Freedom's Forge

by Arthur Herman

  Later, when the president’s train pulled away and the goodbyes were done, someone asked Kaiser how long the ten-day record would stand.

  “I expect that record to go by the boards in the very near future,” he said.36

  He was right. As Clay Bedford rode back to San Francisco, he was already planning his next move.

  Later that week the workers at Richmond No. 2 were getting off the bus and picking up their copies of the shipyard newsletter, Fore N Aft, when they found a flyer inside. “What’s Oregon Got,” it read, “That We Haven’t Got?”37

  In the flyer Clay Bedford asked his crews to think of ways to regain the record they had lost to the yards up in Portland. The flyer set the Richmond crews of Yard No. 2, all three shifts, on fire. Bedford got back more than 250 letters, each suggesting ways to speed up construction.

  Bedford couldn’t try them all. But he already had the dynamic key, which was prefabrication. All he had to do was speed up the process—not of putting together the ship itself, as Edgar was doing, but of pre-assembling the separate sections, so that they could be snapped together almost in sequence, like Lincoln Logs.

  By now Bedford had the building of decks down to twenty-three separate preassemblies, which would then be lifted by crane into place and welded together. His engineers were now thinking they could manage to reduce that down to just seven.38

  The superintendent of Yard No. 2 was J. M. McFarland. Bedford asked him point-blank: Did he think they could build a ship in just five days? McFarland charted out the process on paper and passed his calculations on to the production managers, who all agreed five days was achievable. Bedford was elated. There was only one worry. What would President Roosevelt think if the Richmond yards broke the record set by the Joseph Teal, the ship whose christening the president himself had supervised? Clay put the problem to Henry Kaiser, who put it to the president’s assistant James Byrnes. Roosevelt was delighted. “Build it,” was his response, “and if it can be built in one day, so much the better.”39

  On Saturday, November 7, 1942, the preassembled parts of the “five-day ship,” Hull No. 440, were spread all over the yard. Masts, anchor chains, and deckhouses were stacked up in a confusing pile, ready to be taken down to Ship way No. 1, with more than half the ship’s components already finished. The hull was laid out in five huge double-bottom chunks, the heaviest weighing 110 tons, while the deck units came in 250-ton chunks, with piping, hatches, portholes, radiators, and even washbasins and mirrors all preinstalled. On one side stood the trusty Joshua Hendy engine, all three stories of her. The whole thing looked like an abandoned machinery junkyard.

  “Five days!” said one old-timer. “Hell, it’ll take ’em five days to even find the keel.”

  A huge crowd gathered as midnight approached. Superintendent McFarland, Clay Bedford, and his two sons watched as at exactly 12:01 A.M. the keel was officially laid. Then people began to realize there was method to the madness. One by one the prefabricated pieces began to disappear in the hull shell. By the time the day shift arrived at 8 o’clock on Sunday, November 8, the ship already looked a week old.40

  Sunday was a day to remember, even by Kaiser standards. Some seventeen banks of welding machines were hard at work, carrying out some 152,000 feet of weld line on ninety-three separate prefab sections, while chippers were hacking away at plate ends ten at a time. “It was one seething mass of shipfitters, welders, chippers,” one worker remembered, “hose and cable a foot deep…. The biggest problem that first day,” he added, “was persuading the guys in the rest of the yard not to wander down where all the action was.”41

  As the Sunday night shift arrived, the hull had taken shape and 1,450 tons of ship had been installed, including the 135-ton engine. “I’ll be blind and deaf by next week,” one worker laughed, “but it’ll be worth it.” By the end of the second day, November 9, the upper deck was done. Now other workers were arriving an hour early to watch the progress: McFarland had to send his men out to clear a path so that the next round of prefab pieces could get installed. Clay Bedford wired Kaiser back in Washington. Because of the thronging crowds, they were going to have to institute a ban on all workers not assigned to Hull No. 440 from coming down to Shipway No. 1.42

  At the end of the third day, deckhouses, masts, and deck equipment were all in place. Excitement was building. This ship wouldn’t be finished in five days, they were saying. It’d be done in four. Clay Bedford gave the go-ahead to McFarland to see if he could beat his own estimate.

