If the regions of the Great North (North-East and Middle-West), and the South, were creators of independence and consolidation of US power, the West Coast has been the protagonist, from the first steps, of its internationalization, started with the acquisition of a projection capacity supported by an ocean naval force, which became air naval during the first half of the '900.
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the United States became part of the international concert of the great powers, within which they will conquer a hegemonic position during the thirty years characterized by the two world wars. These historical steps constituted just as many moments of acceleration for the economic development of the West Coast, whose industrialization had received a new impulse in the aftermath of the Civil War, in combination with the demographic growth linked to the migration flows of the "go west", and to additional arrivals from Asia and South America.
In this context, the conditions for the birth and the affirmation of the shipbuilding industry of the west coast have matured, which in turn has provided its contribution as an active part of the rise of the USA to the rank of first world power.
Union Iron Works is founded in 1849 by brothers Peter, James and Michael Donahue, who installed their foundry in a warehouse in the south of San Francisco. Irish immigrants arrived in California at the beginning of the "gold-rush" of the 1848-1855, the Donahue, after a brief stay in the seekers' camps, had opened a workshop where they worked as blacksmiths.
In those years San Francisco passed from a few hundred inhabitants of the 1848 to the 36 thousand of the 1852, thus registering a significant increase in the population that had its turning point in the 1849, with a strong leap in the influx of feverish immigrants of the gold that were called "forty-niners", a name that has become one of the symbols of the local tradition, so much so that it was taken for the name of the city's football team.
A fundamental step in the path of economic and demographic development of California - which became the 31 ° State of the USA, 9 September 1850 - occurs in the 1869, with the completion of the first transcontinental railway line that will unite the pacific and Atlantic coasts, extending the two tracks pre-existing that connected San Francisco to Sacramento, for the western slope, and Omaha, in Nebraska, in Boston, Massachusetts, on the east coast.
The project dated back to the 1845 but only the 1 July 1862 Congress approved the provision that unblocked the federal funds allocated for this work, authorizing the Union Pacific Railroad to build a railway line heading west from Omaha, while the Central Pacific Railroad of California got the go-ahead for the stretch that was to meet him starting from Sacramento.
The Central Pacific, which mainly employed Chinese labor, laid about a thousand km of tracks and encountered the greatest difficulties on the Sierra Nevada mountain passes. The Union Pacific teams of workers, composed largely of Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans, were dealing with less harsh land, having to cross the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, which are older than the coastal chains. formation and therefore more transformed by atmospheric agents that tend to round off the contours. On the other hand it was necessary to alternate the use of pickaxes, bats and shovels, with the use of guns and pistols, to repel the assaults of the Indians, arriving to lay 1.700 km of railway.
The celebration ceremony for the meeting of the two lines, which were joined with a gold bolt, took place the 10 May 1869 at Promontory Point, near Ogden, Utah. In the following fifteen years, three other coast-to-coast railway lines were built: the Southern Pacific that connected Los Angeles to Boston crossing the Sun Belt, was inaugurated in the 1883, the same year of opening of the Northern Pacific that connected Portland, in the Oregon, on the Atlantic coast, joining the height of the great lakes with the Canadian Pacific (completed in the 1885), which went from the city of Québec, capital of the homonymous French-speaking province of eastern Canada, to Vancouver, on the Pacific.
In the 1860 Peter Donahue was among the founders of the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad and the entry into the railway activity will allow him to obtain important orders for the Union Iron Works, which in addition to mining equipment and agricultural machinery, also produced material rolling stock and locomotives. In the 1884, the UIW (with the engineer Irving M. Scott, president of Donahue at the top), enters the naval sector by setting up its shipyards in the area of Scotch Hill (which later became Potrero Point), in the bay of San Francisco.
From 1884 to 1902, UIW builds 75 ships for the American Navy, including the protected cruiser Olympia and the battleship Oregon (kind pre-dreadnought battleship: intermediate battleships between ironclad, built in wood and "coated" with iron plates, and the dreadnought, with a steel and monocalibre hull or “all-big-gun ship”), two of the most famous units among those that took part in the Spanish-American 1898 war.
