10.1: Unbridled Grow

After a brief lull immediately following the war, the state entered one of the longest periods of economic expansion in American history. The war increased industrial capacity, stimulated the growth of new industries, and devastated the economies of our European and Asian competitors. More significantly, the federal government increased defense spending, funneling billions of dollars to private industry in order to wage the Cold War. Federal and state investment in education, transportation, housing, and the development of water resources also helped sustain high levels of economic and population growth; however, growth came with a cost. Industrial expansion and suburbanization took a frightening toll on the state’s natural resource base, leading to a gradual awakening of environmental consciousness and tentative efforts to regulate the pace and impact of development.

Industrial Growth and Organized Labor

In northern California, shipbuilding declined only to be replaced with a booming electronics industry. In 1951, Stanford University created a hightechnology research park by leasing unused land to private entrepreneurs. Originally intended to generate revenue for the college, the park eventually became a means of translating campus-based research into product development, and attracting star-quality faculty to the university. By 1955, seven companies, including Hewlett Packard and Varian Associates, had signed leases. By 1960, the park had attracted 25 more companies and was drawing numerous other high-tech firms, including Fairchild Semiconductor, to the surrounding region. “Silicon Valley,” named after the silicon chips that soon revolutionized the electronics industry, was taking shape (see Map 9.1 on p. 281). Across the bay, Berkeley’s nuclear research was also creating spinoffs. Lawrence Livermore Lab, established in 1952, employed thousands of workers in weapons-related research, while helping, along with the electronics industry, to attract mammoth defense contractors to the Bay Area, including Lockheed, IBM, Westinghouse, and General Electric.

Southern California’s industrial growth was no less impressive. Its aircraft manufacturers, diversifying into the production of jet engines, radar, supersonic aircraft, rockets, satellites, and missiles, dominated the nation’s aerospace industry and employed the majority of the manufacturing work force in Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties by the 1950s. These firms also enjoyed a close partnership with regional research institutions. UCLA, the Jet Propulsion Lab at the California Institute of Technology, and the Rand Corporation received government funding for research and development and transferred their products to the private aerospace industry.

The expansion of the aerospace and electronics industries was largely a product of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. To win this competition, the government transferred billions of dollars to universities and private industry, creating a vast, interlocking university-military-industrial complex. By 1960, California was receiving more than 25 percent of the nation’s total defense expenditures and 42 percent of the Defense Department’s research contracts.

Other sectors of the state’s economy also prospered during the postwar years. Municipal, county, state, and federal government, adjusting to population growth and new demands on infrastructure and public services, generated new bureaucracies and hired scores of additional workers. Minorities, in particular, benefited from the expansion of the public sector. Government, which adopted nondiscriminatory hiring policies more readily than private industry, helped create a growing black and Mexican American middle class. In Oakland, for example, 30 percent of the city’s black civilian labor force worked for various branches of government by the early 1960s.

California’s apparel, footwear, scientific instruments, frozen foods, cosmetic, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries, benefiting from increased national demand, reached beyond local markets to broaden their consumer base. On a local level, real estate, retail, and financial institutions expanded their services to meet the needs of a growing and increasingly prosperous population. The construction industry, however, received an even more significant boost. Thousands of new residents, many starting families for the first time, demanded housing. The GI Bill, passed by Congress in 1944 to provide benefits for veterans, included the provision of low-interest home loans to veterans. This made home ownership an affordable option for many first-time buyers. Developers met demand by applying mass production and prefabrication techniques to homebuilding and by locating new housing “tracts” on cheaper land surrounding the urban core. Across the state, postwar suburban housing tracts, consisting of row upon row of nearly identical dwellings, replaced orchards, truck farms, and open fields.

In contrast, Southern California’s film industry faced serious challenges in the postwar period, but it emerged as a stronger, more influential cultural institution. Until 1948, major studios not only produced films, but also monopolized box office profits by screening their movies at their own theater chains. As a result of federal antitrust lawsuits initiated by smaller, independent theaters, the studios had to sell their chains. This seriously eroded profits at a time when production costs and stars’ salaries were rising. Simultaneously, studios faced increasing competition both from foreign and independent filmmakers and from the emerging New York–based television industry. Hollywood adapted by producing more films on location, rather than relying on the costly and elaborate studio sets and lots of the past. It also diversified into recording and television production, reestablishing its dominance in the entertainment industry by the early 1960s.

