✒️ Author: David Talbot |. 📖 Published: 2012 | 🗓 Read: October 25, 2020 | 📄 Pages:480

Summary

In a kaleidoscopic narrative, bestselling author David Talbot recounts the gripping story of San Francisco in the turbulent years between 1967 and 1982—and of the extraordinary men and women who led to the city’s ultimate rebirth and triumph. Season of the Witch is the first book to fully capture the dark magic of San Francisco in this breathtaking period, when the city radically changed itself—and then revolutionized the world.

Why You Should Read It

This is the best book to understand how San Francisco came of age and became the center of the world for many. It’s unapologetic in its honesty and through its ups and downs, it’s a city that many can’t quit loving. After reading the book, you’ll understand that great cities never die.

Notable Highlights

San Francisco’s Barbary Coast district—with its black-stocking bars, live sex shows, and opium dens—rose again from the earthquake’s ashes. And well into the new century—long before Las Vegas assured tourists that it knew how to keep their secrets—San Francisco aggressively marketed its libertine image.

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Catholic San Francisco had its own wild heart: tough stevedores and cable car operators who fought bloody battles for labor rights; and immigrant kids who learned to love Puccini and Dante, and collected nickels for the Irish Volunteers back home. These working-class heroes eventually turned San Francisco into a pro-labor, arts-loving stronghold of the Democratic Party.

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No other American city has undergone such an earth-shaking cultural shift in such a short span. Today San Francisco is seen as the “Left Coast City”—the wild, frontier outpost of the American Dream. Conservatives have declared war on “San Francisco values” and are bitterly fighting to stop the spread of those values.

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“The difference between San Francisco and Berkeley was that Berkeley complained about a lot of things. Rather than complaining about things, we San Franciscans formed an alternative reality to live in. And for some reason, we got away with it. San Francisco became somewhere you did things rather than protesting about them. We knew we didn’t have to speechify about what we should and shouldn’t do. We just did.”

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“When we started out, the city was antiblack, antigay, antiwoman. It was a very uptight Irish Catholic city,” said Brian Rohan, Stepanian’s legal sidekick and another brawling protégé of Vincent Hallinan. “We took on the cops, city hall, the Catholic Church. Vince Hallinan taught us never to be afraid of bullies.” By taking on the bullies, the new forces of freedom began to liberate San Francisco, neighborhood by neighborhood. They began with the Haight-Ashbury.

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“the day you forget where you came from, you won’t belong where you are.”

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Jack Shelley was typical of the old San Francisco breed. When it came to labor and civil rights, he was a man of progress. When it came to family and moral issues, he was a son of the Church.

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The Diggers’ street manifestos were among the earliest and most passionate expressions of what would later be called San Francisco values. The leaflets’ “free” ethos—which challenged the public to think of food, shelter, health care, and even entertainment as fundamental human rights, not commodities—began to shape the consciousness of the emerging new San Francisco. Decades later, echoes of the Diggers philosophy could still be heard in web mantras such as “Information wants to be free” and other slogans of the digital age.

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You’d better find a way to laugh at life, because it will certainly make you cry.

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When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, don’t you want somebody to love.

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“When I hear about the Summer of Love, I say, ‘Where was that?’” remarked Lewis. “It was there, but always lurking below was this seething hatred and fear from Vietnam and the Cold War. There was always this feeling that we were going to die.”

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Life in the Haight grew more violent and disturbing. The drugs got harder. By 1971, 15 percent of the servicemen returning from Vietnam were addicted to heroin. Smack and speed began to shove aside psychedelics. The harried staff at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic was seeing more and more hard-core drug abusers. The speed freaks were the most harrowing cases: amphetamines worked their dark magic on the brain with power-drill intensity.

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For decades after the war, up to this very day, right-wing politicians and pundits have spread the libel about how peace activists and hippies greeted returning Vietnam vets with gobs of spit and contempt. The truth is that many survivors of the war headed directly to havens like the Haight, where they found more comfort than they ever could in veterans’ hospitals or bastions of flag-waving patriotism. -- David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love, pg. 126, loc. 2037

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San Francisco was only truly liberal when it came to sex. As far as race, it was a microcosm of the United States.”

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As word spread that San Francisco was a wide-open town, hookers began flooding downtown streets. Hoteliers and convention bureau officials lobbied for a police crackdown—an ironic turn of events, since it was a wide-open secret that San Francisco’s tourism business was boosted greatly by the local sex trade. But the new wave of prostitutes was apparently not up to the local convention industry’s standards. “If she is black or if she is garishly dressed, she is more likely to be stopped than if she is elegantly dressed,” explained a local prostitute-rights activist who worked with Margo St. James.

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“I think every city has a soul, every city is unique and special. But for San Franciscans, I don’t think there could ever be another place to call home. And a lot of it has to do with what I saw that night: with this ability to suffer horrible and dreadful events, earthquakes, civil turmoil, assassinations, and to not only endure but to create something beautiful from it.”

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