Mayors rise to the occasion
San Francisco’s chief executives always seem to know just what to do during civic crises — and there have been many
Eugene Schmitz, the only San Francisco mayor to be sentenced to jail while in office, did not go quietly.
The mayor’s July 8, 1907, guilty verdict and sentencing were met with verbal attacks on the judge, threats to the media and a rambling, defiant speech that included his announcement — moments before he was sentenced to prison in San Quentin — that he would run for re-election in November.
“With the picturesque braggadocio of a pirate of romance, Schmitz had attempted to preside at his own judgment,” The Chronicle reported. “Five times the defendant broke in upon the judge and interrupted him with vehement demands that he be sentenced and not lectured. And when the Court’s last words were spoken that pronounced the sentence of five years of penal servitude upon the arrogant Schmitz, a cheer broke from the crowd.”
That was arguably the lowest point in a 165-year history of San Francisco mayors, which included heroics, corruption and no shortage of pirate braggadocio. From Adolph Sutro to “Sunny” Jim Rolph to Willie Brown, it seems as if the city’s mayors were chosen for their quotability and facility to generate interesting headlines.
Mayors helped to build the city, but arguably have contributed to some of the worst moments in city government. Sometimes the city’s voters seem to be gluttons for civic punishment. (Schmitz indeed was elected again years later as a city supervisor.) But when tragedy occurs, the mayors of San Francisco have historically risen to the occasion.
The first San Francisco leaders were alcaldes, essentially village overseers who led the small group of settlers when San Francisco was still called Yerba Buena. Washington A. Bartlett was elected in 1846 by fewer than 50 votes, placed in a lemon syrup container at Ridley’s Bar.
John W. Geary, elected in 1850, was the first to carry the title San Francisco mayor, in a city that barely functioned. San Francisco’s first postmaster, Geary accepted letters through a broken windowpane, because there was no mailbox. The oneyear term was a quick stop for Geary before he left for the Midwest, where he
became governor of both Kansas and Pennsylvania.
In a city beset by crime, vigilante groups and fires that seemed to destroy downtown twice every year, the mayoralty was an obligation. The city’s second mayor, Charles J. Brenham, refused to leave the steamship he shuttled between San Francisco and Sacramento to campaign.
“The Captain never left his business for a moment to electioneer,” The Chronicle later reported, “he having stipulated with the party that he would only accept the nomination on the condition that he should not be required to neglect his private business.”
But he turned out to be the city’s first great mayor, serving two separate terms between 1851 and 1853. Taking office the day after one of the city’s worst fires, the penniless city government didn’t have money for stationery. Brenham built the city’s budget, and physically confronted Barbary Coast’s lynch mobs who had been bypassing due process.
From a front-page Chronicle story: “In the memorable riot when attempts were made to wrest from the Court and officers the prisoner (Benjamin) Lewis, charged with arson, nothing but Mayor Brenham’s resolution and firmness prevented the mob from taking Lewis and hanging him at once.”
Cornelius Garrison was another great mayor, serving from 1853 to 1854. The former Mississippi riverboat captain split his salary between Protestant and Catholic orphanages. He suspended gambling in the city in a short-lived but noble attempt to drop the homicide rate, and was an early supporter of bringing the transcontinental railroad to the Bay Area.
For the rest of the century, mayors rarely served more than a year, many with quirky or downright scary platforms. Stephen Palfrey Webb (1854-55) was elected by the Know Nothing Party, which ran a campaign that mostly consisted of attacking the Irish. Andrew Jackson Bryant (1875-79) wanted to build separate jail wards for male and female Chinese citizens and force them to work as slave labor. Isaac Smith Kalloch (1879-81) was an evangelist pastor, whose son assassinated Chronicle Editor Charles de Young.
As the century closed, the office of San Francisco mayor had a reputation for corruption — sealed by a City Hall that took 27 years to complete. It was so poorly built that when the building opened in 1899, the sewage line was already broken and the lobbysmelled of filth.
After the 1906 earthquake, with City Hall in ruins, the people demanded justice. Eugene Schmitz and his political puppet master, Abe Ruef, who had presided over a city run by kickbacks and political favors, were finally taken down.
“Schmitz Sentenced to San Quentin for Five Years,” The Chronicle headline read, giving a blow-by-blow of the contentious sentencing hearing.
Then, just eight days later, Schmitz’s hand-picked successor, Charles Boxton, was removed as well. The city’s shortest-serving mayor, who admitted under oath that he had taken a $5,000 bribe, didn’t match his predecessor’s brazen demeanor in front of the judge.
“Contrary to his demeanor on previous occasions, Boxton seemed several times as though he would topple from the wooden chair,” The Chronicle wrote, covering the proceeding. “He kept a handkerchief in his hand and constantly dabbed at his eyes; his face was ashen, and he sighed heavily.”
