jan 1, 1943 - Race riots in Detroit and L.A

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The war led to large-scale internal migration and changed both individual opportunities and the fate of whole regions. When men entered the armed services, their families often followed them to military bases or points of debarkation. Civilians moved to take high-paying defense jobs. About 15 million Americans changed residences during the war years, half of them moving to another state. One such migrant was Peggy Terry, who grew up in Paducah, Kentucky, worked in a shell-loading plant in nearby Viola, and then moved to a defense plant in Michigan. There, she recalled, “I met all those wonderful Polacks [Polish Americans]. They were the first people I’d ever known that were any different from me. A whole new world just opened up.”

EXAM TIP
Describe the causes and effects of migration from rural to urban areas in World War II.

As the center of defense production for the Pacific war, California received the largest inbound migration. The state welcomed 2.5 million new residents, growing by 35 percent during the war. “The Second Gold Rush Hits the West,” announced the San Francisco Chronicle in 1943. One-tenth of all federal dollars spent on the war flowed into California, and the state’s factories turned out one-sixth of all war materials. People went where the defense jobs were: to Los Angeles, San Diego, and cities around San Francisco Bay. Some towns grew practically overnight. Within two years of the opening of the Kaiser Corporation shipyard in Richmond, California, the town’s population quadrupled. Other states with major industrial centers — notably New York, Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio — also attracted migrants and federal money on a large scale.

SKILLS & PROCESSES
CAUSATION

What effects did wartime migration have on the United States?

The growth of war industries accelerated patterns of rural-urban migration. Cities grew dramatically, as factories, shipyards, and other defense plants drew millions of citizens away from small towns and rural areas. Mobility, coupled with distance from home, loosened the authority of traditional institutions and made wartime cities vibrant and lively. Around-the-clock work shifts kept people on the streets night and day, and bars, jazz clubs, dance halls, and movie theaters thrived on the ready cash of war workers.

Racial Conflict
Migration and more fluid social boundaries meant that people of different races and ethnicities mixed in the booming cities. Over one million African Americans left the rural South for California, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — a continuation of the Great Migration earlier in the century (see “Racial Backlash” and “The Harlem Renaissance” in Chapter 21). In another echo of the World War I era, blacks and whites competed for jobs and housing, leading to racial conflicts in more than a hundred cities in 1943. Detroit saw the worst violence. In June 1943, a riot incited by southern-born whites and Polish Americans against African Americans left thirty-four people dead and hundreds injured.

Racial conflict arose in the West as well. In Los Angeles, Mexican American pachucos (male youths) often dressed in “zoot suits” — a rebellious fashion defined by broad-brimmed felt hats, thigh-length jackets with wide lapels and padded shoulders, pegged trousers, and clunky shoes. Pachucas (young women) favored long coats, huarache sandals, and pompadour hairdos. Working-class teenagers like these in Los Angeles and elsewhere took to the zoot-suit style to symbolize their rejection of middle-class values. To many adults, the zoot suit symbolized only juvenile delinquency. In June 1943, rumors swirled around Los Angeles that a pachuco gang had beaten an Anglo (white) sailor, setting off a four-day melee known as the “ zoot-suit riots.” Hundreds of Anglo servicemen roamed Mexican American neighborhoods and attacked zoot-suiters, taking special pleasure in slashing their pegged pants. In a stinging display of bias, Los Angeles police officers arrested only Mexican American youth in the wake of the unrest, and the city council passed an ordinance outlawing the wearing of the zoot suit.

A black-and-white photo shows a group of young men, arrested for wearing zoot suits, posing from a jail cell.
Zoot-Suit Youth in Los Angeles

During four days of rioting in June 1943, servicemen in Los Angeles attacked young Latino men wearing distinctive zoot suits, which were widely viewed as emblems of gang membership and a delinquent youth culture. The police response was to arrest scores of zoot-suiters. Here, a group of arrested youth pose for a photographer in a jail cell. What became known as the “zoot-suit riots” were emblematic of racial tensions on the home front, even as the United States fought a war against fascism abroad.


Gay and Lesbian Communities
Wartime migration to urban centers also enabled gay and lesbian Americans to form communities. Religious and social conventions had long treated homosexuality as taboo, and most gay men and lesbians remained closeted to avoid discrimination. During the war, however, big cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and even smaller regional hubs such as Kansas City, Buffalo, and Dallas developed vibrant gay neighborhoods, sustained by a sudden influx of migrants and the relatively open wartime atmosphere. These communities would become centers of the gay rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s (see “Stonewall and Gay Liberation” in Chapter 27).

The military tried to screen out homosexuals but had limited success. The wartime armed forces were home to an extensive gay culture, which was often more apparent than that in civilian life. In the last twenty years, historians have documented thriving communities of gay and lesbian soldiers in the World War II military. Some “came out under fire,” as one historian put it, but most kept their sexuality hidden from authorities who viewed homosexuality as a psychological disorder that was grounds for dishonorable discharge.

A black-and-white photo of folk singer Pete Seeger performing at a labor canteen in Washington, D C, amidst a group of people.
New Urban Communities for Laborers

Folk singer Pete Seeger performs at the opening of the Washington, D.C., labor canteen in 1944, sponsored by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Wartime migration brought people from across the country to centers of industry and military operations, opening new possibilities for urban communities.

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