USA > California > San Francisco County > San Francisco > San Francisco, a history of the Pacific coast metropolis, Volume I > Part 27
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The names of the ayuntamiento of 1849 have been given, and to complete the record those of the members of the first city government under American methods are here presented: Mayor, John W. Geary; recorder, Frank Tilford; marshal, Malachai Fallon; city attorney, Thomas H. Holt; treasurer, Charles G. Scott; comptroller, Benjamin L. Berry; tax collector, Wm. M. Irwin, and street commis- sioner, Dennis McCarthy. The aldermen were Charles Minturn, A. A. Selover, Wm. M. Burgoyne, F. W. Macondray, William Green, M. L. Mott, D. Gillespie and C. W. Stuart. The assistant aldermen were A. Bartol, John Maynard, L. T. Wilson, C. T. Botts, John P. Van Ness, A. Morris, William Corbett and William Sharon. The list of assessors embraced Robert B. Hampton, John H. Gibon, John P. Hoff, Halsey Brown, Francis C. Bennett, Beverly Miller, Lewis B. Coffin and John Garvey.
It is difficult to reconcile the sweeping verdict of the annalist and other his- torians of this period that these two administrations were hopelessly inefficient with the subsequent tributes paid to some of the members composing them. The asser- tion has been made that, while they were in control "the City was fleeced and preyed upon in every quarter," and that it had to pay "for nearly everything it purchased two or three times more than ordinary prices." We can only assume that in pioneer days, as at a later period, the opinion was prevalent that in dealing with the community it was not necessary to apply the rigid rules governing personal relations, and that the people in their collective capacity are incapable of being robbed. In no other way can the tolerance accorded public men, who abused their trust, be accounted for by the historian, who would hesitate to accept the explana- tion if the practices of his own time did not afford abundant evidence of the exist- ence of this vicious opinion.
The unsatisfactory working of the first scheme of municipal government under American auspices pure and simple suggested another experiment and the legis- lature was appealed to, with the result that the first charter was repealed and a new one granted April 15, 1851. In the act of reincorporation the limits of the City were considerably extended, but no changes in the direction of amplification or restriction of the powers or duties of the governing body were made. Perhaps the result would not have been different if some of the modern reformatory meth-
Condemnation of Rascality
First City Government
Hopeless Inefficiency
A Second Charter Secured in 1851
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ods had been applied, but they were not and the City went on in the same old way, expending the money of the taxpayer without getting proper returns, and piling up debt without making provision for its payment.
On May 1, 1851, the indebtedness of the City was over a million and a half, and there does not appear to have been much to show for the expenditure implied. Some of these obligations may have been incurred properly, but the most of the debt represented mismanagement and extravagance. Between August 1, 1849, and November 30, 1850, the amount disbursed was $1,450,122.57, and in the three months following $562,617.53, making a total expenditure in nineteen months of over $2,000,000, an enormous sum, considering the size of the City and the un- doubted fact that scarcely any improvements of a permanent character for the public good were made during the period.
The failure to make adequate provision for the payment of the city debt nec- essarily greatly impaired its credit and called into existence a group of speculators, who bought up the scrip of the municipality, which bore the enormous interest rate of 3% a month. A great deal of this paper fell into the hands of an unscrupu- lous manipulator, who subsequently used it to consummate a scheme to get pos- session of a large part of the land still in the ownership of the City. The pro- jector of this daring job was one Peter Smith. His method was to buy the City's paper, which had greatly depreciated, and to obtain judgments. There is reason to suspect that a ring existed, formed in part of municipal officials, which helped Smith to carry out his operations. Their actions certainly facilitated them, the tax collector refusing to receive the scrip in payment of taxes, and the comp- troller upholding him in his refusal.
