This article originally appeared in the Dec. 2, 1991, edition of U.S. News & World Report.
As it molders on the bottom of Pearl Harbor, charred and crumpled by Japanese bombs, the battleship Arizona is both a memorial and a graveyard for most of the 1,177 crewmen who died on its pitching decks and within its heaving hull. Every few minutes, a dollop of oil the size of a macadamia nut escapes from the rusting tanks deep within the ruin, threads its way upward through the twisted wreckage and flattens into a small slick on the water’s surface. The bubbles, which have come without surcease for 50 years, are the last faint ripples of an event that lashed the landscape of the 20th century like a tsunami.
World War II made the United States the leading power on the globe, blocking forevermore all avenues of retreat to isolationism. It took from the British lion much of its roar. It freed Japan from militarism and restored democracy to Western Europe. It set the scene for the cold war, widening the sweep of Moscow’s imperialism in the East, signing the death warrant of Western colonialism in Africa and Asia, summoning the Third World into existence. It built the bomb.
But the conflict’s international repercussions, as profound as they were, did not leave as deep an imprint on American lives as the tides of social and economic change sent coursing across the then 48 states, tides that flowed far longer than the 44 months between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day, tides that in many respects flow to this day. As Americans liberated fascism’s captives, they were themselves liberated from an array of domestic constraints. A gathering silent revolution at home made the U.S. populace richer, more mobile (15 million people moved out of their home counties during WWII alone) and — for blacks and whites alike — more equal. The cataclysm transformed life more drastically than any event since the Civil War.
THE PROFITS OF DOOM
We are the only nation in this war which has raised its standard of living. — CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow
Shortly after dusk on the day after Pearl Harbor, the scream of sirens — one short blast, one long, one short, one long — pierced the night in San Francisco. Radio stations went silent. Fifteen huge searchlights scoured the heavens as an Army general breathlessly informed reporters that 50 planes from an enemy aircraft carrier had been spotted 100 miles due west of the Golden Gate. Power workers fanned out downtown, cutting off streetlights. Bar patrons, climbing off their stools and growing boisterous, promoted a like result with bricks or baseball bats. With traffic already gridlocked on the city’s narrow, hilly lanes, police ordered motorists not to use their headlights. For thousands, the drive home became a demolition derby beneath the waning moon. Horns blared. Tires squealed. Things went bump in the night. But not one citizen fell to enemy action. For the number of Zeros in the sky was … 0.
Fiorello’s gloom. The scare was the first in a string of false alerts that rattled ”the home front” early in the war. The government swiftly printed 57 million pamphlets on ”What to Do in an Air Raid.” ”Never underestimate the strength, the cruelty of the enemy,” exhorted New York’s voluble mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, doubling as the country’s civil defense chief. ”The war will come right to our cities.”
Of course, it never did. No war in history wreaked more havoc than this one on civilians — in London, in Dresden, in Leningrad, in Hiroshima and countless cities and hamlets in between. Yet geography — those gloriously wide shining seas — spared the United States of America. More than spared. U.S. civilians were soon basking in the serendipitous revival of good times (with the exception of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, who were herded into internment camps on the theory that they were potential saboteurs, a group libel born of palpable racism). The war not only defeated Japan and Germany, it defeated the Great Depression when Franklin Roosevelt’s brain trust, after nine years, had become all but brain dead. The American war machine deployed 15 million men and cranked out 296,000 planes, 12,000 ships, 64,000 landing craft, 86,000 tanks, 15 million guns and 40 billion bullets. The cost came close to $300 billion. In peacetime, the New Dealers would have had to puff on an exceptionally potent brand of cheroot to so much as dream of so vast a public works program (FDR’s answer to the 1938 recession had been an extra $3 billion in public works).
