Freedom's Forge

by Arthur Herman

  The biggest beneficiaries of the demographic shift from country to city were African Americans. Almost one million left the old states of the Confederacy for points north and west.38 Another half million went into uniform.

  Their passage into mainstream American life got an enormous boost on June 25, 1941, when Roosevelt issued an executive order calling for an end to employment discrimination based on race, color, or creed in the nation’s growing defense industries. The idea came from A. Philip Randolph, head of the powerful railway porters’ union, which he founded when no other union in the country would accept black railway workers. He had campaigned hard for the order with both the White House and Bill Knudsen as head of OPM.

  Knudsen fully supported Randolph on desegregation. When the war effort truly hit its stride, he knew America’s factories were going to need those additional black workers. But Knudsen still felt the best way to go about it was through “quiet work with the contractors and workers,” as he put it, rather than executive fiat. Once employers realized that hiring black workers would work, they would come around.39

  Randolph, however, was adamant. Recognizing the Negroes’ equal right to work and serve in uniform, he wrote Knudsen, was partly what American democracy was all about. To Roosevelt he wrote a very different letter. He was prepared, he told the president on May 29, to mobilize “from ten to fifty thousand Negroes to march on Washington in the interest of securing jobs … in national defense” as well as integration in the armed forces.40

  Roosevelt sensed a looming public relations disaster both for himself and for the Democratic Party, which was becoming increasingly successful in poaching black voters away from the Republicans, in spite of the Democrats’ record supporting segregation in the Deep South. The president tried to get his wife, Eleanor, an acknowledged civil rights champion, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and others to talk Randolph out of the march. Nothing could move the black union leader. So finally, facing the prospect of a flood of black protesters flooding the National Mall and surrounding the Lincoln Memorial, Roosevelt backed down. He issued Executive Order 8802 six days before the march was supposed to start. Randolph graciously canceled the day of protest.

  To Randolph and others, it was a historic moment—and a foretaste of the civil rights struggle that was to come. The order, however, had its limits. The armed forces remained segregated right up to the war’s end. The committee FDR set up to oversee discrimination was likewise limited in its powers. Southern politicians closed it down as soon as the war ended. It’s not clear whether Knudsen’s approach might not have worked better.41

  The results were certainly uneven. Henry Kaiser hired blacks in his shipyards, but few found jobs working on ships. Most did peripheral jobs, such as the road gang of blacks from Louisiana Clay Bedford employed for paving roads around and through the Richmond complex.42 Roy Grumman hired blacks and whites without discrimination, while Glenn Martin’s Baltimore plant continued to be segregated. So was the Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyard. General Motors’ Eastern Aircraft plant down the road, on the other hand, was not.

  By and large, labor unions fought hard to keep the African Americans out. Even supposedly “progressive” CIO-affiliated unions like the Boilermakers made life miserable for blacks in workplaces like the Kaiser Richmond yards.43 For some white workers, the presence of blacks in their midst, even in subordinate jobs, was jarring. Having them promoted could be infuriating. In Mobile a riot broke out at Moore Drydock when white workers learned African Americans were about to be upgraded as welders. In Beaumont, Texas, a riot left two dead before the state police and federal troops restored order.44

  Still, hiring blacks to do “white men’s work” signaled the emergence of a new American social compact where skill and content of character mattered more than skin color. It was no surprise that it drove up racial tensions in the South. But when you took a northern industrial city and combined a large influx of black workers with a larger influx of southern Appalachian whites who weren’t used to dealing with blacks without the reassuring cushion of Jim Crow, then threw in some sweltering summer heat, you had a recipe for racial meltdown—as the people of Detroit found out.45

  There had been signs of trouble before that weekend of June 1943—the week before MacArthur launched his offensive to retake New Guinea in the South Pacific, and two weeks before the invasion of Sicily. In February 1942 a group of black families tried to move into a housing development for defense workers. They were met by a mob of three hundred whites armed with stones and clubs. The police moved in but fighting broke out between growing angry crowds of blacks and whites. Thirty people were injured, and over one hundred arrested.

