Military Giantism
The downsizing of American factories came after a final wave of industrial giantism during World War II, devoted to making military goods. Some armaments production took place at government facilities, which swelled during the war. The Brooklyn Navy Yard doubled its size, taking over adjacent land to build the world’s largest dry docks and the world’s largest crane, with its employment roll hitting seventy thousand. But most defense production took place in corporate-run factories, mills, and shipyards, facilities converted to war production or newly built for the purpose.3
Albert Kahn designed some of the largest war plants in a last burst of activity before his death in December 1942. They included the Chrysler Tank Arsenal in Warren, Michigan; the East Chicago cast armor plant for American Steel Foundries Company; Amertorp Corporation’s torpedo plant in Chicago; the Curtis-Wright Corporation plant in St. Louis; the Wright Aeronautical plant in Cincinnati; and the Dodge Chicago plant, which made aircraft engines (the last three of these were huge structures). But Kahn’s largest war plant, the best known of all the wartime defense facilities, was the Ford Willow Run aircraft factory, an effort to bring Fordism to an industry even more complex than the auto industry.4
As World War II loomed, in a dash to build up American air warfare capacity, defense officials—and Walter Reuther, by this time a top UAW leader—pressed for the partial conversion of the automobile industry to airplane production. Officials at Ford, which previously had manufactured small aircraft, with limited success, proposed to use assembly-line methods to produce the newly designed B-24 heavy bomber. When defense officials agreed, a crash effort began to build a massive factory and adjacent airport on Ford-owned land in Ypsilanti, Michigan, twenty-five miles west of Detroit. The main building—which covered sixty-seven acres, making it at the time the largest factory structure in the world—went up quickly, but getting production going was a whole other matter. The federal government and Ford proved not much better than the Soviets in starting up such a massive endeavor and faced similar problems in assembling a workforce in an area distant from existing pools of skilled labor (which, in any case, were too small to meet wartime demand).
Part of the blame for Willow Run repeatedly falling behind production schedules—which became a political hot potato—came from applying mass-production techniques to the manufacture of bombers. Creating specialized tools and fixtures delayed the start of parts making, usually done in the aircraft industry using standard machine tools. Repeated design changes from the Army impaired a manufacturing approach predicated on long runs of standardized parts. As in the Soviet Union, slow delivery of materials contributed to delays. So did repeated reorganizations and personnel changes in the federal defense agencies and managerial chaos at Ford. (Contrary to its rationalist public image, Ford suffered from personal fiefdoms, fierce competition among executives, and a lack of clear lines of responsibility.) But an inability to find and retain enough workers presented the biggest problem.
Figure 6.1 The B-24 Liberator assembly line at the Willow Run bomber plant in Michigan, circa 1944.
Across America, defense industries scrambled to find workers, especially with industrial skills. The location of Willow Run added a burden. As construction and production workers began flooding into the sparsely populated rural area, they found virtually no homes they could buy or rent, forcing them to room with local residents or live in trailers, tents, or jerry-built structures, shades of Gorky and Magnitogorsk.
The UAW proposed the construction of a ten-thousand-unit “Defense City,” a permanent new settlement to house plant workers. It commissioned Oscar Stonorov, a German-born modernist architect who had designed a union-sponsored housing complex in Philadelphia, to lay it out. (In 1931, Stonorov, with a partner, had taken second place in an international competition to design the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, besting such celebrities as Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.) Defense City, and a similar plan by federal officials for a “Bomber City,” proposed multifamily structures and extensive communal facilities, social housing of the sort that had been pioneered in interwar Europe and tried at Gorky and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Stonorov and his partner at the time, Louis I. Kahn (later famed for his modernist structures, and no relationship to Albert), produced striking designs for a variety of types of dwelling units. But nothing came to pass in the face of fierce opposition from local real estate interests, Ford, and even some union members who—like their Russian counterparts—preferred individual living (in this case single-family homes) to the communalism promoted by left-wing planners. Reversing gears, federal authorities quickly threw up prefabricated temporary dwellings, including—again shades of the U.S.S.R.—worker dormitories.
With living conditions difficult and jobs elsewhere easy to find, workers flowed out of Willow Run almost as fast as they flowed in. Most had little industrial experience, requiring considerable training before they could begin efficient work. Though at one point Ford projected a plant workforce of 100,000, in practice it peaked at 42,506, massive but not massive enough to meet production schedules. Reluctantly giving up the idea of Rouge-style total integration, Ford began moving some B-24 parts production to other plants and even did some subcontracting.
