#E004
Strange bedfellows
November 22, 2024
The Story
The California Gold Rush kicked off in 1848 when James W. Marshall discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. The resulting boom quickly transformed San Francisco into the most important port on the West Coast—a title it held for nearly a century. But in the late 1950s, a powerful U.S. Senator from the East Bay secured funding for a new port in Oakland, leveraging a disruptive technology: the shipping container. Within a decade, San Francisco’s share of cargo on the bay plummeted from 95% to just 5%, with most of the business shifting to Oakland’s new container port. This left San Francisco with a largely abandoned, seven-mile-long industrial waterfront full of empty piers and warehouses—and little work for longshoremen.
As developers brought forward proposals for new projects on vacant waterfront sites, San Francisco, proud of its blue-collar roots and maritime history, resisted change. Even as late as 1990, then-mayor Dianne Feinstein famously rallied the city with her battle cry: “Are we or are we not a port?!” For forty years, from the 1960s through the turn of the century, local politicians and union longshoremen teamed up to fight the redevelopment of the waterfront. They held on to the highly optimistic hope that shipping would eventually return, bringing back the union jobs that were eliminated forever by the new technology of container cranes.
A little digression into how cargo is loaded and unloaded
For about 3,500 years—from the time of the Phoenicians until about 1960, when a cargo ship pulled up to a finger pier, longshoremen would swarm it and unload boxes, bags, pallets and barrels, all by hand and using small hooks, cranes, and dollies. Then they would reload the ship’s empty holds with new cargo. The process was labor intensive, time consuming, costly, and there was typically a lot of “shrinkage,” or theft. During the 1950s, shrinkage in San Francisco was estimated to be about 40%, where a lot of lumber crossed the docks and longshoremen were known to have the best fences in the city. But as Karl Marx said, capital replaces labor, and the innovation of the shipping container—sealed and with a manifest—replaced longshoremen with huge cranes that loaded and unloaded the containers, leaving only a handful of jobs for longshoremen as crane operators. Shrinkage plummeted too, and now the biggest risk is containers being washed overboard in rough seas.
The kind of wishful thinking around the return of longshoreman jobs—or at least stalling the inexorable march of technological innovation—lives on even today. As recently as October 2024, longshoreman striking in the US demanded, in addition to wage increases and other changes, that the shipping companies stop adopting new technologies already in use at European ports that would eliminate even more jobs. Forgive the metaphor, but if history is any sort of guide—and I think Marx would agree—the longshoremen are shoveling sand against the tide.
Back to the story
Let us return to San Francisco in the 1990s, where the longshoremen found an unlikely ally in their fight: the historic preservation community. The preservationists, however, weren’t concerned about jobs. Rather, they were worried about losing the vacant, neo-classical warehouses along the waterfront, landmarks from the City Beautiful Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a vital part of San Francisco’s architectural heritage. They were also worried that these historic warehouses, which once anchored the city’s 100 finger piers to the Embarcadero, the city’s commercial artery, would be replaced by tall, modern, structures including new hotels as well as cultural, tourism, entertainment, hospitality, and sports facilities—blocking views of the bay and leading to the “Disneyfication” of the city—all changes that many San Franciscans definitely didn’t want.
So, when the Port of San Francisco sought approval to redevelop the piers for other uses, the longshoremen and the preservationists joined forces. Together, they rallied their larger constituencies—union labor and NIMBYs—to successfully block the Port’s efforts for decades. But did these interest groups really have anything in common?
The Theory
It’s hard to picture longshoremen and preservationists sipping a nice local cabernet together, but as the saying goes: “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” This line, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is spoken by a character named Trinculo, who, after being shipwrecked, seeks shelter under the cloak of the sleeping man-monster Caliban. It’s the origin of the phrase “adversity makes strange bedfellows,” and our variation, “politics makes strange bedfellows.” But what makes people with different interests come together?
In an article titled “Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems,” three psychologists challenge “the widespread view that people’s political beliefs are based on abstract values like equality, tolerance, and authority.” Instead, they argue that “belief systems derive from political alliance structures,” concluding that “when partisans mobilize support for their allies, they create patchwork narratives that appeal to ad-hoc and often incompatible moral principles.” [1] In other words, they are opportunistic, rather than principled, when they form alliances.
Examples of strange bedfellows with ad-hoc and incompatible moral principles are plentiful throughout history. Think of the alliance between the USSR, the US, and other Allied powers during World War II, or more recently, the unlikely partnership of far-right Congressman Matt Gaetz and far-left Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who co-sponsored a bill to make it illegal for sitting members of Congress to trade stocks. A 2009 Washington Post article highlighted a particularly colorful example from 1990, when an “unusual coalition of Christian leaders and policy experts from across the ideological spectrum” worked together to advance anti-poverty initiatives—an alliance described by George W. Bush’s speechwriter Michael Gerson as “an orgy of strange bedfellows.” [2]
In my own city of Minneapolis, we recently saw an alliance between a new organization called Smart Growth Minneapolis, representing homeowners; and the local chapter of the Audubon Society, representing environmentalists. They joined forces to bring a lawsuit against the city’s new 2040 comprehensive plan, which promoted increased density and improved transit systems. Central to the Minneapolis 2040 Plan was the elimination of single-family zoning, allowing smaller multi-family housing projects—duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes—to be built throughout the city, including in traditionally single-family neighborhoods. The plaintiffs argued that this plan would harm the environment. (Never mind that the alternative—maintaining the status quo—would likely lead to continued sprawl and habitat loss on the exurban edge as our population continues to grow.)
The plaintiff’s key demand was that the city complete an Environmental Impact Statement to assess the plan’s impact on the city over time. This would have required that an extraordinarily costly and time-consuming process usually used on individual project sites be applied to the entire city, a practical impossibility. The judge, however, agreed with the plaintiffs and stopped the implementation of the plan, and many projects that had started under it. Finally, after a failed appeal by the city, the state legislature stepped in and passed a law in 2024 exempting Minnesota cities from having to complete an Environmental Impact Statement for comprehensive plans (which are required by state law). While development under the 2040 Plan has resumed, the alliance of these two unrelated groups—strange bedfellows—nearly succeeded in stopping it.
The Lesson
The next time you’re reading the local news and come across a story about a controversial project or program, start looking for the strange bedfellows who are supporting or opposing it. You might be surprised at what you find—and who’s in bed with whom.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
- Ancient proverb
[1] Pinsof, David, David O. Sears, and Martie G. Haselton, “Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems,” in PSYCHOLOGICAL INQUIRY
[2] Peréz, Myrna. “Politics makes strange bedfellows: Jesus wouldn’t have it any other way.” Washington, D.C.: Brennan Center for Justice, March 5, 2009. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/politics-makes-strange-bedfellows