In this episode of The Secret History of Frisco, we’re diving into the San Francisco Examiner’s sensational 1944 moral crusade against Barfly Women and the threat they posed to the social fabric of San Francisco. The paper hired the renowned 86-year-old author and novelist, Gertrude Atherton, a San Francisco native, to mount an investigation into the phenomenon of unaccompanied women drinking in saloons and nightclubs.
We trace the history of William Randolph Hearst’s and Joseph Pulitzer’s battle for domination in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century and the sensational, fact-free style style of reportage that gave rise to the term “yellow journalism,” and created the outrage that led to the Spanish-American War in 1898, the one where Hearst famously said, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war!”
Finally, we circle back to to 1944 and Gertrude Atherton’s first installment of “Women In Saloons, The Shame of My Sex.” The city bursting with wartime workers. Women daring to have a drink in public. Atherton’s piece is a classic piece of moralizing, painting these women as mothers neglecting their kids and succumbing to “riotous indecencies.” She herself was born to great wealth and privilege and it shows.
In her first installment, she hilariously brings along an escort to down her drinks while she performs her first-hand research, since she is a teetotaler. This installment ends as she and her escort make it to the legendary Top o’ the Mark Restaurant and Bar atop Nob Hill.
Sources:
November 12, 1944 (page 16 of 116). (1944, Nov 12). The San Francisco Examiner (1902-) Retrieved from https://www.ezproxy.sfpl.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/november-12-1944-page-16-116/docview/2163245809/se-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Atherton#cite_note-2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faxon_Atherton
https://www.itakehistory.com/post/the-yellow-kid
TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to The Secret History of Frisco. I’m your host, Knox Bronson. Today we are going to look at the San Francisco’s Examiner’s 1944 crusade against Barfly Women, Gertrude Atheron’s four-part series titled, “WOMEN IN SALOONS—The Shame of My Sex; A First Hand Report by a Noted Writer on Today’s Riotous Indecencies and Menacing Breakdown of Feminine Morals in Our Brawling Barrooms.”
The powerful San Francisco Examiner, flagship of William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire, launched incendiary crusade after incendiary crusade from the time he had taken over the failing paper at the age of twenty-four. His father had acquired the newspaper in 1880 as a partial payment of a gambling debt and gave the paper to his ambitious son in 1887.
I think we need to discuss the San Francisco Examiner much like we looked at Frank Sinatra’s mob connections in the first Jimmie Tarantino episode a little while back. By the middle of the twentieth century, the paper was so deeply entrenched into San Francisco’s power structure, with Editor Bill Wren effectively running the city, the police department, and the state Democratic Party, it’s hard to overstate its influence over all aspects of San Francisco life. Bill Wren was Hearst’s point man Northern California.
After leaving Harvard and taking over the paper, Hearst quickly transformed the Examiner into a profitable publication, which he deemed the Monarch of the Dailies. He had a genius for promotion and sensationalism was second nature to him. He wielded both as weapons with Samurai skill as he acquired more newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, and movie companies across the United States for decades to come.
Throughout his life, he maintained tight control over the editorial positions, that is to say, published opinions, and the news content of his entire empire, not just one single paper, station, or studio. Remember this as we discuss the Examiner’s influence in San Francisco in the coming decades.
In 1895, he made one of his first acquisitions and, buying the New York Journal newspaper and moving to New York City. He soon entered into a brutal circulation war with his new arch-rival, Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World newspaper.
It is a commonly held belief that Hearst was single-handedly responsible for the four month Spanish-American War of 1898. There is a grain of truth in there. He certainly fanned the flames, but Pulitzer kept pace with him in the pages of the New York World newspaper as well.
Hearst saw the Cuban rebellion against Spain as a perfect opportunity to attract readers and gain national prominence and to crush his steadfast enemy and his paper in the process.
[intermezzo]
Here the term, “yellow journalism” entered the popular lexicon, derived from their explosive battle for dominance.
Hearst and Pulitzer employed eye-catching headlines, large illustrations and bold layouts, melodrama, and hyperbole and innuendo to sell their newspapers.
