Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
California's workforce permanently changed during WWII, when women and African
Americans were recruited for wartime industries and Mexican workers were brought in to
fill agricultural labor shortages. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7,
1941, San Diego became the headquarters of the entire US Pacific Fleet. Throughout
WWII, as Southern California's aircraft manufacturing plants turned out planes by the
thousands, San Francisco Bay Area workers (including women, nicknamed 'Rosie the
Riveters') built hundreds of warships. Military contracts attracted top-notch engineers and
scientists, who later launched California's high-tech industry.
After WWII many service people decided to settle permanently on the West Coast.
Within a decade after the war, California's population had grown by 40%, reaching 13 mil-
lion. The state's military-industrial complex continued to prosper during the Cold War era,
providing jobs in everything from avionics and missile manufacturing to nuclear submar-
ine maintenance. Military spending peaked in the 1980s under ex-California governor and
then US president Ronald Reagan.
The classic film
Chinatown
(1974) is the fictionalized yet surprisingly realistic account of
the brutal early-20th-century water wars that were waged to build Los Angeles.
Social Movers & Shakers
Unconstrained by the burden of traditions and promoted by film and TV, California has
long been a leader in new attitudes and social movements. During the postwar boom of the
1950s, the Beat movement in San Francisco's North Beach railed against the banality and
conformity of suburban life, instead choosing bohemian coffeehouses for jazz, poetry and
pot.
When the baby boomers came of age, many hippies took up where the Beat Generation
left off, heeding 1960s countercultural icon Timothy Leary's counsel to 'turn on, tune in,
and drop out.' Sex, drugs and rock and roll ruled the day. With the foundations for social
revolution already laid, protestors up and down California's coast marched against the Vi-
etnam War and for civil rights in the late 1960s, then again for gay liberation starting in the
'70s.
Since the 1980s, coastal California has become synonymous with a healthy lifestyle ob-
session, with more yoga classes and self-actualization workshops than you could shake a
shaman's stick at. Remember that in-line skating, snowboarding and mountain biking star-
