My last post made a passing reference to the second gold rush.  Apparently, there’s some controversy over whether this name fits really well what was going on in California during World War II.  On the one hand, it is clear that lots of people flooded into the state in order to take up war-related work: by 1959, the State received about 40% of defense spending, and something around 1 in 15 residents—total, including women and children—worked in defense-related industries.  And certainly, there were some changes in demographic patterns: African Americans had been a relatively small part of California’s urban environment before World War II, brought to the area mostly by railyard work, but that number exploded—at the same time that Japanese internment decreased the Asian presence across the West.  But, it is not clear how much of these changes were revolutionary, or dramatic—in the sense of the first Gold Rush, when San Francisco was built almost overnight—versus brief exaggerations of long term trends.  The State had been militarizing since around World War I (Roger Lotchin calls it “Fortress California”), and many other demographic factors remained returned to antebellum ratios after the war.  Rather than creating something new, then, World War II drew on the latent capacities of California—its prison population, for example, was put to war-work—and so was affected by California as much (or more, or less) than California was affected by it.

Still, there is no doubt that World War II made the experience of living in the Bay Area different, and it was one of the foundational events that all the Forteans would have experienced; as well, they were largely organizing in California in the few years just after the War—there number and significance seemed to dim rather quickly once into the 1950s.  So, let’s look a bit more about how what we already know about California changed—or stayed the same—during and after the war.

San Diego: San Diego continued the process—begun during World War I—of leveraging defense dollars into prominence, eventually becoming one of the ten most populous cities in the country.  The power, though, was controlled by a small oligarchy associated with the military.  It was—and remains—a conservative town.  Which makes me wonder how some of the early Fortean work of N. Meade Layne and Mark Probert faired in the area.

Los Angeles: Since Los Angeles grew up slowly, it came to be dominated by a small, conservative elite, and in the years around World War II, this elite attempted to renew its power.  The War produced some Fortean effects: for example, Hollywood set designers painted giant canvasses to look like tract homes, and then hung these over air bases, so that planes seemed to be heading for homes and then suddenly disappeared.  But, there were also strong pushes for community—the black outs, for example—that enjoined people to pull together and remember what made them distinctly American.

As it turned out, though, the conventional forces could not constrain the centrifugal forces of the region.  Unlike Eastern cities, a single political machine never came to dominate.  And the Catholic Church’s attempts to make the Los Angeles Diocese as powerful as its brethren in New York ultimately failed, undone by, inter alia, nuns and a preference for psychotherapy over conventional Catholic catechisms.  Unlike San Francisco, the Los Angeles area was not broken into neighborhoods but was defined by boulevards, which tended to focus people on their own needs, their own blocks, and not so larger units, preventing cohesiveness and allowing space for things such as Forteanism (and later Dianetics) to flourish.

There was, as well, something else in LA that provided room for Forteanism.  The area was best known, of course, for producing movies, but its literature was also well renowned, and in both cases LA adepts blurred the previous boundaries between high and low culture.  That was certainly true in the case of detective stories, with Chandler profligately mixing high and low, writing to an aesthetic standard and turning out boilerplate for Hollywood.  The same could be said of the pulp science fiction community, in which Forteanism ran strong, with the authors writing for low-grade magazines, but with firmly established ideas about the function of literature that would be borne out over the coming decades.    Fort appealed to this sentiment, I think, because he was doing something very similar: mining high-culture for ideas that undermined high-culture.

The Bay Area: Like the first Gold Rush, the war initially saw the immigration of a large number of single men into the Bay Area.  But, unlike the migration of 1840s, the migration of the 1940s contained a large number of southerners, especially from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana (including the in-migration of Okies from the Central Valley).  And, after a time, whole families came, too.  In the end, because of the draft and the moving of single mothers, the migration came to be led by females: 100 to every 94 men.

The influx of Southerners and blacks brought an evangelist tradition to the region that had been largely missing before.  But, this formed an excluded subculture, at least early on—Southern whites, for example, blanched at the fact that different races worked together.  They formed their storefront churches and country-music clubs, but these did not dominate.  Rather, they were just part of a complex and non-integrated patchwork of boomtowns that surrounded San Francisco.  In these places, housing was short, work was long and hard.  Traditional patterns were disrupted: employees of the ship yards worked three shifts and so businesses started staying open twenty four hours per day.  Hell-raising and prostitution increased.  So did promiscuity in general, and divorce rates.  This was the permissiveness of which Anton LaVey spoke: in the face of death, with social structures straining, in areas of anonymity, it became easier to flout conventional rules.

There were other forces, too, that worked to create a more liberal atmosphere.  The  labor shortage helped Chinese workers break out of the China Town Ghetto.   Corporate welfare also encouraged good health care, and integrated working environments.

At the center of all this activity was San Francisco.  The City won a lot of defense spending and continued to grow, but in comparison to the rest of California actually lost power: between 1939 and 1947, it lost 182 manufacturing jobs.  Still, there was enough there to make the City livable for lower white collar workers—city, county, and state government, financial institutions—as well as blue collar workers—about 1/5 of the jobs were still in manufacturing.

San Francisco was also redefining itself during the 1940s and 1950s as Baghdad by the Bay: A city of beauty and enchantment, a place for sophisticates.  (The Okies and residents of other cities were derided as hicks, although they usually were skilled workers from small towns, not farmers).  Upwardly mobile single women were lionized.  San Francisco was a town for good times: in 1950, there were 3000 restaurants, 1330 bars, 438 churches.

Although the public art scene in San Francisco was poor—the vital art was abstract expressionism, which remained avant-garde—the City had a definite aesthetic sense, which matched with the Fortean ideal.  Kenneth Starr distills it as “imagination transforms experience.”  Williams-Sonoma transformed the mundane act of cooking and eating into an art.  The bohemians and hips imagined the old places of San Francisco as full of mystery and beauty, while the more traditional powers wanted to redevelop by leveling the past and building big new modernist skyscrapers and freeways that killed the waterfront.  Lenny Bruce did stand-up here, mocking the pretensions and hypocrisy of Eisenhower’s America, just as the Forteans mocked the pretensions and hypocrisy of science.

In the later 1950s, while San Francisco in many ways retained its image as the Baghdad by the Bay, the demographic situation changed.  Many whites—including this evangelical group—moved to suburbs, making the interior of California conservative, leaving downtowns to impoverished blacks.  There were few jobs in these areas, which furthered the spiral of poverty.  As well, the separation of the races splintered formerly progressive causes such as labor organizing along racial lines.

The Cold War Campus: Historian Roger Lotchin makes the case that these changes can be subsumed into the more general process of the fortification of California.  Whether one wants to think of the Second World War as a Second Gold Rush as well, or not, his analysis still seems compelling. He argues that the huge amount of defense spending fundamentally shaped California.  The state had the wherewithal to undertake massive water projects, the building of freeways, and the creation of a world class university system.  People came to California—drawn by the promise of jobs and the California dream—and were able to settle into new suburbs made possible by defense spending and public works.  The three counties that did 90% of this defense business were San Diego, Los Angeles, and Santa Clara (which benefitted from the outmigration of manufacturing from San Francisco).  Thus, the state was dominated by science and engineering just at the time when a critique of science and technology was brewing among the Forteans.