"Berkeley, A City in History"
by Charles Wollenberg
© 2002
Chapter 7 - World War II Watershed
During the 1940s, the San Francisco Chronicle called World War II a "Second Gold Rush." Of course, the newspaper wasn't referring to the international combat but to the social, demographic and economic impact of the war on the San Francisco Bay Area. In Bay Area history, the war was to the 1940s, 50s and 60s what the Gold Rush had been to the 1840s, 50s and 60s---a watershed event that transformed and defined a whole era. In the very broadest sense, the war began what might be called the Bay Area's "Defense Period," a fifty year span in which defense dollars, policy and politics, the economic and technological spin-offs from them and the cultural and social protests against them, were the most important factors in regional history. Only the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, followed by the rapid dismantling of virtually all the region's remaining military installations, marked the close of this era. Berkeley was not only deeply affected by the war and post war period, it also played a major role in creating the nuclear specter that was so much a part of the life and culture of those years.
Exodus
The war produced what, at least until now, was the last major population increase in the city's history. After experiencing virtually no growth in the 1930s, Berkeley's population grew by nearly 40 percent during the 1940s, from about 85,000 to 115,000. In the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, however, thousands of people left the city, particularly young men and women departing to join the armed forces. And an additional 1400 or so people of Japanese descent, including Yoshiko Uchida and her family, left involuntarily to take up residence in government internment camps.
President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, issued in February, 1942, authorized the military to relocate and intern all people of Japanese descent living in California, Oregon, Washington and a part of Arizona. The sole criterion for internment was ethnicity, not nationality, the relocation applying equally to Japanese-born immigrants and California-born American citizens of Japanese descent. At the end of April, 1942, the Uchidas and other Berkeley internees were relocated to Tanforan Race Track in San Mateo County where they were assigned "apartments" that formerly had been horse stalls. After about three months at Tanforan, most of the Berkeley internees were transported to a camp at Topaz, Utah, where many remained until the end of the war.
There is no evidence that the internment served any legitimate defense or security purpose. The government did not institute a similar relocation policy for Italian or German Americans, though a relatively small number of Italian and German immigrants were interned, often unjustly. In Hawaii, where people of Japanese descent made up a far larger portion of the population than in California, there was no mass internment. In 1988 Congress provided for a reparations payment of $20,000 to each surviving internee in partial compensation for the injustice suffered. While fear and hysteria following the Pearl Harbor attack were partially responsible for the decision to impose the internment, the long history of anti-Asian discrimination also played a major part. As we have seen, Berkeley was by no means immune to these prejudices. Indeed, as late as mid-1941, some residents of the immediate north campus district were campaigning for restrictive covenants for their area because Japanese American students were moving into the neighborhood.
But it is also probably true that no community in California had more organized opposition to the internment policy than Berkeley. Most Japanese American families lived in the ethnically mixed South Berkeley neighborhood and in some cases had developed bonds of friendship with their white and black neighbors. At the university, Japanese American students had developed ties with sympathetic professors and students of other ethnic groups. Several Pacific School of Religion faculty members had served as ministers and educators in Japan and had come to appreciate the Japanese people and culture. As a result, a small group of Berkeleyans formed the Fair Play Committee to protest the internment. Members included Harry Kingman of Stiles Hall, U.C. Economics Professor Paul Taylor, photographer Dorothea Lange and Pacific School of Religion faculty member Galen Fisher. Their protests hardly represented majority opinion in Berkeley, let alone the rest of the state, and they were unable to prevent the relocation. But the committee did maintain contacts with internees and monitor conditions at the camps. At the suggestion of Kingman and International House director Tom Blaisdell, UC President Robert Gordon Sproul called on the government to allow Japanese American students to finish their college educations. Because of these efforts, young people like Yoshiko Uchida were able to leave the camps and complete their degrees at colleges and universities in the East and Midwest, outside of the West Coast restricted area.
Another gesture of support was a much-debated decision by the First Congregational Church on Channing Way to make its social hall available as the point of embarkation for Berkeley internees. Church members served coffee and cake and even provided toys for the children. This was in stark contrast to the hostile send-off that Japanese Americans suffered in most California communities. The Northern California Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, which included many active Berkeley members, defied a decision of the national ACLU and took the case of East Bay native Fred Koramatsu, who unsuccessfully challenged the internment all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. After the war, most Berkeley Japanese American families returned to the city, beginning their lives and careers over again. But for some like Yoshiko Uchida's father, it was too late to start again. A confident executive, community leader and family patriarch before the war, Dwight Uchida was never able to recover fully from the trauma of internment. He was spiritually troubled and physically ill for much of the rest of his life.
