Because of its Pacific preeminence and connections, California's role in World War II was largely unmatched by any other state. The 40-year clash between the state and its Japanese population, beginning in 1900, set the stage for the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, that thrust America into the war. That attack led to the mass removal of California's residents of Japanese ancestry to barbed wire encampments. Meanwhile, the state's military installations, shipyards, and airplane factories were instrumental in waging war in the Pacific, while UC Berkeley's leadership in the atomic bomb project ensured a decisive and controversial end to the global conflict.
In the war's aftermath, California emerged as more thoroughly industrialized, more heavily populated, and an even more dominant force in Pacific commerce and security affairs as well as aerospace enterprises than in the depression era. While the Pacific Coast states of Oregon and Washington likewise experienced wartime growth, in most regards they were greatly eclipsed by California. The Golden State's phenomenal military infrastructure, necessitated by war, gave rise to a long-lasting, economic boom beginning in the late 1940s and undergirded by agriculture. During the war years and afterward, Greater California's influence in the Far West, the nation, the Pacific Basin, and globally became greater still.
Pacific Eldorado: A History of Greater California, First Edition. Thomas J. Osborne. © 2013 Thomas J. Osborne. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Timeline
1941 Japan launches a surprise attack on U. S. naval vessels and military installations at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere on Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands, resulting in America’s declaration of war on Japan and entry into World War II
1942 Aviation replaces filmmaking as southern California’s leading industry A Japanese submarine shells the coast just north of Santa Barbara
The CongressionaHy authorized bracero labor program begins, legalizing California’s use of Mexican farm workers
1942-5 Long Beach serves as the major anchorage for the U. S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet
UC Berkeley physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer heads the scientists working on the top-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb
1942-6 Americans of Japanese descent, three-fourths of whom live in California, are sent to concentration camps
1943 Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles involve off-duty U. S. sailors beating adolescent Mexican American males
1944 Physicist Theodore von Karman co-founds the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech in Pasadena
An explosion at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine results in the deaths of 320 servicemen, two-thirds of whom are blacks in a segregated unit
1945 The United Nations Charter, founding the international organization, is drafted in San Francisco
1946 By defeating Jerry Voorhis in a Congressional election in southern California, Richard Nixon gains national prominence as a leader of the anti-communist crusade
1947 In Mendez v. Westminster, judges in the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals hold that the California constitution prohibits the segregation of Mexican-origin children into separate schools
RAND Corporation, a leading public policy think tank, opens in Santa Monica
1948 California becomes America’s leading farm state in terms of value of agricultural output
1949 The regents of the University of California adopt a loyalty oath requiring personnel to swear that they are not communists and “do not support any party or organization that believes in, advocates, or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government. . .”
1950 The state legislature passes the Levering Act requiring all state employees, including professors, to take a loyalty oath or risk being fired; in 1967 the state supreme court ruled this oath unconstitutional, largely on First Amendment grounds
Los Angeles surpasses San Francisco in maritime cargo shipping, due to containerization
1951 The San Francisco Peace Treaty is signed, formally ending World War II between the United States and its allies and Japan
The U. S. Naval Postgraduate School moves from Annapolis, Maryland, to Monterey, California, signaling the Department of Defense’s increasing focus on the strategic importance of California and the Pacific Basin
The 117-mile-long Delta-Mendota Canal is in operation, transporting water southeasterly from Tracy in the San Joaquin Valley to Mendota, 30 miles west of Fresno, completing the Central Valley Project
1952 In Tolman v. Underhill, the state supreme court strikes down the UC regents’ loyalty oath as unconstitutional
Richard M. Nixon and Dwight D. Eisenhower are elected as vice president and president respectively
1953 President Eisenhower appoints California Governor Earl Warren as chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, inaugurating a major shift of that tribunal toward support for civil rights and racial justice
World History
