American Babylon

Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland

Robert O. Self

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781400844173
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar Oakland As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and home-owner politics. Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension. American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership.Using the East Bay as a starting point, Robert Self gives us a richly detailed, engaging narrative that uniquely integrates the most important racial liberation struggles and class politics of postwar America.

Part One _____________________________

URBAN AND SUBURBAN POLITICS AND THE CALIFORNIA DREAM, 1945 – 1964

1 _____________________________

Industrial Garden

WHEN THE CENTURY’S most violent and bloody war came to a close in 1945, for whom in the United States had victory been secured? Americans, the Saturday Evening Post wrote, “are fighting for a glorious future of mass employment, mass production, and mass distribution and ownership.” A coming abundance was predicted, too, by Eric Johnston, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who wrote in America Unlimited of a “utopia of production” in the postwar age. Like many American opinion-makers, the Post and Johnston imagined an ascendant white American middle class unprecedented in size, wealth, and security—in their eyes the war’s beneficiaries. For organized labor’s part, wartime cooperation in the tripartite state had won trade unions unparalleled access to national levers of power and convinced many that thicker bread and fatter butter could be had within the new postwar order. Labor’s enemies remained legion, however, many lying in wait for the end of patriotic cooperation and the resumption of political and shopfloor struggles. For African Americans, however, an economy of abundance that excluded them seemed poor reward for wartime patriotism and sacrifice. The Double-V campaign—victory over racism abroad and at home—had come to symbolize the fusion of national duty and criticism of national hypocrisy within 1940s black politics. The war changed the nation forever, but it left unresolved, indeed it raised with renewed imperative, questions of class power and racial equality in the American polity.¹

As postwar celebration and peacetime reconversion proceeded amid nationalist cheers and civic ceremony in California’s East Bay in late 1945, three groups who had gained by the war—business, labor, and African Americans—pulled the city of Oakland in divergent directions. The war’s economic bounty had empowered the city’s business leaders, encouraging them to pursue plans for aggressive metropolitan economic growth. The war had also emboldened Oakland’s strong trade unions, united by the Alameda County Central Labor Council, to set standards for local wages and to extend unionization to new workers as wartime wage and price controls lapsed. Swelled to three times its prewar size by migration, the city’s African American community sought economic and political power and an end to the region’s notorious Jim Crow employment and housing practices. Though by no means entirely unified or undifferentiated, each of these three groups hoped above all to fashion a postwar political culture on its own terms that could remake Oakland and translate its conception of progress into concrete material gains. Calls for wartime unity during the first five years of the decade had neither reconciled competing class interests nor bridged racial divides, in Oakland or the nation.

In 1945 Oakland’s business leaders embraced a vast program of vigorous regional economic development that was supposed to harmonize class relations and prevent a return of economic depression. It was the class vision of a regional commercial and property-owning elite. Oakland’s trade union movement, led by American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions, similarly favored growth but did not intend to give business and industrial capital a free hand. In 1946 unions staged a citywide general strike to defend their power to control local wages and working conditions. Neither business nor labor in the main spoke to the concerns of African Americans. Trade union and NAACP leaders within Oakland’s African American community sought to end racial discrimination in East Bay labor markets, a barrier to equality for which the city’s businesses and white unions were responsible. In 1945, just as the war was ending, African American activists brought the city’s bus and rail transportation company, the Key System, before the federal government’s wartime Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). Civil rights advocates hoped that the Key System suit would act as a wedge to open the entire local economy to black workers.

Each effort drew on distinct economic and political priorities in an attempt to shape the relationship between markets and place. Each constituted a different assumption about progress, the appropriate mean between the social production of the economy and the lives and ambitions of people. Whether or not Oakland would become the center of a thriving industrial metropolis attractive to investors, the city’s unions would control the local labor market, and African Americans would succeed in opening that labor market depended on the political, ideological, and imaginative production of place. Answers would emerge slowly over several decades of contention. Nevertheless, in these efforts of 1945 and 1946 are powerful glimpses that reveal the dilemmas of postwar America to be less about abstract issues of rights than about the entangled demands of class and racial identity, state and municipal power, and capital accumulation expressed in concrete relationships among people, markets, and local places like Oakland, its neighborhoods, and outlying suburbs. They were about the desire to rationalize space for social ends.²

