CHAPTER NINE
Salvation
There are growing out of Camp Shelby’s presence substantial benefits to the entire state which should be consolidated and husbanded by the whole people, thus enabling the federal government, which pressing its armament program in Mississippi, incidentally to make fuller contribution to the economic life of the state.
—David P. Cameron, chairman of the Hattiesburg Camp Shelby Cooperative Association, November 10, 1940
The men began appearing at Camp Shelby on a warm September Sunday, weary and uncertain, but desperate to work. They came by the thousands, gathering in large crowds on the sandy orange hillsides near the employment office. The tattered workers arrived however they could. The roads leading to the camp were filled with the creaking of rust-bitten vehicles, and the highway was “jammed with cars, trucks, bicycles, and anything else that would roll,” wrote a local reporter. Some arrived on railroad cars and then hitchhiked or walked the final ten miles between downtown Hattiesburg and Camp Shelby. One man came all the way from Rhode Island, traveling across a thousand miles of America’s backroad byways in search of a job in the Mississippi Piney Woods. The workers arrived from at least seventeen different states, but most were locals from the dying lumber towns of southern Mississippi. A large black man had walked from near Prentiss, making the entire forty-mile trek without proper shoes. Blood soaked through the makeshift bandages covering his aching feet. He said his last meal had been a hamburger the night before. He needed a job. They all did.1
An estimated five thousand men arrived at Camp Shelby on Sunday, September 15, 1940. Their presence drew dozens of opportunistic locals to the forest. Adults erected makeshift drink and sandwich stands; black and white boys peddled peanuts, candy, and newspapers. Some of the poor men could not afford even the cheapest indulgences. As a local writer noted, the members of this “grim army” were “battling old man depression and his step-son unemployment.” With nowhere to sleep, the nomadic workers huddled around makeshift campfires or lay down on soft patches of grass. Some pulled branches off young pine trees and used the prickly limbs as cover from the chill of the night. Others spent much of the evening shooting dice for spare change. As dusk faded into darkness, the anxious men closed their eyes, desperately hoping to find work in the morning.2
That summer, America began earnestly preparing for war. In response to political and military developments in Asia and Europe, the United States Department of War began placing massive orders for hundreds of thousands of new aircraft, artillery, engines, guns, jeeps, and countless other war-making materials. In September, President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Selective Service Act of 1940, authorizing the first peacetime draft in American history. Across the nation, dozens of old military bases were activated and enlarged to train the troops. On September 6, Mississippi governor and Hattiesburg native Paul B. Johnson authorized the transfer of Camp Shelby from the state national guard to the federal government, an act one writer appropriately dubbed “the most significant event in the history of Hattiesburg.”3
On Friday, September 13, the Fourth Army Corps announced an $11 million building program to reconstruct Camp Shelby into a major military installation capable of accommodating forty-two thousand troops. J. A. Jones Construction, a large firm from Charlotte, North Carolina, won the bid to refurbish the camp. The initial plans called for 318 mess halls, 50 repair shops, 37 warehouses, 36 administration buildings, 19 infirmaries, 5 fire stations, a 2,000-bed hospital, a post office, a telegraph building, a bakery, a laundry building, and an ice plant. And that was merely the first wave of construction. Over the ensuing five months, the federal government spent an estimated $22 million (over $375 million today) to reestablish Camp Shelby.4
Well-capitalized and desperate for labor, J. A. Jones Construction announced wage scales that dwarfed pay rates across the region. At a time when few workers in the Deep South earned more than a couple of dollars per day, J. A. Jones offered $1.25 per hour for bricklayers, $1 per hour for experienced carpenters, and 40¢ per hour for general laborers. In 1939, Mississippi’s average annual income was only $204. With a job at Camp Shelby in September of 1940, an experienced bricklayer could expect to exceed that figure in just over three weeks.5
Camp Shelby. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)
On September 18, the War Department expanded its initial request, asking Shelby’s capacity to be increased from forty-two thousand to fifty-two thousand troops. Thousands more workers arrived at the base. On October 1, nearly six thousand individuals were working at Shelby. Two weeks later, the workforce exceeded ten thousand. By the end of the month, more than twelve thousand laborers were working at the camp. By then, those workers were joined by approximately eight thousand Army troops. The last day of October was a payday for both workers and troops. Their combined total wages and salaries topped more than $1 million, by far the biggest payday to that point in Hattiesburg history.6
News from Camp Shelby buzzed through Hattiesburg. On the morning after men began arriving on the hillside, the Hattiesburg American started running a daily front-page column titled “Shelby Briefs” that detailed the building program and forthcoming troop arrivals. The next day, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce called a special meeting in City Hall to discuss “Co-ordination of plans for handling the additional population.” In the coming weeks, tens of thousands of well-paid workers and troops were scheduled to arrive in Hattiesburg, all in need of meals, lodging, clothing, prescriptions, toiletries, and entertainment. “Every merchant should plan immediately for any changes or expansions in his business,” the Chamber of Commerce advised local business owners.7
Shelby’s mobilization delivered immediate benefits for Hattiesburg’s economy. Within the first forty days of construction, local merchants expanded their hours and hired additional salespeople. Hotels and homeowners rented thousands of rooms to workers and troops and their families. Nearby farmers and local laundry services were swamped with orders. Tool and building suppliers cleared their inventories. A Jackson-based developer announced plans to build a $500,000 apartment complex for soldiers. The Mississippi Central Railroad invested $200,000 to resume its defunct passenger service between Hattiesburg and Camp Shelby. The WPA announced road-paving and airport projects to support camp logistics. The Army ordered the construction of updated water and sewer systems. At local electric and gas companies, business spiked. After years of struggle, the entire city was suddenly inundated with new jobs, wages, and revenues.8
