Introduction
At the close of World War II, agriculture formed the largest economic sector in California’s Santa Clara Valley. Its dominance was so unquestioned that in 1954, a local Mexican American labour leader remarked with full confidence to anthropologist Margaret Clark that ‘if general improvement in the standard of living among our people is to come, it will have to come through reform in agricultural labour. Emphasizing industrial problems is foolish, since Santa Clara County is an agricultural area and will probably continue to be so for years.’Footnote 1 In the mid-1950s, Santa Clara Valley was not yet the global centre of the science and technology industry that it had become by the mid-1960s. When this labour leader made his calculation in 1954, the region’s largest economic sector was agricultural, and that industry seemed permanent.
By the mid-1960s, however, the Santa Clara Valley technology sector was leading the country in research innovation, computer science, electrical engineering and hardware production. By the 1970s, domestic investors and the international business press were calling it ‘Silicon Valley’, after the compound used to produce semiconductor chips. By the mid-1960s, the area’s agricultural economy, which seemed so durable in 1954, appeared as a curious coincidence, or a relic of nostalgia. How had this happened so quickly?
The answer is that the region’s agricultural past was not incidental to this transformation. Rather, the Valley’s transformation from the agricultural economy of the immediate post-World War II period to the industrial Cold War economy was rooted in its existing labour and housing systems. Narratives about Silicon Valley are shrouded in myth, and residents and historians alike often described the transitions of the 1950s and 1960s as a ‘disappearance’ of the Valley’s agricultural worlds. But rigorous analysis of this period requires taking more seriously the words of the anonymous labour leader in 1954, who thought ‘Santa Clara County [was] an agricultural area and [would] probably continue to be so for years.’ Far from disappearing, this landscape generated the conditions for what would become Silicon Valley’s global, meteoric rise to technological, economic and financial power. The roots of the Valley’s technology industry were not grown simply in the culture of its firms, nor in the attitudes of its inventors. Its roots also lay in its labour regimes, where historic conditions of underpayment of workers had already borne profitable fruit for the existing agricultural ownership class, and in its mechanisms for social reproduction, like homes and schools, where workers were educated and housed with robust state support. Richard Walker’s study of California agribusiness explained that Silicon Valley ‘swept away the orchards of the Santa Clara Valley within a generation’, but this article suggests, rather, that those orchards and these two generations of workers seeded Silicon Valley itself.Footnote 2 Where some scholars have attributed the Valley’s low density of union representation to cultural attributes like individuality and non-hierarchical work settings, this article instead traces the low density of union organization to the exclusion of agricultural workers under New Deal labour legislation, and what Cecilia Tsu calls the South Bay Area’s ‘reputation for brutal, reactionary vigilantism’ against labour organizing beginning in the early 1930s.Footnote 3 The tech economy was mapped onto the built environment of the agricultural Santa Clara Valley, and tech’s own extractive labour structures bloomed out of the New Deal’s weak labour protections for workers in California agribusiness. In short, the agricultural world of Santa Clara County did not give way to the tech economy – it grew it.
Federally structured housing, suburbanization, transportation and labour law seeded the technology industry’s ability to graft itself onto the landscape and workforce of the Valley. This collection of federal projects subsidized inexpensive Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans and new housing construction, made unprecedented federal expenditures in road transportation and expanded access to higher education for white male military veterans. Critically, however, it did so through private contracts with individual homeowners and private firms, while failing to build public rental housing, or supporting organized labour. By 1965, federal policies on housing, interstate construction, military research at universities, and labour market segregation emerged as central to the Valley’s development as a hotbed of the computer industry.
From 1942 to 1945, the US military expanded its capacities on the California coast for launching operations around the Pacific Ocean. From 1949 through the mid-1950s, it purposefully decentralized its engineering infrastructure away from the East Coast due to fears of nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. These priorities gave the Bay Area a strategic and regional advantage. Within the Bay Area itself, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the particularities of Santa Clara Valley’s local agricultural industry – its relatively flat landscape, and its seasonal labour force – produced distinct housing and labour conditions. Crucially, high-tech firms were able to profit quickly because federally subsidized homeownership and transit underwrote the living costs of workers whom electronics firms paid poorly. These federal investments guaranteed a basic quality of life for both blue- and white-collar technology workers at a low labour cost to firms.
The existing agricultural labour force of Santa Clara Valley was inexpensive for growing technology firms to attract and employ as industrial electronics manufacturing workers. New Deal labour legislation of the 1930s had excluded field workers from unionization protections, and the anti-communism of the late 1940s and early 1950s dismantled what inroads unions had managed to build in industrial food production, if not in field work. Consequently, regional wages were low and union density was below the urban national average.Footnote 4 This made Santa Clara Valley a similarly profitable place for tech firms to do business compared to the technologically competitive and highly unionized states of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.
These transformations in labour, housing and demography defined the Valley in this formative mid-century period. They were situated in a long legacy of land-use practices and militarization that produced growth and prosperity for firms and the regional ownership class, at the expense of ethnic minorities and the working class. The development of this world-distinctive technology economy was rooted in its agricultural landscape, economy and labour market. Though it seems incongruous that a high-tech economy exploded quickly out of an agricultural world, it was indeed this very set of conditions which fuelled the region’s historic growth.
The technology industry now considered synonymous with Silicon Valley was a state-sponsored project. Against the backdrop of the Cold War and the United States’ national economic expansion, the Valley’s suburban landscape was flooded with inexpensive housing and transportation. Funding began with FHA loans, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act and university and military investment. The availability of new tech jobs drove waves of migration of workers to the area, while suburban expansion created relatively affordable and high-quality housing for them. The Valley had the physical space to accommodate the needs of the tech industry, and as such, it grew rapidly. The agricultural industry had cleared and levelled the topography of the landscape for housing and transit construction, and the agricultural exclusion of the Wagner Act cultivated an unprotected, inexpensive agricultural workforce, ripe for exploitation in the electronics industry and construction economy.
This article unfolds in three parts to explain Silicon Valley’s transformation from the agricultural economy of the 1930s to the built environment of the 1960s. The first illustrates how the agricultural exception of the Wagner Act suppressed the wages of the region’s working class in ways that ultimately benefited electronics manufacturers as the region’s economy transitioned to the technology sector. The second explains the shift from agricultural to real estate development as a driver of the region’s productive capacity. The third shows how the racial and spatial disparities of Santa Clara Valley’s largest city, San José, funded the building of the urban conurbation of the South Bay Area, along with state and federal spending that underwrote the cost of homeownership for white, professional workers.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the South Bay Area was home to large, profitable, food growing, canning and drying enterprises powered by thousands of labourers.Footnote 5 Nearly 40 major canneries towered in a ring separating downtown San José from the orchards extending in all directions around them, appearing much like the fields represented in Figure 1. A majority-female cannery workforce cut, de-seeded, cored, dried and scooped thousands of apricots, cherries, plums and nuts daily. The work was skilled, detailed and fast. Workers endured repetitive stress injuries to their hands, with regular cuts, scabs and pain and bloating caused by fruit acid exposure. Multiple railroad lines crisscrossed the small city, allowing the canneries to ship their product to points domestic and international. San José also served as a banking centre for farmers in Santa Clara Valley, and for many of the growers in the Central Valley and along the Pacific Coast. In this manner, centralized food production built the space of the urban region.Footnote 6
Figure 1. Postcard of agriculture. This image illustrates the mechanized, large-scale nature of agricultural cultivation in the region. Author’s photo of postcard, 2012.
