner, November 16, 1922.
95 create posters telling people to support education by voting yes for the relief and school bonds.
Advocates paid special attention to fire trap schools. The danger of fire resonated with San Franciscans. The Claxton Commission in 1917 noticed “there was a marked agitation among the people of the city regarding greater precaution against fire hazards in the schools. This was doubtless partly stimulated by the experience of the great fire some years ago; also by some recent tragic experiences in the east.”123
The tragic experiences referred to by the Claxton Commission occurred about two years after the 1906 disaster. On March 4, 1908, in Collinwood Ohio, a town near
Cleveland, two teachers and 172 students were killed when fire swept through their primary school. For several weeks, San Francisco newspapers reported that no school in the city was properly equipped to evacuate students in case of an emergency. On the eve of the bond vote, advocates combined the fear of fire traps with memories of the 1906 disaster. It was reported that the department continued to use more than thirty wood frame buildings constructed before 1890. An additional thirteen wood frame schools built after the 1906 disaster as temporary facilities were still open. One particularly ominous political cartoon showed a fireman carrying a lifeless young girl from a school consumed by fire. A report by the Civic League of Improvement Clubs and Associations of San Francisco stated that “Many of the buildings are insanitary
[sic] and a great many of them dangerous fire traps.” According to the report, “The catastrophe of 1906 has left these memoirs in its wake. The destruction wrought that year has never been over-come by the board of education.” The report implored
123 U. S. Department of the Interior, Report to the San Francisco, 187.
96 voters to approve the bond because “the only way to meet these trying conditions is by building on a large scale.”124
One day before the vote, several schools let students demonstrate in support of the bond. The Fremont Primary school rally exemplified the concern about unsanitary fire traps. Fremont, constructed in 1892, had drawn attention during the fire trap scare of 1908. It was a three story, wood frame building, typical of most wood frame schools in the city. In 1908, parents complained the school was a hazard and demanded that school officials construct a fire escape. Fourteen years later, the school was still in bad shape. On Nov 21, the day before the bond vote, more than seven hundred students from Fremont Primary marched in the streets shouting the slogan
“take us out of the dungeon.” The San Francisco Chronicle listed Fremont’s problems. In addition to a leaking roof and an old, outdated furnace, the school had one narrow fire escape leading outside the school. If a fire broke out, the main staircase inside the school was “just wide enough for one child to come down at a time…” “A first-class fire trap,” reported the Chronicle.125
The next day, the bond issue passed overwhelmingly. 69,262 people voted in favor; 11,504 voted against, giving the supervisors 15,000 votes over the required two- thirds majority. Passage of the bonds brought about a momentary respite in the debate over funding, and with the money approved, attention turned to the goals and details of construction.
124 Civic League of Improvement Clubs and Associations of San Francisco, vol. 8, no. 8 (November 1922), 1-7. 125 San Francisco Chronicle, November 21, 1922.
97 The Building Program
San Franciscans had to decide how to allocate the bond money. Potential for conflict became apparent as different groups expressed a variety of goals for school construction. Some people wanted to solve the problems mentioned earlier—to alleviate overcrowding and replace fire trap schools. Others wanted to upgrade the public school system and use it as a lure to attract newcomers to the city. Newspapers occasionally published full page adds promoting the school department. One lay-out in the Chronicle stated that “one great magnet” a city or state can use to attract
“desirable home seekers…is good school facilities.” It declared, “California has been recognized for her superior system of schools, and San Francisco can claim distinguished representatives.”126
The school board had plans of their own. Historian Victor Shradar described the 1922 school board as men and women who shared the values of the administrative progressives. They valued scientific research and the advice of experts. The school board decided to act on some of the recommendations put forward in the Claxton
Report. 127 Their biggest decision was to embark on an ambitious agenda to reconfigure the entire school department. Expecting an annual tax of $1,250,000, they began an extensive ten year building program, officially known as the Reorganization and Housing Program of the Public Schools of San Francisco.
Their first task was to conduct a study to determine “past, present, and probable future distribution of school children by school divisions.” Results from the
126 San Francisco Chronicle, June 12, 1922. 127 Victor Shradar, “Ethnic Politics, Religion, and the Public Schools of San Francisco, 1849-1933” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1974), 123-133; Dolson, “The Administration,” 406-422
98 study estimated the annual growth in enrollments up to the year 1935 and predicted how increased enrollments might affect the distribution of students across the city.
Based on the results, the school board developed a ten year plan for school construction. In 1924, they assembled a committee to review their plan. The review committee was composed of six people, including two prominent educational reformers, Stanford University’s Ellwood P. Cubberley and Oakland Superintendent,
Fred Hunter. Cubberley was the most prominent representative of the administrative progressive movement, and Hunter was one of the movement’s most respected adherents. The report submitted by Cubberley, Hunter and the rest of the committee illustrated how the building program adhered to the priorities valued by the efficiency educators.
The committee’s review was a glowing report of the building program. Their praise and suggestions echoed the advice given by the Claxton Commission. The
Claxton Commission wanted the school board to be an autonomous body, and the review committee saw evidence of the school board’s independence within their decision making process. “From the beginning of the bond campaign to the present time, it is obvious that the school authorities of San Francisco have looked upon this period of reconstruction and rehabilitation of the school plant as an unparalleled opportunity for bringing about much needed change in the educational organization of the city,” began the report. The committee praised the school board for independently deciding to overhaul the entire school district “rather than endeavoring to heed the clamors and evaluate the claims of individual sections, districts, or interests in the city.” The school board proceeded with their plans while knowing “that in the process
99 of reorganization and the development of a city-wide program, many cherished traditions, personal interests, and local conceptions of educational service would have to give way to the larger conception of the problem of educating the children of San
Francisco.” Accordingly, the report noted, the school board “exercised rare good judgment and an administrative sagacity that will, in the long run, mean a vast improvement in the educational service of the school system.”
“Administrative sagacity” was a core tenet of the administrative progressive movement. With a newly appointed superintendent, the school board began to cite the rhetoric of technical expertise. The building program was touted as the culmination of research, analysis, and dialogue between educational professionals. The school board wielded the claim of expertise like a shield to deflect criticism of the building program. One such instance occurred soon after the review committee released their report. In March 1924, the school board announced it was going to build a high school on the site of Monroe Elementary School in the southern portion of the city.
One neighborhood association agreed that a high school was needed but disagreed with the school board over where to build the school. The association asked the mayor to intervene. Mayor Rossi, in talks with the school board, said, “These people represent by this large delegation, a large part of the city of San Francisco and should have a right to say something about this school question.”128 When mayor asked if the board was concerned about the cost of building a school on the site favored by the association, the school board responded,
128 Dohrmann, Jr., Three Years, 71.
100 Mr. Mayor, this is, in the mind of the members of the Board of
Education not a question of money, as shown by the fact that we have decided
to build a high school in that district; we have the funds for the purpose
available out of the Bond Issue. Therefore, it is not a question of money, but a
principle. The members of our Board have personally made an intensive study
of this whole problem and have had expert advice from the Superintendent and
his staff, confirmed by a committee of six expert educational people not
connected with the San Francisco Department, who have confirmed our
selection of the Monroe site.129
It was with such confidence that the school board proceeded with their building program. The goal of the building program was to transform the school district from the eight-four plan to the six-three-three plan, as suggested by the
Claxton Commission. The key to the program was the junior high school. Deciding to build junior high schools meant the school board had embraced a nation wide trend.
During the 1920s, junior high school was the craze amongst educational reformers. At the turn of the century, the eight-four plan was standard, but critics condemned it because most students failed to reach high school; the majority dropped out some time between grades five and eight. The drop out rate indicated to reformers that the eight- four plan was inefficient and wasteful. They proposed junior high school as a solution. Historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban explain that administrative progressives wanted to transform children and society by founding a separate
129 Dohrmann, Jr., Three Years, 72.
101 institution for seventh, eighth, and ninth graders. It was supposed to serve as a mechanism to sort students and decrease dropout rates by providing targeted vocational and academic guidance. Students who deserved to go to high school would get the opportunity; the rest would be prepared for the workforce. Another part of their plan was to construct a school system that could track students based on their perceived abilities and provide students curricula—vocational or academic—that could train them to function in a particular role. They designed metrics to measure students and established institutional mechanisms to sort them.
The idea of the six-three-three model gained momentum after 1910, and by
1920 the need to establish junior high schools was a foregone conclusion. What the
Claxton Commission called an experiment was now an educational axiom. The certainty with which reformers viewed the junior high school was apparent in the review committee’s recommendation: “Introducing the junior high…is no longer an experiment. The junior high school is rapidly being made a part of practically every city school and in light of the building program now being inaugurated in San
Francisco, it would be nothing short of a colossal and unpardonable blunder on the part of the administration not to make the change in organization at this time.”130
Commitment to the idea of junior high school did not translate into the rapid construction of school buildings. Regardless of the commitment and urgency, money had to be raised; buildings had to be built. Implementing the six-three-three plan meant building separate schools to house 13,817 seventh, eighth and ninth grade students, and this was only one part of the comprehensive building program. The
130 Board of Education of San Francisco, Report of the Reviewing Committee of the Reorganization of the San Francisco Schools (San Francisco: Phillips and Van Orden Co., 1924), 5.
102 school board also established new specifications for primary and high schools. The new plan required that elementary schools have twenty-four classrooms with the capacity to hold 900-1000 students. Most elementary schools contained eight, ten, or twelve rooms. High schools were to hold 1,500 to 2,000 students. In addition to more classrooms, all schools had to be outfitted with various amenities, including an auditorium, gymnasium, shop room, and a meeting place for organizations like the
PTA and the boy scouts.
The review committee predicted the most costly expenditure would be real estate. They concluded that San Francisco was far behind other “progressive cities” in providing students adequate playground space. It was anticipated that the department would have to purchase considerable land around school sites, old and new. “It is probably not an exaggeration of fact to say that the board of education might spend one-half of the available bond funds on sites alone, without achieving a thoroughly satisfactory status,” warned the committee. Considering the high cost of purchasing land and constructing buildings, the committee insisted that “twelve million dollars…will only make a fair beginning toward the solution of the school housing problem of the city.”131
As the review committee predicted, acquiring land would occupy much of the school boards attention and resources. The 1925 Grand Jury report described the initial stages of the building program, which mostly involved the school board’s effort to procure land. In San Francisco, a grand jury was selected each year to assess each department of the municipal government. They were supposed to be a bi-partisan
131 Board of Education, Report of the Reviewing Committee, 24.
103 mechanism for determining how well city government was functioning. Their reports often sparked controversy as they were accused of favoring one interest group at the expense of another. For successive years, the grand jury reported on the progress and setbacks of the school board’s building program. In the 1925 report, school board president Dohrmann thanked the supervisors for “bringing the purchase of lands under the twelve-million dollar bond issues to a point of reasonable satisfaction.” The school board also thanked the grand jury for helping to obtain the services of an assistant to the city attorney. The assistant was specifically assigned to help to the school board resolve any legal problems related to land they were trying to buy or sell.
In one case the school board asked the grand jury to help “acquire a parcel of land owned by Abby Rose Wood, an elderly woman, at the corner of Delores and Dorland streets….” Wood had received notice from the courts that she would be compensated for the property, but she did not pick up the money and ignored orders to vacate. The grand jury made certain to mention that although the sheriff had been notified to evict
Wood, “the members of the board of education feel a personal sympathy for her because of her age, and she has been given such notice of eviction, but has wholly ignored the same.” The grand jury promised to “bring friendly influence to bear upon the aged women,” and they expressed “high hopes of a favorable result to this problem, which is looked upon as the most annoying, not to say the most important, situation at present.”
While Abby Rose Wood caused a momentary stir, bigger troubles loomed. In the last paragraph of their report, the grand jury recalled the school board’s letter from
August 14, 1922 and revealed that the supervisors had not complied with the
104 conditions stipulated in the letter. The supervisors levied a tax well below the amount expected by the school board. Nothing in the grand jury’s report indicated overt concern about the issue but the situation was important enough for them to insist that the “proper persons take notice” of the supervisor’s “failure to completely adhere to these provisions.” Difficulties notwithstanding, the grand jury gave the “highest recommendation and fullest confidence” to the school board.