After two others declined an offer to take the mayoral post in 1907, the city found an unlikely leader in Dr. Edward Robeson Taylor, a poet and attorney who was perusing for novels in a bookstore when the district attorney asked him to take the job. He was inexperienced and considered ancient at 68 years. But his lack of strong ties to City Hall and everyman demeanor were considered assets after so much corruption.
“As mayor of this city, every man looks just as tall to me as every other man,” Taylor told The Chronicle after he became mayor.
Five years later, San Francisco elected arguably its greatest mayor, “Sunny” Jim Rolph, whose reign lasted 19 years. He presided over the rebirth of San Francisco into a world-class city, transforming the neighborhoods with the Twin Peaks Tunnel, the
construction of City Hall and the nearflawless execution of the Pan-Pacific International Exhibition of 1915.
“Like a summer sun sinking below the outer rim of the Golden Gate he loved so well, his spirit dropped beyond the horizon of life at 1:30 o’clock yesterday afternoon,” The Chronicle reported, when Rolph died in 1934, after serving as California governor for 3½ years. “He died in the picturesque old house with its cupolas of yesteryear at Riverside Farm, where for days he fought so gallantly for life.”
All but a handful of mayors before Rolph had come from the Midwest or East Coast, and most left the city when they were done.
Rolph was born in a small house on Minna Street in the Mission District, and never forgot his roots. Every chance he got, he told reporters the Beaux-Arts City Hall was built “without a nickel of graft.” Rolph funded a ballpark at 25th and Valencia streets, not far from where he grew up.
“They broke windows, those kids — lots of them,” The Chronicle reported upon his death, “and a couple of days after each was shattered by a baseball the irate householder would receive a check signed by the Mayor of San Francisco, covering his loss in full.”
Subsequent mayors followed the Rolph mold — outsized figures with strong local roots, including Angelo Rossi (1931-44), Elmer Robinson (1948-56) and Joseph Alioto (1968-76).
Worth his own mention is George Christopher, a Greek-born dairy owner who served as a city supervisor or mayor from 1945 to 1964. Christopher presided over nearly unprecedented expansion of city services. The Giants and Warriors both came to San Francisco while he was mayor, and he was a favorite of children. (A generation of kids watched 49ers games practically for free, sitting in the Christopher Milk section of Kezar Stadium.)
The last of a half century of Republican mayors, Christopher was also on the right side of civil rights issues most of the time, unlike some Democrat mayors in the late 1960s and early 1970s who supported overaggressive police actions. Christopher notably invited Willie Mays to stay at his own home after a St. Francis Wood neighborhood group tried to prevent Mays from buying a house in 1957 because of the color of his skin.
“Willie, I don’t want you to think this situation expresses the feelings of San Francisco,” Christopher wrote to the baseball player. “I mean that very sincerely. I have a nice room upstairs; it’s quiet and you could come and go as you please. We’d be portraying the kind of brotherhood the world needs.”
The city in 1975 elected its most liberal mayor in modern times, George Moscone, who beat conservative John Barbagelata by just a few thousand votes. Moscone appointed women, gay San Franciscans and other minorities to key city government positions, and was mayor when a progressive and diverse slate of supervisors, including Gordon Lau, Harvey Milk and civil rights activist Carol Ruth Silver, were elected.
Moscone and Milk were gunned down by Supervisor Dan White on Nov. 27, 1978, the first San Francisco mayor to die in office of other than natural causes.
In San Francisco mayoral tradition, tragedy led to exceptional leadership in City Hall.
Dianne Feinstein had finished a distant third in the race against Moscone and Barbagelata just two years earlier. But, as president of the Board of Supervisors, she was the compassionate and decisive mayor that the city needed. In the era long before social media and rumors quickly circulating on the Internet, Supervisor Feinstein was the leader who informed the shocked public that Moscone and Milk were dead.
“As president of the Board of Supervisors, it is my duty to inform you that both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed,” she said. “The suspect is Supervisor Dan White. … The city and county of San Francisco must and will pull itself together at this time. We will carry on as best as we possibly can.”
Feinstein was elected mayor later that year and became one of the city’s stronger mayors, promoting social liberalism and fiscal responsibility, which served her later as she was elevated to the national stage, where she remains as a U.S. senator.
She was followed by the pendulum-like pairing of Art Agnos and Frank Jordan, a liberal mayor followed by a more conservative mayor, both longtime public servants. In recent years the mayoralty seems more unified in mission and in succession order — Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom and Ed Lee have acted mostly in lockstep in their pro-business decision-making. They have generated their critics, with some memorable accomplishments as well, such as Brown’s reconstruction of City Hall in the 1990s and Newsom’s efforts to legalize same-sex marriage in the 2000s.
As San Francisco moves on after celebrating its 165th year, two things remain certain: There will be more characters in City Hall. And when the city needs a mayor the most, someone will step forward and lead San Francisco out of its crisis.
From the Barbary Coast era to the present day, that’s the legacy of the highest office in San Francisco.