World War II reshaped the Bay Area and its people

San Francisco Chronicle / SFGate.com ^ | Monday, May 28, 2012 | Carl Nolte

[thecodont]

Memorial Day is an occasion to remember the men and women who went off to war and never returned. But it is also fitting on this day to recall the soldiers, sailors and Marines who served in World War II and came back.

Those men and women and their families set off a huge postwar boom that completely changed the Bay Area - and produced the region that today's residents have inherited.

World War II had a huge impact on the Bay Area. It resulted in major changes in the area's racial makeup, its economy, even its physical appearance.

The conversion of the orchard-rich Santa Clara County from "The Valley of Heart's Delight" into Silicon Valley can be directly traced to wartime electronic research.

Author Marilynn Johnson studied the impact of the war on the East Bay, where Oakland and Richmond were turned into boom towns. She called it "The Second Gold Rush." The war, she said, "marked the coming of age of West Coast cities."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/27/MNMV1ONR0I.DTL#ixzz1wEGrZ6cF

[thecodont]

I always enjoy hearing from Mr. Nolte, a great local historian.

[Pelham]

A similar article I read said that the war brought a hard and lawless element to Oakland.

[bigbob]

An article I found elsewhere today really quantifies the magnitude of the aircraft aspect of WWII war effort. It’s hard to imagine a national mobilization of this scale:

http://researchmaniacs.com/Forwarded/WWIIAircrafts.html

[GATOR NAVY]

My father’s family moved to Oakland during the war. My grandfather worked at the Kaiser yard. They didn’t stay after the war, went back to Washington State.

[wac3rd]

I was in East Oakland yesterday and realized after driving from E. 14th to MacArthur to Telegraph that Oakland has died, but like a chicken whose head is missing, still runs about wildly not knowing it is dead.

Done.
Gone.
Finished.

There is no hope except Adams Point, near Lake Merritt and in Piedmont (not Oakland) or Montclair.

In most towns towns, the overwhelming feeling is law and order, but places like Oakland feel like the criminal is the victor and people have to grovel not to get mugged, beaten, raped...or worse.

Oakland is completely and absolutely f-ed.

[nutmeg]

bookmark

[ProtectOurFreedom]

I'm reading a new book called "Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II."

Highly recommended. It's a view of WW II history that hasn't (to my knowledge) been covered before. The mobilization of the US free industrial might to win the war was a staggeringly tough challenge. Almost as tough was fighting communist controlled CIO labor unions which wanted the US to lose and FDR's New Dealers who wanted to centralize all control under government.

The sections about Henry Kaiser and his sons together with Steve Bechtel and his family and the building of the Calship shipyards in Richmond and the Marinship shipyards just above Sausalito are tremendous.

[thecodont]

Thanks for the recommendation!

[ProtectOurFreedom]

You’ll enjoy it! I’m ripping through it right now.

[Talisker]

Oakland is completely and absolutely f-ed.

Word.

And it's the result of Jerry Brown as Oakland Mayor putting the final nails in Oakland's coffin (not that there were many more nails to put in).

Now he's determined to do the same thing to all of California (not that there are many more nails to put in).

The liberals in the Bay Area aren't Zombies, and they aren't even Orcs - they're Uruk-hai.

[Carry_Okie]

Unless he addresses the infrastructure built during the 30s it is only half a story. Without the Grand Coulee Dam, there would have been no Alcoa and no Boeing. Without the dams of the Sierra and the Colorado, there would have been no industry in California.

None of it could be done today because of the legal power of the environmental left. Unless and until the Senate repudiates every UN environmental treaty, our industrial infrastructure will remain in chains. Yet it was the same Roosevelt who built that infrastructure that instituted the UN and its greenie treaty racket. Why?

IMO, the USA had done what it was financed to do, which was to build the industrial base to consolidate global military power for use by the UN. Since then, every war we have entered has been designed to sap our economy to no geopolitical effect, other than to build the infrastructure of a global police state. Reagan was the exception; the rule has been the same.