  Detroit’s mayor tried to calm his city. “If we are one people,” he declared, “the Negroes should go into the project.”46 They finally did, but only with the protection of state militiamen. What the police and mayor and state militia couldn’t control broke loose the weekend of June 20 the next year.

  Rumors that black teenagers had thrown a white man off a bridge on Belle Isle, the city park in the Detroit River, set off a murderous conflagration that tore through the city for two days. Roving gangs of whites, mostly teenagers, rampaged through the city killing blacks and setting cars and businesses on fire. Black gangs attacked whites. “There were about two hundred of us in cars,” one sixteen-year-old white boy remembered. “We killed eight [blacks]…. I saw knives being stuck through their throats and heads being shot through…. It really was some riot.”47 Before federal troops poured onto the streets to restore order, 34 people were dead, 25 blacks and 9 whites. More than 670 were injured. Detroit, the original arsenal of democracy, was shrouded in national disgrace.

  Another riot broke out in New York City in August. It killed seven and injured scores more. If winning the war was the issue that could pull America together, race was still the one that could pull it apart.

  Executive Order 8802 had banned discrimination in defense employment based on race, color, religion, or creed—but not sex. Women were the one group not protected by Washington.† Yet they would gain the biggest foothold in the American workplace during the war.

  At first companies and male workers had their doubts about hiring women, especially for industrial jobs. They had no understanding of machinery, went the argument. They’d be exhausted by any heavy duties, and they’d be a distraction to men on the job. Besides, no factories had women’s washrooms.48

  Almost from the start, however, employers began to reverse their thinking. As early as the spring of 1941, articles in magazines like American Machinist and Business Week told of women being trained to handle even the most complex machinery. Still, a photo of a class of trainees for a leading aviation company at about the same time shows not a single female—yet.49

  All that was about to change. Bill Knudsen was present when the first twenty-five women went into the Consolidated-Vultee plant, on March 31, 1941. They were put to work in the electrical subassembly division, and started a day earlier than planned. The manager feared that if they had started the day their training was supposed to end, on April 1, everybody else would think it was an April Fools joke.50

  Once the women set to work, however, the joke was on the males. The ladies of Vultee showed enormous skill at the subassemblies, running, threading, connecting, and checking electrical cables. Women had “lighter fingers,” as Knudsen put it, that sometimes was as vital in manufacturing as the heavy lifting.51

  North American was impressed enough that they began substituting women for men in their tubing department. Production jumped by 20 percent. Before long, everyone was hiring women for other departments, and they ran milling machines, drill presses, and complex cutout saws and worked in aircraft engine assembling. They could also squeeze into places men couldn’t in airplane assemblies, such as the nose cone and tail section, to do spot welding or riveting or snapping in the electrical system.

  By July 1944, 36 percent of all workers in prime defense contractors were female. And no
t just in aviation. In the end their numbers rose to nearly five million, doing every conceivable form of war work from making planes to building ships and tanks. In iron and steel companies, 22.3 percent of the workforce were women. At GM they were 30.7 percent of all hourly wage earners by the end of 1943, and in the Kaiser yards at Richmond they numbered 70 percent.52

  The press and the nation elevated them to heroic status, as Rosie the Riveter. Norman Rockwell painted her for the May 29, 1943, cover of The Saturday Evening Post sitting at lunch in her overalls, with her riveting gun on her lap—and her foot mashing a copy of Mein Kampf into the dust. Lockheed launched a publicity campaign around “Rosie the Riveter, the Girl from Lockheed” when the photo of one their workers, tall, dark-haired Vera Lowe, appeared in Life magazine in goggles and wielding a riveting gun.53 Artist J. Howard Miller thought he had found her archetype when he spotted a photo of a seventeen-year-old metal press worker at American Broach and Machine named Geraldine Huff. His poster for the Ad Council showing her wearing a polka-dot bandanna and flexing her muscle with the caption “We Can Do It!” turned her into a national icon.

