UC Berkeley on December 7, 1941

In a series of recent oral histories with UC Berkeley alumni, the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) has recorded the recollections of individuals who were students at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor – December 7, 1941. Many of them teenagers late in 1941, they are now approaching ninety years of age. These oral histories shed light on what UC Berkeley was like before the United States officially entered World War II, and provide insight as to how students, faculty, and staff reacted to the news of the event.

For countless university students — in Berkeley and around the country — the events of that day would prove to be a major turning point. While a handful of students behaved erratically or irrationally upon hearing the news, the majority of students quietly realized that the event would soon alter their existing plans and goals. Understandably, as many students worried about their own futures, most were also anxious about the safety of their families. Some worried about their friends of Japanese ancestry. Other students would remain on campus to continue their studies, and numerous faculty members carried on teaching. For other faculty and graduate students, however, the news of the attack would provoke a series of difficult choices – many joined the armed services, found jobs in the rapidly expanding defense industry, or contributed to the war effort through research for government agencies. As the events at Pearl Harbor led many to weigh choices and voluntarily leave campus, numerous students of Japanese ancestry were soon given no choice but to leave campus.

Through the lens of oral history, we can explore the place of Pearl Harbor in the collective memory of the University of California, Berkeley. This story represents but one component of our larger efforts to record and interpret the history of the WWII homefront through oral interviews. Other collections, including our numerous oral histories with faculty, staff, and administrators, speak to the significance of that date in the history of the campus.

December 1941

By many accounts, December of 1941 was shaping up to be a terrific month in Berkeley. The weather was outstanding. Many of our narrators recall the weekend as sunny and even unseasonably warm. Instead of spending time outside, however, most Cal students were busy cramming for final exams. Despite having final exams the following day, some students were taking a mental break visiting family or friends. Others were at home or in their dorm rooms studying.

Natalie Salsig, one of our narrators, recalled in a recent interview “having to study for finals in a closet with the door closed.” After Pearl Harbor, students who wanted to continue studying in the evening were forced to confront both the distractions of global events and the immediate blackouts organized along the entire coast. Salsig recalls studying for finals in the closet, a small light illuminating her books, so as not to signal to the enemy where the cities began and the Pacific Ocean ended. “It was a scary time,” Salsig remembers. Fear of an actual attack was sporadic and uneven, but uncertainty was seemingly universal.

Jack Rosston was living in a co-op in December of 1941. Usually a punctual student, he had let a paper assignment sit until the last moment – staying up late the night of December 6 in order to finish the assignment. In the early hours of the morning, he woke up to screaming. He recalls the reactions of the students on campus, explaining that a couple of students were so angered by the attack, that they were threatening to bomb the Japanese Student Association. Jack recalls the pockets of anger and threats of violence, “It horrified me at that time, and most of the kids were horrified at that.”

Nearby in Oakland, another young woman had more immediate concerns about her upcoming senior ball than world events. In 1942, Margaret Walton would enroll as a freshman at UC Berkeley, earning money during summers working in the shipyards. Months before she enrolled at Cal, she recalls sitting in her bedroom the morning of December 7, “I was still in my bedroom reading and listening to the radio because I had fallen and spilt my lip, and I was feeling very sorry for myself because my senior ball was coming up Friday night, and I had this mashed up face . . . I had the radio on and I got the news, and I ran out and told my folks.” Her family spent the rest of the day, like many Americans, glued to the radio. “It was a real shock,” Walton explained. She adds, “Well, right away you got the news that the coastline could be attacked at any minute . . . my dad had already built black out curtains to put up in the windows.” Her family spent the evening huddled into the one room of their house that would not let any light escape to the outside world – eagerly awaiting updates over the airwaves. Walton’s classmates who enrolled at UC Berkeley during the war years were asked to complete an accelerated degree program – as the war had depleted the number of available faculty and staff. Today, Walton and the classes that followed, students who shared the same unique circumstances on campus, are known as the War Alumni Classes. Members of the War Alumni Classes not only shared classes; they became bound by common experiences with rationing, blackouts, and air raid drills. Almost all of these students had at least one close friend or family member in the service.

