Copyright 1988 -2005 USF Center for the Pacific Rim The Occasional Paper Series of the USF Center for the Pacific Rim :: www.pacificrim.usfca.edu Pacific Rim Report No. 39, June 2006 Beyond Gump’s: The Unfolding Asian Identity of San Francisco by Kevin Starr This issue of Pacific Rim Report records the Kiriyama Distinguished Lecture in celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the University of San Francisco delivered by Kevin Starr on October 24, 2005 on USF’s Lone Mountain campus. Kevin Starr was born in San Francisco in 1962, He served two years as lieutenant in a tank battalion in Germany. Upon release from the service, Starr entered Harvard University where he took his M.A. degree in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1969 in American Literature. He also holds a Master of Library Science degree from UC Berkeley and has done post-doctoral work at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Starr has served as Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Eliot House at Harvard, executive assistant to the Mayor of San Francisco, the City Librarian of San Francisco, a daily columnist for the San Francisco Examiner, and a contributing editor to the Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times. The author of numerous newspaper and magazine articles, Starr has written and/or edited fourteen books, six of which are part of his America and the California Dream series. His writing has won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, membership in the Society of American Historians, and the Gold Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California. His most recent book is Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003 published by Alfred A. Knopf. Starr is the California State Librarian Emeritus. We gratefully acknowledge The Kiriyama Chair for Pacific Rim Studies at the USF Center for the Pacific Rim for underwriting the publication of this issue of Pacific Rim Report. I would like to speak this evening about San Francisco and Asia. By San Francisco, I mean both the city and its extended metropolitan region, the Bay Area. By Asia, I mean to suggest the entire Asia Pacific region. If only indirectly, this city was founded by Spain within an Asia Pacific Basin context. One cannot understand the history of Spain in the New World—specifically the vice-royalty of New Spain headquartered in Mexico City—without reference to the Asia Pacific Basin. Indeed, it can be claimed that the fundamental dynamic of New Spain was its drive towards, then across, the Pacific Ocean: the evocation of California as an island in a far-flung ocean in Ordóñez de Montalvo’s 1510 prose romance Las Sergas de Esplandián; the discovery of the Pacific Ocean itself by Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1513; the crossing of the Pacific by Magellan in 1520-1521; the push westward to the Baja Peninsula in 1532; the reconnaissance up the California coast by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo in 1542; and then, astonishingly, the crossing of the Pacific to the Philippines by Miguel López de Legazpi in 1564, followed by the first Manila galleon across the Pacific from the Philippines to Mexico in 1565. As myth-makers, then, as explorers and settlers, as imperial entrepreneurs, the Spanish can even be said to have been obsessed by the Pacific: a Pacific, we must always remember, linked from earliest times to the California coast because the voyages of the Manila galleons were so long (more than 200 days) and so dangerous (scurvy, dysentery, beriberi, vermin, shipboard accidents, even lightening), Spaniards were ever on the lookout for a port on the Alta California coast, especially after 1584 when a galleon commanded by Francisco de Gali discovered that the best way to get from the Philippines to New Spain was to follow the Japanese current westward, head directly toward the coast of Alta California off Cape Mendocino, then sail down the coast of California (Alta and Baja) and round Cape San Lucas to Acapulco. From the mid- 1580s onward, Pedro de Moya y Contreras, Viceroy of New Spain and Archbishop of Mexico, had as his goal the discovery of a port on the coast of Alta California where the Manila galleons could land before continuing south. In November 1595, the Portuguese merchant adventurer Sebastian Ródriquez Cermeño, sailing on behalf of the viceroy, almost found such a port when, following the usual horrible voyage across the Pacific, he anchored his San Agustín in the same bay where the Golden Hinde of Francis Drake had found safe harbor in 1579. Cermeño named the harbor the Bay of San Francisco. Today, we call it Drake’s Bay. Cermeño missed the great bay itself, and to add insult to injury, a sudden storm drove the San Agustín aground at Point Reyes, scattering its treasure on the shore. For the next 180 years, Spain