Workers posing with 5000th Flying Fortress, signed by 35,000 Boeing employees, May 1944. Copyright © Boeing

I don’t think of the hope of reward as selfishness. Work is the prime mover of our economy, and the fuel that makes people work is profit.

—Tom Girdler

NINETEEN HUNDRED FORTY-THREE was the year certain issues that had been lingering since Bill Knudsen first came to Washington got resolved once and for all. One was that Washington’s long-simmering battle with Big Labor came to a boil. In April the leonine John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, decided it was time for his miners to get a raise. Their ranks were depleted by members who had left to join the armed services or for more lucrative and less dangerous work in war industries, while the rest worked longer. Unless they got another two dollars a day, Lewis thundered, they would go on strike. On April 28, 1943, strikes broke out in the Pittsburgh-area coalfields, and production came to a halt.

When Roosevelt got the news, he exploded. He ordered the army to take over the mines and prepared a radio broadcast for May 2 appealing directly to the miners to go back to work. He was being wheeled down to the Oval Office to make the broadcast when word came that Lewis had struck a deal to have the miners return to work in two days. Roosevelt gave the speech anyway.¹

The Army never actually seized the mines, and no one at the White House had thought about how the Army would get the miners back to work if it did. “You can’t run a coal mine with bayonets,” Lewis said.² But the threat, plus the loss of prestige with the public, was enough to get the UMW back to work—back, that is, until June. On June 19 more than 60,000 coal miners dropped tools and went home.

This time the public reaction was overwhelming. Newspapers across the country denounced the strike as unpatriotic and vile. When Roosevelt threatened to strip the draft deferments from every mine worker, Lewis decided to halt the strike after three days, but the damage to organized labor was done. The Republican-dominated Congress passed the War Labor Disputes Act, ordering a thirty-day notice for all strikes and ending the secret ballot for union membership. On June 25, Roosevelt vetoed it. It took the Senate exactly eleven minutes to override him.³

As Knudsen had observed, labor trouble, far more than business foot-dragging or profiteering, had been the bane of war production. Work stoppages in 1943 alone cost 13.5 million man-days: almost triple the man-days lost in 1942. On December 27 a threatened railroad strike forced the Army to intervene for real. It seized control and ran the nation’s rail system for more than three weeks before the strike ended.

But Big Labor had learned its lesson. It could no longer afford to be seen hindering the war effort; on the contrary, it wanted its workers to share in the credit for arming America in record time. So labor troubles eased slightly in 1944, with only 8.7 million man-days lost—just about enough to build six 35,000-ton battleships on 14,344 B-24s, but still not enough to make any appreciable difference in the burgeoning production numbers.⁴

Even so, a week before D-day, 70,000 workers were on strike at twenty-six plants in Detroit alone.⁵

A second turning point came in February, when Donald Nelson managed to fend off a concerted effort to replace him with the kind of all-powerful production czar he and Knudsen had resisted from the start.^* Although Nelson did finally step down in July as an Office of War Mobilization came into being under Roosevelt’s friend Supreme Court judge James Byrnes, the system he and Knudsen had devised for leaving defense production in the hands of business, not the government, remained—largely because everyone could now see how well it worked.

This was the other point of no return. In 1943 the numbers Knudsen and his colleagues had promised were taking on a life of their own. Production of Liberty ships was reaching 160 a month, while 18,434 Navy battleships, cruisers, carriers, subs, and destroyers poured out of America’s shipyards—along with 16,000 landing craft. Heavy bombers soared from 2,618 in 1942 to 9,616—bombers that would soon be leveling Germany’s cities and industrial heartland by day, while the RAF attacked them at night.

Tank production swelled to 29,495; small arms from 2.3 million in 1942 to almost 7 million; artillery shells from 693,000 to 800,000 tons; machine guns to 830,000; and airplanes of all kinds to 85,946—an air armada beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings.⁶ Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, the symbols of modern military power just two years earlier, were being drowned in the flood. In 1943, American war production was twice that of Germany and Japan combined.⁷ Victory, which had seemed so elusive just ten months before, was now assured.

At the center of the effort, of course, were mammoth companies like General Electric. America’s fourth-largest corporation in 1940 with some 30 million square feet of production space available in its thirty-four main plants scattered from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Oakland, California, GE was a perfect illustration of Bill Knudsen’s principle that the biggest companies are the biggest because they by and large get the best results.