Each viewed the Cuban struggle for independence as a gold mine for dramatic and profitable stories. They published shocking semi-fictional accounts of Spanish atrocities against the Cuban people, rarely letting facts get in the way.
Hearst sent reporters and the famous artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to cover the conflict. When Remington allegedly telegraphed Hearst that there was no war to report on, Hearst’s reply was, “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war!”
in 1898, Hearst’s campaign reached a fever pitch when USS Maine sank in Havana Harbor. While a formal investigation was still underway, Hearst’s New York Journal immediately placed the blame squarely on Spain.
The paper’s front pages were filled with bold, inflammatory headlines like “Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy.” The sensational coverage fueled public outrage and a demand for war, which became known by the rallying cry “Remember the Maine!”
Eighty years later, the United States Navy completed an investigation of the sinking of the ship and determined that the cause was a fire in a coal bunker adjacent to the ship’s ammunition magazines. Spontaneous combustion of coal was a known issue on ships in that era.
I wonder what genius decided putting the coal hopper next to the armory deep in the holds of the ship was a good idea.
Following the war, American business and organized crime elements moved boldly into Cuba. This influx occurred in distinct phases, with business interests establishing themselves almost immediately and organized crime following a bit later.
US corporations like the United Fruit Company quickly gained control of large agricultural estates, dominating the sugar and fruit industries. By the 1920s, American investors controlled a significant portion of Cuba’s sugar production.
American entrepreneurs began developing hotels and resorts, particularly in Havana, transforming Cuba into a popular tourist destination.
American organized crime moved into Cuba in a major way a bit later. While some activities, like rum-running during Prohibition, began in the 1920s, the full-fledged establishment of a criminal empire took a while. The mobsters invested heavily in hotels and casinos, turning Havana into a glamorous city defined by gambling, prostitution, and nightlife just ninety miles off the coast of Florida.
The rise of strongman Fulgencio Batista, who first came to power in the 1930s, was a turning point. Batista and his regime had a mutually beneficial relationship with American mob bosses like Meyer Lansky, “Lucky” Luciano, and others.
A key event was the 1946 Havana Conference at the Hotel Nacional, where top US Mafia bosses met to discuss their business interests and consolidate their control over the island’s criminal enterprises.
Batista’s, and therefore the mob’s, hold on Cuba lasted until Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the corrupt government forced Batista into exile in January of 1959. Both the mobsters and the US companies with interests in Cuba were not happy. They began plotting to take Cuba back.
John Kennedy was elected President in 1960. Immediately after his inauguration in 1961, he was under huge pressure from diverse interests to reclaim Cuba, including the CIA, but he rightly smelled a rat. Or many rats. His eventual refusal to provide air cover for the Bay Of Pigs invasion of Cuba by a force of 1600 CIA-trained Cuban exiles in April of that year was one of the factors that led to his assassination.
After navigating the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Kennedy began making secret back-channel negotiations with Russian Premier Nikita Kruschev to reduce international tensions and to scale back their respective war machines. Both had had a moment of clarity regarding their nuclear arsenals and how close they had come to nuclear war and were determined to work toward true world peace. This was something the masters of war did not want and it was certainly factor in Kennedy’s murder and the deposing of Kruschev from power.
Would the mob and United Fruit have been able to pull off their own invasion and takeover of Cuba had it not been for the ego-fueled battles for money and power between Hearst and Pulitzer at the end of the nineteenth century?
Impossible to say, it might have happened anyway. The war they created out of thin air killed eighteen thousand soldiers, 1200 in battle and the rest dying from yellow fever and typhoid, and drove the Spanish out of the country.
Of one thing you can be certain: rich men are the same today.
[intermezzo]
It was here in the battle between the newspaper titans that the term “yellow journalism” was born. It came from one of the stranger aspects of their multi-faceted conflict.
In 1895, right around the time Hearst had bought The New York Journal and had moved to New York, the New York World newspaper launched a popular, full-color comic strip called Hogan’s Alley, which featured a mischievous, bald, gap-toothed character in a bright yellow nightshirt. The comic strip was a huge hit and sold many newspapers for Pulitzer.
The character became known as “the Yellow Kid.”
