When San Francisco became the comeback city, it caught the world’s attention.

JAMES GANZ, Ph.D., Curator, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

KEVIN STARR, Ph.D., California State Librarian Emeritus

LAURA ACKLEY, Author, San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915

LORI FOGARTY, Executive Director, Oakland Museum of California

ANTHEA HARTIG, Ph.D., Executive Director, California Historical Society — Moderator

 

ANTHEA HARTIG: How important was the Panama-Pacific International Exposition [PPIE] to San Francisco, to the region and to the state? What accounts [for] its lasting appeal and significance?

KEVIN STARR: [It’s] the relationship to the loss of the city in [the] 1906 [earthquake] and the recovery of the city, the rebuilding of the city in such a rapid order. I think that this is the central context. As for the Palace of Fine Arts, it’s not surprising that that structure has been preserved, because [architect Bernard] Maybeck saw it as the Piranesian text in which something was lost, and it was a melancholy reflection of what was lost. At the same time, the architecture evoked civilization and recovery, and I think that is [of] number-one importance.

The second [part] is that major cities go through periods of imagining themselves, and they can be imagined through their artists. We think of Balzac’s Paris, Dickens’ London, Döblin’s Berlin or Jack London’s Bay Area. Sometimes artists do this for their cities, and sometimes cities do this themselves. Chicago did it in the aftermath of its destruction and loss.

In this case, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) represents all the wonderful things that were accurately chronicled, but it also represents, in a mysterious way, a kind of reimagining, archetypal projection on the part of San Francisco of its identity as a city – a city of the mind, a city of imagination, a moral and intellectual construct as well as an actual physical and socioeconomic place.

LAURA ACKLEY: That’s beautiful and literary. I’m going to be far more literal. So in the first decade of the 20th century, San Francisco was really the first city of the West. It was proposed in 1904 to host the 1915 World’s Fair and to have it be the first one to celebrate a contemporary event. All the previous American World’s Fairs had celebrated a historic event like the arrival of Columbus, the Louisiana Purchase, etc. But the San Francisco exposition would celebrate America’s achievement in completing the Panama Canal, even though that completion was at least a decade distant.

Then in April of 1906, San Francisco suddenly developed a huge PR problem. Post-earthquake and fire images flashed all over the world showing nearly four miles of smoky ruins and shattered masonry and the camps of the half of the population that was suddenly homeless. City leaders quickly realized that these terrible visuals would be nearly indelible, and it would take a huge effort to replace them. So they did something quintessentially San Franciscan. No sane city would decide, in the face of catastrophe, to throw a gigantic party and invite the world to attend. But of course that is exactly what San Francisco did. By 1915, they had realized the serene beaux-arts palaces and courts of the PPIE. They were the finest achievement in design of all the classic World’s Fairs.

Within these buildings that looked to the past, architecturally, were housed industrial spaces that looked toward the future. It was the cusp of modernity, technologically and socially. The working Ford Model T plant in the Palace of Transportation illustrated the new assembly line concept and the airplanes that looped and swooped over the ground signaled an entirely new mode of transport never seen at a World’s Fair. Important ideas in medicine, education and engineering were discussed in more than 900 conferences during the exposition.

Mounting a successful World’s Fair so soon after the disaster [helped realize] the planners’ most coveted goal: to announce to the world, San Francisco is not a smoking ruin. We are open for business. We want your investment. We want your shipping to come through our port. This message was carried across the entire globe, whether or not all the nations participated.

The publicity department within the PPIE, which was called the Department of Exploitation, also promoted trips within California as well as investment, tourism and settlement opportunities. So the entire state benefitted. For instance, because San Diego was holding a smaller, simultaneous fair, Los Angeles promoted itself with a postcard featuring a picture of a sandwich and it read,  “When the world comes out West to be fed, this sandwich will furnish a treat. San Diego and Frisco the bread, but Los Angeles sure is the meat.”

When it was all over, it’s estimated that more than $45 million was injected into the California economy from outside of the state, which is about $2.1 billion in 2013. Further, tens of thousands of locals worked on building the fair on its grounds and in its concessions. Nearly 19 million pushed through the turnstiles to hear John Philip Sousa play at his last World’s Fair, to munch on candyfloss or perhaps even to fall in love under the rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts. So even though the PPIE was not without its flaws, the descendants of those millions of people have grown up with the souvenirs and the tales of the wondrous 288 days that were the PPIE, which really make it an essential part of the fabric of the region and the state.

HARTIG: That was beautifully said. I love the Department of Exploitation. Nomenclature matters then and now. Jim, share with us please.

JAMES GANZ: Art was such an essential component of this exposition. It was really incredible how much art was in San Francisco. Now San Francisco had a very strong and solid art world going back to the 19th century. Then as now, many artists were attracted to this beautiful region, which also was a real city with wealth, with collectors and galleries. Of course all of this was disrupted seriously in 1906. But from the very beginning, organizers of the Panama-Pacific Exposition meant for art to be a very essential component to this exposition.

