L.A., Here They Came
The Dodgers move to California, and the world follows
Long before the dawn of superdomes and luxury boxes, Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, set out to build a modern stadium to replace the small and aging Ebbets Field, treasured by Brooklyn fans but with only 23,000 seats and little parking. New York City's planning bureaucrats thwarted him at every turn. By 1957, O'Malley was desperate for a land deal, and Los Angeles was a city in transition with wide-open spaces and big-league dreams.
So, after 68 seasons, and a 1955 World Series win over the Yankees, O'Malley moved the Dodgers to L.A., where he could get what he couldn't get at home: a site to build what would become the finest stadium of its time. The deal not only broke Brooklyn's heart, (the old joke was if you were in the room with Hitler, Stalin, and O'Malley and had only two bullets, you'd shoot O'Malley twice) but forever changed baseball, pushing its boundaries 1,800 miles beyond St. Louis to the West Coast.
It also changed forever the way the rest of the country saw California. With the arrival of the Dodgers (as well as the San Francisco Giants, who also defected from New York as part of the Dodger deal), the land of new beginnings and Hollywood fantasy hadn't just become part of the national pastime; it had become part of the nation. "The Dodgers' move to L.A. was hugely symbolic. It was representative of the whole shift west that was happening in the country," says Kevin Nelson, author of The Golden Game, the Story of California Baseball. "It also finally made easterners aware that California existed."
Dreamers. Of course, California more than existed by the time O'Malley showed up, even if the East Coast had yet to take the state seriously. Lured by great weather and high employment, job hunters and dream seekers were migrating to the state in record numbers. By 1957, California's population had grown to 14.2 million, second only to New York. Los Angeles County, already the nation's third-largest manufacturing city, was closing in on Chicago as the nation's second-largest metropolitan area. It wouldn't be long before L.A. was growing faster than any state in the country, except California itself. In the end, the shift west would become the biggest migration in history. "The new West was the most dynamic area in the nation. We wanted to start over fresh, and this was the place to do it because there was less here to erase," says Neil Morgan, author of the book Westward Tilt. "There had been lots of migrations, the Dust Bowl and all the others. They were casual. But this was a boiling-over kind of thing."
With its population booming, California had also begun in earnest to lay down the infrastructure of a megastate. Thousands of miles of freeways were being constructed, supercharging the growth of the suburbs and fueling the state's love affair with the car. (By 1960, approximately two thirds of the land in metropolitan Southern California would be devoted to drivers in one way or another.) Hundreds of new schools were being built, and the master plan for California's university system, which would become the envy of the nation, was falling into place. Three years later, California would authorize the largest water project in U.S. history.
In addition, Hollywood was back on its feet, after being dealt a blow in 1948, when new antitrust laws required movie studios to divest themselves of their theaters. Television, long the province of New York, became a Hollywood studio staple, transforming the San Fernando Valley into the center of the television industry. The valley itself, with its spacious lots and the nation's highest concentration of swimming pools, was rapidly becoming a population center. By 1960, California's population would hit nearly 16 million, 5 million more than a decade earlier.
Although shipbuilding, commerce, and retail were growing rapidly, nothing fueled the migration to California more than the defense industry. Thousands of GIs passed through Southern California's military bases on their way to WWII and returned to the state for good. Southern California became the behemoth of the aerospace industry, with five of the seven major manufacturers headquartered there. Defense spending fed billions of dollars into the state's economy, accelerating rates of industrial growth to a pace that was unsurpassed by any other state in the nation.
In 1957, when the Russians launched Sputnik, the California equation changed once again. Overnight, the space race shifted the emphasis away from bombs to guided missiles, satellites, and computers, sparking a different round of migration. "The Cold War is a tech war," says Ann Markusen, professor of planning and public policy at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and coauthor of The Rise of the Gun Belt: The Military Remapping of America. "It's not about men and machines anymore; it's about science. And for that you need scientists."
Two cultures. Highly educated aerospace and electronics engineers flocked to northern California and Silicon Valley, which was flush with government contracts. Ninety percent of the research money in Silicon Valley during the '50s was provided by the Department of Defense and NASA, and 90 percent of what was manufactured there was bought by the government. "The late '50s really saw the struggle between Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, which were two very different cultures," says Markusen. "All these guys who were pilots during WWII believed that men flying airplanes is what wins wars. Then this new group shows up and says we don't need to put men on airplanes, satellites can do it for us."
As the Cold War raged on, California continued its rise in the national consciousness as the land of opportunity, innovation, natural resources, and good weather. It was the subject of breathless photo spreads and stories in Life, Look, and Cosmopolitan. It was glamorized on film. Home builders in other states modeled neighborhoods after the suburbs of Los Angeles, with their wide streets and rambling ranch houses. Writers gushed about the "California way of life" and its "glowing example" of post-modern living. They predicted that ultimately the state's influence would "change the pattern of life in America as a whole."
But California's was an uncertain future, and with the giddiness came concern as the state began to confront the consequences of its stupendous growth: urban sprawl, air pollution, water shortages, traffic, and smog. With huge influxes of African-Americans and growing inequality, racial and political tensions began to mount. The state also developed a budding image as a kind of national nut house, which has proved tough to shake. "The outside world has remained an image or two behind in its concept of Los Angeles," wrote Morgan. "The world should be forgiven and so should Los Angeles: No other city has been so transformed by successive waves of migrants." And the transformation continues.
In July, California's Department of Finance released a report predicting that the state's population, fueled by the growth in the Latino population, would explode by nearly 75 percent in 2050 to nearly 60 million—a country, as someone said, masquerading as a state.
If history is any indication, one thing that isn't likely to change, however, is L.A.'s love affair with the Dodgers, which began 50 years ago and endures today. Two seasons after arriving on the West Coast, the Dodgers broke Brooklyn's heart once again by defeating the Chicago White Sox to win the 1959 World Series. The stadium O'Malley so desperately tried to build in New York remains a model of modernity even today. The only question now, as California continues to grow, is how much harder it will be to get season tickets to the game.