Customer Reviews

Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (California Studies in Critical Human Geography)

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There are books that change the way you think about things. "Imperial San Francisco" changed the way I look at the city I live in, revealing the machinations behind the development of the Bay Area and its environs.

Brechin's book is part academic treatise, part shrill denouncement, and part insightful tell-all about America's favorite sweet-hart city. Basically, according to Brechin, a moneyed oligarchy destroyed the regional environment, poisoned our streams and wetlands, steered us towards a consumerist society dependant on fossil fuels and highways, provoked war, dumped toxic waste in workers' neighborhoods, and bought and control all significant media, all in order to make a buck. All the problems plaguing our modern society-poverty, crime, pollution, materialism-stem directly from the path of our greedy, imperial, and disgusting past.

Well researched (with occasional holes better filled by other reviewers), with plenty of gruesome anecdote and illustration, the book made my skin crawl, turned my belly aflame, and made me grit my teeth each morning as I read it on the Muni. All the passing sight from the train was just evidence of Man's greed and selfishness. What's worse, it only reminded me that the pace of our development only increases here in California.

But while Brechin was quite skillful in revealing the underbelly of San Francisco's past, his tone is grating and incessant. The book is like that obnoxious friend we all have who's politically savvy and unduly righteous. Reading the book is like being backed into a corner by this friend at a party and having to listen to all the products you should be boycotting.

And what was the alternative, after all? Certainly not the agricultural-philosophical town Brechin rhapsodizes about in the introduction. Jefferson extolled the same type of society, but his model needed slavery to uphold it, as did the Greeks', who Brechin praises as the ideal. So, after putting the book down, we're left with acrid taste in our mouths, yet no refreshing alternative with which to cleanse our palate.

Brechin's book goes a long way towards unveiling some of the core myths the perpetuate the wrong paths taken by our society.

No other place on earth is more buried in sentimental - and highly inaccurate - nonsense than San Francisco. The beautiful city by the bay, the world's favorite tourist destination, the place everyone loves to visit has also served as the home base for one of the most industrious band of white collar thieves and cutthroats the world has ever known. Rarely, have so few people created so much devastation in such a short period of time.

If this is news to you, then the mythologizers have done their job very well.

The ecological devastation of California and other parts of the West and Pacific basin - the horrific destruction caused by reckless mining, the deforestation on a scale almost impossible to conceive, the ruination of millions of acres of fertile soil - a preponderance of these disasters were the outcomes of San Francisco-based enterprises.

San Francisco's elite also played a crucial role in involving the US in destructive wars overseas starting with the Spanish-American war through to Vietnam and Central America. San Francisco's leadership in developing both the Bomb and the rationale for using against Japan is also covered in detail.

The story isn't pleasant, but it's real and it's essential reading for anyone who is trying to make sense of the last 100 years. Many fascinating illustrations and very well written.

Brechin's acerbic and well-researched account of San Francisco's development and the attendant despoiliaton of its hinterlands will be amusing reading to anyone with a populist bent and an interest in San Francisco history.

But "Imperial San Francisco" is far more than good local history. It's a book that wrestles with big ideas -- the poisonous and secretive power of economic elites, the cost of technology, and the way fortunes are built not by creating wealth but by shifting costs to others (including future generations).

There are no easy answers here. This is not a book that inspires one with optimism about human nature or the human prospect. And by connecting San Francisco's rise to power with that of other imperial cities in the past (most notably Rome), Brechin makes a strong case that "t'was ever thus."

"Imperial San Francisco" is also well-written (although this isn't popular history, but the real deal). And I feel compelled to add that in this day of specialization, careerism, and caution in historical writing it's a real pleasure to read such a wide-ranging and daring book. Brechin also makes excellent use of both photos and illustrations and comes up with quotes so juicy they made me want to head for the archives and read the primary sources myself.

OK, OK, I get the point: elites manipulate the physical world for their own enrichment and then disguise their machinations by comprimising the media. So what else is new?

One complaint that has already been voiced about this book is that it is not reall "about" San Francisco at all, but rather makes a point about all cities. That complaint is true in that author's theoretical underpinings for his argument extend to examples outside of San Francisco. Really though, what else would the author do?

Personally, I found authors attempt to relate San Francisco to Rome and other cities to be interesting and relevant.