In one way or another, virtually all Hattiesburgers stood to benefit from Camp Shelby. Even teenage white girls, who were ineligible for most of the new jobs, became involved. That autumn, Paramount Studios invited white girls to the camp to serve as extras in newsreels. The girls were instructed to “look pretty, smile and wave their hands to soldiers” aboard a departing train. What a thrill it must have been for them to know that they might soon appear on movie-theatre screens across the United States.9
Perhaps there was one local man who did not appreciate Shelby’s rise, but he had good reason to be sour. That autumn, Charles “Pinky” Rohm was set to begin his first season as the head coach of Hattiesburg High School’s varsity football team. Having recently completed one of the most brilliant football careers in the history of Louisiana State University, Coach Rohm was a nationally known gridiron star who brought with him high expectations for Hattiesburg High. But just days into the 1940 season, Coach Rohm suddenly lost a starting guard and a pair of running backs to the Camp Shelby labor force, and his team was pummeled 42–0 by McComb High School in their first conference game. The Tigers struggled that autumn, but the rest of Hattiesburg came roaring back to life.10
The Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce responded immediately to Shelby’s mobilization. The organization had already formed a “Camp Shelby Committee,” but the level of activity in the autumn of 1940 warranted the formation of an entirely new organization—the Mississippi Camp Shelby Cooperative Association. This body was directed by veterans of the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce. Longtime Chamber of Commerce officials Louis Faulkner and West Tatum (the oldest son of W. S. F. Tatum) served on the executive committee and directed one of the subcommittees. The Mississippi Camp Shelby Cooperative Association had a number of important goals, but its most pressing objective was to maximize the economic benefits of federal spending for local white residents. One of its first goals was to convert a federal program designed to aid African Americans into one that would exclusively benefit whites.11
About a year earlier, in August of 1939, the Hattiesburg Housing Authority announced the procurement of a $744,000 loan from the federal government to construct separate low-income housing units for white and black residents. The city’s initial request for $1 million yielded a loan offer of only $600,000. But Hattiesburg’s mayor and the head of its housing authority worked for weeks with their congressional representative William Colmer, a New Deal Democrat who assumed office in 1933, to increase the loan by lobbying members of the United States Housing Authority. Their effort was helpful. Upon learning of the larger loan, the chairman of the Hattiesburg Housing Authority thanked Congressman Colmer for his “splendid cooperation,” which was “greatly appreciated by all concerned here in Hattiesburg.”12
This low-income housing loan was made available through the passage of the Housing Act of 1937. This act, also known as the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act, created the United States Housing Authority (USHA) to provide loans for cities to demolish slum neighborhoods in order to construct “low-rent housing” for “families of low income” who did not otherwise have access to “decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings.” With interest rates as low as 3 percent and repayment periods as long as sixty years, USHA loans were affordable to even the poorest municipalities. Cities were required to raise 10 percent of construction costs, but that capital could be secured through another loan with a private bank. Once completed, USHA housing projects were subsidized by the federal government to ensure low housing costs. The USHA was unique among earlier New Deal housing legislation (most notably the National Housing Act of 1934) in that it catered to low-income renters as opposed to insuring the mortgages of buyers.13
The black housing complex known as Robertson Place was the only major federally funded New Deal–era project designed specifically to aid black Hattiesburgers. The project was slated for construction in the Royal Street Neighborhood, one of the city’s smaller black neighborhoods located just south of downtown. The plan was to raze a section of decrepit black rental homes to clear space for the construction of twenty two-story brick buildings containing six apartments each, thus providing housing for 120 black families who would pay monthly rents between $9 and $15.75. This was highly significant. For the first time in their lives, hundreds of the city’s poorest black residents would be given the opportunity to live in affordable brick housing with indoor plumbing.14
Capitalized at $398,000, Robertson Place also offered numerous benefits to several groups of local white residents. The first white Hattiesburgers to benefit were landowners who sold sections of their property for exorbitant prices to the Hattiesburg Housing Authority. Lots occupying the future site of Robertson Place were sold by local white businessmen for as much as $100 each. Retired real estate mogul George William Kamper sold his lots to the authority for $840. It is difficult to accurately gauge property values in that neighborhood in 1939, but it is clear that these were not valuable properties. Lots owned by the city sold for an average of only $12.06, and monthly rents in the neighborhood rarely topped $8. Landlords might have turned meager profits over several months or years, but these dilapidated properties did not generate much revenue. Nonetheless, it was the flow of capital that told the real story: the federal government loaned money to the Hattiesburg Housing Authority, which used that very same capital to buy slum properties from white landowners at inflated prices. There is nothing about the sales that reveals obvious corruption, but it is worth bearing in mind that many people involved in USHA transactions—including the head of the Hattiesburg Housing Authority, the mayor, and several landowners—were personally acquainted through church affiliation or membership in one of the city’s civic organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce. At best, these deals unfairly advantaged sellers.15
