The Gold Coast

52

How did it happen?

It was World War Two that began the change, World War Two that set the pattern.

After Pearl Harbor the two thousand Orange County citizens of Japanese origin were gathered up and relocated in a shabby desert camp in Poston, Arizona. And people poured west to wage war. President Roosevelt called for the construction of fifty thousand planes a year, and the little airplane factories in Los Angeles and Orange had room to grow, they had empty farmland around them, every one. Thus the aeronautics industry in southern California had its start.

And the soldiers and sailors came west. They saw Orange County, and it looked just like the labels on the orange crates back home: the broad flat plain, covered with orange trees in their symmetrical rows; long lines of towering eucalyptus trees breaking the land into immense squares; the bare foothills behind, and the snowy mountains behind them; the wide, sandy, empty beaches down at Newport and Corona del Mar; the little bungalows tucked in their gardens, under the grapevine bowers, nestled each in an orange grove all its own.

There were only a hundred and thirty thousand people in all the county, lost in the millions of trees. City boys from the East, farmers from the cold Midwest and the poor South, all children of the Depression—they came out and saw the dream, the Mediterranean vision of a rich and easeful agricultural life, under an eternal sun. They went to the beach on Christmas day. They laughed punch-drunk in warm salt waves. They drove old Fords down the country roads, flashing through the ranked shadows of the eucalyptus trees, drinking beer and laughing with local girls and breathing in the thick scent of the orange blossoms, in the bright sun of February. And they said: When this war is over, I’m coming back here to make my home.

There was land, empty farmland, that the military could use. And people were happy to see the military there, it meant good business. Patriotism, good business: the equation took root in Orange County, beginning with this war. The Santa Ana City Council, for instance, rented four hundred acres of the Berry ranch, for $6,386 a year, then turned around and rented the land to the War Department for a dollar a year, inviting the department to use the land for whatever they liked. It was patriotic, it was good business. The War Department made the ranch into the Santa Ana Army Air Base, and through the war 110,000 men trained there. They saw the land.

Next to the air base was established the Army Air Forces Flying Training Command, the “University of the Air.” Sixty-six thousand pilots got their wings there. They all saw the land.

The Navy established one U.S. Naval Air Station at Los Alamitos, and another in Tustin, to house its blimps. It dredged the harbor at Seal Beach, and relocated two thousand residents, and established the U.S. Naval Ammunition and Net Depot, at a cost of $17 million—all of it paid to the local construction industry.

Groves in El Toro were torn out to make room for the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro, one of the biggest in the country.

Orange County Airport became the Santa Ana Army Airdrome. Irvine Park became Camp George E. Rathke, infantry training center. And through all of these military bases poured the men, and the money.

So much of the population was directed to the war effort that not enough were left over to farm. Mexican braceros were brought in to pick the oranges. German POWs were brought in to pick the oranges. A group of Jamaicans were brought in to pick the oranges. (“These Negroes have Oxford accents!” a resident said.)

But the soldiers, the sailors, the fliers, the airplane factory workers, they all served the war. Orange County became part of a war machine; and this military-industrial infrastructure was built, and left in place, and it provided work for the thousands of men who returned after the war, with their new families; they came, and bought houses built by the construction industry that had been so well primed by military construction, and they went to work. In the 1950s the Santa Ana Freeway was extended down into Orange County from Los Angeles, and then you could work in L.A. but live in Orange County; like the coming of the railroad, like all the other improvements in the efficiency of transportation, it fueled the boom, and the military-industrial machine grew again. And so the machine served the Korean War, and the Cold War, and the Vietnam War, and the Cold War, and the Central American War, and the Cold War, and the African War, and the Cold War, and the Indonesian War, and the Cold War, and the Space War… a war machine, ever growing.

And none of that ever went away.