Still Potentially Dangerous in Some Quarters
The charges that led Gen. John L. DeWitt to deport Sylvester Andriano from the Western
Defense Region in 1942 were bogus, the product of an anti-Catholic campaign by
Communist Party activists, Masonic anti-Catholics in the Italian community, and
recent Italian anti-Fascist exiles (fuorusciti). This wartime abuse of civil rights in
the name of national security grew from a discourse of demonizing the religious, not
solely the racial and ethnic, Other. The article makes several arguments about ethnicity
and religion on the Pacific Coast: Faith-based political activism played a significant
role in the region9s urban political culture, as did cultural politics between
Catholics and anti-Catholics. Irish American Catholic clergy welcomed, rather than
excluded, Italian American laymen into the Church9s highest councils in San Francisco,
where the Irish had long dominated civic life. However, Italian Americans were
bitterly divided between devout Catholics and disaffected anti-clericals.
California Cities and the Hurricane of Change: World War II in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego Metropolitan Areas
of the United States, 1953 (Washington, D.C., 1953), 19. The good fortune of the Hoosier state reiterates the fact that the war did not damage, but rather greatly strengthened, the dominance of the East North Central part of the Midwest, the leading industrial area of the country, while not improving that of the West much at all. California was not the industrial pacesetter in new industrial investment in 1947 as a result of the war, and it was not even on the way to becoming the pacesetter. To summarize, neither the absolute number of production jobs, nor the per capita number, nor the investment in new plants and equipment for the future indicates a revolutionary change in the sectional industrial balance of power in the United States. Population change offers perhaps a better case for the transformation hypothesis. Speaking of demographic change, historians have made the argument that "like the Gold Rush a This content downloaded from 73.41.74.183 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 21:01:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 408 Pacific Historical Review century earlier, World War II was a watershed in Bay area history, ushering in revolutionary changes that dramatically affected the regiorin's subsequent development."17 Like much of the discussion of the war, this statement contains some truth, but by and large it is objectively mistaken. The Gold Rush simile is particularly problematic. The Gold Rush truly did transform California from a largely natural, lightly populated, pastoral, Hispanic, and Native American backwater into a rapidly populating, capitalistic, American growth engine. In contrast, World War II impacted on a mature, modern, and very growth-conscious state of 7,000,000 inhabitants. When a state is born in a Gold Rush, it is not easy to find anything else in its history which is quite so unprecedented. By the same token, when a state has also lived through something as tumultuous as the boom of the 1880s or the explosion of the 1920s, it will be even more difficult to find its subsequent decades very novel. This is especially true of population growth, as the census makes clear. To demonstrate this point, I will have to supply some more numbers, with appropriate apologies in advance for employing such dry and, at the same time, controversial material. Someone once suggested the double entendre that "statistics are a group of numbers looking for an argument."'' Given the contents of the other articles, I fear that my numbers have already found their argument, or are at least looking for it in the right place. To gauge the transformative effect of the Second World War, one ideally should look at two sets of figures, percentage growth and absolute growth. World War II certainly accelerated population growth rates. However, to begin with, it should be remembered that California's population grew vigorously even during the Great Depression. The population increased by some twenty-one percent, which would have been considered potent in almost any other American state. So what the war did was twofold. It accelerated growth rates over the depression and partially restored the robust growth rates of earlier years. I say partially because the growth rates of the 1940s did not equal those of the 1920s. Much of our misreading of the forties occurs because 17. Wollenberg, Golden Gate Metropolis, 241-242. 18. Washington Post, May 24, 1992. This content downloaded from 73.41.74.183 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 21:01:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Hurricane of Change 409 the war decade is too often discussed out of its historical context. Therefore, in trying to assess the demographic importance of the forties, it is useful to frame the question in comparative terms by placing that decade into the stream of history that includes the two preceding and two succeeding decades. Doing so will indicate that more cities and counties experienced their largest percentage increases, or record growth rates, in the twenties than in the forties. And these include most of the important places: Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, Alhambra, Berkeley, Beverly Hills, Glendale, Long Beach, Inglewood, Monterey, Monterey County, Oakland, Palo Alto, National City, Oceanside, Pasadena, Redwood City, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Bernardino County, San Diego, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara County, Santa