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By Betty Reid Soskin
Cultural Resources Assistant, National Park Service
Rosie the
Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park
In October of the year
2000 and under the leadership of Richmond city council member, Donna Powers,
and the Bay Area’s Rep. George Miller, Congress legislated Rosie the
Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park at the City of
Richmond as the best place in the nation from which to tell the story of the
greatest work force mobilization in the history of the country; that of the
World War II Home Front war effort.
It is the mission of the
National Park Service (NPS) to collect and tell the nation’s stories through
the memories of its people, existing structures, and sites of significance.
Nowhere in the country are there more still-standing historic sites through
which this could be done – but only because Richmond had not yet begun to
demolish them for various redevelopment plans over the decades following
World War II. That would hold true for the entire Bay Area where many home
front related structures may still exist but are threatened by a fading
collective memory. Many residents currently living throughout the Greater
Bay Area can date their family’s arrival to a mere 67 years ago – during
World War II. That past has not yet mellowed into “history.”
The original intent of
the legislation was to honor the Rosies, the newly emancipated women of the
home front who replaced men in battle; a story worthy of the telling,
surely. However as with many historic sites in the National Park System,
once one begins to explore that history in any depth it becomes clear that
there were equally compelling multiple stories, often conflicting, but
nonetheless each critical to the building of a baseline against which to
measure the succeeding 20 years of unprecedented social change in a nation
undergoing monumental adjustments that would resonate out into the world and
into the present.
Did Port Chicago explosion presage the Civil Rights Movement?
It can be argued that the modern Civil Rights Movement had its beginnings in
the Greater Bay Area dating from the tragic explosion at Port Chicago and
the resulting highly controversial mutiny trials (see: “The Port Chicago
Mutiny” Young Historians Project by Brett Cummings in the California
Historian, Volume 42, Number 1, Fall 1995).
One can trace the
movement from the Naval Weapons Station in Concord on that fateful day of
July 17, 1944 through to the Free Speech Movement that originated on the
University of California Berkeley campus; to the Oakland Induction Center
demonstrations; to Freedom Summer 1964 in Mississippi with students from the
Bay Area leading the way; to the creation of the Black Panther Party by the
children of wartime migrant workers which signaled a new nationalist
attitude among African Americans; to the people’s March from Montgomery to
Selma; to the Montgomery bus boycott, and beyond. The Bay Area was the
birthplace of the history that altered and dominated the direction of change
in that prophetic era which challenged existing national civil rights and
civil liberties policies for all time.
Social change was
happening far too rapidly for anyone to process; too fast to absorb and grow
from; too far-seeking to encompass or understand; too traumatic to retain
for our children.
Only now, given the
scattered sites upon which they happened and the necessary governmental
support through the NPS is there the scholarship, the time, the staff and
the beginnings of an appreciation of how far we’ve come after decades of a
painful national struggle. We are finally mature enough as a larger
community to take the time to remember, appreciate and document that truly
astounding human journey.
The Greater Bay Area is
the palette upon which we can paint the story of those times for the entire
nation. We’re only now mature enough as a collective of California migrants
from elsewhere on the continent and the world – to tell the uniquely
American Story of the greatest wartime home front mobilization in history
and the extent to which it helped to “form a more perfect union.”
Phenomenal home front mobilization
saved nation and world
According to Kaiser Permanente historians, it took seven workers at home to
support each fighting man on the battlefield. The great PBS documentary
filmmaker, Ken Burns, brought to us the story of WWII – the fighting war. No
one has yet told the story of the phenomenal mobilization of ordinary
Americans of all races, religions, abilities and disabilities, ethnicities –
brought together by the common need to survive a Great Depression combined
with a fear of world Fascist domination and the rising sense of patriotism –
to build and maintain the machines, weapons, and tools of war.
That wartime victory was
largely won here in this place (Richmond) that so many of the recently
arriving Californians now called home. Few can be found today who’ve carried
with them any sense of having contributed so much toward the saving of the
nation and the world. The unspoken sense of sharing and sacrifice was so
equal in the general population – despite racial and cultural differences –
that few have lived into our time in full appreciation of that reality.