Military Establishment
While Japanese Americans were coping with internment, Berkeley was filling up with new residents. Some were armed forces personnel stationed at various military installations located around San Francisco Bay. In Berkeley the army established Camp Ashby, headquarters for a segregated unit of African American military policemen located near the west end of Ashby Avenue. The Navy built the Savo Island housing project for married personnel in South Berkeley. Both services established officers training programs at UC. The army took over the Bowles Hall dormitory and kept its personnel largely separate from the rest of the students. The navy, on the other hand, largely integrated its trainees into the general student body, allowing them to play on university athletic teams and even participate in student government. The navy program took over the International House and several fraternities to house its trainees. By 1944, more than 1000 navy personnel were studying at Cal.
The government built several barrack-like buildings north of the main library for the officer training programs. Although designed as temporary structures to last only for the duration of the war, some of these "T-Buildings" were still standing fifty years later. The last of them were demolished to make way for the new Doe Library stacks in the early 1990s. The military programs allowed the university to maintain something approaching its pre-war enrollment. Nevertheless, the number of civilian male students declined from over 11,000 before the war to about 4300 in 1945. The campus went on a three semester, year-around schedule to help students finish their degrees before being drafted. Emeritus professors were called out of retirement to replace younger faculty who left for military service. Interscholastic athletics continued on a reduced scale with teams often manned by large numbers of navy trainees. But many of the university's traditional rivals, including Stanford, suspended their athletic programs. As a result, the Cal football schedule included games with service teams like "Fleet City Marines" and "St. Marys Pre-Flight."
Wartime Boom
As important as military personnel were to the university's student body, the great bulk of new residents coming to Berkeley during the war years were civilians attracted by the new jobs produced by the Bay Area's overheated wartime economy. The federal government poured billions of dollars into the region, making the Depression era public works projects look paltry by comparison. West Berkeley industry boomed, with the military buying everything from Colgate toothpaste and Heinz catsup to Cutter Lab blood plasma and Pacific Steel industrial castings.
But shipbuilding was the local industry that experienced the greatest expansion. In 1939 Bay Area shipyards had recovered from the depths of the Depression and employed about 5000 workers. By 1944 the regional shipyard labor force numbered over 240,000, nearly fifty times what it had been just five years earlier. The Bay Area had become the greatest shipbuilding center the world has ever seen, before or since. Old-time established yards had huge increases in their workforce; Moore Drydock on the Oakland Estuary, for example, grew from about 600 employees in 1939 to 35,000 in 1944. The government also created brand new "instant shipyards," including Henry J. Kaiser's massive industrial complex in Richmond. The Kaiser Richmond yards did not exist in 1940; by 1943 they employed 100,000 workers, more people than had worked in the entire American shipbuilding industry back in 1939.
The Bay Area's wartime production boom came at a time when ten to twelve million Americans were in the armed forces. The big labor surplus of the Depression years turned into a dramatic labor shortage almost overnight. Just about anyone who could remain upright for eight hours a day could get a job in the Bay Area during World War II. Shipyards and other East Bay employers encouraged elderly workers to come out of retirement and young students to enter the labor market. Katherine Archibald, a Cal sociology student, used her experience working at Moore Drydock as the basis for her classic book, Wartime Shipyard. Berkeley High administrators were concerned about the numbers of young people dropping out of school to take well-paying shipyard jobs. The yards also made substantial efforts to recruit women workers. By 1945 about 25 percent of the blue collar, industrial workers at Kaiser were women. The practice was inevitably adopted by other employers. In 1943, for example, Colgate Palmolive's West Berkeley plant announced that it had hired thirteen women to take jobs formerly held by men.
Even with all these "non-traditional" workers, Bay Area firms could not come close to meeting their labor needs. Thus large employers like Kaiser began nationwide recruiting campaigns to encourage workers to move to the region. The efforts were spectacularly successful, and new residents poured into the area, increasing the regional population by nearly a third during the war years. Included in the overall migration was the first large scale influx of African Americans to the Bay Area. During the war years, the East Bay's black population increased by more than four times, from about 14,000 to 60,000. By 1945 nearly 70 percent of the African American wage earners in the Bay Area worked in just one industry---shipbuilding.
While there were no shipbuilding facilities in Berkeley, city residents had easy access to the largest East Bay employers. Long established transit routes linked Berkeley to Moore Drydock and other yards on the Oakland Estuary. The Key System laid new tracks on San Pablo Avenue and Cutting Boulevard to provide service to the Kaiser complex in Richmond. The new "Shipyard Line" featured ancient cars that had once run on the New York Elevated system. These transit connections made Berkeley a convenient place of residence for war workers. Landlords found more than enough tenants to make up for the enrollment declines at the university. Unfortunately for the landlords, however, apartments were subject to strict rent control, part of an extensive government wartime economic regime which included wage and price controls and rationing of many goods and services, including gasoline.
