CHAPTER ONE

INDUSTRIAL GIANT—READY
FOR WAR

In 1830 Milwaukee was little more than Solomon Juneau’s trading post at the mouth of the Menomonee River. Within the brief span of a hundred years, the village became a city, passing through an era in which German culture dominated the social scene and commerce in wheat dominated the local economy to become a major industrial center with strong ties to national and overseas markets. By December 1941 Milwaukee industries largely had recovered from the Depression and were producing turbines, cranes, construction equipment, motorcycles, small engines, electrical controls, machine tools, hosiery, and leather. As war clouds darkened the horizon after Germany invaded Poland, local companies began converting production to meet the growing defense needs of the federal government. With a highly skilled workforce and a reputation as the “Machine Shop of the World,” Milwaukee was ready to go to war.¹

During its first thirty years, Milwaukee’s economy focused on the trading of agricultural commodities rather than manufacturing. The growth of Wisconsin’s hinterland, the completion of railroads from Milwaukee to the Mississippi River, and the improvement of harbor facilities made the city a center for the milling and transshipment of wheat and flour. In 1846 two years before statehood, Milwaukee exported 213,448 bushels of wheat and 15,756 barrels of flour—significant amounts to be sure. In 1857 the Milwaukee & Mississippi Railroad alone delivered 1,678,000 bushels of wheat to the city. Grain elevators and flour mills dotted the city’s landscape. During the Civil War Milwaukee surpassed Chicago as the world’s greatest shipper of wheat, and the Milwaukee Sentinel told its readers: “The business of a large share of our citizens has been to dispose of the manufactures of other people, and to traffic in the rich products of our own broad, fertile prairies.” In 1869 the city’s merchants shipped over 16 million bushels of wheat and a million barrels of flour.²

The Civil War decade also marked the emergence of Milwaukee as a manufacturing center. From wheat came flour; from iron ore came steel; from livestock, meat and leather; from wood, farm implements and vehicles; from barley and hops, beer. The availability of raw materials, the existence of markets, the influx of workers, and the construction of transportation systems coincided in the 1860s to transform Milwaukee from a center of agricultural commerce to a fledgling industrial giant. The eastern United States and Europe provided markets for wheat, flour, and leather. Westerners needed wagons and farm equipment; millers needed grinding mills. Lumbermen needed saws and steam engines; the railroads, endless miles of track. European immigrants, many of them skilled in metalworking and toolmaking, provided the labor force to run factories and foundries; the development of railroads gave industrialists the incentive, and the wherewithal, to bring raw materials to Milwaukee and to ship finished goods to markets both east and west. Metal-based manufacturing slowly grew in importance as Milwaukee became an industrial center. Fifteen years after the Civil War, Milwaukee had the nation’s sixth highest concentration of industrial workers, 45 percent of the workforce. By 1910 the products of Milwaukee’s iron and steel mills, foundries and machine shops, and tool-and-die establishments constituted the city’s broad, rock-solid industrial base.³

By the time of World War II, few, if any, of the city’s major companies could trace their origins as far back as Milwaukee’s most popular manufacturers, the brewers. The brewing industry originated in the 1840s—a time when German immigrants were settling in Milwaukee, when Wisconsin was forming its state government, and when the grains and hops necessary for the brewer’s art were supplied by farms in Wisconsin.

During Milwaukee’s first half-century, Germans such as Jacob Best, Joseph Schlitz, Valentin Blatz, and Frederick Miller made Milwaukee beer world-famous and created an image of the city that, in conjunction with its German heritage, entered the popular consciousness. To serve an ever-growing national market, Milwaukee’s brewers steadily expanded production from 58,666 barrels in 1865 to 3,724,937 barrels in 1910. Drawing as it did upon immigrant expertise and agricultural products from Wisconsin’s hinterland, growth of the brewing industry was no accident—and neither was the linking of Milwaukee with its most famous product. Frederick Pabst’s slogan, “Milwaukee beer is famous—Pabst has made it so,” appeared on walls, wagons, and streetcars in New York. By 1898 Schlitz advertising used the slogan, “The beer that made Milwaukee famous.” Beer had become associated with the city.⁴

Brewing grew out of the link between immigrants and local raw materials. Other early industries likewise originated from the convergence of new settlers and local supplies. By the end of the nineteenth century, Milwaukee was one of the nation’s major producers of packed meats and of leather. Not only were raw materials easily accessible, but the national rail system also carried Milwaukee products to eastern markets.⁵

Milwaukee’s iron and foundry industry best illustrated the important relationship between access to raw materials and to markets. Milwaukee, like other industrial cities of the Great Lakes, was an ideal place for the marriage of iron ore from Michigan and Minnesota and coal and coke from Pennsylvania. In 1880 Milwaukee ranked sixth in the nation with annual iron and steel production valued at nearly $5 million. Although meat packing ranked as Milwaukee’s single most important industry that year, iron, steel, foundry, and machine-shop production combined equaled $7.2 million annually, outstripping the packing industry by over $1 million.⁶

The Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company represented one of Milwaukee’s most important firms engaged in heavy industry. The company began in 1847 as the Reliance Works, founded by Charles Decker and James Seville as a manufacturer of cast-iron products and flour-milling and sawmill equipment. The company prospered for a decade but fell on hard times during the depression of 1857. When the firm was sold at a sheriff’s auction in 1861, Edward P. Allis took possession. Between 1861 and his death in 1889, Allis built the business from production valued at $31,000 to production of over $3 million. He expanded operations by taking risks to enter local markets and by innovating to meet the needs of national markets as well. When Milwaukee built a water system in the 1870s, Edward P. Allis supplied most of the pipe, pumps, and engines. He surprised and excited city observers when he bid on the pipe contract, for at the time he made the bid, the Reliance Works had no foundry in which to make the pipe. As he rushed to build the foundry and meet the contract schedule, Allis hit upon a business formula that served him well: hire the best men available and provide them with the tools they needed to create new products. Among the first of many experts he hired were John Pennycook, a Chicago pipe expert, and William Wall, a skilled foundryman. In addition to the pipe contract, Allis soon specialized in sawmill equipment for northern Wisconsin and millstones for local gristmills. In 1873 he hired George Madison Hinkley, a millwright with extensive experience in the Michigan lumber industry, to revitalize his sawmill department. Successful innovations in the use of band saws and electric motors soon made the company a major manufacturer of sawmill equipment.

Four years later Allis hired William Dixon Gray, an expert in flour milling with whose help he introduced the roller system of grinding flour to America. In 1878 Allis supplied Cadwallader C. Washburn, a former governor of Wisconsin, with an all-roller flour mill for his operations in Minneapolis—what eventually became General Mills. Publicity generated by this event brought new orders and made the Reliance Works a major builder of flour-milling equipment. In 1877 Allis hired engineer Edwin Reynolds from the Corliss Steam Engine Company of Providence, Rhode Island. Reynolds was capable of designing the new engines and power plants necessary for mines, lumber mills, and public works that were becoming a staple of the company’s national business by the turn of the century. By the time of Allis’s death in 1889, the Reliance Works employed 1,500 men.

To improve its ability to serve national and world markets, the Edward P. Allis Company,⁷ then the largest manufacturer of steam engines in the United States, merged with two Chicago companies and a Pennsylvania firm, all manufacturers of engines and heavy machinery, to form the Allis-Chalmers Company in 1901. At that time the new company’s annual business exceeded $10 million and employed a total of five thousand workers at five plants.

Unfortunately, a decade of mismanagement resulted in receivership by 1912. Reorganization in 1913 elevated Otto H. Falk to the presidency of the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company. Falk, a retired brigadier general in the Wisconsin National Guard and vice-president of the Falk Company, a Milwaukee foundry, brought to the company his considerable managerial skills and a strong interest in agricultural machinery. Expansion of the company’s tractor production reflected Falk’s belief in mechanization, his anticipation of changes in many aspects of American life, and his desire to diversify the company’s product line.⁸

Unlike Allis-Chalmers, Milwaukee’s second-largest manufacturer began as a producer of consumer goods rather than of heavy industrial machinery. In 1874 when C. J. Smith, founder of A. O. Smith Corporation, established a machine shop in Milwaukee, he specialized in making bicycle frames and parts for baby carriages. By the 1890s the company was the nation’s largest producer of bicycle frames. Innovation brought the company success. While other producers relied on solid iron bars for bicycle manufacturing, Smith developed a technique for making frames using tubular steel. By 1910 the company had adapted its work with bicycle frames to become the nation’s largest producer of automobile frames.

During World War I the A. O. Smith Corporation turned its attention to making welded bomb casings. In the postwar era the company combined its experience with bicycle frames, pressed-steel automobile frames, and welding to become one of the leading suppliers of large-diameter oil and gas pipes. The company also produced vessels made of numerous layers of welded tubular steel capable of containing materials under high pressure. In seeking a way to contain the corrosive compounds often stored or manufactured in these pressure vessels, the company began lining its casings with a variety of alloys and with glass. By 1940 company engineers were deep in the development of a new use for their process: the glass-lined hot water heater. Whether the product was steam engines and tractors at Allis-Chalmers or bicycle frames and large-diameter pipe at A. O. Smith, Milwaukee’s two largest manufacturers built their success and reputations on new products and processes that became essential to twentieth-century industry.⁹

