Back in the days of the California Gold Rush that began just a few years after that territory had been wrested from Mexico by an America seized with the ideological fervour of its “manifest destiny”, San Francisco was the port of entry for thousands from around the world, all eager to strike it rich. They quickly overwhelmed the society of indigenous Americans mixed with the Mexican Spanish settlers and missionaries already there.

Miners, adventurers, entrepreneurs, chancers, gamblers and crooks from around the globe were all eager to enter the state, hoping to become rich as a result of California’s famous mineral discovery. South Africans should recognise the shape of this saga from the texture of life during the Witwatersrand’s own gold rush, as well as the Kimberley diamond rush that had begun two decades earlier.

Many who travelled to California during the gold rush days arrived aboard sailing ships that had traversed the challenging passage around the southern tip of South America (no Panama Canal yet). Others had come overland in wagons or on horseback (no transcontinental railroad, yet, either). Some never reached their El Dorado due to the rigours of that journey.  

Of the thousands who actually arrived in those early days, many only managed to eke out very modest successes, if that. Nevertheless, most chose to stay on in a state that has always tantalised with its promise — and heartbreak. Now, of course, California has become the US’s most populous state after successive waves of migrants have moved there.

Nevertheless, from those early days of the gold rush, there were always some who became fabulously wealthy from the gold deposits locked in the mountains, or the alluvial gold to be found downstream. From that period, there are those photographs of San Francisco’s harbour, filled with ships that would never sail away, due to a lack of return passengers. The ships would be pulled apart for their wood — to be used as building materials.

The city quickly became a busy entrepôt, as people arrived en route to the actual gold fields. The city became famous for its raucous Barbary Coast district, the wealthy enclave of Nob Hill, and East Asian ethnic neighbourhoods.  

A wonderful Hollywood version of this landscape, complete with the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 and the fire, and the doughty resolution of its inhabitants to rebuild the city, featured Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jeanette MacDonald; the film named, not surprisingly, San Francisco.  

Some would-be miners like Levi Strauss realised running a general dealer’s shop selling household necessities, equipment and supplies needed by miners (along with a few luxuries) was a better way to make money; and then the design, production and sale of sturdy work clothes was an even better avenue for success. Probably every reader of this article has some of Strauss’s famous products in their closet — or perhaps knock-offs made by a company inspired by Levi Strauss’s success.

Joshua Abraham Norton

His Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton I, also known as Joshua A Norton. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Another entrepreneur was Joshua Abraham Norton. Norton was born in England in 1818, migrated to South Africa as a young adult, and then, like so many others, was drawn to the possibilities of great wealth in California. For a time he became an increasingly prosperous businessman, but a deal importing Peruvian rice to feed the city’s stomachs went bad for him, forcing him into bankruptcy. And that led to his nervous breakdown. Now poverty-stricken, Norton wandered the streets of San Francisco after adopting his new persona as “Emperor Norton of the United States”. In 1863, he added to his title the heady responsibility of being “Protector of Mexico” in the wake of France’s ill-fated invasion of that country.

Restaurant owners throughout the city allowed Norton to eat for free; the city issued currency in his name; and he delighted his subjects by proposing that a bridge be built between his adopted city and Oakland, on the other side of San Francisco Bay. When he died, his funeral brought out some 10,000 people. Along the way, his life inspired characters in literature from authors who ranged from Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson to Charles Bukowski. 

Norton’s embrace by San Francisco typified a city that has always been tolerant of eccentricity, oddity and the quirkier forms of exoticism. In this author’s youth, that city became exemplified by authors like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his circle, by the performers of acid rock like those of Jefferson Airplane, by San Francisco’s “summer of love” and the hippie culture of Haight-Ashbury, and, of course, its famous anthem, urging us all to come hither, wearing some flowers in our hair.  

More recently, the city’s traditional culture of tolerance and welcome has meant growing waves of homeless people have come to live on its streets and in its parks, even as a real-estate boom has priced many middle- and lower-income residents out of its neighbourhoods.  