The massive pump priming produced the most dramatic economic renaissance the country has ever known. Unemployment, still a hefty 17 percent at the time of Pearl Harbor, melted away. Corporate profits surged. Union ranks swelled from 8.7 million to 14.3 million in five years. The average worker’s income more than doubled (but the top 5 percent saw their share of personal income slip from a quarter of the national total to a fifth as lower-paid people gained relatively more). Some 42 million tax eaters became income-tax payers, up from a mere 4 million taxpayers in 1940. Tires, gasoline and such foods as meat, sugar and coffee were rationed; makers of autos and appliances shifted their assembly lines entirely to lucrative ”cost plus” defense contracts (the last car, a Ford, had rolled out in February 1942). Yet consumers increased their spending by fully 50 percent. And not just on necessities. Nightclubs jumped with the jitterbug and clinking glasses. A record number of dollars rode the ponies — $2.2 million a day at New York racetracks alone.
It’s only money. Despite the sharp rebound, the public remained obstinately bearish. From laborers muttering over their lunch boxes to bank presidents declaiming at their country clubs, the prediction was the same: When the war ended and military spending was slashed, the country would again be on its uppers. Polls showed 7 out of 10 expected to be worse off. The trauma of the 1930s was deeply etched in their psyches. Besides, hadn’t wars always been followed by slumps? Nearly everyone overlooked the vast reservoir of consumer demand built up over 16 years and the $146 billion in savings (triple the 1940 total) people had at the ready. When peace came, they reached for their bankbooks. By the fall of 1945, merchants were dancing to the bells on their cash registers — nylon stockings, fur coats, diamond jewelry, refrigerators, washers — we’ve got ’em, folks, come and get ’em.
Nine months after V-J Day, baby buggies, cribs and playpens were the ticket, as was the newly published ”Pocket Book of Baby and Child Care,” which became the bible of postwar parents, delivered by a mild-mannered Moses called Dr. Benjamin Spock. The buyers were the founding fathers and founding mothers of the baby boom, a national bout of fecundity that would last for two decades.
Business finally managed to cast off the dunce cap it had worn since the crash of 1929. The restoration of its confidence and prestige began with the ”dollar-a-year men,” who left corporate eagles’ nests to superintend wartime production feats from temporary government roosts on the Potomac. The comeback of prosperity did the rest. In the 1950s, business showered an enticing array of goods on ”the affluent society” (the title of John Kenneth Galbraith’s book became platitudinous), a world of charcoal grills for cooking red meat and gas-guzzling cars with monstrous tail fins for keeping up with the Joneses. The quarter century after 1945, in the words of economist Robert Heilbroner, was ”the longest and most successful period of expansion in American history.” The buying power of average weekly pay increased by 61 percent from 1948 to 1973 (at which point it began to shrink, stagflation becoming the skunk at the garden party).
ALPHABET CITY
Washington’s a funny town. It’s got scores of hotels, and you can’t get a room. It’s got 5,000 restaurants, and you can’t get a meal. It’s got 50,000 politicians, and nobody will do anything for you. — A small-business man visiting the Capital in 1944
From the WPB (War Production Board) and the OWI (Office of War Information) to the PWPGSJSISIACWPB (which had something to do with plumbers), Washington was a city of newborn acronyms. It was also a city of newborn bureaucrats. Lawyers in off-the-rack pinstripes, statisticians in eyeshades, sundry technical wizards packing slide rules in tiny holsters, wide-eyed young typists from Kalamazoo in smart skirts for the big city — all helped balloon the federal bureaucracy by 300 percent (critics of the New Deal had groused about a peacetime expansion of 60 percent). Temporary offices (”tempos”), gray asbestos hulks a block long, squatted in rows on prime parkland beside burnished monuments of marble. The world’s largest office building, designed by 300 architects and hurriedly built by 13,000 men, emerged from a cloud of red dust. With only four stories above ground, the Pentagon provided three times the desk space of the Empire State Building, enough for 40,000 defense workers. Washington never regained the torpor of a Southern town after the war. The alphabet soup was thinned and substantial trims made in the federal work force, but some 2 million workers remained on the U.S. payroll in 1948, twice as many as in 1940. And, soon, the regulatory apparatus was growing again.