The City of Richmond as
the site of the National Historical Park is important to the narrative
because it allows us to tell that national story in microcosm. In 1941 its
population consisted of 23,000 people – a working-class community dominated
by Standard Oil, Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe railroads and the Pullman
Company, a town that was incorporated in 1905.
Within 18 months after
the Japanese aerial attack at Pearl Harbor, Richmond’s population had grown
to 128,000. In contrast, in the period immediately after the closing of the
shipyards – jobs were reduced from 98,000 working around the clock on three
shifts – to a mere 10,000. Without a hint of how and when the war would come
to an end, there was no preparation for how to deal with the disruption of
human lives that ensued. Sixty-seven years later, the city’s population
which had contracted so drastically with the war’s end – is again counted at
102,000. This expansion and abrupt contraction then slow re-expansion barely
hints at the underlying human story of transplanted lives of many thousands
of ordinary Americans who had little sense of the heroism that would be
required in order to live through it unscathed. It is still uncertain as to
whether we actually did so. The manner in which that population survived is
what creates the dramatic narrative that forms the premise upon which the
park was established.
It should not be
difficult to see behind those dramatic figures the chaos brought by such
life-changing demographic shifts. That “change” was necessarily accelerated
by virtue of the speed and urgency of the times has become embedded in the
ethos of place and continues to prevail in the political and social cauldron
established here by the war years. The San Francisco Bay Area continues to
be the catalyst for change for the state and the nation – often
controversial but always acting as pathfinder for a country still
characterized as a world power by its youth and brashness.
Bay Area becomes the catalyst for continuing and irreversible social
change
The cauldron created in the war years to serve the cause of industry was
ignited in large part by the worker-population being brought together to
share workplace, hastily built temporary HUD wartime housing, school
facilities, hospital care, without the benefit of any of today’s
“sensitivity” training programs. The ships and the planes had to be built
immediately and the world had to be saved “cold turkey,” and in the process
– new social patterns, tolerances and behaviors became a part of the
on-the-job-training that had to be lived through with black and white
Americans in this living laboratory – workers who would not be sharing
drinking fountains, schools, public transportation, hospitals for another 20
years in their places of origin.
Just how successfully we survived that process can still be seen in the
forward-thinking that has endured in the Bay Area over the ensuing
half-century. Coping mechanisms developed by necessity through those hard
years of adjustment set behavioral social patterns that continue to place
California and the Bay Area as leading change-agents for the nation as we
continue to adapt to a faster-transforming world than that experienced by
the rest of the country.
By bringing together in
this place the essential elements, the stirrings that would have eventually
risen to the surface – were suddenly thrust forward fueled by a new sense of
urgency born of the dislocation and eventual abandonment of many thousands
of black and white American families thrown into a turbulent period of
transition at war’s end. That this was done without reference to equal
access to the human needs for jobs and shelter needed to sustain daily life
added to the urgency. The changes that might have taken many decades to
accomplish were suddenly fast-tracked by circumstance and new black
expectations. Black hope rose to collide with white privilege and the demand
for social change was now inescapable – and once begun – was insistent and
irrevocable; giving birth to the modern Civil Rights Movement.
Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Park charged with
interpreting that history
It will be the work of Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National
Historical Park to recapture the spirit of the times through the collection
of oral histories and related artifacts; through applying newly developed
technologies to open doors to information long dormant and now threatened by
advancing time that has taken the lives of so many of those who created that
history at the time.
The macro involved the
entire Bay Area and the State of California which saw an enormous growth in
population over a relatively short time period – and has continued to grow
exponentially ever since. The national story of the home front mobilization
involves a variety of industries; aircraft construction, ammunition and
armaments, transportation systems, textile industries, massive warehousing
and shipping operations to service the Pacific battlefront, and a myriad of
enterprises that provided all of the elements needed until peace came in
1945.
