American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  In most of the country, whites enforced, by law or custom, some degree of racial segregation in public spaces and institutions. The rules tended to be complex and often seemingly arbitrary. Colleges in the North (though not in the South) generally allowed blacks and whites to play football together, but the Big Ten had an unwritten rule barring African Americans from their basketball teams. In Chicago, movies and theaters generally were not segregated, but most hotels, bowling alleys, and taverns were, and neighborhoods tended to be strictly divided along racial lines. Most first-class hotels in Los Angeles and some in San Francisco refused to accommodate African Americans. Missouri segregated schools, theaters, hotels, and restaurants but not public transportation.

  The federal government joined state and local governments in enforcing racial separation and inequality. New Mexico and Arizona refused to pay benefits under the Social Security program to Indians who were blind, aged, or dependent children, with no federal repercussions. Federal housing programs permitted and in some cases encouraged segregation. In the District of Columbia, Washington National Airport and swimming pools were segregated. When in 1952 the district government proposed integrating sixteen black firemen into previously all-white firefighting brigades, Congress blocked the move.

  Most notoriously, the U.S. armed services remained almost completely segregated through the end of World War II. No racially mixed Army units fought in the war, though late in the conflict some African American infantry platoons were assigned to white companies. The Navy, which traditionally had allowed African Americans to serve only as mess men, placed a small number of black seamen in integrated crews, but by and large its fighting force remained all white. No African Americans served in the Marine Corps between 1798 and 1942, when they began entering the service in large numbers but were kept in segregated units. Racist thinking so permeated the military that the Army even segregated blood plasma according to the race of the donor.

  Racism respected no boundary between the public and the private. At the end of World War II, thirty of the forty-eight states had laws outlawing interracial marriage. Only in the Northeast, Midwest, Washington State, and New Mexico could such unions occur. Antimiscegenation laws targeted black-white marriages, but many states, especially in the West, banned marriages between Europeans and Asians too. A 1935 Maryland law established three population groups, “Malays,” whites, and blacks, and allowed persons only to marry within their group. Virginia entitled its 1924 antimiscegenation measure the “Racial Purity Act.” During the 1940s, federal courts repeatedly upheld such laws. Not until the 1960s did the Supreme Court deem antimiscegenation laws constitutionally impermissible.

  Though national in scope, racism played a far more determining role in the South than elsewhere, for reasons of history and social structure. African Americans constituted a far larger component of the workforce in the South than non–European Americans did anywhere else in the country. They were especially important in the agricultural sector, so central to southern society. The economic advantages for southern employers in maintaining a racial caste system far exceeded the gains to be had elsewhere. The sheer size of the southern African American population—just under half the population in Mississippi, over a third in South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and Georgia, and over a quarter in four more states—meant that under a system of equal rights African Americans would inevitably command more influence on political and social life in the region than in other parts of the nation, a situation the white elite, and most other whites too, worked hard to prevent.

  To maintain their system of racial domination, southern whites deployed law, custom, and physical terror. In most of the South, state or local laws explicitly required segregation in workplaces, which made it economically difficult or impossible for employers to maintain biracial workforces. South Carolina forbade black and white textile workers from working in the same room, using the same toilets or washrooms, or utilizing stairways, entrances, exits, or pay windows at the same time. Though employers and state regulations played the leading parts in employment discrimination, some unions in the South (and elsewhere) joined the effort by refusing to admit African Americans and pressing employers to refuse to hire them.

  Every detail of daily life had its racial rules. Mississippi law required separate accommodations for blacks and whites in railroad sleeping cars and waiting rooms, trolleys, hospitals, jails, and penitentiaries. Barbershops, beauty parlors, hotels, theaters, restaurants, bars, and billiard halls were strictly segregated by race in most of the South. John Gunther found purdah in India the only analogy that came to mind for the Mississippi practice of using a curtain to separate black and white sections of buses. Atlanta, he wrote, though considered one of the most racially liberal southern cities, “outghettoes anything I ever saw in a European ghetto, even in Warsaw.”

  In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws requiring separate accommodations for blacks and whites did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment if those accommodations were equal. In practice, though, separate accommodations in the South almost never were equal. Parks for whites had swimming pools, parks for blacks did not. Streets in white neighborhoods were paved, in black neighborhoods they were not. During the 1949–50 school year, Mississippi spent $123 per pupil on white schools but just $33 per pupil on black schools. In Atlanta, the over 100,000 black residents had the services of only one public high school.

  To back up law and custom, southern whites used terror to keep blacks economically and politically subordinate and socially deferential. During World War II, racial violence flared up all around the country, including a horrendous clash between whites and blacks in Detroit that left thirty-four dead, a wave of attacks by white sailors against Mexican Americans in Los Angeles (the so-called Zoot Suit Riots), and clashes between white and black soldiers at domestic training bases. But racial violence occurred in the South with a frequency, sadism, and social legitimacy unmatched elsewhere.

