The Zoot Suit Riots—U.S. Racism Stained the “Good War”

  

 Animator Tex Avery's Big Bad Woolf in a zoot suit--a lecherous predator of Red Riding Hood.

The mention of zoot suits these days conjures up fuzzy, even nostalgic memories—the ogling, lecherous Big Bad Wolf in Tex Avery’s classic Red Riding Hood cartoons; clips from old black and white Big Band movies with Lindy Hop and Jitterbug dancers; even teenage Dodie Steven’s already anachronistic 1959 hit Tan Shoes and Pink Shoelaces.  But in the midst of World War II the flamboyant outfits had become youth culture symbols especially popular in minority communities from coast to coast and were widely viewed as flagrant defiance of war time austerity and patriotic rationing.

In 1943 they became the flashpoint of days of rioting as Marines and Sailors roamed the streets of Los Angeles assaulting zoot suiters—mostly Mexican youth—with the open encouragement of the city’s newspapers and the abetted by the LAPD’s notorious vigilante Vengeance Squad.

 

                                    Zoot suits spread from Harlem and other East Coast Black centers with the assistance of Big Band hep cats like Cab Calloway.

The zoot suit arose out of the Big Band Jazz scene and among vipers—marijuana users (think Cab Calloway)—in the late 1930’s as a mark of defiance to the squares.  Like many trends on the cutting edge of culture it probably started in Eastern Black communities but quickly spread.  By 1940 the outfits had become especially popular with California’s Mexican Pachucos, youth who flaunted their flashy, expensive outfits and enjoyed a wild night life of partying and clubbing.  The term originated in El Paso, Texas and was brought to the Los Angeles area with the huge migration of Mexican-Americans—Chicanos—and Mexican immigrants to the area during the Depression which accelerated with the availability of war production jobs.  Pachucos and their female equivalent, Pachucas, who sometimes cross dressed in zoot suits, formed street gangs and became linked in the public mind with crime.

Zoot suits featured a long coat tailored at the waist and billowing pleated pants pegged at the ankles.  Accessories included broad brimmed, low crowned hats with wide bands, brightly colored ties, pointed toe shoes with stacked heels and thick soles, and long watch chains.  No question about it, they were eye catching.

In 1942 in order to conserve wool for uniforms, the War Production Board issued strict regulations on how much material could be used in men’s suits.  The regulations meant to reduce wool use in suits by 26% and encouraged “new streamlined suits by Uncle Sam.” They affected the voluminous pants and suit coats favored as pre-war business attire, but also effectively outlawed zoot suits.  Major manufacturers quickly complied and ended their production of the style.

But in California small tailor shops continued to supply the demand in apparent defiance of the regulations.  Young Latinos with money to spend from war jobs continued to buy the expensive suits.  And, of course, many had zoot suits produced before the restrictions.  The press railed against the unpatriotic defiance and spared no racial insults in singling out the Mexican community adding allegations of being slackers despite the fact that a much higher than average percentage of young men in the community were in the armed services and their workers were essential to war production.

   An 

L.A. Pachuco zoot suiter and a fashionable Pachuca.

Tensions were further heightened by sensational press reports of Pachuco gang activity and street crime.  In one sensational case nine young gang members were accused of a murder in which the victim’s body was found in a dump.  Off-duty police acting as the Vengeance Squad began sweeps of the East LA barrio and popular night spots all over the city targeting zoot suit wearing suspected gang members for assault and summary punishment.

All over California tensions also rose between service men and zoot suiters because of the alleged lack of patriotism for defying rationing.  But typical conflicts between soldiers, sailors, and Marines and locals over women added fuel to the fire.  Attractive young Pachucas in sexy dresses, gowns, and their own versions of zoot suits were out on the streets frequenting night clubs, dance halls, and theaters.  They were often approached and harassed by groups of servicemen.  Many fights resulted.

On May 30 a large group of sailors began hassling a group of young women and were attacked by zoot suit wearing men.  In the melee that resulted one sailor suffered serious injuries and several others were badly roughed up.

On the evening of June 3, 1943 11 sailors in Downtown Los Angeles got into a confrontation with a band of Pachucos and were beaten.  Once again the police Vengeance Squad swung into action in the word of the Los Angeles Times breathless reporting, “seeking to clean up Main Street from what they viewed as the loathsome influence of Pachuco gangs.”

