had staved off even deeper trouble. After the war, they would provide the foundation for a resurgent and redefined American Dream, a dream that would reshape the pattern of cities across the nation and would lead savings and loan executives like Howard Ahmanson to great fortune.
FOUR
The Common Experience
SOCIOLOGISTS AND HISTORIANS often point to the equalizing effect that military service had on men in America. It gave them a common experience, a frame of reference for every conversation. It reinforced the appeals to civic duty made by President Roosevelt in his fireside chats and echoed by civic and political leaders across the country. It fortified a fundamental sense of a social contract between the individual and the state that incorporated basic entitlements, including Roosevelt's “freedom from want.” It also heightened awareness of the personal and collective responsibilities of citizens for the preservation of a free society.1
In the popular imagination, the entitlements flowed especially to soldiers and citizens engaged in the national defense—marines in bunkers on the beaches of Corregidor and Rosie the Riveter attaching the cockpit shell of a B-17 bomber in Seattle. But Howard Ahmanson's military experience hardly fit the popular imagination.
For starters, when most men left for basic training, it didn't make the society pages of the Los Angeles Times. "Instead of waiting to see what his classmates would look like [in uniform],” wrote columnist Lucy Quirk, “he had them over for a preview showing and get-together party.” Most were members of the Beverly Hills social set. Dottie greeted them at the door wearing a Tahitian print with a tropical blossom in her hair, as if they were all bound for a South Sea vacation.2
Charlie Fletcher was no doubt chagrined when he arrived in his navy blues, his broad swimmer's shoulders pushing at the seams. Unlike Ahmanson and Edgerton, who saw the war as an opportunity to escape the glare of official scrutiny of their business activities, Fletcher entered the military from the limelight of public service. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor, he had been elected president of the California Savings and Loan League. True to his vow at the Shoreham Hotel, he had launched a major bond drive to help finance the war. But like Ahmanson, he was not old enough to escape the draft so he had chosen to enlist.3
If Howard reminded him of his emphatic assertion that he would not go to war, the point was lost in a new reality. Since the attack on Pearl Harbor and that morning at the Shoreham, the world had changed. In Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa, men were fighting and dying. At home, families had pulled up stakes and moved to work in factories and shipyards making the airplanes and vessels needed to wage war. More subtly, the relationship between business and government had undergone a profound shift. The tensions between corporate America and Washington that colored the years of the New Deal were giving way to a new partnership that depended on seasoned executives like Fletcher and Ahmanson.
BASIC TRAINING IN QUONSET, RHODE ISLAND
Considered the “birthplace” of the U.S. Navy during the Revolutionary War, Quonset, Rhode Island, was teeming with activity when Howard arrived in 1943. Land- and carrier-based antisubmarine squadrons trained offshore while British, Canadian, and American pilots roared into the air. Arriving roughly a year after another Southern Californian, Richard Nixon, had completed his training at Quonset, Howard and Charlie joined a class full of lawyers, business executives, and other professionals on the fast track to become officers.4
Despite the flip attitude that his send-off party might suggest, Howard seemed to revel in the eight-week basic training experience. He wrote Dottie that he couldn't sleep for the first few days in the barracks but felt “swell.” His bunkmates ranged from “excited kids to old time blasé naval officers.” Although he did well on his written exams (memorizing aircraft and naval vessels), his fellow swabbies kidded him “about being the worst driller in the place.” “My mind wanders,” he confessed, “and I have a strong tendency to look at the scenery. I drill about like I drive a car, half conscious I guess.” He didn't mind the running or physical fitness program and enjoyed playing baseball, basketball, and touch football, though he was “lousy” at sports. On the one occasion when he snagged a high fly ball to win a baseball game, he reported the details to Dottie like a schoolboy crowing to his mother.5 He even looked forward to going to church—a rare event for him—on his first Sunday in Rhode Island because it would give him the opportunity to wear his dress blues and not have to walk in formation.6
Dottie wrote him frequently and grew exasperated when he didn't write back soon enough. She worried that he was having too good a time without her, that he would be unfaithful. He tried to reassure her. Meanwhile, Gould Eddy, who had been rejected by the draft board, kept Howard posted on business issues—a major fire in Malibu that had destroyed a number of homes, unrest among the women in the accounting office who were lobbying for raises, and the latest gossip among the company's main clients in the savings and loan industry.7 Armed with Eddy's news, Ahmanson sent a stream of chatty letters to his clients and customers.
Howard worried about where the navy would send him. He was told he would serve either as an administrative officer at a naval air station or as a materials expediter. Since most of the rest of his class was headed to “fighter direction” or “air combat intelligence,” Howard was happy with his possibilities, but he also hoped that an old friend might be able to land him a position in Southern California.8
Never one to enter unknown waters without a chart, Howard showed rare vulnerability when he wrote to a longtime mentor for advice and influence. Robert Frank Gross worked as a vice president of Mortgage Guarantee in Los Angeles. A generation older, Gross had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1907 and served on active duty through the end of World War I, retiring as a lieutenant commander. After the war, he entered the mortgage business in Los Angeles and helped finance new suburbs in the 1920s. Throughout these years, Gross maintained his navy connections, serving as an officer in the Naval Reserve and retiring in 1941 with the rank of commander.9 The thin correspondence that survives between Ahmanson and Gross suggests the complexity of the relationship and highlights the close personal ties between the defense industries in Southern California and local financial institutions.
With Gross's help, Ahmanson was assigned to the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington as a lieutenant junior grade (JG). As chief expediter for the Aircraft Products Division, he worked with parts manufacturing companies to ensure a steady supply of components to the aircraft manufacturers—most of which were located in Southern California. “As you might well guess,” he wrote to a friend, “for the first thirty days I was completely baffled, never having been inside an airplane.” By January 1944, however, he reported that “I now find myself building them with the greatest of ease.”10 With characteristic humor, Ahmanson wrote to a friend in Beverly Hills:
I came down here expecting to be a nice kind-faced file boy for some guy in the Production Division, find out at the beginning of work the first day that I'm in a whole new end of the work known as the Modification Program, and am the assistant to the head man, and at the end of the day find that the head man is being moved, so I'm it. . . . It has turned out to be more fun than I could imagine a Navy job to be. I have no superiors to read the multitudinous instructions I send out hither and yon. . . . If you could see the reckless abandon with which I am spending your money, you would probably start a tax fight. . . . I find myself surrounded by quite a bevy of near and not-so-near tycoons like young Rockefeller, Firestone, Van Eck, the ex-president of Pontiac Motors, the president of a Boston bank, a guy who owns a bunch of New England knitting mills—along with a Ford dealer from Punk Center, Oregon and a guy who ran a general store in Pine Bluffs, Arkansas. They're all heads or assistants of various sub-sections in the Production Division and truly a swell, patient and hard-working bunch of guys.11
Howard's initial enthusiasm for his work in Washington did not last. By January 1944, he was complaining that