The company got its first military contract on September 23, 1939, making mule-pack howitzers for the Army, and pushed on from there. In the first year of the war, GE spent $78 million of its own money expanding its facilities for military production; the federal government threw in another $120 million. GE would go on to make propulsion plants for warships, turbo-superchargers for airplanes, searchlights and military radios, radar sets and naval gun directors, and motors for operating the ramps of LSTs and Higgins boats. GE also came up with three hundred new types of electric lamps and manufactured 400,000 electrically heated flying suits, as well as designing a new torpedo for the Navy. It also provided the turbines for 10 of the Navy’s carriers, 37 of its 43 cruisers, and 200 of its 364 destroyers. It even filled a contract for the Army for five thousand bazookas in thirty days, even though GE engineer Jim Power had to design the weapon himself in a marathon twenty-four-hour session, while four hundred workers labored around the clock to meet the deadline.⁸

Another major player was Knudsen’s own company, General Motors. The biggest automaker company in the world had been slow getting into war production. As late as May 1941, chairman Alfred Sloan scoffed at the idea that war was coming—and Sloan insisted on keeping GM’s overseas operations in Germany and Japan going far longer than even his close friends thought politically expedient.⁹

Yet when war came, GM shot from an almost standing start to converting almost 90 percent of its forty-one operating divisions to munitions production as war product sales shot from $406 million in 1941 to $3.5 billion in 1943. The automaking giant adopted a new slogan, “Victory Is Our Business,” and business turned out to be pretty good. It saw net sales of $13.4 billion, and a net profit of $673 million. These were slender numbers compared to peacetime, but still enough to make GM the emperor of wartime industry—making 10 percent of everything America produced to fight the Second World War.¹⁰

In 1943, GM was also building trucks and tanks for the Army, as well as Grumman fighter and torpedo planes for the Navy. The GM engineers at Eastern Aircraft learned from Ford’s mistakes at Willow Run. By working closely with Grumman and by concentrating on subassemblies instead of entire planes, they produced 7,546 Avengers and 5,920 Wildcats before war’s end. Another 200 GM-built Wildcats wound up flying with the Royal Navy.¹¹

It was also General Motors who discovered that eight Liberty ships could carry the same number of two-and-a-half-ton trucks disassembled as one hundred could carry fully assembled. All you needed was a place to do the assembling: A few portable cranes, battery chargers, a couple of portable Quonset huts or even tents, a poured concrete floor, and a tractor and trailer or two worked fine. And with 40,000 employees, GM’s Overseas Operations Division was perfectly poised to deliver and assemble whatever American forces needed, almost on the front line.

The first two temporary plants supported U.S. Army operations in Tunisia in 1942. Two more were set up in Heliopolis in Egypt for the Eighth Army. One was finally transferred to the southern terminus of the Burma Road. The other wound up repairing broken-down trucks in the jungle at Rangoon during the final push for the liberation of Burma.¹²

General Motors’ most amazing war-front plant, however, took shape in Iran. Liberty ships landed parts for the plant to supply Russian forces at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. A one-track railroad then moved the parts to the factory site at Andimeshk. The first GM employees reached Andimeshk in March 1942, to find it a hellhole with typhus, dysentery, sand-fly fever, and a running temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

The first sixty men began assembling trucks out in the open, while the others worked to build a makeshift factory. Roving jackals raided the camp stores and kitchens at night. But by day the Andimeshk plant was soon turning out 2,500 military vehicles a month of all makes and types, with tool-working shops and a special oxygen-manufacturing unit for high-speed welding. For labor GM trained five thousand Iranians in the mass-production methods of Detroit, so that they could put together a complete truck in less than thirty minutes.

Once the trucks were tested and inspected, the General Motors men passed the keys to Russian drivers who took them over 800 miles of treacherous mountain roads to Tabriz and then across the border into the Soviet Union—each one heavily laden with Lend-Lease supplies. In July 1942 a second factory opened 185 miles south of Andimeshk at Khorramshahr.

It was not until June 30, 1943, that the Army finally took over the operation. By then the ultimate capitalist corporation, General Motors had delivered 20,380 trucks to the Red Army.¹³

There was, however, another, less epic side to the nation’s war production machine. Bill Knudsen caught a glimpse of it in his Social Security Building office when a letter arrived from a retired railway worker in Reading, Pennsylvania.

This gentleman had an idea. He had figured out a way to recycle discarded boxcar wheels and suspensions, to convert them to wartime use. He already had the machine tools he needed, he said, in a warehouse near his home. There was no call for new steel or other priority materials. The wheels were deemed scrap. All he needed was a contract from the Army to get started.

Knudsen passed the letter on, first to Don Nelson at the Materials and Defense Contracts Division, then to the Army. The retired railway worker got his contract. In no time he had six men working for him, as they reground and refinished old boxcar wheels and got them ready for a new life with the United States Army.¹⁴

At nearly eighty, the man from Reading was the oldest defense contractor in World War II. But his wasn’t the smallest business. That honor belonged to Clyde Walling of Cleveland, Ohio. Mr. Walling was president of a tool company that operated out of his two-car garage while he parked his car in the driveway to make room. By May 1941 he had an employee force of exactly three men.¹⁵

Subcontractors like Walling were the lifeblood of the American free enterprise system, as Bill Knudsen well knew. General Motors alone employed nearly 20,000 of them. Knudsen had aimed to make them the lifeblood of defense contracting, as well. They ranged in size from Clyde Walling’s garage to major companies like Timken, which was also based in Cleveland but had branches in Detroit and other cities, and made everything from machine tools to axles, with a fair number of metal and steel products in between.