The Robertson Place project also benefitted local white construction firms that built the apartments. The white-owned Newton & Glenn Contractors won the initial bid with a construction estimate of $299,950. The white-owned architecture firm of Landry and Matthes received the contract to design the buildings. And the white-owned Southern Glass & Builders Supply Company was hired to install culverts. The contracts benefitted the owners and employees of these firms at a time when good work was hard to find. Between April and August of 1940, Newton & Glenn Contractors employed an average of 150 men who earned nearly $45,000 in wages. The racial composition of their workforce is unknown, but six decades of local employment history suggests that white men at the very least occupied the most desirable positions.16
On September 5, 1940, Frank Glenn of Newton & Glenn Contractors reported that his firm expected to finish Robertson Place well ahead of the scheduled completion date of January 25, 1941. But when the Shelby development erupted in the forest less than two weeks later, local white leaders began to consider alternative arrangements for the black housing project. Remember that the Hattiesburg Housing Authority had applied for the USHA grant under the premise that it would build low-income housing for both blacks and whites. Nonetheless, in mid-September of 1940—after the grant had been received, the slum properties cleared, and the housing project nearly finished—several members of the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce led an effort to procure the apartments for white families instead of black ones.17
The prospect of “converting the Robertson Place negro housing project into apartments for white families” was first discussed at the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce public meeting in City Hall on September 17, 1940. As the housing project neared completion over the following months, members of the Chamber of Commerce continued working in private to secure Robertson Place for white families only. Their argument was that the homes could be used by enlisted men who were coming to Shelby for training. This point had some merit; Hattiesburg did not have enough housing to accommodate the onslaught of thousands of military families. But even this approach demonstrated a clear racial bias. No one ever spoke of transforming the white USHA housing project into military housing. Nor was there ever any talk of reserving Robertson Place for black troops, despite the fact that African American units were mentioned in virtually every notice of the forthcoming troop arrivals. They knew black troops were coming. In fact, during that same fall of 1940, the Hattiesburg Rotary Club held a special meeting to discuss “the problem of Negro soldiers.”18
In December of 1940, West Tatum sent letters to the Hattiesburg Housing Authority, the United States Housing Authority, and commanding officers at Camp Shelby to inquire about “the possibility of working out some proposition wherein we might get the consent of the Washington authorities to use this [Robertson Place] during the life of Camp Shelby as a place for the families of the enlisted men.” Tatum also encouraged Congressman Colmer to contact the United States Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox to advocate on behalf of the Hattiesburg housing authority.19
Their efforts did not look promising. In late January, the chairman of the housing committee of the Mississippi Camp Shelby Cooperative Association reported that “the attempt to convert the negro Housing Project, now nearing completion, had not been successful.” On February 3, Representative Colmer received a direct response from United States Secretary of War Henry Stimson, declaring that the USHA “takes the position that the houses should be occupied by the persons for whom they were intended.” Still, members of the housing committee of the Mississippi Camp Shelby Cooperative Association continued with their efforts. After failing to convince military officials to advocate on their behalf, they tried to secure an endorsement from local black leaders for the conversion, but this tactic also failed to produce any results. Next, they unanimously approved a motion to try to secure an “executive order” that would transfer Robertson Place from the USHA to the War Department “for the use of low income whites.” This somewhat preposterous effort to secure an “executive order” to transfer the USHA-funded housing project to the War Department never came to fruition.20
In March of 1941, the Hattiesburg Housing Authority began selecting black tenants to occupy the Robertson Place apartments. The white housing project, named Briarfield, opened later that same year. Local white leaders, who at the time were consumed with other issues related to Camp Shelby’s mobilization, do not appear to have been overly distraught at their failure to convert the federally funded housing project from black to white. In hindsight, however, this inability to exert local authority over the disbursement of federal resources foreshadowed political conflicts that would soon give them great cause for concern.21
The Camp Shelby labor force peaked in early 1941 with an estimated seventeen thousand workers. In less than six months, the workers erected over 14,000 platform tent frames, 400 mess halls, 80 warehouses, 50 repair shops, 50 administration buildings, 34 mail kiosks, 32 recreation buildings, a 2,000-bed hospital, 50 miles of paved roads, 85 miles of water line, 60 miles of sewer line, and 181 miles of electric wiring. By the end of February, Army officials estimated that Shelby could comfortably house over sixty-five thousand troops.22
By February of 1941, the Hub City was in the midst of what the Hattiesburg American was already calling the “biggest boom in [Hattiesburg] history.” Businesses thrived as consumer demand skyrocketed. Between September of 1940 and February of 1941, at least sixty-six new businesses opened. Other economic indicators such as bank deposits, postal receipts, building permits, land values, and money orders also dramatically increased. In March of 1941, a report from the Mississippi Business Review showed that Hattiesburg led the state in economic growth by a wide margin. As a longtime Chamber of Commerce official observed that February, “[Shelby] has created boom conditions in Hattiesburg and all of our people have received substantial benefits.” This was still nine full months before the United States officially entered World War II. The boom was just beginning.23
