Penelope "Penny" Blake was an American industrialist and the owner of Mercer Steel, inherited from her father Byron Mercer in 1878. She married San Francisco mayor Samuel Blake with the purpose of saving her family's business, but the couple had a tense relationship due to the Mercer family employing Chinese labor, engering Blake's Irish Democratic core voter base. After her husband's murder by her manservant Jacob Fok and an ensuing race riot, the new mayor Walter Buckley had Blake committed to an insane asylum.
Biography[]
Blake in 1878
Penelope Mercer was born in San Francisco, California, the oldest of three daughters born to steel magnate Byron Mercer. She was young when her mother died, and she raised her younger sisters Sophie and Nadine. In fear that her family would lose their home as her father's business began to struggle, Blake married Mayor Samuel Blake, who agreed to bring business to Mercer Steel. The marriage was frigid, as Penelope disliked her racist husband, who, in turn, disapproved of her "parading" her Chinese servant Jacob Fok around town, and of her family's employment of "coolie" labor at a time when the city's Irish population was growing increasingly radical in its xenophobia and demand for whites-only employment. In 1878, the Irish laborers Seamus and Paul O'Shea assaulted her at the Sandlot after spotting her walking with Fok, but the Chinese triad Ah Sahm rescued her, resulting in his own arrest, which Blake protested. Blake repeatedly attempted to help the imprisoned Ah Sahm, and, after Ah Sahm's release, they formed a secretive sexual relationship. At the same time, her father pushed her to sexualize her relationship with her husband to make him more amenable to granting an exclusive cable car commission to Mercer Steel. This did not prevent Blake from continuing to publicly voice her dissent from her husband's racist views, challenging US Senator Robert Crestwood on his anti-Chinese views by pointing out how, unlike the Chinese, their ancestors arrived at the shore and murdered the natives before importing people they deemed inferior to do their dirty work.
Blake dining with her father
On her father's death from a heart attack, Penelope inherited Mercer Steel, employing 100 Chinese laborers. She opposed her husband's efforts to have her replace her Chinese workers with white ones as a political move, and she also rejected Lymon Merriweather's proposal to buy her business. Her hired laborers faced attacks from the Irish Workingmen, loyal to the union boss Dylan Leary, who later firebombed her factory in spite of her hiring Hop Wei Tong protection. The loss of her factory meant that she no longer had economic freedom from her husband, and her sister Sophie pressured her to sell the company. Penelope also proposed a divorce to her husband as a means of distancing her business affairs from his re-election campaign, leading to her drunken husband assaulting her. Her servant Jacob killed the Mayor with an iron poker while defending Penelope, resulting in a race riot that devastated Chinatown. Penelope blamed the anti-Chinese deputy mayor Walter Buckley for Fok's lynching, and she reached out to the San Francisco Chronicle to expose Buckley's corruption. Buckley responded by confronting Blake over the loss of her father, the destruction of her business, and the murder of her husband in front of her, and he stabbed himself in the shoulder with a letter opener, blaming Penelope and having her taken away by authorities and placed in a mental hospital.