Turning the productive power of a Timken loose had been Knudsen’s plan all along. For all the harping about how huge corporations snapped up the biggest contracts and made their fortunes during the war, it was the medium- to small-sized businesses that did much of the actual work—and made the arsenal of democracy work and grow.

Ma and Pa Harrington’s “defense plant,” for example, was a white clapboard farmhouse on a lonely crossroads near Rockford, Illinois. There they made machine tools for turning artillery shells and tank turrets, one thousand dollars a month’s worth right in their living room, while the rest of the house doubled and tripled as home office, sales branch, and factory. Their twin sons worked with them. They had started the business in the middle of the Depression, by borrowing some money to build a machine shop. When Richard and Russell Harrington learned that their main tool was going to cost more than four thousand dollars, they made their own out of a junked lathe, an old washing machine motor, and an oil pump salvaged from a 1926 Chevrolet. Their mother’s old washtub caught the oil that leaked from the bottom of the homemade tool.

When war came, the Harrington brothers pressed their father and mother into helping. Ma Harrington would run the lathes making parts for tank turrets and gun mounts before washing hands to make dinner. Pa Harrington, age sixty-eight, worked the grinder and would comment to visitors, “I have more fun than a kid in this place.” The first visitors were inspectors from the Harringtons’ various prime contractors, who simply could not believe parts of this quality were being turned out in the quaint house with its gambrel roof, dormer windows, and flower boxes under every windowsill.

Soon Harrington brothers had other visitors, like the War Production Board’s local director and a reporter from Time magazine. “I don’t think they knew what they were getting into when they started,” the WPB man told the reporter, “but they had the nerve to make a success of it.”¹⁶

That might have been the motto of every American business, large and small, in World War II. There was Frigidaire, enlisted to manufacture .30-caliber machine guns, and Rock-Ola, the Chicago jukebox maker that was drawn into a contract to make M1 carbines alongside Underwood the typewriter company, National Postal Meter, Quality Hardware, and IBM. On the upper end of the scale, there was Ex-Cello of Detroit, which made thread-grinding machines for turning the millions of screws for military hardware from airplanes to trucks and towed artillery; Okonite of New Jersey, which insulated thousands of miles of electrical wiring; and Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron and Chicgo B&I, which built hundreds of Land Ship Tanks at yards they created in Evansville, Indiana, the so-called prairie shipyards where ex-farmhands built LSTs to float down to the Mississippi and New Orleans for service overseas.¹⁷

At the lower end, there was Frank Ix’s mill, in Charlottesville, Virginia, which was making parachute cloth for every airborne division going into action from Burma to D-day; and R.M.R. of Madison, Wisconsin, which made batteries for walkie-talkie sets and, when the Army decided to raise the order from 100,000 to 400,000 cells a day, organized a committee to ring doorbells and recruit housewives and office clerks to meet the order. By the spring of 1945, R.M.R. had four thousand part-time employees making half a million cells a day.¹⁸

In between was another Wisconsin firm, Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company. It made small cargo vessels for the carrying trade on the Great Lakes when in mid-1942 Electric Boat of Groton came to them with a proposition. Let us use your yards and facilities and laborers, they said, and our engineers, foremen, and production managers will train them to make submarines. The Manitowoc men were startled but game to try. Before two years were out, twenty-eight Navy submarines would be launched from Manitowoc. They were powered by diesel engines being built for the Navy at a brand-new plant in Beloit, Wisconsin, by the weighing-scales company Fairbanks, Morse. The Manitowoc engineers also built huge pontoon docks to carry the finished subs through a series of shallow inland waterways, then down the Mississippi River to where the Navy took over in New Orleans. Halfway down they met Missouri Valley’s LSTs going the same way.¹⁹

Bill Knudsen got to know many of these companies on his travels for Army production. When he wrote later that in those years he “saw America at its best,” he meant precisely those companies with a few hundred to a couple of thousand employees who made the vital subassemblies, processed the raw materials, designed and made the tools and dies without which a Chrysler Tank Arsenal or Douglas Aircraft plant would have had to shut down. A myriad of others supplied the Kaiser shipyards, and the yards where battleships and submarines took shape in Chester, Pennsylvania; Camden, New Jersey; and Newport News, Virginia. They carried the spirit of free enterprise like a revitalizing force, with the power to meet the needs of total war without losing their identity or creativity or power of self-renewal.²⁰