Most of the seventeen thousand workers left for other jobs when Shelby was completed in March of 1941, but they were quickly replaced by tens of thousands of troops. In March, Shelby was home to approximately thirty-five thousand soldiers. By August, there were over fifty thousand, meaning that Camp Shelby was by then the second-largest training base in the United States behind North Carolina’s Fort Bragg. Four months later, the United States officially joined the war.24
During World War II, Camp Shelby hosted an average of fifty thousand troops at a time with a high of about seventy-five thousand soldiers. Because most GIs stayed only long enough to prepare for battle, Shelby experienced constant turnover. All told, approximately 750,000 troops passed through Camp Shelby during the war. Hattiesburg in 1940 was a town of only about twenty-one thousand people. Its civilian population grew during the war, but the number of soldiers at Shelby during World War II always exceeded Hattiesburg’s population. In fact, Shelby during the war housed more people than any city in the state except for Jackson. Many troops spent weekends in other nearby cities such as Birmingham, Gulfport, Mobile, or New Orleans, but Hattiesburg absorbed the brunt of their arrival. Throughout World War II, the people of Hattiesburg found both major challenges and immense opportunities created by the presence of hundreds of thousands of well-paid troops and their families.25
Many of the challenges were predictable. Everything was very crowded, especially local businesses and schools. The city increased municipal tax rates to expand roads and build new public bathrooms, but during the war it also struggled at times to provide basic public services such as electricity and public transportation. The young male soldiers also attracted hundreds of bootleggers, gamblers, and prostitutes, unsavory characters who helped spread illegal activities and triggered what one writer called a “spectacular rise in venereal disease.” The troops also exacerbated conflicts over the city’s blue laws, which prohibited most entertainment venues, particularly movie theatres, from operating on Sundays. And as might be expected, the young, adrenalized men often drank too much, started fights, played pranks, catcalled women, and caused a variety of other commotions. At times, the soldiers’ behavior created quite a nuisance for local residents. But these challenges paled in comparison to the economic benefits provided by the troops and their government pay.26
Through its Mississippi Camp Shelby Cooperative Association, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce took the lead in managing relations between the city and the camp. Soon after the first troops arrived in the fall of 1940, the organization treated roughly sixty Army officers to a “get acquainted” steak dinner at the Forrest Hotel. Several members helped officers find rental homes for their families. And the organization worked with the WPA to produce a pamphlet titled A Serviceman’s Guide to Hattiesburg and Area, which provided a brief overview of the city’s history, local sights of interest, and directions to churches and recreational areas. “I doubt it there is a camp in the United States where a better relationship exists than that between the officers and enlisted men of Camp Shelby and the citizens of Hattiesburg,” bragged the Chamber of Commerce president at the end of 1940.27
Soldiers were transported between Hattiesburg and Shelby by trains, busses, taxis, and private drivers. During the war, as many as eight thousand-person trains ran from Shelby to Hattiesburg each day. But even these large trains struggled to meet the demand. A Vermont soldier reported that “an awful mob” awaited each train and that he sometimes had to wait up to one and a half hours to secure a spot onboard. With the trains overcrowded, hundreds of busses and taxis also transported soldiers between the base and town. The high demand allowed taxi drivers to inflate prices. According to one soldier, a Hattiesburg taxi driver charged him and four friends $6 (the equivalent of nearly $90 today) to drive just ten miles. Along with taxis, hundreds of opportunistic locals with private vehicles began providing rides between the base and town. Resident Ben Earles recalled that “everybody that had an automobile could make … a small fortune at that time.” Because many soldiers wanted to go down to the Gulf Coast on their days off, weekends were particularly lucrative. “They would give you fifty, seventy-five dollars, a hundred dollars to take a carload of them down to Gulfport on the weekend,” Earles noted. The Gulf of Mexico is only about sixty miles south of Camp Shelby, meaning that an efficient driver could earn more for a half-day of driving than the average Mississippian did in a month.28
Local businesses filled with tens of thousands of new customers. “As soon as they could get out of camp,” remembered local woman Dorothy Musgrove of the troops, “they was coming to spend.” Every store and restaurant was packed. Earles recalled that “you could go downtown in Hattiesburg and the line might be a block or two long to get into a restaurant, and the picture shows, and everything else.” As another local named J. S. Finlayson remembered, “Some nights you couldn’t hardly walk on the sidewalks for the soldiers were so thick. They’d surge up and down the streets and go to the ice cream parlors and everything they could to get a little entertainment.” “Hattiesburg was incredibly crowded at the time,” said a soldier from Los Angeles. “You had to wait in line to go to the restaurant, to go to the show, everything.” Businesses barely had to advertise. Some did, but all they really needed to do was to keep the lights on, the shelves stocked, and the plates of food coming to the tables.29
In addition to business growth, Camp Shelby also provided new financial opportunities for thousands of people who took jobs on the base. During the war, about five thousand civilians worked at Shelby. Men predominated in jobs such as construction, maintenance, and transportation, but hundreds of women also found work as nurses, secretaries, typists, cashiers, librarians, dieticians, cooks, telephone operators, and office managers. Local resident Jeanette Coleman explained that “many women got their first job working at Camp Shelby.” Some of Shelby’s female employees had worked before, but few had ever earned as much income. Eweatha Royse was employed at the Woolworth’s Dime Store when she learned she could earn $16 more per month working as an office manager at Shelby. “They thought I was making it up,” she remembered of telling her friends about the pay rates. “It was like nothing I had ever experienced before. Being so young, it was a great opportunity.” Betty Cooley, who worked in one of the finance offices at Shelby, remembered earning up to $120 per month. “I could put gas in the car,” remembered Cooley, “and I could buy new clothes.”30