  Only in the South did lynching remain a routine practice in the first half of the twentieth century. It became less common in the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps because of the decline of cotton cultivation and the political economy around it, which used extralegal violence to maintain a docile workforce. But the immediate post–World War II years saw a new wave of southern racial violence, mostly directed against black veterans, whose wartime experiences made them less willing to accept established norms and daily indignities. Some of these incidents received national attention, like the blinding of Isaac Woodward, a recently discharged soldier being held in a South Carolina jail after a dispute with a white bus driver, and the murder by a Georgia mob of two black men and two black women.

  Most southern racist violence, though, received no publicity, nor resulted in any investigations or repercussions. To maintain or demonstrate their control over blacks, whites committed rapes, beatings, and arson, knowing that authorities would look the other way (or join in), and that in the very unlikely event that criminal charges would be brought, no jury would convict. Black parents schooled their children in behavior they hoped would insulate them from harm. Charles Gratton remembered that as a child in Birmingham, when his mother sent him to the store she would instruct him, “If you pass any white people on your way, you get off the sidewalk. Give them the sidewalk. . . . Don’t challenge white people.” But the capriciousness and unpredictability of white behavior toward blacks—one moment patronizing or friendly, the next brutal or vicious—made fear a constant presence.

  Some observers, at the time and afterward, saw World War II as a turning point for the South. Military service and war industry jobs drew millions of white and black southerners out of the region, disrupting social and economic arrangements, especially in the countryside. Many black veterans returned with a broader sense of possibility and a deeper determination to fight discrimination. As a result of his wartime experiences, which included a stint in Calcutt
a, Amzie Moore, a key postwar Mississippi black activist, became disabused of his belief that there must be something special about whites that gave them such privileged status, joining the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) even before his discharge. National moves against discrimination, such as the 1944 Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright, which declared it unconstitutional to categorically exclude nonwhites from voting in party primaries, convinced some that racism soon would lessen. Meanwhile, government investment in southern military facilities and war industry promoted urbanization and tighter integration of the region into the national economy. But while the war accelerated some long-term trends already at work—most importantly the diminishing importance of the cotton economy as the core of southern life—daily existence at the end of the conflict did not seem much different than before it. Southern society remained rural, poor, and segregated.

  The Southwest

  On its western side, the South melded into the West in a region that combined elements of both with its own distinct identity. Socially and politically, Oklahoma and Texas shared much with the other states of the South. But environmentally, they more resembled those Mountain states—Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada—with which they were often lumped together as the “Southwest,” sharing a rich mineral endowment and large areas of arid climate. Like the Southeast, the Southwest was more rural and less industrialized than the rest of the country, with a per capita income that exceeded the Southeast but lagged significantly behind other regions of the country.

  Extractive industries provided the main source of wealth in large sections of the Southwest. Copper mining dominated the economy in Arizona and loomed large in Montana and New Mexico. Colorado had significant metal and coal mining. Two-thirds of the uranium in the United States lay near the Four Corners where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado meet. In Texas, oil provided much of the wealth, power, and regional cultural identity.

  Coal remained the single most important source of energy in the United States through the 1940s, but petroleum surpassed it in 1950 and by the end of the next decade provided more than twice as much energy as coal. In the immediate post–World War II years, the vast majority of petroleum products consumed in the United States came from domestic output, with the country producing nearly two-thirds of the world’s oil (as well as a quarter of its coal). Roughly half the domestic production came from the Southwest, where immense petroleum fields had been discovered in the early twentieth century. Texas alone accounted for 37 percent of the total, and Oklahoma another 11 percent. Only California joined them in producing more than 10 percent of the national output. The oil companies and their owners, rich, powerful, and very conservative, gave a politically reactionary flavor to the areas they dominated, like Houston and Tulsa, and exerted great national influence on issues they deemed important to their well-being, such as federal regulation of the price of natural gas.

  Dry weather limited the agricultural possibilities in the Southwest. Much of the area could sustain, on an extended basis, at most the grazing of livestock. When, in the early twentieth century, high commodity prices and unusually wet weather led farmers to plow up the southern Plains to plant crops, they harvested disaster. In the early 1930s, a series of dry years resulted in dust storms, severe soil erosion, and economic collapse in what came to be called the Dust Bowl. This in turn led to a massive out-migration that continued through the war years. “From the south land and the drought land, / Come the wife and kids and me, / And this old world is a hard world, / For a dust bowl refugee,” sang Oklahoman Woody Guthrie in 1940, on his first commercial recording. By 1950, 23 percent of the people who had been born in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, or Missouri—nearly four million people—lived outside the region, with over a third settled in California.

  Irrigation held the promise to transform the region. Even before World War II, pumps provided some water for irrigation, with the windmills that drove them dotting the horizon. Irrigation allowed the value of the agricultural output of Arizona to surpass that of mining for the first time in 1944. After the war, the introduction of diesel-driven centrifugal pumps made irrigation possible on a far vaster scale. As cotton production in the Southeast declined, it rose in the Southwest and Far West. By 1949, more than half of the nation’s cotton crop was being grown in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, using irrigated land, mechanized equipment, and itinerant labor.

