the Library of Congress on Flickr

Operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, woman is working on a "Vengeance" dive bomber, Alfred Palmer, photographer, 1943

In fun Flickr news, the Library of Congress has a new Flickr page where they'll be posting some of their enormous catalog of public domain photos. Well worth a visit.

Letters from a Concentration Camp

Clara Estelle Breed, a San Diego children's librarian, was outraged by the WWII era policy of internment for Japanese Americans. In response, she met Japanese American families as they were being sent away by train and distributed stamped and addressed postcards to the children, asking them to write to her and describe life in the camps. Her papers, including cards sent by interned adults and children are now collected at the Japanese American National Museum.

Thanks to amyms on metafilter for this find.

More Rosie

In the massive oversight department, my recent post about the Rosie the Riveter Park failed to mention an awesome related project. The Bancroft Regional Oral History Office conducted almost 50 oral histories of men and women who lived and worked in Richmond during the war. You can read a few of the transcripts on their site.

Rosie the Riveter Memorial Park

I told the kids I was taking them to the Rosie the Riveter Park, which they seemed very excited about it despite the fact they've never heard of Rosie the Riveter. The concept of Rosie the Riveter is confusing because the idea that there was a time when women weren't allowed to work the same jobs as men is foreign to them. I mean, their parents are lesbians – in their world, women do everything including fixing cars, washing dishes, and rolling children up in their blankets like human burritos; why shouldn't women rivet? And what the hell is a rivet anyway? On the way to the park I gave them my now classic lecture (most recently used when discussing Martin Luther King Jr.) about how Sometimes People Have Ideas That Aren't True, and It's Important to Tell Those People That ANYONE Can Be a Riveter (or that anyone should be able to ride in the front of the bus, depending on which lecture I'm giving). (I restrained myself from giving a lecture on war profiteering, which might have been more appropriate for this memorial – more on that in a minute.)

I hadn't been to Richmond in a while, and when I got off the freeway, I was completely confused by the impenetrable wall of condos. This isn't the Richmond I'm familiar with, and if it is part of Richmond now, what is the city doing with all the new property taxes? Please, someone with some real Richmond knowledge fill me in. In any case, I got lost in condo land and finally ended up at an upscale mini-mart where I asked the proprietor for directions to Rosie the Riveter Park. He looked over his glasses at me and chuckled (I'm not exaggerating - he really chuckled!), "Your expectations are too high," and directed me back to a patch of grass next to a parking lot I'd just passed.

The kids and I got out at the Rosie Memorial, a little exhibit about women homefront workers that was commissioned by the City of Richmond, and designed by artist Susan Schwartzenberg (Susan, why don't you have a website?) and landscape architect Cheryl Barton. Given, I'm a nerd, but I really liked it. The memorial runs the length of a Liberty Ship, and as you walk along the path spanning the ships distance, you can read a mini labor history of WWII, with a focus on people of color and women. Also interspersed are quotes from women shipyard workers, and these, along with photos posted at the site, are the most affecting part of the exhibit.

The memorial is planted on the former site of Kaiser Shipyard number 2, where steel magnate Henry J. Kaiser employed many thousands of workers to build ships for WWII.

Richmond's history is inseparably linked with Kaiser's factories and with the war. Richmond became a largely African-American city (36% of the population according to the latest census) as a result of migration related to the war industries. And the poverty that many Richmond residents confront now is directly linked with the city's failure to create adequate housing and infrastructure for its many new residents during the war, and the sudden disappearance of jobs that occurred when the war was over.