  November 11 saw teams of workmen completing the last installations, including final welding, electrical wiring, and painting. Elated and exhausted, Bedford and McFarland watched as the final pieces of their giant prefab puzzle slid into place. Neither man had slept much in the past seventy-two hours.

  Then, at 3:27 P.M. on November 12, the Robert E. Peary was launched, just four days, fifteen hours, and twenty-six minutes after laying the keel. The wife of Jimmy Byrnes, Maude Byrnes, swung the champagne bottle, the crowd roared its approval, and Hull No. 440 entered history. Six minutes later the blocks for laying the keel for the next Liberty ship, Hull No. 443, were in place.43

  Bedford got congratulatory telegrams from Henry Kaiser and from Jerry Land. “Every one of you should be proud of the ship which your sweat and energy built in record time,” wrote the admiral. “Keep up the good work.” But the one that meant the most came from Edgar Kaiser and the work crews up in Portland. Their congratulations came with a postscript: “Now if we cut your record in half, what will you do?”44

  Bedford laughed. In fact, no one challenged his record then or later. It remained one of the supreme industrial feats of the war.

  It took another three days of cleaning, refitting, and rewiring much of the electrical equipment before the Robert E. Peary was truly seaworthy and ready for delivery to the Maritime Commission, and in the end, the accelerated schedule proved too costly to reproduce again. Bedford was already warning Admiral Land that the pace Richmond was setting (Yard Nos. 1 and 2 launched no fewer than eighteen Liberty ships in November, an average of one every other day) couldn’t be sustained because of looming shortages of equipment such as anchor chains, electrical cable, generator engines, and gauges and valves.45 Critics claimed the whole thing had been a publicity stunt, and that all Bedford had done was take two months lining up the ship’s parts and four days to slap it together—although that had been the point.46 All the same, Bedford and the men and women of Richmond No. 2 had proved that the era of mass production had come to shipbuilding.

  As for the Robert E. Peary, she showed no signs of being worse for wear by being assembled in just over 111 hours. She would log more than 42,000 miles in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters of operation, and in May 1943 set a record of her own, loading 10,500 tons of cargo in just under 35 hours. She continued to be a cargo ship long after the war. It wasn’t until June 1963 that the old ship finally headed for the breaker’s yard in Baltimore.47

  The ships were ready. What went in them, comes next.

  * * *

  * One of the ugliest would be in the Portland yards, where Edgar became a helpless spectator to the corruption in the AFL Boilermakers Local 72. Its president, Tom Ray, not only promoted racial strife and denied promotion to women, but had spent a quarter million dollars on parties for himself and his buddies. Ultimately the National Labor Relations Board had to strip Ray of his presidency and order a new election.

  Artillery shells, Fisher Body Divison, General Motors. General Motors LLC. Used with permission, GM Media Archives

  This is a hell of a congregation I’m pastor of.

  —Donald Nelson, March 1942

  IF NEW DEAL progressives had thought Donald Nelson, the head of the new War Production Board, would run the war their way, they were wrong.

  Nelson drove down daily from his suite at the Broadmoor Hotel on Connecticut Avenue through Rock Creek to the WPB offices in the Social Security Building. They had been Bill Knudsen’s offices under O
PM. Nelson proved Knudsen’s heir in more ways than one.

  When he came to Washington from Sears and Roebuck in the summer of 1940, he was the mildest mannered of the dollar-a-year men—the Clark Kent of OPM. Some, reflecting on his bland Midwestern roots, compared him cruelly to Sinclair Lewis’s George Babbitt.

