“A Different Era”

Julia Gorman Porter’s San Francisco Liberalism

©William Issel
San Francisco State University Emeritus, and Mills College

Please do not quote or cite this paper without permission. Issel can be contacted at bi@sfsu.edu. 

 Introduction

            When Julia Gorman Porter reflected on her experience in party politics and urban planning in 1975, she described the 1960s as a turning point for women in public life.  Porter was not repeating the familiar refrain about how “Sixties Feminists” challenged traditional gender roles and demanded more influence in politics.  She was instead observing that she and many like-minded well-to-do liberal women found themselves challenged by the profound changes in American political life since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy: impatience with “politics as usual,” distrust of public officials, criticism of the principle of noblesse oblige.  Porter disliked the radical agenda and the confrontational tactics of liberals influenced by the “New Left” and confessed to feeling nostalgic for an older liberal tradition associated with what she saw as “a different era” before the early 1960s.  She was particularly distressed by the rise of single-issue citizen action groups that preferred confrontation to collaboration, eschewed compromise, and placed a higher priority on their particular causes than they did on advancing the interests of the city as a whole.[i] 

Julia Porter devoted nearly forty years to the California Democratic Party and served twenty-four years on the San Francisco Planning Commission.  Like many other women active in Democratic Party politics and policy work from the 1930s through the 1960s, Porter endorsed growth liberalism, the concept that cooperation among government, business, and labor officials would best produce the high rates of economic growth necessary for progress benefiting the entire society.  This essay will describe Porter and the network of liberal activists of which she was a part and provide a brief account of their urban policy theory and practice.  Porter’s work illuminates the importance of growth liberalism in San Francisco history prior to the 1960s and underscores the need for a fresh look at this relatively neglected aspect of the city’s historical political culture. [ii]

“Why, It Was Just a Natural”

Porter’s involvement in politics had roots in the social welfare activism of the Progressive Era and the urban design initiatives of the City Beautiful movement.  Born in

Miss Julia Gorman, ca. 1914.  Courtesy of the Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley

1897 to a pioneer-era Irish Catholic business-class family, Julia Gorman enjoyed a comfortable childhood, including private schooling at the Convent of the Sacred Heart.  Raised a Roman Catholic, as a teenager she drew away from her faith, and by the World War I years she was part of the city’s genteel bohemian cultural scene. The character of her 1924 marriage to Charles B. Porter, a dentist and instructor at the University of California Dental School, made it “natural” for her to become active in urban policy work.  Her husband was thirty-three years older, the couple proved childless, and both of her brothers-in-law had become involved in urban planning and social policy work.  Robert Porter, an attorney married to the daughter of Harvard philosopher William James, served on the board of the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Association, the city’s first settlement house.  Bruce Porter, an architect and graphic artist, had been one of the founders of the Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco, the private organization that commissioned Daniel Burnham to draw up the “city beautiful” plan of 1905.  Encouraged by Laura Suggett, the sister of Lincoln Steffens, and inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign, Julia became a director of the city’s Democratic Women’s Forum in 1932 and in 1939 she became president of the local League of Women Voters (LWV) chapter.[iii]  She continued to play a leadership role in the California Democratic Party during the forties, fifties, and sixties. 

“Civic Minded Women”

Soon after taking up the presidency of the LWV, Porter joined members of the Junior Chamber of Commerce in conducting an economic and social survey of Chinatown. The survey brought her into a working relationship with a network of seasoned social activists from the Progressive Era and younger newcomers who involved themselves in policy work for the first time during the Depression.  They shared a common belief that New Deal social and urban policy legislation provided an opportunity to reverse economic decline and halt the deterioration of the built environment, as well as to improve the condition of the poor and limit the human suffering caused by the Depression.[iv]

A leading figure in the reform network was Alice Griffith, the well to do San Francisco native who had organized the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Association in 1902.  In 1911, Griffith and her colleague Elizabeth Ash organized a non-governmental social policy agency called the San Francisco Housing Association. Griffith, Ash, and San Francisco’s state senator led the campaign to pass the state’s first tenement law and building code enforcement program.  By the Depression decade, Griffith had become a leading member of California’s social policy reform community.[v]