In the Classroom

The effect on the Berkeley campus that followed Pearl Harbor was both immediate and palpable. Harry Wellman, who years later became Acting President of the University of California following the dismissal Clark Kerr in 1967, recounted that life changed quickly on the campus in the months that followed the attack. In an oral history recorded in the 1970s, he described his recollections of Pearl Harbor as a member of the Berkeley faculty. A specialist in agricultural economics, Wellman recounted that he was briefly assigned to administer the enrollment of students with the department: “I had the responsibility for insuring that classes desired by students would be given. That was not difficult. Student enrollment dropped sharply after 1941-42 and continued downward until the end of the war. In 1944-45 there were only a few undergraduate students in agricultural economics and almost no graduate students.” Indeed, so many of the students had either enlisted, or left school to assume a job in the defense industry that the department had an excess of faculty for teaching needs. Classes pertinent to the war effort, in engineering, science, and foreign languages – witnessed temporary surges in enrollment from enlisted servicemen assigned to the campus, but enrollment in many other departments declined during the war.

Other Berkeley faculty took a prominent role in the war. The most notable of these efforts included Robert J. Oppenheimer, a Berkeley physicist, who served as the scientific director for the Manhattan Project. Working engineers and physicists, his efforts led to the creation of the first atomic bomb. Numerous other Berkeley faculty and alumni worked in all types of war agencies, but their presence was felt especially within the top-secret networks of atomic weapon research at Los Alamos, New Mexico and Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Turning Points

Activity on the Berkley campus following the initial shock of Pearl Harbor, however, was not always so eerily quiet and isolated. Even as Wellman reported dwindling enrollments in his classes, for example, he was occasionally flying to Washington to advise the government on rationing, taxes, and commodity price fixing. Others affiliated with the campus were working on research that would have an even more far-reaching influence on the modern world.

Pearl Harbor, of course, was also an important turning point for millions outside of university settings. Denise Fleig, a Berkeley resident who was returning home from work when she learned of the attack, recalls the sense of confusion at the moment she received the news. In her oral history, she describes her sense of unease, “Everybody’ll have to be drafted, now. Everybody. Oh, I wonder what that’ll mean . . . Sure going to change everything. Sure will . . . Everything’s going to change. Everything.” In her oral history, Fleig notes that, before Pearl Harbor, California seemed to be on the edge of American life – with New York and Washington as the primary focus of the nation. The attack on Pearl Harbor, however, seemed to momentarily shift national attention westward – forcing people in California to prepare for a possible attack from the Pacific.

A growing military presence in the Bay Area, coupled with a rapidly expanding wartime defense industry, brought thousands to the region. The arriving labor force, and their families, reshaped the character of the Bay Area by introducing new religions, ethnicities, and social norms. Thousands of women soon joined the labor force in the Bay Area, many taking up work at the shipyards, coming to be known as “Rosie the Riveters.” These changes not only impacted the students, faculty, and staff of the University of California, Berkeley – they were felt by everyone in the region.

Conclusion

Experts who study the creation of our long-term memories are generally in agreement that powerful experiences, such as those experienced in December of 1941, are either lodged into our memory or quickly rejected and forgotten. Memories surrounding important events are naturally and frequently recounted orally, thus reinforcing the recollection of meaningful events. A project such as the one undertaken by ROHO allows these recollections to be archived and preserved for a larger audience. Certainly, oral histories—like all sources—contain inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Human memory is, of course, fallible. Archival records, however, frequently confirm the narratives of those who are interviewed, and collecting from various sources allows the historian to mine the lived experiences of a more diverse array of historical actors. Often, the subtleties of emotion – the shock, fear, anger, and anxiety surrounding tragic events like the bombing of Pearl Harbor — are either lost altogether, or dramatically embellished in the newspaper accounts that have buttressed more traditional histories. By opening a forum for these emotional recollections to be presented, ROHO is helping to expand the historical memory.

Note: The oral history interviews quoted in this blog entry are currently in production. Transcripts of the interviews will soon be available alongside other WWII homefront oral histories here.

Read the complete transcript of the Harry Wellman oral history, conducted by ROHO in 1976.

Samuel J. Redman is a graduate student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. He works for the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) of The Bancroft Library where he serves as Lead Interviewer for the Rosie the Riveter / WWII American Homefront Oral History Project.

Write a great blog post (at least 400 words) on a topic of your choice that would be of general interest to readers, and the two lucky winners will receive a free massage at Berkeley’s RSF gym!!