  But the attention directed at Rosie obscured the fact that millions more women didn’t use a riveting gun, metal press, or welding torch. They cooked meals for defense plants, worked in defense contractors’ offices as stenographers and bookkeepers and telephone operators, and did a hundred other jobs. Rockwell based his Rosie on May Doyle, a nineteen-year-old phone operator in a dentist’s office in Arlington, Massachusetts. As for Miller’s Rosie, Geraldine Huff, she quit American Broach after six months—to go study the violin.

  Women made gas masks for the Army, life rafts for the Navy and Coast Guard, and wove and stuffed parachutes for the Army Air Forces and airborne divisions. One of those parachute stuffers was a pretty brunette named Norma Jean Dougherty, who was barely seventeen and worked in an aircraft parts plant in Burbank, California, while her husband was in the Merchant Marine. In 1943 an Army newsreel team commanded by Captain Ronald Reagan spotted her and asked her to pose for some pictures. The photos of her in Yank magazine caused such a sensation that the Army used her as a model for several more shoots. After the war Norma Jean took her photos to a modeling agency and moved to Hollywood. There she dyed her hair blond and took a new name: Marilyn Monroe.54

  For millions of other women, the discipline of the job was reward enough. New York writer Augusta Clawson found that out when she moved to California to work in Richmond Yard No. 1. The account of her days there, The Shipyard Diary of a Woman Welder, was the surprise bestseller of 1944 and gave many people, including other women, their first glimpse into the reality of Rosie the Riveter.

  Clawson described signing up for training, and the advice given her by her “Job Counselor,” also a woman, dressed in pink with gray hair and a youngish face. “Get gloves,” Clawson was told, “you have to have them.” The school was going to provide her helmet and goggles, but she had to buy her own welding leathers.55

  “It gets plenty cold out there,” the counselor also warned her, referring to the No. 1 shipways. “You can wear slacks and put coveralls over them; then you can take the coveralls off and you won’t feel so dirty.” And don’t wear a watch: “the rays of the welding will magnetize its works.”56

  Training classes were under the stern eye of Mr. Dunn, who showed his ladies how to adjust the amperage and voltage of the welding machine and then turned them loose to practice for three to four hours at a stretch, with breaks for lectures on safety. At the end of her first day, Clawson barely had enough energy to eat an apple back in her hotel room before she fell asleep.

  But she would grow used to it, just as she would grow used to rising at 5 A.M. every morning to catch the bus down to the Richmond yard and the ways. There she met her fellow laborers, both men and women, who came from every part of the country, and she described her pride when she had completed her first full week of work.

  “Something has happened,” she wrote, “I don’t know quite what it is, but after work today I suddenly realized that I had no dread or fear any more in connection with this job.”57 When she had started, she had been terrified of heights. But now she felt comfortable climbing up a ladder high above the factory floor and stretching out on a board suspended between two uprights welded to overhead beams. “Imagine me,” she wrote, “lying like suspended animation way above the floor (’scuse, I mean deck), resting comfortably and singing to myself.”58 Her fear of heights was gone, as was her lack of confidence about doing manual labor. It was a moment of emancipation as meaningful, perhaps, as any brought by the Nineteenth Amendment.

  Written under the gaze of the wartime censor, Clawson’s account of life in the ways was clearly positive. Katherine Archibald, a liberal sociologist, went to work in the Moore Dry Dock in Oakland hoping to find a nation united in the war effort. Instead she found a boiling cauldron of tensions. Men resented women, whites disdained blacks, old-settler African Americans resented the new “brothers,” and the native Californians hated them all. Fights and brawls and slacking on the job were common. She also found the steady barrage of sex jokes demeaning and saw them as undermining “business-like relationships between men and women” on the job.59

  The rough edge of life in the yards shocked and disillusioned Archibald. Later historians and feminists would be disappointed by the failure of women to achieve full equality of pay and promotion, and be disappointed by the fact that so many would quit their jobs after the war.