The war had demonstrated that the government could spend the country out of hard times — an idea seen in the 1930s as ruinous nonsense. At President Truman’s behest, Congress passed the Employment Act of 1946, which called for use of tax and budget policies to promote ”maximum” employment. That signaled a historic acceptance of government as the unabashed manager of prosperity. Never again would Washington view the business cycle as an unalterable mystery. Federal spending swelled to more than 20 percent of gross national product by 1970 (up from less than 2.5 percent in 1929, 10 percent in 1940), stabilizing demand. Expanded welfare programs furnished other control mechanisms, as did a bigger tax base. In the fat years of the 1950s and 1960s, Adam Smith’s ”invisible hand” was very much at work. But so was the highly visible hand of Uncle Sam.
SHOCK TROOPS
Rose (brrrr — rrrr) the riveter
Rosie’s got a boyfriend Charlie:
Charlie, he’s a marine,
Rosie is protecting Charlie
Working overtime on a riveting machine.
— From a song recorded by the Four Vagabonds in 1943
Their hair could be close cropped and stashed beneath a cap or bandanna. Their faces could be hidden by goggles, their figures obscured by loose-fitting coveralls. Sweaters might be banned — and shorts made a capital offense. Yet there was only so much that could be done to cushion the culture shock. ”Women in the yard!” ”Women in the yard!” The sneering, astonished cry was heard in shipyards, aircraft factories and other defense plants across America when the new workers arrived early in the war — workers so bold, so patriotic (or so eager for higher wages) as to think that they could master such manly arts as riveting and welding without a single Y chromosome among them.
Some male workers advertised their resentment by resorting to what a later generation would call ”sexual harassment.” They sent ”Rosie” and her sisters on quests for a ”left-handed monkey wrench” or played other pranks. They told dirty jokes and swore. They hooted and whistled. They pinched and grabbed. ”You’d think at least some of these ten thousand guys would have seen women before,” Josephine von Miklos wrote of her experience in an East Coast shipyard. ”But that’s where we evidently were wrong.” Another assembly-line ingenue reported: ”The first thing I noticed was that all the men were instructors.”
Press clippings. Away from the plant, ”the girls behind the guys behind the guns” won plenty of plaudits. Feature writers churned out profile after profile of women who were able to slap wings onto B-17s by day and still be sweet and feminine by night. By war’s end, the public accepted that the weapons that defeated Hitler and Tojo, although manned by men, were built to a large extent by women (40 percent of workers or more at many defense plants) — well built by women. At which point, the Rosies were summarily relieved of their security badges and tools and cast out of their jobs to make room for returning GIs. Yes, they had proved they could do an array of jobs previously regarded as suitable only for men. But, no, most Americans were not yet ready to surrender the traditional belief (as one writer explained in the Atlantic Monthly) that ”women’s manifest destiny [is] to cook and breed.”
The legend is that women promptly retreated en masse to home and hearth and stayed there until ”women’s lib” swung the kitchen doors open again in the 1960s. In fact, large numbers of cashiered defense workers found other (if usually lower-paying) jobs. World War II may not have exploded the mind-set that Betty Friedan would later call ”the feminine mystique,” but it planted explosives around its foundations. Rosie had gained confidence in herself and in her sex, a confidence she would impart to her daughters. Even more important, the prosperity and higher educational levels brought by the war steadily opened more and more jobs to females. Between 1947 and 1958, the proportion of married women working outside the home rose from 20 percent to 30 percent — a rate of increase just as brisk as that achieved in the ferment of the 1960s.
The war also spawned new opportunities and a new outlook among black Americans. They suddenly had fresh incentives to shake the red clay off their shoes and say goodbye to the South’s poorest counties (an exodus that spurred the mechanization of Southern agriculture). Day after day, families could be seen gathered on station platforms, their belongings stuffed in ancient Gladstone bags or in cardboard suitcases tied around with rope, waiting for the Illinois Central to Chicago or clutching bus tickets to ”Deetroit” or points east or west.
As migrants of both races poured into war-industry towns, one scholar counted 242 racial incidents in 47 cities in the summer of 1943 alone. The worst of these erupted one steamy June night in Detroit, ”the arsenal of democracy.” Thirty-four people died, including 25 blacks, 17 of them by police bullets. More than 20 riots or mutinies broke out at military bases, many started by black GIs resisting the indignities of segregation. It was all a jolting reminder that while the nation warred against Hitler’s ”master race” megalomania, its moral armor bore a stain: ”the plight of the Negro,” the great ”American dilemma,” as Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal termed it in 1944.
