1942 (1941) (1943) (1930-1940) (1940-1950) Table of Contents
Fred E. Basten Main St. to Malibu, Yesterday & Today, Graphics Press, Santa Monica, CA, 1980, 123pp., 1942 See Text
Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt* Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California, G.P. Putnam's Sons: NY, 1977. 603 pp., 1942 See Text
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1943, 1942, 1941, 1940, 1933, 1921, 1913, 1912 See Text
Lawrence Mace In Search of Whole Rainbows, Unpublished Manuscript 1994, 1952, 1948, 1942 See Text
Tom Moran and Tom Sewell Fantasy by the Sea Peace Press: Culver City, CA, 1980 (1979) (Originally published by Beyond Baroque Foundation with a grant from the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts), 1942 See Text
John Gross-Bettleheim Assembly Line (Home Front) 1942 See Image and Text
Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 1942 See Text
Documents
Fred E. Basten Main St. to Malibu, Yesterday & Today, Graphics Press, Santa Monica, CA, 1980, 123pp., 1942
"Searchlights and anti-aircraft guns comb the sky for unseen enemy over Bay area on February 25, 1942. Photo, snapped during a wartime blackout, clearly shows blobs of light made by exploding shells." p. 78
Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt* Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California, G.P. Putnam's Sons: NY, 1977. 603 pp., 1942
Chapter 18 Cold War Journalism
1. Relocation Camp
"The Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, which opened the door for Los Angeles's massive industrial expansion and urbanization, also brought out a renewed racial hostility from the white Southern California population. Anti-foreign /nativist movements had deep roots in the area. Since the 1860s the state's labor movement and small farmers, threatened by massive immigrations of cheap Asian and Mexican labor, had reacted with prejudice and attempts at exclusion. . . . .
" . . . Chandler had attacked various racist-inspired moves to limit land ownership-the 1913 Alien Land Law, for instance-or to restrict immigration. . . . " p. 296
"By the late 1930s, as first- and second-generation Japanese and Mexican-Americans entered the job market, questions concerning immigration were replaced by the urban-based social and economic problems of acculturation and discrimination. With the outbreak of the war, some of the old tensions found new expression, and the Los Angeles press, led by the Hearst papers and the Times, contributed to one of the region's most shameful periods.
"Within a month after the Pearl Harbor attack, California's press began a systematic campaign to evacuate all Japanese-Americans in California and the rest of the country into "relocation" camps for the duration of the war. . . .
" . . .
" . . . Ninety thousand Japanese-Americans in California were uprooted from their homes and farms to live for more than three years in concentration camps . . ." p. 297
" . . . more than $5 million in Japanese property was auctioned off in the city [Los Angeles]."
" . . . Earl Warren [called] Democratic Governor Culbert Olson soft on Japanese-Americans and "identified the absence of any sabotage up to then as an attempt to create "a false sense of security." p. 298
James W. Lunsford The Ocean and the Sunset, The Hills and the Clouds: Looking at Santa Monica, illustrated by Alice N. Lunsford, 1983, 1943, 1942, 1941, 1940, 1933, 1921, 1913, 1912
"15. Santa Monica High School, 601 Pico Boulevard. The cornerstone for the high school was laid on April 11, 1912, on what was once known as Prospect Hill; the campus has expanded over the years to its present size by incorporating the former Santa Monica College site.
"The high school contains a great many points of interest, especially the Memorial Open-Air Theater dedicated in 1921; Barnum Hall, dedicated to William F. Barnum*, who served as principal from 1913 to 1943; a senior bench donated by the Classes of 1940 to 1943; an imposing Athletic Hall of Fame in the Men's Gymnasium; a trophy collection; the Freedom Shrine in the Administration Building; and the Hall of Fame in the History Building. Two special items of interest in Barnum Hall's lobby are a mosaic-tile mural depicting the landing of the vikings and a four-foot-tall concrete owl that stood atop the original high school from 1913 until 1933, when an earthquake caused its removal."
