On the evening of November 19, 1884, a 27-year-old heir to one of California’s largest fortunes walked through the newsroom of the San Francisco Chronicle, called out the name of the editor who had been attacking his family in print, and opened fire with a Navy revolver. The first bullet struck M. H. de Young in the shoulder and knocked him to the ground.
As de Young lay wounded, Adolph Spreckels advanced and fired again. The second bullet would have killed him, but a package of children’s books he was carrying deflected it into his arm. A Chronicle clerk pulled a pistol from his desk and shot Spreckels, finally stopping the assault. Six months later, despite multiple eyewitnesses, an unarmed victim, and the gun still in his hand when police arrived, Adolph Spreckels walked free.
The New York Times captured what everyone understood: “Well, money can do anything in this city. ”
The Spreckels dynasty was built by Adolph’s father, Claus Spreckels, a German immigrant who by the early 1880s controlled nearly every grain of sugar refined west of the Rocky Mountains. His California operations had crushed all meaningful competition, but it was his Hawaiian empire that elevated him from wealthy industrialist to something closer to a sovereign. A contemporary account described the scope of his influence: “Some six years ago, Claus Spreckels was uncrowned king of the Hawaiian Islands.
He built palaces for the crowned king, planned European excursions for his dusky majesty, and formed the cabinet and swayed the government to suit his own purposes. ” He was jokingly referred to in the public prints as “King Claus” and sometimes satirically alluded to as “King Sugar Barrel,” but he kept on raking in the money all the time. The relationship with King Kalākaua had begun in 1876, when Spreckels recognized the fortune to be made from the U. S.
–Hawaii reciprocity treaty. He traveled to Honolulu, cultivated the monarch with loans and flattery, and soon controlled access to the throne itself. He installed artists, poets, journalists, and historians at the Hawaiian court, all drawing salaries from Spreckels’s accounts. In 1878, he secured a lease on 40,000 acres of Maui’s finest agricultural land.
Four years later, he acquired outright title to the Wailuku lands through a scheme involving Princess Ruth Keʻelikōlani. Spreckels purchased her legally questionable claim to crown lands for $10,000 plus a $60,000 loan, then obtained supportive legal opinions from former attorneys general. When native representative George Washington Pilipo protested that Wailuku was “much loved by the people and the place of sepulture for the ancient chiefs,” warning that this transfer was a step toward destroying the independence of the country, the Hawaiian legislature ignored him. The Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company, incorporated in 1884, would become the largest sugarcane plantation on Earth.
Spreckels’s personal fortune was estimated between $12 and $25 million. His eldest son, Adolph, had been named vice president of Spreckels Sugar Company in 1881, but at 27 he remained primarily identified as the heir, his entire identity derived from his father’s achievements. This dependence would prove volatile when the San Francisco Chronicle began publishing accusations that threatened to expose the rot beneath the Spreckels empire. The newspaper attacks had begun three years before the shooting.
In 1881, the Chronicle published an exposé on labor conditions at Spreckels’s Hawaiian plantations that read like an abolitionist tract. Portuguese, Norwegian, and German immigrant workers testified to systematic exploitation: wages of just $8 per month, with weather-related deductions that made debt repayment virtually impossible. Workers claimed it would take five years of continuous labor to pay off their passage under ideal conditions that never materialized. One witness, Mr.
Ascension, testified that rations were so “execrable and frequently nauseating that hunger, even to the verge of starvation, could not compel their consumption. ” The exposé concluded that Azorean workers faced “a slavery from which escape was more hopeless than from the southern states of America. ”
The Chronicle’s humanitarian rhetoric masked economic warfare—Eastern sugar refiners had underwritten the exposé, hoping to undermine the reciprocity treaty and weaken Spreckels’s market dominance. But the substance of the allegations appears to have been accurate.
By 1884, the Chronicle renewed its assault, this time targeting the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company’s finances. Stock that had sold for approximately $60 at issue had collapsed to $25. The company was drowning in debt, and Claus Spreckels had been forced to make a personal loan of $1 million to prevent bankruptcy. The Chronicle alleged fraud in the Hawaiian operations, and the allegations contained substantial truth.
For Adolph Spreckels, these attacks constituted something beyond business rivalry. The newspaper was calling his father a swindler and a slave driver. Every accusation against the company was an accusation against the family name—and, by extension, against Adolph’s own legitimacy as heir to an empire built on exploitation. A friend encountered Adolph following de Young through the Chronicle building that November evening and counseled him, “Don’t make a fool of yourself.
” Adolph ignored him. The shooting fit a pattern San Franciscans knew well, because the Chronicle’s own founder had done the same thing five years earlier. In August 1879, the newspaper published allegations about mayoral candidate Reverend Isaac Kalloch’s sexual improprieties in Boston. Kalloch responded from his pulpit with an attack so vicious it still shocks, denouncing the de Young brothers as the “bastard progeny of a———, conceived in infamy and nursed in the lap of prostitution.
” Charles de Young drove to Kalloch’s Metropolitan Temple and shot the reverend twice as he emerged from the building. Kalloch survived and won the mayoral election from his hospital bed. Charles de Young posted bail and fled to Mexico. The following April, shortly after Charles returned to San Francisco and announced plans to publish additional damaging material about the Kalloch family, Mayor Kalloch’s 26-year-old son walked into the Chronicle offices with a pistol, found Charles de Young at his desk, and shot him dead.