would continue to sail past the fog-shrouded Golden Gate, as it later came to be called. Sebastian Vizcaíno sailed past it in early 1603. Not until August 1775 did the Spaniards at long last sail into San Francisco Bay, under the command of Juan de Ayala; and even then the civilian settlement that eventually formed on the San Francisco peninsula was not given civic status by Mexico until the mid-1830s. Here, then, is a paradox. Spain embraced the Pacific, crossed the Pacific, explored the Pacific, but for various reasons could never fully establish a civil settlement on the Pacific in Alta California to anchor its Pacific aspirations on the north coast of its New World empire. From the beginning, San Francisco was delayed, delayed, delayed in its Asia Pacific identity. At the deepest point of its identity, this was a city that had been first envisioned—even before its exact site was discovered—as a Pacific Basin capital, the exit and entry port for the Manila trade, but this goal could somehow never be achieved by either Spain or Mexico. This failure, however, does not mean that the Pacific Basin was not energizing the Bay Area from the very beginning of the Spanish and English presence in the Pacific, however delayed the actual founding of the City of San Francisco might be. Pacific Basin energies can even be said to have been stored in this region awaiting the patterning and release of urbanism that came during the American era. And it came swiftly! The Bay of San Francisco—if not yet the city—was very much on the minds of the French, the Russians, and the English as they began to stake their claims in the South Pacific and look to the North Pacific, starting in the late 18th century. In 1541 Comte Eugène Duflot De Mofras, exploring the possibilities of establishing a new French colony, a Louisiana on the Pacific, stood on the shores of San Francisco Bay and, extending his arms with Gallic panache, rhapsodized as to the great city that would one day arise on the shores of this harbor, in which all the navies of the world might find anchor. One might very well write the entire history of the American acquisition of California in terms of the Asia Pacific impulse of the United States, whether in reference to the New England trade with China, the New England-based whaling industry, the hide and tallow trade with California by such New England-based companies as Bryant & Sturgis, one of whose employees, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., would upon his return to Massachusetts in 1840 write a best-seller, Two Years Before the Mast, calling for the Americanization of the California coast. No wonder that, a few short years later, the Reverend Timothy Dwight Hunt of the First Congregational Church in the newly established city of San Francisco would be telling his parishioners that it was their destiny to transform their state into the Massachusetts of the Pacific, with San Francisco serving as a second Boston. When Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his four ships into Tokyo Bay in July 1853, he brought a letter with him from President Millard Fillmore suggesting to the Emperor and Shogun that now that California was a state, the United States had entered the community of Asia Pacific nations and was hence anxious to open dialogue with Japan. A delegation of Japanese envoys arrived in San Francisco in the early 1860s, en route to Washington to open formal negotiations with the American government. Within the decade, steam-sail ships were crossing the Pacific between San Francisco and Yokahama twice monthly. Mark Twain took one of them and wrote about it in Innocents Abroad (1869), and so did the Army captain played by Tom Cruise in the film The Last Samurai (2003), whose depiction of Nob Hill by night in the year 1876, with a recently invented cable car climbing up California Street, briefly but brilliantly suggest the rapidly achieved urbanism of San Francisco: a city long delayed in its foundation but, once founded, pushing forward, as the contemporary historian Hubert Howe Bancroft phrased it, into a rapid, monstrous maturity: a maturity already inextricably bound up with Asia Pacific peoples, commerce, and cultural concerns. Chinese workers, among other things, had entered California through San Francisco by the thousands, brought to California by Charles Crocker, construction manager of the Big Four, to achieve an epic of construction engineering, the Trans-Sierran Railroad, comparable to the Great Wall of China itself. By the mid-1870s two San Franciscans—Anson C. Burlingame and Benjamin Parke Avery—had served as United States minister to the Chinese Empire. Avery, a journalist and essayist—editor of the San Francisco Bulletin and the Overland Monthly magazine—had written numerous articles suggesting the importance of San Francisco’s Asia Pacific connection.