The following year, the grand jury continued to lavish praise on the school board. During the 1925-1926 fiscal year, seven new schools opened and twelve new contracts for construction had been awarded. The school department had opened three junior high schools—two newly constructed buildings and one renovated primary school. Such progress was viewed by the grand jury as proof of the school board’s commitment to providing the community with the best educational facilities.
The supervisors did not receive like praise. Their continued failure to provide adequate funding through an annual tax was viewed as their unwillingness to recognize the importance of erecting modern facilities.
The School Board Takes Control
Since 1923 the supervisor’s unevenly provided revenue for the building program. In 1923 appropriations were $500,000; in 1924, 250,000; in 1925,
1,100,000; and in 1926, 900,000. These figures were far short of what was deemed necessary to continue the building program. The school board was expecting annual
105 appropriations of at least $1,250,000. The grand jury’s assessment was higher; they calculated the supervisors should have raised $1,620,000 per year and because of the supervisor’s inconsistent funding they declared “pressing needs now exist for additional funds to provide for the cumulated expansion needs of the schools.”132
Tension over funding reached a critical point in the spring of 1927. That year’s grand jury report previewed the controversy. The report started by recapping the positive achievement’s of the building program. Most notably, they announced that phase one of the “school building program is now practically at an end.” The report labeled the first phase as the “catching-up” program, “for which the $12 million bond issue was provided in 1923, and has had for its purpose the replacing of old building by new building and the relief of crowded conditions in already existing buildings.” With the bond money totally spent or allocated, it was time to begin phase two, the “expansion program.” It was defined as “the program necessary to provide additional school buildings in line with the growth of the City’s population.” Costs for the expansion program were estimated to require annual expenditures of at least $1,600,000, but the supervisors did not raise this money as it promised to do. The grand jury calculated that over the past five years $2,300,000 tax dollars had been collected for the expansion program. They surmised it was “therefore evident that at the end of the five year period there is an accumulation of unmet expansion needs amounting to
$5,200,000.” The report concluded, “If this sum of money had been provided along
132 City and County of San Francisco, Final Report of the Grand Jury, (San Francisco: The Recorder PRTG. and Pub. Co.,)
106 with the bond money, the school department would not be faced as it now is with a large shortage in school buildings to properly house all the 100,000 children enrolled.”
In May the school board submitted a budget for $7,621,529, of which
$2,100,000 was to be designated for purchasing land and building schools. The
$2,100,000 was intended to restart the pay-as-you-go system. To satisfy the school board’s demand, supervisor would have to add twelve cents to the tax rate. For several months, the supervisors and school board haggled over the budget until August when the supervisors decided to cut $900,000 from the building fund. After being rejected by the supervisors, the board of education consulted the city attorney, John O’
Toole, who succeeded George Lull in 1926. O’Toole, in contrast to Lull, referred the school board to section 1612a of the state political code which stated that if the supervisors rejected the school board’s request then the city auditor had to pass the levy. On August 7 the board of education sent a formal letter to city auditor Thomas
Boyle demanding he pass their budget. The auditor refused, claiming that he would not sign a budget rejected by the supervisors unless forced by a court order. The school board obliged and sued the supervisors.
At this point, the supervisors controlled decision making over school construction. The city charter gave them full authority to revise the school board’s budget and the supervisors often cut expenditures for school construction because that was one of the school department’s most costly expenses. Supervisors and the school board engaged in a public battle for control of the building program. Each accused the other of acting out of self-interest and in complete disregard for tax payers and school children. Two editorials summed up the debate. The first was published in the
107 Chronicle and it opened with a headline that read, “School board’s demand strips camouflage from fake economy.” The editorial skewered the supervisors for being selective in their plans to save money. “It has long been the fashion to run for office on promises to cut the tax rate by economy,” stated the editorial. According to the author, the supervisors were particular about how to curb spending; they were reluctant to cut funding for programs “where they might lose votes.” The supervisors were not directly accountable for educational policy, so they “‘economized’ by sacrificing the public schools.” The editorial claimed the supervisor’s refusal to collect taxes for the building program was disingenuous because “in 1922 the public was promised that in the future there would be a year-to-year building policy to keep up with demands.” Children would suffer the most, stated the author, because they continued to attend old and unsafe schools. The reader was left with a somber prediction. If the supervisors cut funding on school construction, it might cause a
“breakdown in the whole city program.”133
The second editorial was published in the Examiner. The headline warned:
“Taxes low again, unless school board lifts them.” It praised the supervisors for keeping the “taxes down, as promised when elected in 1925.” A twelve cent tax was unnecessary because previous bonds provided enough funding to require, at maximum, a special tax of seven cents. The editorial lauded the finance committee for keeping the tax rate low by denying funds to other departments, but the board of education, “being in some respects a State rather than a municipal body,” presented a unique challenge because it claimed to have the legal power to levy taxes regardless of
133 San Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 1927
108 the amount. The author tried to assure readers that the “exhibit of economy” by the board of supervisors would stand in court and the tax rate would remain low, but in the unlikely chance “the tax rate goes up now in response to a court decree, the full responsibility will rest upon the board of Education.”134
Other critics of the school board questioned their progressive building program. In early September, days before the court ruling, several public officials and prominent citizens accused the school board of being irresponsible by placing higher value on progressivism than safety. Adolph Uhl, a manager of the City Efficiency
League and candidate for mayor, accused the school board of wasting money to build gymnasiums instead of fixing and rebuilding fire trap schools. According to Uhl “so long as children are going to school in wooden structures and some are going to school only a half day, the board of education should use all its money in construction of new buildings.” He continued, “…the board of education intends to spend $1 million of its requested $2,100,000 on gymnasiums and cafeterias. At the same time it is saying that children are housed in fire traps.”135
On September 12, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the school board giving them exclusive power over their budget. Opponents claimed the ruling severely constrained the power of the supervisors. “Never again can the supervisors promise outright to reduce taxes; always they must add the proviso: ‘if the school board be willing,’” stated an Examiner editorial. The author focused on the school board’s inadequate response to fire trap schools and conditions that left children “crowded in basements” and “housed in ancient shacks.” $12,000,000 from the bond issue of 1922
134 San Francisco Examiner, August 31, 1927 135 San Francisco Daily News, September 9, 1927.
109 had been “expended by the school board for a few very expensive structures, leaving many firetraps still in existence.” It was pointed out that only $75,000 of the proposed
$2,100,000 was allotted to replacing a fire trap school, while the rest was going to frivolous projects. “Is it wise to build music-rooms while firetraps exist?” asked the editorial.136 As expected, people who supported the school board argued the ruling was justified. An editorial in the Bulletin insisted the supervisors were beaten “fairly and squarely,” but instead of accepting the decision, the supervisors were “whining and even trying to pass the buck of the tax rate increase on the school board.”
According to the editorial, fault lies with the supervisors, who beat “the school board down to a point at which it could not function efficiently.” The school board, who showed “wonderful patience,” had limits, “and when that limit was reached it invoked the aid of the law and won hands down.”
The matter was formally settled but tensions continued to run high. Days after the ruling, the finance committee accused the school board of wasteful spending. The committee claimed, “School building costs, under the board of education’s management, are running twice as high as Oakland and Los Angeles.” Supervisor
Mark Milton began an investigation, which concluded two years later, when he presented a report in 1929 that claimed the school department was building
“educational palaces.”137 A community newspaper implored the school board to not
“feel compelled to make their school buildings exactly the show places of the community; a habit which has lead to expensive and unwarranted competition between
136 San Francisco Examiner, September 13, 1927. 137 October 19 1929 in San Francisco Public Library SFUSD files, box 134.
110 communities….”138 Other city agencies expressed contempt for what they considered to be excessive spending on school construction. The department of libraries explained how their department was slighted because the school board developed plans to spend two million dollars to build a high school and junior high school in the park-presidio district, while there was hardly any money allocated to build new libraries. When asked why, the explanation was straightforward: “The board of education can levy taxes without the consent of the supervisors…Such is not the case with other departments of the city.”139
When the school board was confronted with figures that revealed a junior high school in Oakland cost $270,000, while a similar structure in San Francisco cost approximately $650,000, they relented somewhat and agreed to investigate the cost discrepancy, but it was clear the balance of power had shifted. School board’s advantage was evident through board president Daniel Murphy’s defiance. He argued that construction costs were high because they built safe, fireproof schools. Murphy said that if engineers tell him that he can cut cost and continue to build fireproof schools, then “maybe I’ll say too, but if left to myself I’d say we’d better build as we’ve been building.” Murphy’s showed the board’s strength through his insistence to continue building and he also illustrated the school board’s willingness to refer to fire safety as a means to justify the building program.
The school board’s power became more evident during a new conflict with the supervisors over the 1929-1930 budget. In August 1929 the board of education submitted a budget for $10,778,179, which was an increase of $297,041 over the
138 San Francisco Commercial News may 8, 1929. 139 Richmond Banner, May 17 1929.
111 previous budget. When the finance committee led by supervisor Franck Havenner asked for the school board to reduce the budget, board president Murphy responded,
“We believe that we figured the budget and arrived at an irreducible minimum.” “We are however,” said Murphy, “willing to listen to reasonable suggestions.”140 The school board did not revise the budge and forced the supervisors to cut other expenditures in order to keep the tax rate down. According the San Francisco News, the supervisor kept the tax rate down “in spite of the fact that the board of education has within the past three years adopted the new policy of financing the annual building program out of taxes.”141
The 1920s ended well for the school board. They accomplished several noteworthy achievements in their building program. The six-three-three plan was well underway. From 1922 to 1930, the school department built fifty schools, including nine junior high schools. Fifty-one percent of all seventh, eight, and ninth graders were attending junior high schools.142 Most importantly, the school board controlled the city purse. Since gaining the power to pass their own budget, the school board annually levied a tax of $2,100,000 for school construction. Total school expenditures amounted to thirty percent of the municipal budget for the 1927-1928 fiscal year.
Before the California Supreme Court decision, school expenditures never exceeded twenty-four percent. Changes to the special tax rate during the 1920s reflected the controversy over funding. In 1922 when the supervisors decided to fund construction
140 San Francisco News, August 6, 1929. 141 San Francisco New, September 2, 1929. 142 San Francisco Public Schools, A Ten year Record 1920-1930, Together with General Information Concerning the San Francisco Public Schools (San Francisco: San Francisco Board of Education, 1930), 24-25.
112 through taxes, they levied a special tax of twenty-eight cents per $100 of assessed property. From 1923-1927, there was a precipitous drop in the special tax levied by the supervisors. The highest levy collected during that period was 15 cents in 1923 and 1925; the lowest was 3 cents in 1924. Beginning in 1927, each year, the school board levied a special tax above twenty cents, with the highest at twenty-eight cents in
1927 and the lowest at twenty-three cents in 1930. It probably seemed like the good times would continue indefinitely. Even when the stock market crashed in October
1929, school officials did not flinch; they carried on with the building program.
Indeed, times had changed. In 1922, there was a spirit of cooperation in San
Francisco in regards to school construction. The problems of overcrowding or fire trap schools were attributed to the earthquake and fire of 1906 or the inconveniences caused by World War I. When the school bond passed in 1922, it passed overwhelmingly. The city was on one accord about school construction. In five years,
San Franciscans were still unhappy about their schools, but now they were willing to point fingers. No longer were people referencing World War I or the disaster of 1906.
The school board implicated the supervisors and likewise, the supervisors castigated the school board; they were engaged in direct political conflict.
Control over decision making was governed by the formal rules and procedures listed in the city charter and state constitution. Prior to 1927, the charter constrained the school board by opening up the decision making process to include the supervisors by giving them veto power over the school budget. However, state law, as interpreted by the California Supreme Court, expelled the supervisors from the process, giving the school board total control over the tax levy taxes. Ultimately, the
113 conflict was about values and resources. The supervisors and the school board battled over whose values should be given priority when it was time to set the tax levy. The school board gave priority to the six-three-six program and the supervisors wanted to keep the tax rate low and replace fire traps.
