The Homeland
Written by Eric Avila
During the War, California -- its cities in particular -- sustained new models of social relations that challenged traditional stereotypes and ultimately heightened demands for social justice and equality. The intense demand for labor, the convergence of diverse men and women upon Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the shortage of available workers compelled new modes of social integration that brought different social groups into contact with each other for the first time. Women, for example, enjoyed a newfound economic independence as they assumed factory jobs that were traditionally reserved for men only. “Rosie the Riveter” became familiar to Americans throughout the nation, but she enjoyed a heightened visibility in California, which employed greater numbers of women in its sprawling military industrial complex. This defied longstanding cultural values and social conventions, which insisted that women belonged in the home, not the workplace. In 1936, for example, 80% of Americans believed that married women should not work outside the home. Yet by 1943, 43% of the workers in aviation plants in Southern California and 27% of the shipbuilding workforce in Richmond were female, with Kaiser Shipyards alone employing almost 25,000 women at its peak.
As women achieved greater visibility in the workplace, so too did African Americans. The ‘second great migration’ of African Americans from the impoverished rural South to the booming economies of Los Angeles, Oakland and Richmond mandated new levels of racial integration at the workplace as employers found that in order to meet higher demands for production, they could not afford to abide by the longstanding conventions of racial segregation. Although some factories stubbornly retained ‘whites only’ hiring practices, a new generation of Black Californians, men and women alike, found employment opportunities building ships and planes alongside their white counterparts.
Racial integration thus became more commonplace in wartime California, not only in the workplace, but in the nightclub as well. As African Americans brought their distinctive cultural styles with them in their journey to the West Coast, white Californians discovered their affinity for jazz, swing, bebop, and other cultural expressions pioneered by Black Americans. In Los Angeles, for example, Watts became the center of a bustling nightlife that regularly featured the nation’s most celebrated Black singers and musicians. Much to the ire of local law enforcement, who sought to restrict racial intermixing, the talents of Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway drew racially mixed audiences who packed the nightclubs of Central Avenue late into the evening.
More hidden from history than African Americans and women, gays and lesbians also enjoyed a newfound independence in wartime California. The war provided the basis for a more visible gay community, especially in San Francisco, where vast numbers of gay men and women forged social networks based on their shared sexual identities. As the principle administrative center of the war’s Pacific theater of operations, San Francisco became a kind of dumping ground for homosexuals dishonorably discharged from military service. At the Treasure Island Naval Hospital in the San Francisco Bay, medical and psychological experts conducted nonconsensual tests on many of these men to discover the “causes and cures” of homosexuality. Faced with prospect of returning home in disgrace, many gay war veterans opted to remain in San Francisco, leading one tabloid newspaper to report in the late Forties, “Homos Invade S.F.!” Whatever hysteria ensued from this development, World War II sparked the basis for what later emerged in San Francisco as the modern gay civil rights movement.
Racial minorities, sexual minorities and women all found paths to greater independence and freedom in wartime California, breaking the historic barriers that maintained their subordinate, even hidden, place in American society. The heightened visibility and growing independence of these groups during the war years entailed a mixed blessing. On the one hand, California fostered the development a more tolerant social climate open to innovation, experimentation and change, and sustained new modes of individual and group consciousness that heightened demands for economic opportunity and social justice. On the other hand, the disintegration of social convention and the weakening of traditional racial and sexual hierarchies sparked a substantial backlash in California that would fundamentally alter the landscape of national politics. While the nation’s conservatives balked at what they perceived to be the breakdown of traditional social norms in California, others celebrated the more progressive direction of social change on the West Coast, anticipating the set of social movements that exploded in the state during the 1960s. World War II and the accelerated thrust of economic and urban development that it spurred, had everything to do with these radical social changes, the consequences of which continue to shape our social interactions.
