1942 Starr 2002

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 expelled 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 Californians 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 suspicion, then released. Beatings were frequent, as were frameups . . An [p. 99, 1943] impressive number of young Mexican men were 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 of the underground and underworld, having its origins in medieval Spain), gypsy, Ladino (Iberian-Hebrew), Mexican tough-guy talk, jive, Anglicized Spanish and Hispanic - cised English, together with 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 given to tatoos-crosses, mainly, surmounted by initials-which the Los Angeles 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-American 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 defendants" . . .

The Sleepy Lagoon Incident (Aug. 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 serviceable 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 serviceable 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 technology. 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 McWilliams 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 public 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 teachings 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), Kenny 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.

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 Kelyn Roberts 2017