Sparring continued until disaster struck when America’s economy collapsed in
1932. For the rest of the decade, the economy languished, causing untold suffering across the country. San Franciscans suffered their share, and just as individuals sought ways to cope, the school board sought to continue its building program. They would be forced to adjust their views on school construction and altered there relationship to other groups in the political environment.
The Great Depression and Political Compromise
What historians today call the Great Depression was an enigma to Americans who experienced it. It was an enigma was because few people saw it coming. When the stock market crashed, Americans viewed it as extraordinary, but not abnormal.
They did not view the crash to be an omen of what was to come. They understood the economy moved in cycles, and they expected the market to recover. Moreover, at the beginning of the 1930s, many Americans were optimistic about society and the economy. It was an exciting time because the first three decades of the 1900s were years of momentous change. Historian David Kennedy assembled a list of “epoch changing events”: “the great war, mass immigration, race riots, rapid urbanization, the rise of giant industrial combines like U.S. Steel, Ford, and General Motors, new technologies like electric power, automobiles, radios and motion pictures, novel social
114 experiments like prohibition, daring campaigns for birth control, a new frankness about sex, women’s suffrage, the advent of mass-marketing advertising and consumer financing.”143 Americans were optimistic because for many people the 1920s were prosperous years. By the 1929 over 45 million people were employed and collectively, Americans earned approximately $77 billion dollars, an unprecedented level of income.144 Businesses and consumers benefited as consumer goods became cheaper and more affordable to average Americans. Before the crashed there existed a general idea that anyone could become rich if they invested their money properly.
Thousands tried their hand in the stock market with dreams of a windfall. After the crash, people waited anxiously for the recovery and resumption of prosperity.
Historians, through hindsight, know what Americans living in the 1930s could not: that their confidence was grounded on a precarious reality. Although many
Americans improved their standard of living, many others suffered in squalor. One reason government officials were blindsided by the depression was that they did not have the tools to analyze the economy. The federal government did not keep accurate statistics on key indices like unemployment. Without such data they could not see the signs of economic distress. The government, however, was aware of one glaring problem: the plight of American farmers. Farmers prospered during World War I when they produced crops to support the war effort. When the war ended, they were stuck with a surplus of goods at rapidly decreasing prices. Many of them became
143 David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press), 13 144 Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 4th ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 240.
115 mired in debt. By 1931 when the economy reached bottom, the agricultural sector had been there for several years.
President Herbert Hoover embodied the dichotomy of optimism and concern.
When he took office in March 1929 he praised the American economy, but was aware that all was not right. This oft-quoted statement illustrated Hoover’s optimism. “We shall soon with the help of God be within sight of the day when poverty will be banished from the nation,” stated Hoover.145 But historians credit Hoover with being more astute than most politicians. He was not completely blinded by prosperity.
Before the crash, the soaring stock market worried him and he had deep concerns about the frivolous attitude with which Americans bought consumer goods and stocks on margin. One of his first tasks as president was to address the plight of farmers.
Although Hoover had a better grasp of the economy than most public officials, he did not foresee the imminent peril and saw no reason for stronger federal intervention. David Kennedy writes, “…no one—including Hoover, whose anxieties were keener than most—suspected that the country was teetering at the brink of abyss out of whose depths it would take more than ten years to climb.”146 Hoover, like so many others, considered the economy to be relatively sound. When the stock market crashed in October 1929, Hoover insisted that a quick and effective response would help the economy recover. Hoover set out to contain the effects of the crash by restoring the public’s confidence in the economy. One plan was to urge state and local governments to finance public works projects. He directly asked city mayors and state governors to accelerate and expand their construction projects in order to provide jobs.
145 Cited in Heilbroner, Worldly Philosophers, 241. 146 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 56.
116 His entreaty to state and local officials indicated the limits of Hoover’s insight. Public works was one strategy to strengthen the people’s faith in the economy by expanding employment. His insistence on locally funded public works illustrated his adherence to a belief in limited federal involvement in local government. He held strongly to the idea that local communities could work together and endure what he considered to be a temporary economic downturn. The federal government could help coordinate projects at the local level or provide careful guidance and encouragement, but it was up to the people in those communities to act; they had to do the work to sustain each other during the hard times.147
The school board’s building program benefited politically from Hoover’s appeal. At a convention of California educational leaders—including several from
San Francisco—attendees were urged to build schools. “By building now,” stated one speaker, “we not only take advantage of the lowest prices in years but we line up with
President Hoover’s program.” Newspapers reported that “San Francisco made a generous response to the Nation’s call for more building activity to relieve unemployment.”148 Timothy Reardon, president of the board of Public works, announced he was launching a $12,000,000 building program that included construction of schools, roads, streets and hospitals. Controversy over the educational palaces subsided when school construction became associated with employment. The school department, along with the board of public works, made plans to build several
“palace schools” that ranged from $400,000 to $1,000,000, including Balboa High
147 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 56; William Mullins, The Depression and the Urban West Coast, 1929-1933: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1. 148 March 12, 1930 in San Francisco Public Library SFUSD files, box 135.
117 School which was allotted $650,000; Aptos Junior High School, $890,000; and
George Washington high school, $1,000,000.149
Debate over the tax levy continued as the supervisors continued to ask the school board to cut its budget to reduce the city tax rate. In May 1930, the school board requested 1.7 million for school construction. During the summer and fall, the supervisors swore they would do what they could to keep the tax rate below $4 for every hundred dollars of assessed property. The supervisors warned that if they were force to accept the school budget, then they would be forced to levy a tax rate of
$4.04. Supervisor Angelo Rossi, the chairman of the finance committee, wanted to board to cut the entire $1.7 million dollars allocated for the school construction, claiming that it was unnecessary to build schools at this time.150 Another supervisor,
James Power, made less stringent demands, telling the board to cut at least $1 million from its budget. School board President, Ira Coburn, called any cuts to the building program “indiscreet.” Former board president Murphy agreed, “we members of the board know that any reduction in the building program this year will be difficult to make up next year…Furthermore, I am opposed to interfering with the building program which has been mapped out over a period of years and is virtually necessary for the protection and education of your children.” The school board agreed to cut the budget $150,000, far less than recommended by the supervisors. The city-wide tax rate was set at $4.04. It was only the second time in San Francisco’s history that the tax rate exceeded $4. Mayor Rossi reflected on the school board’s power. “If other
149 March 19, 1930 in San Francisco Public Library SFUSD files, box 135. 150 June 3, 1930 in San Francisco Public Library SFUSD files, box 135.
118 departments of the city had the same authority as the Board of Education, we would have a rate of about $8,” he said.151
Taxes are a social dilemma because private citizens with divergent values have to pay money to fund public services. Controversy turns on a variety of questions such as how much money should each individual be required to pay? Who has the right to levy taxes? What public services should be given priority? In normal times, these are difficult questions; during times of economic hardship, they become much more complicated. Historian William Mullins explains that as the reality of the Great
Depression gradually seeped into the American consciousness—most explicitly through the growing concern about unemployment—San Franciscans became more anxious about the tax rate. Occasionally, they publicly vented their concerns. In
September 1930, contempt for the school board’s power over the tax rate inspired a movement to amend the city charter. Sponsors of Amendment 27 argued that if the school board had the power to raise taxes, then they should be an elected body. As it stood, the mayor appointed the school board and the citizens voted to confirm his appointees. Dr. Frank Fischer, president of the California Literature Society and a spokesperson for the amendment, called the school board’s power to levy taxes “un-
American” and claimed it was “taxation without representation.” “We fought a bloody war to get rid of the practice,” stated Fisher. He accused the board of being
“autocratic in the management of the school” because they continuously “defied and defeated the people’s will.” Fisher elaborated, “… while they build these palaces for some children, they left other children housed in schools that were shacks and fire
151 San Francisco Examiner, August 30, 1930.
119 traps.”152 People who favored an elected school board objected to giving appointed officials the power to levy taxes. They wanted the school board to be directly accountable to the people. The Taxpayers’ Defense League of San Francisco issued a statement to rally support for the amendment on the premise that it would end an undemocratic process: “Amendment 27 will restore directly to the people the power to choose the representatives who have a constitutional right to levy taxes…It is inconceivable to see how any body of men or women could opposed the right of the electorate to choose its own officers, when such officers have such important vested rights as the power to levy taxes.”
Several men and women did oppose the charter amendment. The most vocal opposition came from the Public Education Society. For more than fifteen years, since they co-sponsored the Claxton Report, The Public Education Society were influential players in educational politics and their ideology remained consistent. In 1917 they fought to make the superintendent an appointed position; in 1930, they fought to preserve an appointed school board. They argued that elected school boards were effective only in small districts. If big cities elected their school boards, urban districts would inevitably get bogged down in politics. Local editorials summarized the Public Education Society’s viewpoint. One editorial insisted an elected school board would turn “the entire school system into a hot bed of politics.” Under such conditions, school children would be “used as pawns in a political game.” With an
152 San Francisco Examiner, September 25, 1930.
120 elective school board, it was inevitable that members would “spend more time thinking about votes than they do about the children’s needs.”153
The Public Education Society had several important allies. The Chamber of
Commerce also pledged to fight Amendment 27. The president of the Chamber stated,
“It would be a calamity to the efficiency of the school system to adopt the elective method.”154 When Ellwood P. Cubberley, a notable administrative progressive, was asked to give his opinion, he backed the Public Education Society. Initially, he qualified his position. He explained that if San Francisco decided to amend the charter then school board elections should be held separate from other municipal elections to prevent city politics from contaminating the school department. But he held high praise for the present system under superintendent Gwinn, suggesting the school department had been successful over the last decade because “For the first time in
[San Francisco’s] history they have been under professional rather than political oversight.” He concluded, “I fear that the proposed charter Amendment means a backward step.”155
PTA leadership also opposed the amendment, but they suggested a compromise. The PTA president provided context by explaining that the demand for an amendment was sparked by the controversy over taxes. They recommended that school board members continue to be appointees of the mayor, but give up their power to levy taxes. The Public Education Society rejected this solution. They continued to adhere to the advice of the Claxton commission, which recommended that school
153 San Francisco Examiner September 24, 1930. 154 San Francisco Examiner, September 26, 1930. 155 San Francisco News, October 7, 1930
121 boards should have full control of their budget. The Society continued their fight to maintain the status quo without relinquishing the school board’s power over the city purse. The election was held on November 4. Unlike bond measures, which required a two-thirds majority, charter amendments require a one vote majority. The amendment was defeated 70, 778 people voting no and 68, 292 voting yes. The movement to amend the charter was unsuccessful, but the episode put a spotlight on the controversial surrounding the building program. The following questions continued to foster anxiety: how should school construction be funded? Should the focus be transforming San Francisco into a progressive district, complete with junior high schools and facilities outfitted with auditoriums, cafeterias and gymnasiums? Or should the priority be eliminating all fire traps?
In May 1931 the school board’s building program received a lukewarm endorsement from the grand jury. Their report praised the school board for the excellent work done over the last decade, but warned that a few schools were fire hazards and needed to be replaced as soon as possible. Four of the worst schools—
Fremont, Douglass, Buena Vista, and Irving M. Scott Primary Schools—were labeled pre-fire schools because they were built prior to the earthquake and fire of 1906.
Superintendent Gwinn defended the building program with an optimistic declaration.
