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Sam Brannan's Vigilantes brought a violent kind of order out of the violent chaos. San Franciscans settled down to ordinary, corrupt city politics and a less homicidal good time. Ladies like "Cowboy Maggie" Kelly on the Barbary Coast still provided entertainment in the old style. But '49ers learned to waltz at Lawyer Hall McAllister's wife's cotillions.
Mayors came & went. In 1869 the transcontinental railroad arrived and the few San Franciscans who had managed to make and hold their fortunes built wooden castles on Nob Hill. The thousands who had not, organized. Subsequently the organized put Eugene E. Schmitz of the Musicians' Union into City Hall.
Charges of graft involving Schmitz, Boss Abe Reuf, the Southern Pacific Co.'s subsidiary United Railways (precursor of the Market St. Railway) grew so loud that even tolerant San Franciscans were aroused. The only reason they did not act immediately was because of a louder noise. The earth moved. The city tumbled down in dust and fire. When San Franciscans, recovering from the earthquake, found time, they clapped Reuf in jail.
Glad Hands. In 1911 "Sunny Jim" Rolph sailed into the mayoralty in a ten-gallon hat and polished cowboy boots. He stayed there for 19 years, and in those years the city grew up. Up climbed the buildings. Up climbed industry, shipping, finances, while "Sunny Jim" ran things with a glad hand. When "Sunny Jim" left to become governor, he passed the mayoralty to Florist Angelo Rossi, who sailed into office with a carnation in his lapel.
Rossi celebrated the opening of the Great Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. But he also presided, without honor, at San Francisco's greatest labor fight, the 1934 general strike. Out of that trouble came the name of Harry Bridges, boss of the West Coast longshoremen.
The strike ended, but not the trouble. One of the issues was malpractices in hiring longshoremen. Bridges' union wanted to run its own hiring halls. One day in 1936 the president of the American-Hawaiian Steamship Co. accepted a challenge to debate that issue publicly with Bridges. The steamship line president was gregarious, articulate Roger Dearborn Lapham.
They met in a hall packed with Bridges men. The longshoremen hooted at the red-faced, white-haired capitalist and shipowner. Lapham put his feet apart and shouted back. Bridges' longshoremen ended up by applauding him for his frankness and sportsmanship. That day Roger Lapham walked onto the political stage.
The Rise of Roger Lapham. He was born in Manhattan, in 1883. Five of his mother's brothers had gone to sea. One of them, Uncle George Dearborn, had organized American-Hawaiian, and he gave 17-year-old Roger the chance to ride one of the line's new freighters out to Hawaii.
Roger wistfully returned to the East Coast, went to Harvard, married Helen Abbott from Brooklyn and dreamed of the West. He worked in his family's several large shipping firms, served as a captain of infantry in World War I, suffered a gassing and temporary blindness, served on Hoover's Food Board. Uncle George died. Five years later Roger Lapham became president of A-H and moved permanently to the city he had always dreamed about.