Monica, and Ventura. Among the state's bigger towns and major cities of the 1970s, only Burbank, Alameda, Fresno, Stockton, and Richmond set percentage growth records in the 1940s. The growth percentages were not even unprecedented, much less revolutionary or cataclysmic.19 The absolute increases were not record setting or beyond the experience of urban Californians either. Historians argue correctly that the war had a more dramatic effect on the suburbs than on center cities.20 Nonetheless, even suburban increases were usually well within the experience of urban Californians. For example, Los Angeles County, a good index of suburbanization, gained 1,366,000 residents during the forties but added almost as many people, 1,272,000, during the twenties, starting from a much smaller population base. The total for the 1940s is only marginally larger. One could hardly argue that the distance between the two figures represents the difference 19. I have elected to discuss population by decades for several reasons. There were intercensal counts done during the war, which estimated population from 1940 through November 1943 and which estimated it from 1940 to 1945. I have decided not to use these wartime censuses because we have no comparable figures for other decades. I could not compare growth from 1940 to 1945 with that from 1920 to 1930. At the same time, the decade figures for the 1940s would seem to give the transformation hypothesis more than its due. Some of the migrants to California after 1945 may have come because they had served there during the war and wanted to return or because their relatives had lured them there based on the initial war boom. However, some of the postwar migrants came for other reasons. So using the decade figures gives maximum justice to the transformation hypothesis. 20. Johnson, "Western Front," 130-176. This content downloaded from 73.41.74.183 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 21:01:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 410 Pacific Historical Review between ordinary change and revolutionary upheaval. Clearly, California as a whole was accustomed to radical population growth. The experience of urban California in World War II was not all that different from its own past. It was also not that different from its future either, i.e., the Korean War and Cold War decades. Another part of our misunderstanding of the war's contribution to California history stems from largely ignoring the Korean and Cold War periods. In our haste to pay homage to World War II, the Korean War and Cold War impact on population has been generally undervalued, but it was a very significant one. Of the major metropolitan counties in the state, twelve made their largest absolute gains during the era of Dwight D. Eisenhower instead of during World War II. These included Fresno, Los Angeles, Marin, Monterey, Napa, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Mateo, and Santa Clara, or in other words, most of the great growth centers of the post-World War II era. For example, what happened to Orange County in the 1960s is much closer to a boom and much more impressive than any of the absolute increases of the 1940s. In the one decade of the sixties, Orange County grew by 706,000, more than the World War II total of Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, Solano, and Sonoma counties put together12' And the absolute growth of Los Angeles County alone in the 1950s was more than three times the advance of the same five counties in the 1940s. Its gain in that period is more than twice as much as all of the counties that set records in World War II.22 Several counties did experience their greatest absolute growth explosion in the decade of World War II. Significantly, these were not scattered at random about the state, but rather confined to two locales: the San Joaquin Valley and the northern and eastern parts of San Francisco Bay. In other words, the boom of the forties was both suburban and exurban.23 Even San Francisco, which would lose people in the next several decades, 21. Bureau of the Census, 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population. California (Washington D C., 1982), pt. 6, pp. 6-8. 22. Ibid. 23. For a discussion of exurbia, settlements beyond the suburbs, but still tied to cities, see Blaine Brownell and David Goldfield, Urban America: From Downtown to No Town (Dallas, 1979), 305, 382-385. This content downloaded from 73.41.74.183 on Sun, 20 Jan 2019 21:01:43 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Hurricane of Change 411 registered an advance during World War II. The war reversed the stagnant depression growth rates of the city; however, it merely interrupted, but did not change, the long-term course of its demographic history. With the exception of Fresno County, all the record-setting growth areas of the 1950s were in the southern Bay area or in southern California. One of the key assumptions of the transformation hypothesis is based on the fact that the federal government spent lots of money in the West.24 Supposedly, the dollars then produced the unprecedented growth. Yet at this point in our research into World War II and urban society, the relationship of defense spending to population growth is not at all clear. As a matter of fact, the government spent more money in absolute and nearly as much in per capita terms in the North Central States of the Midwest than in the West, yet that area did not experience the same supposedly transformative growth. Throughout the United States, the war-induced expenditure of monies did n
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