California’s labor unions, enjoying unprecedented power during the postwar years, helped ensure that the benefits of a booming economy were widely distributed. Having taken a “no-strike” pledge during the war, unions— particularly those affiliated with the CIO—focused on expanding their membership, forming political action committees, and creating coalitions with liberal and progressive community organizations. When the war ended, they had not only the numeric strength to obtain wage and benefit concessions from management, but the political clout to influence local and state elections. The anti-Communist crusade, leading to the expulsion of left-wing union leadership, and the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which limited the effectiveness of strikes and protected open shops, somewhat muted their new power. But labor rebounded in 1955, when the AFL merged with its more progressive rival, the CIO. Together, the two represented more than 90 percent of the state’s union members. Largely as a result of the decade’s rabid anti-Communism, this new entity de-emphasized liberal social activism and rank-and-file participation. Nevertheless, its mostly blue-collar membership obtained substantial material benefits, swelling the state’s middle class to a historic high.

Large growers consolidated their dominant position in California agriculture during the postwar years, reaping enormous profits and political influence in the process. Their increasing power partly derived from the “agricultural-industrial complex,” a partnership forged by farmers, public research institutions, and private manufacturers of chemicals and farm machinery. For example, the University of California at Davis, the state’s premier agricultural institution, obtained private industry funding to develop new high-yield plant varieties, pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, and farm equipment tailored to the needs of large-scale producers. Industry then secured the patents and sold their product to large growers. As a consequence, small farmers, unable to afford the new technology or apply it on a reduced scale, fell behind their larger, more competitive counterparts.

Although this partnership predated the war, it grew stronger and more influential in the 1950s and 1960s. Wartime chemical research led to the creation of a new generation of synthetic compounds that could be endlessly combined and modified for agricultural use, even tailored to specific crops, soils, insect pests, and climatic conditions. Plant genetics and farm equipment technology also advanced rapidly during the postwar years.

Postwar agricultural growth, despite this new technology, continued to depend on cheap agricultural labor. Using their considerable political influence, large growers successfully lobbied for the continuation and expansion of the bracero program, ensuring a captive, subsidized labor supply throughout the 1950s. Several hundred thousand undocumented workers and foreigners with temporary work permits also helped keep wages low by maintaining a surpluslabor supply. In addition to its labor subsidy, agribusiness received ample cheap water from both state and federally funded sources. The Central Valley Project (CVP), completed in the postwar years with federal funds and supported by large growers like J. G. Boswell, diverted water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers to the drier San Joaquin Valley. In accordance with the Reclamation Act of 1902, growers with more than 160 acres of land were not entitled to subsidized water from federally funded projects. Agribusiness used its political influence to obtain significant concessions in the law: additional 160-acre allowances for each child, spouse, joint tenant, and corporate partner; reclassification of some CVP water as “natural flow,” which was exempt from

Aerial view of the California Aqueduct. Consider the massive scale of the state's water delivery system. Did the benefits to agriculture, industry, and growing urban and suburban areas outweigh its environmental costs?

the federal acreage limit; and suspension of the limitation if local irrigation districts, managed by grower-elected boards, repaid their share of CVP construction costs in a timely fashion. Finally, farmers who leased, rather than owned, land avoided the limit altogether. The legal costs involved in circumventing federal law prompted growers to back the new state-funded California Water Plan that promised to deliver subsidized, limit-free water from northern California to growers in the San Joaquin Valley and southern California. Blocked for several years, the plan was finally approved between 1959 and 1960, removing yet another obstacle to agricultural consolidation and corporatization.

Education

Postwar economic growth and Cold War anxieties precipitated changes in the state’s educational system. Private industry, government officials, and the scientific community all warned that California’s booming economy, increasingly centered on high technology, demanded a more educated, specialized work force. They also argued that the United States would compromise its ability to wage the Cold War unless it provided the younger generation with adequate scientific and technical training.

At the same time, rapid population growth placed strains on existing educational facilities. Wartime migration, coupled with the postwar baby boom, filled elementary and secondary classrooms beyond capacity. The state’s colleges and universities, crowded with veterans who took advantage of the GI Bill’s generous education benefits, experienced similar strains. These strains continued as the first baby boomers, attending college at higher rates than any other generation in history, came of age in the 1960s.

With these concerns in mind and with ample support from taxpayers, education policymakers embarked on an ambitious program of school construction, curricular reform, and reformulation of teacher preparation requirements. In keeping with the new curricular emphasis on traditional disciplines, particularly math and science, future elementary and secondary school teachers could no longer major in education. The 1961 Fisher Act instead required teachers to possess a four-year academic degree and a fifth year of professional education training.