 

Hundreds of sailors rampaged against zoot suiters or any young Mexicans or Chicanos they could find, but as this picture shows they were joined by Army Air Corps men, Marines, and White civilian thugs. 

The next day, with the apparent winking approval of base authorities, more than 200 sailors piled into taxis to invade East LA.  Their first victims were a group of 13 and 14 year olds, some of them wearing zoot suits who they attacked and beat.  Those in zoot suits were stripped and their clothes burned on the streets.  Adults of both sexes in the neighborhood who tried to come to the boys’ defense were likewise attacked.  The sailors moved on to other targets, invading movie theaters, forcing the management to turn up the house lights, and dragging zoot suiters and other young men to the stage where they were stripped, beaten, and their clothes and bodies urinated on.  Night clubs were invaded.  Men were pulled from busses.  And not just Mexicans—Filipinos, Blacks, and anyone with a dark complexion.

 

Zoot suiters were attacked, beaten, and publicly stripped as police looked on or actively participated.

As word spread hundreds more Sailors and large numbers of even more aggressive Marines converged on the city and on barrios from San Diego to San Jose.  Mobs marched down streets accompanied and escorted by police who not only did not interfere but often participated.  No young Latin with or without a zoot suit was safe from attack.  Pachucas were especially targeted and many were sexually assaulted.  When one young woman was arrested in possession of brass knuckles the press reacted hysterically.

Rioting continued for days and spread across Southern California.  The press, especially the Times applauded the rampaging sailors and Marines, spared no racial animus toward Mexicans, and generally threw gasoline on a roaring fire.

 

Pachucas were swept up by police out of dance halls and movie theaters, dragged off of buses just for their style.  But the gangs of service men also sexually assaulted many which fueled Pachuco resistance and escalated the violence. 

Navy Brass was slow to react.  They continued to issue passes in large numbers during the first days of the disturbances and maintained that their personnel were merely defending themselves.  The Shore Patrol (SP) was conspicuous for its absence on the streets in the heart of the riot zones.  Finally late on June 7, after the reeling Pachuco gangs rallied to organize resistance to the attacks and injuries to sailors and Marines began to climb, the Brass acted.  They cancelled all shore leave and confined men to their bases and ships.  The SP was finally dispatched in numbers with orders to retrieve service members on the scene.  None were ever charged by the service for any offences committed during the riot.  In fact, rumors later swirled that the Marines quickly promoted men who were reported to have shown “leadership ability under stress” during the fighting.

The Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution condemning “pleated pants” as gang apparel in much the same way later municipal bodies would try to ban gang colors or drooping pants.  Despite the ballyhoo no actual ordinance banning zoot suits was adopted.

 

 Many of the young men swept up by police remained cheerily defiant enraging White public opinion.

By mid-June rioting and fighting died down in L.A. Official reports indicate that more than 150 were injured badly enough to seek treatment and police had arrested more than 500 Latinos on charges ranging from rioting to vagrancy in the city alone.  Although the figures for the injured are probably grossly under reported, there were no known deaths during the disturbances due largely to the fact that neither the service men nor Pachuco gangs used firearms. 

As things died down in California, copycat anti-zoot suit rioting spread across the country to cities in Texas and Arizona where Chicanos were targeted to Northern cities such as Detroit, New York City, and Philadelphia, where Blacks were often singled out.  But even White hipsters were not immune.  Two members of Gene Krupa’s big band were beaten up for wearing the band’s stage costumes.  In Harlem a young zoot suit street hustler named Malcolm Little—the future Malcolm X—was caught up in fighting. 

 

In Harlem a young street hustler named Malcolm Little was caught up in attacks on zoot suiters.  

The Federal Government, which was trying to shore up relations with Latin America to counter Nazi activity there, became alarmed when the Mexican government vigorously protested the abuse of its nationals and warned of possible severe diplomatic consequences. The government was particularly concerned that Mexico might cut off the supply of bracero migrant farm workers who had become absolutely essential in bringing in the nation’s crops as traditional Anglo migrant workers joined the military or flocked to cities for big paying defense jobs. 