Lieutenant General Knudsen visited Eaton Manufacturing of Cleveland on his very first inspection trip, in February 1942. The company was filling orders for 8×8 axles for GM (1,000 axles a month), two-speed axles for Ford, Canada, and Chrysler, Canada (7,500 a month), 6×6 rear axles for Timken (1,200 a month), as well as axles for two manufacturers of the 40mm Bofors gun, Firestone and Koppers. Eaton and Timken were normally fierce rivals. Now the subcontracting web of defense work made them partners, and pooled their talents to get the Army on the move.²¹

In Elyria, Ohio, Knudsen visited General Industries, a company with twelve hundred employees, of whom only 20 percent were engaged in wartime work assembling M48 artillery fuses (this was in early 1942). With present and new orders, that was expected to jump to 50 percent—while the major parts for the fuses were themselves subcontracted. The rest of the company’s work was on miscellaneous plastic products. Knudsen made a note that Army Ordnance had just approved three plastic parts to replace metal ones for a trench mortar fuse. Why not, he suggested, have those parts made here?²²

The one thing Knudsen and the Army could not do, of course, was order General Industries or any other company to make the things they needed. The lines of Washington’s control over the economy had been carefully drawn. It intervened to affect the consumption of civilian goods, some of which were rationed, such as meat and gasoline and coffee, and others made according to their place in the system of priorities. It also regulated wages and, to a more limited degree, prices.

Production, however, remained an entirely voluntary process. The War Production Board could and did order companies not to produce things: new cars, for instance, and refrigerators and other heavy durable goods. It never told anyone what to make. That was left to the imagination of American business.

This was how Bill Knudsen had designed things from the start, and it remained the pivot point of the entire wartime system. Everything made for the war effort was made by those who saw some advantage for themselves in doing so, and therefore they brought all their skills and tools and knowledge to bear on the task—both to help the country and to make some money. This drove the New Dealers crazy, but it was what Adam Smith had recognized a century and a half before as the cornerstone of capitalism, when he wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” The same was true when it came to making planes and ships and artillery shells in record numbers.

And Americans, by and large, accepted what might be termed the generosity of selfishness. “The public believes in the profit system,” asserted J. B. Hartley, director of the National Association of Manufacturers, and “they do not believe in war” as a substitute.²³ This offended those who believed that war without self-sacrifice lacked a certain moral standing. What they couldn’t change, however, was their reliance on a collaboration between businesses large and small forged years before by the free market, a system so complex and so constantly changing that no government agency could ever have devised a system to supervise—let alone plan out—the result.

When, for example, General Motors subcontractor Yellow Truck and Coach Company was under contract to the Timken–Detroit Axle Company, at the same time Timken was under contract to Yellow, because Yellow also made an essential component that Timken needed to make the axles it sent back to Yellow to make the wheel assemblies, which it then forwarded on to a General Motors plant to complete a military truck. When these interrelationships were multiplied by a thousand, and then ten thousand, it was hard to see how any top-down command system could have kept effective track of all the moving parts.²⁴

Nor was it entirely a coincidence that no other wartime economy depended more on free enterprise incentives than America’s, and that none produced more of everything in quality and quantity, both in military and civilian goods.

The process kicked off even before the war began in the spring of 1941, when a magazine such as Business Week began running stories on how to snag defense contracts by conversion to wartime production. It offered advice in answer to queries like “I would like to sell some shovels to the Army, but its purchases run to much larger quantities than I can handle,” or “We have a canning plant which will probably be idle and could be used for war contracts. Can you tell us how to contact the proper parties?”²⁵ There was advice on where to write in order to get government loans to help with conversion: the RFC or the Defense Contracts Division of OPM. In addition, it said, the Army and Navy both made advances of up to 30 percent for prime contractors. Business Week also offered free advice on what materials to use as substitutes for those too hard to get for civilian production: plastic for aluminum film spools, say, or cast iron for brass bicycle locks. Human ingenuity could solve problems that government planning or rationing could not.

When war came, the scramble for defense contracts produced an extraordinary book published by the Research Institute of America, called Your Business Goes to War.²⁶ Page by page it told firms whom to contact for getting a government contract and how to draft one up. It explained where and how to get critical materials, how to work with the priority system, and how to deal with labor under the new wartime laws such as the rules concerning overtime. It offered several pages of suggestions on what products a company could offer to make. (See Appendix B)

If, for example, you made vacuum cleaners, there might be a place for you manufacturing gas-mask parts. A razor manufacturer might want to look into percussion primers for artillery shells; an office furniture company, into making bomb containers. A shoe company could make helmet linings; a maker of bottle caps and bottlers could turn out .50-caliber tripod mounts; while a lawn mower company might offer to machine shrapnel.²⁷

Other companies have already done it, was the message. You can do it, too. “There is an alternative,” its author added in the preface. “It is the shouted order, the broadcast ultimatum, the decision made by an unchallengeable Führer” in which “the executive becomes a clerk in the national warehouse.” No one wanted that. But there was also another implicit message: Those companies who adapt to the new wartime conditions will survive and even thrive. Those who do not will not.