First place prizes:

-Two 25 minute massage certificates– that’s 50 minutes of free massage therapy!

-Publication of the blog post

Second place prizes:

-One 25 minute massage certificate

-Publication of the blog post

Submit your entries to berkeleygraduate@ga.berkeley.edu by October 15. The contest is open to Berkeley grad students.

Good luck, bloggers!

Especially to those new to Berkeley, Telegraph and Bancroft definitely seem like the heart of the city. People weave in and out of shops with big shopping bags, squeeze into window cafes to chat over lunch (or happy hour), and otherwise fill the street and sidewalks with life. As a city planner, that’s how you know you that you’re on to something.

This isn’t to say that Berkeley’s actual downtown, west of campus along Shattuck, is deserted. In fact, it’s definitely worth checking out. There are several small restaurants, a growing number of good bars (“Revival”, indeed), and many buses, cars, bikes, and trains. But what downtown doesn’t have is the same sense of place. When you accidentally wander into Upper Telegraph for the first time, you know you’ve found something special. Downtown Berkeley, with buildings of a similar height but set much farther apart, seems almost anti-climatic for what it is and should be.

In 2010, 64% of Berkeley residents voted to change that. By passing Measure R, almost two thirds of Berkeley voters agreed to a new Downtown Area Plan that would allow downtown Berkeley to grow.

Currently, the two tallest buildings in Downtown Berkeley are the 173-foot Wells Fargo and 180-foot Great Western buildings. When flanked on sides by one, three, and five story buildings, these two really stick out. The Downtown Area Plan would allow property owners on those closest blocks to build new buildings higher and help smooth the skyline. These new, larger buildings would help foster a more vibrant arts district while creating new condos, apartments, retail and office space. The rest of the plan adds more open space, tree-lined streets and plazas, especially along Center Street.

The western block of Center Street, which connects Berkeley’s campus to the Downtown Berkeley BART station, is highlighted in the plan as an opportunity to create an all-pedestrian street. Not only that, but the City would “daylight” a portion of Strawberry Creek, which currently runs under Center Street on its way underneath the city. A generous canopy of new trees and seating would turn an endured and unconsidered passageway into an attractive destination.

Being Berkeley, the plan also includes state of the art integrated stormwater filtration systems, gold LEED certification or higher, wider sidewalks, preservation of historic features, and every effort to provide safe access to people of all abilities.

Of course, some people disagree with the entire idea of putting more people in Downtown, simply because “Berkeley is already dense enough”.

New residents should be forgiven for thinking Berkeley residents are as progressive with their own backyards as they are in the national papers. Inviting prisoners of Guantanamo to live in Berkeley is great, but want to open a Trader Joe’s on University? Sorry, it will cause too much traffic, so we’re going to tie that up in committee for almost a decade.

Even though a majority of every precinct endorsed Measure R, including over 70% from Downtown Berkeley residents, the modest zoning increases could still end up stalled forever. When the plan goes before City Council later this year, expect some of Berkeley’s notorious NIMBY’s to show up. Only in Berkeley do a few vitriolic speakers at a City Council meeting outweigh the wishes of the majority as expressed by ballot measure.

Will Berkeley’s minority of NIMBYs triumph? We’ll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, Berkeley’s Downtown remains oppressed. Have fun in Upper Telegraph, San Francisco, and Oakland.

A quick re-cap: During the weeks-long protests that shut down the Wisconsin state capitol, Cronon tried to situate the Republican’s anti-union bill in the state’s and the nation’s historical context. This effort culminated in two publications that have attracted the ire of Wisconsin’s Republican Party.

• First, Cronon published a blog post about the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is the architect of much of conservation legislation sweeping the nation.
• Second, in a New York Times editorial, he argued that the policies of Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker, are not only undoing a century of social reforms that are in large part the work of Republicans, but also break with the state’s bipartisan tradition of transparency and mutual respect.

On March 17, two days after the blog was published, but four days before the op-ed appeared, the University of Wisconsin-Madison received an email from the Republican Party of Wisconsin formally requesting under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) all of the email’s from Cronon’s state email account (i.e., @wisc.edu) which reference terms such as “union”, “rally”, “Republican”, and “Scott Walker.”