The Peter Smith Judgments
The judgments obtained by Smith and those who profited by the nefarious transaction were usually for small amounts and bore interest at the rate of ten per cent per annum. They were not secured for the purpose of recovering the amounts represented by the scrip, but to afford the requisite excuse for obtaining possession of the remaining city lands, sales of which were ordered to satisfy the judgments. At the sales under these executions the lots were sold for a trifle. Perhaps all who bought were not in the conspiracy to rob the City, but they were under grave sus- picion. The wretched transaction caused a great scandal, which involved numerous citizens of repute, among them David C. Broderick, afterward United States sen- ator. He was the purchaser of sixteen beach and water lots, two south beach blocks and a hundred vara lot. The fact that he did so must not be counted too strongly against him, as the iniquity of the transaction, if it was iniquitous to do what every one sought to do, was shared by others, against whose names no word of criticism has been directed, and was practically condoned by the community.
Beach and Water Front Lots
It is true that the transaction created a great scandal and that an attempt was made to defeat the purposes of the jobbers, but the fact remains that after several years of litigation it was decided that the Peter Smith sales carried the title to all the beach and water lots, wharves and city property below high water mark that had been sold and not otherwise previously disposed of by the City; and that an attempted redemption which followed the protests against the job was invalid for the reason that the commissioners of the funded debt were not authorized to re- deem. Thus in the case of the property indicated it was in effect held that the people, when acting in their collective capacity, may not recover stolen goods, pro-
Debt of City in 1851
No Adequate Provision for Payment of Debt
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vided the robbery was accomplished with some semblance of adherence to the forms of law.
The funding commission appointed after the Peter Smith grab sold most of what was left of the city property conveyed to them for the purposes of extin- guishing the debt, but the proceeds did not go far towards the accomplishment of that object. The operations of the commission continued through a long period, but at the expiration of ten years only one-sixth of the bonds issued were redeemed. It was not until 1871, when the bonds matured that these old bonds were paid in full. They originally bore ten per cent interest, and were given in exchange for the scrip obtained by the speculators for absurdly small considerations.
In 1852 the people of San Francisco were called upon for $769,887.22 to sup- port the government. Of this amount $275,873.14 was derived from licenses and $262,665.23 from taxation of real and personal property. In addition they con- tributed $231,348.85 in the shape of state and county taxes. The burden, accord- ing to an estimate made by a statistician of the period, amounted to $35 per capita for the support of the City, and $10 for the state. The demands made on the tax- payer, according to this showing, were nearly double those which he was called upon to meet during many years in which public improvements of some importance were made, but the administrators of 1852 did not accomplish much with the sum placed at their disposal.
Out of this amount they expended little or nothing for the improvement of streets. That work was a direct charge upon the property owner, who had to pay for grading and planking the street or roadway on which his holdings were sit- uated. He was also called upon to make large payments for a special police serv- ice, that furnished by the municipality being ridiculously inadequate and inefficient. There were plenty of means, however, for getting rid of the money of the tax- payer and the latter had no doubt in his mind that they were largely corrupt and did not hesitate to charge that they were by resolutions passed in mass meetings and through the medium of the press, which was becoming aggressive in its criti- cisms.
One of the scandals of the year 1852 was caused by the purchase of a theater for the use of the municipality. The city hall had been destroyed in the fire of June 22, 1851, and a place had to be provided for housing the municipal govern- ment. Although there were contractors who stood ready to erect a suitable build- ing for the sum paid for the Jenny Lind theater the council disregarded their offers and purchased that structure. It had to be entirely remodeled to adapt it to the needs of the city officials, and a considerable sum for that purpose had to be added to the purchase price of $200,000. The transaction excited great indig- nation. Mass meetings were called and the councilmen were accused of jobbery, but they were undeterred by the clamor directed against them. Legal steps were taken to prevent the consummation of the bargain, but the supreme court finally decided that the council had the right to make the purchase. Less than two years after its purchase, despite the expensive change made in order to make it at all useful, the building had become too small for the accommodation of the city officials.
