A pledge from ITT, a memo marked "Please destroy this," a banker who later lost everything, and the week the city threw itself a party instead. All records sourced and cited.
San Diego started calling itself America's Finest City in August 1972, and the timing was no accident. That was the month the Republican National Convention was supposed to be here.
The city had won it the summer before. Then a lobbyist's memo turned up in Jack Anderson's column, tying a $400,000 pledge from ITT to a favor from the Nixon Justice Department. Nine weeks later the party moved the whole convention to Miami. Tapes released years later showed the order came from Richard Nixon himself.
So Mayor Pete Wilson gave San Diego a week of its own instead. The banker who led the local fundraising would go on to preside over one of the biggest bank collapses in the country.
People new to town ask me about the nickname all the time. This is where it came from.
The city has told this story two ways.
The version backed by the record comes from Vincent S. Ancona, then assistant curator at the San Diego Historical Society, writing in The Journal of San Diego History in 1992. Wilson "proclaimed the week of August 21, the week that the convention was to have taken place," as America's Finest City Week. In other words, the slogan was a morale patch for a city that had just been dumped.
The other version, reported by Voice of San Diego from a 1985 Los Angeles Times piece, is that the phrase was inspired by Look magazine calling San Diego "one of America's finest cities." The same Times writer still concluded that the slogan was "born more of mediocrity and failure" than of civic pride.
Both can be true. Look may have handed Wilson the words. The convention is why he needed them in August 1972.
San Diego did not chase this convention at first. According to Ancona, Mayor Frank Curran and City Manager Walter Hahn turned away bids from both parties early in 1971. Curran's line was, "We need this like a hole in the head."
The push came from Washington and from downtown. In early May 1971, Robert Finch, a Nixon adviser, told Congressman Bob Wilson that San Diego could still have the Republican convention if it raised $800,000 to bring it here.
Ancona also names the local pressure. Curran "received pressure from financier C. Arnholt Smith, San Diego's most powerful and influential citizen." Smith was a close friend of Nixon's and, Ancona notes, "an important financial backer of Mayor Curran, a fact that was no secret at the time."
The money showed up at dinner. On May 12, 1971, at the Half Moon Inn, Harold Geneen, the president of ITT, pledged $400,000 toward the convention if Congressman Wilson could raise another $400,000 locally.
ITT was in the middle of an antitrust fight with the Justice Department at the time. That would matter.
Six weeks later the deal was moving. On June 30, 1971, Smith wrote to Congressman Wilson: "After talking with you, I contacted Frank Curran and everything apparently is on track."
It was on track. Ancona has the votes.
On June 29, 1971, the City Council approved up to $600,000 in cash and services, on the condition that other agencies put up $900,000. The one no vote was Councilman Floyd Morrow, who said the Republicans should be "paying the city to come here." Three years later Morrow cast one of the five votes that made Black's Beach the only legal nude beach in the country, so he was not a predictable man.
On July 1 the county approved $200,000 in cash and services, three to two. On July 2 the local committee filed its bid, $1,521,800 in all, after the official deadline. On July 23 the Republican site selection committee picked San Diego anyway, 119 to 12.
San Diego had a national convention, and the Sports Arena in the Midway district was going to host it.
C. Arnholt Smith is the local part of this story.
He had bought control of the United States National Bank in 1933 and built it to $1.2 billion in assets, the 86th largest bank in the country. He owned the Padres. He had been with Nixon on election night in 1968, and he raised a reported $1 million for that campaign, $250,000 of it his own.
When the ITT money became a problem, it was Smith who stepped in. In Ancona's words, "C. Arnholt Smith led the campaign among local businesses to come up with the additional funds."
On February 29, 1972, Jack Anderson published an internal ITT memo in his syndicated column. It was written by an ITT lobbyist named Dita Beard, and it tied the convention pledge to a favorable settlement of the company's antitrust case. Beard had written on it: "Please destroy this."
Mark Feldstein, who wrote the book on Anderson and Nixon, "Poisoning the Press," told Voice of San Diego that the column ran in about a thousand newspapers.
On March 24, 1972, Life magazine published "Tampering with Justice in San Diego." Ancona says the article went beyond ITT and into local corruption, naming men such as C. Arnholt Smith and John Alessio.
The party backed away from the money. Ancona: the Republicans "decided to accept only a token pledge of $25,000 from ITT for the convention." San Diego was about to lose a convention over $400,000 the party never took.
What happened in Washington next is darker, and it rests on Feldstein's reporting, so I will put it in his name. According to Feldstein, Nixon's people tried to smear Anderson and his young assistant, Brit Hume, later of Fox News, by spreading false claims that they were gay. Feldstein also reports a serious plot inside the administration to kill Anderson, with a poison expert consulted.
Back home, the convention was coming apart on its own.