The manufacturers for whom Milwaukeeans worked in 1940 made beer, leather, clothing, steel, automotive products, tractors, electrical relays, generators, water heaters, batteries, kitchen utensils, and industrial cranes. As with Allis-Chalmers and A. O. Smith, many of these companies dated back to the nineteenth century. Filer and Stowell evolved from a machine shop established in the late 1850s to serve the sawmill industry. Geuder and Paeschke Manufacturing Company was founded in 1880; by 1940 it was making kitchen utensils, milk cans, and steel shipping packages. Alonzo Pawling and Henry Harnischfeger founded their machine and pattern shop in the early 1880s; it evolved into the Harnischfeger Corporation, specializing in heavy industrial cranes.¹⁰

All of these companies contributed to Milwaukee’s growing industrial importance. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the city was more committed to industrial production than were many other cities of the same size. With a population of 373,857 Milwaukee ranked twelfth in the United States, but the city’s manufactured products were valued at over $208 million, placing it tenth in the nation. Approximately 15.9 percent of the city’s population were industrial wage earners. Of the other top ten cities, only Detroit and Philadelphia had a greater concentration of their populations involved in manufacturing.¹¹ More than 50 percent of Milwaukee’s labor force worked at industrial jobs in 1910 and 1920. In 1940 even after the dislocation and retrenchment caused by the Great Depression, almost 40 percent of the labor force worked in factories.¹²

Milwaukee’s high concentration of industrial workers, as well as its significant German population,¹³ shaped city politics in ways conducive to the development of a strong, vibrant labor movement. In the early twentieth century an alliance of workers, Germans, and socialists (with much overlapping) created a reform movement that shaped Milwaukee politics for forty years. In 1910 after years of agitation and campaigning, a coalition of socialists and organized labor defeated David G. Rose, the corrupt mayor and Democratic political boss, and replaced him with Emil Seidel, a Social Democrat.¹⁴

Although he was a socialist, Emil Seidel was elected because of the reputation of socialists in Milwaukee for reform rather than revolution. The foundation was laid during the 1880s by the careful work of Victor Berger (1860–1929). An Austro-Hungarian by birth, Victor Berger resigned his teaching job in 1892 to devote his attention to socialist organizing and newspaper editing. He took over the Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1893, renamed it the Wisconsin Vorwarts, and soon made it the official voice of the Milwaukee Federated Trades Council (founded in 1887) and the Wisconsin State Federation of Labor (founded in 1893).

Berger preached a moderate, evolutionary socialism. He organized an informal group known as the Sozial-Democratischer Verein at about the same time he took over the Arbeiter-Zeitung. This small group attracted German-speaking socialists, many of whom were leaders of Milwaukee’s fledgling trade unions. The link between socialism and the trade unions was perfectly clear when Berger formed the Social Democratic party in 1897. Almost immediately, the Federated Trades Council endorsed the new organization. After an internal struggle between the socialists and the non-socialists, the Federated Trades Council ended the century by electing an executive committee made up solely of socialists, among them Victor Berger. Although unions offered opportunities for socialist organizing, he admonished his colleagues that the labor movement must include “Democrats, Republicans, Populists and Prohibitionists” as well as socialists or risk failing in its mission to represent the interests of workers.¹⁵

Thus was forged an alliance between organized labor and the Milwaukee socialists that lasted well into the twentieth century. The years before World War I marked the alliance’s heyday—a time when major figures in the Milwaukee Federated Trades Council such as Frank Weber and John J. Handley also played prominent roles in the Socialist party.

When Emil Seidel won the mayor’s seat in 1910 and another Social Democrat, Daniel Hoan, won it in 1916, the victories represented the strength of the socialist-labor alliance, the importance of the German vote, and the power of reform politics in the Progressive era. When voters in Milwaukee supported socialists, they were voting not so much for ideology as for honest government over corrupt machine politics.

Daniel Hoan won the mayor’s office in 1916 with the strong support of organized labor. Seidel’s socialist administration had demonstrated the value of having an ally in the mayor’s chair. The administration had insisted on the use of union labor for city printing jobs, enforced the city’s factory safety and sanitation ordinances, raised the wages for common laborers working for the city, and kept the city’s anti-union police chief under control in 1911 when the Garment Workers Union went on strike.

Hoan himself came to office with impressive credentials. During the garment workers’ strike he refused to prosecute a picketer who called a strikebreaker a “scab.” As city attorney, he had vigorously enforced ordinances designed to force utilities to bear their fair share of the municipal tax burden. Besides his role as a member of the Seidel administration, he had been the attorney for the Wisconsin Federation of Labor and had helped draft a proposal from which the state legislature created the nation’s first workmen’s compensation law.¹⁶

Remarkably, Hoan served uninterrupted from 1916 to 1940. His record amply justified labor’s support. He seldom had a socialist majority on the city council, but he shaped an administration renowned for its fairness, humanity, efficiency, and honesty. Unions and workers alike became accustomed to an administration that was concerned about the welfare of working-class people and that assiduously worked to resolve labor-management troubles amicably.