In another blog post, Cronon makes a convincing argument that this request is intended to embarrass, punish, and a silence a critic—a misuse of FOIA that threatens academic freedom.

As academics and members of a public university, this is an issue that affects all of us. What do you think? Does this change how you use your @berkeley.edu email account?

Here’s a sampling of the relevant news pieces. For a more complete list, see Cronon’s blog.

• ‘Have you no sense of decency?’ The Wm. Cronon story, The Atlantic, March 25.
• A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin, New York Times, March 25.
• There’s No Such Thing as a Bad FOIA Request, Salon, March 25.
• Academic Intimidation, New York Times, March 25.
• Wisconsin GOP Seeks E-Mails of a Madison Professor Who Criticized the Governor, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 25.

If you need guidance, see our post on preparing for an earthquake.

The County of San Francisco also has a helpful step-by-step guide to preparing for a variety of disasters.

You can find the latest campus coverage of the disaster in Japan here.

The 911 system was designed for landlines, which make it is easy to identify a caller’s location. While calling 911 from a cell phone will put you in touch with local emergency service providers, it may not happen as quickly as you’d like. In both Berkeley and Oakland, for instance, 911 calls made from cell phones go first to the California Highway Patrol (CHP). This is handy if you need roadside assistance, less so if you need an ambulance to come to your house. In this situation, the CHP must then reroute your call to your local police or fire departments, losing valuable time.

Also, when you call from a cell phone, emergency responders will not immediately know where you are as they would with a landline. If your call gets dropped before you can say your location, they may not be able to find you. If you do call 911 from your cell phone, the Berkeley Police Department advises you to give as much information about the location of the emergency as possible to ensure that help is dispatched  from the appropriate location.

Bay Area blogger Amy Gahran, who recently wrote about this problem, suggests programming the local emergency number into your cell phone for those cities or towns where you spend the most time. In Berkeley that number is (510) 981-5911; in Oakland it’s (510) 777-3211. If you’re not sure about the place where you live, call the police department’s nonemergency number to see what they recommend. Of course, if you can’t remember the local numbers or find them quickly in an emergency, you should still dial 911.

Photo by Darren Hester

It’s a sad truism that if you are a graduate student, you are probably in debt.  While rumors of Obama forgiving all student loans floated around during his campaign, realistically it was unlikely to happen. Still, it was with eager anticipation that I read all of the news sources I could find about the overhaul of the student lending laws.

The Christian Science Monitor helpfully offered a run-down of key components of the legislation:

* Improved repayment options! New borrowers can cap their repayments at 10%, down from 15%.  Sadly, this is only for new borrowers, so it doesn’t apply to my old debts.

* A streamlined federal loan system! So, all loans now originate from the same source. No real change here.

* Competitive loan servicing! Wait, this means we get better customer service? So they will be nicer to me when they tell me to pay up?

* Support to stay in school and manage debt! $750 million for classes on financial literacy for low-income students. This is probably a good thing, but I’m wondering how much time cash-strapped low-income students will divert from their classwork and jobs to attend supplementary classes.  Will this be mandatory?

* More Pell grant money! Sadly, the amount of money does not match the enormous fee hikes that many colleges are imposing this year.

There is also an additional $4 billion dollars to go to community colleges and historically black institutions. As a former community college attendee, I wholeheartedly support this part of the bill.  I was a transfer student and some of my best students at Berkeley are transfer students; I hope that this money will help our valuable, cash-strapped community colleges.  Still, the financial impact on my student loans–nada.

So, Derek Thompson from The Atlantic is accurate in his assessment of what the student lending law means for borrowing students: not a whole lot.

Photos by Colleen Morgan

It’s late and the bus is still filled to the gills with chattering Berkeley students, fogging up the windows and ignoring the exhortations of the bus driver, “STEP BACK! EVERYONE STEP BACK!” Students are leaving campus after late nights studying and working in labs, some headed to Safeway to stock up on supplies.  The student traffic tapers off south of Alcatraz, with older commuters staying on, heading to downtown Oakland and beyond.  The bus quietly undergoes an almost complete demographic change, one that has not gone unnoticed by the AC Transit authorities.