Blacks had been cheated of lasting gains in World War I, that earlier crusade in the name of democracy. They said: never again. A. Philip Randolph, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened to bring 50,000 protesters to Washington on July 1, 1941, if blacks were not guaranteed their share of defense jobs. He canceled the march when Franklin Roosevelt agreed to set up the Fair Employment Practices Committee. The FEPC was largely toothless, but by late 1944, blacks had pushed their way into 8.3 percent of the jobs in the war plants, up from 3 percent in 1942
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Military gothic. As angry as many blacks were (one sharecropper taunted his landlord: ”By the way, Captain, I hear the Japs done declared war on you white folks”), few refused to fight. More often they had to fight for the right to fight. Attitudes in the military had changed little since an Army War College study in 1925 that pronounced blacks a lower form of life with a ”smaller cranium, lighter brain [and] cowardly and immoral character.” At the start of the war, the Navy accepted blacks only as lowly mess attendants. One such, Dorris Miller, took over a machine gun at Pearl Harbor in the face of serious fire, winning the Navy Cross. By war’s end, blacks had proved themselves reliable in combat, and many of the most demeaning restrictions had been eased (Harry Truman finally desegregated the armed forces in 1948).
World War II transformed the status of blacks more drastically than any event since the Civil War. In just six years, their income rose from 40 percent of white income to 53 percent. Their numbers on the federal payroll quadrupled. The GI Bill of Rights lifted their educational levels, training a new generation of leaders. The masses began mobilizing, encouraged by a pugnacious African-American press. The size of the Urban League tripled. The NAACP grew from 355 branches to 1,000, from 50,000 members to 450,000.
White consciences were pricked. Interracial committees multiplied. The American Bar Association dropped its color bar. The Supreme Court banned whites-only primaries, poll taxes and restrictive covenants. The Truman-appointed Commission on Civil Rights urged ”the elimination of segregation based on color, creed or national origin, from American life.” Although the revolution would take decades to unfold, the civil-rights movement had stirred to life in the shadow of the cannons.
THE PEACEMAKER
My God, what have we done?
— A journal notation made by Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay, just after the explosion of the A-bomb at Hiroshima
It began like the creation of the universe in Genesis — with an unimaginable burst of light — and for a moment, a distant observer might well have mistaken it for something equally divine. Then came the rolling, rising fireball, the heat like a blast from hell, the thick, billowing dust sucked from the living earth into a lethal cloud 8 miles high. No, this was the latest work of man. Decreation of Hiroshima. Harry Truman called the atomic bomb ”the greatest achievement of organized science in history.” Fully 85 percent of Americans polled said its use was justified, but the Saturday Review reflected the chill felt by many. Its editorial was entitled ”Modern Man Is Obsolete.” Those B movies in which a crazed genius manipulates basic forces of nature with disastrous effect had seemed like mere Hollywood hokum in the 1930s. Yet now science had built a Frankenstein’s monster that would have done the most fertile screenwriter proud.
In a flash, ”science became too important to be left to scientists,” historian Geoffrey Perrett wrote, recasting the truism about generals and war. Before World War II, the United States had been a poor country cousin to urbane European science, which supplied the building blocks of such wartime wonders as radar and the proximity fuse (Britain), jet fighters (Britain and Germany) and advanced rockets (Germany). In America, the war put big government and big science permanently in bed together for a multibillion-dollar marriage to which the cold war added heat.
More bucks from a bang. In the 1950s and 1960s, scientists worried that the vast sums going to research and development projects on campus would give the government too much control over universities. They fretted about the military corrupting priorities with its big slice of the research pie. Yet they took the money and they prospered. Scientists gained key positions and unprecedented influence in the federal establishment; the United States breezed past Europe in the Nobel sweepstakes.
