(See Cover)
Delegates to the annual American Medical Association convention in San Francisco last week (see MEDICINE) saw a remarkable appeal to citizens. On a billboard near the Civic Auditorium was the portrait of a vaguely sinister man whose face was hidden by a tilted derby. A legend read: "Don't surrender your city to the faceless man. Vote no on recall."
San Francisco was in the middle of a muddle and a strange political campaign. On July 16 the city will go to the polls and decide whether to recall Mayor Roger Dearborn Lapham. Some San Franciscans wanted to oust him because his administration had put through a 3¢ fare rise on the city's rattletrap trolley lines. To add to the doctors' confusion, when they first hit town the trolleys were not even running. They were strikebound.
To all outward appearances the anti-Lapham campaign was the idea of a 73-year-old, kewpie-like man named Henry F. Budde. Little Mr. Budde is the publisher of some weekly throwaways ("You can't cancel your subscription, he'll just throw it in your goddam living room") and a paper for municipal employes. He had been a salaryless park commissioner under Mayor Angelo Rossi; Lapham did not reappoint him. More recently Budde had tried to start a "Dimes for Manila" drive; Lapham had declined to push it. Perky Mr. Budde reacted with the fury of a pinto with a burr under its tail. He circulated a petition for a vote to boot out such a graceless officeholder.
The Mayor, he charged, had acted arrogantly in the matter of the trolley-fare boost (from 7¢ to 10¢). Thousands of San Franciscans signed. Lapham signed the petition himself—so the proposal could be put on the June 4 primary ballot, thus save the city the expense of a special election. Budde did not gather enough valid signatures in time, but he got them later; a special election was decreed.
The Lapham people charged that Budde was only the front for politicians who want to enthrone their own man. Who is he? Hardly anyone knows. He is someone the city's supervisors would elect if Lapham is fired. He is the Faceless Man.
There is an outside chance that the plot will work. Odder things have happened in odd and amiable San Francisco.
Birth of Bedlam. Strong men and weak, good & bad—from Mormon Elder Sam Brannan to Roger Dearborn Lapham—have tried with varying success to run or rob or manage "The City" since it began life as Yerba Buena 112 years ago.
Today, as then, the average San Franciscan's idea of government is the average schoolboy's idea of school: the less of it the better. There was little of it in 1846, when the population was 60, even less four years later, when the population was 15,000—mostly gold miners, ex-convicts, hoodlums and pioneering whores. Then the town was a bedlam where gamblers murdered one another at the drop of a deuce and drunks suffocated to death in the mud of Montgomery Street. Six times in one and a half years the ramshackle town burned down.