If the records are at all dependable the authorities gave the people absolutely nothing in return for their money. The writer of the "Annals of San Francisco," speaking of the causes responsible for the cholera visitation in 1852, said the con- dition of the streets was bad. They were covered with black, rotten mud, and were
An Unsatisfactory Funding Experiment
Municipal Expenditures in 1952
No Returns for Money Expended
The Jenny Lind Theater Purchase
No Concern for Public Health
Vol. 1-13
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the receptacles for rubbish and sweepings of all kinds. Rats, huge, lazy, fat things, infested them and pedestrians abroad at night would tread on them. They were of all varieties, black, grey and white. A sickening stench pervaded every quarter. Hollows made by raising grades were filled with anything that came to hand.
Unsatisfactory Government
Some of these evils appear to have been the direct result of the feverish haste which marked the effort to convert the waters of Yerba Buena cove into land avail- able for business structures. Often beneath the houses there remained pools of stagnating water, into which putrid substances were thrown in order to save the trouble and the expense of removing them. This practice was not interfered with, and unless the chronicles are wholly unveracious there was no attention whatever given to sanitation. Altogether it was a wretched state of affairs and it is not surprising that good men should have despaired of the future of the City. One such tells us that: "It was confessed on all sides that almost everyone who had a chance of preying upon the corporation means unhesitatingly and shamelessly took advantage of his position. His brother harpies kept him in countenance. This gave risc to a general opinion that the City never could possibly obtain a pure government until the bone of contention among rivals for office-its property, to wit -was all exhausted. Had the affairs of San Francisco been prudently managed," he added, "the City might have been the richest of its size in the world."
A Third Attempt at Charter Making
The people were by no means patient under their afflictions. They sought a remedy, and as before they turned to law making to correct the evils of bad gov- ernment. On February 16, 1853, delegates to frame a new charter were elected. They were chosen from the various wards of the City and the list embraces the names of one or two who afterward achieved an unenviable notoriety, but on the whole the body was an eminently respectable one. Despite the fact that so much was expected of the new instrument very little interest was displayed by the citi- zens generally. Its provisions relating to the establishment of titles excited the antagonism of the squatters, but the discussion of the instrument by no means indi- cated a hearty desire for reform. In six of the eight wards of the City, when sub- mitted for adoption, it met with an adverse vote, but a majority of the voters of the City cast their ballots in favor of its adoption.
Neglect of Civic Duty
It is not improper to suggest that the fact that only 1,367 persons voted at the election of September 7, 1853, although the population of the City at the time was not less than 50,000, and the City's misgovernment were closely connected. It was not, however, because lack of interest was shown that the legislature rejected the instrument. Its rejection was due chiefly to the energetic action of some of its adversaries, whose influence at the capital was greater than that of the people of San Francisco. There may have been no real ground for the belief prevalent at the time, that anything desired by the City was certain to be antagonized by the representatives of the people, but many years had to pass away before the prin- ciple of local self government was well enough established in California to induce the legislature to abandon its propensity to engage in special legislation.
Legislature Interference with City Affairs
San Francisco suffered greatly from this cause in the early Fifties, and it was not always the malevolence of the outsider that induced interference with the management of the City's purely municipal affairs by the members from interior counties. More frequently the troubles growing out of the system arose from the machinations of interested San Franciscans, who could depend upon the active
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assistance of a part of the legislature, and the indifference of the remainder to carry out their schemes. It is true, however, that from a very early date there was a disposition to regard San Francisco as a toll gatherer by the sea and to utterly ignore the services it rendered the interior.