Dan Hoan believed that industrial violence occurred either when the civil authorities were demonstrably anti-labor or when the employer refused to bargain in good faith with the workers. During his tenure the Milwaukee police remained a neutral force prepared to protect the rights of picketers and employers alike. He assumed that workers were basically rational, law-abiding citizens who were not seeking special privileges but rather were seeking to exercise legitimate rights. When the mayor talked about reforming the police department during his administration, he emphasized the importance of using the police fairly in labor disputes. He argued that Milwaukee’s modern record of nonviolent strikes¹⁷ was due to the fact that workers knew their rights would be protected and employers knew that the mayor would countenance no abrogation of those rights.¹⁸

A similar commonsense approach marked the Hoan administration’s attempts to mitigate the worst effects of the Great Depression. The First World War had fostered rapid expansion of Milwaukee industry. Between 1910 and 1915 the value of manufactured products in Milwaukee increased by 7.5 percent. By contrast, manufacturing increased by 158 percent between 1915 and 1920. Wartime orders created tremendous demands for iron, steel, heavy machinery, motor vehicles, packed meats, and leather—all Milwaukee specialties. The early postwar prosperity and economic growth were hurt by an agricultural depression that began in 1920 and ended with the crash of the stock market on Thursday, October 24, 1929.¹⁹

Milwaukee’s economy was partially insulated at the onset of the Great Depression by the fact that orders for heavy machinery did not decline as rapidly as did consumer orders, and the fiscally conservative municipal government closed 1931 with a $4 million surplus. Nonetheless, by 1933 Milwaukee felt the full impact of the Depression. Employment dropped to only 66,010 wage earners—a decline of 44 percent since the crash in 1929. Manufacturers of iron, steel, and heavy machinery in particular had borne the brunt of declining orders placed by railroads, farmers, and the general public. Building construction had plunged to only 12.5 percent of the average annual expenditures during the previous twenty years. Once hard times came to Milwaukee, the city’s experience mirrored that of the nation. The economy improved somewhat in 1935 and 1936, then worsened during the recession that began in August 1937 and ran to September 1938. It was not until 1939—as global tensions mounted—that the economy finally rebounded.

In the early years of the Depression, Milwaukee met relief needs by converting an old armory into a kitchen and dining facility and by transferring available city funds to departments prepared to provide work for the unemployed. During 1931 more than 12,000 men worked at least one ten-day shift improving the city’s parks and playgrounds. During 1933 the burden of meeting growing relief needs shifted from the locality to the federal government and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. With federal money, bureaucrats, planners, and legions of workers created the middle-income Parklawn and Greendale housing projects, constructed school buildings, paved city streets, laid new sewer lines, and renovated city buildings.²⁰

As city, state, and federal governments sought solutions to the Depression and attempted to ameliorate the suffering, Milwaukee’s trade unions stirred, sought their own solutions, and came to life with new organizing campaigns. Beginning with a union-mounted drive to organize common laborers in August 1933, labor-management friction increased and began to place stress on Daniel Hoan’s approach to industrial relations. In 1933 there were only six strikes involving a total of 482 workers in Milwaukee. The following year there were forty-two strikes involving almost 14,000 workers.

The bitterest of those strikes resulted in the unionization of the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company, operator of the city’s transit system. The strike began when the company refused to abide by a National Labor Relations Board order to reinstate thirteen employees who had been fired for their union activity. Soon it paralyzed the city’s electric trolley transportation system. Large crowds of Milwaukeeans supportive of the strike gathered at the car barns, riots broke out, and Mayor Hoan made plain his support of the workers. To protect company property, the railway company electrified its grounds with live wires. On the evening of June 29, 1934, a demonstrator entered the grounds and an employee turned a fire hose in his direction. There was a flash of light, and the young man was electrocuted. The crowd that had gathered at the car barns quietly disbanded in stunned disbelief.

This grisly incident rapidly solidified public hostility toward the company, and railway officials soon met with union leaders for the first time. The negotiations resulted in recognition for the union and the rehiring of both the strikers and the workers who had originally been discharged unfairly. The city government and the people of Milwaukee played an important role in supporting unionization of the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company.²¹

Similar support was provided in 1935, when workers began a seventeen-month-long strike at the Lindemann-Hoverson stove works. The company refused to meet with representatives of the workers or with federal conciliation officials and insisted on keeping the plant running. The police found it impossible to control the large crowds that gathered at the factory. As conditions worsened, Mayor Hoan said that he feared a “breakdown of local authority and . . . the intervention of the state militia and the declaration of martial law.”²² To bring conditions under control, the common council adopted an ordinance empowering the mayor or the chief of police to close a plant if an employer refused to bargain with his or her employees and if large crowds gathered at the plant on two successive days. Although the Boncel Ordinance—so called for its author, alderman Frank Boncel—was never used and was repealed by the council after the socialists received a stinging defeat in the elections of 1936, it caused Lindemann-Hoverson to close its factory voluntarily. Thereafter the level of hostility subsided.²³