If the beginning of the twentieth century in the Valley was defined by the proliferation of industrial agriculture, the 1920s and 1930s were defined by long-distance migration, poor working conditions, labour militancy and grower repression inside the industry. Wages in picking and canning were low, and workers, especially women and children, were paid on a piecework model, by the weight of produce they picked.Footnote 7 Farm wages steadily declined between 1920 and 1933, with a steep drop, especially, after 1929, to near all-time lows. At the same time, agricultural production increased, and the gross value of agricultural products continued to rise.Footnote 8 In 1931, further industry-wide wage cuts triggered a wave of labour organizing in Santa Clara Valley, and catalysed the founding of the communist-led Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (CAWIU), whose first offices were in downtown San Jose.Footnote 9 That year, the union went on strike. In a downtown park, grower-hired vigilantes seriously beat a number of striking workers on a picket line, and San José acquired a reputation for violent repression.
This riot did not deter the union, however: two years later, the San José CAWIU ran a handful of successful actions, including another strike, in the context of a large national strike wave in 1933. Their organizing was part of a larger groundswell of farm labour actions that took place between 1929 and 1935. ‘Never before’, according to Carey McWilliams, ‘had farm laborers organized on any such scale and never before had they conducted strikes of such magnitude and such far-reaching social significance.’Footnote 10 The CAWIU strike won.Footnote 11 In response, in 1934, California growers resolved to organize themselves, as well, to keep wages low.
The Associated Farmers (AF) formed in 1934. They ran the most powerful legislative lobby in the California state legislature, attempting to pass anti-union laws across the state. The AF threatened to deport non-citizen workers who were labour organizers and harass members through close contacts in law enforcement, and used a criminal syndicalism law whenever possible to prosecute union organization in the courts. Their published materials conflated unionism and communism, and they had a network of vigilantes on the payroll.Footnote 12
Racial groups perceived to be instrumental to unionization efforts, like Filipino citizens, were targeted. In 1935, San José Republican congressman Richard Welch passed federal legislation designed to repatriate Filipino workers to the Philippines. The Filipino Repatriation Act provided transportation to send Filipinos in the United States to the Philippines at the federal government’s expense on the condition they forfeit their right to ever re-enter.Footnote 13 These attempts at spurring voluntary Filipino repatriation were accompanied by mass forced deportations, which resulted in far larger-scale disruption.
In the early 1930s, the federal government deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican and Filipino citizens, creating a farm labour shortage in 1933 and 1934. In response, growers recruited workers from Oklahoma, Kansas and other parts of the American South and the Great Plains who were trying to escape the ecological and agricultural collapse of the Dust Bowl. Beginning in 1935, these workers migrated to California by the tens of thousands, reaching a peak of over 100,000 in 1937, and totalling about 400,000 workers in the state by 1940.Footnote 14
Growers, the AF and the elected representatives who relied on their support weaponized racism between workers in order to interfere with union organizing efforts and rend labour solidarity. Nearly 75 per cent of all California food-processing workers were women, and these women brought to the job their racial and ethnic backgrounds – African American, Armenian, Chinese, Czech, Filipino, German, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Portuguese and Swiss American, as well as indigenous workers from across North, Central and South America.Footnote 15 Women workers in the San José fruit and vegetable canneries, as well as Sicilian women in the Monterey, California, fish canneries, were rarely aligned in labour organizing across ethnic lines. In the case of Monterey in this period, labour organizing was left almost entirely to Spanish-speaking women.Footnote 16
That Santa Clara Valley growers weaponized racial division to hamper unionization did not mean all growers were white, however. The growing class was internally differentiated by race, as well. Indeed, Japanese immigrant farm owners predominated sectors of Santa Clara County agriculture, like flowers and berries, in the decades before the Depression. Though the size of the farms in Santa Clara Valley were not the same as the large-scale industrial farming found in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, owner opposition to labour organizing, as well as the wage structure for farm workers, was nonetheless similarly gruelling.Footnote 17
Far from being ‘naturally’ disposed to a low union density, as some early business press about Silicon Valley had insisted, Santa Clara Valley’s unionizing campaigns were, on the contrary, brutally rooted out by growers. In July 1934, 300 private citizens announced plans to ‘drive communism’ from the Valley. The Committee of Public Safety of Santa Clara County urged ‘good Americans’ to sign an anti-communism oath at the Chamber of Commerce. A large prune grower named Charles Derby formed a committee to ‘handle the Communist Activities’, and was sworn in as deputy sheriff as part of a larger ‘anti-communist action’. People in nearby Los Gatos and Palo Alto formed ‘security leagues’, and Sunnyvale passed an ordinance banning picket lines. Vigilantes attacked the Communist Party headquarters in San José, driving out organizers, beating members and stealing literature. Simultaneously, in the state capital of Sacramento, 17 CAWIU leaders were arrested on charges of criminal syndicalism, 8 of whom were ultimately sent to prison. That same year, the San José district attorney, chief of police and county sheriff spoke out against Filipino strike activity, denying those workers police protection against grower violence while they were engaged in any industrial actions.Footnote 18 These acts of intimidation, physical violence and criminalization sought to chill union activity.
The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), however, pushed back on this labour repression. Their alliance, led by Mexican American women, was central to California cannery unionization, ensuring that grower power did not proceed unchecked. Despite its reputation for anti-labour violence, San José likewise fomented militant union organization and frequent cannery strikes. ‘Women organizing women’, observed historian Vicki Ruíz, ‘proved the key to the union’s success.’Footnote 19 The majority of peelers and processors on cannery floors were women, whereas management and machine operation was mainly done by men, meaning that the points in the production process that maintained the smooth operation of the cannery lines lay in the hands of rank-and-file women. Using these pressure points, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, female workers had organized for workplace rights, such as maternity leave, and had won solid gains. When the Wagner Act passed in 1935, along with the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Public Contracts Act and California minimum age laws, California cannery workers could make wider claims under these protections than they had before. They already possessed organizational structure and experience from their earlier union campaigns, but the Wagner Act allowed them to formally organize into UCAPAWA.Footnote 20
The New Deal and the transformation of waged work
This new juncture in national labour policy altered the landscape of labour conflict in Santa Clara County. In July of 1935, President Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act into law. Known as the Wagner Act, it created the National Labor Relations Board, to protect workers’ self-organization activities, oversee union elections in the workplace, preside in workplace disputes and penalize employers who violated labour law. The Act guaranteed workers the legal right to create and join unions of their choosing, and to picket, boycott, strike and collectively bargain. It also outlawed company unions.
But critically for the political economy of Santa Clara Valley, the NLRA excluded agricultural workers.Footnote 21 This exception extended to children, who remained legally permitted to perform agricultural labour. Federal exclusion of agricultural workers from national labour protections functioned as a barrier to unionization for the Valley’s fruit and nut pickers. Though California state law did recognize farm workers’ right to form unions, it had inadequate enforcement mechanisms, which did little to rectify the exclusion in the Wagner Act and empowered growers.Footnote 22
Under this new legislation, the definition of agricultural labour came under debate in California. In March 1938, an NLRB lawsuit in the nearby town of Santa Cruz set new terms for cannery workers. In the case of the Santa Cruz Fruit Packing Company v. the National Labor Relations Board, the Supreme Court upheld the NLRA for packing operations that moved 37 per cent or more of their production through interstate commerce. Because the vast majority of Santa Clara County produce was preserved explicitly for export outside of the state and the country, that decision brought nearly all cannery and packing shed workers into the protections of the NLRA. Cannery workers were now classified as industrial labourers, and as such, were eligible for a wider set of labour rights than field agricultural labourers.Footnote 23 Field workers remained unprotected, but the labour movement hoped cannery workers could subsequently leverage their power as industrial workers to improve conditions for field workers. Two years later, in 1940, the NLRB again ruled in favour of California cannery workers, this time prohibiting the interference of the California Processors and Growers in labour organizing by UCAPAWA.Footnote 24 At the time, it seemed field workers would have a good shot at unionization going forward.