To that degree, wartime conditions reproduced important features of peacetime market conditions. The Army and Navy were like classic customers: demanding, even finicky, and reluctant to pay except for exceptional service. Contracts flowed to those who could produce at the most competitive rate—and after 1943 both services could force producers to renegotiate contracts if they thought the profits or costs excessive.²⁸ There were no favored state industries as in Nazi Germany or Japan. No state subsidy was on hand to save the incompetent or underperformer. But on the other hand, a raft of timely government loans could leapfrog a newcomer over his staid competitors. In wartime as in peacetime, entrepreneurs challenged the old established firms, as Henry Kaiser and a dozen others proved. The small and nimble rose up to compete with the large and slow-moving.

This rule didn’t just apply to existing business. The war produced more than half a million new businesses, which became the hinge of change from the prewar to the postwar economy.²⁹

There was, for example, Frank Hobbs and his partner George Comstock. Hobbs had grown up in California before moving to Portland, Oregon, to open his own Firestone tire dealership when he was barely out of his teens. Then, in the teeth of the Depression, Hobbs launched his own company to produce Masonite wallboard using superhard paint finishes as a substitute for more expensive tile. Soon he had perfected a process and substance he called Colotyle. It became a low-cost alternative to tile in kitchens and bathrooms up and down the West Coast. Henry Kaiser even used it for the heads in his Liberty ships.

The coming of war was for Hobbs just another business opportunity. In the spring of 1942, someone showed him the bulky, steel-ribbed shelters the Army was shipping out from Quonset, Rhode Island, for troops who would have to serve in the frozen wastes of Alaska. Hobbs was shocked. The huts were not only awkward and heavy to ship, but wasted that all-important critical wartime material, steel. He and his business partner George Comstock came up with the idea of a lightweight version made of hard-coated wood—a sturdy plywood igloo. Three weeks later they showed a model to the Army Corps of Engineers, Seattle District, who immediately ordered eighty-five more test huts. In no time Pacific Huts, with Hobbs as president and Comstock as vice president, had a contract for one thousand.³⁰

What they needed now was a factory. They found it in a run-down industrial area just half a mile from Boeing’s Seattle plant, at 6901 Fox Avenue South. They raised $100,000 from local bankers and in sixty days converted the old shipyard into an assembly line for making their huts. Five hundred employees built the sixteen-by-thirty-foot hut using Masonite, spruce or hemlock ribs, and plywood floors, complete with electrical wiring. Each was tall enough (nine feet at the center) for a man to stand in, and each could be assembled by five soldiers in eight hours.

Soon Hobbs’s employees were turning out a completed hut every fifteen minutes and packing them up for shipment. In September 1943, Hobbs ran an ad in Seattle newspapers boasting of how his huts were two months ahead of schedule, thanks to employees’ suggestions on how to boost production. The ads showed the names and faces of twenty-seven employees who had streamlined the process—each of whom also received a war bond as a reward.

Hobbs’s Fox Avenue factory turned out more than 12,000 Pacific huts before the war ended. In Alaska thousands were left where they were erected when the Army withdrew. For four decades they stood forgotten and abandoned through snow, rain, and ice storms. Then in the 1990s the Pentagon sent out their Defense Environmental Restoration Program to survey the sites for demolition. They found that not only had Hobbs’s huts weathered the decades better than the steel Quonsets, but most of them were intact and still livable.³¹

Ted Nelson had been an eleven-dollar-a-day welder in the Mare Island Navy Yard in 1940 doing standard welding chores, including the ten thousand upright studs on an average-sized naval vessel. It was a laborious process, in which Nelson had to melt the proper amount of flux before setting each stud. He retreated to his garage and experimented with a device that would perform both tasks at once. He called it his “rocket gun,” and showed it to his amazed superiors. A fast welder working the old-fashioned way could do forty studs in an hour. Nelson’s rocket gun did one thousand in the exact the same time.

Tom Nelson began selling versions of his rocket guns out of his garage to shipyards for $500 each. Then, with $95,000 he borrowed from Jesse Jones and the RFC, he created the Nelson Specialty Welding Equipment Corporation and built a plant in a cornfield near San Leandro. By war’s end he was supplying his guns and other welding tools to more than one hundred shipyards up and down the West Coast, including the Kaiser yards at Richmond and Portland and the Bechtel-McCone yards at Calship.³²

If businessmen like Hobbs and Nelson and Frank Ix and the managers of Manitowoc Shipbuilding were the living, beating heart of wartime production, its new workforce was the blood transfusion that kept it flowing and growing.