One of the factors in the strip’s popularity was the use of a new bright yellow ink that simply popped The Yellow Kid right out from the page amidst the rather muted ink colors of the day. You can see samples of the strip on the Frisco website.
Hearst hired Richard F. Outcault, the cartoonist who drew The Yellow Kid away from Pulitzer and began running the strip in the Journal. He had to buy new printing presses to handle the new yellow ink properly.
Pulitzer hired a another cartoonist to continue the strip for the New York World. Thus, there were two different “Yellow Kid” comic strips running in the two competing newspapers.
The intense rivalry over the comic strips led critics to derisively label the sensationalist reporting of both newspapers as “yellow-kid journalism,” which was later shortened to “yellow journalism.”
While the term originated from a comic strip battle of epic proportions, yellow journalism came to represent a specific style of journalism for which Hearst newspapers would be known throughout the twentieth century.
[intermezzo]
At this point, we return to the cool grey city of love of 1944.
The San Francisco Examiner launched numerous moral crusades and exposés over the years to address society’s ills, its moral failings, alleged corruption, often imaginary controversies, all designed to sway opinion and boost circulation.
In the early part of the century, the paper railed against prostitution and vice and the corruption as evidenced by the lax attitudes of the mayor and police. The Examiner constantly railed on about the yellow menace (here we are again with the color yellow) which meant Chinese, Japanese, and other asian immigrants.
In the 1920s, the Examiner focused on what it saw as the moral decay of the city.
One of the most sensational stories of the decade was the 1925 “Jazz Baby Mother Slayer” case, where a teenage girl, Dorothy Ellingson, murdered her mother during an argument about Dorothy’s wild and wanton ways.
The banner headline on January 16, 1925 read:
GIRL SLAYER ACCUSES MEN: 3 HELD, 14 HUNTED
The lead story read:
THEY STARTED ME.’ KILLER OF MOTHER, IN CELL, INSISTS
Arrest of 17 Companions of Jazz Killer Ordered, as She Reveals Details of “Parties”
Child Who Killed When She Was Denied “Bright Lights” Keeps Calm Demeanor in Cell
By WOOSTER TAYLOR.
Smiling. inscrutable figure in the only crime of its kind in the history of California, Dorothy Ellingson, confessed slayer of her mother, emerged from twelve hours of pitiless questioning at the City Prison yesterday the same 16-year-old enigma of unsatiated sophistication. She was still the life of the party, just as she had been twelve bours after the murder when she danced and sang in the apartment of Dave Stein, while her mother, Mrs. Annie Ellingson, lay in the little home in Third avenue, shot dead in a flare of anger.
She said, “I don’t believe in heaven or hell. My idea has been to have a good time today and tomorrow.”
In an essay about Dorothy by Annie Laurie, entitled, “Dorothy Ellingson Egotist Who Thinks Only About Herself,” she is quoted as saying:
Yes, I killed my mother; they all know it now, so I might as well confess. She made me mad, so I killed her. She was always at me about going to wild parties and she didn’t like any of my friends and she said if I went out again that night she would call up the police and have them arrest me, and she said she would bar the door and never let me in again, and so I just went into the other room and got the gun and when her back was turned / shot her. I didn’t know whether I killed her or not-I guess I didn’t care. I was mad-and you know when you’re mad- The secretive smile was particularly in evidence just then and the sly eyes gleamed a little-“when you’re mad, you’ll do most anything.’
The paper carried opinions, sidebars, stories about the men with whom she had been carousing, three of whom had been arrested while the police looked for the other fourteen.
The Examiner even hired Dorothy to write a confessional series of articles, the first of which was headlined, “GUN WIELDER BARES SECRET OF JAZZ SOUL.”
There Were No Tears in the Days of This 16-Year-Old Who Danced Way to a Slayer’s Cell
Never Loved; Hate the Very Word and Never Will Love” .Memoirs Disclose
This is the first installment of the life story of Dorothy Ellingson. written for “The Examiner” by Dorothy Ellingson herself.