But despite high hopes, unionization failed to ‘march in’ from the canneries into the fields. Rather, the durable exclusion of agricultural workers from NLRB protections became a key reason for Santa Clara Valley’s low union density into the 1940s. From the 1930s on, the agricultural exclusion for field workers reproduced the gendered and racialized class of workers in the Valley who were paid poorly for backbreaking work. The seasonal nature of field agriculture and the lack of legal protection made job security less dependable and income less regular. When fruit was ready to be harvested, entire families, including children, assembled to pick produce, getting paid by bushel or by weight. The fracturing of worker solidarity at the two adjoining points of production – with different legal protections for picking labour versus canning labour – created significant barriers to unionization. This workforce thus remained low paid, seasonally unemployed and poorly protected under labour law, and this labour structure defined the economy of Santa Clara Valley from the 1930s to the 1940s. Unions were not part of a ‘dying industrial order’ in the Valley; rather, their lack of organization was violently enforced in the fights of the 1920s and early 1930s, and then codified in federal law in the mid-1930s.Footnote 25 And this labour regime was the fertile ground upon which the mushrooming profits of the technology sector shot up in the 1950s.
An early tech campus
At the same time that weak labour laws were producing this distinct labour structure in the Valley, the United States Navy was expanding a sprawling air station on its western marshlands in Sunnyvale, California. Beginning in 1930, the Navy broke ground on construction of an airfield, which would become known as ‘Moffett Field’, and later, as ‘Ames Research Center’. The base grew to be a hulking military research and development complex. On a clear day, when the California sun was shining, a person could stand on the other side of the San Francisco Bay and, with an unassisted eye, see the massive airplane hangars that dominated the airfield, some of the largest freestanding structures on earth. They were so tall that sometimes, it was rumoured, fog developed inside the tops of the hangars. They seemed to have their own weather.Footnote 26
In addition to the hangars, the Spanish Revival and Art Deco buildings of the Naval Airfield contained numerous labs for mapping, radio, weapons development and communications technologies. The scale of the facility was enormous, containing barracks for soldiers, single-family homes for officers, accommodation for visiting dignitaries, mess halls, recreation buildings and a golf course. The airfield was highly technologically productive due to the volume of funding and people flooding through its gates. This decade of federal investment, technological research and engineering expertise hinted at the future of Santa Clara County. In December 1941, when the United States entered World War II, Moffett Field became central to the country’s war efforts in the Pacific Theatre.
Staging ground for war in the Pacific
In these short years, the US military transformed the entire region. Beyond Moffett Field, Santa Clara County was surrounded by other vast military infrastructures to the north, east and south.Footnote 27 To the north, in San Francisco’s Presidio, on the northwesternmost face of the city, sat the Western Defense Command. This base co-ordinated the defence of the Pacific Coast of the country for the duration of the war. It also oversaw the planning and execution of widespread incarceration of civilian citizens and residents of Japanese American descent. To the east, the Oakland Army Base, the US Naval Supply Station, the Port of Oakland and nearby Port Chicago became high-volume barracks, shipbuilding docks and munitions production centres.Footnote 28 To the north-east, federal money poured into physics laboratories at the nearby University of California, Berkeley, to advance atomic weapons and energy research. To the south, the military base Fort Ord housed and trained troops, conducting large-scale manoeuvres.Footnote 29
Mobilization for World War II revolutionized the Valley’s demography as well as its geography. The war brought an influx of people to the area for jobs in the defence, railroad, technology, agriculture and food-processing industries. Workers came not only from throughout the greater West, but also from the American South, the East Coast and the Midwest.Footnote 30 Thousands of braceros, temporary agricultural workers from Mexico, came as well, with many staying on after the war.Footnote 31 The Valley’s European, Filipino, Japanese and Mexican American communities made for a cosmopolitan workforce. A January 1953 San Jose Mercury News article reported ‘more farmworkers live in urban areas in California than any other state’.Footnote 32 More than most other cities, San Joséans were both agricultural workers and urban, industrial denizens.
During the war, with European farms decimated and American troops abroad, California agriculture – and in particular, its preserved foods – became the cornucopia of the North Atlantic world. The United States federal government issued thousands of contracts to California packers and canners.Footnote 33 Canned foods were portable, preserved and nutritious. In addition, the county’s canneries, as defence-necessary industries, came under the regulatory framework of the National War Labor Board, allowing the workforce to remain living locally for the duration of the conflict. The Board standardized the length of the workday for cannery workers, resulting in shorter hours. A severe labour shortage resulted. The need for a stable labour force was strong and women and children were recruited from all over California to pack in the canneries.Footnote 34 The Santa Clara Valley cannery industry again expanded over the course of the war, growing the workforce and in turn making more secure other infrastructural jobs, like those in railroad shipping. This densification of the cannery industry added to an overall picture across the Bay Area in which the war created plentiful jobs in defence industries like shipbuilding and aerospace.
As labour demand increased, and the National War Labor Board standardized pay and working conditions, wages and benefits increased as well. Overall, worker power improved across the multi-racial cannery sector, with the crucial exception of Japanese American workers. Unlike many other farm owners and agricultural workers in the Valley, who saw their economic fortunes rise with the war, the incarceration of Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066 divested thousands of workers and farmers of their homes and land while the federal government imprisoned them in isolated, inhospitable camps around the western United States. In March of 1942, the Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) forced Japanese American farmers to transfer their businesses to non-Japanese operators. They endured threats, harassment and vigilante violence.Footnote 35 One Santa Clara County Farm Security Administration field agent, Charles Hearn, chillingly reported that the area’s Japanese Americans were co-operating ‘absolutely 100 percent’.Footnote 36 This incarceration resulted in the wartime devastation of San José’s Japantown, as well as the decimation of Japanese American-owned fruit, berry and flower farms.
By the time the war ended, many Japanese American farming businesses in the Valley were ruined. There were reports that white managers to whom Japanese farmers had transferred their land and business had transferred title and rights to themselves while the original owners were detained. Older farmers, landless farmers or those without family to rely on, struggled to re-enter agriculture, and their former lives and livelihoods.Footnote 37
Throughout World War II, agricultural production and food preservation made the area a centre of war mobilization. Santa Clara Valley firms like the California Fruit Canners Association, Del Monte Fruit, Mariani’s and Libby’s controlled the largest fruit production and packing region in the world.Footnote 38 Between 1939 and 1950, California produced more canned fruits and vegetables than any other state, predominantly fruit picked and packaged for consolidated agribusinesses.Footnote 39 Though San José was home to more ‘mom and pop’ canneries than other regions in California, the large growers profited most, streamlining their buying processes by sourcing from large orchards instead of small farmers. This process consolidated economic and political power within a small group of landholding families. The families who owned the larger industrial agriculture operations and the cannery sector were mostly British American, Italian American and Portuguese American. Unlike Japanese American farmers, who largely grew high-value, labour-intensive truck crops like berries and flowers, fruit and nut growers and canners were not usually small family farmers. The year after the war’s end, in 1946, California alone produced half of the United States’ entire fruit pack.Footnote 40 Nearby shipbuilding enterprises, military bases, maritime ports and railway depots moved troops, migrant workers and food products through the Valley. The swirling military logistics of the war relocated substantial numbers of military personnel and engineering workers to the area, and by the end of the war, local governments in the region began to plan for this population growth. Critically, this growth coincided with the agriculture industry’s expansion and industrialization in the South Bay Area. An agricultural region that exported its foodstuffs was now becoming a strategically important military centre, and a crossroads for not just agricultural workers, but incoming military and infrastructure workers as well.
Further blows to labour
It was into this strong agricultural labour market that, in June of 1947, Congress over-rode President Truman’s veto of the Taft–Hartley Act. The intent of the Act’s supporters was to roll back the NLRA, and in its passage, Taft–Hartley eroded many of the gains made by organized labour since the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935. Fruitful labour organizing tactics, just recently supported by federal law in 1935, became unprotected once again. These now-illegal tactics included mass picketing, sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts. It also mandated an 80-day cooling off period for industrial actions in sectors deemed essential to national security, like food preservation.