Even kids got jobs. Every morning during the war, between forty and fifty boys as young as eight years old rode trucks out to Camp Shelby to spend the day selling copies of the Hattiesburg American, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and magazines such as Collier’s, Life, and Liberty. The most enterprising boys found additional ways to earn money by selling greeting cards and metal clothes hangers. Soldiers were always interested in purchasing cards to mail home. And because of metal rationing, the Army only issued cardboard hangers, which created an underground market for metal hangers that sold for as much as a quarter apiece. Some of the working youths also received leftover groceries or even discarded watches and dress suits from soldiers departing for the war. Bobby Chain, a future Hattiesburg mayor, remembered that he earned as much as $2 per day working as a thirteen-year-old paperboy at Shelby. “Two dollars a day at that time would buy all the clothes I needed and a little spending money,” remembered Chain. “Couldn’t make that much around town.” Jimmy Mordica, who sold newspapers and metal hangers, earned enough to buy a $250 used car at the age of fourteen.31
Hattiesburg’s wealthiest citizens, especially prominent members of the Chamber of Commerce, were uniquely positioned to enjoy additional profits from Shelby’s mobilization. Some of the primary beneficiaries were those who invested in the Forrest Hotel. Completed in 1929 with the goal of attracting tourists to the region, the Forrest Hotel was funded by a group of longtime city leaders, including Louis Faulkner, W. S. F. Tatum, and several of Tatum’s sons. But few tourists occupied the hotel during the early 1930s. The company lost money in each of its first five years of operation. The worst year occurred in 1932, when Louis Faulkner was serving as company president. That year, the Forrest Hotel Corporation lost nearly $18,000 (the equivalent of over $300,000 in 2018 dollars). In 1940, the hotel’s fortunes suddenly reversed with the arrival of tens of thousands of troops and workers. That year, the Forrest Hotel earned a profit of $28,690, by far the largest in company history. Even better years followed. In both 1943 and 1944, the hotel earned annual net revenues of over $107,000 (over $1.45 million today) due to unprecedented occupancy rates during the war. Louis Faulkner and the Tatums all profited handsomely.32
The Tatum family also benefitted from a massive uptick in the consumption of natural gas. In 1934, W. S. F. Tatum and his sons started a firm named the Wilmut Gas and Oil Company. The company was always profitable, but wartime mobilization escalated its gross revenues to new heights, as is amply shown by comparing sales reports from different years for the period between February 20 and March 20. Between February 20 and March 20, 1936, Wilmut Gas sold $12,844 worth of product. Over the same period in 1938, the company’s gross sales totaled $14,619. Then came the war. During those same weeks in 1941 and 1944, Wilmut’s gross revenues increased to $33,368 and $28,625, respectively. Net revenues are unknown, but the firm’s gross revenue and total cubic feet of gas sold more than doubled during the war.33
The fate of Louis Faulkner’s concrete business was also dramatically altered by World War II. Founded in 1915, Faulkner Concrete for years generated nearly all its revenue through contracts with Louis Faulkner’s employer, Fenwick Peck’s Mississippi Central Railroad. In 1936, Faulkner Concrete was a profitable company with twenty-one employees, but in over twenty years of operation, it had never expanded significantly. Federal contracts obtained during the New Deal and World War II changed its fate. Detailed monthly revenues are not available, but records show that Faulkner Concrete received government contracts at Shelby during both the WPA-sponsored refurbishment in the late 1930s and the War Department’s complete overhaul that began in 1940. Soon thereafter, Faulkner Concrete began acquiring other firms as it rapidly expanded from a small local business into one of the largest companies of its type in the state. In 1941, Faulkner Concrete acquired the Mississippi Concrete Pipe Corporation. In 1943, the firm purchased another concrete firm in Meridian, charting a course of growth that lasted for over twenty years.34
As a longtime leader in the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce, Louis Faulkner was well-positioned to receive federal contracts. In fact, it was Faulkner who in 1937 led a delegation of local businessmen to Atlanta to meet with Army officials about securing WPA funds to begin restoring Shelby in the late 1930s. When Army officials from the Fourth Corps began planning Shelby’s expansion in September of 1940, they directly referenced using Faulkner Concrete as a client. The details of the selection are unknown, but clearly Faulkner’s company held an advantageous position.35
Ironically, in the years after the war, Faulkner and several members of the Tatum family became some of Hattiesburg’s most vocal opponents of federal spending and overreach. As early as July of 1944, W. S. F. Tatum’s son Frank wrote a letter to Congressman William Colmer—the New Deal Democrat who helped the city secure the USHA housing project that Tatum’s brother tried to convert from black to white—expressing concerns over “postwar planning” and advocating “the elimination of all bureaus and government spending where possible.” Tatum stressed that “this government or any other government cannot carry on at the high rate it has been carrying on.” As we will see, Louis Faulkner similarly went on to become one of the city’s most strident critics of excessive federal spending and overreach into local affairs.36
Faulkner and the Tatums did not become rich solely because of federal spending during World War II. They were social elites prior to the war and would have remained so even without the financial windfalls of Shelby’s mobilization. But they benefitted from federal wartime spending as much as anyone else in Hattiesburg. And it is also worth recalling that Faulkner and several Tatums were instrumental in overseeing WPA spending during the New Deal era. It makes complete sense that local elites worked to obtain relief for their struggling city and managed to profit from the enormous level of federal wartime spending. The inconsistencies lie in their later critiques of many of the same federal mechanisms that had benefitted their own private interests.
