The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 7, Issue 1, Winter 2018 | Page 28

the Bay Area could not fill. Industrialists looked to the rural and urban areas of the
upper Midwest and South as a source of unskilled labor. The unprecedented
movement of war migrants, primarily women and minorities, to the East Bay,
permanently changed the racial and cultural make-up of the area. The
prefabrication manufacturing techniques of Henry Kaiser initially opposed by the
conservative craft unions ultimately magnified their membership in such a way that
the unions realized political influence on the national level. Meanwhile, attempts
by the defense industry to improve morale and boost wartime production resulted
in corporate welfare initiatives that American families depend upon today. These
are the enduring legacies of shipbuilding during World War II not only in the San
Francisco East Bay but of the United States as a whole.
Notes
1. Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 146.
2. “The Liberty Ships of World War Two,” The MAST Magazine (October 1944),
republished in USN Armed Guard WWII Veterans, The Pointer (August 1998): 2.
3. Ibid., 2.
4. Marilynn S. Johnson, Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), 2.
5. Ibid., 8.
6. Ibid., 2.
7. Ibid., 8.
8. Ibid., 48.
9. Ibid., 41.
10. Department of Interior, The Rosie the Riveter / WWII Home Front National Historical
Park: Self-Guided Auto Tour, National Parks Service (Washington DC, 2010), 3.
11. Johnson, 41.
12. Ibid., 45.
13. Ibid., 4.
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