The local narrative is
dominated by shipbuilding, and it is through Kaiser Permanente’s
still-standing historic sites (along with other service, housing, and
educational facilities in the City of Richmond) that those stories can best
be told as we work to incorporate the national stories as the home front
story evolves. But the story is not limited to Kaiser Permanente but will
provide archives and museum space for all of the home front industries
scattered throughout the Greater Bay Area and the nation.
The stories
• There is the story of Rosie the Riveter, the women who left hearth and
home to replace the men on the battlefields. Many entered the workplace for
the first time in history. They not only built the ships, tanks and planes
but also ferried planes to the war fronts. They picked up the instruments
and “manned” symphony orchestras. They became the designers and architects.
They dispatched trucks and trains and “manned” the front offices of wartime
industries. They learned new skills far beyond their imaginations, prior
experience or their own expectations.
• But Rosie’s was
essentially a white woman’s story. Black women shared a far different
history of the times. Before 1941 African American women had but two choices
in employment – in agriculture and as domestic service workers. Racial
bigotry prevented their entry into the workforce in any significant numbers
until late in 1944 – another untold story. For several years after massive
recruitment of unskilled white female workers for the war industries, black
women began to replace white women who were entering the workforce and
employers began to accept black women at those lower level jobs being
vacated by white women who were moving into higher-paying war-related work.
• There is the story of
Henry J. Kaiser the Industrialist; a bold man with an eighth grade
education; a cement contractor who had never built a ship yet believed that
– by adapting to shipbuilding the pre-fabrication techniques of the auto
industry pioneered by Henry Ford – he could drastically reduce the time
required for ship construction. But first it was necessary to build the
shipyards in order to build the ships. This he did for the British under
Lend Lease government contracts prior to World War II. Kaiser flattened the
nearby hills and filled in the bayside wetlands in order to make his vision
of creating four local shipyards possible.
After the attack by the
Japanese at Pearl Harbor on December 7th of 1941 – Kaiser sent his
recruiters out to the five southern states of Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma,
Mississippi, and Arkansas, to bring back an unskilled crew of countless
workers who would become the builders of 747 ships over the next three years
and eight months. His plan was to train tens of thousands of
depression-scarred unskilled workers to do very small parts of very large
jobs. He needed hands; many hands, attached to as many assorted live bodies
as he could recruit. They answered the call by boarding trains, trucks, box
cars; packed into whatever mode of travel they could find. And they stayed
on.
There is the story of Black migration across the country, families with new
hope for a brighter future for their children. The home front defense work
opportunities would speed up the migration already in motion.
• Having discovered the
west coast earlier, many black Pullman porters had been bringing their
families out of the south in a slow but steady stream throughout the
twenties and thirties in order to escape white southern hostility and the
demeaning culture of Jim Crow. That movement was accelerated by the need for
defense workers. Many railroad workers continued as a part of the massive
wartime movement of people from South to North and West to serve in the war
effort, and many of the in place black railroad families were folded into
the shipyard workforce along with the more recent black migrant arrivals.
• There is the horrific
and shameful story of the Japanese-American relocation and internment that
involved the forced removal from Bay Area communities of 140,000 people,
70,000 of whom were American citizens.
• There is the story of
the Double V campaign waged by the national Negro press and the NAACP in
order to try to take advantage of the times in order to advance the cause of
democracy by confronting unfair and discriminatory practices in employment,
education and housing for people of color.
• There is the story of
early childhood education. In order to accommodate the needs of the women
brought into the workplace, Kaiser Permanente and the Maritime Service
created 11 child development centers that were scattered throughout
Richmond. These were not child care but places of learning. Under the
leadership of a UC Berkeley professor, those centers were the progenitors of
today’s Head Start, the most forward-thinking program in the history of
early childhood education.
