Is it possible to tell the story of an American city through its scandals? For Gary Krist, who has previously unearthed histories of scoundrels and sinners in Chicago, New Orleans and Los Angeles, the lens of true crime brings into focus the welter of urban growth and social change. In “Trespassers at the Golden Gate,” Krist’s focus is an adulterous affair that culminated, in 1870, with a pistol shot, fired in fading daylight on the ferry that crossed San Francisco Bay.
From its dramatic opening, Krist’s book backtracks to chart San Francisco’s astonishing growth, from a rough, polyglot outpost of prospectors attracted by the 1849 Gold Rush to a mature metropolis, which within 20 years counted respectable married women among its population of almost 150,000.
The problem with the metaphor of maturation, which Krist and many of his sources rely on, is its implication that urban growth is preordained, written in the bone. It exonerates individuals and erases protest; it is the means by which the real forces at work here — white supremacy and patriarchy — cover their tracks.
There were always those who did not conform: Krist’s wide canvas is peopled with intriguing minor figures like Ah Toy, a Chinese immigrant sex worker; a French frog-catcher, Jeanne Bonnet, who fell afoul of restrictions on cross-dressing; and Mary Ellen Pleasant, a civil rights pioneer who fought to desegregate the city’s streetcars. But these individuals rarely had the means to bend the city to their own tastes and notions of justice.
And when one of the men in power — a married lawyer named Alexander Parker Crittenden — was brazenly killed by his lover, the younger, licentious, murderous woman became the scapegoat, bearing all the sins of the city.
Except for brief vignettes from the trial, Krist’s narrative does not return to the scene of the crime for more than 200 pages. This structure demands a fair amount of investment in people whose motives and morals are muddled, at best. Crittenden, his wife and his lover, Laura Fair, had all migrated to San Francisco from the antebellum South, and carried with them the prejudices of those origins: They were pro-slavery, anti-Lincoln and, in due course, Confederate sympathizers (a cause for which the Crittendens’ eldest son died). “Unfortunately,” as Krist puts it rather mildly, it was Crittenden who, while briefly serving in the California State Legislature, was responsible for writing a “notorious statute” banning the testimony of nonwhite defendants from admissibility in court.
These were people who benefited from the restrictive moral code of a “mature” Victorian city, even as they chafed at its constraints. Crittenden, who is described repeatedly as “restless” or “reckless,” did not amass a great deal of actual influence: His political ambitions were thwarted, and what money he earned ran through his hands like fool’s gold. Still, he moved around the country freely, enjoying, as his frustrated lover put it, “the man’s thousand privileges,” which included leaving his wife and children for months or years on end.
During one of those extended wanderings, in pursuit of the riches flowing out of Nevada’s silver mines, Crittenden met Fair, then a 26-year-old with a young daughter, running a boardinghouse with her mother. “Thrice married — twice divorced and once (somewhat suspiciously) widowed — the hotheaded and independent Fair refused to be fixed by the feminine clichés of her time. Amid the rampant speculation in precious metals, she amassed a substantial investment portfolio and occasionally lent her lover money.
But without a husband, her social position was always precarious. She was desperate for Crittenden to divorce his wife and marry her, but he prevaricated, lied and threatened suicide or murder should she break off their affair.
After seven torturous years, it was Fair who broke.
At her murder trial, journalists, lawyers and spectators struggled to make sense of her. Was she the victim of an evil seducer, a wronged woman trying to claim her rights as a wife of the heart, if not the law? Had she been driven mad? And if so, by her emotions, her menstrual cycle or both? Was her trial a case of singular insanity, or a referendum on the moral stature of the entire city of San Francisco, as the prosecution urged? Or was Laura Fair a symbol of women’s wholesale oppression, as the suffragists insisted?
These questions remain open: As Krist puts it, the final judgments of Fair “depended largely on the perspective of the person asked.” It’s a logical but frustrating conclusion. The author’s evenhandedness and scrupulous adherence to the documentary record are worthy qualities in a writer of nonfiction, but they need a little passionate partisanship to fight against the inertia of “it depends.”
We’re left wondering: What did this case mean for the city of San Francisco? And what might it mean for those reading about it today?
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