And the megamonster revealed socially redeeming qualities in later reels. In 1943, Niels Bohr had asked about the A-bomb in the making: ”Is it really big enough?” — big enough, that is, to put a stop to world war. Forty-eight years later, with the superpower struggle at last at an end, the question put by the great Danish physicist could be answered yes.
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TEENAGER AMERICANUS
If lonesome, he reminds you of the guy away from your arms. If waiting for a Dream Prince, his thrilling voice sings for you alone.
–– Rita Stearns, 17, in a prize-winning 1943 essay
On Columbus Day, Oct. 12, 1944, friendly forces laid siege to the Dream Prince, marching on Manhattan at first light, an army dressed to kill — in sweaters, skirts, saddle shoes and bobby socks. Their purses stuffed with sandwiches and bananas to avert starvation, they overran Times Square, 30,000 of them, ankling along, giggling, smashing against shop windows, jiving with New York’s finest. Some 3,600 made it into the Paramount Theater and let loose a merciless fusillade of screams, shrieks, squeals and ”Oh, Frankies!” that ricocheted off the ceiling and descended like a buzz-bomb attack while Raymond Paige and his orchestra assaulted a no man’s land of sharps and flats.
On stage, a blue-eyed young man caressed the microphone, his suit hanging on his bony frame as loosely as on a coat hanger. Blinking under the spotlight, his Adam’s apple bulging, Francis Albert Sinatra crooned: ”All … or noth-ing at all! … ”
”Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee … ” went the bobby-soxer echelons.
”Half a love never appealed to me … ”
”Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee … ”
”If your heart nev-er could yield to me … then I’d rath-er have noth-ing at all!”
”Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee … ”
Girls swayed, collapsed onto each other, swooned in the aisles and fainted as ushers deployed with smelling salts and stretchers like medics on a battlefield.
Help Wanted. The tableau at the Paramount was a hormonal testament to the coming of age of an ebullient new species of primate. It had no Latin name, but the noun teenager was just entering the English language. Economic recovery and wartime exigencies brought unprecedented wealth and freedom to adolescents. It was partly a case of indulging youth with Daddy’s dollars. But beyond that, many teenagers now had their own dollars. Girls could easily get work as sales clerks and waitresses (fully two thirds of America’s waitresses having taken defense plant jobs). With employers forced to replace lost manpower with ”boy power,” many a young male went through a rapid metamorphosis from a footloose drugstore cowboy bumming Lucky Strikes off his pals to a scrubbed-up working stiff with cash in his jeans. Money bred a heady new sense of independent identity for both sexes.
The bobby-soxers introduced the teenager as shamelessly pumped up fan, foreshadowing the even zanier upheavals to come with rock-and-roll. The ”Victory Girls” gave the country a look at another stereotype that would prove equally lasting — the neglected, delinquent teenager, tarted up and running wild in the streets. These working-class Lolitas, some as young as 12, were typically the offspring of an ”old man” gone to the service and an ”old lady” gone to the swing shift at a munitions plant (”latchkey children” was a WWII coinage). They sashayed around juke joints and train stations picking up GIs, trading sex (and often VD) for a hamburger, a Coke or a Nehi orange. Some called them ”Cuddle Bunnies.” But ”V-Girls” was just as apt, for they were wont to profess a ”patriotic duty to comfort the poor boys who may go overseas and get killed.” Psychologists pronounced them sincere in this sentiment, scant comfort to people fretting about the 130 percent rise in female delinquency from 1941 to 1943. The increase was more modest among boys, who scholars surmised were less likely to feel ”left out” of the war experience.
Higher on the socioeconomic ladder, the teenager as coddled consumer was being born. The midwife was Seventeen, the first issue of which hit newsstands in September 1944, announcing ”Seventeen is your magazine, High School Girls of America — all yours!” All for them — and for the advertisers wooing them. One ad proclaimed: ”Carolteen — the clothes that put hi-jinks into hi-school.”