He pledged, “Within four years not a child in San Francisco will be receiving instruction in anything but Class A, fireproof school buildings.”156 Gwinn continued,
156 Call-Bulletin May 6, 1931.
122 “even if we have some old buildings here, I am sure that we have much better schools then in any other state in the union.”157
On the heels of the grand jury report, in the spring of 1931, the school board and supervisors began their latest round of fighting. The pattern established since
1927 continued: school board proposed a construction budget of $1,700,000; supervisors asked the school board to suspend the building program; school board refused, agreeing to cut only $200,000 if the supervisors can prove that such a reduction was necessary. Superintendent Gwinn responded in typical fashion: “There will be no cut in the building program.” He continued, “Reductions in the budget may be necessary, but the building program will be the last item to be slashed.” He used the grand jury’s critique of the building program to validate his point. Gwinn insisted the money allocated for construction this year would “go a long way toward eliminating seven dangerous schools.”158 More specifically, the school board argued the six-three-three program was part of their plan to eliminate fire traps. When supervisor Aldoph Uhl questioned why the school board had not closed Agaissiz primary school, one of the schools marked as a fire trap, the board answered that junior highs schools were part of the solution. Superintendent Gwinn explained that construction of the new Bernal Junior high school would take seventh and eighth graders out of Agissiz, making it easier to transfer students in the lower grades and eventually close the school. Aldoph Uhl, sounding stumped, replied, “Well, what can
157 Call-Bulletin May 6, 1931. 158 Call-Bulletin, May 12, 1931.
123 I say to that when I have been campaigning for years to get rid of the Agassiz school?”
Uhl was then told by the school board to go pick “someone else’s pet.”159
In July, the Call-Bulletin wrote, “The board of education will maintain its school building program regardless of conditions.” The paper’s source was
Superintendent Gwinn, who offered to compromise with the supervisors through alternative cost saving measures. To cut expenditures, Gwinn offered to combine small classes and increase teacher/student ratios, leave vacant a few administrative positions, close small schools and transfer students to neighboring campuses, and suspend the purchase of new textbooks. Savings were estimated at $225,000, but the supervisors were unimpressed; they wanted more. Supervisor J. Emmet Hayden said,
“We are out to keep tax rates down as low as possible.” Hayden added, “The board of
Supervisors has done its part and I believe that the Board of Education should do its share.”160 Resolute, the school board decided to keep the funding intact.
Once again, the school board demonstrated it was in control of the budget, but a month later, the situation changed. Over the last decade, school board members resolved to transform the department into a modern, progressive school district, the central component being the building program. In 1927, the school board was given legal sanction to levy taxes for their department budget and more specifically, for school construction. With their newfound power, they pledged to let nothing interfere with the building program. They favored the pay-as-you-go strategy and each year, supervisors were forced against their will to levy a special tax for school construction.
But in August 1931, the school board agreed to suspend the pay-as-you-go policy in
159 Call-Bulletin, May 12, 1931. 160 San Francisco News, July 23, 1931.
124 favor of a $5 million bond issue proposed by Mayor Angelo Rossi, who succeeded
Mayor Rolph in January 1931. For the board to endorse a bond issues was a marked change from their actions over the last four years and their defiance the previous month. On August 26, the San Francisco Daily News ran the following headline,
“Board OKEHs Rossi plan for jobless.”161 Rossi reportedly believed that a bond issue could solve his two biggest concerns: keeping the tax rate down and creating jobs for the unemployed. Mayor Rossi’s promised to create jobs, maintain the municipal tax rate, and continue the building program. In return, the school board promised to donate $1 million of the tax money allocated for school construction to the unemployment relief fund. Board president Ira Coburn explained that a bond issue was the “only practicable way out of the unemployment relief maze.” He explained,
“The current emergency is worse than that of the fire of 1906, because it is national and international in scope.”162 Coburn concluded, “If the depression continued the bond issue will prove the only way we can house our school children.”
What happened between July and August to make the school board shelve the pay-as-you-go-plan in support of a bond issue? Unemployment was the critical factor.
Because of the employment crisis, all municipal departments were under pressure to reassess their expenditures. One issue that illustrated the anxiety of the moment was the citywide furor over moonlighting. Mullins explains that the laboring classes put pressure on business leaders to end the practice of allowing one person to collect two incomes. People were becoming desperate and they wanted to end moonlighting to prevent one person from holding two separate jobs when so many others could not
161 San Francisco News, August 26, 1931. 162 August 29, 1931 in San Francisco Public Library SFUSD files, bag 135.
125 find one. School board members were targeted because several teachers held positions in day and night school. An editorial stated, “With hundreds of qualified teachers and unemployed and in financial distress, there is no excuse for giving jobs in the city’s night schools to city employees who are already earning adequate salaries during the day.’’163 The school board responded by pledging to end the practice, calling it
“indefensible.”
Concern about moonlighting showed the school board—like other municipal departments—was caught in the unemployment malaise, but the story does not reveal the depths of the crisis. By late 1931 the American economy had deteriorated and emotions were catching up to reality: optimism was dying; fear and uncertainty abounded. Historian Robert Heilbroner adeptly captured the emotional transformation that occurred across the nation:
In 1930, the nation manfully whistled “Happy Days Are Here Again,” but the
national income precipitously fell from $87 billions. In 1931 the country sang
“I’ve Got Five Dollars”; meanwhile its income plummeted to $59 billions. In
1932 the song was grimmer: “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”—the national
income dwindled to a miserable $42 billions.164
Board president Coburn’s statements suggest that San Franciscan’s became anxious about the economy before 1932, but the gist of Heilbroner’s statement remains accurate. By 1931, San Francisco was caught between “cautious optimism”
163 San Francisco News, August 28, 1931. 164 Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, 243-244.
126 and pure disillusionment.165 San Franciscans were optimistic because their economy declined less precipitously than other major cities, but regardless of what happened elsewhere, they were experiencing severe hardship. Between 1929 and 1931, manufacturing decreased in San Francisco by 34 percent. During that same time 11 percent of San Francisco’s businesses failed. Wages per capita in 1929 were $108.00; by 1931, they were $72.50. Although figures for unemployment were widely inaccurate, one newspaper reported that between March 1930 and April 1931, 18 percent of the workforce had become unemployed.166
Statistical data may have been unreliable, but people did not need data to confirm what they saw and experienced. Unemployment and homelessness were growing, as were cries for relief. Nationwide, the general approach to relief— advocated by President Hoover and accepted by most American’s—called on local communities to assume the burden of caretaker. Institutions like the community chest and organizations like the PTA collected donations—money, clothes, and food—for the unemployed. There services were meant to augment the monies and supplies provided by city governments. In San Francisco, from 1929 to 1931, the increase in the tax money designated for unemployment relief was stark. Supervisors allocated
$20,000 in 1929; the next year $118,000; the next, $2.4 million. Still, they could not meet the demand. Rising demand for unemployment relief influenced negotiations over the municipal budget.
May to September were months when the supervisors calculated the budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Over the past 4 years, this was a time of conflict, as the
165 Mullins, The Depression and the Urban West, 54 166 Mullins, The Depression and the Urban West, 56
127 supervisors and the school board haggled over money for school construction. In
1931, conflict gave way to concession, as the supervisors and school board felt the pinch of the depression. Assessed wealth for the city had declined by approximately one hundred million dollars, mostly due to drops in property values. To raise sufficient revenue for unemployment relief, supervisors would have had to increase the tax rate above the previous year’s levy of $4.04. A news article explicitly laid out the political ramifications of a tax hike. The article reported that Supervisor Hayden, chair of the finance committee, predicted that a “big boost in the tax rate may have a bad political effect upon incumbent supervisors who seek reelection and upon other incumbents,” such as Mayor Rossi. The supervisors, apparently not willing to risk the backlash of a tax hike, decided to keep the municipal tax rate at $4.04. They chose to shuffle money around and incur debt, hence the agreement with the school board to float a bond issue, suspend the pay-as-you-go plan, and divert money for school construction to unemployment relief. School board member Daniel Murphy shared the supervisor’s concern and explained his compliance with mayor Rossi’s plan. To be stalwart toward the pay-as-you-go plan was not an option. He explained, “The settled policy of the board of education had always been the pay-as-you-go plan of school building. But this emergency year it was necessary to avoid increasing the tax rate at a time when it can be ill borne.”167
Not all school board members agreed. The loudest objection came from Alfred
Esberg who resigned his position over the board’s decision. In his resignation letter,
Esberg wrote that he was following through on his pledge to resign if the school board
167 San Francisco News, October 28, 1931.
128 decided to support a bond measure instead of continuing the pay-as-you-go method of funding. Esberg called a bond measure “wasteful, unsound, uneconomical, and unwarranted” and warned it would impose the “greatest tax burden upon the tax payer.”168 The bonds would raise too much money, more than what was needed at the present time. He insisted the pay-as-you-go method would provide just enough money to build schools for which the required preparations had been completed. Esberg made his intentions clear: “I am against the proposed bond issue and my reason for resigning was so that I might do what I can to defeat the proposal.”169
The Power of Local Interests
On September 11 the supervisors unanimously voted to submit the bond for public vote on November 4. It was left to the board of education to decide the exact amount, and on September 16, they decided to float a $3,500,000 bond. Proponents of the bond issue seemed fairly optimistic that it would be approved. They advertised the bond as too good to fail and listed several reasons why the bonds would pass. The money would pay to build safe schools for children. It would provide jobs for the unemployed. It would keep the tax rate down for several years. And lastly, “San
Francisco voters have never failed to carry a bond issue for the public schools.”170 Dr.
J. C. Geiger, the health officer of San Francisco, predicted “many more than the necessary two-thirds vote will assure adequate housing for the school needs of the
168 San Francisco Examiner, August 29, 1931. 169 August 30, 1931 in San Francisco Public Library SFUSD files, bag 135. 170 San Francisco News, October 21, 1931.
129 city’s children.”171 The school board displayed similar confidence, taking steps to get several projects ready to begin soon after the bonds were approved. They contracted the city architect to begin drafting blueprints and consulted landowners about purchasing property needed for the school sites.
The bonds received widespread public support. San Francisco’s two biggest labor unions, the San Francisco Labor council and the Buildings Trade Council, endorsed the bonds, as did the Chamber of Commerce, several district improvement clubs, the Retail Grocers’ Association and the American Legion. News coverage of the bond campaign was overwhelmingly favorable. When reading the papers, one might think the city unanimously supported the bond issue. Newspapers printed pictures of ramshackle fire traps. Portraits depicted a variety of hazardous conditions, such as young children posing next to an old, charcoal fueled, cast-iron stove; and in another scene, stood a boy, grinning profusely, while sticking his hand through a broken window. Except for reports about Esberg’s resignation, there was scarcely any mention of opposition. The newspapers only reported friction between proponents.
One important disagreement occurred between the school board and a broad coalition of prominent, middle to upper-class women. They rallied behind the bond campaign, but disagreed with the school board over how the money should be spent.
In general San Francisco’s women’s organizations had been longstanding advocates for children and stalwart supporters of public education. Their advocacy began in the late 1800s and became stronger, more public and coordinated after the turn of the century. Numerous studies have examined how women across the country
171 Call-Bulletin, October 22, 1931.
130 formed social groups that bridged the gap between home and society. Distinctions between public and private life became blurred as they used their role as domestic caretakers to insert themselves within the public discourse. Education provided a particularly fertile institution for their activism. Their objective was to keep the politicians focused on what really mattered in schools: educating children. And who would be a more natural advocate for children than their mothers. On occasion, their methods were brash, such as the time reported below when a group of San Francisco mothers, in September 1921, started a near riot after hearing rumors that their children were forced to sit in uncomfortable chairs because the school department sold their desks:
“Humming like a swarm of bees, an army of 500 women, including many with
babes in arms, and accompanied by a large number of toddlers and children of
more advanced age, stormed the city hall this morning, terrified the employees
of the board of education into sending out an SOS call for help, charged upon
the office of Mayor James Rolph Jr., besieged the office of the board of
Supervisors and put John S. Dunnigan and his chief deputy, John Rogers to
flight, defied a riot squad of police and finally dispersed with out casualties.”
Most of the time, however, they acted through more formal channels, one of the most prominent being the PTA.
The PTA started as a group of uncoordinated, independently founded clubs.
Prior to 1900 these clubs went by various names including mother study circles,
131 mothers and teachers study circles, parent and teachers associations, or simply as mothers’ clubs. Many of these clubs were inspired by the child study movement, made prominent by educational reformer G. Stanley Hall. Hall’s objectives were different from administrative progressives, like Cubberley, whose reform agenda focused on revamping the administrative capacity of urban schools. Hall zeroed in on the child, believing that children were born with particular talents, talents that could either be developed or squandered. Schools represented great promise and peril; they could help children fulfill their natural potential, or they could interfere with and corrupt a child’s development. To determine a child’s natural gifts, adults had to study them and amass enough data on each child in order to customize curricula that would best develop their individual talents.172 One objective of the mothers’ clubs was to establish a space where parents and teachers could talk about children.