When San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors established a local Housing Authority following federal and state legislation in 1937, Alice Griffith was appointed one of the five commissioners.  One year later, Griffith, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and volunteers from a study group led by social reformer Alexander Meiklejohn began the Chinatown survey (he and his wife were part of Julia Porter’s social circle).  Then in 1940, Porter and Griffith, with the financial assistance of Morse Erskine, Morgan Gunst and several other business executives, revived the San Francisco Housing Association in order to create an information clearing-house and contact point for publicity, public speaking, and lobbying activities. It was these “Civic Minded Women,” to use Porter’s own language, who transformed a Progressive Era non-governmental planning and social policy agency into an institution capable of linking San Francisco city planning work with New Deal-era federal urban policy legislation.[vi] 

 “It Began With Slums”

 The Association’s orientation to urban policy included a new and forthright emphasis on the necessity of considering slum clearance, housing improvement, transportation planning, and downtown revitalization within the context of the need for comprehensive urban planning and the need to plan cities in relation to their natural environment.  With Morgan Gunst as president and Julia Porter serving as vice president, the organization incorporated in 1943 and changed its name to the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association. The new emphasis came at the suggestion of a group of local architects who had recently graduated from the School of Architecture at the University of California, plus a recently arrived lecturer at Berkeley.[vii]

 The architects included Francis Violich and T. J. (Jack) Kent Jr., and they worked under the name of “Telesis” in order to signify their conviction that the human and the natural environment could be brought into harmony by means of intelligent planning.  The Telesis group had the support of an older generation of Bay Area architects, including William Wurster, and was influenced by the ideas of Lewis Mumford.  Kent had formally sought out Mumford to be his mentor after his graduation in 1938.  Mumford had also influenced the new lecturer at Berkeley, Catherine Bauer, author of Modern Housing (1934), activist on behalf of the passage of the 1937 Housing Act, and first director of the new federal Housing Authority. Bauer arrived in January 1940 as the Rosenberg Lecturer in Public Social Service, and in August, she married William Wurster.  The Rosenberg Foundation, which supported Bauer Wurster’s faculty position, also provided a four thousand-dollar seed money grant for the new Planning and Housing Association.[viii] 

In the view of Julia Gorman Porter and her associates, the voluntary work of the Association would stimulate, and monitor, a reconceptualized and more effective partnership arrangement between the private and the public institutions involved in urban development.  In previous decades in San Francisco, business associations, especially the Chamber of Commerce, had taken the lead position in urban policy planning.[ix]  In the future, Porter and her colleagues reasoned intellectuals, professionals, and citizen volunteers, both inside and outside government, would take over that position. This elite planning coalition, informed by grassroots preferences as expressed by the electorate, would bring a broad-minded, aesthetically aware, environmentally conscious, community-wide perspective to what had been a more parochial process rooted in the bargaining between economic and neighborhood interest groups and city government officials. They grounded their work in a desire to protect and enhance the quality of life of all of the people of the city and to preserve the unique natural and physical amenities of the city and the region. They believed that future economic growth constituted a high priority, but growth needed to be guided by environmentally-conscious professional planners in cooperation with public-spirited volunteers serving at the request of elected officials.[x]  Their point of view was ambitious in view of the historically fractious and politically polarized political culture of San Francisco.

 “This Great Wave of Idealism”

            For Julia Porter and her circle, active involvement in Democratic Party electoral politics went hand in hand with urban policy activism.  In 1941, Porter became Chairwoman of the Northern California Women’s Division of the state Democratic Party; her vice-chair until they both resigned in 1943 was Catherine Bauer Wurster.  The National Resources Planning Board regional office provided Jack Kent with his first job after he earned his degree in architecture and before he began studying planning at M.I.T.  When Kent moved to Cambridge in 1943 to complete his graduate degree before being

Julia Porter (left), Elinor Heller (middle) and Lucille Gleason (right) at a luncheon during the 1946 Democratic Party primary election campaign.  Porter was serving as chair of the women’s division of the Northern California Democratic Party State Central Committee.  Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

drafted, he joined two of his Berkeley associates who had also moved to Cambridge.  Forty-five year old William Wurster and his new wife had also come to M.I.T., because Wurster wanted to train himself in city planning in anticipation of the demand for planners given the urban revitalization he imagined would be necessary after the war.  The Wursters returned to Berkeley during the war, as did Kent after completing his service when the war ended.[xi]