So in 1911, when San Francisco was identified officially as the organizing city for the next World’s Fair, right off the bat, a man named Robert Hartsch, a graphic artist and a professor at Stanford, was put in the position of temporary head of fine arts. He immediately went out across the United States and started meeting with some of the great industrialist collectors of the time and also some of the art institutions. Within a few months, he came back with promises to lend significant works of art to San Francisco. In fact, most of the works of art that were promised in 1911 never made it, but a few of them did.

But the point is that art was going to be very important to this fair. The papers reported on all of this. There were more than 11,000 works of art in the Palace of Fine Arts. Imagine what that was like. If you take into consideration the art that was included in the foreign pavilions and the state pavilions and the education and liberal arts pavilions, I would estimate that there were more than 20,000 works of art here. They came from all over the world, particularly all over the United States.

Looking at the cultural landscape of San Francisco and how it grew in those early years, I find it especially interesting. In 1915, if you looked up museums in the Crocker-Langley directory, the phonebook for San Francisco, it was pretty pathetic. There was the Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park. This was leftover from the 1894 midwinter fair that was actually rather an important little museum. It was kind of like San Francisco’s attic. It had a little bit of everything, a little bit of art too, but mostly everything else but art. The California Academy of Sciences was under construction. I think the Department of Mining and Metallurgy had a little gallery of minerals in the Ferry Building. That was pretty much it for museums.

When this exposition ended, a decision was made by the San Francisco Art Association to try to keep the Palace of Fine Arts and operate it as a museum for San Francisco, and that’s exactly what they did. The Palace of Fine Arts reopened as a museum and it functioned that way until about 1924. Now of course we all know about Alma Spreckels and the story of the Legion of Honor, our building up in Lincoln Park, the beautiful Legion of Honor. That was based on the Legion of Honor model in Paris, which was also the model for the French Pavilion in the PPIE. Alma, who had lent her Rodins to the PPIE, eventually donated them to the city, as she donated this new institution that would open in 1924.

Finally, I would mention the Memorial Museum itself. This was an institution that actually became much larger after the Panama-Pacific Exposition and grew to become quite an important art museum for the city of San Francisco in the wake of the PPIE.

The first director of the PPIE [fine arts] became the director of the Oakland Museum after the Panama-Pacific Exposition ended and was responsible for opening the Oakland Art Gallery early in 1916, too. So the legacy for arts institutions was very important, and San Francisco’s identity for a center of art on the West Coast really comes out of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

LORI FOGARTY: I want to echo a lot of these comments about the importance and the continued legacy of the PPIE, certainly the idea of this city rising up out of the rubble of the 1906 earthquake and the sense of rebirth, the sense of can-do American attitude, the technological innovation and of course the artwork and many artists, not just with the PPIE but responding to the earthquake and being a part of the rebuilding of San Francisco.

But I want to mention another facet, which is that the Panama-Pacific International Exposition was, as Laura said, celebrating the opening of the Panama Canal; but it was also about reimagining America’s and particularly California’s relationship with the Pacific, and of course, in a very different way than what we would likely do today. It was a very colonial attitude. It placed California and San Francisco as the epicenter of Pacific trade and the opportunity for expansionism and future opportunities in the Pacific.

California, of course, has had a very long relationship with the Pacific. So it was an interesting way to think about what is our future relationship with the Pacific. In addition to all of the wonderful features and artwork and pavilions, of course there was a Japanese Pavilion; there was a Chinese Pavilion; there was a Samoan Village; there was an exhibit devoted to Hawaiian culture and music; there was a New Zealand Pavilion.

For many Californians and for many visitors to the PPIE, it was, for better and for worse, their first exposure to Pacific Island cultures and really understanding these islands, some of which had become territories of the United States, like the Philippines and Hawaii. I think it opened people’s eyes to what the future of California’s relationship with the Pacific could be. I think it has a continuing impact, because we’re still considering that today. We’re still thinking about what it means for California to be the Western edge of European-American expansion and Manifest Destiny, but actually the Eastern edge of the Pacific and our relationship with the Pacific. So I think there’s a very important context globally for us to consider with the PPIE as well.

HARTIG: The inspiration of sadness and melancholy as Maybeck’s keynote for the Palace of Fine Arts – was this a historical transition from the Victorian [to] the Jazz Age?

STARR: We also have to remember that with the earthquake, we didn’t manage the fighting of the fire very well in San Francisco. There was a lot of destruction that could have been avoided. The sadness was because of the fact that the city was lost, the great city that was created the first 50 years. But at the same time, the fair itself, in terms of its arrangement of avenues and squares, comes out of the City Beautiful Movement as a quality of the Burnham Plan. In 1905, the Committee for the Adornment and Beautification of San Francisco produced the Burnham Plan, which was one of the vehicles for a city envisioning itself.