This chapter sets the stage for our exploration of urban social movements, politics, and place by introducing midcentury Oakland and the East Bay from the perspectives of the downtown business community, organized labor, and African American neighborhoods. Oakland embodied the combination of human energy, political convulsion, and economic expansion that made American cities in the 1940s epilogues to one era and prologues to another. The epic class battles that had so marked cities in the first four decades of the century had ebbed, and the liberal modernism of the New Deal state seemed to promise an end to the urban tensions of the 1930s. The unprecedented prosperity that attended the war, and the centrality of cities to wartime production, represented the consolidation of urban manufacturing power embodied in American industrial cities since the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the war had interrupted, but not altered, the decline of urban America that had begun in 1929, the end of a long period of central-city vitality dating to the late nineteenth century. Other forces marked beginnings. The war brought millions of rural Americans from across the country—the largest share, both African American and white, from the South—to northern and Pacific Coast cities. These cities would occupy a pivotal place in the postwar national debate over the meaning of race. That debate would take place within an urban-suburban system undergoing epochal shifts and facing unprecedented strain. As industrial decentralization accelerated, as national capital investment and population shifted to the West, especially California, Oakland in 1945 stood at the axis of the transformative forces swirling across the American urban landscape.³

Envisioning a Metropolitan Oakland

In the decade between 1945 and 1955, the Oakland Chamber of Commerce married boosterism to regional planning in its Metropolitan Oakland Area Program (MOAP). No mere “second city” in San Francisco’s shadow, Oakland was to become the center of a dynamic metropolis. The MOAP outlined a set of relationships and social harmonies thought to ensure postwar economic development: suburban industry tied to downtown Oakland and the port, universal homeownership in both city and suburb, an absence of industrial strife, and booming West Coast markets. Oakland’s business establishment, operating through the activist Chamber of Commerce, envisioned and then set out to create, both physically and imaginatively, a metropolitan Oakland. Inaugurated in 1935, the campaign borrowed from California iconography but reconfigured booster images around manufacturing rather than earlier promotional incarnations like agriculture, real estate, and tourism. Neighborhoods and factories, workers and managers, homes and highways were to coexist in a delicate balance that brought the machine (industry) into harmony with the garden (single-family home). It was a model of postwar urban/suburban imagining, with deep roots in nineteenth-century American culture: the industrial garden. By the late 1940s, the MOAP was the major promotional vehicle for the industrialization of the East Bay corridor with huge annual national advertising campaigns and a Washington, DC, lobbyist. Through the MOAP the city would campaign relentlessly for the attention of American capital.⁴

Much more than a booster dreamscape, the MOAP represented the response of Oakland’s business class to an acute crisis in downtown as a site of capital accumulation. On Oakland’s major commercial and retail thoroughfares along Broadway as well as Washington, Franklin, and Webster streets in the central business district, property values declined more than 50 percent between 1925 and 1955. Anxiety about the profitability of downtowns was shared by local business leaders across the nation. American downtowns as a whole reached their pinnacle of profitability in the first decades of the twentieth century but had been in steep decline since. Decentralization, especially the growth of chain stores and the flourishing of business districts in outlying areas, took firm hold of metropolitan regions throughout the country, inaugurating a decades-long central-city crisis that would build across midcentury until the much-heralded “death” of downtowns in the 1960s. Downtown merchants and their political spokespeople often behaved like civic patriarchs, but they were not all-powerful. Indeed, by the 1940s they were a class with sinking fortunes, struggling to maintain the profitability of their property holdings in a business climate that no longer favored central business districts. The sharp decline in downtown’s generation of both private revenue (profit) and public revenue (taxes) called for a response—the MOAP.⁵

Oakland’s experience with industrial expansion in the interwar years had convinced postwar business and civic leaders that if East Bay cities were to be engines of growth, they must be sold to Midwest and East Coast owners of capital. Oakland had accumulated much of its modest industry during the 1910s and 1920s. In those decades, city boosters, the Chamber of Commerce, investors, and local entrepreneurs assembled in Oakland and the nearby suburban communities of Berkeley, Richmond, Emeryville, and San Leandro an industrial base of small factories, machine shops, and manufacturing facilities, most of them branch plants of eastern companies. Early on, chemical, electrical, wood, and paint products, and the manufacture of machine tools, predominated, along with one of the nation’s largest canning and packing industries, which processed fruits from Oakland’s agricultural hinterland in southern Alameda County and the Central Valley. After World War I the East Bay acquired numerous automobile and truck manufacturing plants, including Chevrolet and General Motors, the Durant Motor Company, Willys, Faegeol, and Caterpillar Tractor (boosters dubbed Oakland “the Detroit of the West,” even as promoters in Southern California claimed the same title), as well as a major shipbuilding and ship-repair firm, the Moore Dry Dock Company. The city’s port facilities and two transcontinental railroads made Oakland a major center of shipping and transportation as well.⁶