The youth market became vast in the long period of postwar prosperity, embracing music, television, the movies, fashion and more. Sales reached billions of dollars annually, and by the late 1950s, highbrow high priests such as Dwight Macdonald were writing that commercial courtship of the ”new American caste — the teenagers” was debasing popular culture. When Seventeen itself turned 17, it remembered that in 1944 adolescents had lived in a world overwhelmingly attuned to grown-ups. It found in 1961 that ”the needs, the wants, even the whims of teenagers are catered to by almost every industry … When a girl celebrates her 13th birthday today, she knows who she is. She’s a teenager — and proud of it.”
THE D.A.R. INVASION
Why go to Podunk College, when the government will send you to Yale?
— Time magazine, March 18, 1946
When the veterans of World War I were mustered out, they got $60 and a rail ticket home. Veterans of World War II did better. They got a ticket to the middle class. All it took to punch it were brains and determination.
The GI Bill of Rights gave veterans a free college education — tuition plus a modest living allowance. Student populations swiftly doubled at many colleges. To house married vets, a warren of ivy-less hovels was thrown up amid the elegant old halls at Harvard University. Trailer camps, which swam in mud after a rain, appeared on many campuses, as did rows of Quonset huts with wash lines full of diapers. Alabama Polytechnic bunked veterans on tugboats, another school floated them on surplus LSTs (landing vessels). Had Robert Maynard Hutchins been correct? The University of Chicago president had warned that the GI Bill would bring a flood of ”educational hobos,” unmotivated men who would be standing in a bread line if they were not reclining in the groves of academe.
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”Damn Average Raisers.” As it happened, Joe Veteran was a different breed from Joe College. He disdained dinky caps, hazing and the like as ”kids’ stuff.” He was such a grind that professors were soon praising the postwar classes as the most serious, hardest working ever (nonveteran students at Stanford called vets D.A.R.’s for ”Damn Average Raisers”). Joe Veteran was often from a family that had never before seen the inside of so much as a cow college. He often spoke in a class or regional accent that diluted the prep school honk at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. He was a drinker of beer, not a sipper of sherry.
The GI Bill and revived prosperity inaugurated higher education’s egalitarian age. Access and enrollment would continue to grow in the decades ahead. Fully 2.2 million GIs went to college, and more than 5 million others went to trade schools. Veterans led an explosion in the professions: 450,000 became engineers, 360,000 became schoolteachers, 243,000 became accountants, 180,000 were trained as doctors or nurses, 150,000 as scientists, 107,000 as lawyers.
Because they remembered the insecurities of the years before the war, few wanted to be entrepreneurs (unlike many of their offspring, who would enjoy snugly secure 1950s childhoods). As Fortune reported of the class of 1949, most were eager ”to work for somebody else — preferably somebody big” whether it be government, business, a school or foundation. William Whyte would dub them ”organization men” in the 1950s. Others would label them ”the new class,” defined by one writer as consisting of ”number crunchers, word wielders and symbol jugglers.” They were intellectual worker bees, the technocratic core of an emerging postindustrial society.
AND BABY MAKES THREE
A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. — Henry David Thoreau, 1862
First, potato plants stood, row upon row, as far as the eye could see. Then, the 4,000 acres on Long Island, 25 miles east of Manhattan, became a field of dreams 1947 style: Tract houses rose, row upon row, as far as the eye could see. They named it Levittown.
The all but identical boxes, completed at the rate of 30 per day, typically had two bedrooms, one bath, a fireplace, a Bendix washer, an 8-inch television and a picture window before which you could stand and be master of all you surveyed — the back yard. Priced at $7,990 for a Cape Cod, $9,500 for a ranch, with no down payment, Levittown was Shangri-La. Or so it seemed to the ex-GIs (addressed as ”Mister Kilroy” in Levitt ads) who came in wave after wave, spouses and squalling tots in tow, sometimes lining up for days, sleeping in their cars, for a chance to put down roots in the potato patch.
Quality of life. Many builders, like William Levitt, had perfected assembly line methods while building wartime housing for Uncle Sam. In the spring of 1946, bulldozers were chewing the earth on the edge of nearly every city in the land to answer housing demands pent up since the crash of 1929. New, conspicuously less affluent subdivisions shot up just down the highway from the old ”railroad suburbs,” enclaves of the well-to-do. Low interest rates, the GI Bill and other federal policies smoothed the way for veterans and nonveterans to buy homes, speeding 9 million people into suburbia by 1954. Cars helped. Between 1945 and 1955, the number of them on the road doubled, from 26 million to 52 million.