THEOlympia it was part of the Asiatic Squadron along with the cruisers Raleigh e Boston, to the gunboats Concord e Petrel and the coast guard cutter McCulloch, and had been chosen as a flagship by Commodore George Dewey, who faced the naval squad led by Admiral Patricio Montojo y Pasaron, in the small bay of Cavite, facing the Philippine coasts in the waters off the capital Manila, the 1 May 1898 . The numerical superiority of the Spaniards, who could count on 37 units, was not a problem for the most modern ships of the young and rampant US power.
The Spanish inferiority then emerged clearly and the clash ended up turning into a real "pigeon shooting" [...] The heroism with which the Spanish sailors fought was of no use: almost 400 men of Montojo were killed or wounded; all ships were sunk or knocked out (Massimo Borgogni, "The birth of American naval power (1873-1909). The US Navy from the incident of the Virginus to the Great White Fleet", New Image, 2005).
In view of the conflict and in the fear of a Spanish naval incursion against the east coast, the battleship Oregon was moved, by order of the Secretary to the Navy John D. Long of 7 March 1898, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. THE'Oregon left San Francisco on March 19 and after circumnavigating Latin America (the Panama Canal will be completed in 1914 and inaugurated in the 1920), the May 24 met at the base of Key West in the southern tip of the Florida.
From the North Atlantic Squadron, headed by Admiral William T. Sampson, a formation called Flying Squadron was spun off, assigned to the command of Commodore Winfield Scott Schley, with the initial task of defending the eastern coastal belt, and based at Hampton Roads, in Virginia, a town known for being the scene of the first naval battle between battleships in history (8-9 March 1862), which saw the unionist confront each other Monitor and the confederate Virginia (realized by converting the frigate USS Merrimack).
At the beginning of July, with the battleships Indiana, Iowa e Texas, the armored cruiser Brooklyn, the armed yachts Gloucester e Vixen,Oregon he took part in the battle of Santiago (about 70 km west of Guantanamo), facing the southeastern Cuban coast, which saw the annihilation of the Spanish fleet commanded by Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete. The Hispanic stronghold of Santiago capitulated definitively about two weeks after surrendering the July 17.
By the end of the summer the fate of the war was clearly marked and the conflict officially ended with the signing, the 10 December 1898, of the Treaty of Paris, which sanctioned an unconditional surrender by the Spanish crown that had to accept all the requests of the US administration led by William McKinley.
Between the 1892 and the 1902, the year in which the Union Iron Works became part of the United States Shipbuilding Company, the total number of workers in the company changed from just over 1.200 to over 3.500 workers and the submarines were assembled in its sites Grampus e Blanket, the first made on the west coast, following a subcontract agreement obtained at the Holland Torpedo Boat Company.
Launched respectively in the 1902 and 1903, the two underwater units were designed on the model of the prototype made by the Irish-naturalized American engineer John P. Holland, between the 1897 and the 1900 (year of delivery to the American Navy), and named SS1 The Netherlands. These two submarines, with petrol propulsion for surface navigation and electric for underwater, were part of the seven boats of the class plunger (renamed later Adder-class), set between the 1900 and the 1901 and also composed of: plunger, Adder, mocassin, Porpoise e Shark.
In the 1905 the UIW is acquired by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation which aimed at a further strengthening of the vertical production integration process started fifteen years earlier by the then Bethlehem Iron Company, one of the largest steel mills in the United States that since 1890 had begun manufacturing armor and naval guns.
According to Richard Overy, to illustrate the US attitude towards mass production, there is no better story than that of Liberty Ship which were assembled with the same methods used in the car industry. The first of these boats, about 126 meters long and capable of transporting up to 10.000 tons, was launched in the Bethlehem-Fairfield yards, in Baltimore, Maryland, following a request from Great Britain to replace the merchant ship put out use by German submarines.
The initial order of the 1940 was exemplary for 60 but within three years the production target grew to 2.700 units and an evolutionary leap in terms of the organization of industrial work, which was accomplished in Henry's plants, was needed to cope. J. Kaiser in Richmond, on the north side of the San Francisco Bay, where ships began to be produced in series.
The whole complex of conveyor belts, rails, cranes, the mountains of preassembled standardized parts, the army of hastily trained men distributed along the chain by assembly line experts, the factory banners urging the workers to building the "ships for victory" became an improvised monument to rationalization, one of the typically American obsessions ("The road to victory. Because the Allies won the Second World War", the Mill, 2011).