Section 9H of the Act sought to not just bar certain tactics from use, but to bar members’ speech and creed as well. 9H allowed the National Labor Relations Board to exclude from the bargaining process any union representative who would not disclaim membership in the Communist Party. This meant no union officers could participate in a dispute resolution process in front of the NLRB if they did not swear an oath that they were not members of the Party.Footnote 41 Many cannery union organizers, including the Food, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ leaders – formerly of UCAPAWA – refused to take the oaths. The national Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), to which the FTA belonged, subsequently ordered its organizers to take the oath. Leaders of the FTA who refused to disclaim membership in the Communist Party were blacklisted from the union. The fissure rattled, then weakened, the cannery unions, and many members and organizers departed them.Footnote 42 According to Vicki Ruiz, the FTA ‘descended rapidly from the seventh largest CIO union into obscurity’.Footnote 43 Amid a wider redbaiting campaign, San José labour leader Luisa Moreno, the ‘California Whirlwind’, was hauled before the California Un-American Activities Committee and subsequently deported to Guatemala in 1948. Lucio Bernabé, another San José cannery organizer, barely escaped a similar deportation in the early 1950s.Footnote 44 Required oaths and ongoing threats of deportation had a chilling effect on organized labour across the Valley.
This union-busting did not only serve to keep wages low in Santa Clara County agriculture, it kept them low across its growing electronics sector as well. At this same time, the country’s international anti-communism shaped the Valley as much as its local anti-communism. In the late 1940s, Santa Clara County’s military and transportation industries were once again ramping up along with US military operations on the Korean Peninsula. In addition to the manufacturing and design of weapons and navigation technologies, consumer goods, like household electronics and appliances, radios, televisions and early consumer calculation and recording devices, constituted an increasing share of the Valley’s industrial output. In 1950, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) was the third-largest union in the Congress of Industrial Organizations, at nearly half a million members. Its members worked in the electronics production and parts industry in the Valley, bargaining with firms like GE and Westinghouse, in the growing fields of scientific, business and consumer electronics. In 1950, in Sunnyvale, redbaiting and oath requirements were so severe at the Westinghouse factory that the factory’s UE Local 1008 lost several hundred members, and the union eventually lost the entire bargaining unit.Footnote 45 This left the workers in the Valley’s burgeoning electronics production industry as exposed and unorganized as the agricultural sector. This repression broke continuities in institutional knowledge about labour organizing, squashed nascent unions and drove experienced organizers from the area. In doing so, it denied the region’s workers, across sectors, fluency in critical organizing traditions.
The Santa Clara County Planning Commission
As electronics engineering and production was expanding in the late 1940s, military spending and personnel in these industries were transforming the physical realities of Santa Clara Valley. During the Depression and into World War II, a lack of building materials had slowed construction of much-needed housing and transportation on a national scale.Footnote 46 But as soon as the end of the war seemed near, California authorized a series of road-building projects unprecedented in the state. In 1944, Santa Clara County’s post-war planning ‘blueprint’ made county representatives like the Board of Supervisors responsible for entering into construction contracts. It also praised them for building roads in their districts.Footnote 47
This increasing local density of industrial and military production correlated with a national increase in building infrastructure. Between 1944 and early 1950, corporate profits after taxes rose by 82 per cent, while the purchasing power of corporate profits rose by 37 per cent nationally.Footnote 48 This accumulation of capital produced ‘an uneven, unstable and tension-packed geographical landscape for production, exchange, and consumption’, as evidenced in Figure 2.Footnote 49
Figure 2. ‘Assessed Value’. This graph from Santa Clara County’s Blueprint for the Future illustrates a local economy and landscape changing in tandem. Canneries, fruit trees, water infrastructure and railroads sit alongside modernist single-family homes and downtown office buildings in the depiction of the local built environment. Dotted lines at the top of the chart represent the substantial growth in assessed dollar value of the county over the course of the war. Santa Clara County Planning Commission, Blueprint for the Future: A Post-War Plan for Santa Clara County, California (San José, 1944).
The Santa Clara County Planning Commission was a crucial institution in the transition of this ‘unstable and tension-packed landscape’ from an agricultural economy to the location of production of a labour force ripe for Silicon Valley technology employment. The Planning Commission used public construction to supplement private sector employment and ease the transition from war industry jobs for displaced war workers. In this way, municipal and regional state power stablized a highly mobile, trained workforce, and became another underwriter for private sector technology development.
In a plan presented to the Board of Supervisors in 1944, the Santa Clara County Planning Commission laid out the material realities of post-war surplus. ‘Due to the concentration in California of a large percentage of the nation’s aircraft and shipbuilding industries with their allied manufacturing activities, we will be faced with large scale unemployment when these war plants curtail their production’, they wrote. ‘Public works provide ideal projects because they use a large amount of labour in combination with materials such as lumber, cement, reinforcing steel, plumbing and electrical equipment that is now being manufactured and for which there will be no need to wait when the war is over.’Footnote 50 The Commission encouraged the acquisition of airport sites and petitioned the federal government for ‘construction’ and equipment.Footnote 51 They continued:
This type of [public works] project can also make use of heavy equipment which will be available…Their construction will be undertaken by private contractors drawing their workers from the ranks of former locally employed war workers and returning personnel of the armed forces…It is, therefore, extremely likely that public works projects may have to supplement private enterprise from time to time…Correlation and coordination of these public projects in timing and extent with private employment is imperative. Footnote 52
Santa Clara County, then, became an administrative organ for synchronizing displaced, skilled war workers with military surplus from the surrounding region. The local state, in the form of the County Planning Commission, stepped in to ensure private and public works continued apace, in the form of infrastructure. This shifted the major industrial sectors in the Valley from an agricultural base to a sector based in large-scale suburban construction.
Just months after the plan was published, while corporate profits soared, nationally, so too did inflation. In the spring of 1945, workers’ average real earnings fell by 12 per cent in the nearby city of San Francisco. By the end of 1946, most Bay Area workers found themselves with weaker purchasing power than they had in early 1944. Many of the region’s largest employers withdrew previously granted union recognition and collective bargaining practices which had prevailed during the war, insisting on a return to ‘normal’ ways of doing business.Footnote 53 This further weakened the regional unionization rate across local sectors, which was already low due to the agricultural exemption in the Wagner Act.
During this time, San José, like much of the United States, simultaneously saw an expansion of federally backed mortgage credit and road construction. All over the country, the FHA provided incentives to ‘land speculators, subdivision developers, building contractors, realtors, and lending institutions’ in places like the South Bay.Footnote 54 The aggregate ‘residential behavior of the American people’ who moved to new suburbs was, in large part, ‘the result of market forces and government policies’.Footnote 55 Specifically, the FHA programme guaranteed the value of collateral for loans made by private banks. In doing so, it guaranteed over 90 per cent of the value of a home loan, so that 10 per cent down payments became routine, and 20- or 30-year loans ensured low monthly payments for buyers. Under these terms, suddenly it became ‘cheaper to buy new suburban homes than rent comparable older dwellings in the central city’.Footnote 56 In guaranteeing a massive national real estate project, the FHA minimized risk for individual developers and homeowners. A number of factors – the production of roads, the war surplus of newly discharged civil engineers and surveyors, the existence of surplus war materiel, level agricultural land and cheap home loans for men – converged to suburbanize the South Bay. These created a ready source of largely affordable, new, spacious, desirable housing for workers. An abundance of jobs, affordable housing and new transit investment led to further explosive, rapid population growth. In Santa Clara Valley, this meant that many men – even blue-collar returning veterans, cannery workers and agricultural labourers – could purchase a free-standing new home on a suburban block for the first time.
