BACK TO SAN FRANCISCO
By D. W. BROGAN
September, 1944. T is two years and four months since I last saw the Golden Gate ; it has been a little more difficult to see it this time, owing to the prevalence of those fogs on which the inhabitants of the larger but less self-confident city in the south of the State are prone to insist. But whatever they may say in Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay is as well worth looking at as ever it was, from the bridges, from the glass-walled bar of the Mark Hopkins, "The Top of the Mark," or from office windows all over the city. It is, I am sure, no breach of military security to say that San Francisco is busy with its primary business of being a port. The streets are full of salon, men going or coming from Saipan or some other spot on the gigantic Pacific bittle-front ; full, too, of Australian aviators and an occasional pink-and-white sailor from ships of the Royal Navy. Two years and four months ago San Francisco was even more conscious d the Pacific War, for Pearl Harbour was totally unavenged and the battle of the' Coral Sea was being fought with unknown fortunes. A great deal of the pessi- mism current in May, 1942, was mere "sounding-off," but there was a general sense of shock, of injured pride, of genuine appre- hension that the Japanese might stage another Pearl Harbour, put a carrier or two into the fog-belt and inflict on the highly vulnerable city injuries that would recall the earthquake.
All that is past, the Japanese are everywhere in retreat, every- where faced with disaster—everywhere, that is, except in China. And in San Francisco the war in China is not very remote. Even though Chinatown still keeps itself largely to itself, the Chinese population of the city is large, and is accepted as part of the political and aesthetic background. Hatred of Japan, combined with opti- mism about China, is a link binding together the two races. And the disasters threatening at the moment in China are taking a little of the gilt off the gingerbread of victory in Europe and the Pacific. It is better to be frank and state that, rightly or wrongly, it is not felt that we in Britain, or at any rate our Government, have any such solicitude for the fate of China as is felt here, or any adequate per- ception of the importance of the Pacific or of the necessary adjust- ments to be made in it. Seen from this side of the Pacific, Russia, China, Australia, New Zealand and the islands are all part of a Pacific system to which the remote island on the north-west coast of Europe is a stranger. In that Pacific set-up, the Californians (and I am sure the people of th.: other States between the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades and the ocean) see the United States as a pre- dominant partner. They know to what prodigious strength the American navy has grown ; they know with what prophet's-gourdlike rapidity the shipyards of San Francisco, the aeroplane plants of Seattle and Los Angeles, have grown. They feel the reflection of the confidence that a series of unbroken, desperately fought for, and more and more fruitful victories has bred in the American armed forces, especially in the Navy.
It is no longer a case of desperate holding actions like the Coral Sca or almost Pyrrhic victories like Guadalsanal or Tarawa. Now the Americans move with the confidence of predestined victors, bringing their forces to bear with an almost impudent indifference to the counter-measures of the Japanese. Of course, this strong wine of victory goes to some heads. It is not a totally fanciful danger that, if an international organisation should not be created soon, many Americans would fall naturallt
into a more than Palmerstonian attitude with more than Palmerston' power behind it. Many Americans believe that the whole tposition of Britain, Australasia, the Netherlands East Indies and the French possessions depends on American power and American policy. Tht motives for a restoration of the status quo in Malayan waters, for instance, will not be merely generous, they will be prudential. But if the labour and glory of effecting that restoration fall almost ex- clusively on the United States, the American people, especially on the Pacific coast, may feel in a few years' time like a rashly generous man who has set a rival up in business and regrets now that he d:dn't make conditions. Nor is it merely paradoxical to say that one of the genuine emotional drives of the American people, a deep- rooted dislike of "imperialism," may be an instrument of ambitious and shrewd politicians to invade the eastern Pacific in a big way. "Of course we can have fascism in America," said the martyred Huey Long, "but we'll have to call it anti-fascism." In the same way it is not impossible to have imperialism in America if you call it anti-imperialism.
But against such fears must be set the fact, politically so important, that the American Wanderlust seems to have died. San Francisco is the city of the Argonauts, but few people today seem to want to set out to seek more golden fleeces outside the boundaries of the United States. There does not seem to be any deep desire to push out into the world whose margins fade for ever and for ever. Here on the western rim of the continent the long tidal movement of settlement has finished. Governor Dewey, whose political astuteness no one denies, has made a speedy return of the conscripted soldiers and sailors his first campaign promise. Should he be elected, he might not be able to keep it, for the prospects of raising a volunteer army and navy adequate to police Germany and Japan do not look bright. But it is significant that he has made the promise, and no one doubts that the average American resents, more or less bitterly, the exile imposed on him by war—an exile which a bold policy of imperialistic anti-imperialism would make a permanent feature of American life. Here in California it is especially difficult to find valid arguments for persuading native sons and daughters to go elsewhere to fare almost certainly worse. To the Golden State could be applied the once famous story of the tiostonian who, on arriving at Heaven's Gate and giving his place of origin, was told by St. Peter, "You won't like it here." The American people, especially the people of the Coast, will knock Japan cold, but that does not mean that they will be eternally vigilant to keep her cold. Feu the man in the street, at any rate, one of the most famous songs of this region sums up his fundamental war aim: "California, here I come, Right back where I started from."
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