The prevalence of this feeling led to numerous experiments in taxation, which seemed to have for their object the extraction of a relatively larger proportion of the sum required by the state for carrying on the government from San Francisco than from other parts of California. An instance of this sort was the revenue act of 1853 imposing a license of $1,000 on auctioneers, a license tax of 10 cents on every $100 of business done by bankers or dealers in exchange, stocks or gold dust or bullion, and an imposition of 60 cents on every one hundred dollars of consigned goods sold, not the property of persons domiciled in the state. San Francisco re- fused to submit to these extortions even after the supreme court had decided that they were not unconstitutional. Numerous meetings were held denouncing the act, which fell into desuetude, not because of its manifestly one-sided character, but . because it was systematically and successfully evaded, the state having no machin- ery to enforce the law.
The inspiration of this legislation came from San Francisco. It was plainly instigated by merchants, who were importing on their own account, and who objected to the rivalry created by large consignments sold for the benefit of eastern and foreign exporters. This practice had attained large proportions and later precipi- tated disaster by glutting the market. It was an undoubted evil, but one which could not be properly corrected by the state converting the practice into a source of revenue. Had the measure been completely dissociated from those provisions of the act which were added for no other purpose than to increase the state's sources of revenue by singling out the City as the object of a method of taxation, which would not directly touch any other part of the state, San Francisco would have submitted to the unjust exaction as cheerfully as it did in subsequent years, during which it bore, because it could afford to do so, more than its proportion of the public school tax.
The inequality of the early taxation methods were a frequent cause of disagree- ment between City and country, and between the sections devoted to mining and those in which grazing was still the leading pursuit. In a message of Governor McDougal the fact was dwelt upon that the southern grazing counties, with a pop- ulation of 6,367, had been called upon to pay taxes on real and personal property to the amount of nearly $42,000, while the twelve mining counties, with 119,000 inhabitants, paid only about $21,000. The latter, he pointed out, had a represen- tation in the legislature of forty-four, while the counties in the southern part of the state had only twelve members. Taking all the agricultural counties together their population aggregated only 79,778, and they were called upon to pay taxes to the amount of $246,000, while 119,000 living in the mining counties only con- tributed $21,000 to the support of the state.
The poll tax was also a source of vexation. A few years later it was charged in the legislature that Butte, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, Siskiyou and Tuolomne paid more than half of all the pool taxes received by the state, and that San Francisco, with 6,000 more voters than Siskiyou, contributed $3,000 less to the amount derived from poll taxes than the mining county. A similar inequality of distribution was noted by McDougal, who asserted that there was a per capita
Experiments in Taxation
Taxation of Consigned Goods
Taxation Inequalities
The Poll Tax Vexations
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tax of $51.495 levied in the mining counties as against $7.205 in the grazing coun- ties, but that the amount actually collected in the mining region was only $3.580, while $3.918 was contributed by sections devoted to grazing.
Perhaps these inequalities may be set down as being due to inexpertness and inefficient machinery for the proper collection of the taxes levied rather than to de- liberate purpose to impose a greater burden upon one section of the state than on another, but the debt-making proclivities of the early administrators of the state created a pressing demand for funds, which had to be met in some way, and the idea that the City could more easily respond to the tax collector than the country undoubtedly influenced the legislature in 1853 to take a course which seriously affected San Francisco. Here again, however, the manipulations of a San Francisco contingent played as important a part as the alleged "cinching" disposition of the interior.
The attempt of the legislature to extend the water front line of San Francisco harbor 600 feet further in to the bay than the red line, and to dispose of the prop- erty thus gained, was inspired by unscrupulous grabbers, who had bought lots at the Peter Smith swindling scrip sales, to which the City could give no title, because it had no proprietary interest beyond the red line. These purchasers, if they did not instigate, easily entered into the scheme which, had it been successfully con- summated, would have shut in all the owners who had bought at other than the Peter Smith scrip sales, while at the same time adding something to the revenues of the state, which claimed the land outside of the red line.
