There is going to be a big movie out soon about the life and death of Harvey Milk. I want to get my ideas about those events down before the movie comes out so I can see how the movie changes my perceptions. I lived in San Francisco during most of the 1970’s and spent about a year covering the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. I wasn’t closely involved with the events. I knew Harvey Milk to nod to, and let Mayor George Moscone bum maybe a dozen cigarettes from me after Press Conferences. I was working at a paying job during the assassinations and the subsequent trials, but read the newspaper stories with a little more background than the average citizen.
Background
San Francisco, in the 1970’s, was like a box of kids’ blocks. There were many, many communities that rested against each other but never melded. To begin with, the ballot was printed in 4 different languages. The state law required that if a national immigrant group was more than 10% of the population, then their language had to be on the ballot. So San Francisco’s ballot was printed in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Tagalog (the official language of the Philippines). The English speakers were divided between the Whites and the Blacks. The Blacks were divided between the militant Muslims and the militant Evangelicals. The Whites were divided into the Freaks and the Straights, the gays and the straights, the radicals and straights. Then add in the Feminists, the New Age people and the Human Consciousness movement and there were a lot of different blocks in the box.
The interesting thing was that few of these blocks were aware of each other. The only white person who was ever seen in Hunter’s Point was the truant officer. The only black person ever seen in Bernal Heights was the trash collector. As one of the freaks, I knew my way around the Haight-Ashbury, the Western Addition, and the South of Market area, but I couldn’t find my way to St. Francis Woods with a map.
One of those blocks, different and separate, was City Hall. The Mayor was always a lawyer of Italian descent. The Board of Supervisors (the city council) changed very, very seldom. Each member had his or her own little constituency and had almost no contact with all of the communities that made up San Francisco. Everybody read the San Francisco Chronicle, but it was a little block of its own that didn’t understand the other blocks.
The only thing you could be sure of in an election was that the Incumbents would be re-elected to the Board of Supervisors and that Harvey Milk would lose.
Harvey Milk was a New York stockbroker who had lost his job when it was discovered that he was gay. He moved to San Francisco, and started a small camera shop in the Castro Street area just at the time it was becoming a gay stronghold. In the early 70’s, he started running for political office. it took a whole lot of defeats, but he slowly built up some political knowledge and name recognition. Finally, he became the best loser in the race for the Board of Supervisors.
There was an interesting sidebar at this time. Mayor George Moscone recognized Harvey Milk’s strong showing by appointing him to a city board, I think it was the board of permit appeals. When Milk announced his candidacy for the State Legislature, Moscone fired him. Many people were angry with Moscone for being so politically partisan, but Milk took his dismissal with good humor.
At that time, all of the members of the Board of Supervisors were elected at large. Five seats were open one year and the other six seats were open two years later. The top five vote getters (or six) among the various candidates would get the job. There had been various attempts to modify the system over the years, but none were very serious. Then, early in 1976, a large and diverse group of activists got together around the issue of district elections. They did it right. They held community meetings in just about every neighborhood, and publicized those meetings on every relevant telephone pole. It was grass-roots organizing at its grubbiest. But at every meeting, they picked up some more suggestions to strengthen the proposition, and some more signatures on their petitions. On Election Day, they won. San Francisco would be divided into eleven districts, each with own supervisor.
This was a political earthquake. Nine of the supervisors lived within blocks of each other in the rich Saint Francis Woods neighborhood, so the real estate business was booming. A person who was a leader in his or her neighborhood could seriously consider working at City Hall. And many of them did. The Chronicle grumbled about having to cover over one hundred candidates, but the city took to the new election scheme in a big way.
The turnout for the election was huge and the new Board of Supervisors was a distinctly mixed bag. Harvey Milk was the first openly gay supervisor. There was also a civil rights attorney, and an office worker for a union. But many of the old supervisors won re-election. Two of the the new supervisors new unabashedly conservative: a former Board of Education president and Dan White.
