On the Second Gold Rush

This is an interesting text on a transformative period in both the histories of the United States and of northern California. In it, Johnson argues that the expansion of the defense industry during World War II led to awe-some change in the East San Francisco Bay. While there were movements to California from other states in earlier decades—the two most well-known being the 1848 Gold Rush and the movement of “Okies” from the Great Plains during the Great Depression—this process accelerated to a dizzying pace throughout World War II.

This process was largely the responsibility of the federal government. Although the defense industry expanded virtually everywhere, from the city of Evansville in southern Indiana to the small towns of Connecticut, one-tenth of all federal expenditures of defense were put into California, accounting for nearly half of all of the personal income accumulated by those who lived there (and moved there). As a result, Americans from all over the country began to migrate their in order to experience the wealth that wartime (ironically) brought.

The bulk of these migrants came from the Great Plains—as they had in the age of the Okies—and from the black South, which fundamentally transformed the demographic landscape of the East Bay. While there were tensions between newcomers and “old-timers” throughout the war, white newcomers were able to “assimilate” into California society, finding homes in suburbs where they lived comfortably alongside those who had been there for decades. Black migrants, on the other hand, were heavily segregated and forced into housing projects and communities far outside the “mainstream” of the East Bay. While black migrants did benefit tremendously from their migration, it also had its limitations for them, and many of the old social structures that they had tried to escape began to re-emerge in northern California. Ultimately, this racial stratification would lead to much of the violence and riots of the 1960s, while the benefits of the defense industry would come to transform the region into the home of tech giants by the 1990s.

This is a good book, if one that lacks some of the narrow focus of other comparable texts. This is both a blessing and a weakness—at the end of the day, it allows me to contextualize some of the other things that I’ve previously read.

As an aside, I had no idea that both sides of the Bay were often considered different regions until the construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in 1936. It makes sense, but I had never fathomed it.