Although the term “military-industrial complex” was not coined until President Eisenhower used it in 1961, the web of connections between the Pentagon, military contractors, and universities was woven during World War II. California in the 1940s - with its military installations, shipyards and aircraft plants, and universities - played a leading role in shaping America’s emergent military-industrial complex. Huge outlays of federal dollars sustained the three linked components of the complex. Of the $360 billion the federal government spent in the continental United States from 1940 to 1946 to prosecute the war and provide for defense, $35 billion went to California, which made sense given the state’s geographical proximity to the Pacific theater of fighting, its ports, and the need to transport artillery and troops across the vast ocean lying at its doorstep. No other state west of the Mississippi received nearly as much federal money; only Michigan and New York received more. These expenditures provided employment opportunities, with good wages, that drew millions of job-seekers into the state, triggering a second gold rush.
In World War II the Bay Area, with its more than 30 shipyards and $5 billion in federal expenditures, boasted the largest shipbuilding complex in world history. The bayside towns of Richmond and Sausalito were home to the major yards producing Liberty ships - large military cargo vessels carrying weapons, munitions, tanks, jeeps, and other war materiel to battlefronts - as well as to 50 escort aircraft carriers, tankers, and other vessels.
From his corporate office in Oakland, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, a key builder of the Boulder/Hoover Dam and founder of the Golden State’s first steel plant in Fontana, oversaw the production of Liberty ships - and their larger variant, Victory ships - in Richmond
Figure 11.1 The launch of the S. S. Robert E. Peary Liberty ship at Kaiser No. 2 Yard in Richmond, CA, November 12, 1942. Courtesy of Richmond Museum of History, Richmond, CA.
California, Oregon, and Washington. More than 100,000 incoming workers and their families swelled the population of the once quiet bayside town that housed four interconnected shipbuilding yards. Using assembly-line and pre-fabrication techniques, Kaiser’s Richmond shipyard set a record by building the S. S. Robert E. Peary in 4 days, 15 hours, and 26 minutes from the time the keel (the lengthwise bottom plate structure of the vessel) was laid. “Richmond yards. . . have produced more ships than any other yards in the country,” concluded Vice Admiral H. L. Vickery in 1945 after surveying shipbuilding nationwide for President Roosevelt. The fact that Kaiser built 30 percent of America’s wartime shipping, most of which was assembled in the Bay Area, speaks to the impact of the publicly financed private sector of Greater California. Progressive in his thinking, Kaiser provided workers with high wages, medical care for which Kaiser Permanente hospitals would become renowned, and exemption from military service since their labors were considered critical to the war effort.
In 1945-7, the war having been won, congresspersons critical of the New Deal and the billions of federal dollars that had gone into shipbuilding, charged that Kaiser had been a “war profiteer.” Henry Kaiser responded sarcastically: “I recall quite vividly that it was important at one time to win the war [and] that ships were necessary to win the war.”
Meanwhile, on the northern shore of the Bay other industrial magnates, including the Bechtel brothers (Kenneth and Stephen), built Liberty ships in the upscale Marin County town of Sausalito. Marinship, the name of their new company and assembly yard, employed
19.000 workers in 1942, and delivered 93 vessels including Liberty ships and tankers. A Master Agreement provided for a closed shop (union workers only), and an hourly wage of $1.20 for journeymen laborers, that is, those having gone through an apprenticeship and considered competent in their trade or craft. As at Richmond, the daily work cycle included three eight-hour shifts. Twelve to 15 percent of the workers lived in Marin City, an on-site public housing project that included its own post office, library, nursery and elementary schools, grocery stores, laundry and dry-cleaning establishments, a cafeteria, and a gymnasium. Rental housing ranged from dormitory rooms for $5.50 a week, to one-room apartments for $29 a month and six-room detached houses costing $43.50 a month. Rents included utilities and health care. Despite worker absenteeism and juvenile delinquency, the on-site living arrangement succeeded. Surveying “hundreds of war housing projects” nationwide in 1943, Massachusetts Congressman George Bates proclaimed Marin City “the best administered and best organized war housing project that I have seen.” The relatively high pay and congenial working conditions attracted job-seekers from throughout the United States.
While shipbuilding and commercial transoceanic voyaging had a long and impressive record in California, the state’s aircraft industry by contrast remained in its early stages of development until the late 1930s, when southern California surpassed New York as the leading builder of planes. As with shipbuilding, the Pearl Harbor attack led to a cascade of federal dollars being poured into the making of warplanes, which, in turn, catapulted California aviation even further into national prominence.
In 1942 aviation replaced filmmaking as the leading industry in southern California. The region’s nearly year-round clear, safe weather conditions proved ideal for manufacturing and test-flying aircraft. President Roosevelt’s call for 60,000 planes that year and
125.000 the following year doubtlessly spurred production, especially when accompanied by federal outlays for construction. The major airframe assembly plants, some virtually the size of cities, were located in Los Angeles and San Diego counties. In 1943 they employed 280,300 workers. Douglas, Lockheed, North American, and Northrop operated largely out of Los Angeles; Convair and Ryan were headquartered in San Diego. Lockheed, the most socially progressive of these companies, offered its workers food service, counseling, medical provision that included dental and optometry care, banking, and more. In 1944 the company was Los Angeles County’s largest employer, with a workforce numbering 90,000.
Aviation spawned a major component of the nation’s emerging military-industrial complex - government - and corporate-subsidized university research facilities. By the late 1930s the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena had become America’s leading center for aeronautical engineering. Physicist Theodore von Karman, a foremost expert on rocketry at Caltech, interfaced with Army Air Corps Major General Henry (Hap) Arnold and other top military brass. In 1944 von Karman co-founded the school’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and chaired the Pentagon’s Scientific Advisory Board, which explored space weapons technology in the coming decades.
Though other American universities contributed greatly to the war effort, the University of California played the most determinative role in World War II because of its leadership of the top-secret, federally subsidized Manhattan Project (1942-5) that developed the atomic bomb that ended the war. Two of the most gifted physicists in the world, Nobel Laureate Ernest O. Lawrence and J. Robert Oppenheimer, were UC Berkeley faculty members. In 1930 Lawrence invented the cyclotron, a device that whirled nuclear particles in a chamber at speeds sufficient to smash atoms. Later he built a Calutron, a device based on the cyclotron, while working in the Manhattan Project. By enabling the making of weapons-grade uranium, the Calutron paved the way for the creation of the atom bomb. Lawrence’s colleague, Oppenheimer, recruited and managed brilliantly the team of scientists from other prominent universities throughout the nation who gathered in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to build such a weapon before Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union did. America’s dropping of two atomic bombs - one on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945 - quickly ended the conflict while ushering in the nuclear age.
Finally, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, founded in 1903 and later attached to UC San Diego, also comprised the state’s World War II-generated military-industrial complex.
Figure 11.2 J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer graduated with the highest academic honors at Harvard, focusing on the sciences and Asian religions. He earned his doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Gottingen in Germany, afterward teaching at Caltech and UC Berkeley. His leadership on the Manhattan Project later unsettled him. "I feel we have blood on our hands,” he told President Harry S. Truman in the aftermath of America's use of atom bombs on Japan. Courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico.
During the war the federal government extended $12 million in grants to Scripps for research into submarine acoustics.
The war demonstrated that California’s universities were in the forefront of scientific research. By the late 1940s, Stanford took its place in the state’s formidable military-industrial complex, as a major center for Pentagon-financed Cold War projects.
World History