White was a fireman and a former policeman who lived in the Bernal Heights neighborhood, an area in the extreme southern part of the city that was separated from the rest of the city by hills. Almost all of its residents were white working class people. White had no political experience.
The first thing he had to do was quit his job, because he had a conflict of interest. He was given a booth on Pier 39, a new tourist development, selling baked potatoes. He voted his conscience at the Board of Supervisors meetings and quickly gained the support of the downtown business interests and the hostility of the Mayor and many of the neighborhoods.
But money became a big problem for White. His salary as a Supervisor ($800 a month), his wife’s salary as a teacher, and the profits from the baked potato booth were not covering his expenses. He announced that he was quitting the Board of Supervisors.
This next part is merely my speculation. White was a political amateur. He didn’t understand how politics was played in San Francisco. He didn’t realize that as a conservative Supervisor, he was valuable he was to the commercial and financial elites of the city. He didn’t know there were many perfectly legal ways that rich people could reward their friends. Heck, he may not have known that these people considered him his friend.
I am convinced, and have absolutely no proof, that during the days following his resignation, White had a conversation, or series of conversations, that convinced him that his life was over if he didn’t get his Supervisor seat back. First, he tried to take his resignation back publicly. Mayor Moscone rejected that out of hand. Then, White asked for a private meeting with the Mayor. I don’t know whether he planned to assassinate Moscone, or was merely keeping his options open when he took his gun and snuck through a basement window in City Hall. He then had a private meeting with the Mayor and ultimately shot him. Then, for some reason, he went to the other side of the building to the Supervisors’ office.
The Supervisors’ office was not quite what you’d expect for the elected officials of a major American city. Each of the eleven Supervisors had an aide, so there were 22 cubicles crammed into one big room. Most cubicles had a desk, a file cabinet, and two chairs. The visitor’s chair was at the end of the desk. Aisles between the cubicles were narrow and rather haphazard. Two people could squeeze past each other rather easily, if they were both slim. The privacy level was about the same as the Fenway Park bathrooms. There are a lot of things that I don’t know about what happened in the Supervisors’ office, but White shot Harvey Milk. He then left City Hall, went the three or four blocks to Saint Mary’s Cathedral (which is right across the street from the Unitarian Church, by the way) and stayed there to pray while he waited to be arrested.
At that time, there was a tense truce between City Hall and Police Headquarters. A couple of years before, the police had gone on strike over pay and benefits. The police felt that the former Mayor, Joseph Alioto had reneged on a deal. The strike had been settled, but no one was satisfied. The police had a siege mentality. Everyone fell into two categories: they were either with them or against them. Dan White was one of them, Moscone and Milk were not. There was an urban myth floating around then that police officers were seen with a button that said “Free the Dan White 1″ on their uniforms.
The trial was a wonder to behold. Many people felt that the prosecutor couldn’t be agressive for fear of alienating the Police Department. White had a good lawyer. There were a lot of people to testify that the whole incident was hard on Dan White, and almost no one to point out that it was a lot harder on Moscone and Milk. White’s wife testified that White had been depressed. He spent a lot of nights on the couch. Normally, a bit of health nut, he stopped exercising and started eating junk food: the Twinky Defense.
The gay community, angry throughout the trial, took to the streets when White was convicted of Involuntary Manslaughter. Dan White went to jail, was paroled after about 5 years, and committed suicide as soon as he could without getting anyone into trouble. Now-Senator Dianne Feinstein became the Acting Mayor and appointed a liberal to Dan White’s seat and gay activist Harry Britt to fill Harvey Milk’s seat.
The main lesson I get from this story is that we all have to vigilant to get glimpses of what we don’t know that we don’t know. Dan White didn’t know about all of the events that were happening outside of his nieghborhood. He didn’t know what he was getting into when he ran for Supervisor. Harvey Milk and George Moscone didn’t realize how rigid and fragile White’s belief system was. They didn’t know that a person they knew and worked with could become so dangerous.