Higher education, suffering from uneven academic standards and unnecessary duplication of institutional missions and programs, also needed attention. In 1960, the legislature approved the Master Plan, which created a new threetiered structure: university, state college, and junior college tiers. Under the plan, the University of California was given sole authority to award doctoral degrees and given exclusive jurisdiction over graduate-level training in law, medicine, dentistry, and veterinary studies. As the premier research and professional institution, the university was to admit students from the top 12.5 percent of the state’s high school graduates. Similarly, candidates for advanced degrees were chosen on the basis of high academic and professional promise. State colleges, under the Master Plan, were to provide a liberal arts education to students from the top one-third of high school graduates. Graduatetraining, with special exceptions, was limited to the master’s degree level. Junior colleges, open to all high school graduates, offered a two-year liberal arts curriculum designed to prepare students for transfer to the state college or university system, as well as technical and vocational programs of study leading directly to employment. This system, offering tuition-free education to California’s college students, became a model for the rest of the nation.

Population and Suburban Growth

California’s population increased dramatically during the war and continued to expand throughout the 1950s and 1960s. From 1951 to 1963, the state’s annual growth rate fluctuated between 3.3 and 4.6 percent, with more than a million people added every two years. In 1962, California became the most populous state in the nation. During this period, the state’s population increasingly spilled outside of the urban core into the suburban fringe as developers rushed to meet the demand for new housing. Citrus groves in the Los Angeles basin and orchards and truck farms in the San Francisco Bay area were converted to suburban communities at an astonishing rate. From the early 1950s to the early 1960s, between 60,000 and 90,000 acres of prime agricultural land were replaced with tract homes, freeways, and shopping centers. Industry, attracted to ample, cheap land and a less heavily unionized labor force, relocated to the suburbs as well, contributing to the massive, largely unregulated redistribution of the state’s population and tax base.

New suburbanites, longing for normalcy after the dislocations of the war years, focused on pursuing the “California lifestyle.” Ranch-style homes, and houses built by innovative developer Joseph Eichler with their characteristic flat roofs and open, glass-enclosed interiors, reduced barriers between indoor and outdoor space. Patios, barbecues, outdoor furniture, swimming pools, and casual dinnerware further reduced this separation by facilitating outside entertaining and family activity. Hollywood, television, advertising agencies, and the popular press not only popularized this lifestyle among Californians—they also created a new national trend.

Recreation patterns also shifted. Suburban shopping centers, forerunners of today’s malls, framed consumption as a leisure activity. Suburb-based theme parks, following the Disneyland prototype, provided “wholesome” entertainment for the entire family as an alternative to urban, adult-centered cultural institutions. New sports facilities, such as Dodger Stadium and Candlestick Park, built on the urban fringe, also catered to suburban families. Finally, the new emphasis on outdoor living extended to the state’s beaches and mountains. Campgrounds, ski lodges, vacation rentals, and summer home developments burgeoned during the 1950s and 1960s, intruding on once-pristine or sparsely populated scenic areas.

The carefree suburban lifestyle came with a price. Its housing tracts, shopping centers, and decentralized industry not only despoiled open space, but also stripped inner cities of their much-needed jobs and tax base. Beginning in the late 1940s, and continuing through the 1960s, white residents left inner cities for the suburbs. Industry soon followed. Black and Mexican American residents, locked out of the suburban exodus because of discriminatory real estate and housing practices, remained behind in the older, decaying urban core. Even after the state adopted fair housing legislation in the mid-1960s, discriminatory lending institutions, homeowners, and real estate agencies continued to block equal access to affordable suburban housing. This process, reinforcing social separation and economic inequality, was repeated in virtually every metropolitan region of the state, setting the stage for the urban revolts of the ’60s.

Although idealized in postwar popular culture as safe, untroubled enclaves, suburbs came under criticism in the mid-1960s by a new generation of feminists. The suburb, according to pioneering feminist Betty Friedan, was little more than a “comfortable concentration camp” that fostered depression, a growing sense of isolation, loneliness, and quiet desperation among its female inhabitants.

Many suburban wives, whether they felt trapped or not, did indeed conform to the postwar ideal of the stay-at-home mom. But thousands of others joined the paid labor force in the ’50s and ’60s. Ironically, the financial demands of maintaining the “California lifestyle” often necessitated more than one wage earner per family and began to erode the long-held taboo against married women’s participation in the labor force. At the same time, increasing numbers of women were attending college—some in search of husbands, but many in preparation for rewarding careers. Young careerists, along with an older generation of professional women, rarely obtained jobs that matched their education and skill levels. Locked into clerical and sales jobs, and a limited number of professional occupations like nursing and teaching, working women earned only 60 cents for every dollar made by their male counterparts.