Under Federal pressure California Governor Earl Warren ordered the creation of the McGucken Committee to investigate and determine the cause of the riots. Its 1943 report found racism to be a central cause and blamed the press for aggravating the situation by emphasizing zoot suits in any report of Latino crime.  In response he appointed the Peace Officers Committee on Civil Disturbances, chaired by Robert W. Kenny, President of the National Lawyers Guild to make recommendations to the police.  In a tradition of post-riot soul searching familiar to us today, human relations commissions were established, and Police Departments were instructed to institute training on treating all residents equally.  You can draw your own conclusions about how effective that was.

But not everyone was on the same page.  L.A. Mayor Fletcher Bowron angrily dismissed the McGucken Committee conclusion of racism.  The fault for the riots, he maintained laid with the criminal culture of the Pachucos and zoot suiters on one hand sailors and Marines led by White Southerners, who came out of a region in with both overt legal and socially sanctioned racial discrimination.  It was just a clash of cultures, he maintained, with the good [White] citizens of the city, including the police, caught in the middle.

Anecdotal evidence does show that Southerners may have played leading roles in the violence, but it is clear that White sailors and Marines from all parts of the country were involved.

Also arriving in Los Angeles to cash in on the situation was California Un-American Activities Committee under State Senator Jack Tenney which declared that it had evidence that Nazi saboteurs were behind the riots.  That evidence was never produced and the Committee did not even hold hearings.  Yet wide-spread publicity around the claim made sure that many Californians were convinced it was true.

 

The Los Angeles Times did everything in its power to inflame the riots as they continued, kept stoking racial animosity in every way possible throughout the War, and savagely attacked Eleanor Roosevelt for expressing concern and sympathy with the victims.

Eleanor Roosevelt in one of her My Day newspaper columns wrote “The question goes deeper than just suits. It is a racial protest. I have been worried for a long time about the Mexican racial situation. It is a problem with roots going a long way back, and we do not always face these problems as we should.”

The Times, owned by the rabidly anti-Roosevelt Chandler family, erupted with predictable furry.  It repeated the accusations of Nazi sabotage by the zoot suiters and it accused Mrs. Roosevelt of having “Communist leanings and stirring race discord.”

Although the Zoot Suit Riots have been nearly obliterated from history for White Americans, for Chicanos and other Latinos they represent a critical cultural moment and are in enshrined in their collective memory.

 

A Game Turned Deadly at Fort Michilimackinac

     

Ojibwe tribesmen playing a rowdy ball and stick game similar to lacrosse suddenly rushed the open gates of Ft. Micjilimackinac massacring the small garrison and English inhabitants.  It was the westernmost attack in a continent spanning uprising against English rule led Pontiac in 1763. 

It must have been an exciting game.  Certainly June 2, 1763 was a perfect day for it.  Spring had finally come to Ft. Michilimackinac, the ice was clearing from Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.  The Sun was shining.  The men of the fort, and some of their women, too, spilled out of the palisaded walls to watch the excitement.  Others went about their business inside.  The semi-permanent Ojibwe trading village outside the walls was overflowing with visitors for the contest of baaga’adowe, a stick and ball goal game—a forerunner of lacrosse—with scores of young men, stripped to the waist, dashing back and forth across a broad field flaying with their clubs.  It must have been quite a spectacle, and a welcome relief from the boredom of having been cooped up in the Fort for the long northern Winter.

Then, on some sort of signal, the players turned from their game and rushed the wide open gate of the fort, their game clubs now turned to deadly weapons.  The warriors clubbed all of the Englishmen they could find but unless they resisted or there was a mistake left the French unmolested.  The English not killed outright were rounded up.  Their prolonged executions were more gruesome than those felled in the initial rush.  One or two Englishmen hid or managed to escape and attempted the long, treacherous trip to the safety of far off Ft. Detroit.  The handful of English women were taken captive.

Michilimackinac was not a military outpost.  It was a key trading post for the fur trade.  But it was situated in one of the most strategically important locations in North America, the southern shore of the Straits of Mackinac connecting Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, at the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula of the present-day Michigan.  Thus is stood athwart the trading highway that stretched from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes and by connection via portage to the drainage of the Mississippi River.