War production had triggered the greatest mass migration in American history.

At least 20 million Americans left their homes to find work in the new and old plants. At the end of the war, 15.3 million of them were living someplace other than where they were the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. As in the era of the covered wagons, Americans followed the call of opportunity—in this case opportunities created not by the birth of a nation but by the rebirth of American industry. If business profits rose during the war, labor’s wages rose much more—an average of 70 percent.³³ It was either a very happy or very complacent worker who wouldn’t get himself and his family on the road for wages like that.

At least seven million left America’s farms, especially in the South.³⁴ Five and half million of those went to work in factories and cities; the rest went into the military. But instead of this being a disaster for the nation’s ability to feed itself, farm payrolls fell by only a million.³⁵ Because if farmers were fewer on the ground, they were far from idle. They turned to mechanization and chemical fertilizers to make their acres more productive, so much so they also expanded pasturage for livestock by 22 percent. Some complained that Washington’s restrictions on manufacture of machinery like tractors and harvesters made conversion that much harder. Some lamented that the big farms were devouring the small inefficient ones as well as the abandoned homesteads.³⁶

But it was this concentration and mechanization that made it possible for American farmers to feed not only their own country better than it had been fed before the Depression, but their Allies, as well. By the time the war was over, they were ready to feed a devastated Europe for almost five years. After that, they would go on to feed the world.³⁷

The biggest beneficiaries of the demographic shift from country to city were African Americans. Almost one million left the old states of the Confederacy for points north and west.³⁸ Another half million went into uniform.

Their passage into mainstream American life got an enormous boost on June 25, 1941, when Roosevelt issued an executive order calling for an end to employment discrimination based on race, color, or creed in the nation’s growing defense industries. The idea came from A. Philip Randolph, head of the powerful railway porters’ union, which he founded when no other union in the country would accept black railway workers. He had campaigned hard for the order with both the White House and Bill Knudsen as head of OPM.

Knudsen fully supported Randolph on desegregation. When the war effort truly hit its stride, he knew America’s factories were going to need those additional black workers. But Knudsen still felt the best way to go about it was through “quiet work with the contractors and workers,” as he put it, rather than executive fiat. Once employers realized that hiring black workers would work, they would come around.³⁹

Randolph, however, was adamant. Recognizing the Negroes’ equal right to work and serve in uniform, he wrote Knudsen, was partly what American democracy was all about. To Roosevelt he wrote a very different letter. He was prepared, he told the president on May 29, to mobilize “from ten to fifty thousand Negroes to march on Washington in the interest of securing jobs … in national defense” as well as integration in the armed forces.⁴⁰

Roosevelt sensed a looming public relations disaster both for himself and for the Democratic Party, which was becoming increasingly successful in poaching black voters away from the Republicans, in spite of the Democrats’ record supporting segregation in the Deep South. The president tried to get his wife, Eleanor, an acknowledged civil rights champion, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and others to talk Randolph out of the march. Nothing could move the black union leader. So finally, facing the prospect of a flood of black protesters flooding the National Mall and surrounding the Lincoln Memorial, Roosevelt backed down. He issued Executive Order 8802 six days before the march was supposed to start. Randolph graciously canceled the day of protest.

To Randolph and others, it was a historic moment—and a foretaste of the civil rights struggle that was to come. The order, however, had its limits. The armed forces remained segregated right up to the war’s end. The committee FDR set up to oversee discrimination was likewise limited in its powers. Southern politicians closed it down as soon as the war ended. It’s not clear whether Knudsen’s approach might not have worked better.⁴¹

The results were certainly uneven. Henry Kaiser hired blacks in his shipyards, but few found jobs working on ships. Most did peripheral jobs, such as the road gang of blacks from Louisiana Clay Bedford employed for paving roads around and through the Richmond complex.⁴² Roy Grumman hired blacks and whites without discrimination, while Glenn Martin’s Baltimore plant continued to be segregated. So was the Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyard. General Motors’ Eastern Aircraft plant down the road, on the other hand, was not.

By and large, labor unions fought hard to keep the African Americans out. Even supposedly “progressive” CIO-affiliated unions like the Boilermakers made life miserable for blacks in workplaces like the Kaiser Richmond yards.⁴³ For some white workers, the presence of blacks in their midst, even in subordinate jobs, was jarring. Having them promoted could be infuriating. In Mobile a riot broke out at Moore Drydock when white workers learned African Americans were about to be upgraded as welders. In Beaumont, Texas, a riot left two dead before the state police and federal troops restored order.⁴⁴

Still, hiring blacks to do “white men’s work” signaled the emergence of a new American social compact where skill and content of character mattered more than skin color. It was no surprise that it drove up racial tensions in the South. But when you took a northern industrial city and combined a large influx of black workers with a larger influx of southern Appalachian whites who weren’t used to dealing with blacks without the reassuring cushion of Jim Crow, then threw in some sweltering summer heat, you had a recipe for racial meltdown—as the people of Detroit found out.⁴⁵

There had been signs of trouble before that weekend of June 1943—the week before MacArthur launched his offensive to retake New Guinea in the South Pacific, and two weeks before the invasion of Sicily. In February 1942 a group of black families tried to move into a housing development for defense workers. They were met by a mob of three hundred whites armed with stones and clubs. The police moved in but fighting broke out between growing angry crowds of blacks and whites. Thirty people were injured, and over one hundred arrested.