These inequities, combined with suburban isolation, prompted female activists to press for change. In 1964, after three years of intense lobbying from women’s organizations, the California legislature finally agreed to create a state Commission on the Status of Women. The commission’s findings on employment discrimination and male/female wage differentials reinvigorated the women’s movement and created the foundation for the more radical feminist critiques of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Transportation, Energy, Water Resources, and Environmental Pollution

A massive, postwar freeway construction program, funded with a mix of state and federal dollars, helped facilitate white and industrial flight to the suburbs. In 1947, the state legislature passed the Collier-Burns Act, which approved approximately 12,500 miles of new roads, connecting suburbs to surrounding urban centers and funded with a seven cent per gallon gasoline tax. By the mid-1950s, the federal government augmented this expanding network by helping to fund an interstate freeway system that created linkages between each major metropolitan center. Growing dependence on the automobile was further encouraged by the decline of prewar electric rail systems that had connected residential neighborhoods to downtown areas. From San Diego to San Francisco, local governments replaced energy-efficient electric trains and trolleys with diesel-fueled buses. By the late 1950s, only isolated remnants of these regional rail systems survived. The automobile—increasingly a symbol of personal freedom and status—reigned supreme.

The new freeway system had several unanticipated drawbacks. It frequently bisected poor, inner-city neighborhoods, cutting them off from surrounding services, wiping out small business districts and large tracts of affordable housing, and contributing to the spatial isolation and “ghettoization” of residents. Declining air quality was yet another problem associated with the postwar transportation boom. By the late 1940s, Los Angeles residents faced a human-made atmospheric threat: automobilegenerated smog. The city first responded by imposing restrictions on factory emissions and backyard waste burning, but failed to address the primary cause—the transportation boom. Part of the problem was that smog came from multiple jurisdictions. Even if city officials imposed regulations in their municipality, pollution from neighboring areas knew no boundaries. By the early 1950s, the problem had worsened. Los Angeles County responded by establishing an Air Pollution Control District, which began to monitor air quality and introduce pollution control measures.

Soon after, in 1955, nine counties in the San Francisco Bay area joined forces to create a regional air quality control district, empowered to set emission standards and regulate polluting industries. Although these districts did

Reflect on the social, political, and demographic pressures that led to urban sprawl in Los Angeles County, and evaluate the costs and benefits of such rapid growth. How did the uniform nature of postwar subdivisions affect residents' quality of life?

little to curtail auto emissions, the main source of pollution, they created an important model of regional cooperation that was later adopted by other municipalities. When the federal government passed the Clean Air Act in 1963, regional air quality districts, along with the newly created state Air Resources Board, provided the institutional framework to enforce the act’s auto emission standards.

By the early 1960s, declining air quality and increasing traffic congestion on the already overtaxed highway system prompted some cities to reconsider electric transit systems. The Bay Area took the lead in 1962, receiving approval from voters in Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Francisco Counties to build a regional rapid transit system; however, it took another two decades for Los Angeles, Sacramento, San José, and San Diego to follow suit. And even with these systems in place, most Californians continue to prefer private transportation to the cleaner, more fuel-efficient alternatives.

From World War II on, population and economic growth rapidly moved the state from energy self-sufficiency to dependence on imported energy. California’s plastics, chemical, and defense-based industries, and its suburban, automobile-centered lifestyle, were fuel intensive, demanding more energy than the state produced. By the early 1960s, hydroelectric resources had been exploited to about 80 percent of capacity. And the new California Water Plan, with its extensive network of pumping stations and cross-terrain aqueducts, was expected to use much of the energy it generated. Onshore oil reserves were also limited, leading petroleum companies to search offshore for new deposits during and after World War II, and to supplement domestic supplies with imports. Utility companies followed suit, tapping electricity, gas, and oil from elsewhere in the West, and ultimately turning to foreign suppliers. By 1962, for example, two-thirds of California’s natural gas, which was used to generate electricity, heat homes, and produce chemicals and plastics, came from Texas, New Mexico, and Canada.

Long before the energy crisis of the 1970s awakened consumers to their dependence on imported fuel, the state’s utility companies searched for alternative sources to meet increasing demand. In 1960, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) became the first private utility in the nation to tap geothermal energy at its Geyserville plant in Sonoma County. Other geothermal plants soon followed, providing a clean, but modest addition to the state’s energy mix. More controversially, nuclear power, promoted by the Atomic Energy Commission as a safe, environmentally friendly energy source, was first produced in 1957 on an experimental basis at the Vallecitos plant outside of Livermore. PG&E began operating a commercial facility in 1963 near Eureka, spearheading a 10-year plant construction boom that failed to anticipate growing public concern over seismic hazards, safe disposal of radioactive wastes, and the potentially lethal consequences of human error or reactor malfunction.

