A City at War: Milwaukee Labor During World War II

WHS Archives CF 663;WHi(X3)49572

Wisconsin National Guardsmen occupy the E. P. Allis Reliance Works on May 5, 1886. Governor Rusk ordered militia troops to fire on striking Milwaukee workers, who had been agitating for the eight-hour day. By the end of the day five people were dead, including three protestors and two bystanders.

PH 2767, J. Robert Taylor;WHi(X3)17695

Workers take a break outside the Milwaukee Harvester Works, c. 1910. Milwaukee was one of the most industrialized cities in America at that time.

WHS Archives Lot 561;WHi(X3)28834

People, wagons, and streetcars shared Milwaukee’s busy streets in 1908. This view is at North Third and Grand Avenue looking east.

West Allis Historical Society

An early twentieth-century forge shop at Allis-Chalmers.

WHS Archives CF 6803;WHi(X3)33738

Milwaukee women make and repair clothing for relief families as part of a Wisconsin work relief project during the Great Depression.

WHS Archives/Milwaukee Journal photo

At the Seaman Body Corporation, Socialist Milwaukee Mayor Daniel Hoan speaks to a crowd of workers in support of a strike for union recognition, March 20, 1934.

Wisconsin AFL-CIO

“Union Gift to Soldiers”: Local 1131, representing workers at the Louis Allis Company in Milwaukee, presented thirty radios to the USO in the summer of 1942. The workers used flags and a portrait of FDR to symbolize their loyalty and patriotism.

Wisconsin AFL-CIO

The Wisconsin state CIO board in 1943. Harold Christoffel, the controversial leader of UAW Local 248 at Allis-Chalmers, stands in the center.

WHS Archives, WWII Poster Collection

“Soldiers without Guns”: heroic figures on the home front.

Library of Congress

Elizabeth Little, age thirty and mother of two, sprays gasoline trailer tanks for the U.S. Army Air Corps at the Heil Company.

“I can do as much work as any man, and I can do it just as well or better,” boasted Theresa Langolf to a Milwaukee Journal reporter in 1944. At the time Langolf was a nineteen-year-old welder making army tanks at Milwaukee’s Chain Belt Company. She was the first woman in Wisconsin to pass the army’s test for armor-plate welding; her first test weld was perfect.

Wisconsin AFL-CIO

CIO organizers during the Greenebaum union organizing drive of 1942.

WHi(X3)8645

In the face of strong CIO organizing, AFL unions in Milwaukee maintained their strength with traditional crafts and at major factories such as International Harvester, Harley-Davidson, and A. O. Smith. AFL President William Green (seated, third from left) posed with Wisconsin union leaders when he attended the 1943 convention of the Wisconsin State Federation of Labor in Milwaukee.

Although people claimed to be following OPA restrictions, Milwaukee had a flourishing black market for meat during World War II. In this Milwaukee Journal photograph, Lawrence P. Dwyer, OPA investigator, stands beside pails of blood and the carcasses of freshly slaughtered black-market pigs and a cow. Deputy sheriffs seized the farmer, William H. Beck, and two helpers in May 1945.

WHS Archives, WWII Poster Collection

The Office of Price Administration urged home-front consumers to fight inflation by curbing their spending habits. In 1942 the OPA froze the current retail price of food as a maximum, or ceiling. Price controls were generally successful, but the cost of living still outstripped wage rate increases.

The Victory Kidines (kid marines) collected five thousand pounds of scrap in West Allis in July 1944.

CIO News Wisconsin Edition, September 14, 1942;WHS Microfilm P42448

As this political cartoon attests, many Wisconsin workers and farmers believed that they bore the brunt of wartime sacrifices while industrialists became fat on government contracts.

CIO News Local 248 Edition, January 31, 1944;WHS Microfilm P35004

The government and organized labor disagreed on the rate of inflation and its impact on workers’ cost of living.

WHS Archives CF 622;WHi(X3)40290

Interior of the Nordberg Manufacturing Company.

WHS Archives, Lot 3090

Milwaukee Red Cross nurses draw blood for the war effort, January 1943.

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FDR visits the Allis-Chalmers plant in Milwaukee on September 19, 1942. Governor Julius Heil applauds the workers for their efforts and patriotism.

Wisconsin AFL-CIO

Jean Richter, a three-year-veteran coil winder at the Louis Allis plant, does war work in the fall of 1942.

WHS Archives PH 3330

U.S. Army-Navy “E” Ward presentation at the main plant of the Cutler Hammer Company, 1943. The “E” stood for “excellence.” The federal government gave these awards to companies that met government contracts on time and produced quality war matériel.

Wisconsin AFL-CIO

R. J. Thomas, vice president of the CIO autoworkers and of the CIO, joined thousands on picket lines outside the Allis-Chalmers plant on November 25, 1946. Workers and unions sacrificed to help make the production miracle possible during World War II, but all too often they received little recognition of their efforts in postwar labor disputes.

West Allis Historical Society

The workers of Allis-Chalmers went out on strike right after the war in order to win the wages and respect they felt they deserved. This is a page from their 1946 strike songbook, entitled The Pavement Trail.