3. WORLD WAR II, THE COLD WAR, AND THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMIES OF THE PACIFIC COAST

Prepared for 2017 Conference on “World War II and the West It Wrought” The Bill Lane Center for the American West Stanford University [Revised January 2018] World War II had enduring effects on the economies of the Pacific Coast, but not necessarily in the ways most commonly adduced. In his classic World War II and the West, historian Gerald D. Nash suggests that the war transformed the region from a colonial “Third World” economy based on agriculture and mining into a modern, technology-driven manufacturing dynamo. The war did indeed generate a flood of new workers into the West, propelled by an unprecedented infusion of federal spending for military production. But wartime spending did not particularly favor the West over other regions. And most of these jobs were transitory; employment in such industries as aircraft and shipbuilding fell rapidly between 1945 and 1948. Thus, as some analysts have observed, it was if anything postwar federal spending policy that sustained high income levels in the Pacific states, “preventing a decline that might otherwise have mirrored the Midwest.”1