Panic on the Pacific

On December 7, 1941, the three westernmost of the forty-eight states became a de facto theater of World War II. Together, Washington, Oregon, and California encompass around three hundred thousand square miles, a vast area larger than any country in Europe, yet in 1941, this was a remote and largely empty land. The three states of the Pacific Coast were home to just 7 percent of the United States population, while the five mid-Atlantic states, with just a sixth of their area, were then home to 27 percent of all Americans.

For a century, the Pacific Coast’s allure as a land of opportunity had drawn pioneers westward, and in the 1940s, it was still a place where population growth was driven by transplants from other states farther east. Indeed, in 1941, the governors of Oregon, Washington, and California had been born in Kansas, Minnesota, and Utah respectively.

The story of the Pacific Coast in the first half of the twentieth century was the story of two distinct regions—one that was urban, and a much larger one that was distinctly rural. Unlike the thickly settled areas of the country east of the Mississippi River, the population in the Pacific Coast states was highly concentrated. Around 5.5 million of their 9.7 million people lived in just four metropolitan areas—San Diego County, Los Angeles County, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area, and the Seattle-Tacoma metro area around Puget Sound. Without its metro areas, California had fewer people than Massachusetts, which has only 5 percent of California’s land area. Without the people who lived in the Puget Sound region, Washington would have ranked as thirty-fifth among the states in terms of population. Without the people within the Portland city limits, Oregon was only slightly larger in population than Rhode Island.

California was the most populous state on the Pacific Coast, while Oregon was the most rural. Washington and Oregon led the nation in forest products, while California accounted for 70 percent of the fruits and vegetables produced in the country. The Golden State was also second only to Texas in oil production.

Seattle, San Francisco, and Southern California were leading ports and centers of shipbuilding. Southern California led the nation in aircraft manufacturing, with Seattle-based Boeing and Buffalo, New York’s Curtiss vying for second place. San Francisco, where Montgomery Street was known as the “Wall Street of the West,” was the region’s financial hub. And Hollywood, of course, was the movie capital of the United States (and, for that matter, the world).

The Great Depression struck the West Coast less harshly than other parts of the country. In fact, California had become the refuge for tens of thousands of migrants, especially those from the prairies, where a series of severe droughts over the course of more than six years had turned millions of acres of farmland into what was known as the “Dust Bowl.”

In the 1930s, the West benefitted from dramatic public works programs, including hydroelectric dam-building projects, including the massive Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, which in due course would supply electricity to Southern California, and on the Columbia River the Grand Coulee Dam, the Bonneville Dam, and nine others that helped transform the economies of Oregon and Washington.

Politically, the Pacific Coast was fickle. Oregon and Washington had followed the election of Democrat governors with Republicans in 1938 and 1940 respectively, and California, which had elected nine Republican governors in a row, in 1938 elected Democrat Culbert Olson, a Utah-born Mormon turned atheist who refused to say “so help me God” when he was sworn into office.

One worry united these governors—that the National Guard in their states might be federalized and under the authority and command of the U.S. Army. What they did not realize was that they were soon themselves to be subordinated to a de facto military governor: Lieutenant General John Lesesne DeWitt, U.S. Army.