Suburban houses were not only lower in price — they were also lower in quality (a 9-year-old boy threw a baseball right through the wall of one Sacramento abode, an investigator told Congress). But the debate more often had to do with quality of life, not the quality of gypsum board. It reached a fever pitch in the 1950s and 1960s as a flying wedge of intellectuals attacked the suburbs as an empty promise — too sprawling, too conformist. Cookie-cutter wastelands with neither the culture of the city nor the beauty of the country. Statistics tell how Middle America replied to the indictment: In 1950, 1 in 4 persons lived in suburbia; 40 years later, 1 in 2 lived there.
PACIFIC CENTURY
We have sniffed our destiny.
— Earl Warren, Governor of California, April 14, 1944
Amid the delirium of V-J Day, two sun-gilded young women popped out of a taxi at City Hall in San Francisco, clad only in their smiles. They scampered to a public fountain and within seconds were chest deep, playing peek-a-boo among the waterlilies as onlookers whooped and whistled. Postwar California could not have made a more prophetic debut. For now, more than ever, the state would be America’s golden girl, a siren calling from her Pacific perch, an earth mother nurturing (as John Gunther wrote in his 1947 bestseller ”Inside U.S.A.”) ”a bursting cornucopia of fruit, glaciers, sunshine, crackpots and petroleum.”
The new gold rush. California had fancied itself El Dorado ever since the gold rush of 1849. Yet, nearly a century later, people back East still saw it as a colonial outpost, a colorful sideshow over the horizon from the true heartland. World War II torpedoed such patronizing notions. The federal government, seeking a prudent dispersal of defense production, built a vast munitions industry in California and gave it fully 12 percent of the country’s war contracts. New factories — to make airplanes, electronic equipment, aluminum, steel, synthetic rubber and much else — sprouted among the yuccas; cranes flew in the shipyards; research labs spread like amoebas. The boom set off a new gold rush. Millions came to prospect, this time, for jobs. The population surged 53 percent to 10.5 million, making the state the second most populous in the union by 1950 (it passed New York in 1964).
The trek continued after the war as the state’s defense industries swiftly converted to peacetime, hundreds of thousands of GIs introduced to the charms of the Coast while in uniform returned as civilians and a progressive GOP governor, Earl Warren, sank surplus revenues left over from taxes on arms production into schools, colleges, hospitals and water projects. Kiplinger Magazine in 1948 proclaimed the West Coast ”a new citadel of power.” The New York Times declared: ”California can no longer be thought of merely as the Land of Sunshine. Politically and economically, she tips the national balance westward.” In matters as diverse as freeways (1940) and Frisbees (1957), the Golden State emerged as America’s great social laboratory. ”So leap with joy, be blithe and gay, or weep my friends with sorrow,” teased Richard Armour’s verse. ”What California is today, the rest will be tomorrow.”
Smog was already stinging eyes in the Los Angeles basin in the 1940s. But few could have guessed the extent of the strains to come — runaway development, $300,000 tract houses, gridlock, tax revolts, teenage gangs et al. Five decades after the wartime influx began, those storied sunsets had been dulled by more than dirty air. And yet new suitors of the golden girl still came — not as many from Iowa and Kansas, perhaps, but more than ever from Latin America and Asia.
Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth;
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
— William Shakespeare’s ”Julius Caesar”
In the brightness of the postwar dawn, it was almost possible to forget the darkness: the global carnage that left 50 million corpses ”groaning for burial” — men, women and children killed by bombings, shootings, bayonetings, gasings, garrotings, hangings, drownings, beatings, starvation, suffocation, radiation, fire and disease. Good and Evil have coexisted throughout history, of course, in a kind of dynamic tandem, each sparking off the other. But that so much positive change could spring from the most destructive war ever fought may be the strongest proof yet that, in the modern as in the ancient world, the appetite of the Fates for irony knows no bounds.
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