Even before Japan’s surrender in 1945, the Soviet-American wartime alliance began to unravel under mounting strain. The United States was displeased about Soviet expansion into eastern Europe and the Soviet Union felt uneasy about the United States’ development of an atomic bomb. Even as World War II was ending, the Cold War was beginning.
The political climate nationally and in the state was ripe for ambitious politicians to challenge office-holding Democrats on the issues of national security and loyalty. In the Golden State, heated disputes regarding communism arose in Hollywood’s film industry and on several campuses of the University of California.
Orange County, a stronghold of Republican conservatism, was home to Richard Milhous Nixon, a rising young politician who knew just how to turn Cold War issues to his electoral advantage. Born in Yorba Linda to Quaker parents who owned a small store, Nixon entered Whittier College on a scholarship. On graduating, he went on to earn a law degree at Duke University. Following a World War II stint in the U. S. Navy, serving as a lieutenant commander in the South Pacific, he returned home and entered politics.
Some Orange County millionaires saw in Nixon the drive and other qualities they desired in a Congressperson. Consequently, they backed his candidacy as the Republican challenger to unseat Democratic Representative Jerry Voorhis in the 1946 election. The liberal, scholarly, genteel Voorhis never knew what hit him as the bare-knuckle political tactics employed by the Nixon campaign carried the day. For example, Nixon claimed that Voorhis’s voting record in Congress was “Socialistic and Communistic.” Just days before the election, voters received anonymous phone calls: “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?” Afterward, Nixon acknowledged: “Of course I knew that Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist, but I had to win. . . Nice guys. . . don’t win many elections.” Nixon used similar smear tactics, for which he became known, in his successful 1950 campaign for the U. S. Senate, defeating Democratic nominee Helen Gahagan Douglas. A liberal Democrat, Douglas was mischaracterized as “the Pink Lady” whose voting record in Congress allegedly reflected her communist sympathies.
Nixon’s rising profile in the Republican Party landed him a place on the party’s victorious ticket in the 1952 election, in which he ran as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice-presidential running mate. The California Senator’s political prospects suddenly brightened.
Meanwhile, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), founded in 1938 to investigate subversives nationwide, turned its attention on the Hollywood film industry, which was suspected of employing communists. In 1947 HUAC worked from a list of 250 actors, writers, and directors it suspected of having communist ties; they were all eventually fired. During the next five years, film moguls Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, and Walt Disney were joined by the president of the Screen Writers Guild, Ronald Reagan, in helping HUAC investigators ferret out “Reds.” Some cinema stars, including Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, and Katherine Hepburn, endangered their careers by publicly denouncing the “Red Scare” and its ruination of careers.
At the same time that film people were placed in the crosshairs of HUAC, Jack B. Tenney of Los Angeles served as chair of a joint California legislature Fact-Finding Committee on
Un-American Activities. In response to the committee’s charges of communist activity and affiliations among University of California faculty, the university’s regents adopted a loyalty oath in early 1949.
The regents’ oath required university personnel to swear that they were not communists and “did not support any party or organization that believes in, advocates, or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government. . .” In August 1950, 32 professors who refused to sign the oath were terminated for insubordination. Many distinguished scholars who had no communist ties refused to take the oath on the grounds that it violated academic freedom and the California constitution. UC Berkeley psychology professor Edward C. Tolman led the non-signers in suing the regents, represented by the board’s secretary and treasurer, Robert M. Underhill. A state supreme court decision in Tolman v. Underhill (1952) declared the oath invalid since only the legislature possessed the power to impose it. Consequently, the professors were offered reinstatement.
Meanwhile, three happenings in Pacific Rim nations in the mid-twentieth century intensified the loyalty oath debate in postwar California politics: the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic bomb (August 29, 1949), the communists’ takeover of China (October 1949), and the outbreak of the Korean War (June 25, 1950). Amid these Cold War developments, in 1950 the California legislature passed the Levering Act, requiring all state employees, including university faculty, to take an even more stringent loyalty oath or risk losing their jobs. The Levering oath, too, met with resistance from some faculty members. In 1967 the state’s supreme court ruled that this oath was unconstitutional largely on grounds that it violated First Amendment rights and that membership in an organization did not, in itself, prove disloyalty.
The Red Scare of the mid-twentieth century evoked a liberal backlash that slowly gained momentum in the 1950s. An era known for free expression, reform, and major government-sponsored infrastructure upgrades was at hand.
SUMMARY
War in the Pacific followed by Cold War, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, shaped developments in the Golden State in the 1940s and early 1950s. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in California becoming the West Coast’s command center and staging area for U. S. military operations in the Pacific theater of World War II. Overnight the state’s shipyards, aircraft plants, and public universities - particularly UC Berkeley - merged into a military-industrial complex that would influence national policy and ensure robust economic growth in California for the next half-century. Women and minorities enjoyed defense industry employment opportunities unimagined before America’s entry into the war. Racial discrimination, assuredly, did not disappear, as demonstrated in the Zoot Suit riots, the imprisonment of civilian Japanese Americans on the basis of their ethnicity (later seared into the consciousness of readers worldwide by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir Farewell to Manzanar), and the explosion at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine. San Francisco captured international attention as the founding city of the United Nations and later venue for the treaty-making ending America’s war with Japan.
