Freedom's Forge

by Arthur Herman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  War production had triggered the greatest mass migration in Ame
rican history.

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

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

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