  When he was summoned to the White House in January 1942 to replace Bill Knudsen, however, he became the Washington media darling. Columnist Walter Lippmann hailed his hitherto-unnoticed talents. Fortune magazine was pleased that one man, any man, was at last in charge of the war production effort. So was Time—although Nelson might have noted its editors had once been enamored of the big Dane from Detroit, as well.1

  Nelson also discovered the president had given him enormous powers compared to his predecessor. “We had authority to force a manufacturer to accept a contract,” as he described it later, “and we occasionally employed it.” Nelson could also requisition private property for war use, and he could order production of certain civilian goods halted.2

  None of this bothered the New Dealers. Indeed, Nelson was something of a New Dealer himself. He had been a strong supporter of Roosevelt since 1932. As chairman of the wage committee for the textile industry during the National Recovery Act, Nelson was seen by Big Labor as a reliable friend of the workingman.3

  Nelson came with another advantage for the White House: He had none of the independent stature of Bill Knudsen. He was a successful businessman but no titan of industry. Hopkins and others assumed he’d be good at taking orders. Unlike his predecessor, he would help them use conversion to a wartime economy as a tool for taking power away from businessmen and “the blind chances of an allegedly free competitive marketplace,” and investing in “purposeful, detailed, and total economic planning by the national government”—even, as one later enthusiast put it, international government.4

  Nelson disappointed them all. His regime turned out to be more like his predecessor’s than anyone had supposed—which also suggested that Knudsen’s approach had more merit than anyone supposed. Bill Harrison, ball-bearings magnate William Batt, who was OPM’s deputy chief of industrial materials and was now vice chairman of WPB, John Lord O’Brian, Stacy May—even Knudsen’s assistants ended up being his. Other dollar-a-year men like Montgomery Ward’s Frank Folsom and GE’s Charles E. Wilson soon joined them. “On this job we must get the maximum results from American industry,” Nelson declared. “To do that we must have down here men who understand and can deal with industry’s intricate structure and operation.”5

  The New Dealers’ disappointment is still reflected in history textbooks that treat Nelson as a bumbling, rather ineffectual figure, lost in the corridors of Washington—or even a pawn of big business.6 Nelson also caught heavy flak from the other side of Constitution Avenue, from the Munitions and Navy buildings. When he refused to give the Army and Navy exactly what they wanted, and exactly when they wanted it, they turned on him, as well. When Felix Frankfurter complained to Roosevelt that Nelson “was an utterly weak man incapable of exercising authority or making decisions,” it was a judgment on which both War Department Republicans and New Deal Democrats were, for once, in agreement.7*

  After a year in office, Donald Nelson was the most despised man in Washington.

  Nelson knew there was nothing he could do about it. He continued to sit at his desk, pipe in mouth and pencil in hand, governing as best he could the thankless task Roosevelt had thrust upon him. No one seemed to notice that he was struggling to implement changes in the procurement system following the Truman investigating committee’s devastating report on OPM, which found millions of dollars misspent through incompetence and fraud—not surprising when Knudsen and his people had no authority to examine how the money was being spent, only to draw up the contracts and count the results.8 No one noticed that the numbers of strikes were easing, and that a concerted effort was under way to find housing for the thousands of defense workers crowding into places both large and small that were unable to handle them.

  But the supreme thought governing his every action had governed Knudsen’s, as well. Any sudden switch to centralized government control over war production, whether by New Dealers or the military, would spell the end of the American system that made the promise of prodigious production possible.

  “As I understood my job,” Nelson would write later, “it wasn’t up to me to tell industry how to do its job; it was our function to show industry what had to be done and then to do everything in our power to enable industry to do it”—including stepping in if the marketplace couldn’t deliver fast enough.9

  “We are going to have to rely on our great mass production industries for the bulk of our increase under this war production,” he told an audience of merchandising executives in his very first speech as director of WPB. He was referring to autos, textiles, chemicals, consumer durables, and metallurgies like iron and steel. “The only gauge we can apply to this process is: What method will most quickly give us the greatest volume of war production in this particular industry?” America was going to change the war, but the war wasn’t going to change America.10 Once they got Ford, General Electric, Westinghouse, and other companies going, the Axis wouldn’t stand a chance. All America had to do was “step on the gas,” as Time magazine put it that May.11 And Donald Nelson saw his job as quietly, unobtrusively treading on the accelerator pedal.