Detroit’s mayor tried to calm his city. “If we are one people,” he declared, “the Negroes should go into the project.”⁴⁶ They finally did, but only with the protection of state militiamen. What the police and mayor and state militia couldn’t control broke loose the weekend of June 20 the next year.

Rumors that black teenagers had thrown a white man off a bridge on Belle Isle, the city park in the Detroit River, set off a murderous conflagration that tore through the city for two days. Roving gangs of whites, mostly teenagers, rampaged through the city killing blacks and setting cars and businesses on fire. Black gangs attacked whites. “There were about two hundred of us in cars,” one sixteen-year-old white boy remembered. “We killed eight [blacks]…. I saw knives being stuck through their throats and heads being shot through…. It really was some riot.”⁴⁷ Before federal troops poured onto the streets to restore order, 34 people were dead, 25 blacks and 9 whites. More than 670 were injured. Detroit, the original arsenal of democracy, was shrouded in national disgrace.

Another riot broke out in New York City in August. It killed seven and injured scores more. If winning the war was the issue that could pull America together, race was still the one that could pull it apart.

Executive Order 8802 had banned discrimination in defense employment based on race, color, religion, or creed—but not sex. Women were the one group not protected by Washington.^† Yet they would gain the biggest foothold in the American workplace during the war.

At first companies and male workers had their doubts about hiring women, especially for industrial jobs. They had no understanding of machinery, went the argument. They’d be exhausted by any heavy duties, and they’d be a distraction to men on the job. Besides, no factories had women’s washrooms.⁴⁸

Almost from the start, however, employers began to reverse their thinking. As early as the spring of 1941, articles in magazines like American Machinist and Business Week told of women being trained to handle even the most complex machinery. Still, a photo of a class of trainees for a leading aviation company at about the same time shows not a single female—yet.⁴⁹

All that was about to change. Bill Knudsen was present when the first twenty-five women went into the Consolidated-Vultee plant, on March 31, 1941. They were put to work in the electrical subassembly division, and started a day earlier than planned. The manager feared that if they had started the day their training was supposed to end, on April 1, everybody else would think it was an April Fools joke.⁵⁰

Once the women set to work, however, the joke was on the males. The ladies of Vultee showed enormous skill at the subassemblies, running, threading, connecting, and checking electrical cables. Women had “lighter fingers,” as Knudsen put it, that sometimes was as vital in manufacturing as the heavy lifting.⁵¹

North American was impressed enough that they began substituting women for men in their tubing department. Production jumped by 20 percent. Before long, everyone was hiring women for other departments, and they ran milling machines, drill presses, and complex cutout saws and worked in aircraft engine assembling. They could also squeeze into places men couldn’t in airplane assemblies, such as the nose cone and tail section, to do spot welding or riveting or snapping in the electrical system.

By July 1944, 36 percent of all workers in prime defense contractors were female. And not just in aviation. In the end their numbers rose to nearly five million, doing every conceivable form of war work from making planes to building ships and tanks. In iron and steel companies, 22.3 percent of the workforce were women. At GM they were 30.7 percent of all hourly wage earners by the end of 1943, and in the Kaiser yards at Richmond they numbered 70 percent.⁵²

The press and the nation elevated them to heroic status, as Rosie the Riveter. Norman Rockwell painted her for the May 29, 1943, cover of The Saturday Evening Post sitting at lunch in her overalls, with her riveting gun on her lap—and her foot mashing a copy of Mein Kampf into the dust. Lockheed launched a publicity campaign around “Rosie the Riveter, the Girl from Lockheed” when the photo of one their workers, tall, dark-haired Vera Lowe, appeared in Life magazine in goggles and wielding a riveting gun.⁵³ Artist J. Howard Miller thought he had found her archetype when he spotted a photo of a seventeen-year-old metal press worker at American Broach and Machine named Geraldine Huff. His poster for the Ad Council showing her wearing a polka-dot bandanna and flexing her muscle with the caption “We Can Do It!” turned her into a national icon.