Ironically, it was a Republican city administration that provided Julia Porter and Jack Kent with an opportunity to put their planning and policy ideas into practice, and it was a faction fight within the Democratic Party that brought Porter into a Republican administration.  In 1943, George Reilly, the leader of the rival Democratic faction, ran for mayor. Rather than endorse Reilly, Julia Porter and Catherine Bauer Wurster resigned from their party offices, and Porter campaigned for Roger D. Lapham, a Republican.  President Roosevelt also endorsed Lapham, who had transformed himself from an Old Guard to a Moderate Republican and who served on Roosevelt’s War Labor Board.  Porter referred in campaign speeches to the “outpouring of women” who were helping to get out the vote for Lapham.  She argued that women especially admired Lapham, because they knew he would ensure there would be “no more muddling of such problems as transportation and housing.”  A Lapham administration, she stressed, would invite the “best brains in our community and business  to apply “sound business methods” in addressing the city’s needs in the “extraordinary times” after the war.[xii]

After Lapham won the election, he appointed Julia Porter to his new Planning Commission, and the Commission, riding a “great wave of idealism” that coincided with planning for the drafting of the United Nations Charter, moved quickly to implement a program of revitalization guided by comprehensive planning.  The Commission was headed by Lapham’s friend and fellow city businessman, Michael Weill (Weill owned the White House department store, and Lapham would joke about “going to the White House to see the President”).[xiii]

The city’s planning director (the first in its history) was L. Deming Tilton, who had been appointed in 1942.  Tilton had been trained as a landscape architect, had worked as a planner for Harland Bartholomew’s firm, and during the 1920s he earned high praise for his work with Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Orange counties.  In 1934 he became planning director for the California State Planning Commission and helped draft the 1935 state planning act.[xiv]

Tilton was a logical choice for the new San Francisco position, but he proved an inept administrator and an ineffective bureaucratic politician. Tilton’s philosophy was close to that of Julia Porter and Jack Kent and his Telesis group, and he hired Kent as one of his assistants when the young planner left the Army.  However, Tilton’s personal style clashed with that of the mayor, he lacked experience in the give and take of municipal government agency bargaining, and his efforts to implement a Master Plan met a solid wall of resistance by old guard bureaucrats in City Hall. Mayor Lapham interpreted Tilton’s lack of success as a sign of incompetence, and he had no patience for Tilton’s lectures about how comprehensive planning needed to encompass social and environmental as well as land use and transportation goals. The mayor had promised to limit his service to one term, and he was determined to push through a vigorous program of growth and development.  “San Francisco,” he predicted, can and will be the queen port of the pacific long after the scars of war are healed.” However, Tilton believed that future city development had to conform to “the organic structure of California . . . [that planning should] contribute to an understanding of many current social and economic problems” and that “the people of California are merely trustees, having under their management many priceless natural treasures.” Lapham regarded such sentiments as idealistic rhetoric at odds with the hard and fast realities of business and politics. [xv]  

Instead of developing allies in the powerful Department of Public Works and the (city) Public Utilities Commission, and supporters in the community who could help him convince Lapham that his ambitious agenda could coexist with the mayor’s growth program, Tilton retreated.  Rather than cultivate his City Hall opponents and court the mayor, Tilton devoted his time to a project close to his heart: drawing up plans for the future shoreline of San Francisco.  Lapham regarded Tilton as a visionary who was all talk and no action, banned the planning director from the mayor’s office during his last year of service, and pressured the Planning Commission to remove him in 1946.

“A City either Goes Ahead or Retrogrades”

L. Deming Tilton came to San Francisco as an accomplished professional with a national as well as statewide reputation, but the city’s political culture in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s placed a high premium on being a “Native San Franciscan,” and the planner lacked that status.   His outsider status, and the way that he “stood on his dignity,” limited his effectiveness.  Julia Porter not only proudly counted herself a San Franciscan by birth but she also was a consummate politician, skilled in the fine art of building allegiances, repairing broken alliances, maintaining coalitions, and brokering compromises.[xvi]  During the Lapham years (1944-1948), and then again between 1956 and 1976 (during the terms of George Christopher, Jack Shelley, and Joseph Alioto), Porter served on the Planning Commission, with one term as Commission President.  She believed that growth was vital: “a city either goes ahead or retrogrades, and you do not stand still.”  She excelled at the delicate task of moving the growth agenda forward, while at the same time insisting that development projects be compatible with the city’s natural beauty, the health of its citizens, and the well being of the people of the entire region.[xvii]

During the second half of the Lapham administration, and again in the mid-1960s, Porter’s friend Jack Kent worked with the Planning Commission, first as Planning Director and then as the mayor’s Special Deputy for Planning.  During the Christopher and Shelley years, Porter worked closely with another advocate of growth liberalism, the deputy city planner, James Redmond McCarthy. 