As the Depression decade wore on, the Federated Trades Council (FTC) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) achieved notable success not only in organizing trade unions but also in organizing industrial unions. Socialists in Wisconsin’s labor movement advocated organizing the workers of a factory into a single union, regardless of specific worker duties or skills, when that factory or industry relied largely on assembly line production or on workers who completed only a small portion of an assembly job. With its focus on building unions based upon an industry rather than on the craft of an individual worker, this position was a departure from the way unions had been organized during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Milwaukee Federated Trades Council had been quite sympathetic to the concept of industrial organizing. Similarly, the Wisconsin State Federation of Labor had been in the forefront of those advocating a compromise between the old AFL craft unions and the rapidly growing industrial unions of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), which had been so successful elsewhere in the automobile, steel, and rubber industries.

The most important Milwaukee organizing drives resulted in the formation of Federal Labor Unions (FLU, meaning industrial unions directly affiliated with the AFL and not with a craft union) at Milwaukee’s largest manufacturers, A. O. Smith and Allis-Chalmers. Success at these companies symbolized the contrasting results of industrial organizing. At A. O. Smith, Milwaukee’s second-largest employer, management readily accepted craft unions. When the AFL organized a Federal Labor Union in the 1930s, the company quickly accepted it as the bargaining agent for workers not already represented by craft unions. Throughout World War II AFL Federal Labor Union 19806 (also known as the Smith Steel Workers Union) coexisted with nearly a dozen older craft unions at A. O. Smith.

By contrast, Federal Labor Union 20136 (later to become United Auto Workers [UAW] Local 248) at Allis-Chalmers, led by members of the electricians’ union, began absorbing craft workers, much to the displeasure of several of Milwaukee’s most powerful craft unions. Those AFL unions had experienced little success in organizing Allis-Chalmers’s workers, who often resented the entrance requirements, elitism, and high dues of the craft unions. When Allis-Chalmers workers greeted FLU 20136 enthusiastically, it put the union on a collision course with the FTC.

Unfortunately, the leaders of established craft unions such as the carpenters, electricians, and teamsters in Wisconsin and nationally feared that unions organized by industry or factory would harm their craft-based organizations. After the 1935 AFL annual meeting refused to sanction industrial organizing, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and leaders from the garment and textile unions formed the Committee for Industrial Organization to pursue this new approach. Technically a committee within the AFL, the group was the embryo of a new national labor federation headed for a confrontation with the dominant craft unions of its parent organization. At the AFL annual meeting in 1936, delegates voted to suspend the rebellious unions. Two years later, in recognition of its standing as a new national force in the labor movement, the Committee for Industrial Organization changed its name to the Congress of Industrial Organizations and was known thereafter as the CIO.

The same rivalry between craft and industrial unions resulted in an irreparable rift in the Milwaukee Federated Trades Council. Shortly after the AFL expelled the CIO unions, the FTC expelled the union at Allis-Chalmers, the largest local in Wisconsin. The split developed when Molders Local 125 and Electrical Workers Local 494 complained that Trades Council representatives from the Federal Union at Allis-Chalmers were former members of the Molders’ and Electrical Workers’ locals. In the weeks that followed, the Trades Council debated the issue, the Allis-Chalmers Federal Union joined the UAW as Local 248, and the FTC expelled the local from its ranks. The gigantic Allis-Chalmers union threatened the established craft unions and the balance of power in the Federated Trades Council. Eventually sixty-two locals withdrew from the FTC and formed the Milwaukee Industrial Union Council (IUC) under the leadership of Harold Christoffel, president of Local 248. The stage was set for an intense struggle as the FTC and the IUC competed for workers’ loyalties in a new wave of organizing activity.²⁴

Thus, as war broke out in Europe in September 1939, the Milwaukee labor movement was at war with itself. The rivalry between the two labor federations fostered organizing as never before. The movement signed up thousands of workers who were unorganized prior to 1932. That year Milwaukee’s unions had 20,000 members. Four years later, they had 60,000. Following the split between the AFL and the CIO in 1936, the pace of organizing accelerated nationwide, and Wisconsin became one of the most significant battlegrounds. The Wisconsin Labor Relations Board concluded that renewed organizing drives had doubled AFL membership in Wisconsin during the year between the 1936 and 1937 AFL conventions. At the same time, the CIO officially came into existence and brought thousands of members into the fold of organized labor. In a thinly veiled attack on AFL critics, the Wisconsin edition of the CIO News made this very point in 1938:

Take a look at Wisconsin. If we had not had this “tragic split” at least 125,000 men and women enrolled in CIO or AFL unions would still be unorganized. The 8,000 Allis-Chalmers workers would still be at the mercy of wrangling craft union leaders. Harley-Davidson, Fairbanks-Morse, Evinrude Motors, Milprint, Louis-Allis, Gisholt, Highway Trailer, Marathon Electric and more than 100 other industrial plants would today be open shop . . . strongholds, instead of organized in powerful, industrial unions.²⁵