African American Migration
Berkeley was particularly affected by the African American migration, the city's black population growing from 3,000 to more than 12,000 between 1940 and 1945. Berkeley's black heritage goes back to the arrival of Pete and Hannah Byrne in 1859, but the African American population remained small for the rest of the nineteenth century. In 1900 there were only 66 black residents in Berkeley. Oakland, by contrast, already had an African American population of over 1000. As terminus for the transcontinental railroad, Oakland had an established black community that included sleeping car porters, cooks, waiters and others working in traditionally African American railroad occupations. But after the turn of the century, black professionals and prosperous blue collar workers began to settle in Berkeley. In spite of the overall climate of discrimination, Berkeley had a reputation for relative tolerance. In South Berkeley, blacks could buy inexpensive homes in well-kept, mixed neighborhoods. The African American population steadily increased, to 500 in 1920, 2,000 in 1930 and 3,000 in 1940. By the beginning of World War II, Oakland and San Francisco had more back residents than Berkeley, but among Bay Area cities, Berkeley had the highest proportion of African Americans in its population, about 4 percent.
Blacks also had a small but expanding presence at the university. The first African American graduate was Vivian Logan Rogers, who received her diploma in 1909. By the 1920s, black enrollment was large enough to support African American sororities and fraternities. They served as important social and political networks for the students. Although the organizations could not afford their own houses, they had contacts with black families with whom students could live and black business owners who had part-time jobs available. Both Stiles Hall and the University YWCA allowed African American students to use their facilities, and after its opening in 1930, the International House welcomed blacks to its social and cultural activities.
During the thirties, black students joined with sympathetic whites to protest various forms of discrimination. Campus blacks also allied with community groups to boycott Berkeley businesses that refused to hire African Americans, campaigning on the slogan "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work." The students kept in touch with black community leaders like attorney Walter Gordon, Sleeping Car Porters Union Vice President C.L. Dellums and political activist Frances Albrier. Albrier was an important figure in Berkeley life for more than three decades and in 1939 became the first African American to run for the city council.
The great World War II migration both energized and overwhelmed the established black leadership. The huge increase in black population gave the leadership a larger power base, and good wages earned in the shipyards provided greater economic security than the Berkeley black community had ever known. But new residents were not always willing to defer to the old leaders and did not fit comfortably into the web of close personal and family ties that characterized the old black community. Nevertheless, members of both groups joined in battles against various forms of discrimination and segregation, including the Jim Crow practices of the Boilermakers Union, chief collective bargaining agent for the shipyard workers. During the war years, black leaders in Berkeley joined the national "Double V" campaign, "V" for victory against fascism abroad and "V" for victory against racism at home.
Housing Crunch
Housing was a serious problem. The region as a whole faced a major housing crisis, but the situation was particularly bad for African Americans because there were so few neighborhoods in which they could live. One such neighborhood was South Berkeley. Ironically, the Japanese internment made more housing available just as the migration of war workers began. Nevertheless, the neighborhood soon became extraordinarily over-crowded. Whole families were living in rented garages, and single workers were sharing beds. Since the shipyards operated 24 hours a day, on three eight-hour shifts, one person could be sleeping in the shared bed while another worked.
Another option for both blacks and whites was to apply for a unit in one of the several Bay Area wartime public housing projects. In San Francisco, Oakland and Richmond, as elsewhere in the country, the federal government provided the funding and the project was managed by a local city housing authority. Federal officials proposed a similar arrangement for Berkeley, asking the city to do its part to meet the regional housing crisis. African American and labor spokesmen favored the proposal, but the city council refused to cooperate, arguing that the units would attract "undesirable elements" and were inappropriate for a city of largely single family homes. After months of fruitless negotiations, the government took the unusual step of building and operating a Berkeley project without local participation. The result was Codornices Village, a complex of barrack-like apartments, located west of San Pablo Avenue along Codornices Creek and straddling the Berkeley-Albany city line.
As was the case in most East Bay projects, about 25 percent of Codornices Village units were reserved for black families, who were placed in segregated housing blocks within the larger project. After the war, however, the percentage limits and segregation policies ended, and over time, African Americans became the majority of Codornices Village residents. Blacks were particularly affected by the rapid post-war decline in shipyard employment and the end of federal wartime policies that banned discrimination on defense contracts. As old patterns of job discrimination returned, blacks were more likely to need and qualify for public housing than whites. However, married university students, many subsisting on G.I. Bill benefits, were also a significant portion of post-war Codornices Village tenants.