Among white Hattiesburgers, the most common financial benefit of Shelby’s mobilization was the revenues generated by wildly inflated rental rates. Throughout the war, thousands of local homeowners converted houses, rooms, shacks, and even closets into rental units for soldiers and their families. People rented virtually every possible space. Some units were so small that soldiers and local media alike called them “rabbit pens” or “chicken houses.” In some cases, homeowners hung little more than a blanket to partition bedrooms into two or three units that were rentable by the weekend or even just the evening. Before Shelby’s mobilization, Hattiesburg had an estimated eight hundred rental units. By October of 1944, there were over ninety-one hundred.37
People took advantage of the troops, especially married soldiers who desired a bit of privacy with their families before heading off to war. Young couples flooded the rental market. “It was very common for homeowners here in town … to rent a room to some guy that had just gotten married and was about to go overseas,” remembered Bobby Chain. Soldiers and their lovers were so desperate for places to stay that some even offered to “ ‘sleep on the porch if you have a place for us,’ ” recalled one local woman. Thousands of officers and other men with families rented entire houses or apartment units during the war.38
To maximize revenues during the wartime housing shortage, Hattiesburg’s new landlords charged troops as much as possible. Rental rates increased both suddenly and substantially. In October of 1940, one local couple was forced out of a rental property they had occupied for thirteen years when the monthly rent suddenly increased from $6 to $30. When looking for a new home, the couple, who earned $46 per month, encountered another rental where the monthly rate had jumped from $6 to $50. Even the “rabbit pens” and “chicken houses” went for as high as $15 per month. Rents increased so much that even some of the soldiers struggled to afford housing. And some landlords increased their revenues by charging exorbitant prices for basic services such as water or access to a telephone or a stove. “In Hattiesburg,” one Colorado soldier bitterly recalled, “you probably had to pay to walk across the lawn.”39
By 1944, Forrest County landlords were earning an estimated $3,808,500 (nearly $52 million today) in annual rental income—roughly thirteen times the rental revenue earned in the county before the war. Local and federal officials had previously tried to control rent inflation through voluntary suasion. As early as September of 1940, the Hattiesburg American pleaded with “landlords and property owners” not to abuse the “present supply-and-demand emergency.” But these efforts influenced the market very little. In June of 1942, the national Office of Price Administration (OPA) declared Hattiesburg one of sixty “defense rental areas” where “voluntary efforts had failed.” In June of 1942, the OPA ordered that rents be reset to rates in April of 1941, and at one point the Hattiesburg American even published a chart detailing how much rent could be applied to servicemen based on rank. But landlords throughout the war consistently overcharged tenants and found ways to evade OPA price controls through a variety of schemes, the most common of which was to inflate charges for other goods and services. In one particularly egregious example, a landlord who rented a furnished home for $75 per month required tenants to pay $300 upon occupancy to purchase the furniture. When the tenants left, the landlord then paid $50 to reacquire the furniture only to inflict the same scheme on the next tenant. The estimate of $3,808,500 in annual rental income does not include all the extra revenue earned by Hattiesburg landlords who were intent on pinching every dollar possible from the troops.40
Local churches also experienced significant financial windfalls. Camp Shelby had its own chapels and military chaplains, but many soldiers were interested in joining more established and traditional congregations. A Serviceman’s Guide to Hattiesburg included the locations and schedules of the city’s largest churches. Many of the churches advertised like businesses, placing regular advertisements in the Hattiesburg American that encouraged visiting white troops to join their congregation for Sunday services. Local pastors also held special events for soldiers both on and off the base. And several major churches organized soldier’s lounges or held informal gatherings to help entertain the troops.41
Soldier-church relationships were mutually beneficial. Many young men facing the prospect of war desperately needed spiritual guidance and appreciated the opportunity to join established faith communities. Churches also fulfilled social interests. Because very few young women attended one of the twenty-two chapels at Camp Shelby, male soldiers often attended church-sponsored social mixers and private dinners to meet members of the opposite sex. The wives of soldiers were similarly drawn to female-led church organizations.42
From the churches’ perspective, soldiers presented a tremendous financial opportunity. The young men who sat in the pews every Sunday helped fill collection plates and contribute to various church initiatives. The full scale of their economic impact is immeasurable, but one study of Hattiesburg during the war has shown that between 1940 and 1946, the city’s six white Baptist churches increased their net worth from $234,000 to $420,000. The net worth of Main Street Baptist alone grew from $67,500 to $186,000. Though some of this economic growth was a result of the city’s improving economy, the presence of more than seven hundred thousand troops clearly helped swell the coffers of nearly every congregation during World War II.43