Lawrence Mace In Search of Whole Rainbows, Unpublished Manuscript, 1994, 1952, 1948, 1942
pp. 107-108 (circa 1942, Lawence is twelve years old)
"Our favorite outing was Venice Pier at the beach west of Los Angeles. A fat, jolly lady robot rocked backward and forward, laughing incessently above the front of the fun house. Ernie [Lawrence's younger brother] and I would play there for hours. We groped our way through a maze of mirrors and staggered through an obstacle course of moving stairways and walkways. An operator blasted compressed air through holes in the passageway floors, forcing girls to hold their dresses down with both hands.
"There was a huge hardwood slide with lanes for several riders. It was convex and then concave several times. We started by sitting on a burlap pad high up near the roof of the building, then hurtled down the slide, going weightless flying over each convex bump, finally scooting out onto the flat surface at the bottom.
"There was a twenty-foot rotating, hardwood disc with a slight downward incline from its center. We climbed onto it and sat at the center with our backs together. The disc began to rotate, moving faster and faster. Soon, the centrifugal force began to take its toll. One after another we lost our positions, sliding outward off the disc, crashing into a padded trough surrounding the disc.
"Sometimes a rider was able to center perfectly and stay on while the disc spun at top speed. There were metal buttons embedded in the hardwood near the disc center. Whenever maximum centrifugal force failed to dislodge a rider, an operator pressed a switch sending electricity to the buttons. The perfectly centered rider then left his position quickly, to the delight of everyone watching.
"Ernie and I both loved the fabulous, scary roller-coaster on the pier, but our favorite ride on the pier was the Dragon Slide. The dragon wrapped itself around a one-hundred foot conical tower. Its tail stuck straight upward at the top, with its huge head next to the bottom of the tower.
"The slide was inside the spiral dragon, constructed from split bamboo stips attached to the inner walls of the spiral. A rider sat inside a heavily paddded bag, on a swivel board, at the top of the dragon tail. An operator pivoted the board from horizontal to vertical. The rider plummeted straight downward into the dragon tail, spiraling around and around, finally zooming out the dragon's mouth. It was an awesome thrill. The Dragon Slide was closed and torn down after several years. A bamboo strip had come loose from the slide impaling a rider."
Tom Moran and Tom Sewell Fantasy by the Sea Peace Press: Culver City, CA, 1980 (1979) (Originally published by Beyond Baroque Foundation with a grant from the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts), 1942
"A large Japanese-American population lived in Venice. They had started settling in the area as early as 1913, buying and leasing truck farms where they had planted snap beans and celery crops. A number of Japanese-Americans were also attracted to the pier and bingo parlors along the beach front.
". . . the federal government issued an Executive Order . . . West Coast residents of Japanese heritage were ordered to report to . . . internment camps . . . Manzanar."
Karl Rydgren* (1914- ) I Remember, Unpublished Ms., 1975 [Reprinted 2005], 1942, 1906
"Mr. Emile Pourroy* [ -1942] arrived in California during the San Francisco earthquake (1906). He ran the Blue Streak Roller Coaster and later the Merry-Go-Round. Later he worked for the City of Santa Monica as a grounds keeper at Santa Monica High School. He used a hand mower. He also planted all the trees at the McGinley* Estate, now Jocelyn Park, and was chief caretaker there until his passing in 1942."