In 1940, Richmond had a small town feeling and a population of around 23,000. By 1950, the population was more than 99,000. Workers came in carloads and trainloads, brought by the more than 170 recruiters that Kaiser employed around the state and around the country to power the shipbuilding empire that he had centered in Richmond. So desperate was Kaiser for workers that at one point, LA recruiters instituted a "work for drunks" program where judges issued suspended sentences to 'vagrants' in exchange for an agreement to come work in the Richmond yards. That program didn't last long, but even for the average newly arrived worker, (if you can say that there was an 'average' since folks came from all over the state, from all regions of the country, and represented dozens of ethnic groups) the attrition rate was high. Once workers arrived they found limited housing, working conditions that were both stressful and tedious, and the loneliness of leaving home. The many new African-American workers transplanted from the South found themselves subject to the same Jim Crow racist hiring and housing practices they were familiar with from back home. War industry work crews were racially segregated, Black workers were rarely promoted to supervisory positions, and Black workers were refused membership in the major unions and instead relegated to auxiliary 'negro' unions where members were expected to pay dues but received little or no protection. (White women faced job discrimination as well, receiving significantly lower pay for jobs that white male workers got more for). While many protested these conditions, for example, in the Sausalito shipyards nearly all the Black employees walked out in protest of racist conditions in 1943, government agencies, white labor leaders, and industrialist business-owners were less than sympathetic. Outside of the factory, public housing built during the war was segregated in Richmond, as it was in Oakland and elsewhere in the Bay Area. (According to The Second Gold Rush, details on that book below, Berkeley community leader Byron Rumford started a petition drive protesting public housing segregation which finally lead to federally mandated integration of Berkeley/Albany public housing in 1946.) Basic workplace rights and decent housing were a struggle for Richmond's many new Black residents. For their part, newly arrived white Southern workers tended to complain about 'having to' work side-by-side with African-Americans.

Who was Henry J. Kaiser? He was your basic guy-out-to-make-a-buck, all-American, success story. He got his big start running a road-paving business, and ended his life turning Honolulu into the tourist sink that it is today. He was successful to say the least – his company, along with another Bay Area local, Bechtel and four other companies managed the construction of the Hoover Dam. During the war, Kaiser employees in Richmond (and his three other factories along the West Coast) were building a whole war ship in about a month (the record was set when workers constructed an entire ship in just over four days). His name also lives on in the Kaiser Permanente HMO, which was created because Kaiser needed to provide some basic health services to his thousands of employees, and who can afford that kind of expense (while maintaining a millionaire lifestyle)?

When the war ended, Kaiser moved on to new projects. He even (briefly) got into the auto industry. For the thousands of factory workers who had moved to the Bay Area, many full of patriotism and hope for the future, life wasn't quite as easy as Kaiser's. The jobs disappeared almost immediately. Soldiers came home and were given priority for the few jobs that remained. Women and men of color found themselves fired or demoted to make way for white men who were prioritized by employers. Today Richmond is still full of art, culture, and hard work, but undeniably, Richmond has been scarred by the poverty that is a legacy of the war industry here. The Rosie Memorial is just a little thing, but I loved getting to learn more about why things happened the way they did here. I was glad to come. I confess that the kids liked the nearby boats a lot more than that exhibit, but what can they do, they're a captive audience.

This entry barely scratches the surface of what can be said about the long-term impact of WWII industry on race, gender, and economics here. If you want to learn more, there are a bunch of other sources I'd recommend:

Marilynn S. Johnson's The Second Gold Rush provided a bunch of references for this post. It's factually dense but it maintains a readable narrative. I don't think you have to be as obsessive as I am to enjoy it, which is unusual for this kind of regional history book.

Fight or Be Slaves also has tons of information about this period.

Robert Self discusses issues related to changing racial dynamics in the East Bay after WWII in American Babylon. Unfortunately, I got about 50 pages into this book last summer, and then accidentally left it at Feather River Family Camp, so I can't tell you for sure if it's worth reading, but my friend Jess was just saying good things about it, so on his recommendation, I'll say, go for it.

I thought this Bay Crossings article had some interesting history about water travel related to Richmond.

Finally, I was inspired to check out the Rosie park after reading a nice article about it in the San Francisco Bayview. The article originally appeared on Black Commentator, but I'm including the Bayview link because of some additional notes at the end of their version.

Hey, if you want to learn more, Here's a whole pile of relevant sources.

I'll send you out with this video by historian Betty Soskin on African-Americans in the Richmond war industries. You can read some details about the content of the video here.

whitewashing

A government propaganda film on Japanese "relocation" camps - stunningly bland in its portrayal of the camps as an unfortunate "necessity". (found on metafilter today):

Oakland General Strike Part II

Read Part I

Striking department store clerks, photo from the Oakland Museum of California.

In the first few days of December 1946, retail workers at Hastings' and Kahn's department stores, across the street from each other where Broadway meets Telegraph, had been on strike for more than a month. Most of the workers were women. Their pay was shitty, less than $16 a week, and worse, they were subjected to an absurd procedure where they had to show up to work first thing in the morning, and then wait in the basement (unpaid), until they were called to the floor to work. A clerk could easily be stuck in the basement all morning, or even all day.