 

                      Jesuit missionary and explorer  Pere Jaques Marquette founded  St. Ignance Mission in 1671  near the site where the French built For de Baude.

The French from Quebec had established a presence in the area back in 1671 when the Jesuit explorer Père Jacques Marquette founded St. Ignance Mission.  Then French authorities built Ft. de Buade in 1683 and a mission at Sault Ste. Marie in 1688.  But these distant outposts were imperiled when some of the tribes murdered their Jesuit missionaries in isolated villages and rebelled against French trading practices.  Fearing a general war and the permanent rupture of valuable trade relations with the tribes, the Sieur de Cadillac moved the French garrison to Ft. Detroit and closed the mission.

But the area was too vital to be permanently abandoned.  The French returned in 1717 and built the first palisades for Fort Michilimackinac.  Over the next decades the Fort grew into a complex of buildings, a real village, as the log walls were expanded.  There was a small military garrison, but the fort was filled mostly with French traders, priests, and numerous Métis—French and native “half breeds” who made up the indispensable core of the voyagers who made the vast fur trade possible.

Since the French lost the prolonged dust-up known to Americans as the French and Indian Wars, they had to surrender Michilimackinac, along with half a continent in 1716.  The English recognized the post as a key trading post and as a possible check to any possible attempt by France to reclaim the fur trade by encroachment from their settlements in Louisiana.  Although they did dispatch a small garrison, the post remained what it always had been—a trading post.  The English allowed the French and Métis inhabitants to stay and to practice their religion.  They had to.  In order to take over the fur trade they needed them.  But a layer of new English traders was brought in to run things.  And the English had a different way of doing business.

The French both well understood the local culture, which valued gift giving, and had developed long standing relationships—often blood relationships—with the tribes.  So naturally, the Ojibwe were resentful of the displacement of their longtime friends.  But they were far more resentful of English trade policies.  The newcomers with their mercantile tradition were loath to make gifts or payments without explicit direct return.  So they greatly reduced the annual gifts presented to tribal leaders.  Then they re-set the value set on a variety of furs and pelts essentially reducing payments across the board.  In addition, goods in the post stores were priced higher and some were subject to the new duties imposed by Parliament to pay for the cost of the wars—the same duties Colonists on the Atlantic seaboard would soon become restless about.

Moreover, the English just seemed more contemptuous of the tribes and their people.  As they were less interested than the French in saving the souls of the “savages”, they were less likely to treat them with respect.  To be frank, a deep racism had already infected the English to a degree different, and worse, than the French.

So it should not have been surprising that resent building among the tribes was bound to boil over.  Yet it was.   So clueless were the English to all of the signals around them, so confident in their superiority to rule.

No reliable portrait of Pontiac exists.  This fanciful 19th Century engraving un-historically depicts him in council before a village of tepees, a plains tribe lodging found nowhere among the tribes the great leader united against the British.

Dissatisfaction was not just limited to the Ojibwe.  It was shared by many tribes spanning the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes, and the newly acquired Illinois Country.  Representatives of many tribes had been called together for a Great Council on April 28 of 1763 where the Ottawa leader Pontiac purportedly called for a confederation of the tribes to unite in a concerted effort to drive the English out.

Runners went out across the wilderness.  Quickly remarkably coordinated attacks were launched against English outposts across the wide area.    On May 7 Pontiac led an attack on the keystone fort in the West—Detroit, which settled into a long siege.  Meanwhile attacks were carried out on other posts and five more were captured—Ft. Sandusky on Lake Erie, Ft. St. Joseph on the river of the same name near Lake Michigan, Ft. Ouiatenon in the Illinois Country (modern Indiana), Ft. Miami near modern Ft. Wayne, and then Michilimackinac. Despite the wide spread warfare, the garrison there was completely unaware of the other attacks.

Ojibwe elders and warriors gather in the shadow of the Fort to plan the attack.  Although eastern posts and been attacked almost a month earlier and Fort Detroit was under siege, Michilmackinace had not gotten word of the wide-spread uprising. 

In all of these attacks, except the one on Ft. Ouiatenon, the garrisons and civilians were massacred.  But at the Illinois outpost the Weas, Kickapoos, and Mascoutens not only spared the garrison, but apologized to the English commander for the attack.  They did not want to do it, they said, but they had promised the other tribes that they would support the uprising.  The fact that the Illinois tribes were at best reluctant participants helped unravel the whole rebellion.

