Not only did federal military spending catapult the West Coast out of the depression, it also primed the region’s economy for continued post-World War II growth. Most of that growth took place in California, whose military-industrial complex quickly grew into the most extensive nationwide. Meanwhile, San Francisco played a key postwar role in international relations, including Pacific security.
California’s role as America’s Pacific fortress became even more imposing after hostilities ended in 1945. In addition to the state’s wartime military bases, many of which remained in operation after Japan’s surrender, the Department of Defense took a major step in 1951 by relocating its Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) from Annapolis, Maryland, to a site overlooking the Pacific in Monterey, California. NPS, founded in 1909, has been a premier institution of higher learning for educating naval officers and defense specialists in military science and strategic planning. The move to California’s shores speaks to the importance that the Department of Defense attached to the Pacific state’s role in global security affairs.
In addition to Department of Defense facilities, war-related industries constituted a major component of the state’s evolving military-industrial complex. Shipbuilding and aviation were of particular importance to California’s postwar economic development.
Shipbuilding and repairing in postwar California took place mainly in the Bay Area, Long Beach, and San Diego, and had both naval and civilian sectors. Members of Congress whose districts included these port cities saw to it that federal appropriations subsidized naval shipbuilding and maintenance operations in these urban maritime centers. The United States Merchant Marine, with its own service academy in the Bay Area, was an auxiliary of the navy, and thus received federal military funding. The rationale for these naval-related disbursements was invariably the same and invariably succeeded: national security. Just beneath the surface, however, loomed the always significant matter of jobs. The Long Beach naval shipyard, which had closed after the war ended, reopened in 1951, thereby cutting the state’s unemployment rate by half.
Civilian shipbuilders also sought and benefited from federal defense outlays. In 1949 the federal government assigned to Bay Area shipyards five of the 35 shipbuilding contracts awarded nationwide. These contracts gave a needed boost to the state’s postwar maritime economy and translated into jobs for Bay Area workers.
While the shipbuilding and repairing industry struggled to remain alive in the late 1940s and early 1950s, aircraft-related enterprises prospered more than ever before. The Cold War was on, the U. S. Air Force emerged as a separate branch of the armed services in 1947, and California had the nuclear weapons laboratory, the aircraft companies and their ancillary manufacturers, and the university research programs to put the state in the forefront of the new aerospace industries. These enterprises included the designing of jet aircraft for commercial and military uses as well as the building of missiles and other space weapons.
In the first postwar decade and a half, Douglas, Lockheed, and North American were joined by Rocketdyne, Aerospace Corporation, and Litton Industries as major defense contractors. These companies were based in southern California. Numerous smaller spinoff businesses, for example, Aerocraft Heat Treating, founded in Paramount in 1947 by gifted entrepreneur William Dickson to provide metallurgical services related to aircraft manufacture and maintenance, dotted the Southland.
By 1960, 25 percent of America’s defense expenditures and 42 percent of Pentagon research contracts went to firms and universities in the Golden State. The cluster of California’s universities engaged in military research was unmatched in any other state, and included UC Berkeley, Caltech, and Stanford. Berkeley, under contract with the federal Atomic Energy Commission, ran the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, the Livermore Laboratory in the Bay Area, and the radiation laboratory on its own campus. Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed guided missiles. Stanford, partnering with General Electric Company and Lockheed, began receiving Defense Department contracts for electronic research in the 1950s, drawing the Silicon Valley into the state’s military-industrial complex. Like these leading universities, RAND Corporation (an acronym signifying scientific research and development) produced knowledge on which public policy could be based. It was initially part of Douglas but established itself as an independent “think tank” in Santa Monica in 1947. Much but by no means all of RAND’s contract work has been related to military security.
The jobs created by the military-industrial complex, particularly in aircraft plants and shipyards, continued to draw blue-collar and white-collar workers into California after 1945. High-tech engineers and scientists also followed the job market to the Golden State, whose population increased dramatically in the aftermath of World War II.
Beyond the scale of its huge military-industrial economy, California’s role in postwar international relations was equaled by few, if any, other states. The Golden State’s role was underscored in the writing of the United Nations Charter, and the negotiation of two treaties regarding Allied-Japanese relations and military security in the western Pacific region.
After several earlier efforts had met with little success, the Western world’s centuries-old dream of creating a concert of peace-seeking nations to end the scourge of major war made headway in San Francisco. For two months beginning on April 25, 1945, delegates from approximately 50 countries assembled in that city for a high-level conference that wrote the charter founding the United Nations. Accordingly, the gathered powers established a Trusteeship Council to handle the disposition of islands once ruled by Japan; permanent members of the powerful Security Council (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China) were installed, each with the right of veto; a General Assembly giving voice to the smaller nations was set up; and the International Court of Justice was born. U. S. President Harry S. Truman arrived at the conference and gave his approval of its work. Inspired by their city’s role in giving birth to the United Nations, in 1947 San Franciscans founded the West Coast’s largest foreign policy organization, the northern California chapter of the prestigious World Affairs Council that brings together international leaders, academicians, and business luminaries to weigh and discuss the leading foreign policy issues of the time.
Japan, meanwhile, remained occupied by the U. S. military, which oversaw the pacification of that nation from 1945 until 1951, when, again in San Francisco, a major international conference was held. The purpose of the meeting was twofold: first, to negotiate a peace treaty between 46 World War II allied nations, led by the United States, and their former enemy; and second, to ensure peaceful relations in the Asian Pacific region, meaning the countries in the western Pacific near or bordering the Asian continent. The San Francisco Peace Treaty, as it is often called, returned sovereignty to Japan while committing that country and the signatory powers to the peaceful resolution of disputes, allowing for the negotiation of agreements providing for U. S. bases on Japanese islands in the Pacific, and renouncing any Allied rights to reparations from Japan. The pact went into effect in 1952. While the peace treaty was being negotiated, top American and Japanese officials also signed the Japan-U. S. Security Treaty, pledging the United States to defend Japan in return for the right to establish bases on its territory. Taken together, MIT historian John Dower terms these two agreements “The San Francisco System,” which has shaped U. S.-Japan relations and Pacific security ever since. All of this happened in the City by the Bay in a California whose international stature in the mid-twentieth century, especially in the Pacific Basin, was becoming greater by the day.
World History