Julia Porter, Dennis O’Harrow, and Roger Lapham, Jr. (right) at the San Francisco Planning Commission offices, 1957.  Lapham was then chair of the commission.  Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. 

 Kent and McCarthy, like Porter, claimed native birth and both were well connected, like Porter, through family, friendship, and political party ties to influential decision-makers who could make or break a particular initiative by the Planning Commission.[xviii]  During her tenure, she supported the scaled-down and landscaped freeways along the northern waterfront and through part of Golden Gate Park, which were never built, as well as the Transamerica Pyramid, which is today a world famous feature of the city’s skyline.[xix]

When Porter dictated her oral history in 1975, she tallied up her defeats and victories.  Both the biggest defeat and the greatest victory, in her mind, occurred on the waterfront. Her defeat (by a one-vote margin) in the campaign to stop the construction of the Fontana Towers apartment building near Fisherman’s Wharf still rankled after more than a decade.  At the same time, she took pride in using the Fontana defeat to rally citywide support for a permanent forty-foot height limit on the waterfront.  She was pleased that her friend, the businessman and philanthropist William Roth, had purchased the old Ghirardelli chocolate factory.  Roth’s move kept the previous owners from turning the site into more high-rise apartments and allowed architects associated with the Telesis group to convert the factory into an environment-friendly retail destination serving local and regional residents and tourists from beyond the bay area.[xx] 

 “Mrs. Porter was a Lady of the Old School”

By the middle of the 1960s, because of opposition against cross-town freeways and outcry against the “Manhattanization” of the city, the Planning Commission found itself confronted by a new breed of neighborhood politics and a new and robust environmentalist movement.  Many of the new environmentalists challenged the equation of development and progress altogether.  Bruce Brugmann, founder of the free weekly newspaper San Francisco Bay Guardian, publicized this reform agenda. Brugmann’s neo-Progressive muckraking weakened the political influence of the Examiner and the Chronicle. The environmentalists challenged the qualifications of incumbents whose careers had been premised on “growth liberalism,” and they mobilized to replace them with more ecologically minded candidates.  Phillip Burton led the new breed environmentalists, and they successfully worked to displace many of the older generation of Democratic Party officials in local and state government positions. Phillp Burton went to Congress, where he became a leading national environmentalist leader.  His brother, John Burton worked with Jean Kortum, the organizer of the successful campaign against a Golden Gate Freeway along the city’s northern waterfront.  John Burton went to the State Assembly and later served as the Speaker Pro-Tem of the State Senate.  Willie L. Brown, Jr., a Phillip Burton protégé, went to the State Assembly, where he served as Speaker for many years, and then moved to the Mayor’s office. 

Julia Porter and new members of the Planning Commission taking the oath of office from Judge Leland Lazurus, January 15, 1964.  Mayor John F. Shelley is on the right.  Courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

Conclusion

For what are perhaps understandable political reasons, the men and women who led the new urban environmentalist movement ignored the degree to which the reforms pioneered by the growth liberals such as Julia Porter had prepared the way for their own activism.[xxi]  By the time Porter died in 1990, San Francisco had earned a national reputation for its pioneering “Downtown Plan” of the mid 1980s that established thoroughgoing height and bulk limitations on downtown office buildings.  In the publicity surrounding that accomplishment and similar innovations in planning with the environment in mind, no credit was given to Julia Porter’s work.  Eight years after Porter’s death, Democratic Party activist Sue Bierman recalled her not as a forerunner but rather as “a lady of the old school.”  Bierman had organized the successful campaign against the Golden Gate Park Panhandle Freeway, a campaign that operated out of Willie Brown’s campaign office in 1964, and she later served on the Board of Permit Appeals, the Planning Commission, and the Board of Supervisors.  When queried about Julia Porter’s influence, Bierman could not recall any positive accomplishments associated with Porter’s planning work and remembered her only as a proponent of an outmoded approach to planning who had been disturbed by the uncompromising character of the anti-freeway movement and upset by the confrontational tactics of the activists.[xxii]  It is ironic that Julia Porter’s work has been forgotten, because her brand of growth liberalism, albeit seasoned with a strong dose of “progressive” populism, has proved remarkably resilient since the 1970s.