None of this is to suggest that Hattiesburgers did not also contribute to the war effort. Local residents supported troops in a variety of ways. They helped build and staff a federally supported Soldiers’ Service Center and two new United Service Organizations (USO) buildings, welcomed white troops into local organizations such as the YMCA and American Legion, and allowed white troops to use recreational facilities such as the Elks Club, the new Hattiesburg High School gymnasium, and Reliance Manufacturing’s Dixie Club. The Hattiesburg American ran two almost-daily columns, “Shelby Briefs” and “Shelbyettes,” that included news about the soldiers and their families who were stationed at the base. There were also countless examples of local residents inviting troops into their homes for “dine-ins” and cook-outs. And thousands of residents attended football scrimmages between Army Divisions or participated in an endless number of suppers, parades, concerts, lectures, parties, balls, and dances held for the troops. With young male soldiers vastly outnumbering their female counterparts, Hattiesburg camp liaisons and the local Girls’ Service Organization made arrangements for busses to transport women from nearby towns into the camp for social events. Promised one such program committee in 1942, “Dates will be provided for those who do not bring their dates.” So many couples formed during these co-recreational activities that one local woman joked that “Hattiesburg ended up as the mother-in-law of the army.”44
The people of Hattiesburg also contributed significantly to the broader national war effort. They bought war bonds, grew victory gardens, donated to the Red Cross, collected scrap metal, rationed every staple imaginable—from pork to gasoline—and, of course, sent many of their own young men to fight in the war. Hattiesburg did not have a large industrial defense plant, but there were some smaller local manufacturers, such as Komp Manufacturing and Reliance Manufacturing, that produced ammunition and parachutes for the military. As in many towns across the United States, Hattiesburgers embraced a national sense of duty in support of the war effort. “I had never seen patriotism of that magnitude before or since,” remembered local woman Gloria Coleman. “They felt real privileged to be able to do the small things that we could do to help.”45
Ultimately, however, the story of World War II in Hattiesburg is the story of how wartime mobilization saved the town’s economy. This was widely recognized and appreciated by locals who lived through the wartime boom. “Hattiesburg prospered … because of the money and all from Camp Shelby,” Dorothea Musgrove remembered. “Then come along World War II, and it boomed,” said local man Harmon Strickland of Hattiesburg during the war. “I remember that very well. It was just a different world to live in here.” Ben Earles and his wife took jobs as a safety engineer and a nurse during the war. More than thirty years later, Earles recalled that “between us, we saved enough money to build this house, during the first two years of the war.”46
It is impossible to fully measure the aggregate economic impact of the wartime boom on Hattiesburg, but a 1946 survey conducted by the Chamber of Commerce reveals the scope of local economic growth. In 1935, Hattiesburg banks had approximately $5.4 million in deposits and cleared roughly $45 million worth of transactions. In 1945, local banks counted over $29 million in deposits and cleared over $154.5 million in transactions. Inflation explains some of this increase, but Camp Shelby’s mobilization was by far the greatest factor in Hattiesburg’s explosive economic growth during World War II. Camp Shelby did not merely boost Hattiesburg’s economy; during the war years, Camp Shelby essentially was the local economy.47
Few places in Mississippi—or the entire South for that matter—experienced the economic benefits of a military base as large as Camp Shelby. The state had thirty-six other wartime military installations, but only Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi offered similar economic benefits to the surrounding population. Nonetheless, wartime mobilization created new opportunities for thousands of workers across Mississippi, especially those who took industrial jobs on the coast at the Ingalls Shipyard or worked for one of the smaller manufacturers scattered throughout the state. “Anybody that wanted to leave home and work,” remembered one local man, “they could work in the shipyard if they kept their nose clean.” Between 1939 and 1947 the state added 750 new industrial establishments, twenty-five thousand workers, and nearly $103 million in payroll. In total, the state’s per capita income tripled between 1940 and 1946.48
Throughout all those years, white voters in Hattiesburg and across Mississippi ardently supported the national Democratic Party. All of Mississippi’s congressmen and senators were Democrats, and President Franklin Roosevelt was enormously popular in Hattiesburg and across the state. As local man Buck Wells recalled, “Everybody in the South thought Roosevelt was just the greatest thing that ever lived.” In 1940, Franklin Roosevelt won 93 percent of the vote in Forrest County and more than 95 percent of the vote in Mississippi. Roosevelt lost a few Forrest County supporters in 1944, but still captured a commanding 87 percent and 93 percent, respectively, of the local and statewide vote. Yet toward the end of the war, Mississippi’s most ardent Democrats began to experience several problems with the National Democratic Party that would ultimately lead them to abandon the party during the 1948 presidential election. It should not come as a surprise that these problems were related to race.49
On June 25, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, barring racial discrimination in national defense industries and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to enforce the policy. This action was largely spurred by growing national black influence in labor unions, such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which expanded in the 1930s largely because of pro-labor legislation passed during the New Deal. The FEPC was only lightly enforced during the war, but the order nonetheless represented a symbolic gesture from the federal government that, if enforced, offered the potential to use federal authority to thwart racial segregation.50
