Skip to main content
Humanities LibreTexts

9: World War II and the Great Transformation

  • Page ID
    127012
    • Robert W. Cherny, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, & Richard Griswold del Castillo
    • San Francisco State University, Saint Mary's College of California, & San Diego State University via Self Published
    \( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \) \( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)\(\newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\) \( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\) \( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \(\newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\) \( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\) \( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)\(\newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}\)

    Main Topics

    • Economic Expansion
    • Japanese Relocation and Internment
    • Population Growth and Diversity
    • Daily Life and Culture
    • Political Transformation
    • Summary

    On October 20, 1943, Theresa Waller stood in the “colored” waiting room in the train station at Houston, Texas. Dressed in her Sunday best, this tall, dignified 24-year-old felt a disquieting mixture of fear, expectation, excitement, and uncertainty. Her strong will and poise—traits that marked her as a person who “wanted to go somewhere and be someone”—had propelled her to this departure point. In a few moments there would be no turning back. A young woman who “wanted to do something good and big, but couldn’t name it” was about to leave everything that she had known as a child for the promise of a new life in California.

    In Houston, Theresa had worked as a domestic servant. Each morning, she left her home in the mostly black Fifth Ward for the rich white neighborhoods in “the heights.” As she worked at jobs that “didn’t amount to much” and was paid only a few dollars a week, she endured the dangers and

    clipboard_e3b01be72878d08c1787d1cf4a63944a2.png

    humiliations of life in the segregated South. Struggling to describe her experience, Theresa remarked, “You just don’t know what it was like. They [white people] would try to make you feel like you weren’t human.” Facing a future limited by racial discrimination, she dreamed about leaving Texas.

    Early in 1943, Theresa met and fell in love with a man who worked on the Houston waterfront. Through a network of fellow workers, he learned of plentiful, high-paying defense jobs in the San Francisco Bay area. Their relationship flourished on shared dreams of a better life out West, and soon they married. Within weeks, he moved to Oakland, found housing and a job in the shipyards, and sent for his bride. Theresa, about to embark on a journey that would reunite her with her husband and profoundly change her world, felt small and alone on that October day in the Houston train station. But as her journey unfolded, it bore a striking resemblance to the journeys made by countless other California-bound migrants during the war years. While most found economic opportunity, others—particularly black migrants like the Wallers—encountered significant racial prejudice and discrimination. In this regard, California was not the promised land.

    By the early 1940s, California had become central to the nation’s war effort. Its aircraft and shipbuilding industries, funded by huge federal defense contracts, dramatically expanded production and provided new employment opportunities for skilled and unskilled workers, women, and ethnic minorities. California’s ports and military bases, suddenly bustling with defense-driven activity and thousands of new recruits, also contributed to civilian job growth. The wartime

    clipboard_e2ed406d9caecc8f05618bb5ff24192a4.png

    Shown here is a shift change of workers at the Kaiser, Richmond Shipyards circa 1942-1944. What does this photograph reveal about wartime changes in the age, gender, and ethnic composition of the industrial labor force?

    boom spilled over to virtually every sector of the economy. Restaurants, nightclubs, theaters, and other service establishments, responding to a burgeoning clientele of soldiers and round-the-clock defense workers, extended their hours and hired additional employees. The state’s growers, attempting to keep pace with wartime demand for agricultural commodities, increased production and expanded their labor force. The defense effort even stimulated the development of new electronics, communications, and aerospace technologies that became the mainstay of the state’s postwar economy.

    Sadly, the war also ignited long-smoldering anti-Asian prejudice, culminating in the worst mass violation of civil rights in the state’s history. In the spring of 1942, California’s Japanese American population was deported by government order to a series of internment camps in remote sections of the western United States. In the process, most lost homes, treasured possessions, and businesses, and suffered severe emotional and physical trauma. Wartime prosperity, which partially offset the pain and humiliation of racial discrimination for other ethnic minorities, only added to the raw sense of loss experienced by Japanese Americans.

    As this tragedy unfolded, California’s economic boom attracted newcomers from a variety of ethnic and class backgrounds, greatly increasing the size and diversity of the state’s population. Unfortunately, growth placed strains on schools, recreation facilities, housing, and transportation systems—strains that heightened existing patterns of racial discrimination and produced tensions between migrants and established residents. Emboldened by the pro-democracy rhetoric of the war, minority activists and their sympathetic supporters attacked discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations with new zeal, creating the foundation for postwar struggles for civil rights and political power. The Wallers, and countless other African American newcomers, joined this struggle to make the California dream a reality. At the same time, state government, under the leadership of Earl Warren, responded to growth-related challenges by taking a more active role in directing the forces of social and economic change.

    Questions to Consider

    • Did World War II have a significant and lasting impact on the state’s economy? How? Discuss why historians have described this era as the “Second Gold Rush.”
    • Who was responsible for Japanese relocation and internment? Did anti-Asian prejudice, rather than “informed military judgments,” contribute to this mass violation of civil rights?
    • Excluding Japanese Americans, did Californians benefit equally from the Second Gold Rush? Why or why not?
    • How and why did World War II alter the priorities of political activists and leaders and expand the size and scope of state government?


    This page titled 9: World War II and the Great Transformation is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Robert W. Cherny, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, & Richard Griswold del Castillo (Self Published) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.