David DePape

David DePape turns out to be one of those wanderers, a Canadian from British Columbia who eventually ended up in San Francisco. He became increasingly enmeshed in the delusions of QAnon and other conspiracy theory media garbage and then resolved to kill the Democratic Party’s Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (right) and her husband Paul Pelosi. (Photo: Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty Images)

Pelosi has become one of the leading targets of the spewers of that dangerous nonsense — as well as a growing share of the Republican Party’s caucus in Congress. Many of those people have taken perverse delight — and in their increasing fury — in laying the blame for all the ills of the country, real or imaginary, directly at Pelosi’s feet. Pelosi and her husband, Paul, a wealthy real-estate developer, have lived in San Francisco for many years and she has represented the city in Congress for decades.

David DePape. (Photo: Supplied)

DePape broke into the Pelosi home early last Friday morning and assaulted Paul Pelosi with a hammer. DePape wandered through the house, screaming, “Where’s Nancy, Where’s Nancy?” — echoing the cry of insurrectionists who had entered the Capitol Building on 6 January 2021 and loudly expressed their intent to do physical harm to her. In the San Francisco attack, the Speaker was in Washington and, fortunately, police arrived in time to prevent Paul Pelosi’s likely death, but not before he had received grievous injuries. DePape, who was in the US illegally, is facing possible deportation after his criminal cases are resolved, the Department of Homeland Security said late on Wednesday.

In the aftermath of the attack, while Democrats and many other rational people issued statements deploring this astonishing decay of civil order, most Republicans, or at least those who chose to say anything at all about it, couched their expressions of horror with the kind of smarminess that virtually insisted the Speaker had brought this down upon herself.  

Worse was soon to come, as others insisted on spreading the worst kind of comments about a conspiracy that enmeshed Paul Pelosi in some kind of homosexual tryst gone bad with DePape, or an “inside job” of some inexplicable kind. Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, joined in the general nastiness with his own relaying of this nonsense, although he eventually retracted his appalling social messaging on the crime. 

Biden speaks out

US President Joe Biden. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Jim Lo Scalzo / Pool)

US President Joe Biden — in common with a growing chorus of commentators warning about this alarming growth in incivility, the growing political intolerance and demonising of the other side in politics, the increasing efforts to draw on noxious conspiracies as the sine qua non of political discourse, and those barely cloaked calls for actual violence against their political opponents by some Republicans — has now spoken out as forcefully as he as ever done on anything in the waning days of the midterm electoral campaign. On Wednesday, 2 November, Biden spoke about this intolerance, his response to it and the danger it poses for the country.  

As The Washington Post reported, “Signs of strain in the nation’s democratic system mounted Wednesday with less than a week left before the midterm elections, as President Biden warned that candidates who refuse to accept Tuesday’s results could set the nation on a ‘path to chaos.’ 

“Biden’s grim assessment in a speech Wednesday evening came as the FBI and other agencies have forecast that threats of violence from domestic extremists are likely to be on the rise after the election. In Arizona, voters have complained of intimidation by self-appointed drop-box monitors — some of them armed — prompting a federal judge to set strict new limits. And the GOP has stepped up litigation in multiple states in an effort to toss out some ballots and to expand access for partisan poll watchers. 

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“Speaking at Washington’s Union Station — steps from the U.S. Capitol, which was attacked by a pro-Trump mob in the wake of the nation’s last major election — Biden warned of an ongoing assault on American democracy. The president spoke as a growing number of major Republican candidates have said they may follow in former president Donald Trump’s footsteps and refuse to concede should they lose.

“ ‘It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it is un-American,’ Biden said. ‘As I’ve said before, you can’t love your country only when you win.’

“The virtually unprecedented presidential message — a plea to Americans to accept the basic tenets of their democracy — came as millions of voters have already cast their ballots or are planning to go to the polls on Election Day, and as some election officials expressed confidence that the system would hold.”

Much will now depend on how losing — and even some winning — candidates frame their victory and concession speeches following Tuesday’s election. Then there will be the mob who will probably be vying for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2024 — with or without Donald Trump — as they choose to define the limits of political discourse and how to respond to those who disagree with them.

But even more may come to depend on how the country can figure out how to restrain the growing, malign influence of conspiracy theorists combined with broadcast and social media outlets. So far, at least, there is little evidence that this is happening. Sadly. DM