According to the organizers, only when mothers and teachers cooperated could the
“awful gap between home and school life be closed, and intelligent, uniform training secured to the child.”173
In 1907 representatives from the National Congress of Mothers—founded in
1897 in Washington D.C.—came to San Francisco to consolidate the various clubs.
Their efforts culminated in the founding of the San Francisco Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations in January, 1909. In August 1910, California founded a state wide congress of which San Francisco, along with Los Angeles, became the states most influential chapters. In 1924, when the National Congress of
172 Herbert Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (New York: Routledge, 1995), 35-44. 173 H. C. Rothwell, “Second District Delves into Past History,” Parent-Teacher Journal (December, 1932), 10.
132 Mothers changed its name to the Parent Teachers Association, San Francisco’s chapter became the Second District of the California Congress of Parents and Teachers.
The 1920s were important years for the PTA. At the start of the decade membership was 2237; by the end it was 7500. Evidence suggests it was a well functioning organization. There was a hierarchy of officers and clear processes for electing leadership. They issued annual reports detailing the organizations expenditures and receipts. Their public relations committee used the radio and newspapers to announce programs and workshops organized and sponsored by the organization. The programs covered several topics including education for the physically challenged, public speaking courses for women, and philanthropy. They seem to have had connections throughout the political and academic worlds of the Bay
Area, as they regularly invited prominent politicians and scholars to speak at their meetings. Numerous photos show the range of their activities: touring schools with board members to assess safety, campaigning for donations for the community chest, joining city officials when they signed legislation related to children, and sewing and distributing clothing to needy children.
One passion for the PTA was the building program. They were well informed about school construction. Whenever the school board decided to build a school, they consulted the city architect who drew up plans and passed the plan on to the board of public works. After the board of public works reviewed the plans, they were returned to the school board. Before final approval of a blueprint, one group that had to be consulted was the PTA.
133 In regards to funding, their propensity was to support any plan that would most likely provide money for new schools. In 1921, they publicly supported the pay-as- you-go plan. The following year they supported the bond issued promoted by the supervisors. They backed the school board in 1927 during their battle against the supervisors to reinstate the pay-as-you-go plan, and they sided with the Public
Education Society against the charter amendment in 1930. In the bond campaign of
1931, the PTA rallied behind the school board and supervisors.
While they were indifferent towards funding, they were tenacious in their advocacy for safe schools. Conflict between the school board and PTA occurred when the PTA judged the school board as too slow in its response to fire trap schools. Such was the case during the bond campaign in 1931. When the Second District released its annual report in May, the Freemont Primary School PTA reported they had been working for the last year “to get a new school, which has been promised within the next two years.”174 During the bond campaign they criticized the school board for not including provisions to rebuild Fremont and other fire traps. The PTA questioned the school board’s commitment to rid the district of fire trap schools. In regards to renovations previously made to Fremont, they doubted “if the repairs would have been made if [they] had not gone to the board of education and insisted upon it.” They decried the school board for building “expensive new schools when children risk their lives daily in a dark, overcrowded, tinderbox that has stood unaltered since it was build in 1892.”175 The school board’s reply was blunt. The PTA was told that “the new Fremont school was far down the list of new buildings proposed for
174 San Francisco Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations, Annual Reports, 1931 175 San Francisco News, October 19, 1931.
134 construction.”176 Fremont was not a priority and it would be several years before money was set aside to replace the building. Undeterred, PTA women would continue to press the board to close fire traps like Fremont. While there efforts to influence board policy failed in the campaign of 1931, their actions would take center stage after the Fremont fire of 1933.
Although the PTA did not agree with the school board’s plan, they nonetheless supported it because the prospect of a failed bond issue was unacceptable. Board member Murphy laid out the options. “The present question is not one which stands between the pay-as-you-go plan and the bond issue idea,” explained Murphy. “It is a question of whether or not the school building program halts or goes ahead.” Failure to pass the bond would stop the building program because the budget for the next fiscal year was fixed. When voters go to the polls, they “decide whether or not the children get the schools and the workingmen their jobs.”177
The supervisors, the school board, the newspapers, the labor unions, the PTA, and other proponents were surprised when the bond measure failed. 56,727 people voted in favor and 34,399 against. It failed to gain the required two-thirds majority by approximately 4,000 votes. An editorial in the Call-Bulletin declared, “San Francisco broke a record in the Tuesday election. For the first time in our history we failed to approve a bond for the construction of public schools.” In an attempt to explain the outcome, the editorial offered several possibilities. “We can blame the depression, we can lay some of the blame on the feeling that government expenses should be reduced at this time, and some more of it on the active propaganda in favor of a pay-as you go
176 San Francisco News, November 2, 1931. 177 San Francisco News, October 28, 1931.
135 method…” Additionally, several reports claimed the bond measure was “poorly positioned” on the ballot, such that several people who were not inclined to vote on the issue might have if it was better located on the placard.178 After some deliberation to resubmit the vote, the supervisors dropped the issue.
One group was certain why the measure failed. Occasionally, newspapers mentioned people who opposed the bond issue but provided few details about their identities or actions. The opposition turned out to be the Public Education Society.
The coalition forged between the Society and the school board throughout the 1920’s had dissolved. Unlike the PTA, the Public Education Society placed great priority on the continuance of the pay-as-you-go method. Rather than see the building program funded through bonds, they voted against the measure and placed the future of the program in jeopardy. During the campaign nothing was printed about the organization, but the day after the vote, they issued a statement lauding the results.
The group’s corresponding secretary said, the “results of the bond election fully justifies the value of the pay-as-you-go method as the only dependable economic way for providing money for an orderly program of construction.” She surmised the public will for a bond must have been weak because “with no organized fight against them and with the complete support of the press, the necessary two-thirds vote was not available to carry even so small a bond issue as 3,500,000.” She urged the school board to remain committed to the pay-as-you-go plan. “We earnestly hope that in the future the board of education will not so early yield the needed allotment of money which would have provided school buildings for the children and payrolls for the
178 Call-Bulletin, November 7, 1931.
136 unemployed, in order that other departments of the city government might benefit and yet keep down the tax rate temporarily,” stated the secretary. She concluded, “If economies must be made, there is no reason why they should be made at the expense of the school children.”
The Public Education Society rift with the school board indicated conflict within the reform coalition. Other historian’s classify elite progressive reformers as a cohesive group that competed against other groups in their quest to transform the schools. David Tyack’s administrative progressives imposed their vision of schools and society on the working class and ethnic minorities. Herbert Kliebard’s efficiency experts competed against other progressive reformers to implement there corporate model of educational reform. Victor Shradar argues that during the 1920s, in San
Francisco, progressive reformers unified along class lines. Wealthy and socially influential people of mixed ethnic heritage joined together to support progressive reforms at the expense of the working class. The Public Education Society’s actions suggested a different story. It revealed a rift between elite reformers. Their disagreement was not over ends but means. The Public Education Society was instrumental in amending the city charter to appoint the present school board and superintendent. They all supported the building program, but the Public Education
Society broke ranks when the school board decided to endorse the bond issue.
Regardless of the economic emergency, the Public Education society was unwilling to compromise. They did not want tax money diverted away from the building program; nor did they want the school board to surrender control over the tax levy. And state law made the Public Education Society a strong minority. Because bond issues
137 required a two-thirds majority, opposition could effectively block a bond measure with relatively few votes. In November 1931 the building program was virtually shut down.
Choice Opportunities: Fire, Earthquake, and the New Deal
Trouble continued in 1932 as the economy worsened. Rising unemployment overwhelmed local responses to the crisis. Charles Wollenberg, who oversaw the city’s relief program, warned more money was needed to help the unemployed.
According to his calculations, the city had to raise $1,750,000 above the money currently set aside for unemployment relief. He claimed the city was feeding at least
40,000 people each day and he predicted the number would grow to 60,000 by winter.
What alarmed Wollenberg the most was that “more and more of our better type citizens, those who have carefully husbanded their savings, are reaching the relief line.” He noticed these “better type citizens” have not only “used up the funds they had on hand but have borrowed on their homes, have eaten that up and now are facing eviction.”179
In February 1932, the school board officially decided to suspend the building program for the next fiscal year. They also devised strategies to save additional money. They agreed to forgo the $1,000,000 to build George Washington High
School. In lieu of new buildings, to remedy overcrowding, they decided to transfer students in crowded school to less congested facilities. Deputy Superintendent David
P. Harding issued a report showing there were at least 9,000 vacant seats in schools
179 San Francisco News, May 12, 1932.
138 around the city. In addition to transferring students, they plan to convert auditoriums and gymnasiums into temporary classrooms. Following these measures, “San
Francisco can get along at least another year without additional investment in educational housing facilities,” said Harding.
The decision to suspend the building program drew criticism from the PTA.
Once again, the PTA insisted that fire trap schools—especially Fremont—be replaced.
“Fremont is a dangerous firetrap menacing the lives of the 500 small children who attend it,” protested the women.180 The board of education dismissed the PTA by calling their claims “unwarranted” and “contrary to facts.” Ira Coburn, the school board president, responded to the criticism by claiming, “The Fremont School was given a thorough overhauling recently and is good for several years.”181 Coburn asked the PTA to be patient and understand that nothing could be dune until the economy improved. Superintendent Gwinn agreed, insisting the community can “get along” for a few years with the schools in their present condition.182 When the PTA confronted the mayor, he deflected responsibility. “These matters are up to the board of education,” he said. But he supported the school board’s decision. “In view of the practically universal demand from citizens that the tax rate be kept at the lowest figure and the necessity for providing for unemployment relief, the school commissioners have fully cooperated in reducing budget items and thereby aiding the taxpayers.”
180 Call-Bulletin, April 4, 1932. 181 San Francisco Chronicle, April 6, 1932. 182 April 26 1932 in San Francisco Public Library SFUSD files, bag 139
139 The mayor added, “We cannot build new schools from tax money at this time. That fact should be fully recognized by every citizen.”183
1932-1933 was a difficult school year. Depression, scandal, earthquake, and fire would rack the school department. The school board continued to be hampered by financial difficulties. In addition to cost saving measures listed earlier, the board eliminated several administrative positions, froze salaries, and closed several night schools. Superintendent Gwinn was accused of mismanaging funds when it was discovered the school department overpaid several teachers. Gwinn and other school officials were portrayed as being grossly inefficient and incompetent. During an investigation conducted by the supervisors, department employees testified that Gwinn hid files to impede the investigation. He would eventually be forced to resign.
Between March and April 1933, earthquake and fire would shock San
Francisco and alter the politics of school construction. On March 10, Long Beach
California was the epicenter of a magnitude 6.4 earthquake. The quaked was responsible for 115 deaths and significant damage to property. Across Los Angels,
142 out of 392 schools suffered damage, with several completely destroyed.
According to authorities “no other type of building in that area suffered in anything like this proportion.”184 Californians across the state shuddered at the thought of the young people who would have been crushed if the earthquake had occurred during school hours. State law makers quickly responded to wide spread calls for reform.
On March 20, the California assembly proposed the Field Bill, which set up stringent safety codes, mandating that state officials inspect old buildings and authorize the
183 April 26 1932 in San Francisco Public Library SFUSD files, bag 139 184 San Francisco Chronicle, March 18, 1933.
140 construction of new ones to ensure they are sufficiently earthquake-proof. It became law on April 10.
Earthquake safety would influence the building program, but not immediately.
A few weeks after the Long Beach Earthquake, the Fremont Primary School burned down and fire safety took priority. After the fire, people were looking for someone to blame beyond the painter who was directly responsible. A favorite target was the voters who defeated the 1931 bond in favor of the pay-as-you-go plan. The Mayor took aim by claiming, “The fire demonstrated only too clearly what the people of San
Francisco have been doing since they turned down, by small margin, the recent school bond issues: they have been gambling economy against the very lives of their children!”185 An editorial from the Examiner echoed the mayor’s anger. “Pay-as-you- go—and now the Fremont School is Gone!” The author concluded that the “‘pay-as- you-go’ argument is little short of murderous.”186 The president of the PTA struck a softer tone. In her view, voters in 1931 were not fully aware of the danger. “If the public had known the type of school their children were attending in 1931, the
$3,500,000 bond issue would not have failed,” she said.187 School board President implied that if the bonds had not failed, fire trap schools would have been replaced.
