Newspaper Machinations In The City

I am continuing to work my way through Gray Brechin’s book Imperial San Francisco. Being from the Bay Area, I’ve gone on numerous outings to the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum which is the fine arts museum located in Golden Gate Park. I didn’t know a thing about M. H. de Young before I read Chapter 4 of the book. Here are my notes from it.

• Contra what San Francisco Chronicle publisher Richard Tobin Thieriot said in 1990, lenses refract rather than reflect reality; the three San Francisco newspaper clans all agreed the city must grow and property values rise.
• Michael and Charles de Young arrived as adolescents during the Civil War. The brothers founded the Daily Dramatic Chronicle with a borrowed twenty-dollar gold piece. Their father who didn’t join them in San Francisco was of Dutch Jewish background. Michael claimed aristocratic descent but didn’t fit into upper-class Gentile society nor the pecking order of the German Jews around Temple Emanu-El.
• In its formative years the Chronicle lampoons the wealthy and goes after monopolists.
• As a result the de Youngs get hit with many criminal libel suits. The favor of the Chronicle becomes something to be curried.
• Charles de Young gets into a libelous spat with popular Baptist minister Isaac Kalloch. Kalloch calls the de Youngs “the bastard progeny of a whore born in the slums and nursed in the lap of prostitution.” Charles de Young shoots Kalloch at point-blank range in front of his church. Kalloch recovers and is elected mayor; after de Young resumes accusing Kalloch of adultery Kalloch’s son goes and shoots Charles de Young dead. A jury acquits young Kalloch on grounds of reasonable cause.
• Michael de Young goes after “sugar king” Claus Spreckels with stories about virtual slavery on Hawaiian plantations and swindling their stockholders. Claus’s son Adolph snaps and shoots Michael de Young. He is badly injured but is saved because he was carrying a package of books. Adolph was acquitted on grounds of reasonable cause. Ambrose Bierce writes “Hatred of de Young is the first and best test of a gentleman.”
• Mining mogul George Hearst takes over the San Francisco Examiner to help him become U.S. Senator. His son William Randolph Hearst takes over management in 1887. He has an eye for talent and a lust for power. In the 1890s the Examiner becomes the leading paper in Northern California.
• The block of Market, Kearny, Geary and Third becomes newspaper row.
• Claus Spreckels buys the San Francisco Call. His son John takes over. They speak for the Progressive wing of the Republican party, and keep tabs on the peccadilloes of the Chronicle’s owner. It turns out the Chronicle was incorporated in Nevada rather than in California, making it difficult for plaintiffs to sue de Young.
• In 1894 de Young clears a 180 acre site in Golden Gate Park for a Midwinter Fair that architect Willis Polk calls an “architectural nightmare”.
• de Young owned land north and south of the west end of the park and hoped for skyrocketing land values with the Fair.
• Hearst hires muckraking Scots journalist Arthur McEwen who uncovers the story of de Young’s long-forgotten brother Gus who is rotting away as a pauper in an insane asylum in Stockton.
• The Fine Arts building at the Midwinter Fair remains standing to become San Francisco’s first public art gallery. In time this morphs into the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum. de Young was an incurable collector of everything.
• After the victory in the Spanish-American War, the Chronicle promotes “The Imperial Future of California.”
• Corruption in City Hall (Mayor Eugene Schmitz and attorney Abraham Ruef.) The Bulletin funded by Rudolph Spreckels, goes after them but then starts going after the bribe-givers. The city’s elite turn against this investigation.
• The prosecution gets stopped because it is damaging business and tourism.
• The Chronicle in its society pages starts to rehabilitate reputations, including Patrick Calhoun. Calhoun had a syndicate that wanted to build an electric interurban between San Francisco and Sacramento. The state railroad commission blocked this since Calhoun didn’t want his ledgers which contained evidence of bribery to be examined.
• The Chronicle and the Examiner collude to buy out the Call, and de Young is rid of the media presence of Spreckels.
• Michael de Young was never able to move in with the Hillsborough set, but his four daughters were able to marry into it.
• The Chronicle’s society pages were able to define who constituted the city’s “us.” Its communications empire expanded well beyond the Bay Area, with secretive holdings and value.
• In 1995 Michael de Young’s granddaughter Nan Tucker McEvoy held more than 26% of the stock of the company and wanted to move the publication more to the center. Private corporate intrigue follows: McEvoy is voted off the board, McEvoy sues her cousins, and this is settled behind closed doors out of court.
• The Chronicle would always champion new expansion, even though there were considerable environmental and social costs.

Afterword: The de Young museum is now managed by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco together with the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, which is on a hill in the extreme northwest corner of the city. The latter museum was built between 1921 and 1924 and is a three-quarters scale copy of the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris. It was a gift from Alma de Bretteville Spreckels and Adolph Spreckels. I am speculating that the Spreckels built the Legion of Honor so as to upstage Michael de Young, though I do not have a source for this.