The Teamsters local had supported the retail workers strike from the beginning. They refused to deliver anything to the struck stores. (When I was at the Labor Archives, I even saw minutes from the Teamsters Local 70 meeting showing a member being expelled for trying to deliver to Kahn's in November.) The local NAACP and National Negro Congress publicly supported the striking workers. And union laborers had stopped painting and construction of a new elevator at Kahn's in solidarity.

On the business side, the Oakland Tribune, then run by republican powerhouse Joe Knowland, advocated a citywide ban of pickets. According to Albert Lannon's Fight or Be Slaves, right-wing city council members were publicly objecting to the use of the word 'scab'. Most detrimentally, the city agreed to send out the police force to escort delivery trucks to the stores, so they could keep stock for the Christmas shopping season.

OPD escorting delivery trucks from the notoriously anti-union company G.I. Trucking. From the Oakland Museum of California.

That move was too much for the local labor council. The night of December 1st, a Saturday, Teamsters patrolled every roadway into Oakland to keep the delivery trucks away, and the labor council organized members to use their cars to block the parking spaces surrounding the effected stores. Several hundred picketers came out in the middle of the night to keep the scabs out.

Cops block the street to keep strikers out. From the Oakland Museum of California

At 4 in the morning the cops started towing the strikers cars and blocking off sections of Broadway, Telegraph, and San Pablo. When they waved the streetcars through their police line at 6:30 Sunday morning, a driver told the cops that he'd never crossed a picket line, got out of the car and removed its control box, causing an immovable backup along the streetcar line. The general strike was on, although it was another day before the whole city was out.

Tribune clipping from the Oakland History Room.

At a long and fevered meeting of various local AFL union leaders Sunday afternoon (the clerks were affiliated with the AFL), Teamsters pledged that because of the strikebreaking deliveries, they would shut down work in the East Bay starting Monday. Every other union but the milk truck drivers' agreed, and the milk truck drivers only insisted on working in order to get milk to local hospitals. Labor leaders went on the radio to declare Monday a 'work holiday' and to call everyone downtown, to the center of the strike, to show their support.

From the Oakland Museum of California.

At the peak, as many as 30,000 people were packed into the rainy downtown streets. The mood was excited to say the least. Bars were allowed to stay open, but they were only allowed to serve beer, and were told to turn their jukeboxes out to face the street, where people were literally dancing. All AFL building trades were shut down. All East Bay newspapers were shut down. Buses, streetcars, greyhounds, taxis, and trucking were stopped. Gas stations were closed too. Hotels, movie theaters, and larger restaurants and grocery stores were shut.

The picture's pretty blurry, but can you make out those huge grins? From the Oakland Museum again.

I've read conflicting stories on this, but from what I understand, the CIO, the second-largest umbrella union organization in Oakland, had offered their support the night before the strike. They were patently turned down. AFL leaders didn't want to be associated with the CIO whose on-the-ground organizers were largely communist. Robert Ash, the head of the labor council was quite progressive, but balked at working together, imagining headlines in the paper saying "Reds cause Anarchy Downtown" and so forth. Besides the communist associations, the AFL and CIO were rivals not comrades. Working directly with the CIO would have brought about ugly repercussions from national AFL leadership. The CIO honored picket lines anyway, and finally, on the third day of the strike, called for a general meeting to vote on whether to walk out themselves. A CIO walkout would have cut off gas and electricity to most of the city. At this suggestion, Oakland's city manager was ready to settle.

But the unions had lost the upper hand. The national vice president of the Teamsters, Dave Beck, told the local to withdraw from the general strike. He didn't support revolution, and apparently, the strike was developing that flavor. Rumors circulated that Governor Earl Warren was going to send in the National Guard, and the mayor had declared a state of emergency.

Instead of holding their ground, the union negotiated with Oakland's city manager only for an agreement that police would not be used to break strikes. There was no settlement for the department store clerks (who stayed on strike for eight more months, and then had to settle for a weak contract before they finally negotiated a better deal and a closed union shop in May of '47). There was certainly no attempt to make structural change in the city. Robert Ash from the Labor Council admitted later, in retrospect, that had they held out, they could have had more. Maybe they could have gotten the whole right-wing city leadership to resign.

But even that laudable goal suffers from a failure of imagination. Workers owned the city for those three days. They could have done anything. On the other hand, what can you do when you suddenly control your own world? When you have the power to rearrange everything, if only you can agree with tens of thousands of others who share that power? Who knew what to do with complete worker control of a city?

