The Bad City in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego (review)

Roger Lotchin's The Bad City in the Good War traces the experiences of the residents of San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco during World War II. The aims of the book are threefold. The author seeks to replace what he terms the "fragmented" nature of studies of the wartime experience at home with a narrative synthesis organized around the universal desire for victory. He also seeks to connect the homefront experience to the actual process of fighting the war, mostly through depictions of personal sacrifice and of what he terms "the latent military resources" of the Golden State. Moreover, he seeks to rebuff accounts that claim the war years constituted a "second gold rush," by arguing that the continuities of urban living militate against narratives of transformation. These goals are regularly restated.

These signposts should prove particularly useful for graduate students and others seeking to understand the role Californians played in waging and winning the Second World War. Readers of military history should find descriptions of military fortifications and defense production interesting, while historians of the west will find the centralization of demographic and industrial data useful. Scholars of the wartime experience at home will need to incorporate the particularities of California into discussions of the homefront elsewhere.

These are important contributions to a number of scholarly literatures. By representing his book as a synthesis, moreover, Roger Lotchin has joined a debate that has roiled the historical profession for more than a generation. At best, works of synthesis seek to incorporate the particularist interventions into a larger framework, conceding that this process alters preexisting narratives. Less helpful are those cries for synthesis that misstate the aims and conclusions of ostensibly narrow projects such as those that treat race, gender, and class as critical categories of historical inquiry. In this instance, the balance is tilted toward the latter position, with little recognition that studies of gender, ethnicity, and labor have done anything other than divide historical subjects into "roles as victim and victimizer" (p. 5). Moreover, the absence of critical works that deal with racial affairs during the Second World War, including books by Ronald Takaki, John Dower, Robert Allen, Quintard Taylor, George Sanchez, and Carey McWilliams leaves doubt as to the extent to which the author felt inclined to take serious note of what he terms "fragmentary" narratives. For without the serious inclusion of dissenting perspectives, the contention that women, industrial workers, Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans viewed the goal of victory as overriding their daily concerns cannot be supported with any certainty.

Whether one sees wartime western cities as symbolizing evolution or transformation, as demonstrating unity or discord, or as representing "parts" or "wholes," the subject of how one of the country's most important moments played out in one of its most important places is certain to continue to generate scholarly attention. The Bad City in the Good War should thus constitute one work that subsequent scholars will draw upon.