Ancona describes a fight between Peter Graham, who ran the Sports Arena, and Richard Herman of the Republican arrangements committee. Graham had leased the building for $49,000 for four weeks, and he was not shy about his plan: "to get all I can, and if they don't like it, I'll lock the doors and they can go somewhere else."
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were promising a million protesters. Ancona says police planned for about 100,000. Officials floated a protest campsite on Fiesta Island, which the protesters called a "suicide swamp," and residents of Mission Beach and Pacific Beach turned in a petition with 763 signatures against camping near Mission Bay.
In April 1972 a confidential letter from a Republican official suggesting a move was leaked to the press. On April 20, Mayor Wilson and Leon Parma, who chaired the city's civic committee for the convention, held a press conference to hold it together.
It did not hold. On May 5, 1972, the Republican National Committee voted unanimously to move the convention to Miami.
There were three explanations at the time. Local people blamed Graham and the arena. The party publicly blamed San Diego for various shortcomings. And there was ITT.
The third one is the one with a document behind it. Ancona cites the San Diego Tribune of May 2, 1985, reporting that released White House tape transcripts showed "Nixon himself had given the order for the convention to be moved to Miami" to get away from the ITT scandal.
Ancona's verdict: "The GOP used San Diego as a whipping boy to cover up the indiscretions of the Nixon administration."
The convention opened in Miami Beach in August. Nixon accepted the nomination there on August 23.
In San Diego, Mayor Wilson proclaimed the week of August 21, the week the convention was supposed to be here, as America's Finest City Week. Ancona, writing twenty years later, noted that it "continues to be celebrated annually, with little mention of the origins of the tradition."
America's Finest City is what San Diego called itself the week it was supposed to be hosting the President, after the President had moved the party somewhere else.
Smith's year got worse from there. Wikipedia, citing the Bangor Daily News of 1973, records that he gave $200,000 to Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign and it was handed back, because he was under investigation by the SEC and the IRS.
On October 19, 1973, federal regulators seized the United States National Bank. The San Diego Business Journal called it the largest bank seized since the Great Depression. The bank's bad loans had gone to companies Smith controlled, over the legal limit.
He had owned the Padres from the National League team's first season. He sold them to Ray Kroc in 1974. In 1979 he was convicted of embezzling $8.9 million and of tax fraud, in a case involving the Padres sale. He served his time in a county work furlough center in 1984 and 1985. He died in Del Mar in 1996, aged 97, and the San Diego Reader reported that he died penniless.
So the man who led the local fundraising for Nixon's convention had his own Nixon check returned, lost his bank, and went into custody over the sale of the ball club.
Jim Beam made a commemorative decanter for it anyway. It is a Republican elephant in a San Diego Chargers uniform, sitting on a football, made of Regal China in 1972.
The Jefferson County Records Management and Archives in Golden, Colorado, holds two of them in its Donald Couch Political Decanter Collection. Its finding aid describes the bottle as a "Republican elephant in San Diego Chargers uniform, from San Diego Republican Convention." There was no San Diego Republican Convention. The bottle is still a nice piece of evidence that everybody, distillers included, expected one.
The Republicans did come back. San Diego hosted their national convention in 1996, and by Voice of San Diego's account it was uneventful.
The nickname had a rougher time. In 2005, after a municipal scandal pushed the mayor into early retirement and The New York Times called the city "Enron by the Sea," San Diego temporarily took the slogan off its website. A city spokeswoman told the Associated Press: "We couldn't stake that claim anymore." When Mayor Jerry Sanders took office that December, Governing magazine reported, he put the title back.
So the slogan was born out of one scandal, pulled for a few months over another, and restored. San Diegans have never stopped saying it.
If you are new to town or thinking about it, the Moving to San Diego guide covers the neighborhoods, and the downtown market report has current numbers. The whole city story, from Horton's $265 purchase forward, is on the history of San Diego, and the town's earlier run of civic corruption is on the Stingaree.
Sixteen years later the Sports Arena Travelodge, across the street from the arena that lost the convention, had a guest of its own. Hunter S. Thompson stayed there the week of the 1988 Super Bowl.
Who coined it. Ancona documents Wilson proclaiming America's Finest City Week in August 1972. A 1985 Los Angeles Times piece credits Look magazine with the phrase. This page does not say Wilson invented the words, only that he made them the city's in 1972.
Who killed the convention. Local accounts blamed the Sports Arena dispute, the party blamed San Diego, and the 1985 tape transcripts point to Nixon and ITT. All three are on the page. Only the third has a document behind it.
Smith and the fundraising. That Smith led the local business fundraising rests on Ancona. No other source I read names him in that role.
The smear and the plot against Anderson. Both come from Mark Feldstein's reporting, and they are attributed to him here.
How big the bank failure was. Some accounts call it the largest bank failure in American history at the time. The San Diego Business Journal says the largest bank seizure since the Great Depression. This page uses the Business Journal's wording.
More San Diego history: every story, oldest history first.