You may have missed the announcement last month from AC Transit: major changes were coming for some of the local bus lines, the most shocking of which is breaking the 51 in half at the Rockridge BART into 51A and 51B, lines that would service the north and the south segments of the 51′s route.  This would require paying for a transfer for non-UC Students, and for students with a Class Pass (a mandatory charge of $69.50 to your student fees, I hope you make good use of it!) presumably AC Transit would be able to charge UC for two rides instead of one. I also do not particularly look forward to getting off at Rockridge and waiting for another bus, especially late at night after a long day of grading.

It’s not a major disruption and will not change the experience of most students who live inside the Berkeley bubble, yet it seems a bit cynical on the part of AC Transit to break the bus line in half at the Berkeley/Oakland border. Students tend to stay in a tight circle around campus, and while this may benefit their university education, it seems a bit sad to live in the Bay Area for several years without venturing into Oakland and San Francisco.  In this respect, breaking up the 51 is just another division between Berkeley and Oakland, punishing those who would venture outside of the bubble.

You can follow the day’s activities in the East Bay and in Sacramento with the Daily Cal’s live blogs. Or read other media coverage here, here, and here.

If you’re a Berkeley graduate student invested in the future of your institution, you know all this already. But in all the debate swirling around the lamentable fee increases – most prominently, how best to protest them – another issue is at stake. It’s heresy around here to suggest that anyone who wants and works for it shouldn’t have access to a college education. But does everyone really want a college education?

As San Jose State professor (and Berkeley Ph.D.) Mike Rustigan argued in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, many young Americans are more interested in working with their hands than sitting behind a desk, and to insist that everyone aspire to a four-year degree discounts the value – not to mention national economic necessity – of learning a trade. Caitlin Flanagan’s polemical (and pretty much universally derided) critique of the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley serves as the reductio ad absurdum of our unblinking devotion to a liberal arts education at the expense of any practical knowledge. Arguing that school garden programs rob students of valuable time with civics textbooks, Flanagan accuses Alice Waters and her “ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting” acolytes of preventing migrant workers’ kids from getting into college, which is the only way they could possibly escape their fate of diabetes and underemployment. (Waters’ suggestion that working in a garden can prove pedagogically useful is unlikely to breed a permanent underclass of sharecroppers, but if it asks students to write recipes as well as coherent paragraphs about The Crucible – if it produces people who can effectively communicate information rather than haughtily parade their cultural capital in The Atlantic – is that really such a bad thing?)

Faux-populism aside, most school garden advocates would agree with Flanagan that, whether early education is cultivated in vegetable plots or those of Shakespeare, college is the ultimate goal, and the argument that the university isn’t for everyone runs a real risk of elitism. It’s easy for a tenured faculty member, or a first-year graduate student enjoying the first fruits of fellowship, to wax poetic about the art of mechanical production. But, as Rustigan argues, recognizing the abilities of those who show promise in shop class isn’t just empty praise; it might help steer would-be dropouts in a positive direction. Our educational system tends to give short shrift to those with neither the desire nor the skill set to don white collars. If the push for equal education put more emphasis on vocational programs, like the Regional Occupational Training offered in cooperation with the Santa Cruz public school system, we might give otherwise unmotivated teens a reason to stay in school by showing them there are multiple paths to success. Manufacturing may be cheaper in China, but home improvement and electricians’ visits will continue to be made in America, and such expertise comes with a certain job security. As Rustigan quotes a retired plumber, “No one is going to outsource your local repair guy.”

And let’s face it: not all of us in academia have the luxury of condescending to the service sector. Plenty of plumbers make more money than assistant professors, and grad students flush with funding now might not find such a plum situation on the job market – to say nothing of undergraduate humanities majors who try and fail, as I did last year, to score jobs in marketing or magazines and end up waitressing (and earning more than some office-bound peers) instead.

This isn’t meant to suggest that anyone is deciding between a mechanical engineering PhD and a career as a shop mechanic, or to deny the fact that college education can indeed be a powerful force for social change and personal gain. As the current controversy at Berkeley High attests, the misguided assumption that non-white students can’t excel in college-prep courses comes perilously close to proving Flanagan’s point. But it’s about time we realize that learning skills for manual labor, like learning critical thinking, is good for everyone, whether it’s part of a formal curriculum or not, whether as the basis for a vocation or as a supplement to one. The best education would teach how to use all the basic tools: reading, writing, arithmetic, and a hammer.