World War II reshaped the economic landscape of the region and influenced postwar MOAP strategies. A major center of shipbuilding, troop transportation, food processing, and naval supply during the global conflict, Oakland and the East Bay occupied a crucial niche in California’s industrial “arsenal of democracy.” The war stimulated and gave contour to the local economy in three critical ways. First, shipbuilding in Oakland, Richmond, Alameda, and Vallejo triggered growth in Oakland’s numerous subsidiary industries, adding tens of millions of dollars annually to the economy. The Pacific Coast led the nation in shipbuilding by 1943, with the East Bay’s share a phenomenal 35 percent. Second, the “gold rush” of federal contracts throughout the East Bay corridor, from Vallejo and Richmond south to San Leandro and Alameda, deepened an industrial metropolitanization already underway. Third, the wartime jobs boom brought half a million migrants to the Bay Area during the first half of the 1940s, an enormous expansion of the regional consumer market. Since the 1920s the Oakland Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Property Owners Association, and the Oakland Real Estate Association had dreamed of a “greater East Bay” economy with Oakland at its center. World War II seemed to make that dream a reality. But Oakland’s cautious business class did not take postwar prosperity for granted. Building a prosperous industrial landscape in the postwar decades, they believed, required winning intense competition with other Bay Area and California cities for markets, industries, and investment. Metropolitanization through the MOAP was their formula: an economically integrated set of cities to the north and south of Oakland, a multicentered expanse of industry and residence held together by highways, rail lines, and the centrifugal force of Oakland’s downtown. It was suburbanization recast as urbanization.⁷

A tight-knit, though fractious, coalition oversaw postwar economic development and planning in Oakland. The publisher of the Oakland Tribune and longtime Chamber of Commerce torchbearer, Joseph R. Knowland, led this group. Knowland was one of a handful of powerful Republican Party stalwarts in the state’s major cities who oversaw local civic affairs with paternalist conservatism. Like Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, railroad heir and banker William Henry Crocker, and San Francisco Chronicle publisher Michael De Young, Knowland established himself in politics and civic promotion by leveraging the power of the newspaper in an era when the printed word dominated political campaigns and city boosting. But Knowland did not control Oakland’s business and industrial establishment single-handedly. Henry Kaiser, leading architect of West Coast war production with his shipbuilding and steel empire, maintained company headquarters in Oakland and took a keen interest in local planning. The downtown retail industry, led by R. H. Biggs of Capwell’s and Irving Kahn, owner of Kahn’s Department Store and president of the Downtown Property Owners Association, formed an important bloc. The Moore Dry Dock Company, second to Kaiser in Bay Area shipbuilding during the war, the Bechtel Company, and a handful of small manufacturers, bankers, and real estate interests influenced postwar economic planning. Though significant conflicts developed within Oakland’s commercial and industrial class in the years following the war, for the most part a consensus existed. Rather than fight decentralization, Oakland would attempt to turn it to advantage. Expanded metropolitan development would benefit everyone as long as the “center,” Oakland, held.⁸

In promoting “metropolitan Oakland,” business interests sought to resolve the instability of capital. Boosters and developers know by calculation what often eludes the person on the street: capital moves through and shapes local places in concrete ways. Residential capital makes homes and neighborhoods. Industrial capital makes factories, goods, and jobs. Both generate public capital in the form of property taxes, which in turn make schools, roads, fire departments, and so on. These flows of capital on which cities rise and fall are governed by an elaborate system of rules: the taxes, zoning codes, transportation and labor costs, land prices, and rents on which investors and the owners of capital figure returns. The geography of these relationships was not abstract to Oakland’s economic elite. The concrete spaces that capital could produce—West Oakland’s booming wartime shipyards, for instance, or East Oakland’s mini Detroit, a flourishing set of neighborhoods between Seminary Avenue and the San Leandro boundary where General Motors and Fisher Body plants employed thousands of workers—translated economic abstractions into a physical and social landscape. Such a translation, on a broader scale, was the objective of the MOAP.⁹

To attract the eastern and midwestern capital necessary to extend wartime industrial growth into the postwar decades, it was crucial to make California and the East Bay look like a good investment. The linchpin of the pitch was the East Bay’s elaborate and idealized industrial garden: a mixture of single-family California ranch-style and bungalow homes, small factories, and larger industrial plants in a coordinated middle landscape that joined economic progress and social stability. The region, boasted the Chamber, possessed “a most unusual combination of city, suburban, and country life, closely associated with, yet distinct from, business, factory, and shipping.” During the decade between 1945 and 1955, the Oakland Chamber of Commerce and the Alameda County Board of Supervisors invested heavily in national MOAP advertising, placing promotional material in business trade journals, real estate magazines, popular weeklies, and major urban dailies. The Chamber promoted an industrial corridor spanning the East Bay from Richmond in the north to the unincorporated areas of Alameda County in the south. With “Oakland at its very heart,” this expansive metropolitan region offered prospective investors “new high-income western markets,” a “huge new labor supply,” and “enormous industrial developments.” And it offered easy connections to the Pacific Rim economies, where “countries are hungry for goods,” and to the greater American West, where railroad rates from Oakland to the “eleven Western states” were comparable to those from Chicago and Los Angeles.¹⁰

The principal concern of Chamber promoters was extending the manufacturing capacity of Oakland and the East Bay. They envisioned a series of medium- and small-sized factories, branch plants of eastern and midwestern concerns, in a “diversified industrial economy” that relied on skilled and semiskilled labor. Fearing a ...