This conversation of agricultural land into housing was transforming the local economy. In the 1950s, the Bay Area census registered 290,547 people in Santa Clara County.Footnote 57 In 1955, there were 43,920 farm workers hired in Santa Clara County, excluding ‘family workers’, such as wives and children, and small farm owners who also worked their land.Footnote 58 Thus, even a conservative estimate indicates that over 15 per cent of residents were employed in agricultural jobs at some point in that calendar year. But the political and economic gains cannery women made during the Depression and the war had unravelled by the 1950s. First, the cannery unions became unwelcoming, if not outwardly hostile, toward Mexican American female leadership.Footnote 59 Powerful and conservative labour organizations like the mostly white and male Teamsters Union and the Catholic clergy of San José joined with elite growers’ associations to charge that the cannery unions were ‘dangerous arms of the Communist Party’ that Mexican Americans should avoid supporting.Footnote 60 By 1951, interference from the male-dominated Teamsters, and deportation of Central American union leaders broke what had once been a militant, women-of-colour-led union.Footnote 61 By 1977, the canning industry in the Valley employed only 12,000 workers, down from an estimated 30,000 workers in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote 62 A decade after that, 30 canneries would close in the Valley, leaving only 8 remaining by 1987.Footnote 63 In their wake, thousands of workers – largely Latin and Asian American – were left looking for industrial jobs.
As the orchards were converted to housing and the canneries closed, Santa Clara Valley exploded in population and industrial density in the early 1950s. The Santa Clara County Planning Commission’s urban plan was beginning to come to fruition. Large blue-chip engineering and electronics corporations relocated out of the north-eastern United States to California.Footnote 64 In 1952, New York-based International Business Machines (IBM) built an enormous research facility at the south end of San José. In March 1964, Westinghouse relocated its new Marine Products Division to Sunnyvale, California – where the UE had previously been driven out – from the highly unionized state of Pennsylvania.Footnote 65 By late October of that year, the federal government had awarded the Sunnyvale Division of Westinghouse a contract for nuclear engine test facilities.Footnote 66 Soon after, the Sunnyvale facility contributed parts for the world’s first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus. Footnote 67 Westinghouse Sunnyvale also built parts for the USS Enterprise, a massive naval aircraft carrier which defined the United States fleet for decades after its first voyage in 1962.Footnote 68 Alongside California’s Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse Sunnyvale also developed and built Polaris missile equipment for the Navy.Footnote 69 A technology economy was being mapped onto the existing nodes of military, housing and transportation infrastructure across the Valley.
FHA home loans and the explosion of suburban housing
Over the course of the late 1950s and early 1960s, local landholders united with construction firms and property developers to build housing across the Valley. Seeing there was more money to be made in homes and roads than in prunes and apricots, a booster class of wealthy and conservative orchard men set about profiting from the flat land and mild climate of Santa Clara County in a different way.Footnote 70 Increasingly, for farmers, selling land to real estate developers became an easier way of making money than the unpredictable work of growing fruits and vegetables. For families who remained committed to farming, it became harder to hold on financially: as more of the Valley became zoned for residential and commercial instead of agricultural use, property taxes went up, making it more appealing, if not imperative, to sell land to housing developers. Individual farming families were less able to stave off developers than their larger grower peers.
The more land housing developers purchased and built on, the more powerful their firms grew, and the more consolidated their interests in the Valley became.Footnote 71 This booster class envisioned San José as a large city, prosperous and peopled. The Valley’s large landholders saw the potential in selling sunny San José to people who had passed through it during the war. They wanted new families to build lives in San José, to buy homes boosters built on boosters’ land, and fill them with goods from boosters’ local shops. Likewise, the San Jose Mercury News wanted San José’s own local paper on the doorsteps of each of these new homes. Indeed, Joseph B. Ridder, the publisher of the Mercury News, was known for his adage ‘prune trees don’t buy newspapers, people do’.Footnote 72 This shared interest in growth meant the city paper touted or buried political opinions on local land use as the booster class saw fit.Footnote 73
To stand aggressively in favour of suburban growth benefited the growth of the newspaper itself. It crusaded for a number of general obligation bonds for capital projects which benefited developers, which, when passed, amounted to 134 million dollars. The Mercury News also supported a revision to the San José city charter, which abolished the vote of confidence for the city manager, which had helped to make the office more accountable to voters. By 1967, the circulation of the Mercury News was the sixth largest of all the morning dailies in the United States.Footnote 74
The South Bay grew the fastest of any part of the Bay Area in the 1950s.Footnote 75 San José’s population grew 39 per cent in the decade between 1940 and 1950, and between 1953 and the end of 1954, newcomers swelled the valley’s population by an additional 50,000 people.Footnote 76 By 1955 and 1956, Santa Clara County was the second fastest-growing county in the state of California, ‘its population rising in 12 months by 9.6 percent, according to the California Chamber of Commerce’.Footnote 77 The newspaper declared that it was going ‘Up! Up! Up!’, as pictured in Figure 3. By 1964, less than a decade later, Santa Clara County’s population had reached 857,000.Footnote 78
Figure 3. Circulation numbers from the San Jose Mercury News. An advertisement in the San Jose Mercury News showcases pride in the growth of readership spurred by the valley’s rapidly increasing population. Image courtesy of the San Jose Mercury News, Jan. 1957.
The city planner, local developers, Board of Supervisors, zoning and permit officials and the local paper were not invested in the construction of rental housing or public housing that would be accessible to a broader segment of newcomers. The FHA loan programme did not subsidize rental construction, like it did single-family homes. The booster class consolidated around converting agricultural land to suburban housing tracts, wanting private, single-family, residential housing. They did not just want population increase; they wanted property owners.
A.P. ‘Dutch’ Hamann, San José’s city planner throughout the 1950s and 1960s, aspired to make the California dream affordable to everyone, including and especially the aspirational middle class. He set out to make San José the ‘Los Angeles of the North’. With local business interests in mind, the city government, Hamann and the Mercury News supported rapid, low-density growth. This growth was also appealing to many residents in need of affordable housing.
This form of housing creation shaped the political constituencies of the Valley in two operative ways. First, the lowered barrier to entry on mortgages for single-family homes was creating a wider homeowning class where there had been a much smaller one previously. Homeownership allowed owners to generate wealth from the rapid appreciation of their property values. Second, these positive gains largely devolved to white men; it was uncommon for banks to extend FHA-backed loans to African American or Asian American men, or, to a lesser extent, Mexican American men.Footnote 79 Before the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, women of any race could generally not take out mortgages without a male cosignatory.
Crucially for the rapid development of the tech sector, federally backed mortgages with low interest rates and long time horizons kept the cost of purchasing a house affordable for white, male scientific and defence workers. This was especially true for the region’s veterans, who had often gained electronics and radio expertise during their military service, and who then went on to complete their university degree under the GI Bill, which they in turn used to develop a professional specialization in the technology sector. The affordability and rapid appreciation of small, suburban houses pulled many science and engineering workers into Santa Clara County’s newly expanding middle class. Without an increase in labour costs for firms, homeownership, rather, allowed property value appreciation to buoy income from wages. Importantly, cannery workers likewise took advantage of federal policy to buy homes, determined to improve their lives and the fortunes of their children, and homeownership and the rapid appreciation of land values transformed many, though certainly not all, agricultural workers’ economic status within a generation.