Roberta Lehrman Introduction The People Work, Associated American Artists, 20 West 57th Street, NY, NY, 10019 June 6-29, 1990
Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 1942
[p. 96] Chapter 4 1943 Zoot Suit
[p. 96, 1942] " . . . By the end of 1942 California had imprisoned most persons of Japanese ancestry and was serving as the central training and staging zone for the fierce war-a fierce racial war-against Japan in the Pacific. In the final phases of that war alone, more than seventy-five thousand Americans and an estimated one million Japanese would lose their lives in terrible, no-holds-barred, hand-to-hand island battles lasting to the bitter end . . .
p. 97, 1943] Los Angeles, in short, was a Jim Crow town in which numerous nobodies-failures, drifters, downwardly mobile Folks, those expellled from their previous communities-had one thing and only one thing going for them, either con-[p. 97, 1943]sciously or subconsciously; they were white. As racial hatred against the Japanese surfaced into respectability-indeed, became a vehement proof of patriotism-such Los Angelenos began to identify their whiteness with America itself, and with the war effort.
[p. 98, 1943] With the Japanese removed into camps, Mexicans provided the next obvious target for racial hatred . . . Among the many charges leveled by whites against Mexicans was their alleged proclivity for violence. Captain Edward Duran Ayres, chief of the Foreign Relations Bureau in the office of the sheriff of Los Angeles County, spoke for many white Southern Californias in a 1942 report to the county grand jury: Mexicans were descended from Indians, Orientals, with Mongolian tendencies to violence. . . . resorting to knives or lethal weapons rather than the fists of Anglo-Saxon youths . . .
[p. 98. 1943] Once again, the racism of California caused international embarrassment, since Mexico was an ally of the U.S, against the Axis . . . American liberals . . . drew obvious comparisons to the anti-Semitism of the Nazis.
[p. 98, 1942] On the other hand . . . A significant percentage of the officers of the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff's Department agreed with Ayres. For many years, in fact, the LAPD and the sheriff's department had been making war on young men of Mexican descent in the belief that such young men were by definition criminal in fact and intent. . . young Mexican men found themselves hauled into jail for seventy-two hours on mere suspicicon, then released. Beatings were frequent, as were frameups . . An [p. 99, 1943] impressive number of young Mexican men wre shot dead in the streets by trigger-happy officers. No white police or sheriff's deputies in the Deep South of the period kept the local population under a more intense level of intimidation through violence.
[p. 99, 1943] Central to this perception of the young Mexican-American as violent gang member were the pachuco and pachuca and the zoot suiter. Not every pachuco was a zoot suiter (pachucas had their own stylized attire), and not every zoot suiter was a pachuco. Evolving in the barrios of Los Angeles, pachuquismo represented a more fundamental condition than the mere wearing of a zoot suit. . . . The pachuco was a young male Mexican-American caught between two worlds and belonging to neither . . . the pachuco was in a condition of generalized revolt born of alienation. . . . the pachuco retreated into a stance of defiant isolation broken only by loyalties to other pachuco in associations invariably seen by the police as criminal gangs. Interestingly enough, given the deracination of the pachuco in American society, the pachuca was reaching back into Spanish tradition for the creation of his argot: an idiosyncratic blend of Calo (the perennial language fo the underground and underworld, having its origins in medieval Spain), gypsy, Ladino (Iberian-Hebrew), Mexican tough-guy talk, jive, Angleicized Spanish and Hispanic - cised English, together weith numerous linguistic terms of strictly Los Angeles coinage. Pachuquismo also brought to Los Angeles its own ballad tradition, the ballads being mainly about the Los Angeles Police Department beating pachuco heads. Pachucos were gtiven to tatoos-crosses, mainly, sumounted by initials-which the Los Angele press invested with near-cabalistic significance.
[p. 99, 1943] Pachuquismo represented a defiant response on the part of many young men who belonged to neither Mexico nor the United States . . . From the perspective of white Los Angeles, the pachuco was its worst nightmare come true: The avenging Mexican-dark, fierce-eyed, Indian, bent on violence and revenge.
The pachuca expressed more style than revolt. She was, in fact, little more than a Mexican-Anerican version of the Anglo-American V-girls who had emerged by 1943 as a social type in the American city. Like the V-girl, the pachuca featured a stylized version of popular dress: saddle shoes, bobby socks, skirts at or above, the knee, sheer blouses, cardigan sweaters, heavy lipstick, drawn square above the lip . . .
