The Bad City in the Good War
San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego

Description
"Riders were very appropriate to a western war, but these horsemen could not have been more different. One group patrolled the oceanfront of 'The City' after dark. While the residents of the nearby Sunset District and Seacliff huddled around the radios in their living rooms, curtains pulled and blinds lowered, listening to war news or to 'One Man's Family, ' other residents rode the beaches. Mounted on their own ponies, the men of the San Francisco Polo Club labored through the sands of China Beach, Baker Beach, and the Ten Mile Beach, looking for Imperial Japanese intruders." --from the book
In the mythology of the West, the city was seen as a place of danger and corruption, but the "bad" city proved its mettle during the "Good War." In this book, Roger W. Lotchin has written the first comprehensive study of California's urban home front. United by fear of totalitarianism, the diverse population of California's cities came together to protect their homes and to aid in the war effort. Whether it involved fighting in Europe or Asia, migrating to a defense center, writing to service personnel at the front, building war machines in converted factories, giving pennies at school for war bonds, saving scrap material, or pounding a civil defense beat, urban California's participation was immediate, constant, and unflagging. Although many people worked in offices, factories, or barracks, the wartime community was also fed by a vast army of volunteers, which until now has been largely overlooked. The Bad City in the Good War is a comprehensive local history of the California home front that restores a little-known part of the story of the Second World War.
About this Author
Roger W. Lotchin is Professor of History at UNC, Chapel Hill. He writes books and articles on California and western history, American urban history, and the history of the U.S. home front in World War II. He is a jazz buff and an avid traveler, photographer, stonemason, and tennis player.
Reviews
Lotchin takes aim at homefront historians who have been adding the story of African Americans, women, and ethnic Americans in California to the narrative of World War II. He finds their social histories a necessary corrective to the more common battle histories or presidential policy analysis of yesteryear, but he says that the newer focus on the impact of war on society omits the urban dimension of that war. This is really a spurious claim as the African Americans, women, and ethnic groups who have been highlighted in other World War II social histories, mostly hailed from cities, and thus the dependent variable in all of these valuable histories is the city, Lotchin's same variable. His claim that this book, along with his 2002 companion collection of essays, Fortress California, provide a much needed interpretive framework seems a bit too self--aggrandizing. He does not even employ the ironic questioning of World War II as the 'good war' as Studs Terkel called for in his so-named collection of oral histories.
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