The AFL and the CIO enrolled thousands of new members as the Great Depression drew to a close and industry and manufacturing revived. In many instances labor’s greatest victories occurred when organizers, both of the AFL and of the CIO, emphasized the industrial union rather than the craft union approach. The CIO auto, steel, and electrical workers’ unions were particularly successful in Milwaukee. Federal labor unions and the AFL auto workers, both of which sought to organize unskilled production employees, were equally successful at A. O. Smith, Briggs and Stratton Corporation (small gasoline engines), and the Harley-Davidson Motor Company (motorcycles). These were not truly “industrial-style” unions, because the AFL craft unions bargained for their own narrow memberships; but it was the unskilled workers who dominated labor-management relations at Milwaukee’s biggest factories, whether organized by the CIO or the AFL. Craft unions representing the machinists, electrical workers, carpenters, and operating engineers remained powerful forces in Milwaukee; but the vitality of the labor movement resided in those who were organizing workers who normally fell outside the old craft-union structure.

By 1940 Milwaukee was a thriving city of 587,472 residents, with an adjacent county population of approximately 766,885. Nearly 40 percent of the city’s labor force was employed in manufacturing, making Milwaukee one of the most heavily industrialized cities in the nation. Manufacturers of iron, steel, and heavy machinery continued to dominate. Packed meats, leather products, textiles, chemicals, and beer trailed far behind heavy industry.²⁶

As Britain and Russia teetered on the brink of disaster in Europe, and the United States edged toward war, industries in Milwaukee and other Wisconsin cities rapidly converted to war production. During 1941 the state garnered $450 million in orders for military goods. At first, industry responded slowly to these orders as it converted civilian production facilities to meet military needs. By December 1941 however, war conversion and production were moving at a rapid pace, and Wisconsin manufacturers had delivered finished products to the federal government valued at over $225 million.²⁷

Well before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Milwaukee’s industries were committed to military production. Milwaukee factories received more than $175 million in arms contracts by November 1941. Total industrial production in Milwaukee reached $940 million in 1941, topping the previous high from 1929 by $28 million. The total number of workers employed in Milwaukee factories rose from an average of 86,400 in 1940 to 108,180 in 1941.²⁸

As the economy converted to war production, Milwaukee’s industrial corporations expanded their operations, depleting local labor supplies and drawing thousands of workers to the city in search of war jobs. Allis-Chalmers with 11,610 employees and A. O. Smith with 6,499 dominated the industrial scene in July 1941. A year later Allis-Chalmers employed 20,632 workers and A. O. Smith employed 8,594. In response to the demands of the war economy, each company eventually reached peak employment in 1944, with over 25,000 and 15,000 employees, respectively.

In July 1941, on the eve of war, the United States Employment Service (USES) surveyed more than two hundred Milwaukee-area companies, including most if not all of Milwaukee’s major manufacturers. Of the 98,854 people employed by these companies, 53,416 (54 percent) already worked in plants producing ordnance or small-arms ammunition.²⁹ In fact the USES probably underestimated the number of workers already engaged in war production because it listed companies such as Allis-Chalmers as making non-war machinery. The Allis-Chalmers turbine department produced equipment valued at more than $l.6 million in 1939. By 1941 the same Milwaukee plant was heavily committed to manufacturing steam turbines for navy warships. Thanks in large part to government contracts, the value of production in this department increased 165 percent during 1940 (to $4.2 million) and another 72 percent in 1941 (to almost $7.4 million).³⁰

News from other companies reinforced perceptions of a vibrant defense production economy in Milwaukee. A. O. Smith showed third-quarter earnings of $1,382,688 in 1941—some 356 percent higher than for the same quarter in 1940. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Allis-Chalmers, Nordberg Company, Cutler-Hammer, Inc., and the Harnischfeger Corporation already operated their plants twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, turning out machine tools, propelling equipment for ships, torpedo tubes, electrical controls, and industrial cranes. Chain Belt Company, A. O. Smith, and Square D Company, makers of artillery, aerial bombs, and electrical controls, operated on a similar basis in some departments. The Falk Corporation was on a seven-day, round-the-clock schedule working on naval contracts, as was the Kearney and Trecker Corporation, which reported being “swamped” with orders for milling machines essential for industrial conversion to war production. In an attempt to extend defense production to small contractors, the Heil Company subcontracted over $175,000 in orders for repair tools to service Pratt and Whitney aircraft engines to ninety-four companies employing between three and eighty workers throughout Milwaukee. Heil itself had received a $25,000 order for airplane service trucks. Four days before the United States entered the war, the Heil company received a $10 million order for aircraft gasoline and oil tanks. The company already devoted 90 percent of its output to defense production and estimated that the new order would keep its 2,400 employees busy around the clock throughout 1942.³¹