Since it was the Chicago meat industry slaughtering facilities that inspired Henry Ford and his entourage in the conception of the assembly line, the latter's birthplace is certainly the Midwest, but it was the Californian shipbuilding industry. to demonstrate its possible application also to the assembly of large and complex products such as ships and airplanes, as confirmed by the production history of the B-24 bomber Liberator, conceived in the establishments of Consolidated San Diego and of which it has already written (see Article Online Defense 13 / 03 / 2016).
Apparently the 1912 was a crucial year for the California aviation industry, which at that time saw the construction, in Los Angeles, of the first plane by Glenn Luther Martin, and the foundation, in Santa Barbara, of the seaplane company Alco Hydro-Airplane Company, by brothers Allan and Malcolm Loughead.
The Glenn L. Martin Company (which in the 1961 will become Martin Marietta Corporation following the merger with the American Marietta Corporation), opens its doors to the 16 August 1912 with the aim of producing military aircraft and subsequently will also realize aircraft for civil transport such as 'M-130, which entered service in the autumn of 1935 at Pan-American, a company that at the time managed the monopoly of international flights thanks to the government contract to transport American mail and was working to consolidate its routes on the Pacific, along which in the same year he began the construction of stopovers in Honolulu, Midway, Wake and Guam.
The November 25 1940 made its first flight on the medium-light Martin B-26 twin-engine bomber Marauder, which will enter into service the 8 December 1941 at the USAAF, and will then be used by the Allies on all fronts of the Second World War, including the coasts of Normandy on the occasion of the great amphibious assault (operation "Overlord"), of the 6 June 1944.
In the 1916, Alco becomes Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company and with US participation in the First World War in the 1917, it begins to supply aircraft to the US Armed Forces. In the 1934 Allan Loughead changes its surname to Lockheed and also the family business will be renamed Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, based in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles.
Limiting yourself to models connected to the Second World War: when the Lockheed P-38 prototype lightning the 27 flew on January 1939, its performance was judged to correspond to the specification issued for an interceptor capable of exceeding 600 km per hour and flying at 6.000 meters, rising to the optimal altitude in a time not exceeding six minutes, and the order was ordered mass production.
The P-38 consisted of two fuselages - which housed the Allison 1.600 cv engines thanks to which the aircraft exceeded the 660 km per hour - linked together by the tail and wing planes, at the center of which was the gondola in which the cockpit and the armament were placed. Used as a fighter and reconnaissance aircraft, the lightning entered service at the end of the 1941 distinguishing itself in particular in the Pacific theater, where it could make the most of its high autonomy (4.180 km), and 9.900 examples were assembled.
Between January and October of the 1944 the activities of flight, evaluation and setting up of the prototype and the first 13 specimens of pre-series of the P-80 are carried out Shooting Star which, following the excellent results of the tests, is initially ordered in 5.000 specimens which will be reduced to little more than 900, in consideration of the lower need for US aviation with the end of hostilities in 1945.
An improved version of the Shooting Star was built in the 1948 and named F-80C, based on the changed designation of the aircraft for the hunt by P (Pursuit), to F (Fighter), which followed the establishment of the US Air Force as an autonomous weapon in the 1947. From this aircraft a training two-seater initially designated TP-80C was derived, which made its 1 March 1948 debut in the skies, and was immediately promoted to mass production.
Among the aircraft assembled by Lockheed and those made under license, this trainer, renamed in the meantime T-33A Silver Star, specimens were sold in around 6.560 to the Armed Forces of over 40 Countries, starting from NATO members.
Effective natural obstacles and deterrents in a defensive key, the two oceans that bathe the coasts of the USA become a multiplier of logistical problems for the projection in the European and Asian theaters of the military device of American power. Already during the 30 years the need for new aircraft with greater capacity emerged in terms of payload and range, but the decisive impulse for their development came with the second world war that also marked the decline of the seaplane. , until then reference aircraft for transoceanic connections.
The Lockheed L-049 Constellation is designed in the 1939 and will enter service with the US Army Air Force with the designation C-69. To tell the truth the military use of the latter was limited concerning, between the 1944 and the 1945, exemplary 22, and the career of the Constellation (of which in the various civil and military variants were built 856 units), it will unfold above all in the civil sphere with the Pan-Am and TWA fleets, for whose routes the L-649 model was created which presented greater comfort and capacity than board up to 81 passengers. From this it was developed, at the end of the years' 40, the L-1049 Super Constellation which could take up to 109 people and whose latest version, L-1649 Starliner, met with little luck due to the competition from the ever more successful jet aircraft.