The trial lasted six weeks. The jury deliberated for 24 hours, then returned a verdict of not guilty, ostensibly on grounds of self-defense—though Charles de Young had never returned fire and his weapon was found unfired. Witnesses who claimed de Young had shot back were later convicted of perjury and imprisoned. Young Kalloch walked free.
The pattern was now established. San Francisco’s vigilance committees of 1851 and 1856 had hanged suspected criminals without trial and exiled political opponents, all under the control of the city’s commercial elites. By the 1880s, this culture of elite impunity had migrated from revolutionary tribunals to courtrooms. The city had demonstrated that a wealthy or politically connected man could shoot an unarmed victim in front of witnesses and secure an acquittal through jury manipulation and class solidarity.
This was the environment in which Adolph Spreckels walked into the Chronicle building with a loaded revolver, determined to defend his family’s honor the way San Francisco’s ruling class had always defended its interests. De Young survived through anatomical luck. The first bullet had struck his clavicle rather than the underlying left subclavian artery, which would have caused fatal hemorrhaging. His recovery was slow and painful, but he would live to continue both his newspaper and his war with the Spreckels family.
Adolph Spreckels was arrested and charged with attempted murder. Then something happened that shocked even San Franciscans accustomed to the city’s elastic approach to wealthy defendants. Spreckels was released on bail. For a defendant facing attempted murder charges with multiple eyewitnesses, an unarmed victim, and overwhelming physical evidence, release before trial was extraordinary.
The preferential treatment announced to everyone paying attention that the fix was already in. The trial was scheduled for May 1885. The defense team Claus Spreckels assembled deployed a strategy so brazen it bordered on contempt for the legal system itself. Spreckels’s attorneys advanced two defenses simultaneously—defenses that contradicted each other completely.
The first was self-defense. The second was temporary insanity. The self-defense claim required the jury to believe that Adolph Spreckels had been protecting himself from an unarmed man who had not even finished turning around before the first shot was fired. The prosecution established that Spreckels had stalked de Young through the building with premeditated intent to kill.
The temporary insanity plea was equally weak. While several friends and co-workers offered tentative testimony that Spreckels had seemed moody and unfocused in the week before the shooting, another friend recalled that the two had shared a drink just hours before Adolph walked into the Chronicle building with a loaded pistol. Yet the defense was not really arguing law or fact. It was arguing power.
Contemporary accounts referenced something far more troubling than weak legal arguments. Witnesses reported that jurors dropped paper pellets to Spreckels’s friends sitting in the courtroom gallery and exchanged hand signals before rendering their verdicts. This method of secret communication would have allowed the defense to coordinate with sympathetic jurors throughout deliberations. In June 1885, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
The New York Times reported the outcome with acid clarity: “Well, money can do anything in this city. ” Ambrose Bierce, the era’s most caustic social critic and a columnist for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, was incensed by the acquittal. Years later, Bierce would write that “hatred of de Young is the first and best test of a gentleman”—a savage commentary on how San Francisco’s elite had closed ranks around a man who had shot an unarmed editor for the crime of telling the truth about his family’s business practices. The verdict announced something larger than one man’s freedom.
It declared that California’s wealthiest families operated above the constraints that bound ordinary citizens. Adolph Spreckels walked out of that courtroom and never looked back. He continued his rise through the family business, eventually assuming the company presidency when his father Claus died in 1908. That same year, at age 51, he married Alma de Bretteville, a strikingly beautiful artist’s model 24 years his junior.
The courtship had lasted five years. Alma, pragmatic and ambitious, extracted maximum value from the arrangement before agreeing to the match. At six feet tall, from a working-class family, and with a reputation her biographers describe as risqué, Alma was never fully embraced by San Francisco’s old-money society. But she transformed herself into one of the era’s most significant art patrons, becoming an important collector of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture and acquiring 13 of his works for display at the 1915 Panama–Pacific Exposition.
Alma famously called Adolph her “sugar daddy”—the origin of the term now embedded in American vernacular. Together they commissioned the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, a replica of Paris’s Palais de la Légion d’Honneur that opened in 1924 as both an art museum and a memorial to California’s World War I dead. Adolph died six months before it opened, and Alma devoted the remaining decades of her life to philanthropy. M.
H. de Young, meanwhile, survived both the shooting and his brother’s murder to build an empire of his own. In 1890, he opened San Francisco’s first skyscraper, the Chronicle Building, a ten-story tower topped with what one observer called an “almost endearingly hideous” clock tower. The Spreckels family responded by purchasing the rival San Francisco Call and commissioning an even larger building—a petty architectural arms race that continued for decades.
De Young later founded the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park, which houses one of the finest collections of American art in the country. The irony is almost never acknowledged.
San Francisco’s two greatest cultural institutions—the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor—were built by families who spent decades trying to destroy each other. One founder shot the other in cold blood and walked free because his father’s fortune had corrupted the jury. The shooting that should have defined Adolph Spreckels’s life has been reduced to a footnote, a testament to his complex personality in the sanitized language of one recent account.
The verdict that should have outraged a nation merely confirmed what the New York Times had observed: in Gilded Age San Francisco, money could do anything.