Except in rare cases,
such services were available only to white families. Black families brought
with them from the south a long tradition of collective parenting that
served them well as they adjusted to the new and unpredictable living
environment in a wartime economy. Black expectations were modest at the time
but grew with time and exposure to a less limited version of the American
Dream which seemed possible in the chaotic New West. This was not only the
edge of the continent but also was proving now to be the absolute cutting
edge of social change.
Another important part of
the story of those times is embedded in the fact that many who settled in
California during and after the war, brought with them the belief that this
was a place where freedoms involved more than mere aspiration. The growing
belief beyond the state’s borders – in the Art of the Possible – may have
given weight to the self-fulfilling prophecy that the San Francisco Bay Area
might become the place where change was not only tolerated but embraced.
That, too, was a product of the great mobilization of the era. The testing
of the concept of Democracy that became the outer expression of our inner
hope that out of chaos might come the opportunity to create a more
enlightened world and that ordinary people could bring this about. That
legacy persists and never more clearly than in the cities of San Francisco
and the East Bay communities that rim the Bay.
There is the story of
affordable health care not born of altruism, but of the belief on the part
of Henry Kaiser’s great collaborator, Dr. Sidney Garfield, that productivity
was of necessity tied to health and safety. Together they created the model
for Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) that are still actively serving
the working class and many others today, nationwide, by bringing affordable
healthcare to millions while serving well the medical professional community
upon which it rests.
Bay Area became nerve center for war in Pacific
It should be remembered that the Greater Bay Area was the nerve center for
the war in the Pacific. During the first two years of the war, the Presidio
of San Francisco was the headquarters and command center for the Army in the
Pacific. The City of Richmond was the nerve center of the home front
activities nerve center.
One could go on
interminably but this should suffice. It should be obvious to even the most
casual observer that the Bay Area was then and still is the pivotal place in
the nation where monumental industrial, educational and social change
started on the path that is still being emulated across the nation. It was
during those years that we became the trendsetters for social change for the
nation and the world, a role we still play – though until now we’ve been too
busy adjusting to changes we’ve never really processed well enough to fully
appreciate.
What hasn’t yet been
stated is that the needs of that monumental mobilization for the purposes of
shipbuilding and the recruitment patterns of the Kaiser Permanente
Corporation inadvertently created the transference of the entire system of
racial segregation from five southern states – bringing together into the
Greater Bay Area white and black folks still marked by the lasting effects
of a Civil War mentality and who shared little history in common, except
that marked by pain and misery – and whose expectations for a continuing
system of white privilege over black subjugation would be in conflict for at
least another 20 years.
It was here in the San
Francisco Bay Area, then, that the fire under the cauldron was lit that
would begin the struggles that would spread to the rest of the country
during the 1960s and beyond. It is that history that we are late in
processing. That spirit of change washed across the continent back to the
southern places from whence it came, this time supported by a younger
generation of student leaders bent upon making the dream of true democracy
more than purely symbolic – which then gave rise to unprecedented unrest on
college campuses throughout the country.
Can all that be
attributed to the great mobilization of World War II? Unquestionably.
Sites that commemorate history
This partial list of sites being identified and (hopefully) rehabilitated or
restored for visitation and the learning of that history for a new
generation and those to follow are in scattered sites throughout the greater
Bay Area. In Richmond the National Park Service is working to raise
awareness for historic preservation within the community and beyond. The
story is far greater than one city (now declared a national park with
scattered sites). The more complex story reaches beyond the city of Richmond
and encompasses the greater Bay Area. Some historic sites under study:
• Oak Knoll Naval
Hospital in the Oakland Hills
• Letterman Hospital, at the Presidio, San Francisco
• Hunter’s Point Shipyard in South San Francisco
• MarinShip in Sausalito, shipyard operated by
Bechtel Corp.