[ScottinVA]

I spend much of my childhood in Vallejo, just up the road from SF. The entire region in the postwar era was a choice area to live and work. Unfortunately large numbers of the nonworking welfare parasites and flowed in as well and the Bay Area.. especially locales like Oakland.. was truly regained its footing after the mid-60s. The influx of illegals from Mexico that followed exacerbated the problem.

But at one time.. the Bay Area was a great place.

[JimRed]

No mention of what drew so many queers there.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

He starts with the life of Bill Knudsen and his career before GM. Then covers the life of Henry Kaiser and the construction of Hoover Dam, Bonneville Dam, and Grand Coulee. He doesn’t do a good job (yet) of connecting low-cost electricity in the NW to the production of alumninum nor the TVA and the low-cost electricity that made it possible to concentrate uranium and plutonium.

He discusses at length the speed at which enormous manufacturing plants were built all over the country, but he fails to point out how this was possible precisely because of the inability of extreme greens to block their construction. However, there were myriad forces that sought to prevent the US from arming — less than 1/4 of the population was in favor of helping Europe in 1940, Truman and other Congressmen wanted total centralization of war production (which would have been a disaster), the New Dealers saw the free market’s ability to produce materiel as a threat to their concentration of big government, and the communist CIO was actively fomenting strikes that crippled our ability to produce when time was our most precious resource. Even without environmental enemies, there were plenty of nefarious people and forces at work.

The author also spends a lot of time discussing the mass manufacturing methods pioneered by Knudsen, the huge gains made in driving prices down in the 20s and 30s, and how these manufacturing techniques were applied in most armament industries.

[Carry_Okie]

Thanks for the recap. Although I knew that material, it's good to have it integrated into my perspective again, particularly the industrial unions, Harry Bridges and the ilk. I was just a kid when the big ILWU strike went down over containerization. It's hard to appreciate the degree to which that event shaped the Bay Area today.

My dad was a municipal bond financing consultant of some note on projects such as the Stockton deep water channel and bulk loading facility, the Oakland Airport, and any number of water treatment projects. So I've had an unusual perspective on the role of big infrastructure projects in shaping a developmental history of an urban area.

In any event, it's the farms of the Santa Clara Valley I miss the most. It just seems terribly wrong to me that we ruined the best soil on earth simply because it was cheaper to pave.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

In any event, it's the farms of the Santa Clara Valley I miss the most. It just seems terribly wrong to me that we ruined the best soil on earth simply because it was cheaper to pave.

I know what you mean. I moved to the Palo Alto / Mt. View area in '73 after everything had been paved over, but I distinctly remember a photo exhibit long ago at Syntex dedicated to the "Valley of Heart's Delight." It was a spell binding and magical place, that's for sure. Paving over the world's best soil is indeed criminal. On the bright side (in a perverse sort of way), the lousy economy and extremist environmental regs have stopped the paving over of the Central Valley. Too bad you can't grow anything there because of lack of water, though. But the soil is still there for future use.

[Carry_Okie]

I distinctly remember a photo exhibit long ago at Syntex dedicated to the "Valley of Heart's Delight." It was a spell binding and magical place, that's for sure.

The smell of those orchards in the spring... the peaches and apricots... I've never since had their like. It was wonderful. Believe it or not, there are still a few of those trees left in Los Gatos, in an uninhabited little valley between Blossom Hill and Shannon. It was bequeathed to the University of California and they've never done a damned thing with it.

If you have time, go to the old mill in Los Gatos in which you will find the town museum. In the foyer, there is a reproduction of a sketch by a young girl of the Town of Los Gatos drawn from a hilltop, if memory serves in drawn in 1877. It isn't the scenery which is so extraordinary, it's the love she put into that picture. It cost me $125 to photograph it.

I've found the location from which it was drawn with which to take a repeat photo. I have yet to write the landowner for permission to get access, but it's up on Aztec Ridge Drive.