Cities of change

Among the defenders of our country during World War II, perhaps the least celebrated are the horse-mounted guardsmen who served on the home front in California. Members of the San Francisco Polo Club, riding their own polo ponies, guarded the beaches near the Golden Gate Bridge. Cowboys from Southern California ranches patrolled the hills overlooking aircraft plants in Glendale and Burbank. And African American soldiers, “the celebrated Buffalo Soldier horse cavalry of the United States Army,” watched the Mexican border.

None of these men saw action, and the fear of Japanese commandos coming ashore on the California coast now strikes us as quaint, if not downright ridiculous. (“Enemy Aggression May Come at Any Minute,” one headline writer announced to his readers in 1942. “This Is War! It’s Right at Our Front Door.”) For Roger W. Lotchin, author of “The Bad City in the Good War,” however, the unlikely sight of horse soldiers on the beach allows us to see exactly how the war effort shattered the status quo and revolutionized the sleepy world of prewar California.

“Separated by space, race, class, and occupational barriers, normally the aristocratic polo men, cowboys, and black soldiers had very little in common,” explains Lotchin, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But World War II was a “participatory conflict,” he contends, and “their fear of totalitarianism united them in a greater effort.”

The melting pot, Lotchin says, was specifically urban, and his book focuses on four key cities in wartime California: Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Oakland. “Americans have traditionally been very skeptical of their cities and often downright hostile to them, but cities and city people would contribute markedly to the overthrow and containment of totalitarianism. The ‘bad city’ came in very handy in the ‘Good War.’ ”

Lotchin’s survey of the California urban home front is sometimes slightly comical. In the panicky days after Pearl Harbor, for example, both yachts and tuna boats in San Diego harbor were commandeered by the Navy, hastily outfitted with sonar and sent on sub-hunting missions in coastal waters. A facility for the printing of ration books was set up inside San Quentin, and the prison laundry at Alcatraz started washing the linens from naval bases and military posts.

More often, Lotchin is intent on showing how California was quickly turned into a vast arms factory and a staging area for the war effort -- some 1,650,000 servicemen embarked from Ft. Mason in San Francisco Bay by the end of the war and a map that shows a dot for every aircraft plant in Los Angeles County is solid black at its center because of the sheer concentration of war production.

“Fortress California came of age in World War II,” writes Lotchin. “The overbuilt, overnight, jumped-up, ‘improbable’ California cities were an enormous asset to the American homefront.”

Something as basic as a bed turned out to be a precious wartime commodity. Tent cities popped up in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, San Francisco’s Aquatic Park and San Diego’s Balboa Park. War workers shared bunks in factory dormitories on “the hot-bed system,” one man sleeping while the other worked a shift. Churches turned their basements into boardinghouses -- “Never did a church hear such utterly blissful snoring,” wrote one reporter in the Los Angeles Times -- and some desperate souls resorted to all-night theaters and hotel lobbies.

The sheer congestion brought its own social and cultural reverberations as soldiers and sailors, factory workers and young locals encountered each other in the hectic setting of bars, ballrooms and clubs all over California. The Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, Lotchin reminds, were the result of a clash between military men on liberty in the streets of Los Angeles and the young men they encountered there -- “the best known ‘recreational’ event of the war,” as Lotchin puts it, wryly noting that both sides in the street rumbles were out to amuse themselves.

Some of the gender and racial barriers that fell during World War II come as a surprise. Women were able to work not only as riveters but as stockbrokers and movie executives. Lotchin shows how the civil rights movement of the 1960s was rooted in World War II: “African Americans, who wanted to support the war effort but wanted to use it to win something in return, devised the political slogan of the Double V, fighting fascism abroad but also combating discrimination at home.” Ironically, the initial military success of the Japanese prompted at least some Californians to rethink their old assumptions about race.

“The Japanese are showing themselves our equal in arms and machinery, if that is what counts, [and] the Chinese have for ages been at least our equals in the cultivation of human personality, if that is what counts,” said one editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle in March 1942, only three months after Pearl Harbor. “Their half of the human race has its rights, too, the first of which is respect for its racial dignity.”

Still, both the war effort and the social revolution that came with it were driven by the very real fear of Japanese attack. A sign posted on beaches by the Auto Club warned the citizenry to remain vigilant even while sunbathing: “Immediately report any boat actually landing persons on shore here to the nearest military or naval post and to the sheriff and police forces.” The sense of common peril was an important factor in overcoming differences of class and race among the men, women and children who were thrown together in California’s cities.

“Urban leaders saw the need for a sense of belonging and participation as a means to win the war,” he writes, “and they set out consciously to create that sense.” Californians of all kinds were afforded both a place and a role in the war effort. Thus, for example, air-raid wardens who were charged with responsibility for treating the wounded during an attack set up casualty stations at places that were socially, culturally and geographically disparate: the Brentwood Golf Club as well as Union Station, North Hollywood High as well as the Wilshire Methodist Episcopal Church. Movie-theater ushers and usherettes were trained in first aid, and the Humane Society offered instructions on how to calm a panicked pet during a raid.

The author is careful not to overstate his case, insisting that the war ought to be regarded as a “heroic interlude” rather than a revolution. Some of the forces of change already were at work before the war began, and some of them continued long after the war was over. But the war years turned out to be crucial in the remaking of California: “Races met, mingled, settled in grudgingly or willingly, or skedaddled,” he observes. “No one knew quite what to make of this mix; yet all seemed to agree that it was upsetting, different, and fascinating.”

The world we live in today, as Lotchin allows us to see in his authoritative and engaging book, began then and there.