“The city was started on a program aiming eventually to replace all of its 46 [wood] frame schools. But for two years that program has been at a standstill, for lack of funds,” said Bush.188
185 San Francisco Chronicle, April 28 1933. 186 San Francisco Examiner, April 29, 1933. 187 San Francisc, Call-Bulletin, April 28 1933. 188 San Francisco News, April 29, 1933.
141 A few newspapers doubted the school board’s sincerity. They referenced the school board’s progressive agenda and their reluctance to replace Fremont. The San
Francisco News reminded readers that in 1931 “Fremont school was far down the list of buildings to be replaced.” The News recalled how the Fremont PTA lobbied unsuccessfully to have Fremont included in the building program. The Examiner published a similar story, reporting that the bond issue of 1931 had “no provision for replacing the old Fremont School.” The Examiner article wrote, “The chief purpose of the bond issue…was to build new high schools and junior high schools.” It concluded that any renovations to Fremont would have been incidental. Superintendent Gwinn countered with an old argument—that building junior high schools and high schools was part of their plan to close fire traps. Gwinn stated, “The 1931 bond plan would have permitted a satisfactory readjustment so that the Fremont school could be abandoned.”189
The day after the fire, the mayor announced a plan to submit a $3,000,000 bond issue for school construction. To get public support, he addressed the queries raised in the newspapers. He pledged the bonds would be used “for one purpose only, the construction of new schools to replace the present fire-traps….” He avowed,
“New high schools may be needed—but I shall insist that they wait until no San
Francisco school child is further exposed to the perils of such ramshackle makeshifts as the Fremont.”190 The mayor moved quickly. In May, he gained the unanimous approval of the supervisors and they settled on June 27 as the date for the vote—the same day voters were going to decide the future of the Eighteenth Amendment.
189 San Francisco News, April 28, 1933 190 San Francisco Examiner, April 29 1933.
142 By June, the campaign was in full swing. All city newspapers supported the bond measure. They reported and listed numerous civic groups, influential people, and organizations that endorsed the bond. They printed several editorials to refute the pay-as-you-go plan. One week before the vote, the mayor announced an additional reason why people should pass the bonds. According to Mayor Rossi, “if the voters approved the proposed $3,000,000 school bond issue…San Francisco will be one of the first cities in the nation to receive direct federal aid under President Roosevelt’s
National Recovery Act.”191
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s was elected president in November 1932, he radically altered the federal government’s response to the Depression. His predecessor, President Hoover, remained devoted to the idea that local communities had to band together to endure the hard times. Hoover’s approach was grounded in the belief that the economy would recover, that the depression was just a natural slump in the business cycle. It was a weather-the-storm mentality. Local governments were encouraged to hold on, sustain the unemployed through local relief—from private and public sources—and eventually, on its own, the storm would pass and life would return to normal. As the depression got worse, Hoover, realized that federal intervention was necessary. He offered more federal assistance to the states than any prior administration. In 1932, he instituted the Reconstruction Finance Corporation
(RFC) that provided federal money for public works. $329,660,000 was allocated for federal projects and $1.5 billion was designated for the states. The RFC was hampered by complicated rules dictating how the money should be doled out.
191 San Francisco Examiner, June 20, 1933.
143 Additionally, the program was not big enough to deal with the rampant unemployment caused by the depression. Ultimately, its effect was minimal.192
President Roosevelt took office in March 1933 and during his first hundred days he ushered in a barrage of legislation that expanded federal intervention in the economy. At the conclusion of this hundred day period, on June 16, a package of bills known collectively as the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) were signed. Title
II of the act established the Public Works Administration (PWA) and launched the most extensive federal public works program in the nation’s history. Initially the
PWA was appropriated $3.3 billion; in the following years it would receive over a billion more. The agency sponsored construction projects across the nation. With
PWA assistance, state and local governments constructed sewage treatment plants, courthouses, roads, bridges, aqueducts, hospitals and a host of other structures.
Schools were a popular expenditure. Between July 1929 and March 1939, an estimated seventy percent of school construction across the country was partially funded with PWA money.193
When Mayor Rossi tried to bolster support for his bond issue through the promise of federal money, the PWA had existed for less than a month. Rossi did not have much to say about the program because he knew very little about it. What he knew was that federal money was going to become available, but he did not know how or when. The PWA had not yet developed the capacity to operate such a large program because it was in the process of establishing its administrative structure. So
192 U. S. Public Works Administration, American Builds: The Record of PWA (United states printing office: Washington, 1939), 6; Mullins, The Depression and the Urban West, 2. 193 U. S. Public Works Administration, American Builds: The Record of PWA (United states printing office: Washington, 1939), 8.
144 Rossi’s promotion of the PWA was vague and it was presented as an addendum rather than a core feature of the bond campaign.
Similar to the 1931 campaign, the bond issue received overwhelming support from prominent organizations and the press. And similar to 1931, the bond issue failed, this time by a wider margin. The Fremont fire, the widespread community support, and the promise of federal money were not enough to sway two-thirds of the voters. 79,833 people voted for the bonds. 50,989 voted against it, making the vote approximately 7,000 votes short of passing. In 1931 the bond vote failed by 4,000 votes.
The defeat left the mayor and the school board unsure about how to proceed.
The mayor remained adamant about not raising taxes. On July 12 they decided to fund only maintenance projects they declared as absolutely necessary. They decide to repair Fremont and reopen it, but the third floor, which sustained the most damage, remained closed and only the youngest grades attended the school. Buena Vista school, another building that had been labeled a fire trap, was scheduled to be replaced. The board of education calculated that it could pay for the repairs without raising the budget if they cut other expenditures like teacher salaries and night school.
In august, the board of education repackaged the school bond proposal. This time the school bonds would not be presented on its own. It was folded into a city- wide proposal of public works projects to be submitted to the NRA. In September the board of public works presented a plan of construction projects to the board of supervisors. The report was an itemized list of project that cost approximately
$35,000,000. The board of supervisor chose November 7 as the day for the special
145 elections. The election included thirteen individual bond measures. Unlike the bond vote in June, the mayor and supervisors were more knowledgeable about the NIRA.
The supervisors promoted the federal works program as an incentive to attract voters.
A headline from the San Francisco News announced, “NRA Projects To Give Work to
Thousands.” The public was told the federal government would subsidize thirty percent of the cost for labor and building material. If the bonds were approved on
November 7, then they city would receive more than $8 million from the federal government. The process was made explicit. First the city would forward the request for a grant to the state NRA advisory board and then, if approved, it would be sent to
Washington. City controller Leonard S. Leavy allayed concerns the bond would raise taxes. According to Leavy, the “federal gift” would be deposited in the banks and used to pay the debt incurred through the bond sales.194
One of the thirteen bond measures was a $13 million proposal for new schools.
$2 million were allocated to build five new schools: one high school, one junior high, one health school, and two elementary schools. $1 million would be divided to pay for “replacements and alterations,” which including the replacement or repair of nine firetrap buildings, but did not including Fremont. But now the supervisors had the upper-hand for the first time since the California Supreme Court case of 1927 because for a bond measure to be place on the ballot, it had to be approved by the supervisors.
When the school board submitted their proposal for $3 million, it “was rejected by the supervisors with instructions to increase the firetrap allotment.”195 The school board returned with a $3.5 million proposal, allocating “$1,685,000 for new construction,
194 San Francisco Examiner, October, 27, 1933 195 September 26, 1933 in San Francisco Public Library SFUSD files, bag 142.
146 and $1,315,000 for restoring and replacing so-called firetrap schools.”196 This plan was approved.
On September 26, the board of supervisors accepted the school board’s proposal but explained it could not be placed on the November 7 ballot. By state law, when a bond was defeated, it could not be resubmitted to voters for at least six months. Because of the failed vote in June, the supervisors could not authorize a bond for school construction until after December 27. While the supervisors geared up for the November 7 vote and pressured the federal government to rush approval of its funding, the school board mulled over how to get its bond proposal in front of the voters. On October 18 they found a solution. The presidents of The City and County
Federation of Women’s Clubs and the Parent Teachers’ Association agreed to collaborate and organize an initiative petition to secure a special election for the school bonds on December 19. To get the initiative on the ballot by December 19, the women were instructed by registrar Charles J. Collins, to file by November 10. They needed 22,740 signatures, so Collins suggested they get 30,000 because many people who sign the petition turn out not to be registered voters.
With the women in the forefront, attention was refocused onto fire trap schools. The newspapers described the women’s campaign as a “New Drive on
School Fire Trap Peril.”197 Memory of the Fremont school fire was still fresh, but another school, Irving M. Scott Primary became the new symbol of the danger. Papers published pictures and articles describing the hazards of the school. Mayor Rossi lent his support. “It would be a sad commentary on our judgment if, after taking care of
196 September 26, 1933 in San Francisco Public Library SFUSD files, bag 142. 197 San Francisco Examiner, October 24, 1933.
147 our adult generation by passing the NRA bond issue on November 7, we should leave the younger generation in peril.” He declared, “No greater necessity confronts us than the removing of our children from schools which are a menace to their safety.”198
On the evening of October 24 the PTA launched their campaign by hosting a meeting with guest speaker Justus Wardell, the federal public works administrator for the western states. The next day, the petition drive began in earnest with the Mayor being one of the first signers. He was photographed with the president of the City and
County Federation of Women and the second vice president of the PTA looking over his shoulder. The caption read, “The mayor aids women’s bond plea.”199 The women led a grassroots movement to get signatures. They walked the streets to garner votes.
Each organization set up a headquarters to coordinate their efforts. The two groups used a wall-size map complete with push pins to ensure that volunteers were efficiently distributed across the city. They designated schools, firehouses, and hospitals as stations where volunteers could solicit people for signatures. The PTA worked with high school art classes to create posters to advertise their campaign. By
November 11 they were short five thousand signatures. Registrar Collins gave them five additional days and on November 15 they turned in 29,000 signatures. Collins certified the signatures, and the supervisors unanimously approved a bond vote for
December 19.
With the slogan to “make every school building safe for our children,” the women immediately began a second campaign to rally support for the bond issue. The
PTA’s campaign was multi-dimensional. They visited schools to give “pep talks” to
198 San Francisco Examiner, October 24, 1933. 199 San Francisco Examiner, October, 25 1933.
148 students. They plastered the city with posters created by junior high school and high school students. They visited meetings of various organizations at which the PTA arranged for speakers to talk about the bond campaign and school safety. The PTA organized a phone bank to spread the word and convince people to support bond measure. They had members ready to drive to the polls people who were not physically able to travel on their own.200
Soon after the start of the bond campaign, events gave credence to their argument for safer schools. Fall-out from the Long Beach earthquake began to materialize. On November 21, engineers from the state classified three schools earthquake hazards under the guidelines of the Field Bill. The board was ordered to close the schools immediately and transfer students to neighboring facilities. More closings were expected because the engineers expanded their investigation. People who supported the bonds incorporated the closures into their campaign, reminding the public of the old hazards and warning them of the new. San Francisco’s schools were described as “virtual death traps in case of fire and earthquake.”201 The sudden closing of the schools provided more impetus for the bond. An article in the
Chronicle stated, “The money is to be used to replace ancient wooden schools—some of them fifty years old, to remodel other schools to make them safe and to provide three new school buildings in districts where there is now crying need.”202 The school board seemed to use the school closings as a means to issue a veiled threat of high taxes. Board President Bush announced that if the bonds did not pass, then they
200 San Francisco Call-Bulletin, December 16, 1933. 201 San Francisco Examiner, December 12, 1933. 202 San Francisco Chronicle, December 11, 1933.
149 would be forced to include appropriations in the budget to “take care of necessary school construction that cannot longer be delayed.” He predicted a special tax of possibly $1.5 million.