In the 90 years the streets of Lockheed and Martin-Marietta end up crossing each other and the two companies will create a new group through a merger set up and completed between the 1994 and the 1995, following which the head office of the two companies originating in California, will become the town of Bethesda, Maryland.
At the end of the 70 years, California has long been the main outlet market within the star-striped free trade area, so that, having taken the helm of the Chrysler the 2 November 1978, Lee Iacocca identified in the inability of intercept the tastes of the potential clientele of the Golden State, a clear symptom and one of the major causes, of the gravity of the crisis that the Detroit company was going through, whose cars, besides being mediocre in terms of design and production, were now perceived as vehicles for old people and therefore they could certainly not take hold of the rich and exuberant youth of the two coasts, especially those of the Pacific.
Although the automotive industry was born in Michigan, it developed in California. It was California to give us the first examples of wide arteries and therefore of fast scrolling. IS always been the gateway to the market of young people with powerful cars, with four-speed gearbox and central lever, external spare wheels with patterned wheel covers, vans transformed into campers, crazy cars and a thousand other series model processing from a chain of assembly of some Michigan factory (“An autobiography”, Sperling & Kupfer, 1986).
Thus, when Ronald Reagan was elected president in November of the 1980, California has long started to become a sort of great power in great power, and in the White House of his former governor (from 1967 to 1975), he may find the political sanction of the advanced state reached by this process.
Received the blow of the outbreak of the "new economy bubble", between the 2000 and the 2001 (to which it could not remain a stranger since it was the land of Silicon Valley), and that of the energy crisis, which had its emblematic story in the "Enron case ", With the global financial crisis opening in the second half of the 2000 years, California entered a phase of serious difficulty that reached its peak with the mandates of Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (from 2003 to 2011), whose management has almost "Finished" the state budget bringing it to the brink of bankruptcy.
With the return to the saddle of the Democrat Jerry Brown (photo), former governor from 1975 to 1983, a not easy turnaround began that in the 2015 (year of Brown's reconfirmation for a second mandate), saw the Californian GDP settle at 2.448 billions of dollars at current values, with growth of 4,1% over the previous year.
To highlight the economic weight reached by California, it is customary to point out that if it were an independent state it could stand as a member of the G7, and after all, with almost 40 million inhabitants, it is even more populous than Canada which has little more than 35 million. This type of argument uses an image of undoubted efficacy and is very good in terms of theoretical speculation, but we must not forget that this coastal State could not have become what it is if it had not been part of the United States of America.
The Golden State today can boast the status of a great power in great power thanks to the fact of belonging to a State whose sovereignty factors - money, financial institutions, political bodies, Armed Forces - are an emanation of a continental economic-demographic force. The growth of the latter and the political and military ascent of California and the United States, tell the story of a symbiotic relationship in which (within a collaboration-competition dynamic that is physiological for a federal political entity), some are indispensable to the other and vice versa.
This dialectical combination (which obviously in the US does not only apply to California), and its resultant, albeit with the important differences due to a unification process that involves states of much more ancient and rooted power identity, deserves careful consideration on the European, where - despite the recent "astonishing" results, and so much heralded by the "brexiters" and their acolytes, related to economic growth and employment - the alleged champions of an insular veterosovanism, risk finding themselves in the situation of the sorcerer's apprentice incapable of check the forces he invoked.
Not to mention those who, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, believe they are offering a return to who knows what "grandeur" promising the exit from the common European market, from the euro and from NATO's integrated military command, while it should be evident for some time how much it weighs - on the definition of an incisive foreign and security policy (management of migratory flows included) - the deficit of political centralization of the EU, which, compromising the capacity for unitary synthesis, undermines the authority of any European point of view, starting from within the Atlantic Alliance.
The individual nations of the Old Continent, without the critical mass and the shock force of a federal state that is an instrument (as an expression) of an effective Europe-power: in the framework of the international relations of the 21st century, which will always rotate more around the confrontation between great continental powers, they seem destined (more or less) to be the equivalent of the "small states" of pre-unification Italy.
