six “The Noble Spectacle” Historical Walking Tours and Ethnic Slamming, 18908-1915 In 1915 an earnest young San Franciscan brought her Boston beau to see her hometown. He made the trip only for her sake, as he considered she city coo new to have any attraction for the cuitured tourist. “San Francisco is modern to the core,” he sncered, *Boston dates back gen- trations, but you have hardly acquired your three score years and ten.’ Deceamined to prove to him that her city had just as much history as his and thus was equally worthy of the love of is citizens and visirors, she took him om a tour. They visited the great eross in Golden Gace Park. that commemorated Francis Drake's presence in 1579, the eighteenth- century Spanish colonial Mission Dolores with its Mexican and Indian devotees, and the central plaza, aow Portsmouth Square, where a crusty ‘old forty-niner loanged near a fountain dedicated to Robert Louis Ste- venson. They alsc ate tamales ata “Spanish” restaurant, ambled through the city’s Tealian reighborhood, and had tca at a Chinese restaurant, In the end, our heroine won both her point and bis heart. This didactic litle romance titled The Lure of San Francisco high- lights two important elements that altered the way prosperous Ameri: cans perceived thei cities by the eaely ewentieth centu of a heroic history ard the romanticization of ethnic minorities. Boch were part of the effort to discover (more accuratebs, invent) a truly na- sional culture, the same enterprise in which domestic travel writing was involved at the turn of the century.? The consolidation of a castonical hartative of the Arverican past and the fostering of a distinely Ameri “The Noble Spectacle” ws ‘can culture in the present required definina which people and events were tculy American, Choosing the appropriate ancestors and casting cthnie minorities as picturesque peasants, popular writers participated in the process of reshaping the way thac Americans imagined and moved through their eities and, moze broadly, theis nation. Ikis significant chat The Lure of San Francisco appeared in 1915, that ‘cused the steategy ofa city tour to make its claims, and that it was writ- ten by two women, Flizabeth Gray Potter and Mabel Thayer Gray. San. Francisco hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition that year, and the husinessmen who organized it conducted both an enormous publicity campaign and an ongoing effort to defeat the powerful labor ‘movement there. The cultivation of history and the romanticization of cthnie differences promised to make a city attractive to tourists by giv~ ing them privileged access to its meanings and portraying urban social divisions as evidence of unchanging and unthreatening cultural diter- ences, Commemorative events, statuary, and guidebook descriptions and itineraries constructed on the city’s Fandscape vision of both past and present community. Many other cities undertook similar campaigns to publicize and preserve ceytain parts of their past in addressing and ‘masking class and ethnic conflicts in the present? Finally, this way of envisioning the city presented it as a homelike place for the wel-to-do, including women. Riding the trolley through San Francisco, the Bostonian eyed “a Japansse arrayed in a new suit of "American clothes and ... a bright yellow fei wound about the hat of @ swarthy Hawaiian.” He remarked, *Lots of strangers in San Francisec {or the Far.” But to the San Franciscan, these men were not foreign: “I smiled as I nodded to the Japanese who had worked in my kitchen for three years, and recognized in the dusky Hawaiian one of the regular singers ina popular café."* The domestication of ethnic minorities and the flowering of history in the city meant that refined city dwellers and visitors, especially respectable women, now had a greater degree of free- dom in moving through public spaces. Having acquired both history and peasantry, American cities ap- peared to the mind's eye moze like the cities of Europe. As a result, they became increasingly attractive to tourists. & historically and aesth cally meaningful landscape and a stable social hierarchy generally en~ ddorsed by the well-to-do were two of the essential prevonditions for ‘genteel rourism, These qualities had long drawn Americans to Europe, ‘where the process of efacing the evidence of work and social conflict fisom many sites autracsive to tourists had >een ongoing, at least since16 “