By Dorothy Ellingson, Sixteen-year-old Confessed Slayer of Her Mother. (Copyright. 1925, the Ran Francisco Examiner) (All Mights Reserved.)
l don’t see why anybody should be interested in a story of my life. It isn’t very much of a success, 50 far, but maybe failures are in- teresting as well as successes–and maybe some girl who is starting out the way I started out can learn a lesson from me. So here is my story as well as I can remember it-but when you read it remember that I’m only sixteen years old, even if am taller than the average woman, and I have never been beyond the eighth grade in the grammar school.
I think we’ll have to return to Dorothy’s story at another time. But we will.
The Examiner used the JAZZ BABY MOTHER SLAYER furor as a launching pad for several more campaigns, stoking fears about the corrupting influence of jazz music, and the associated drinking, dancing, and immoral behavior in the city’s “black and tan” clubs (these campaigns almost always focussed on minorities or women), leading to police raids on nightclubs and, of course, increased circulation for the paper. Broader anti-vice campaigns, targeting prostitution and other forms of what they perceived as public immorality continued for decades, often in collaboration with police and politicians.
In the Thirties, it was gambling housewives and later, marijuana.
The paper railed against the neglect of home and family, the wasting of household money, moral depravity
Sensationalist headlines framed the miscreants as worthy of public humiliation. Editorials called for social control.
Marina Bookmaking Joints Openly Lure Housewives to Gamble on Races
RACKETEERS LET CHILDREN INTO ‘JOINTS’ Gamblers Provide Scissors So Kiddies Can Cut Out Dolls as Mothers Play the Ponies
25-CENT BETS TAKEN FROM SHABBY WOMAN ON RELIEF
Police Station Near, but Captain Fails to Take Any Action; Hard-Boiled Operators Kick Them Out After They Lose All Their Cash
Men, Fearing for Safety of Homes, Write How Bookies Beguile Housewives
Here are some excerpts: “I’ve begged the bookies to keep my wife out of the pool hall down the block. “They let her In as soon as my back is turned.
“My niece borrows money to play. I have to pay it back to keep her out of trouble ”
This is what bookies who cater to women bettors on dog and horse races do to San Francisco families.
William Randolph Hearst rightly saw commercial hemp, also know as cannabis or marijuana, as a threat to his vast timber and paper manufacturing interests. The development of new technology for processing hemp fiber threatened to provide a cheaper alternative to wood pulp for making paper.
His anti-marijuana campaign fit perfectly with his tried-and-true brand of yellow journalism. It allowed his papers to publish lurid tales of violence, murder, and insanity allegedly caused by the drug. Hearst himself once wrote: “Users of marijuana become STIMULATED as they inhale the drug and are LIKELY TO DO ANYTHING. Most crimes of violence in this section, especially in country districts are laid to users of that drug.”
Shades of Remember the Maine.
With the Atherton Report of 1937 and its attendant scandals, resignations on the Police Force, and prosecutions, the many bordellos of San Francisco continued to operate, but with much more circumspection. Gambling joints still peppered the Tenderloin.
The advent of World War II brought huge changes to the socioeconomic fabric of San Francisco.
With so many men serving overseas, women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers. They took on jobs in shipyards and factories that were previously held by men. Think Rosie The Riveter.
Many of them were single.
[intermezzo]
Throughout the Forties, the Examiner kept its anti-vice sensationalism turned up to eleven, just as one would expect, but the focus broadened. Gambling dens were still a problem and pinball machines a plague. Every cigar stand was a front for a bookie operation. The moral collapse of the city was an ongoing crisis.
On November 11, 1944. We were still a year away from the end of the war. Headlines on the front page that day:
Weird. 1.000-MPH. Strato-Rockets Blasting Britain —
Metz Trap Closing; Jap Destroyers, 3 Transports Sunk
Fourth Heavily Laden Troopship Set Afire; New Gains on Leyte Yanks Drive Five Miles Toward Ormoc; Big Sea, Air Battles 1,000 Nazi, U.S. Tanks In Battle For Fort
U. S. PROBING SHORTAGE OF CIGARETS HERE
Roosevelt Back at Work, Calls Cabinet Takes Up World Problems, Big 3 Meeting
A. L. VOLLMAN FOUND GUILTY IN BRIBE CASE
The movie Laura, directed by Otto Preminger, Starring Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, Judith Anderson, was riding high at the box office. You can watch the whole movie for free over at the secret history of Frisco website. Look in the Vintage Films section. The American Film Institute named it one of the 10 best mystery films of all time.
