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104 chapter four Super-America It is possible the whole West may try to become a Los Angeles. ladd haystead, IF THE PROSPECT PLEASES (1945) “No, the West of song and story, the West of fable and myth, the West of the colorful books and neon-promotion brochures, as well as the western ‘society’ of Frederick Jackson Turner, is gone,” wrote Ladd Haystead, who covered the region for Fortune magazine, in 1945. “It started to wither in the Dust Bowl days. Silently and unnoticed it passed away entirely during the riotous war days.”1 This sense that the West had been transformed by World War II was widely shared among journalists, social scientists, and other observers in the immediate postwar years. As was true of the country as a whole, it seemed a historical divide had been crossed, punctuated by the full stop of the Trinity bomb test. Yet the incursion of the new atomic infrastructure into New Mexico, Washington, and other parts of provincial America was only the most spectacular of a series of dramatic changes to fast-forward the development of the West because of the war. The movement of eight million civilians into the region, especially to the West Coast states, dwarfed the Okie migration of the previous decade. As many as ten million military personnel were shuttled in and out of the West during the war, and a substantial number returned to live there in the postwar period. The 1950 census reflected the consequences: California alone gained 3.5 million residents in the preceding ten years, a 50 percent increase; the population of the Rocky Mountain states grew by 15 percent; the Southwest increased by 40 percent; and the Great Plains states (still the origin of many migrants) lost 3 percent. Individual cities witnessed explosive growth: San Diego, California, leaped from just over 200,000 residents in 1940 to over half a million civilians and military personnel in Super-America • 105 1945. In the same period the Wichita, Kansas, metropolitan area population grew by nearly two-thirds.2 Economically, the results of federal war spending were nothing short of astounding in some places, though unevenly distributed regionwide. Hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing jobs opened in the shipbuilding, steel, aircraft, and aluminum industries along the West Coast. California itself received over one-half of the estimated $60–70 billion in wartime contracts awarded in the West. Large cities of the interior also saw spectacular economic growth and development, but much of the region did not take off industrially during the war. Wichita experienced an incredible 800 percent increase in manufacturing jobs thanks to its aircraft industry, which brought in nearly $2 billion in contracts and at one point was adding new workers at the rate of 300 per week. In contrast, the entire state of North Dakota received only $9.6 million worth of military contracts during the war; Wyoming added a sum total of 900 manufacturing jobs to its economy. Nevertheless, World War II did bring boom times even to those subregions of the West that failed to diversify economically and remained primarily farming- or mining-oriented. In some states of the Great Plains, including North Dakota, per capita incomes nearly tripled because of high wartime prices for agricultural products. Not every place in the West could say, as did one city official in San Diego, that “the war has revolutionized the economy,” but many westerners were introduced to a level of prosperity (crimped here and there by temporary rationing) they had never known before.3 By 1945, prognostications on this developing New West formed a growth industry of their own. Haystead’s If the Prospect Pleases (1945) was only one of a range of notable regional analyses to appear, including Wendell Berge’s Economic Freedom for the West (1946), Avrahm G. Mezerik’s Revolt of the South and West (1946), and Bernard DeVoto’s “The West Against Itself” (1947). While bright vistas seemed to be opening for the region, old issues also continued to weigh in, most particularly, economic colonialism. In some ways the theme was a resumption of New Deal political debate interrupted by the exigencies of war. Mezerik had been involved in the formation of the United Auto Workers union in the 1930s; Berge, an antitrust lawyer and native Nebraskan, had been employed in the New Deal’s Justice Department. Ostensibly, then, they were predisposed to take up the charge of economic exploitation where Walter Prescott Webb’s Divided We Stand and...

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