• Marin City Housing Development
• The Oakland Army Base
• Southern Pacific Railway Station (16th & Wood
in Oakland)
• Moore Dry Dock
• The Alameda Naval Air Station
• The Vallejo Shipyards
• Benicia
• The Kaiser Permanente Field Hospital
(Cutting Boulevard)
• Kaiser Warehouse at Shipyard 3
• Kaiser Paint Shop and Riggers Loft at Shipyard 3
• The Maritime Child Development Centers (Richmond)
• Nystrom Wartime HUD housing and school
• Atchison Village Maritime Housing Co-operative
• The SS Red Oak Victory – moored at Richmond Shipyard III
• The Oakland Induction Center (Clay Street in
Downtown Oakland)
• Cordonices Village – Albany
• Camp Ashby for black MP’s – at the foot of Ashby Avenue in Berkeley
• The Leamington Hotel, the wartime administrative offices for the US
Air Force – Oakland
• Port Chicago Naval Weapons Station
• Treasure Island Naval Station
• The International Hotel (for black porters, only) on South Street in
Richmond
• Neighborhood House of North Richmond
• The Buchanan Street USO (for blacks only)
• The Bayview Opera House at Hunter’s Point
• The Buchanan Street USO (blacks only)
• Sweet’s Ballroom on Oakland’s Grand Avenue
• Kaiser’s Shipyard III
• Lawrence Laboratories in Berkeley and Livermore
• The San Francisco Opera House; the site that hosted the birth of the
United Nations
This is a partial list. Most of these sites have been long since demolished,
but many still remain though perhaps are no longer recognizable. Some can be
marked by plaques of remembrance. Some can be restored to serve a new
generation of purposes. Some stand abandoned. Many sites have not yet been
identified, but many who lived that history are still with us and can be
helpful in this process. Their help will be needed as we work toward the
preservation and restoration of that era.
Why is this history so critical to our times?
The reasons lie in the fact that in the immediate future we will again be
called upon to mobilize in order to respond to a new unanticipated threat –
that of precipitous climate change and the urgent need to create and develop
alternative sources of energy. There is currently much talk of the need to
create the new Green-based economy that will guide the future by moving us
out of an economy based upon vanishing fossil fuels. The models for
achieving that exist in memory. We’ve done it all before. Most of those now
living in the Greater Bay Area are the descendants of the extraordinary
ordinary men and women who answered the call and led the nation and the
world into the most productive period in the nation’s history.
• The Greater Bay Area rose to the challenge of building ships faster than
the enemy could sink them and thereby brought victory to the nation and the
world in the war against Fascist world domination.
• Working in three
round-the-clock shifts seven days-a-week in Kaiser Shipyard 3 with a
workforce of 93,000 ordinary folk in constant motion we accomplished the
astonishing feat of building 747 ships in only three years and eight months
which meant launching a ship a day.
• The industry named 17
newly built ships for prominent African Americans; five for historically
black colleges (Xavier, Talladega, Tuskegee, Lane, Fisk), facts long
forgotten and potentially empowering information for disaffected youngsters
of color.
• Much of this was
accomplished against a background of race riots and social turbulence but we
managed to work through all of it to the place where we are today – a
multicultural multiracial region at relative peace with itself and the
world. The San Francisco Bay Area still can be looked to for leadership in
the reach toward racial and cultural diversity and for defining social
trends.
• We broke through
important sociological barriers and – over the tumultuous ensuing 20 years –
played a strong lead in bringing about the formal end to racial segregation
with legislation that set the stage for full racial equality. That work,
however, remains a work in progress.
The models for a future that will be shaped by our need for alternative
energy sources are embedded in that history. The Greater Bay Area played a
key role in the creation of that model. We can renew our dedication to the
continuing re-creation of the Democracy that must be nurtured with each
generation if our system of governance is to survive our times.
It is important to our
nation’s future as world leader that we take the time to re-visit an era
that we moved through too quickly to learn its lessons (see:
www.YouTube.com – Lost Conversations).
The National Park Service is the institution that the nation created to
honor and sustain its history and wild places for succeeding generations. We
must re-visit those years while providing ourselves with the tools, the
sites, the preservation and maintenance of a history that must be held in
memory so that we don’t continue to repeat a past filled with critical
lessons unheeded.
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