At the bottom of the front page on this eleventh day of November in 1944 there was a small box, known as an ear in the newspaper trade, that read: Gertrude Atherton Begins Women in Bars® Sunday
Women in Bars was accompanied by a registered trademark symbol.
[radio voice]
The alarming wartime increase of heavy drinking among women in San Francisco is discussed and analyzed in a series of penetrating articles written by Gertrude Atherton, noted author, beginning in tomorrow’s Sunday Examiner. Factual and completely documented, Mrs. Atherton’s report will bring you a revealing picture of the demoralizing influences at work among women in this wartime community. Begin this first hand report by Gertrude Atherton on a current problem of major importance in tomorrow’s Sunday Examiner.
[/radio]
Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton, born in San Francisco in 1857, was known for her novels set in California, the most popular of which, Black Oxen, was made into a silent film of the same name in 1923. You can watch the movie for free on the Secret History of Frisco website.
Her father was a prominent San Francisco tobacco merchant and her mother hailed from New Orleans. They separated when she was two and she was raised by her grandfather, Stephen Franklin. Grandfather Franklin insisted she be well read, and so she attended St. Mary’s Hall high school in the north east Bay Area, and, briefly, the Sayre School, a prestigious all-girl boarding school in Lexington, Kentucky.
Naturally rebellious, she didn’t last long at the school and moved back to California to live with her grandfather and mother.
There she met George Atherton, wealthy son of Faxon Atherton, after whom the affluent town of Atherton California was named. George Atherton was in the process of courting Gertrude’s mother when she arrived back in California.
George soon became more much more interested in daughter Gertrude and he began courting her. Mom could not have been too happy with this development.
After Gertrude accepted George’s sixth marriage proposal, they eloped on February 15, 1876 when she was nineteen.
She lived with him and his domineering Chilean mother and found life at both the Atherton mansion in San Francisco and on their estate on the San Francisco peninsula, stifling. She decided to create her own life independent of the marriage and began writing.
Her first publication was “The Randolphs of Redwood: A Romance,” serialized in The Argonaut, a venerable San Francisco newspaper in March 1882 when she was twenty-five years old, under the pseudonym Asmodeus. Her first novel, “What Dreams May Come,” was published six years later under the pseudonym Frank Lin.
She had a long and very successful writing career, producing short stories, essays, and articles for magazines and newspapers on such issues as feminism, politics, and war, as well as her popular novels. She is considered to be an early feminist and suffragette of some influence. She was also a white supremacist, claiming that American civilization had been created by the “Nordic” or “Anglo-Saxon” race, and that this was now threatened by an influx of “Alpine” and “Mediterranean” immigrants.
I will leave it to you to assess her brand of feminism as conveyed in the article. Just remember that the arc of history, some say, bends toward the light.
At the age of 86, she was hired by the San Francisco Examiner to write a four-part exposé on “Barfly Women,” a new and troubling phenomenon in the city, according to the paper, brought on by the war and the rapidly changing demographics of the city.
The name of the series was: “WOMEN IN SALOONS—The Shame of My Sex.”
Today, I am reading first installment, “A First Hand Report by a Noted Writer on Today’s Riotous Indecencies and Menacing Breakdown of Feminine Morals in Our Brawling Barrooms.”
By GERTRUDE ATHERTON
Distinguished American Author
I will preface this article with the statement that as I grew up in a household where whiskey, brandy and gin were the staple remedies for every known ill and I was liberally dosed with all three (to say nothing of port wine with cod liver oil in it, and a long session with “stout” as a tonic) I have never ceased to regard every one of them as medicine and hate them accordingly. On the other hand it is a matter of complete indifference to me whether other women drink or not. Other persons’ morals and habits are their business, not mine, so long as they behave themselves when I am around.
This merely to demonstrate that I am quite without bias.
San Francisco has undergone many phases in drink as in all things. When I was a girl California was a lovely State, seven long days by train from New York; the men were frantically engaged in making fortunes and losing them, and women, unless intellectual, had no resources beyond gossip, dress, children, servants, and the somewhat monotonous pleasures of society in a small and formal city.