Despite the success of early attacks and the defeat of an English relief force in the field at the Battle of Bloody Run on July 31and a second wave of attacks that captured forts in the Ohio region, forcing the English back to Ft. Pitt where they were besieged,  Pontiac was not able to take Fort Detroit.  By late August his warriors, used to warfare by raid and unaccustomed to a prolonged siege campaign began melting away.  He pinned his hopes on the arrival for support from the Illinois Country but eventually came to the conclusion that it would never arrive.  By October he had to lift the siege.

Meanwhile after serious fighting and raids deep into Pennsylvania and Virginia, the siege of Ft. Pitt had been relieved by reinforcements and the English systematically introduced small pox to the eastern tribes by way of infected blankets causing what would eventually be a devastating epidemic killing as many as 400,000 natives during and in the years following the rebellion.

 Lord Jeffrey Amherst donned romantic armor for this heroic portrait.  He out waited Pontiac at the Siege of Detroit and managed to retake most of the lost western forts the next year before making a peace largely favorable to the native tribes.

The following year the English commander, Lord Jeffrey Amherst was able to mass reinforcements and take back most of the lost forts, including Michilimackinac with relatively little fighting.  The Ojibwe and their French and Métis friends could find no market for their furs with the English still controlling the east and St. Lawrence, meaning none of the trade goods on which the local economy had become dependent on were available.  They were willing to treat with the English.

For their part the English seem to have learned a lesson.  Instead of punitive expeditions aimed at annihilating the tribes, Amherst promised a return of annual gifts and more favorable trade policies.  A local peace was made.  This pattern was repeated over the widely contested areas.  Pontiac was never able to rally the tribes for a second season of coordinated warfare.  Although some fighting—including brutal raiding and counter raiding between the tribes and frontier settlers and their militias along the eastern frontier—continued, local peace took hold many places and Pontiac himself signed a treaty at Ft. Ontario in July of 1766.  It was hardly a surrender—no lands were ceded, no prisoners returned, and no hostages were taken, but it did end the conflict with a broad acknowledgement of English sovereignty.

News from England of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which drew a boundary line between the British colonies along the seaboard, and Native American lands west of the Alleghenies creating a vast Indian Reserve that stretched west to the Mississippi and from Florida to Quebec, undoubtedly appeased the tribes.  But it also infuriated the American Colonies, particularly Pennsylvania and Virginia which had claims to land beyond the mountains and settlers clamoring for new land.

The English rapprochement with the tribes was so successful that when the American Revolution broke out, most sided with the Red Coats and were recognized as irregular native troops in bloody frontier warfare.  The Americans, for their part, had been so hostile and punitive that few tribes allied with them.

Back at Michilimackinac, the English came to the conclusion that the old fort was indefensible, especially after George Rogers Clark successfully captured their western outposts at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes during the Revolution.   In 1781 they began the construction of a new, modern limestone fortification on nearby Mackinac Island.  Once the walls were up, the buildings of Ft. Michilimackinac were dismantled one by one and rebuilt on the island.  When the transfer was complete, the palisades of the old fort were burned.

The masonry fort on Mackinac Island replaced the last incarnation of the wooden palisade fort on the mainland.

The English were supposed to surrender the fort to the newly independent United States by the Treaty of Paris in 1783.  But the English were loath to give up such an important strategic location and a still quite profitable trading post.  The Americans were not able to take possession until 1798.

In the war of 1812 the English were able to retake the fort without firing a shot from the small American garrison there.  An American attempt to retake the fort in 1814 failed and it remained in enemy hands for the duration of the war.  It was returned to American hands in 1815.

 The modern re-creation of Fort Michilimackinac is considered one of the most accurate replicas in North America except for having just one wall instead of a double palisade.

Today a recreation of Ft. Michilimackinac stands in Colonial Michilimackinac State Park in Mackinaw City.  It is considered one of the most accurate of such recreations, although it features only one palisade, not the double palisades of the old French fort.  Across the water Ft. Mackinac is well preserved as part of Mackinac Island State Park and is the site of regular historic reenactments.  Both are major tourist attractions.