Another complaint voiced in these reviews is authors tone. That tone has been described as "shrill". I would have to concur with that complaint. I found the tone of this book to be distracting. I would venture to guess that anyone, ANYONE who reads this book is likely amenable to his "Cities suck" thesis. To belabor the point in the manner that author does is just beating a dead horse.

In defense of author, he doesn't present himself as a true "academic" but as a sort of journalist/academic cross-trainer. I found that perspective refreshing. Author is impassioned about the subject of book in a way that makes you put up with the occasional hectoring and shrillness.

One fundamental problem I had with the substance, rather then the style of the book: Author repeatedly discusses various civic improvement schemes as plots to "increase real estate values". Query: Is that really such a nefarious scheme? If you look at California today, property ownership is hardly the exclusive province of the elite. In this way, I think the book unwittingly lends supports to an alternative, and contradictory hypotheses: That the actions that economic elites take in their own self interest ultimately benefit those outside their own social class.

So, that's something to think about.

I am long overdue in giving praise, and thanks, to Gray Brechin for writing one of the definitive and most unique historical treatises on the incomparable and often barbaric history of California, San Francisco, and the American West. He opens with an examination of urban-centric empires, particularly Rome and London, and shows how the process repeated and accelerated in California, due to the unprecedented economic boom triggered by Gold Rush, Silver Boom, the "green gold" agricultural explosion, real estate, ship building and military hardware. His portraits of the ruthless visionaries/profiteers like California's Big Four and Comstock Load barons gives a historical and cultural understanding of how the West became a major economic and political engine that helped transform America into the lumbering financial juggernaut it is today. Brechin dissects the phenomenon of faux wealth perfectly: explaining how hundreds of millions of dollars invested in Gold Mining stocks fueled the Western boom and expansion, investments that were several times greater than the actual amount of gold taken from the land. He dissects the financial "pyramid" that he attributes to mining: how elevator shafts that went down into the grown soon becamse elevator shafts that moved people up into the heavens in high rise buildings, transforming the brief gold mining bonanza into the real estate phenomenon that continues in California to this day. It a truly fresh, original, eye-opening and flawlessly documented observation. And Brechin is not shy about showing the human and environmental costs: the deforestation of the entire Lake Tahoe Basin, the astonishing wastelands created by high pressure water mining for silver in the High Sierra. This is mesmerizing, wonderfully written, a reflective and predictive tale, told as deftly and poignantly as any California history I have ever read, and I have read many. This book should take its place alongside Walter Bean's "Abe Ruef's San Francisco", Marc Reisner's "Dangerous California" and Gladys Hansen's "Denial of Disaster" as a pivotal tome on where we started and where we are headed in America and particularly the American West. James Dalessandro, author, 1906.

I was first drawn to this book because of its cover photo: the intersection of Market, Montgomery and Post Streets in the heart of the financial district in San Francisco sometime in the early 20th century. Today my office looks out at the very same intersection. A (very) current photo would show me waving from a window above the building on the cover's front left.

That aside, I found this to be a very entertaining and enlightening history of the Bay Area. Using Lewis Mumford's concept of the Pyramid of Mining, Brechin structures his history along these main lines: the Gold Rush; San Francisco as the Golden Gate of US dominance of Asia; water, Hetch Hetchy and land values; newspapers and the shaping of public opinion; Mining and Munitions; and finally UC Berkeley, E.O. Lawrence and the mining of Uranium and Plutonium.

Brechin's book is a serious, down to earth history. It is important for understanding not only the history of the west, but also the history of the US and Western Civilization's march from east to west to encircle the globe.

The comments in the next few paragraphs are my conceptual riffs - my connecting the dots - the dots that Brechin provides.

Brechin's work reminds me of David Ovason's book "The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital." Like Ovason, Brechin brings an art historian's eye to San Francisco's cityscape and public art - telling the history behind the art, what it means and what the underlying story really is. Whereas the first book deals with Washington, D.C. as the New Rome filled with Masonic symbolism expressed through astrological orbits, "Imperial San Francisco" deals with that city as an even later New Rome - a Constantinople -- dominated by the technology of Mining and Munitions expressed through atomic orbits. There is an axis that follows directly from Washington, DC through the Gold Rush of 1849 and on to the bright star in the east over Hiroshima in August 1945. It makes me wonder if the fireballs of August 6 and 9 in 1945 are somehow related to the sun's setting position in Washington around August 12th of every year. (see Ovason for more details).