  But most women who worked in the arsenal of democracy were not out for gender transformation. They were shamelessly conventional. They would do their jobs, and appreciate the opportunity to earn some pay and serve their country. But the moment they looked forward to was the reunion with fathers and sons and brothers and husbands.

  None would forget that moment when one of their co-workers would arrive in the morning with a crumpled telegram in their fist and tears in his or her eyes as they mumbled, “It’s about my son …”60 Most would appreciate the words of Katie Grant, who worked the graveyard shift for two years in the Richmond yards while her husband was in the Marines.

  “I told Melvin later,” she recalled years later, “that I helped to make the ship for him to come home in.”61

  * * *

  * The driving force behind the effort was the Army, and their choice to replace him had been trusted old Bernard Baruch. Unlike in May 1940, this time Baruch was willing to get into harness—perhaps because he knew the really hard work had all been done.

  † The exception was a ruling by the War Labor Board in September 1942 dictating equal pay for equal work in defense work.

  Henry Kaiser cartoon from the Phoenix Republic and Gazette, circa 1943. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

  You can’t work as hard as I am getting production and pay any attention to personal relations.

  —Henry Kaiser, June 22, 1943

  AS FOR HENRY Kaiser, he was sitting on top of the world.

  The entrepreneur Business Week described as “the Man of Mystery” back in March 1941 was a mystery no longer. “He’s terrific; he’s colossal; he’s completely unbelievable,” gushed respected news commentator Frazier Hunt in a CBS broadcast. “He’s the master Doer of the world.”1 Kaiser’s bald head with its spectacles and irrepressible grin was plastered across the covers of magazines and inside newspapers. Every other month, it seemed, Life or Time or Fortune ran a featured story on the Kaiser phenomenon; in January 1943, the New York Times called him the Paul Bunyan of the age with his own three giant blue oxen in harness: Imagination, Organization, and Perspiration. A schoolteacher in South Carolina asked her class if they knew which face launched a thousand ships (referring to Helen of Troy in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus). One boy’s hand shot up. “Henry Kaiser,” he said proudly.2

  In the spring of 1943, that larger-than-life reputation was about to be turned loose on the U.S. Navy.

  Under Navy undersecretary and
Dillon, Read, investment banker James Forrestal, the Navy was already embarked on the biggest shipbuilding program in history. From a force in 1939 still trapped in a hemispheric defense mentality, it was now in effect a seven-ocean navy, engaged in operations from Alaska and the Aleutians to Greenland, the North and South Atlantic, and across the Pacific to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. The five biggest shipbuilding firms in the country were filled with orders for battleships, cruisers, carriers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts, while companies like Electric Boat in Groton were building submarines in record numbers.

  Events in the Pacific in 1942, however, had forced a major change in thinking. The battles of Coral Sea and Midway had proved the value of the aircraft carrier as the fleet’s primary capital ship—even as battle losses shrank that force from six to four. At the same time, both the British and American fleets in the Atlantic saw the value of carriers for convoy protection. From Atlantic to Pacific, the push was on for carriers—not just the 34,800-ton monsters of the Essex class like Yorktown and Intrepid, but smaller carriers that could be built faster to fill the gap.3

  The result was the so-called Independence class of less than 15,000 tons, which could carry nine TBM Avenger torpedo planes and twenty-four new Hellcat fighters, compared to the nearly one hundred aircraft on a Yorktown or Bunker Hill. Likewise, Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock in Chester, Pennsylvania, was converting old oil tankers into the 23,350-ton Sagamon class.4

  Even this, however, was not enough. The Navy decided they would need something still smaller that could be built in one-quarter of the time of the Independence class—and since the yards were running out of hulls to convert, it would have to be designed from scratch.