And here I will digress for a moment, for as I’m sure you’ve gathered, Gertrude grew up in the wealthiest strata of San Francisco society and, as such, may have been only peripherally aware of what Benjamin E. Lloyd wrote in 1876 book, Lights and Shades in San Francisco, the same year Gertrude married George Atherton at the age of 19:
“We do not wish to say, or even imply, that San Francisco is the wickedest and most immoral city in the world; that her men are all libertines and her women all fallen; that she has no noble sons and pure daughters. This is only a single chapter on her wickedest ways-the deepest shade among many brilliant lights.
“But we would say to the parents of San Francisco to look closer to their daughters, for they know not the many dangers to which they are exposed—know their associates, guard their virtue and to mildly counsel their sons, for when upon the streets of this gay city they are wandering amid many temptations.”
“The Barbary Coast is the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind. The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cutthroats, murderers, all are found here. Dance-halls and concert-saloons, where blear-eyed men and faded women drink vile liquor, smoke offensive tobacco, engage in vulgar conduct, sing obscene songs and say and do everything to heap upon themselves more degradation, are numerous. Low gambling houses, thronged with riot-loving rowdies, in all stages of intoxication, are there. Opium dens, where heathen Chinese and God-forsaken men and women are sprawled in miscellaneous confusion, disgustingly drowsy or completely overcome, are there. Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy, and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also.”
And now we return to 1944, sixty-eight years later, and Gertrude’s timely exposé.
I used to overhear my elders gossiping about this woman and that who had “taken to drink.” A phrase remains in my memory:
*Actually picked up in the corridor of the Occidental Hotel, my dear, and had to be carried by two men into her suite!”
In time, as population increased, and distance decreased with more rapid trains, as diversions multiplied, and San Franciscans spent more time in their country houses during the summer or at lively resorts, as they developed an interest in music and attended the opera and the symphony concerts, to say nothing of the theater, for the best plays traveled to California, one heard less and less about the drinking of either men or women until prohibition, the most stupid and unpsychological law ever passed by the United States Government.
Then one began to hear of men drinking heavily who had been moderate before, of hip-pocket flasks, of petting parties, of girls of all classes making fools of themselves; but still no scandals like those of the past. Toward the end of prohibition I attended a cocktail party of young people; being a professional writer of fiction it was my business to see all phases of life and I hoped for and expected a new experience, something really sensational.
EXCEPT THAT COCKTAILS WERE HANDED ABOUT FREELY AND IMBIBED TO THE LAST DROP I COULD SEE NO DIFFERENCE IN THE GENERAL ATMOSPHERE FROM THE OLD-FASHIONED “TEAS.” ONLY ONE YOUNG MAN HAD TO BE GENTLY LED OUT AND DRIVEN HOME. BUT NOT A GIRL LOOKED PINKER THAN HER MAKEUP. NOR KICKED UP HER HEELS IN A CAN-CAN, AS I HAD NAIVELY EXPECTED. EVIDENTLY THEY HAD ALL ACQUIRED COPPER-PLATED STOMACHS.
During prohibition, on one of my frequent visits to New York, I was taken to a famous night club. It looked promising, for my host knocked discreetly and murmured a password before the door was opened and we slid hurriedly in. We ascended to a large room, half filled, quiet, elegant -and deadly respectable. My infrequent utterances were almost inaudible, so fearful was I of disturbing that holy calm.
I was taken to two other night clubs that were more lively, but there was little noise. I had hoped to see men and women reeling about in the dance or engaging in fisticuffs, but although they drank hard and long, they looked more as if they were performing a solemn duty in defying the law, and rather bored. I did observe, however, that the women were losing their complexions, and the men looked red and ugly. No doubt my experience was unfortunate, and there were other places that resembled these forbidden resorts as depicted on the stage, but my hosts were far too considerate for my taste. With the recall of prohibition that phase passed, although night clubs continued to flourish, but more for the purpose of giving those who did not know what to do with their evenings a place where they could drink and be merry in moderation, dance, or be entertained by stage shows.