When the wartime emergency ended, federal officials argued they had no further authority to operate the project and again asked the city to accept responsibility. But Berkeley (and Albany) still refused to cooperate, and in 1955, after more than a decade of controversy, the feds finally closed Codornices Village. The Albany portion of the project was on UC property, and the university has continued to operate it as Albany Village, a married students housing complex. At least some of the original 1943 "temporary" buildings are still in use. The Berkeley section of the project was simply returned to private ownership and the property used for a number of non-residential purposes. The African American majority of former Codornices Village residents were left high and dry, many of them forced to leave the city and find low-cost housing elsewhere.
In spite of such discouraging developments, World War II affected many aspects of race relations positively in Berkeley and the nation as a whole. The internal migrations of war workers changed the demographics of cities like Berkeley, giving blacks a far greater role in community life. Migration out of the Jim Crow South and into northern and western cities also resulted in a large increase in the number of African American voters, thus increasing black political influence. Finally, the war changed the discourse on race. In the 1930s, the fight against racism was controversial and very much a matter of debate, even in "liberal" cities like Berkeley. But World War II equated racism with fascism and identified the struggle against discrimination with the triumph of democracy. By the end of the war, "equal opportunity without regard to race" was considered a national principle, and post-war America was about to be asked to put its money where its mouth was on this matter. In the meantime, as one female African American war worker put it, "It was Hitler that got us out of white folks' kitchens."
Atomic Age
As important as the shipyards and the labor migrations might have been, the most significant historical events in the Bay Area during the war years occurred in laboratories in the hills above the Berkeley campus. It was there and in Los Alamos, New Mexico that Berkeley scientists led the world into the atomic age. Berkeley's part in this drama goes back to 1928 when the UC Physics Department successfully recruited two promising young scientists to the faculty. Ernest O. Lawrence was an experimental physicist, and soon after arriving at Cal, began work on the cyclotron, a device that allowed revolutionary advances in the study of the atomic nucleus. When it appeared that Northwestern might hire Lawrence away from Berkeley in 1930, President Sproul intervened in the tenure process to give the 29-year old researcher a full professorship and a $1200 a year raise. Sproul also helped obtain private funds from the Crocker family to support Lawrence's work and authorized the establishment of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in a ramshackle wooden building that dated from the 1880s. Lawrence more than repaid Sproul's support and confidence. In 1939 he became the first UC faculty member to win the Nobel Prize (and the first Berkeley resident to have his picture on the cover of Time magazine).
The other 1928 recruit, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was not nearly as well known to the public or, for that matter, to Robert Gordon Sproul. But by the late 1930s, Oppenheimer's reputation among scientists was very high indeed. A theoretical physicist of great imagination and philosophical breadth, Oppenheimer was all but idolized by a group of promising graduate students who had gathered around him. In fact, the combination of Lawrence and Oppenheimer attracted some of the finest young scientific minds to Berkeley. It is hardly surprising, then, that the university would play a key role in the Manhattan Project, the program to invent and develop the world's first atomic weapons.
On the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Lawrence was at a meeting in Washington where he was informed the Manhattan Project had received presidential approval. A few weeks later, Oppenheimer convened a small seminar in LeConte Hall on the UC campus to study the practical problems involved in building the bomb. The federal government allocated funds for a vast expansion of Lawrence's radiation laboratory, allowing its relocation to the current site in the hills above campus. Among its accomplishments, the lab produced the uranium-235 that fueled the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Oppenheimer, the most important participant in the Manhattan Project, served as director of the laboratory in Los Alamos, where the first bombs were developed and assembled.
The Berkeley lab was located on university property and directed and staffed by UC scientists. The Los Alamos facility was also directed by a UC professor, and the staff included several Berkeley researchers. It seemed reasonable, then, that the federal government should pay the university to manage the labs. In the early 1950s, when another Berkeley physicist, Edward Teller, established a third laboratory in Livermore to develop the hydrogen bomb, that lab also came under university management. All three federal labs still exist and continue to be managed by the university. The Berkeley facility has not done classified weapons research in more than thirty years, but Livermore and Los Alamos remain the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories. Every item in the United States nuclear arsenal has been designed at a facility operated by the University of California.
The Manhattan Project completed the process begun in 1872, when Daniel Coit Gilman proposed that the new university devote itself primarily to scientific research. The university's role in developing atomic weapons also completed a process begun by Phoebe Apperson Hearst and Benjamin Ide Wheeler, to make UC an institution of great world renown. By the end of the 1940s, knowledgeable people around the globe knew that, for better or for worse, Berkeley had given birth to the atomic age.
End of Chapter 7
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