In 333 AD Roman Emperor Constantine the Great moved his capital from Rome to Constantinople. I was in Istanbul (Constantinople) in 1995 and was struck at how similar its topography is to San Francisco. I learned from Brechin's book that I was far from the first to note the similarities. For example, California pioneer John Fremont named the Golden Gate in reference to the Golden Horn of Constantinople - the water route by which the riches of the east flowed to the capital. Over the years many San Franciscan city boosters have hailed San Francisco as the New Rome and the New Constantinople.

Brechin explores how both Rome and SF both built their pyramids of power on a basis of gold mining, and how water was channeled via long aqueduct systems to both.

He explains and documents that the Polk administration knew of the existence of gold in California at least two years before it was publicly announced. Once the stage was set and the time was right, Polk presented a huge nugget of gold to Congress and the Gold Rush was on. And what a myth the Gold Rush turned out to be! Most lost money. Indeed, as Brechin shows, each $1 of gold produced cost a total of about $5 to produce when land degradation, soil erosion, clean up and other costs are included.

Toward the end of the book, the author traces how Silicon Valley arose. What he doesn't get into, but others have, is how similar the dot.com bomb is to the Gold Rush. We are even now living in the shadow of the tech wreck, which while born in the Bay Area, affects the national and even the world economy.

All in all, a very interesting read. Highly recommended.

I'm a SF Native and CAL alunmus as well and I have to say that this was one of the best non fiction books I've read in quite some time. I recall taking trips as a teenager to the Gold Country and remember falling for the myth of the individual forty niner. The knowledge that extracting gold and silver from the sierra was such a hugely capital intensive enterprise transforms your perspective so much. Mr. Brechin has piqued my interest in so many topics. I want to know more about the Union Iron Works and how the military industrial complex built so many bases in the Bay Area. I want to know more about what's behind the barbed wire in Strawberry Canyon. Write another book, or series of books!

I bought this book after I heard Gray speak on a local radio station. I bought it because I wanted to learn more about San Francisco. What I got was a treatise on how cities become powerful at the expense of what Gray calls the "contato" or countryside.

What is surprising about this book is that it really isn't about San Francisco, but rather the effect such "imperial" cities have on its people and the environment. Gray could be talking about any large city. It is San Francisco provides the urban backdrop for Gray's analysis: all large cities exploit (and destroy) peripheral communities and their resources in order to grow. At several points, the book reads like an incestuous soap opera where San Francisco's elite inter-marry to garner their power over San Francisco valuable assets. Gray gives us all of the names and the places.

This book will change the way you look at any city, guaranteed.

I'm a native San Franciscan, 3rd generation Californian, and UC alumnus. I picked up the book from a stack my wife brought home from the library -- and couldn't put it down. It may be the best non-fiction book I have read. I thought I knew my hometown and state pretty well, but I was surprised again and again by the revelations in _Imperial San Francisco_. Brechin's writing is clear and compelling; the book is thoroughly researched and footnoted. The footnotes are often fascinating in themselves. The approach is overtly political: Brechin has an ax to grind. But it's a worthy ax, and he grinds it to a fine point. If one ever had warm feelings toward the Crockers, Floods, Fleishackers, et.al., this book will dissolve them. The story of Hetch-Hetchy water is heartbreaking. Unfortunately, imperialism is still with us, and the Bay Area is still the West Coast Distributor. Buy the book, dammit.

While friends nagged me to read this book, I spent years dodging away. OK, they were right, I was wrong.

I thought I'd read all the San Francisco and California history I ever needed, which was a lot, and that one more recounting of the glory days of Mark Twain, the Gold Rush, the opium dens and Willis Polk in his prime would be gratutious boredom. Thank god they kept nagging.

What the reader gets here is all of the above but with totally new spin, as though Howard Zinn put on environmentalist glasses and went off to fight the good fight once again. Kevin Starr nothwithstanding, this is California history as the world ought to know it, and for the world's benefit.

Organized in chapters that deal with themes, not chronology, it gives us the real costs and nature of mining, the ravaging search for water rights, the pursuit of military contracts to arm the bay, the rise of populist journalism, and the absurd rivalries that gave birth to the University of California and Stanford. I could go on, but why?

Read this book if you have the remotest interest in the subject matter and prepare to be enlightened.