[p. 101] . . . In 1942, the Los Angeles Police, the Los Angeles Courts, the Los Angeles Ruling Oligarchy, the Los Angeles newspapers committed, "the most egregious persecution of Mexican-Americans in the history of American criminal courts-the mass arrest, trial and conviction of the Sleepy Lagoon defendents" . . .
The Sleepy Lagoon Incident (Auig. 1, 1942). . .
[p. 103, 1942] University of Southern California historian and psychoanalyst, Mauricio Mazon: "Only a community in a form of trance could have sustained such mass indictments on such non-existent evidence and the phantasmagoric trial that followed."
[p. 103, 1942] The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was chaired by the California Housing and Immigration Commissioner Carey McWilliams, "a brilliant voice and prolific pen on the left (and the single finest non-fiction writer on California-ever)", included Orson Welles and Hollywood screenwriter Guy Endore . . .
[p. 104, 1942] . . . On 10 August 1942 . . . a dragnet organized by the LAPD, the sheriff's office, and the California Highway Patrol swept through Los Angeles County and arrested more than six hundred Mexican American men on a variety of trumped-up charges . . .
[p. 123] Chapter 5 1944 Swing Shift
[p. 128, 1942] "The year 1942 witnessed the tight-sweater controversy. One aircraft factory in the East sent fifty-three women home in one day for wearing sweaters to work. Even the chauvinistic 1940s could not straightforwardly state that the revelation of the female form would distract the male workers. Instead, it was argued that sweaters were unsafe around heavy equipment and were liable to catch fire from welding sparks. Very soon, sweaters, dangling bracelets or earrings, long hair, and heavy makeup were banned entirely from the assembly line. After hundreds of women caught their Veronica Lake-like tresses in machinery, aviation officials prevailed upon the Hollywood star to adopt an upswept hairdo for the duration of the war. Patriotically, Miss [p. 129] Lake complied, although her change in hairstyle can be said to have endangered her career.
[p. 129] "In compensation for these restrictions, the aircraft industry in Southern California did its best to develop attractive working attire for its female employees. Following up on uniform design for WACS, WAVES, WRENS, and Women Marines, Lockheed employed a Hollywood designer to create a servicable but smart slack-suit for its female employees. North American prescribed blue slacks. These blue slacks caught on with other young women workers, for they were dressy as well as servicable and required only a change of blouse for after-work socializing. . . . Aviation . . . had a glamour that included its spiffy uniform.
[p.135] "Like the Hollywood studios, moreover, aviation plants while industrial did not seem so. [They exuded an atmosphere of skilled production and technolgy. They were extremely well-lit. They were glamorous.] Aviation plants employed Hollywood set designers to camouflage their facilities from possible air attack. Set artists devised cunning color patterns to integrate plants in agricultural areas into the surrounding landscape. In the case of the Douglas plant in Santa Monica, a replica of an entire Santa Monica neighborhood, complete with mock houses and cars, was spread across the roof. . . .
[p. 135] "A photograph in Life for 12 October 1942 showed the all-male members of the Aircraft Production Council in session. Growing out of informal pre-war talks hosted twice a month by Donald Douglas at his Santa Monica plant, the council coordinated the aircraft industry in the Southern California region. Briefly, in January 1942, Washington had been contemplating the appointment of an aircraft czar to coordinate the entire industry; but West Coast aviation leaders had balked, pointing out that they already were accustomed to cooperating and sharing ideas. Obviously, such an emergency wartime council suspended just about all anti-trust provisions of American law and created what was in effect a coordinated industrial [p. 136] policy operating through a temporary instance of capitalist-syndicalism parallel to those of Germany and Japan. Under the guidance of the Aircraft War Production Council, Southern California aviation incorporated liberal and conservative elements in its structure and operations. On the one hand, it was an industrial cartel, but then again: it was government-sponsored. In terms of its employee relations and benefits, it was a planned social democratic utopia.