So the Burnham Plan was adopted as the model for the fair while, at the same time, the Stockton Street Tunnel was being built. Within the same period, the Twin Peaks Tunnel was being built, the Great Highway was being built. There were aspects of the Burnham Plan being implemented in the real world.

ACKLEY: From an architectural standpoint, Maybeck was highly inspired by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who was very fond of making etchings of imperial Roman ruins. [Maybeck] felt that he wanted to evoke this feeling in the Palace of Fine Arts, an aura of melancholy. He deliberately placed this rotunda and the colonnades and the weeping women whom the guards were told to tell visitors were weeping over the sadness of art.

This was to provide a moment, a respite, a moment of quiet and introspection and thoughtfulness when going from the loud machinery of the exhibit palaces and all of the amazing, rich goods crammed into them, into the artistic spaces. So whether or not we could equate that [with] a transition from the Victorian to the Jazz Age, which I think arguably is more chaotic, I don’t know. But Maybeck did mean it to be a transitional melancholy space.

HARTIG: The “war to end all wars” broke out in August of 1914. How did that interrupt the fair?

STARR: I think there was a very high level of military awareness in the San Francisco Bay Area right from the beginning, from Mare Island [Naval Shipyard] to the conquests of California in 1846 through the military. Also, California played a major role [in] the establishment of the Pacific Fleet. Admiral Robley Evans brought the Great White Fleet into San Francisco. That was an extraordinary, powerful moment of consolidating ambition for the fairs. Then, at the fair itself, the Marines demonstrated landing on the beaches. There was a … psychic relationship to the military that’s increasingly going to grow. I think you see that in both the San Francisco and the San Diego fair as well, in which the military played a really important role.

ACKLEY: The war broke out in 1914, but of course the United States did not enter it until 1917. The fair was supposed to open up in the next six months, and even though the director of exhibits had deliberately overbooked the exhibit halls, exhibitors started canceling in droves and about 20 percent of exhibit halls were going to be empty. Suddenly they had to redouble their efforts to fill their halls.

Also there had been a number of international events that had to be cancelled or curtailed: an international polo tournament, an around-the-world air race – which was probably a very, very bad idea to start out with – and a military tournament. That didn’t happen because people were actually killing each other. So they called Charles C. Moore, the president of the fair, at his country house in Santa Cruz; they got him as he was entertaining the Argentinian Commission, and they said, “We hear there’s a war in Europe. Are you canceling the fair?” He had to say with no opportunity to consult with anyone, “The exposition will not be postponed.”

They call it the turn of the helm that saved the ship, because even though 1915 turned out to be probably a terrible year to hold a fair, the next year would have been worse and [the year after that when] we were in the war. As [the fair] ended up being profitable and they did refill the space to almost 100 percent capacity, 1915 was the better of the [possible] years.

There were many, many influences of the war that you could see all over. For instance, one of the attractions was an electromechanical recreation of famous naval battles, and it started out being called “the evolution of the dreadknot” and then, when it didn’t do very well, they re-themed it and called it “the world’s wars” and it featured the sinking of the Lusitania. You could feel it everywhere: in the musicians who were able to come, in the attractions, in the way people treated each other. The exposition orchestra had to sign a contract that said “we will not discuss politics.”

GANZ: [The war] had an enormous influence on the art. For one thing, the organizers of the art exhibition, aware that the situation was getting worse abroad, overcompensated and they let in more American art than they probably should have, because in the end they actually did get a lot of European art and this caused this huge problem: too much art, not enough walls.

The German school was very important, and the organizers had worked very hard; they were going to get 300 German paintings. Of course, this didn’t happen, but as luck would have it, there was an exhibition of about 40 German paintings that happened to be in Pittsburgh in 1914. This was on its way back to Germany just when war was declared. The ship was taken by the British. Everything ended up in court and they wound up sending it all back to Pittsburgh. Fortunately, Pittsburgh was sending a lot of work to the PPIE, so we ended up with some German paintings after all. The artists won medals. They didn’t even know that their work was in the fair in San Francisco.

On the other end, it caused a huge problem in terms of returning some of this work. So the German work, fortunately, for the sake of San Francisco, went back to Pittsburgh and they had to deal with that problem. In San Francisco, we had Austrian art, we had Hungarian art, we had Finnish art. All of this got stranded here. So the Kokoschkas, for example, they were in San Francisco until 1923, 1924. Most of them on view at the Palace of Fine Arts. It’s kind of amazing to think that some of this avant-garde European art stayed here and was actually on view for a really long time.

FOGARTY: I think lender relationships were very different then, because we actually have in our collection – maybe I shouldn’t say this publicly – a sled from Admiral Perry’s exhibition that was lent by the Smithsonian and we still have it. I don’t think they discovered they were missing it. It’s much harder, I’m sure, to borrow these paintings now than in 1915.