On the 17th of March, 1853, an assemblyman from Tuolomne county intro- duced a bill to carry out the proposed extension, and to dispose of the property that would be gained thereby, the proceeds of which were to be divided, one third to go to the state and the remainder to the purchasers at the Peter Smith sales and their grantees. It was expected that the sale would realize a couple of millions for the state, as the property embraced in the extension was valued at six million dollars. The flagrant iniquity of the transaction, which proposed to violate the terms of the act of March 26, 1851, which fixed the water front of the City per- manently, did not deter the assembly from voting for the bill and passing it in that body by 31 to 27. The action of the San Franciscans in the lower house caused so much resentment, and the protests were so vigorous, that the members who had abused the confidence of their constituents resigned. The project, however, was persevered in by Governor Bigler, and his attorney general attempted to allay ap- prehension and divert attention from its real purpose by stating that its object was to save the City from itself by preventing it from thereafter extending its water front. The measure, however, received its quietus in the Senate where on the 26th of April, Samuel Purdy, lieutenant governor and presiding officer, by his cast- ing vote against it, earned the approbation of the City, which was nearly a unit against the proposed change.
The legislature was not alone in its assaults upon the integrity of the water front. The city council of 1853 exhibited equal disregard of the public interest and helped to give point to the declaration of the writer of the "Annals" that there would be no more pure government in San Francisco while anything remained to be stolen. By the act of March 26, 1851, four blocks lying along Commercial street wharf, and extending from Sacramento on one side to Clay on the other, between Davis and East streets, were given to the City and by an ordinance of the council
Making the City Pay Dearly
Water Front Line Scandal
The State and the Water Front
Pessimistic Views of an Annalist
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of November 4, 1852, they were reserved as a free public dock for shipping. Originally these blocks had been covered with deep water, but the nearby wharves in the course of their extension eastward had rendered them useless for the purpose designed by the ordinance. The council of 1853 decided that the free public dock scheme would be impracticable and by ordinance of December 5th ordered the lots to be sold. The sale was made but was afterward declared void, but not until the City had lost considerable money through the transaction. An idea of the rapidly increasing estimation in which water front property was held may be gained from the fact that purchasers were willing to pay ten thousand dollars a piece for lots not equal in value to those formerly sold for a few dollars.
But the experiences already described were eclipsed in 1854, when an event occurred which disclosed a degree of municipal rottenness compared with which the worst exhibitions of recent misgovernment will seem venial. In 1850 there arrived in San Francisco from New York a man named Henry Meiggs. He had an engaging personality and was a typical boomer. He early conceived the idea that the North Beach section of the City had a great future because it was nearer to the Golden Gate than the region about the cove and must, therefore, he argued, be superior for business purposes. He was a man of action and backed up his belief by causing a level road to be built above high water mark, around the base of Telegraph hill to Clarke's Point from the beach, where he had invested consid- erable money, together with friends he had persuaded of the soundness of his views.
The construction of the road was followed by that of a long wharf which, be- ginning at a point near the foot of Powell street, extended 2,000 feet into the Bay in the direction of Alcatraz island. Meiggs' personality and his enterprise caused him to become extremely popular. He was "Harry" to everybody and no man in the community was better liked or more highly esteemed. In 1853 he was elected a delegate to the convention which framed the charter rejected by the legislature after its adoption by the people; and later in the same year he became a member of the board of aldermen. He made the best possible use of his connection with the council to push along his North Beach projects. Through his efforts the bury- ing grounds of the North Beach section were closed and the bodies they contained were removed to Yerba Buena cemetery, which later became the site of the city hall destroyed in the fire of 1906.
Meiggs' principal energies were directed to overcoming the natural obstacles interposed by the hills, which were numerous in the section he was booming. Through his efforts many streets, among them portions of Stockton, Powell street from Clay to North Beach, and Francisco through to the northern end of Tele- graph hill, were graded, but his activities were not convincing enough to induce outsiders to invest in North Beach property. Having loaded himself with obliga- tions his financial condition became precarious, and when the commercial and general depression of 1854 set in he tried to save himself by resorting to a daringly criminal expedient.
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