When war came, the United States stood poised to become what would be known as “the arsenal of democracy”—in fact, the biggest arsenal on earth. For the next seven months Milwaukeeans were treated to a spectacle that implied, by its very nature, that America would win the production battle. Through its news columns and monthly “General Business Pulse,” an index of local economic conditions, the Milwaukee Journal carried the message of rising industrial production to its readers. The nation rushed to meet its war needs, and millions of dollars in new contracts poured into Wisconsin. The Milwaukee shoe industry took its first government contracts; the Massey-Harris Company purchased a major plant in Racine to begin tank construction; Allis-Chalmers began work on two new factories. The latter company hoped to have a $9 million plant ready to produce turbo-superchargers for high-altitude bombers before June and had laid plans for a $2.25 million steam-turbine plant as well. In March, Captain Frederick Hansen, director of the Milwaukee suboffice of the Chicago ordnance district, reported that Wisconsin military production had improved markedly—by 400 percent in some cases—since December.³²

Small companies as well as large ones benefited from the war-induced prosperity. One small firm, the Taylor Manufacturing Company—makers of drill presses, production drills, and hydraulic dynamometers for measuring the power developed by engines—stood on the verge of bankruptcy in September 1939. By May 1942 the company had expanded to a new factory, employed over fifty workers, and was thriving.³³

Stories about production bottlenecks, corporate inefficiency, and broken production schedules provided a sobering counterpoint during the days after Pearl Harbor, but such stories paled next to those of successful production. Entire industries retooled in record time and began to produce critical war supplies ahead of schedule. The automobile industry provided the best single example of America’s awesome productive power. Through careful planning, the major automobile manufacturers prepared for converting their plants to military uses even as civilian vehicles continued to roll off their lines at full speed. By March, for example, General Motors’s Buick plant was turning out bomber engines at the rate originally scheduled for December of 1942. At a Fisher Body plant in Detroit, gleaming new auto bodies—the last of their kind for “the duration”—were still on the assembly line as workers began converting the factory to tank production. Forty-seven days later the first of many thousands of all-welded M-4 Sherman tanks rolled off the line under its own power. To achieve this miraculous transformation, company engineers and workers designed and built many of their own tools, drew their own blueprints, and adapted their old knowledge to new purposes. Likewise, by the end of May, Henry Ford’s new bomber plant at Willow Run completed its first B-24, the first aircraft to be built solely by an auto company. Ford’s huge four-engined bomber symbolized what Americans and Europeans had been waiting for: mass production of war matériel by the world’s greatest industrial power.³⁴

The initial phase of war production demonstrated unmistakably that the Depression was over. Unemployment rose briefly during the conversion period, but more than three-quarters of those who were laid off immediately found other jobs. Curtailment of automobile production hit Milwaukee factories harder than any other single development during the conversion period. Major Milwaukee companies such as A. O. Smith, Briggs and Stratton, and Seaman Body (Nash-Kelvinator) were closely tied to the production of cars and trucks. The first two firms, however, had already secured major defense contracts, lessening the need for layoffs. In addition, in 1941 A. O. Smith established a retraining program that allowed many workers who would otherwise have been laid off to prepare for new jobs in the plant.³⁵

Seaman Body workers were not so lucky. In January 1942 the company laid off approximately 3,000 workers as it retooled to accommodate aircraft orders. Nash-Kelvinator, the parent company, expected employment at Seaman Body to return to 3,200 by fall; but conversion problems, poor planning, and contract cancellations delayed full production at the plant until the fall of 1943. In the interim, workers and union officials alike complained of the mismanagement that was preventing their reemployment. When Seaman Body called its workers back, they returned with memories of the hardship and discontent bred by eighteen months of unemployment. Many companies had been reluctant to hire laid-off workers who might soon be recalled to work by their original employers.³⁶

Happily for most workers, the dislocation at Seaman Body was the exception, not the rule. Most factory workers displaced during the conversion period soon found new jobs in similar plants or were recalled by their original employers. In May, for example, Allis-Chalmers advertised for workers to fill jobs opened as men went into the armed forces or took jobs created at the company’s new supercharger plant. The response reflected the basic health of the local economy: only five hundred workers applied for some six thousand jobs! Presaging future developments, J. I. Onarheim, Allis-Chalmers’s employment supervisor, anticipated that the necessary workers would come from those employed in nondefense work and from women not employed at the time. Onarheim told a Milwaukee Journal reporter, “We are running out of people with even a minimum of training . . . and fellows like [Donald] Pulley will have to be trained to supply the necessary force.”