Foreclosing on renters: the CIO’s fight to save public housing
During the Depression, the federal government had built public housing throughout California through works projects, especially in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland. In the very late 1930s or early 1940s, under California Governor Culbert Olson, agricultural labour expert Carey McWilliams was made head of the Commission on Industrial Housing. Under this leadership, the federal Farm Security Administration built model labour camps at Corcoran, Shafter, Arvin and other cotton-growing areas.Footnote 80 Moreover, during this same period between 1930 and 1940, the high point of cannery union organizing, the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO) had grown rapidly across the state of California. The AFL–CIO was both exercisng this growing power, and building it, when it set out to enact a ‘People’s Program’ focused on full employment, high wages and industrial democracy.Footnote 81 Part of this larger commitment was the protection of worker housing. During World War II, this had become a federal priority, as well. Under the wartime US Housing Defense Act of 1940, the federal government funded low-rent public housing projects for municipally constructed and managed housing. Under the Act, local authorities received financing for select project sites, construction contractors and choice residents. Through the Housing Defense Act, thousands more public, low-rent housing units were constructed in the Bay Area.
But by the late 1940s, wages were stagnating, wartime housing support softening, and residential building materials were scarce, so more working families were struggling to secure high-quality housing. This was a challenging environment for residential renters. In the first half of 1950, rent ceiling laws came under attack in the California legislature. A statewide vote, named Proposition 10, suggested an amendment to the California constitution that would require voter approval of a ballot measure to authorize publicly funded low-rent housing projects. Prop 10 would throw up substantial legal barriers and time delays to the public funding of affordable housing across the state. Compounding the statewide threat to public housing, Harry Truman’s federal administration had also put forward a ‘so-called stabilization law’ which specifically forbade new rent controls.Footnote 82 Rent control was under attack from both the federal and state governments.
In July 1950, the AFL–CIO-backed California Federation for Civic Unity, a multicultural civil rights group that grew out of the American Council for Race Relations, declared at a statewide meeting of 60 community groups, ‘Behind a lot of talk about democracy, the landlord-builder-real estate lobby is trying to kill public housing in California.’Footnote 83 The Federation urged a ‘No vote’ on Prop 10, the public project housing law. The California Federation for Civic Unity insisted that ‘the real purpose of the initiative is to undermine and wreck the Federal Housing Act of 1949, which provides funds for low-rent public housing construction.’Footnote 84 The CIO News also worried ‘the initiative would make public housing, which is a matter to be determined calmly by legitimate city and county governments, into a political football for demagogues and pressure groups. It would put thousands of California families at the mercy of politicians…Secondly, the initiative would inflame class and race hatred throughout the state.’Footnote 85
Despite the fierce opposition of organized labour and racial justice groups, Prop 10 squeaked by with the electorate, winning the state by only 50.78 per cent.Footnote 86 This struck a blow to affordable rental housing. In response, the city of San José abolished rent ceiling laws in October 1950; that year the vacancy rate in the city was only 2 per cent.Footnote 87 Soon thereafter, public housing in the South Bay Area was largely converted to unregulated rentals, or demolished. Thus, both local and federal governments were helping middle-class and white workers buy individual homes, while creating a separate class of renters who, without the stabilizing anchor of public housing, remained vulnerable on the private real estate market. The elimination of rent control increased the property values of homeowners and landlords, creating family and corporate wealth, and deepening existing racial and class inequalities.Footnote 88 The abolition of rent control also threw workers onto the home-buying market.
Cherry orchards to cherry-stem annexations
As rent control was abolished, single-family homes continued to sprout all over the Valley. The pro-sprawl growth ideologies that boosters cheered in the pages of the Mercury News were expressed on the ground as the ‘cherry-stem’ annexations then exploding all over the county. In a cherry-stem annexation, a developer bought a farm or an orchard in its entirety, secured funds from the city to build a long road out into the property from a better-connected street, constructed scores of inexpensive, near-identical homes on that land, incorporated that development into the larger municipality of San José and then sold the homes to individual buyers.Footnote 89 The city then furnished these new annexations with sewage systems, lights, water and roads at public cost, then scooped up property taxes from newly incorporated areas – taxes which had formerly gone to Santa Clara County. Rather than generating potential revenue for services for residents of Santa Clara County, these funds were directed towards wiring and paving yet more annexations. Private developers bought more agricultural land and built more homes.Footnote 90 Large-scale farmers sold their property for generous sums of cash. Construction companies secured large contracts, developers sold houses in astounding numbers, and thousands of families moved into new homes. These cherry-stem annexations were duplicated hundreds of times across the Valley floor.Footnote 91 But this created an inequality of service provision, as rural county denizens were left without the new roads and sanitation systems that new buyers received in recently annexed extensions of the city. The land-use model of cherry-stem annexation engaged speculative land and taxation strategies to maximize private profit at public expense.
These annexations across the Valley were rapid and repeated. Between the founding of the city of San José and 1950, the city had annexed only 42 territories. By contrast, in the two decades between 1950 and 1969, that number climbed to an astonishing 1,377. In the year 1956 alone, the city of San José, led by city planner Hamann, annexed over 3,100 acres into the city.Footnote 92 If annexing county lands ensured the ongoing acquisition of new tax bases, issuing building permits proved another means to feed the juggernaut of speculation. In a testament to the city’s expansion, more than half of the building permits issued in Santa Clara County in 1951 were for unincorporated areas in the county, where residential occupation was low and services rudimentary.Footnote 93 These permits were lucrative. In 1955, the city building inspector reported that permits for new buildings and alterations to existing structures in San José amounted to $39,002,994, or $458,285,180 in today’s dollars.Footnote 94 The next year, that figure soared to $56,544,790, or $645,176,054 today.Footnote 95 The majority of the permits were for new residences, with around 2,000 for single-family homes, around 127 for duplexes, 635 for apartment units, 97 for new business buildings and 89 for industrial structures.Footnote 96 In 1953 alone, developers built 12,000 homes in 240 new subdivisions, housing an average of 4.3 residents per home.Footnote 97
As the city of San José grew, smaller cities around it like Burbank, Sunol and Cambrian Park struggled to keep up with infrastructural costs. The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors subsequently oversaw the incorporation of several small cities within Santa Clara County into the city of San José. As agricultural land was converted into suburban housing, the city planners of San José and these smaller cities competed to officially incorporate more county land, and thus more property taxes, into their respective municipal coffers. The competition over property taxes became known as the ‘annexation wars’.Footnote 98
Annexation wars
On a house-by-house scale, cherry-stem annexations provide a clear physical manifestation of how this model depended on speculative expansion into new neighbourhoods and consequent underdevelopment of others. Spatial expansion, an inherently unsustainable practice, became the means by which the city came to fiscally sustain itself. In this period, to provide services like roads, sewers, sidewalks and electricity to new houses, the city of San José had to continually annex fresh lands that would provide the next set of property taxes to fund the provision of services to the last annexations. The annexation model distributed resources from a geographic periphery into an expanding geographic centre, using newly annexed lands to build a stronger inner-ring city. In this way, the South Bay’s housing industry produced its own human and built geography.
This transition increasingly shifted the economy in the region from the agricultural sector to a real estate-based economy.Footnote 99 Residential and transit construction became primary industries, but their solvency was predicated on a form of accumulation only possible through the production of ever more roads and homes. The city of San José had to continue to grow outward, annex new land and collect the permit values and property taxes from that new land to continue providing services to existing residents. The expense of creating each new neighbourhood was supported by the speculation that another neighbourhood would soon be built. In each case, the developers bought up a parcel of land – paying for its building permits – and recouped the expenditure from building houses to pay for the next development. This happened at a rapid pace. The speculative process of using taxes from the next deal to pay for the last one hampered zoning regulation or city planning, funded private development at public cost, embedded racism in the city and generated poor environmental outcomes. It made the city government an organ for creating new, affordable housing, but it equally created an engine for absorbing new residents at the expense of existing ones, and for favouring homeowners over renters. Santa Clara Valley’s speculative practices, the labour law exclusion that had suppressed union density, wages buoyed by a lowered barrier of entry to homeownership for white-collar professionals, and the model of funding private growth with public money, became the roots on which Silicon Valley grew.