In the aftermath of World War II, many discharged service people settled in California at the same time that job-seekers from throughout America streamed into the state where opportunities invariably bumped up against racial prejudice against non-whites. Feeding and housing newcomers led to booms in agriculture and construction. Braceros from California’s Pacific seaboard neighbor, Mexico, worked the fields for a pittance under conditions that few whites could, or would, endure. Mexican Americans fought discrimination against their children in the state’s public schools as blacks opposed restrictive covenants aimed at keeping them from living in white neighborhoods.
Developments along the Pacific Rim - the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic bomb, China’s fall to the communists, and the Korean War - shaped politics. Tapping into and at times stoking voters’ fears of communism, Republicans usually triumphed at election time. Governor and then U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren was the face of progressive-minded Republicanism in Cold War California while Congressman and later vice president Richard Nixon was the face of militant Republican anti-communism.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
• What accounts for California’s commanding home front role in the Pacific theater of World War II?
• What were the major components of California’s military-industrial complex in World War II, and what role did that cluster of institutions play in the state’s economy in the immediate aftermath of the conflict?
• What factors were responsible for the imprisonment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry in California during World War II?
• What were the major instances of racial discrimination against non-whites in California during the 1940s?
• In what ways did international developments along the Pacific Rim, for example, the communists’ takeover of China, in the late 1940s and early 1950s shape California politics?
FURTHER READINGS
Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). This book is a leader among recent studies giving the Pacific its due significance in shaping the history of the United States, the Far West, and California.
Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972). This classic account provides a cautionary tale about the injustices that racist-minded majorities in a democracy can inflict on ethnic minorities.
Edward J. P. Davis, The United States Navy and U. S. Marine Corps at San Diego (San Diego, CA: Pioneer Press, 1955). The author provides one of the few detailed studies of San Diego’s Navy-Marine Corps history during World War II.
Iris Engstrand, San Diego: California’s Cornerstone (San Diego, CA: Sunbelt Publications, 2005). A leading historian of Pacific maritime affairs provides sound coverage of San Diego during World War II and its immediate aftermath.
Mark S. Foster, Henry J. Kaiser: Builder in the Modern American West (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989). For a reliable, balanced, thoroughly researched account of this entrepreneurial California capitalist who worked closely with government, this book is unmatched.
David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). The author shows that government and regional businesses have actively recruited workers from Mexico, and that immigrants from that country have maintained their cultural identity by living in Spanish-speaking American enclaves.
Donald T. Hata and Nadine I. Hata, Japanese Americans and World War II: Mass Removal, Imprisonment, and Redress (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2011). This invaluable smaU book gives an overview of the removal policy and redress movement, and updates readers on the appropriate terminology and recent scholarship on the subject.
Marilyn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). The author contends that the changes that World War II brought to the Bay Area, particularly through its shipbuilding industry, were as great as those occasioned by the gold rush era.
Roger W. Lotchin, The Bad City in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003). While cities are often stereotyped as centers of crime and graft, this work shows that the state’s urban areas were indispensable in weapons production and provided major military installations in World War II, the so-called “good war.”
Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). This work traces the close ties between California’s cities, particularly those on the coast, and the emergent military-industrial complex that became such an important component of the state’s economy.
Abraham F. Lowenthal, Global California: Rising to the Cosmopolitan Challenge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Though not essentially a work of history, the book places the opportunities and challenges facing California today within a context of the state’s ever-increasing global presence.
Carey McWilliams, Prejudice: Japanese-Americans, Symbol of Racial Intolerance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945). This volume, written by a journalist-historian who publicly denounced the removal policy at the time of its implementation, examines the historical roots of the racial prejudice directed at Japanese Americans in World War II.
Gerald D. Nash, World War II and the West: Reshaping the Economy (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). The author argues that large-scale federal investment in the American West during the war years reshaped the region’s economy, resulting in the Pacific Coast states - particularly California - becoming the cultural pacesetters for the nation.
Walter Nugent, Into the West: The Story of Its People (New York: Vintage Books, 2001). Moving beyond Anglocentric and politically focused histories of the West, the author narrates the region’s rich multicultural past, giving due attention to urbanization as weU.
John B. Rae, Climb to Greatness: The American Aircraft Industry, 1920-1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). Though not a recent publication, this critically acclaimed volume is still the starting point for the serious study of twentieth-century aviation in the United States.
Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). This comprehensive account treats the social, economic, and political history of California in the 1940s with a novelist’s sensibility for narrative, poignancy, and detail.
John Tateishi, And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps (New York: Random House, 1984). Based on interviews with men and women of Japanese descent who were incarcerated, as well as with incarcerees who enlisted in the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, this is a work of testimony given by those who experienced wartime imprisonment due largely to race.
Arthur C. Verge, Paradise Transformed: Los Angeles during the Second World War (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1993). Contemporary concerns about defending Los Angeles from attack, race relations, rapid economic growth, and more are treated expertly in this study of wartime Los Angeles.
Richard A. Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California (New York: The New Press, 2004). This highly regarded volume analyzes the environmental, labor, capital, biochemical, and technological components that together have turned the state into the world’s most productive agricultural region.
Charles Wollenberg, Marinship at War: Shipbuilding and Social Change in Wartime Sausalito (Berkeley: Western
Heritage Press, 1990). This brief book is particularly strong in its treatment of class, gender relations, and race at a major wartime shipbuilding facility in the San Francisco Bay Area.
World History