Campaign leaders offered the public an alternative. Repeatedly during the bond campaign, the public was reassured that if they voted yes, they would not incur the full debt of the bond issues. Provisions of the bond measure were made explicit.
One newspaper wrote the bonds would be “issued only on condition that the Federal
Government makes an outright gift of 30 per cent of the total amount of the issue.”203
Another paper declared, “If there is no government gift of thirty per cent there will be no bond issue.” It was also made clear that most of the money from the bond issues would be used to pay workers. San Franciscans were informed that because the school department owned most of the land upon which it planned to build, “almost all the
$3,000,000 will go for labor and materials.”204
On December 20 the Call-Bulletin announced, “S. F. Schools Win.” The bond measure passed. It was close: approximately 2,600 votes above the required two- thirds majority with 68,926 people voting for the measure and 30,618 voting against it.
Those who supported the bonds relished the victory. They lost the last two bond votes and it had been two years since the building program was suspended. PTA described the campaign as their “outstanding project of the year.”205 One day after the vote, the school board sent a memo to the supervisors and mayor asking them to request federal money from the PWA. On March 29, 1934, the PTA in their annual report announced
203 San Francisco Examiner, December 12, 1933. 204 San Francisco Chronicle, December 11, 1933. 205 San Francisco Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations, Annual Reports, 1934
150 that the federal government granted San Francisco the 30 percent aid for the school bonds. Two weeks later the board of education began to make preliminary plans for school construction.
Conclusion
One of the conditions in the PTA campaign of December 1933 was that the money raised from the bonds would be used to replace “old wooden three-story buildings, similar to the Fremont school…, erected between 1880 and 1913….”206
Fourteen years later, in 1948, the school board conducted an extensive survey of the school department’s buildings. One of the worst schools in the district was a wood frame structure built in 1892. It was recommended “the building should be abandoned at the earliest possible date.”207 The school was the notorious Fremont Primary, one of three “pre-fire” schools—the other two were Irving M. Scott and Douglass—still in use. The pre-fire schools, however, do not indicate the success or failure on the part of the PTA. In the bond campaign of December 1933, thirteen fire traps were singled out to be rebuilt or refurbished. Four were “pre-fire” schools and as stated, three were left untouched. Five schools were completely rebuilt. Two were razed. And two schools were renovated. The upgrades varied; one school got a new library, while the other became the annex for a new building.
Overall, the PTA was moderately successful in their goal to eliminate old wood frame schools. In 1930 students attended about thirty-eight wood frame
206 San Francisco Examiner, December 9, 1933. 207 San Francisco Unified School District, Building Survey: Elementary School (San Francisco: San Francisco Unified School District, 1948), 109.
151 buildings constructed prior to 1913. In 1948, twenty-six remained open with seven- teen in their original form. The most glaring remnant of the past were the “pre-fire” schools, especially Fremont, considering it was the building that helped energize the movement against fire traps. As for the school board their vision of a school district reorganized according to the six-three-three plan was incomplete. In 1930 fifty-one percent of the students in the seventh, eighth and ninth grades had been transferred to separate junior high schools. By 1948, seventy-two percent were enrolled in separate schools. The district opened eleven junior high schools, nine of which were built prior to 1937. One school—Marina Junior High School, completed in 1936—was paid for through the 1933 bond issue.
This story involves conflict over goals and process. Problems between the school board and the PTA were centered on goals. It can be visualized through a
Venn-diagram. In the middle of the Venn diagram, there was plenty of common ground between the two groups. Both wanted new buildings and new schools— whether elementary, junior high, or high school—meant safe fireproof schools. But at one ends of the diagram, outside the intersecting portions of the two circles, the school board often chose to build junior high schools or new, modern elementary schools rather than raze or refurbish a fire trap. The school board was willing to permit some students to attend a school identified as a fire trap, while they proceeded with their building program. This was unacceptable to the women. They wanted all fire traps destroyed. Conflict between the supervisors, school board, and Public Education society was about process. The core issue was who should be able to make decisions about school construction. The Public Education Society wanted to maintain the
152 system they fought hard to create. Their insistence on continuing the pay-as-you-go plan was as much about fiscal policy as it was about preserving the political autonomy of the school board.
The Great Depression muddied the water. Conflict was not a straightforward battle between people with different goals and preferences. All the groups involved had to calculate their actions within a severe economic crisis. The depression provided opportunity and obstacles depending on one’s position in the debate. As unemployment reached staggering heights, all municipal officers, including the supervisors and school board had to make sense of their policies in terms of the present context. Much about the formal process stayed the same but the school board changed its priorities in order to address the demands created by the depression. The school board’s decisions affected other groups within the political environment as these groups recalibrated their positions in light of the school board’s actions.
There were no clear winners or losers. No one could claim a clear cut victory, or a debilitating loss. Each side accomplished goals and influenced decision making.
The upper-hand temporarily went to whatever group could seize an opportunity and work it to their advantage and each group had their moment.
153 Conclusion
The 1906 earthquake and fire and the Great Depression were devastating events that altered the political, social, and economic contexts of San Francisco. Each crisis was a turning point in the lives and psyche of all who experienced them. In some ways the effects were obvious. Thousands died in the disaster of 1906 and the city’s physical infrastructure was reduced to charred ruins. During the depression, while the poor got poorer, millions of upper and middle class people were also left helpless. Despair was rampant as Americans struggled to endure a seemingly endless nightmare. For some, however, the crises were a turning point of a different sort.
Some people treated them as opportunities. To explain opportunity as crisis, historian
Kevin Rosaria refers to the concept of creative destruction in which crises disrupt longstanding ideas and destroy physical structures and modes of production. He argues that with the old ways disrupted, opportunities abound for new ideas and processes to emerge.1 The earthquake and fire and the Great Depression were certainly disruptions, but in regards to the policies of Japanese segregation and school construction, crisis provided opportunities to advance longstanding political agendas.
Another viewpoint is that even in times of crisis there are those who try to conduct business as usual. The notion of business as usual does not discount the fact that crises alter lives, but it illustrates that, regardless of the severity of a particular crisis, vestiges of life prior to the event continue and are not simply swept away.
Historian Stephen Beil explains that old patterns of life continue to thrive because people to use their established political and cultural practices to make sense of the
1 Kevin Rosario, “What Comes Down Must Go Up: Why Disasters Have Been Good for American Capitalism,” in American Disasters, edited by Steven Beil (New York: New York Press, 2001), 72-102.
154 disaster. But the impact goes both ways. Crisis can also give rise to new meanings because people adopt language and representations generated by the crisis. In effect, crises can overlay previous political relationships and cultural practices with new language and new meanings that people use to communicate and interpret their world.2
The cases of this study are positioned between these two perspectives of crisis.
For some political actors, crisis was an opportunity; for others, an obstacle. When the earthquake and fire and Great Depression changed the availability and flow of resources, the events altered activity within the political environment. However, for school officials involved in the issues of Japanese segregation and school construction, it was business as usual. In respect to my study, the notion of “business as usual” can be interpreted as “politics as usual.” Political agendas remained the same as actors articulated their policies in light of the current circumstances and tried to marshal whatever resources they could to realize their objectives.
Educational Decision Making: State Law and Local Politics
A critical feature of the politics in each case is that the school board had to negotiate its role as a state and local institution. School policy was the outcome of how the school board was able to manage its role as a “creature of the legislature” and as a local organization embedded within city politics. School boards in California got their legitimacy and power from the California State Constitution.3 State constitutional law superseded local statutes, giving the state final say on educational
2 Steven Beil, “Introduction: On the Titanic research and Recovery Expedition and the Production of Disasters,” in American Disasters, edited by Stephen Beil (New York: New York Press, 2001), 1-8. 3 Charter of the City and County of San Francisco, art. 7, chapter. 3.
155 matters. The constitution provided broad guidelines for how education was to be conducted throughout the state with state law designating local school boards as the official decision makers of educational policy within each district. But there was significant wiggle room between state law and how each school board conducted its business.
As long as the local charter did not conflict with the state constitution, it added another layer to the formal code that defined the functions and responsibilities of the school board. In San Francisco, the local charter defined the details of the school board’s standard operating procedures such as the size of the board, dates and times for board meetings, and the school board’s power and responsibilities relative to other municipal departments. In 1900, when the new city charter was ratified, one goal of the charter was to reorganize school governance based on a corporate model which set up a bureaucracy with the school board at the top of the hierarchy. Decisions were supposed to move from the top down and the formal code was supposed to insulate the school board against the vagaries of local politics.
It was impossible to detach schools from the local political environment because they were embedded within it. Local politics included the school board’s interactions with interest groups and other municipal departments within the city.
Local interest groups publicly supported or challenged the school board. Interest groups had several methods for expressing their views on school issues. They could have members attend board meetings, send official memos to the school board, or write an article or editorial for one of the newspapers. Whatever means they used to communicate their views, interest groups had the power to gain the school board’s
156 attention and try to sway their decision making. Additionally, the school board constantly jostled with other municipal departments. Their prime nemesis was often the board of supervisors. The school board was the biggest drain on the municipal budget and the supervisors had to juggle the school department’s demands with demands from other departments.
Within this political environment, the school board’s control over decision making fluctuated. Their authority was contingent on the way state law either constrained or empowered the board in their interactions with the supervisors, other government agencies, and local interest groups. Further, when crisis struck, the shift in resources affected the school boards political leverage and ability to make decisions. In the cases of Japanese segregation and school construction, the school board’s had a set of goals they wanted to achieve. Their desire to achieve their goals remained constant before and after each crisis, but their ability to actually make decisions changed over time.
Historians are correct to argue that the school board’s desire to segregate the
Japanese was motivated by race prejudice. San Francisco was particularly hostile toward Asians. Prejudice against the Japanese was a carry over from the hostility leveled against the Chinese. Notions of a racial hierarchy were ingrained within the social consciousness of white and non-white people. Formal and informal codes of behavior reinforced the idea that whites were superior to non-whites. In 1901, labor unions rose to power through anti-Japanese political platforms. When the Union
Labor party won the mayoralty, they did so promising to ban Japanese immigrants from entering the country. The school board of 1906 had personal ties to the
157 administration. School board president Aaron Altmann was the brother-in-law of
Boss Abe Ruef, the unofficial head of the Union Labor Party. Superintendent Alfred
Roncovieri and Mayor Eugene Schmitz were members of the city orchestra.
Race prejudice can be taken as a given, but pressure from labor can be overstated. The school board did not have to be pressured into segregating Japanese students because they supported segregation. School officials honed their methods of discrimination on the Chinese, so when the Japanese became the new “Asian problem” there were strategies in place to deal with them. For the school department, the method of choice was segregation. As early as 1893, school board members passed the first of several resolutions to segregate Japanese students. The important question is not why the school board segregated the Japanese, but why it took them so long to enforce the resolution. The school board’s desire to segregate the Japanese may have been inspired by a racist ideology, but their inability to act was determined by the standard operating procedures laid out in the state code and city charter.
If the school board could have segregated the Japanese sooner than October 11, it is probable they would have. Regardless of race prejudice or demands from labor, state law and the supervisor’s reluctance to build schools prevented definitive action on the issue of Japanese segregation. State law gave school districts authority to segregate “Mongolians” only if the district provided separate facilities for their education. In 1892 when the school board first resolved to segregate Japanese students, some board members decided it was wrong to classify them as Mongolians.
They rescinded the order because board members disagreed over whether state law governing segregation applied to the Japanese. Between 1900 and 1906, when
158 hostilities intensified against the Japanese, city and school officials were in accord that the Japanese should be classified as Mongolians. School officials advocated for segregation. The city charter gave the supervisors veto power over the school board’s budget. Repeated demands for new schools—for white and Asian students—were rebuffed by the supervisors. The school board was caught in a bind. Without a new school they could not segregate the Japanese and without approval from the supervisors, they could not build a new school. Decision making was left in abeyance, as the school board could not raise the money needed to open a school for the
Japanese.
Prior to the Great Depression, the politics of school construction was a fight between the school board and supervisors for control of the decision making process.
In this case, the school board used state law to their advantage. In January 1922 the newly appointed school board adhered to the administrative progressive ideology.