A year later that kind of question hardly mattered anyway. In 1947, congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act outlawing secondary boycotts (boycotts of union companies that do business with a struck company), removing government protection for wildcat (unofficial) strikers, and allowing the president to force workers back to their jobs if he feels that their strike "imperils the national health". The phenomenon of the General Strike came to an abrupt end.

In the aftermath, the Teamsters local withdrew from the central labor council (and not long after, the national Teamsters withdrew from the AFL). Voters elected a labor slate of candidates for the City Council in '47, but not enough to get a majority, and the winners didn't work very well as a team, and were voted out a few years later. Oakland changed dramatically after the war, demographics changed, the beginnings of civil right struggles emerged, but worker control was not on the agenda.

Found at the Oakland History Room.

If you're interested in the Oakland general strike, I'd recommend Chris Rhomberg's No There There. Online you can listen to a nice KPFA documentary on the strike that features interviews with participants and more on the historical context that led to the strike. Also, check out longshoreman and publisher Stan Weir's account of the strike at the very cool libcom.org or Dick Meister's summery on ZNet.

THIS IS A STRIKE support our CAUSE - The Oakland General Strike

General Strike! The photo at right shows police milling around an injured shopper in front of a struck Oakland department store. Headline at left refers to a nationwide coal miners strike. This clipping is from the Labor Archives and Research Center at SFSU.

Someone with my politics (anarchist, idealist) tends to think of the general strike as a kind of labor-movement Excalibur, whose ass-kicking powers were so great that it could blind King Arthur's enemies simply by being drawn from its scabbard. (In this problematic analogy, King Arthur = The People.)

A general strike is the ultimate exercise of worker solidarity and worker power and basically, it happens like this: everyone (well, almost everyone), in every industry, stops working until their collective demands are met. One hopes that their demands go beyond asking for better pay or other simple benefits, and begin to address the big problems that go with a society where a few people own everything and do nothing, and others own nothing and do all the work.

And if that is your idea of the purpose and potential of general strikes, then it's clear that they haven't been very successful. Part of the problem though might be that there isn't always a clear purpose, even if there is a lot of potential. In the case of Oakland's 1946 general strike, we had an unbelievable potential power. I'm not so clear on the purpose.

I have so much to say about the Oakland strike, I'm going to split this into a few entries. Here's part 1, the context:

The Bay Area had gained half a million people between 1940 and 1945, when immigrants from around the country flooded in to find work in the war industries (mostly shipbuilding) centered here. The East Bay was so packed, there was nowhere to put everyone. I love the image in Marilyn S. Johnson's book The Second Gold Rush, a quote from an Oakland police captain saying in 1942, "Hundreds of men, women, and children [are] sleeping nightly on outdoor benches in public parks, in chairs in all night restaurants, in theatres, in halls of rooming houses, in automobiles, even in the City Hall corridors." Even with so many people, there were labor shortages. Between the shipyards and the businesses that supported them, there was an almost insatiable need for workers.

But a year after WWII ended, Oakland's economy had already started to wobble. Soldiers came back to a new and newly crowded Bay Area looking for jobs just as the war industries were beginning to contract. And the population boom and economic stressors weren't the only pressures. The need for labor had overruled some long standing social and political rules here and everywhere, most obviously, many more women, including for the first time middle class women, started working in factories and other industries. And Black immigrants to the Bay started to integrate the segregated neighborhoods and jobs here. Returning soldiers too had been transformed by their battlefield experiences. Maybe they expected to be able to make changes that hadn't seemed possible before.

Working conditions hadn't been great during the war, but most unions had signed patriotic No Strike pledges. After the war, business leaders and government officials found it impossible to stuff a broadening political agenda back into a box. In '46, a massive strike wave spread around the country (and internationally). The rail and coal mining industries were debilitated by strikes that year, and a number of cities held general strikes.

I found a newsreel that nicely captures the panic that industrialists felt about the rail strike at archive.org.

In this context, of a country and world that was changing by the second, where worker power seemed possible and real, and let's face it, where communists were all over the place, the idea of shutting down a city wasn't just a fantasy. At least, that's what I understand from what I've read.

Next time I'll post about the strike itself. I've got some links to original accounts and a nice documentary too. Stay tuned.