Soon after the end of the war, several national Democratic leaders, including Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry Truman, began advocating for a permanent and more comprehensive FEPC. This advocacy grew in response to expanding national black political influence during and immediately after World War II. During the war, hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the Jim Crow South to take jobs in defense industries. Between 1940 and 1950, the number of black people living in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, California, Ohio, Michigan, and New Jersey increased by 72 percent. In the North, black migrants could exercise voting rights previously denied to them in the South. Because of the growing number of black voters, Northern political candidates from each major party began increasingly expressing support for civil rights initiatives.51
The prospect of the FEPC mortified white Southern Democrats. Although there had been some racial concessions in the New Deal, white Southern Democrats had used their legislative influence to ensure local control of federal grants and exclude black farmworkers and domestic laborers from programs such as Social Security. They were major supporters of the New Deal, but only so long as any new federal program enabled them to maintain local control over access to resources. The FEPC endangered their ability to do so by prohibiting racial segregation in federal defense-related contracts, meaning that black Southerners might gain direct access to federal resources.52
During and after the war, Mississippi legislators offered more boisterous opposition to the FEPC than politicians from any other state in America. While filibustering against the FEPC in 1945, Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo dubbed the program “a damnable, Communist, poisonous piece of legislation,” adding, “Some Catholics are linked with some rabbis trying to bring about racial equality for niggers.” “The Negro race is an inferior race,” insisted Mississippi’s other senator, James Eastland, who suggested that the Communist Party was “exploiting the Negroes by making special promises such as FEPC, such as social equality, such as racial amalgamation.” In 1947, Mississippi congressman John Rankin promised white supporters, “I will take the floor the first hour, if necessary, and tear to shreds the arguments of the opposition who are attacking you and who are pushing those vicious measures that are calculated and designed to stir up trouble for you such as the anti-poll tax bill, the dishonest anti-lynching bill … and the communistic FEPC bill.” The following year, Rankin’s congressional colleague William Colmer told a Hattiesburg audience that the FEPC was a “vicious program” designed to “reduce the people of this country to an inferior race and make of our anglo-saxon heritage a mockery.” In Hattiesburg, the Hattiesburg American ran a series of anti-FEPC editorials with titles such as “Nature of the Beast” and “Evils of FEPC.”53
Senator Bilbo successfully ran for reelection in 1946. In a one-party state, he did encounter some challenges from more moderate Democrats who did not condone his public usage of the term “nigger” or his call over the radio that summer for “every red-blooded Anglo-Saxon in Mississippi to resort to any means to keep Negroes from the polls.” But Bilbo still won the primary by a significant margin. In a five-man race to determine which Democrat would run unopposed that November, Bilbo carried 51 percent and 53 percent of the vote in Mississippi and Forrest County, respectively.54
Bilbo did not, however, return to the Senate. For months, his return was delayed by senatorial opposition to his extreme anti-black rhetoric and an investigation into improper usage of campaign finances. During that time, the Mississippi statesman was diagnosed with oral cancer and then experienced a series of medical complications that ultimately led to his death of “a progressive heart failure” in August of 1947.55
That November, five Democrats ran in a special election to decide Bilbo’s replacement. This contested race, which featured two of the state’s sitting congressmen, was decided by a series of internal state political factors and regional allegiances. But the nominees were not all that different in terms of their broader political goals. Each of the five viable candidates openly opposed the FEPC and vowed to fight federal intrusion into state Jim Crow laws. Ultimately, a forty-six-year-old attorney named John Stennis won the Senate seat, a post he would hold until 1989.56
Mississippi congressman John Rankin finished fifth in the special election of 1947, but offered one of the most historically perceptive observations of the challenge facing white Mississippi leaders in the years immediately after the war. In a speech given about a month before the election, Rankin told voters, “Mississippi has more at stake in this race than she has had in a senatorial contest since Reconstruction.”57
Consider Rankin’s point within the broader context of Hattiesburg’s history. Hattiesburg had undergone several major transformations in the years between Captain Hardy’s lunch and the end of World War II, but Congressman Rankin’s notion of a historical continuum is appropriate. There was indeed a fundamental pattern that stretched across each era of Hattiesburg history. From the end of Reconstruction to the end of World War II, white Hattiesburg leaders had always relied on their ability to procure external resources and consolidate the dividends of such resources among white residents. This dynamic was central to their economy and form of governance. By the late 1940s, however, that authority was being threatened by the very same Democratic Party that had not only helped save their city but that they themselves had so ardently supported.