I HEARD MUCH OF THEM IN SAN FRANCISCO, BUT ACCEPTED NO INVITATIONS; BEING A MEMBER OF THE WORKING CLASS. AND RISING EARLY I PREFERRED TO GO TO BED AT 9 O’CLOCK WITH A BOOK.
But after the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor, plunging us into war, and the population of San Francisco increased by some 250,000, one heard less of night clubs and more of cocktail bars and wild doings. Society for the most part held aloof and devoted itself to war work; but society is a small body, and with thousands of girls, young and middle aged women of different strata, on the loose, the so-called leisure class was almost forgotten, their few diversions given scant space in the newspapers.
There had been a few cocktail bars in the city before; after Pearl Harbor they multiplied like locusts. The high-toned ones were in the hotels, but there were a thousand others to entice all classes.
I was very busy at the time, but read the newspapers. Almost every day there was a story of some young woman, who had been knocked down in a lonely street and robbed or raped, or both. And invariably she was a woman on her way home from a cocktail bar where “she had had a few drinks.”
As invariably she had left her children at home with no one to look after them; her husband was either in the Army or working on a night shift. The city was crime-ridden, but apparently her longing for “a drink and fling” overbalanced her caution as well as her maternal impulses.
Girls flocked to these bars not only for distraction and liquor but to “pick up some man with a roll.” Prostitutes reaped a rich harvest, and even girls, heretofore respectable, ran wild.
The married, when hailed before a magistrate for disorderly conduct on their way home, pleaded that they were lonely and didn’t see why they couldn’t have a little fun like other people.
Others went out of curiosity, cocktail bars being the talk of the town, accepted a drink from some predatory male, then another, made the discovery that life in cocktail land was more fascinating than sitting at home reading a detective story or darning the children’s stockings, and became habitues.
MANY WERE THE REASONS, BUT THERE MUST BE A FUNDAMENTAL CAUSE -BUT MORE OF THAT LATER.
San Francisco, although now one of the largest and most densely populated ports in the Nation, the whole “Bay area” surrounded by war industries, is, after all, but one city of many with a similar history of drinking women, and when I was asked to write a series of articles on the subject I assumed that my experience would be typical.
Of course it was necessary for me to make a round of these bars, so different from my former excursions, and at first I hesitated, fearing that I would be put out if I didn’t drink, and having no “head,” knew that even a glass of sherry in each resort would have a dire effect; I had no desire to wind up in a police station.
I was reassured, however. A daily newspaper offered a member of its staff as escort, who would not only guide and protect me but dispose of the drink–preferably bourbon-I might be forced to order.
The first place we visited was “Top o’ the Mark.” on the nineteenth floor of the Mark Hopkins Hotel: a large circular room with walls of glass that commanded a view of the entire city; the hotel itself is perched on one of the highest hills. It is the one cocktail bar where people go for something besides liquor and “pick-ups” and there is probably nothing like it anywhere else in the world.
Lights. Lights. Lights. Lights on the invisible hills and valleys of the city. Lights on the islands in the Bay and on the hills and mountains beyond. Even Alcatraz, that grim “Rock,” once a military prison, now the last earthly dwelling of civilian “lifers,” showed a point here and there. Belvedere, with its magnificent homes, looked like a long regiment of fireflies, others would seem to have settled in patches on Angel Island and Yerba Buena.
They were brilliant on Treasure Island, “made ground” for the Exposition of 1939-1940, now a reception center for sailors waiting to be assigned to ships. On the north side of the Bay at Marinship, where many tanks a month are turned out, the yards were bright while the night shift toiled and lighted also were many of the thousand little houses which were especially built for the Families of workers.
So I set forth on my new adventure. That must be left for the second article.
[intermezzo]
And now we come to the end of Women In Saloons—The Shame of My Sex, Part One.
Please be sure to return for Women In Saloons—Part 2, Gertrude’s further forays into San Francisco’s nocturnal drinking world, her observations and estimations of the barflies therein, her erudite, if skewed, diagnosis of the problem, and her astonishing, mind-boggling, no, actually mind-blowing suggestions as to how to correct the societal ills as she perceived them.
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Once again, I’m your host, Knox Bronson. Thank you for listening. Until next time, please get a little crazy and call it Frisco.