A Beach for the Suburban Age

Chapter 4 explores the postwar beach modernization projects and the movement for the acquisition of public beaches. During World War II, California beaches became endowed with patriotic symbolism. The beach lobby picked up on the rhetoric and used it to raise funds for its program of beach acquisition and modernization. In the immediate aftermath of the conflict, Southern California positioned itself as the national leader for shoreline planning and public access to the coast. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, thanks to lobbying efforts at the state level, large sections of the shoreline were bought for the public, artificially widened, and cleaned up. These vast, empty beaches allowed the planners to proceed with the next step of their plan: adapting the coastline to the postwar suburbanite values of cleanliness, privacy, and respectability. Taking their cues from newly opened Disneyland, they built modern accommodations and family-friendly recreational spaces on the sands, hoping to prevent the white middle-class from “fleeing” the beach just as they had “fled” the city.