The Donald Pulley named by Onarheim had grown up on a farm near Highland, Wisconsin. In August 1941 he moved his wife and two children to Milwaukee in hopes of finding a defense job. With no prior factory experience, Allis-Chalmers rejected his first application for work. Instead, he found work in a Milwaukee restaurant. Nine months later Pulley applied again for one of the jobs being advertised by the company. This time, as Onarheim told the Journal reporter, Pulley probably would get a job despite his lack of experience.³⁷

When Donald Nelson, head of the national War Production Board, proclaimed an end to the conversion period in July 1942, most Milwaukee workers engaged in vital war work could look forward to several years of uninterrupted employment in factories committed to turning out military supplies. During the first year of the war, Milwaukee industry increased the value of its output by 27.5 percent and set a production record for the city. One year later, local industry topped the record by another 21 percent and produced almost $1.5 billion worth of products.³⁸ As the war economy hit its stride, Milwaukee factories were producing seagoing tugs, electrical controls, plane refueling units, leather goods, giant diesel engines, torpedo tubes, aircraft and tank parts, artillery pieces, and all manner of ammunition.³⁹

For many companies, wartime production meant unprecedented expansion. Allis-Chalmers was not alone in opening a new plant in Milwaukee. Ben Froemming, a Milwaukee building contractor, began producing 1,000-ton seagoing tugs at a shipyard on the Kinnickinnic River. On the site of the old Eline Candy Company on the Port Washington Road, the federal government built a huge ordnance plant to be operated by the U.S. Rubber Company. A. O. Smith built a new facility to manufacture airplane propellers, and the Harnischfeger Corporation, maker of industrial cranes, tripled its production without even building new facilities. With the aid of the Smaller War Plants Corporation, a federal agency created to help manufacturers with fewer than 500 employees to secure war contracts, a wide variety of small machine shops and businesses carried out subcontracting work for major war factories. Likewise, several hundred basement mechanics and small shop owners formed A-M, Incorporated (Ability and Machines), in order to take advantage of subcontracting assignments. The war economy presented numerous opportunities for the small, highly skilled manufacturing enterprises that abounded in and around Milwaukee.⁴⁰

For the first time in more than a decade, Americans did not have to worry about layoffs or plant closings. Factory work was easy to find, and it paid well. During the first year of the war, the “General Business Pulse” index maintained by the Milwaukee Journal rose 22 percent. Employment was up by 21 percent from 113,800 in December 1941 to 137,700 a year later; payrolls rose 54 percent during the same period. Between December 1941 and December 1942, average weekly earnings in Milwaukee rose by 20 percent—from $36.10 to $45.20. As the war began, manufacturing employees were working an average of 43.3 hours a week and earning an average of 83.6 cents an hour. A year later they were working 47.4 hours a week and earning an average of 95.8 cents an hour. The rise in average hourly pay reflected both an increase in hourly pay of approximately 12 cents and the overtime pay received for the extra four hours a week being worked.⁴¹

Prosperity and wartime social tensions, high profits and high wages, energetic and growing unions, confident and thriving businesses; all of these factors comprised the fabric of life on the home front during World War II. Milwaukee companies and their workers helped make possible the production miracle of the early 1940s; but the record of those years reflects a history more complex than simple devotion to national duty and the war effort.

In Milwaukee labor relations were influenced by the fact that, although the city prospered during the war, it was not a boom town. Unlike Willow Run, Michigan, which sprang up in an empty field, or cities such as Seattle and Birmingham, which underwent sudden, dramatic changes with the rapid growth of the aircraft and steel industries, Milwaukee’s wartime expansion did not entail extreme, overnight social dislocation. Approximately 70 percent of the city’s industries continued to produce their standard products during the war, but instead of serving the private marketplace, they served the war effort.⁴² Milwaukee’s war plants tended to draw upon local sources for industrial workers: women, employees in nonessential jobs, retired workers, young people, and racial minorities, mostly black. As a consequence, the social structure of neighborhoods, kinship, and friendship remained largely intact—a resource to be drawn upon as Milwaukeeans dealt with wartime demands that placed pressures on home and family.

Labor relations also were shaped by Milwaukee’s long heritage of skilled craftsmanship and craft unionism and by the recruitment of assembly-line workers by vibrant new industrial unions. Workers unaccustomed to dealing with employers from a position of strength found themselves negotiating with managers equally unaccustomed to negotiating anything about how to run their companies. Friction inevitably occurred as labor and management worked out the details of this new relationship. The results of this process ranged from the relatively cooperative relationship between the union and management at A. O. Smith to the highly combative relationship between UAW Local 248 and the management of Allis-Chalmers.

By the time the United States went to war, these relationships had solidified in Milwaukee. Much of labor relations during the war—the rhetoric and the politics of boardrooom and shop floor, the compromises and the obduracy, the continual jockeying for advantage and the sometimes bitter wrangling—can be understood only by examining those relations in context and in detail. No matter how patriotic and self-sacrificing both parties were, nor how great were their achievements, labor and management possessed fundamentally different visions of the best way to guarantee themselves a bright future in the postwar world. In Milwaukee, as elsewhere, the resolution of those differences proved to be a complex and frequently misunderstood chapter of wartime history.