When Superintendent Gwinn was appointed in 1923, district leadership was unified in their commitment to progressive reform. At the top of their agenda was the building program. School construction got off to a rocky start because the city charter initially constrained the powers of the school board. Similar to the situation in 1906, the charter gave the supervisors veto power over the school budget. They could reject or adjust the tax levy recommended by the school board. In addition to the supervisors, the school board had to contend with local interest groups. In the early 1920s the school board was pressured by the public to build safe schools.
In 1927 the school board gained the upper hand over the board of supervisors when the California Supreme Court ruled the city charter violated state law. The court
159 gave the school board total control over the school budget by ordering the supervisor to levy the taxes requested by the school board. The ruling placed decision making squarely in the hands of the school board and between 1927 and 1931, the school board had virtually total control over the building program. School construction proceeded based on the plans devised by the school department. They focused on building Junior high schools and upgrading elementary schools. Other issues related to school construction, such as the elimination of fire traps, were secondary concerns and the supervisor could attend to those issues at their discretion. The supervisors and local interest groups, such as the PTA, were shut out of the decision making process.
Politics of Crises
In each case, when crises struck, the fortunes of the school board were reversed. It was politics as usual in regards to the school board trying to implement their policies, but the crises altered the availability of resources and subsequently changed the school board’s control over decision making. Sometimes change worked in favor of the school board and at other times to their disadvantage when other groups were in a position to benefit from the shift in resources.
Jim March and Johan Olsen explain that politics involve complicated interactions between institutions, individuals, and events. To understand the complicated nature of politics, March and Olsen refer to their concept of organized anarchies. In their view, given the complexity of the political environment, alternatives choices available to decision makers are in constant flux; choices flow in an out of the situation. They write, “Alternatives are not automatically provided to a
160 decision maker; they have to be found.”4 Policy makers have to be alert to moments when they can either attach an old policy to a new problem or attach an old problem to a new policy. When decision makers find an alternative, March and Olsen label those moments choice opportunities, one feature of which is the ephemeral nature of the moment. An important feature of the school board’s choice opportunities in Japanese segregation and school construction was that the school board had more power over decision making when they were able to reduce the number of actors involved in the process.
The earthquake and fire created a choice opportunity when the school board was able to attach the old problem of Japanese students to a new solution: vacant seats within the Chinese school. Before the earthquake and fire, the supervisor’s control over taxes prevented the school board from acting on their desire to segregate the
Japanese. After the disaster, when the board realized they had space within the
Chinese school, they responded quickly by expelling the Japanese and ordering them into the Chinese schools. When the Chinese school provided a building for the
Japanese, the school board did not have to consult with the board of supervisors about the budget and they were no longer concerned about violating state law. The school board was free to make a decision.
A new chapter began, however, when Japan and the federal government involved. The political process grew extremely complex as new actors entered the scene and old actors assumed a more aggressive role. The federal government stirred up the political environment. It was a classic David and Goliath story: the school
4James March and Johan Olsen, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life, The American Political Science Review 78 (September 1984): 740, 734-749.
161 board against the White House; a local resolution pitted against an international treaty.
President Roosevelt and Secretary Metcalf attracted the attention of the nation and world. And out in the Pacific somewhere was the opaque threat of Japan’s navy.
External pressure from the White House altered political relations within San
Francisco. President Roosevelt’s involvement empowered the Japanese immigrant community, who previously had no say in public policy. The speed at which they were expelled from school was evidence of their inability to defend themselves against local authorities. When they directly confronted the school board, they were dismissed. It was only through diplomatic negotiations with the state department, could the Japanese gain the school board’s attention. The controversy also exacerbated animosity directed at the Japanese. San Franciscan’s closed ranks around the school board to defend the resolution. Labor Unions and the Exclusion League ramped up their efforts against the Japanese. The school board was caught in the middle, with the White house bearing down on them from Washington and local groups pushing them to the forefront of a campaign to ban Japanese immigration.
The politics of school construction also showed how the school board’s power to make decisions fluctuated depending on the number of participants involved in the process. In the early 1920s, the building program was initiated as a solution to several problems, such as the danger of overcrowded fire traps, out of date facilities, and an outmoded academic program. Between 1927 and 1931, the school board held significant power over school construction. The school board controlled the city purse and dictated to the supervisors how much money to spend on new schools. Policy decisions were simple. The school board calculated a budget and the supervisors had
162 to sign it. After the stock market crashed, the building program benefited from
President Hoover’s endorsement of local public works. School construction became an old solution linked to a new problem. When Hoover made a call for public works, the building program was advertised as a solution to unemployment and this continued to be a major theme for school construction throughout the depression.
Fortunes changed when the economy hit bottom in 1932. In 1931, with unemployment soaring, the school board was presented with two alternatives. The first choice was to endorse a school bond for school construction and give the tax money allotted for the building program to relief programs for the unemployed. The alternative was to continue using tax money to fund the building program and leave the supervisors in the lurch to find another way to raise money for unemployment relief. When the school board decided to endorse the bond issue, they essentially gave up their control over school construction because they allowed other groups to reenter the decision making process. To float a bond, the school board had to get the supervisor’s approval and then garner two-thirds majority in a public vote. In the bond votes of November 1931 and June 1933, formal procedures enabled a small minority to defeat the votes and shut down the building program for two years.
In the bond vote of December 1933, the PTA benefited from provisions within the city charter to gain more input in school construction. When the proposed bond issue of June 1933 failed, the city charter prohibited another vote for six months.
Typically special elections for bond measures were slated for June and November each year, so the school board would have had to wait until June 1934 for the next round of special elections. To get the bond measure before voters as soon as possible,
163 the PTA led a drive to petition the public for an initiative. For special elections, normally there was only one campaign before the vote, but for the 1933 December election, there were two campaigns. The first campaign was led by the PTA to get signatures for the petition and the second was to get people to come out and vote on the issue. In each campaign the women emphasized their preference to eliminate fire traps and framed the bonds as a plan to build safe schools.
Rhetoric of Crises
Each case shows that resources are important. Crises altered the political environment because changes to the flow and availability of resource can make a political actor’s plans more or less feasible. Crises also infuse the environment with language that gets integrated into the political rhetoric. David Tyack and Larry Cuban explain the importance of rhetoric in educational politics, explaining that rhetoric—or what they call policy talk—“is a dramatic exchange in a persistent theater of aspiration and anxiety, for Americans have for over a century used debate over education as a potent means of defining the present and shaping the future.”5 The earthquake and fire and the Great Depression transformed the policy talk of Japanese segregation and school construction.
During the controversy over Japanese segregation, the school board and the federal government competed for control over the public’s perception of the issue. The federal government attempted to paint the resolution as an anomaly. In doing so, they featured the earthquake and fire prominently in their narrative. The federal
5 David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 42.
164 government created a before and after scenario in which hostility against the Japanese soared after the disaster. They portrayed the school board as members of a community in shock after experiencing a traumatic event. Segregation was one of many vile acts orchestrated by labor unions, who in normal times harbored ill feelings toward the
Japanese, and when consumed by the stress of the disaster, their aggression reached unprecedented heights.
The school board wanted to portray itself as an independent organization that functioned according to the formal rules and responsibilities of its members’ position as educational leaders. They refuted the federal government’s cause and effect narrative and portrayed themselves as a stable institution unaffected by the disaster.
The earthquake and fire was a side note. Other than presenting the board with an opportunity to do what they planned to do anyway, the earthquake and fire was inconsequential. Further, segregation was educational policy, unrelated to the racial and economic policies of labor. In their words, they were a state institution responding to the needs of their constituents. State law granted them the right to segregate Japanese children, and parents asked them to expel the Japanese.
The policy talk about school construction involved several adaptations. In the early 1920s, school construction was connected to the earthquake and fire of 1906.
The community was unified around the theme that the school department had been dealt a harsh blow by the disaster and needed help to recover. Problems like over crowding and unsanitary conditions were attributed to the lingering effects of the disaster. In 1927 there was a notable shift in the policy talk. Rhetoric about school construction was filtered through the ideology of progressive reform or concerns for
165 school safety. Proponents of progressive reform argued their plans were based on the science and standards of efficiency. Their opponents countered that progressive reform overlooked the importance of creating safe schools for children.
During the depression, these two ideas continued but additional ideas relevant to the economic crisis were included within the policy talk. People were told that building fireproof schools would relieve unemployment; or that school bonds would provide money for the building program, jobs for the unemployed, and tax breaks for the financially strapped; or that the school construction would create safe schools and attract federal subsidies for employment.
Final Thoughts
What can we take away from this study of school policy and crisis? There are a few insights, more suggestive than definitive. The study suggests bad news and good news for policy makers. The bad news is that people tend to assume they have more control over policy than they really do. In 1984, Mike Kirst asked the question
“Who controls the schools?” The best answer this study offers is that it depends.
Control of decision making was contingent on numerous factors. San Francisco’s school board existed in a nebulous political space between state laws, local laws, and local politics. State and local laws overlapped and sometimes conflicted with each other. Sometimes the laws empowered the board and at other times, they hampered the school board’s ability to act. The school board gained advantage over other groups when they were able to eliminate actors from the decision making process. But participation fluctuated. David Cohen and Mike Kirst insist that when the political
166 environment becomes more crowded—especially when state and federal officials play a stronger role—then policy and the processes for making decision become more uncertain. The school board could not indefinitely control access to decision making because events unpredictably altered the political environment. Both crises were unpredictable events that shocked the school system and changed the political dynamics of each case. The best political actors could do was to have a plan, stay alert, and respond to situations as they arose.6
The good news is that opportunities exist regardless of how dire circumstances may appear. These two huge shocks—the 1906 earthquake and fire and the Great
Depression—definitely altered the political environment but they did not completely dislodge political actors off their path. They had to reassess and recalibrate their plans, but they moved forward—with varying degrees of success—with their agendas.
It was critical for political actors to understand how to adapt when resources suddenly became available or suddenly became scarce.
If anything, this study argues for humility in educational policy making, for taking a step back from confident assertions about what is right or wrong for the schools. The success and failure of educational policies are contingent on a number of factors, many of them unknown or outside the purview of individual actors. And, although this study is focused on two extreme events, several scholars explain that disorder in education is natural. Larry Cuban warns against the mistake of trying to
6 Mike Kirst, Who Controls Our School? (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1984); David Cohen, “Policy and Organization: The Impact of State and Federal Education Policy on School Governance,” Harvard Education Review 52 (November 1982): 484
167 assign blame when policies fail.7 He argues that when people assign blame, they imply there was a definitive problem with a definitive solution and someone failed to correctly analyze the problem or implement the solution. But Cuban argues, when we examine education as a dilemma, we get another picture. We get a picture of competing interest groups who want their priorities valued over the demands of other groups. We get a picture of an overlapping system of laws and regulations that often send mixed messages and contradictory directives. Philip Cusick paints a chaotic portrait of the school system. He argues that the American education system is a messy, unruly one. He states, “…the problem with the American educational system is that it is the American Educational System.”8 Schools are messy because they are
America’s most democratic institution. People have access and make constant demands. School officials respond, satisfying some, appeasing others, and leaving many unhappy.
It is difficult for us to accept that some things are out of our control.
Educational research is grounded on methods that isolate variables in order to predict outcomes for administrators, teachers, and students. And while this research is valuable, it may provide an overly simplified picture of the problems, solutions, and processes involved in operating schools. Policy makers, educators and lay persons become frustrated when predicted outcomes do not materialize. In that case, it might be helpful to factor in the messiness and understand that we can to strive for a
7 Larry Cuban, How Can I Fix It?: Finding Solutions and Managing Dilemmas: An Educator’s Road Map (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001) 8 Philip Cusick, The Educational System: Its Nature and Logic (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1992), 140.
168 particular outcome as long as we are prepared to adjust our expectations when events transpire that are beyond our control.
169
Archival Collections
Minutes of the Board of Education. San Francisco Board of Education Archives, San Francisco CA.
Second District of California State PTA Records. San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, CA.
San Francisco Unified School District Records, 1854-2003. San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, CA.
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