But the attention directed at Rosie obscured the fact that millions more women didn’t use a riveting gun, metal press, or welding torch. They cooked meals for defense plants, worked in defense contractors’ offices as stenographers and bookkeepers and telephone operators, and did a hundred other jobs. Rockwell based his Rosie on May Doyle, a nineteen-year-old phone operator in a dentist’s office in Arlington, Massachusetts. As for Miller’s Rosie, Geraldine Huff, she quit American Broach after six months—to go study the violin.

Women made gas masks for the Army, life rafts for the Navy and Coast Guard, and wove and stuffed parachutes for the Army Air Forces and airborne divisions. One of those parachute stuffers was a pretty brunette named Norma Jean Dougherty, who was barely seventeen and worked in an aircraft parts plant in Burbank, California, while her husband was in the Merchant Marine. In 1943 an Army newsreel team commanded by Captain Ronald Reagan spotted her and asked her to pose for some pictures. The photos of her in Yank magazine caused such a sensation that the Army used her as a model for several more shoots. After the war Norma Jean took her photos to a modeling agency and moved to Hollywood. There she dyed her hair blond and took a new name: Marilyn Monroe.⁵⁴

For millions of other women, the discipline of the job was reward enough. New York writer Augusta Clawson found that out when she moved to California to work in Richmond Yard No. 1. The account of her days there, The Shipyard Diary of a Woman Welder, was the surprise bestseller of 1944 and gave many people, including other women, their first glimpse into the reality of Rosie the Riveter.

Clawson described signing up for training, and the advice given her by her “Job Counselor,” also a woman, dressed in pink with gray hair and a youngish face. “Get gloves,” Clawson was told, “you have to have them.” The school was going to provide her helmet and goggles, but she had to buy her own welding leathers.⁵⁵

“It gets plenty cold out there,” the counselor also warned her, referring to the No. 1 shipways. “You can wear slacks and put coveralls over them; then you can take the coveralls off and you won’t feel so dirty.” And don’t wear a watch: “the rays of the welding will magnetize its works.”⁵⁶

Training classes were under the stern eye of Mr. Dunn, who showed his ladies how to adjust the amperage and voltage of the welding machine and then turned them loose to practice for three to four hours at a stretch, with breaks for lectures on safety. At the end of her first day, Clawson barely had enough energy to eat an apple back in her hotel room before she fell asleep.

But she would grow used to it, just as she would grow used to rising at 5 A.M. every morning to catch the bus down to the Richmond yard and the ways. There she met her fellow laborers, both men and women, who came from every part of the country, and she described her pride when she had completed her first full week of work.

“Something has happened,” she wrote, “I don’t know quite what it is, but after work today I suddenly realized that I had no dread or fear any more in connection with this job.”⁵⁷ When she had started, she had been terrified of heights. But now she felt comfortable climbing up a ladder high above the factory floor and stretching out on a board suspended between two uprights welded to overhead beams. “Imagine me,” she wrote, “lying like suspended animation way above the floor (’scuse, I mean deck), resting comfortably and singing to myself.”⁵⁸ Her fear of heights was gone, as was her lack of confidence about doing manual labor. It was a moment of emancipation as meaningful, perhaps, as any brought by the Nineteenth Amendment.

Written under the gaze of the wartime censor, Clawson’s account of life in the ways was clearly positive. Katherine Archibald, a liberal sociologist, went to work in the Moore Dry Dock in Oakland hoping to find a nation united in the war effort. Instead she found a boiling cauldron of tensions. Men resented women, whites disdained blacks, old-settler African Americans resented the new “brothers,” and the native Californians hated them all. Fights and brawls and slacking on the job were common. She also found the steady barrage of sex jokes demeaning and saw them as undermining “business-like relationships between men and women” on the job.⁵⁹

The rough edge of life in the yards shocked and disillusioned Archibald. Later historians and feminists would be disappointed by the failure of women to achieve full equality of pay and promotion, and be disappointed by the fact that so many would quit their jobs after the war.

But most women who worked in the arsenal of democracy were not out for gender transformation. They were shamelessly conventional. They would do their jobs, and appreciate the opportunity to earn some pay and serve their country. But the moment they looked forward to was the reunion with fathers and sons and brothers and husbands.

None would forget that moment when one of their co-workers would arrive in the morning with a crumpled telegram in their fist and tears in his or her eyes as they mumbled, “It’s about my son …”⁶⁰ Most would appreciate the words of Katie Grant, who worked the graveyard shift for two years in the Richmond yards while her husband was in the Marines.

“I told Melvin later,” she recalled years later, “that I helped to make the ship for him to come home in.”⁶¹

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* The driving force behind the effort was the Army, and their choice to replace him had been trusted old Bernard Baruch. Unlike in May 1940, this time Baruch was willing to get into harness—perhaps because he knew the really hard work had all been done.

† The exception was a ruling by the War Labor Board in September 1942 dictating equal pay for equal work in defense work.