Author shows how 1978 was gamechanger for S.F.
Book explores tumultuous year’s shifts in baseball, politics, music
Lincoln Mitchell’s new book began, like many things in his life, with baseball.
It’s not a surprising fact for those who know Mitchell’s work. After all, he’s written two books about the sport. But this project was different. It started with the perspective of the 1978 San Francisco Giants, a nonplayoff team that won’t sit as one of the franchise’s proudest moments. And, yet, Mitchell says, “for me, the 1978 Giants were a magical team.”
Like David Talbot’s “Season of the Witch,” which looked at the years from 1967 to 1982, Mitchell’s “San Francisco Year Zero” uses a point in the city’s past to help us understand the city today. Mitchell uses that team’s season as an entry into his book about how 1978 was a major turning point in the makeup of San Francisco.
Even after trading for the Oakland A’s ace pitcher, Vida Blue, in March of that year, the team was projected to have a poor season. But the Giants played electrifying baseball, dominating in the first half of the season to reignite the fan base and maintaining first place in their division for months before languishing in the final stretch. That ’78 team became formative for Mitchell as a young Giants fan growing up in San Francisco, but its highs and lows were also part and parcel of a uniquely tumultuous 12 months for the city. While the Giants’ exciting season saved the team from a potential move to another city, there was simultaneously the rise of a punk scene that, unlike the rest of the country’s punk movement, was uniquely political — such as campaigning for gay rights — during what was a politically fastchanging moment in San Francisco. At the start of the year, Harvey Milk was sworn in among a newly diverse class of city supervisors, serving under a radically progressive mayor, George Moscone. Of course, 1978 was also characterized by death: first, the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, of the members of San Francisco’s Peoples Temple, orchestrated by its cult leader Jim Jones, followed almost immediately by the assassinations of Moscone and Milk by former Supervisor Dan White. Mitchell’s book not only examines these events as moments that ultimately changed San Francisco’s fate but also provides somewhat of a corrective on
the often misconstrued, or altogether ignored, narratives of the city’s identity.
“What strikes me about San Francisco with the changes, and this is one of the reasons I wrote the book, is I feel like there’s not a lot of institutional memory,” he says.
Mitchell, who lives in New York City, still spends a month in San Francisco every year and says he isn’t one who visits and “grumbles.” His view of its changes is informed by a more longitudinal and measured perspective of the city, which in 1978 was undergoing a cultural shift.
“This notion that San Francisco always was this kind of lefty, radical place gets the history kind of wrong,” Mitchell says, referring to the image of a liberal utopia that is often projected onto the city from the ’60s onward. “It was not really until almost the late ’80s that it really became the kind of progressive San Francisco.”
Growing up within this stretch of the late ’70s and beyond, Mitchell characterizes 1978 as an inbetween moment, and a period of great rifts. The Giants were far past the glory days of Willie Mays and still years away from contending for a title again. It was well after the Summer of Love; hippies and their music had aged, and a new punk scene saw them as authority figures and commercialized products. But mostly, ’78 was the middle of a political transition — the Republican National Convention took place in San Francisco in 1964, Mitchell notes, while 20 years later, the city had completely flipped, hosting the Democratic National Convention in 1984.
Moscone, Milk and other members of that year’s new class of supervisors represented an unprecedented brand of progressivism, prompting a culture war of sorts in San Francisco.
“The divisions in San Francisco might well have torn the city apart,” Mitchell says. White’s violent acts tested this sentiment. In Mitchell’s book, the assassinations come to serve as the focal point of 1978’s significance.
“The one question we can never answer is the whatif — what if Moscone hadn’t been assassinated and Harvey Milk hadn’t been assassinated?
But really Moscone.”
White’s resignation just days before he killed Moscone and Milk would have led to a progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors, a major upper hand for Moscone. “He would’ve had to run against (Supervisor) Quentin Kopp for reelection in ’79, but he was going to have a year and maybe five to push through and remake the city in a progressive, neighborhoodoriented, truly diverse way,” Mitchell says.
Despite not having passed much meaningful legislation, the book notes, Moscone introduced radical precedents — ones that have lasted ever since — by actively diversifying city government to reflect San Francisco’s changing demographics and speaking openly about supporting gay rights.
“I say this with some sadness, but Moscone is too frequently seen as the career politician who was killed the same day as Harvey Milk,” Mitchell says. “And that is just not a fair way to wrestle with the legacy of George Moscone.”
After Moscone’s assassination, Supervisor Dianne Feinstein became mayor, carrying on Moscone’s legacy of inclusivity in City Hall, but also introducing a different agenda. “She split the difference, going back to real estate and big business, having downtown interests being very powerful, but putting the intolerance aside. And that’s the San Francisco we live in today,” Mitchell says.
Had Moscone survived, Mitchell says, the contemporary issues over San Francisco’s tech boom could have played out differently. “He might have created programs that created meaningful lowincome housing in the early ’80s back when it was a very different city, back when there was still a lot of land that could be used differently, instead of just building office buildings and office buildings, which is essentially what’s happened more or less for the last 30 or 40 years in San Francisco.”
Mitchell’s book, though, shies away from speculating or griping over San Francisco’s modern ills. Reexamining this fateful year, instead, might reorient our sense of memory about San Francisco. The persistent allusion to a former, better version of the city was happening then as much as now.
“If you’re 50 years old in 1978 and come from the old San Francisco, you’re looking around saying, ‘What has happened to my city?’ ” Mitchell says.
For his part, Mitchell concedes concerns about the current changes in San Francisco, but again ponders them with the longer arc in mind. “I just don’t believe that it’s going to be just super rich people and unlivable,” he says. “I can say this because I teach undergrads now — there’s a progressive energy that is willing to wrestle with problems of democracy and economics that I haven’t seen in a long time. So I have reason to be hopeful.”