Hand of man.

Fireman, Janet

From benign to beneficial on a sliding scale--or another scale that measures a progression from expedient to voracious--human actions and motivations in the civic arena are often difficult to judge, tricky and thorny to decipher, and therefore exposed to varying and new interpretations.

San Francisco Mayor James D. Phelan, imbued with late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Progressive spirit, pushed to bridge the city's class divide between working people and moneyed elite, hoping to achieve a harmonious, classless society based on a diverse citizenry. In the 1901 Waterfront Strike "the forces of organized capital collided with those of organized labor," destroying the mayor's cross-class reform coalition and, famously, strengthening San Francisco as a union city. John Elrick's essay, "Social Conflict and the Politics of Reform: Mayor James D. Phelan and the San Francisco Waterfront Strike of 1901," brings this complex story to light, probing the contrasting impulses and aspirations fueling labor, capital, and politics.

Only a few years later, developers of a new residential neighborhood in San Francisco were confronted by multiple challenges from wind, blowing sand, and distance from commercial and work sites. Chadwick & Sykes, a new engineering firm, found the means of overcoming the obstacles to build a trolley line, streets, and houses, establishing the vigorous part of the Sunset district called Parkside. Previously unpublished photographs of the project shape a special feature in this issue, "Rediscovering San Francisco's Parkside Neighborhood."

By our time, when moneymen in the 1987 film Wall Street were urged to live by Gordon Gekko's terse motto, "Greed is good," or when the 2010 sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, affirmed, "It's not about the money--It's about the game," moviegoers might easily have confirmed a skeptical view of investors.

Earlier, the film Chinatown (1974), along with published sources about business, growth, and the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, cast the role of the financier in a devious light. Timothy Tzeng's "Eastern Promises: The Role of Eastern Capital in the Development of Los Angeles, 1900-1920" offers a more positive perspective in a complex and previously untold story involving eastern bankers, railroad executives, industrial capitalists, and the national context of early twentieth-century Los Angeles.

Behold the hand of man.

JANET FIREMAN