By 1964, when PG&E proposed another facility at earthquake-prone Bodega Bay, the public grew more skeptical of industry safety claims and mounted a successful campaign to block the plan. This protest, slowing but not stopping the plant construction boom, set the stage for the more vocal and militant anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s and 1980s and helped broaden the focus of older environmental organizations. In the meantime, even nuclear energy could not keep pace with demand, and California’s utility companies and petroleum industry drew ever more heavily on imported fuel.

Unbridled growth also took its toll on the state’s water resources. The Central Valley Project, which became fully operational in the 1950s, diverted vast quantities of water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers to farmland in the San Joaquin Valley. The initial phase of the project, which included construction of the Shasta, Keswick and Friant dams and their water delivery canals, allowed growers to bring more than 700,000 acres of San Joaquin farmland into production. Although it benefited wealthy landowners like J. G. Boswell, the project decimated wild fisheries, destroyed thousands of acres of waterfowl habitat, and prevented natural flow from reaching and recharging underground aquifers. The most serious impact of the CVP was the decline of the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta water quality. As fresh water was pumped southward, particularly during the dry summer months, salt water from the San Francisco Bay intruded into the delta, damaging fragile ecosystems and reducing freshwater flow into the bay. Salty water, occasionally drawn into canals and used to irrigate farmland, also contributed to the salinization of soils in the San Joaquin Valley. Indeed, California’s second largest river, the San Joaquin, was soon reduced to a drainage ditch for pesticide and salt-laden agricultural runoff.

The California Water Plan, initiated in 1960, eventually diverted additional water from the north to the San Joaquin Valley and up over the Tehachapi Mountains to thirsty southern California residents. The system tapped the tributaries of the Sacramento River, further compromising delta ecology, intensifying northsouth competition for water resources, and sparking angry opposition from environmentalists to proposed dams on California’s remaining wild rivers.

Postwar growth did more than place strains on the state’s water and energy resources; it generated increasing amounts of toxic wastes that poured, virtually unregulated, into the air, water, and soil. New chemical compounds, added tothe older mix of heavy metals, solvents, corrosives, paints, and dyes, created an unprecedented threat to California’s environment and public health. Produced in increasing quantities by the petrochemical industry following World War II, new substances like DDT, PCBs, and dioxin not only persisted in the environment for long periods of time, but also became more concentrated as they moved up the food chain. By the early 1960s, wildlife biologists began to sound the alarm. More careful study also revealed their potential threat to human health. Despite mounting public concern, mobilized by Rachel Carson’s 1962 condemnation of the chemical industry in Silent Spring, and by environmental organizations like the Audubon Society and California Tomorrow, effective regulation of toxic chemicals did not occur until the 1970s and 1980s. The federal Clean Water Act of 1960 prompted the state to adopt more stringent sewage treatment standards, but synthetic chemicals and other toxic substances could not be removed by normal processing methods. And the producers and consumers of these compounds, including the state’s powerful petrochemical and agricultural industries, vigorously opposed regulation of chemical production, use, and disposal.

As Californians awakened to the growing threat of toxic pollution, a small group of environmental activists launched a path-breaking movement to save one of the state’s natural wonders from industrial and suburban development. During the postwar years, the San Francisco Bay lost 2,300 acres each year to accommodate shoreline construction of garbage dumps, airports, housing tracts, and industrial parks. Already reduced by 40 percent of its size from a century earlier, it was in danger of becoming little more than a shipping channel by the year 2000. In an era when limits to growth were inconceivable to most of the state’s residents, Catherine Kerr and her fellow “university wives” vocally asserted that the public good should prevail over the interests of municipal and private developers. Save San Francisco Bay Association, founded in 1961, attracted enough public support over the next four years to secure legislative approval for both a temporary halt to bay fill and the formation of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. This agency, empowered by the state legislature to grant or deny permission for all shoreline construction, established the precedent for government regulation of development. Other commissions, including the California Coastal Commission and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, soon followed, along with a host of municipal-level no-growth and controlled growth ordinances and measures.

Smog in Los Angeles. Examine the relationship between this photograph and the Los Angeles sprawl image. What were the connections between suburban growth and declining air quality?