  Yet for the next year and a half, everywhere he went, and in every decision he made, he could make out the footprint of Bill Knudsen ahead of him.

  Unlike Knudsen, Donald Nelson was no industrial production man. He was a chemical engineer, with a degree from the University of Missouri—a handy degree when later he had to look at priority claims for materials from the engineers and scientists running the Manhattan Project.12

  In 1912, Sears and Roebuck, for almost a quarter century America’s emporium for every product from sewing machines and tractors to overcoats and underwear, hired him to study the chemical composition of the textiles their suppliers were buying. Later they made him check the scientific descriptions of merchandise with what appeared in the catalogue copy. From that day until the day he became president, Sears never gave him a full-time contract.13

  In the meantime Donald Nelson learned more about how nearly every one of the 135,000 products in the catalogue was made by some five thousand companies—from the sources of raw materials to costs and manufacturing methods—than he could have learned from a lifetime in the businesses themselves.

  Sears had been a business of razor-thin margins, where lowering cost, even by a few pennies, was everything. Sears had taught Nelson how to get one manufacturer to convert to a line of products suddenly in high demand in the catalogue, like stoves or nylon stockings, and to drop all others. At times he would even act as purchasing agent for a Sears-run company, to make sure the brass or cotton or plate glass it needed to make the product came at a cheaper price.14

  It was good training for running SPAB, and later the War Production Board. Nelson was conditioned to see the big picture behind the steadily rising mountain of data: how to coordinate the flow of materials from a myriad of sources to an equally complex network of suppliers and manufacturers, and then how to move the finished goods to the distributors on a nationwide scale so that ultimately they reached the customer on time—in this case, the Army and Navy and the Army Air Forces.† This also meant a myriad of toes to be stepped on, in trying to coordinate the intermeshing of an entire economy for one purpose, winning the war. But Nelson in his quiet way persisted, defying newspaper columnists, congressional investigators, outraged labor leaders, Army and Navy brass, and furious businessmen who thought they were being shortchanged or overburdened by Nelson’s system—and sometimes both. As one of his own staff, and one of his fiercest critics, admitted, “The most striking thing about the whole war production program was not that there were so many controls but that all of them fell within the established patterns of industry.”15

  O
ne of his first big battles was with organized labor. Walter Reuther and others hoped that Nelson’s appearance on the scene would revive the idea of joint labor-management committees, to handle the war conversion process and give unions a direct say in how the factories and production lines would be run. Nelson’s dealings with the National Recovery Administration, however, made him wary of opening the door to the union way of doing things. “My experience,” he once said, “was that whenever you set up a joint committee, industry and labor representatives get together to see how they can screw the public.”16 Instead, he insisted that WPB take as little or as much advice on production or conversion from separate industry committees and labor committees as it needed, and reserve for itself the final decision. As for the unions, they should keep their hands to themselves, and concentrate on getting workers work, pay, and adequate housing—in that order.

  Another big battle was over antitrust.

  Roosevelt’s assistant attorney general Thurman Arnold was a crusader on the subject. He had fired off investigations into some of America’s biggest corporations, from Standard Oil to DuPont and Alcoa, and firmly believed that without Justice’s heavy supervising hand, America would never be safe from their anticompetitive collusions.

  The new system devised by Knudsen and sustained by Nelson broke every one of Arnold’s rules. Defense contracts were no longer based on competitive bids. There was no time. They were negotiated instead on a cost-plus basis, with the company negotiating the contract based on what the government would pay up front to get what it needed—planes, tanks, TNT, uniforms—instead of the company forgoing what it could to gain the contract in the first place.

  In the mind of Thurman Arnold, this was a clear invitation to corruption. “The vast government spending for war production,” Arnold thundered, had “created a great opportunity for conspiratorial agreements between businessmen.”17 He was also livid to see big-business executives serving as “dollar-a-year men” directing contracts toward their old industries, if not their old firms. General Arnold smelled a rat everywhere he sniffed. He started smoking them out in August 1940 by filing an antitrust action against no fewer than twenty-two major petroleum firms, for restraint of trade.