  During the 1940s, the Southwest also saw significant industrialization, much of it related to the war. Along the Gulf Coast, in Texas and Louisiana, the petrochemical industry rapidly expanded, in part to produce synthetic rubber once the Japanese cut off the supply of natural rubber from Southeast Asia. In contrast to the German chemical industry, which used coal-based products as its primary feedstock, the U.S. industry depended primarily on petroleum products. Texas saw the expansion of steel mills, shipyards, and ammunition plants as well. Huge factories in Tulsa and Dallas–Fort Worth poured out military aircraft. Phoenix, too, emerged as an aircraft center, as a host of military air bases built during the war drew aircraft manufacturers and parts suppliers to the area.

  By the end of World War II, the worst days of the Dust Bowl were behind the Southwest. But most of the region remained sparsely populated and undeveloped. Few envisioned that a half century later it would contain some of the fastest-growing areas of the United States.

  The West

  In the West, World War II had transformative effects so pervasive that both westerners and outside observers immediately perceived the conflict as a turning point in the history of the region. Some of the oldest continuous European settlements in the United States were in the West (predated only by St. Augustine, Florida, founded by the Spanish in 1565). But population and industry grew more slowly in the region than elsewhere in the country. In 1940, only 13.9 million people lived in the eleven western states, just over 10 percent of the national population and barely more residents than in New York State.

  In 1942 and 1943, the United States did the bulk of its fighting in the Pacific. Money flowed to the West on an epic scale to train and equip a fighting force for the war with Japan and for combat elsewhere. The military favored the region because of its proximity to the Pacific theater; its favorable climate, which made year-round outdoor activity possible; its abundant, cheap electricity, needed for the production of aluminum, plutonium, and other war materials; and the availability of huge, remote, thinly settled tracts, which made it possible to build and operate facilities, like the atomic research installations at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington, in relative secrecy.

  California, along with Texas, served as the most important troop training and staging area in the country. Bases popped up all over the state, some of staggering size. The Army, to prepare for the invasion of North Africa, set up a Desert Training Center in Southern California 180 miles long and ninety miles wide, roughly the size of Denmark. North of San Diego, the Marines took over a 122,798-acre ranch to establish Camp Pendleton. In San Francisco Bay, the Navy built the largest naval repair facility in the country, on Mare Island, and one of the largest airfields in the world, the Alameda Naval Air Station.

  Farther north, in the territory of Alaska, the military constructed bases at a furious rate after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese occupation, six months later, of the Aleutian island of Attu. By the end of the war, the Army and Navy had built some three hundred Alaskan facilities at a cost of $3 billion. The Alaska Highway, one of the largest and most expensive military construction projects of the war, provided the first overland connection between Alaska and the forty-eight states by cutting across northwestern Canada. Once upgraded by civilian contractors, it provided an important postwar link for commerce and tourism.

  Up and down the West Coast, the government made massive investments in industry and infrastructure to support the war effort. California alon
e got 10 percent of all wartime federal spending. Existing aircraft firms in Southern California and Seattle served as seed crystals for what became huge centers of warplane production. At its height, the Southern California aircraft industry employed 243,000 workers. By the end of the war, its value exceeded the prewar dollar value of all industry in Detroit. In the Seattle area, Boeing went from seventy-five hundred workers in 1940 to fifty thousand (nearly half women) in 1944. Shipbuilding similarly boomed. California shipyards, many thrown up almost overnight, employed well over a quarter of a million workers. Portland shipyards employed another 125,000. To support his huge West Coast shipbuilding operations, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser built the West Coast’s first integrated steel plant in Fontana, sixty miles east of Los Angeles; threw up new cities to house his workers, like Vanport City in Portland, with homes for nearly ten thousand families; and expanded the prepaid comprehensive medical program he had established for his employees before the war, renaming it Kaiser Permanente.

  The end of the war brought a temporary decline of western industry. Shipyards closed or consolidated. The airplane industry shrank radically. Women (not only in the West) left the industrial jobs that had opened up to them during the war to return to traditional, lower-paid women’s work or home life. In much of the region, extractive industries—mining, timber, agriculture—remained dominant. But the manufacturing decline proved short-lived, as the accelerated development of the West continued into the postwar years.

  The war opened the eyes of businessmen to the possibilities out west. While after the war the Portland defense industry rapidly diminished, many small factories making civilian goods opened up, taking advantage of the raw materials, cheap power, and good transportation that had made the city an attractive center for military production. The war left the West Coast with much-improved physical infrastructure, a more skilled workforce than in the prewar years, and a scientific community with greatly expanded capacity and international connections as a result of government spending. Technically sophisticated defense contractors, like the airplane companies in California and Seattle, applied expertise developed during the war to making civilian products, which helped tide them over until the Korean and Cold wars brought new waves of military spending.