[p. 136] . . . Not yet fifty, Donald Wills Douglas was the paterfamilias, the Louis B. Mayer (or the Henry Ford) of the industry. The first person to take a degree in aeronautical engineering from MIT, graduating in 1914, Douglas had journeyed to the Coast to build planes in Los Angeles for Glenn Martin. In 1920 he had established his own Douglas-Davis Company, appropriately located in an abandoned movie studio at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Chelsea Avenue at the eastern border of Santa Monica. His partner David Davis was a sports writer from the Los Angeles Times who put up most of the money. Jack Northrop and Gerard Vultee joined Douglas as engineers.
The Douglas company specialized in larger aircraft. . . .
[p. 136] As befitted a founder of the industry, Douglas sustained a quasi-Hollywood lifestyle. He lunched daily in a private dining room at the Santa Monica plant and sailed on weekends in his seventy-five foot yacht Endymion. Expanding his parent plant in Santa Monica before and after Pearl Harbor until it became a city unto itself, and expanding a second plant in El Segundo as well, Douglas built in 1942-43 his third and largest plant (it covered 142 acres) adjacent to the municipal airport in Long Beach.
. . .
"
[p. 262] Chapter 9 1948 Honey Bear
[p. 262] " . . .
"Despite his Republicanism, Earl Warren remained sympathetic to his Democratic supporters . . . Cary McWillliams suggested that Warren was merely seeking to mask his conservatism through imitating FDR as much as he could within the limits of his Republican affiliation and instincts. . . Marquis Childs . . . described Warren as a "New Deal wolf in Republican sheep's clothing" . . . Harry Truman, "He's a Democrat and doesn't know it." . . . [p. 263] Within the limits of the Old California myth, for example, Warren had excellent relations with Mexican-Californians. As a boy in Los Angeles, he had attended Mexican festivities in the Plaza and been enchanted by the dancing and singing, the gaily colored horses . . . Like so many Protestant Californians, Warren revered the myth of Old California as a Spanish Arcadia of white-walled, red-tiled haciendas and a colorful, pastoral way of life. Whenever possible, he attended the Old Spanish Days Fiesta in Santa Barbara. When Warren ran for governor in 1942, the actor Leo Carrillo, a sixth-generation Californian and a registered Democrat, campaigned for his compadre among Mexican-American voters. Carrillo, in fact, became the closest thing to a pal Earl Warren seems to have had in publci life: Pancho to Warren's Cisco Kid, a combination factotum-court jester, master of ceremonies, and sometimes hatchet man of the sort most politicians, even Earl Warren, seem to find necessary.
" . . .
[p. 264] "Masons and Roman Catholics were oil and water in these years, yet Earl Warren, Grand Master Mason, sustained deep and warm personal and intellectual connections with members of the Roman Catholic community, especially of the Irish persuasion . . .
"Warren was intrigued by Roman Catholic intellectuals, especially the social democratic aspects of their political philosophy. The single most influential person in the Warren administration was William Sweigert, a brilliant Irish Catholic attorney from San Francisco, a Democrat, strongly influenced by the liberal social teachingz of papal encyclicals . . . Sweigart became Warren's liberal alter ego . . .
"Warren was equally friendly to another liberal intellectual Irish Catholic Democrat strongly influenced by the social teachings of the papal encyclicals, Attorney General Robert Kenny. To the manor born (an old Southern California family, long active in banking), Kenney grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from Stanford and Stanford Law, and had worked as a foreign correspondent in London and Paris before returning to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a lawyer and a judge. In 1938 Kenny won election to the state senate, where he replaced Culbert Olson when Olson became governor. As state senator, Kenny was one of the few important state officials-perhaps the only one-to speak out against the internment [p. 265] of the Japanese. Oddly enough, this did not prevent him from being elected attorney general in 1942, replacing Earl Warren.