Building space for science
This housing landscape allowed for highly specialized workers in the Bay Area’s technology firms, universities, research labs and hospitals to quickly and easily relocate to the area. Within the growing urban formation of post-1950 Santa Clara County, these suburban landscapes took on two significant characteristics. The first was that of the traditional bedroom suburb, which efficiently absorbed large numbers of new workers, like ‘Mr. and Mrs. San Jose’, in Figure 4, who needed to sleep, prepare food, wash and raise families in enough space to support their labour outside the home. The second was the form of the low-density, massive suburban conurbation that would draw nearly a million people to the county in a matter of decades, and generated more income and wealth than central cities because of its new, post-industrial growth.Footnote 100 The urban and suburban planning which took place in the immediate post-war period created the conditions for both.
Figure 4. ‘Mr. and Mrs. San Jose’. This image illustrates the region’s enormous population growth during the late 1950s, showing an homogeneous crowd of families arriving to town. The respective reactions of ‘Mr. and Mrs. San Jose’, both surprised and welcoming, reveal the community’s complicated relationship to that growth. The image promotes an idea of typical San Joséans as white, conservatively dressed, middle-class and heterosexual, constructing a classed, raced and gendered ideal that obscured the presence, needs, rights and labour of many residents. Image from the San Jose Mercury News, 5 June 1957.
As key to the low-density, urban model as single-family homes, roads proved the crucial, profitable and complementary means for urbanizing surplus capital and underwriting private gain at public expense. Requisite for moving people to their home, to work and points in between, roads connected the ever-sprawling suburban tech economy. Moreover, the public construction of roads subsidized homeowners who benefited from the infrastructure; developers, who did not have to pay the true cost of building homes on their land-use model; and construction firms, who secured lucrative contracts.
If the state of California had supported greater highway expansion through the Collier–Burns Act, the United States federal government did the same through the National Defense Highway Act, less than 10 years later. Also known as the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the Act allocated unprecedented funding to build an interstate highway system that served national security interests, like moving armaments and troops in case of emergency, and civilian needs, in the form of urban and inter-urban transport. Federally subsidized roads underwrote the cost of transportation and affordable housing construction in the suburbs.Footnote 101 This land-use form underscored the expansion of the South Bay Area as a militarized space, in which Cold War priorities were embedded in the physical environment.Footnote 102 Roads were to be funded by levies from gasoline taxes, another model that established a speculative dependence on an ever-increasing number of automobiles. To pay for roads already in progress, policies similarly banked on the idea that more people would move to low-density regions and start driving cars.
Santa Clara County, like the State of California and the federal government, also invested heavily in the building of suburban roads. On 28 March 1961, a $70 million Phase I Expressway Bond Issue passed in the county.Footnote 103 By the end of the 1961 fiscal year, multiple expressway segments had entered the construction phase.Footnote 104 By 1962, 9 more expressway agreements had been secured.Footnote 105 Between March of 1961 and November of 1963, 35 engineering contracts were finalized, representing an estimated construction value of about $25 million.Footnote 106 In the fiscal year 1963–64, 8.25 per cent of every dollar the county spent was spent on roads.Footnote 107 By 1965, there were approximately 560,000 automobiles in Santa Clara County.Footnote 108 Even with these great expenditures, the report from the county the same year worried ‘we are barely keeping up with the exploding number of vehicles’.Footnote 109 But the county’s commitment to rapidly subsidizing housing and transit infrastructures allowed technology firms, universities and research labs to hire more workers at a similarly rapid pace.
Racial disparities ‘everywhere in evidence’
As new roads and homes stretched further west toward the Santa Cruz Mountains, and north towards Stanford University, the historically Mexican American and African American East Side of San José faced particularly acute divestment by city and county services.Footnote 110 Brown and Black workers had experienced longtime economic, political and social marginalization in the Valley. In the 1850s, the neighbourhood had served as housing for those who toiled in the poisonous mercury mines of the Diablo Mountains.Footnote 111 As César Chavez and Herman Gallegos of the Community Service Organization explained in 1956, while Mexican Americans gave ‘“a disproportionate share of bodily strength to the development of the region, [they] have been in the lowest income bracket, socially disadvantaged and civically weak”’.Footnote 112 Compounding this economic and political marginalization, the denial of public services to the East Side over the course of the twentieth century only redoubled the environmental pollution and challenging living conditions that had plagued its residents since the closure of the mines.
In the 1950s, the Mexican American civil rights group, the Community Service Organization, documented official neglect was ‘everywhere in evidence…in the curbless, lightless roads and dirt sidewalks, and the absence of adequate facilities for medical care, housing and recreation’. In 1952, this neglect was so acute the Mayfair neighbourhood experienced an outbreak of amoebic dysentery due to insufficient sewage systems.Footnote 113 In 1955, the San José chapter of the CSO reached new levels of visibility when its member Albert Pinon became the organization’s national vice president. Shortly thereafter, the CSO successfully pushed city officials to install streetlights throughout some underserved neighbourhoods, in addition to continuously petitioning for paved roads, improved drainage and furnishing of sidewalks to the East Side. In San José, and nearby Monterey and Salinas, the CSO was a middle-class organization, and represented the interests of homeowners. Their push also had a gendered dimension to it: women were the ‘organization’s backbone at every level’, and the CSO’s membership was ‘heavily made up of couples and families’.Footnote 114
The disparities between the predominantly Mexican American East Side of San José and the more white western and northern parts of the city were leveraged for the county’s transition to the scientific economy in the 1950s and 1960s. The West Side, closer to universities, laboratories and the financial centre of the city of San Francisco, disinvested from infrastructure and public services of all kinds on the East Side, in order to build up transportation, education, public services and spaces of leisure and consumption on the West Side. Between 1956 and 1966, during the height of the county’s annexation wars, the majority of homes in San José’s Mexican American neighbourhood of Sal Si Puedes were razed in urban renewal projects.Footnote 115 This municipal fiscal model of the annexation wars not only exacerbated racial disparities in the city, but it activated those racial disparities in order to further underwrite state support for the quality of life of workers in the growing electronics and technology research industry.
In addition to disinvesting in communities of colour, the growth of the West Side suburbs also consolidated the growing scientific and defence industry’s shared sense of its own homogeneity. Members of what had previously been deeply internally differentiated ethnic groups, like Irish, Italian, Portuguese, German and British Americans, now became increasingly conflated, both culturally and geographically, as white suburbanites. Now residing together in the suburbs and sharing common experiences like the benefits of FHA home loans, investment in school districts and advantages in a racist hiring market, formerly ethnically disparate groups of white people increasingly politically identified with one another. They now shared a suburban culture with shared norms around work, gender, privacy, space, childrearing, US foreign policy, economic conservatism, ideological surveillance, mainstream media and religion. In the Bay Area, as throughout California, and indeed the country, suburbanization consolidated a previously fractured set of ethnic European identities into a homeowner conservatism.Footnote 116
This denial of services to the East Side stands in stark contrast, of course, to the federal subsidization of new low-density developments, in which extensive FHA loans underwrote the provision of transit, services and utilities necessary for suburban homeowners, who were largely white ‘new people’ to the area.Footnote 117 The systematic, uneven state support for white male homeowners helped local contractors accumulate incredible short-term profit from building urban sprawl at the expense of East Side residents.Footnote 118 Resources were taken away from older neighbourhoods, often the homes to people of colour, to build new ones for workers who had newly migrated to the region for white-collar engineering, scientific, university and medical work. Through this housing system, public money flowed into private hands.
In each of these interlocking spatial processes, capital moved from the agricultural to the residential sector, and as farmland grew more scarce, jobs in the Valley became increasingly white collar. The tech jobs boom and the housing and transit boom propagated one another. Working-class cannery and orchard workers were literally losing the ground under their feet, and the work that came with it.
Cherry-stem academics: the university as a suburban property developer
This symbiotic relationship between the expanding suburban environment and expanding electronics industry was further expressed in the two’s shared architectural forms. Middle-class white workers and their families had come to the Valley seeking the affordable homes, job security and the sunshine many boosters had touted. And the industrial architecture of these technology and research industries mirrored the residential architecture of the single-family home. Low-slung and surrounded by lawns, these industrial parks and research campuses were likewise designed with large, landscaped areas that lengthened distances between sites of production.Footnote 119 Pedestrian infrastructure was evacuated from the built environment, meaning these lawns, offices and parking lots often lacked sidewalks. The industrial parks themselves were often miles away from population centres, peppered along the periphery of San José in separate cities and zoned to give technology industries a favourable tax status. In the case of the Stanford Industrial Park, in a 1962 study, 56 per cent, or the ‘majority of the Park’s 10,500 employees did not live in the immediate area but commuted from communities south of Palo Alto’.
Administrators at Stanford University spurred the institution’s growth into the technology sector. After World War II, Stanford found itself in need of funding. But while ‘the Farm’ lacked a large endowment, it did have hundreds of acres of rolling hills, and groves of willow, bay and sage trees. Finding itself with insufficient cash flow for university operations, and with vast amounts of farmland lying in trust, the university decided, like so many other farms around it, to become a property developer and landlord.Footnote 120
Stanford Research Park
Engineer Frederick Terman was raised in Palo Alto, the son of a Stanford professor known for popularizing the use of the IQ test. Fred had earned his doctorate at MIT, but his respiratory health had pulled him back to the warmer climes of the West. Like his father before him, he was hired at Stanford, and he quickly rose through ranks to gain tenure at the university, with a brief return to Boston during the war to assist in defence radio and radar development at Harvard, where he managed a team of almost a thousand engineers. At Harvard, Terman became a military man, learning to weaponize his scientific expertise. At the war’s end, he returned to California, where Stanford appointed him the university’s provost and dean of engineering.
The Stanford Industrial Park was Terman’s brainchild. He saw an opportunity for the university to generate income by renting out land to industrial tenants who specialized in scientific research and development aligned with the university’s engineering priorities. The project might also provide jobs for Stanford graduates and build the economic base of the sleepy college town of Palo Alto. The city of Palo Alto annexed Stanford Research Park lands into the city’s limits, and Stanford Research Park was born.
Two of Terman’s first renters were Varian Associates and Hewlett–Packard. Varian broke ground in the Park in 1951, and soon thereafter would further huge advancements in particle acceleration, satellite technology, radiation oncology and medical devices. Hewlett–Packard developed chemical analysis, electronic measuring instruments, laser printers, the mainframe computer and medical electronics. Lockheed’s Stanford Research Park space division developed integral parts of spacecraft, as well as missile technologies for the American government. Xerox had an adjacent research centre, the Palo Alto Research Center, which would go on to invent such technologies as personal workstations, Ethernet and the mouse. Terman’s Research Park would harness the booming post-war military technology sector to become the nucleus of Silicon Valley.
In addition to attracting high-performing white-collar science workers, the model of the Stanford Research Park, based upon military-contracted firms paying rent to a central private landholder, would make the science park an appealing low-risk, high-reward architectural fixture on California’s suburban landscape.
The university built much of its property into an industrial park, billed exclusively for advanced research-intensive industries. In 1951, Stanford began renting out this space to many military, radio, chemical and technological entrepreneurs and recent graduates to generate a cash flow.Footnote 121 Thus, the university merged the property development scheme already happening all over the Valley with high-tech research and economic activities. In doing so, Stanford embarked on a large-scale programme to strengthen its science and engineering capabilities, and soon became one of the largest university recipients of federal research funding.Footnote 122 By 1960, there were 40 technology firms in Stanford Industrial Park alone. In this way, Stanford spurred the development of a critical density of firms into a ‘city of knowledge’, based in the imperative of land development so characteristic of the Santa Clara Valley during this time. Gordon Moore, who would go on to co-found Intel in 1968, liked to say ‘the most important thing Fred Terman’s university did for Silicon Valley was to graduate 800 masters and PhD students per year, replenishing the region’s intellectual pool’.Footnote 123 As Stanford grew, Santa Clara County provided these new graduates with ample new housing. By the mid-1960s, Stanford Industrial Park became an intellectual capital for technology firms, investors and engineers. And Santa Clara Valley, by the late 1960s, was the technology industry’s ‘company town’.
‘A pretty small price to pay’
After the initial boom years in the two decades following World War II, by the mid-1960s, the Valley’s spatial and economic transformations, which had once eased the cost of housing, presented several challenges. As cherry orchards increasingly turned into cherry-stem annexations, country roads became city highways, and a sleepy college town became a cutting-edge technology centre, the economic realities of the residents of the Valley changed dramatically. The rapid, low-density growth had wide-ranging economic, political and social consequences over the course of the late 1960s. The city of San José, spending money on building basic services for vast swaths of new low-density housing, struggled to maintain the public services long-time residents in the downtown urban core had previously enjoyed. The new developments did not have sufficient schools, transportation infrastructure or hospitals built for their growth in population. Larger numbers of students stressed the budgets of local schools, and once-sufficient bus routes stretched over lengthening distances, providing less regular service to fewer customers. Quality of life, long touted by boosters as a reason to move to San José, was now threatened by the city’s accrued land-use choices.
Residents came to see these housing and transit options as insufficient. In 1966, the County of Santa Clara Transportation Planning Study and Bay Area Transportation Study conducted a survey of 4,000 randomly selected families. A vast majority of respondents wanted more ‘variety in housing types’, rated public transportation ‘poor’ and cited a desire for increased options.Footnote 124 Growth had produced discontents. When Frederick Terman was asked about the traffic and air pollution in 1965, he responded they were ‘“really a pretty small price to pay”’ for the wealth the area had produced.Footnote 125 The agricultural economy had provided fertile conditions for the industry, the suburbanization and the burgeoning science sector now noticeable everywhere.
The story of the South Bay Area in the mid-century illustrates how working people and public funds subsidized private acquisition for new corporations in what would become known as Silicon Valley.
Conclusion
By 1965, no labour leader in Santa Clara County would have gone on the record as saying that its future still lay in agriculture. Indeed, by then there was no question that the municipal governance of the Valley had fully mobilized to support the professional class. The future now lay in housing, universities, hospitals, technology firms and scientific research. Many field and cannery workers moved directly from the canneries into electronics manufacturing work. They found their experience quickly cutting and coring palm-sized pieces of fruit on a fast-moving belt to be a transferable skill to the fabrication of small silicon chips and electronic component parts. The new industry felt modern, clean and like a vanguard of a bright future. By 1971, the world had begun to call Santa Clara County ‘Silicon Valley’.
At the close of World War I, Santa Clara Valley was on the United States’ agricultural periphery. Less than 50 years later, the US military, federal and local states, technology firms, property developers, academic institutions and workers themselves had reconfigured the economy of the Valley into a hothouse of scientific and technological discovery. Waves of intensive labour, investment and migration had created a growth machine. In the 1930s and 1940s, federal policy and the global market for local agriculture stratified the regional labour market along gendered and racialized lines, and in the 1950s and 1960s, the housing market generated a segregated, private property regime. The availability of quality, low-cost education and cheap housing allowed for a low cost of living in the immediate term, and subsidized, en masse, the artificially inexpensive upstart and labour costs of new technology firms. This low barrier to entry into a new economic sector unleashed incredible latitude for risk and speculation, subsidized by workers and the public, and captured by businesses. The history of mid-century Santa Clara County is that of a landscape ripe with labour, and propagated by workers who nurtured the roots of Silicon Valley.
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