Eventually tools were finished, production methods perfected, and a large enough workforce trained to achieve high-volume output. By 1944, the plant turned out one plane every sixty-three minutes. When production ended in June 1945, the plant had manufactured 8,685 B-24s. Some were shipped out as kits for final assembly elsewhere, but 6,792 were put together on site and flown off, many almost immediately into action.5
No other aircraft plant tried as thoroughly to apply mass production methods, but industrial giantism characterized the wartime aviation industry as a whole. North of Baltimore, at Middle River, Glenn L. Martin employed even more workers than Willow Run, 45,000, making B-26 bombers and PBM Mariner flying boats at a complex that included a huge Kahn-designed assembly building with the longest flat-span trusses ever used and massive lift-up doors that allowed airplanes to move in and out. On Long Island, Republic Aircraft Corporation swelled from a few hundred workers to more than 24,000 and Grumman Aircraft from 1,000 to more than 25,000. In the Seattle area, Boeing employed 50,000 workers, nearly half of them women.6
Wartime shipbuilding also depended on huge facilities and assembly-line methods. Until the war, ships had been custom-built by highly skilled workers, a practice that continued for naval vessels at facilities like the Bethlehem Steel shipyard at Sparrows Point, Maryland, which employed eight thousand workers. But for cargo ships, needed in massive numbers for the war effort, assembly line techniques were developed, including the standardization of design, extensive prefabrication of parts, the use of welding instead of riveting, and a highly developed division of labor. At Bethlehem’s newly constructed Fairfield yard in Baltimore harbor, 45,000 workers, 90 percent of whom had never worked in a shipyard, produced over four hundred vessels during the war. On the West Coast, Henry J. Kaiser, a construction company owner new to shipbuilding, threw up a series of huge yards to produce Liberty ships and other vessels using mass-production methods. His Richmond, California, shipyard employed some 90,000 workers, making it one of the most populous industrial worksites in American history. To support his operations, Kaiser built the first integrated steel mill on the West Coast, in Fontana, east of Los Angeles; constructed new cities for his workers, like Vanport in Portland, Oregon, with homes for nearly ten thousand families; and expanded his prepaid comprehensive medical program, which he renamed Kaiser Permanente—altogether an American Kombinat. After the war, Kaiser leased the Willow Run plant from the federal government to produce automobiles for the newly established Kaiser-Frazer Corporation, which remained in the car business until 1955.7
Defense production—especially in huge factory complexes—elevated the social prestige of the blue-collar worker, already raised by the substance and imagery of the New Deal and the great union organi
zing drives. Political, military, and labor leaders repeatedly stressed the importance of the industrial home front to victory, overlaying patriotism on the Promethean heroism already associated with the giant factory and the workers within it. Flags, bond sale rallies, blood drives, and collection points for British, Soviet, Greek, and Chinese relief made factories, mills, and shipyards into arenas of patriotic expression. Newsreels, billboards, and magazines celebrated war workers—female and male—for their skill and dedication, their ease in operating giant machines and building huge objects, their role in the defense of the nation. Workers responded to such publicity, higher income brought by steady work, unionization, and the tight labor market with a confidence evident in the many short wartime strikes, held in defiance of the union movement’s no-strike pledge, and in a jauntiness that characterized the industrial workforce across the country. It could be seen in wartime photographs of industrial workers, like those Dorothea Lange took at the Kaiser Richmond shipyard. Though few realized it at the time, the war brought the giant factory and the blue-collar worker to their apogee in American life.8
The Bounty of Unionized Industry
The end of World War II led to a rapid shrinkage of employment at defense plants, fears of mass unemployment, and a tectonic crash between workers and their employers. The immediate issue was the desire by workers for wage boosts to catch up with inflation and compensate for diminished hours once war production ended. But the larger question was the place of organized labor in the postwar world, the desire by unions to solidify their New Deal and wartime gains and by employers to check or roll them back. In the year following the end of the war, five million workers went on strike in the largest strike wave in American history. At its height, in January 1946, two million workers were off the job, including 750,000 steelworkers, 175,000 GM autoworkers, 200,000 electrical manufacturing workers, and more than 200,000 meatpacking workers. Left-wing reporter Art Preis wrote from Pittsburgh of steel plants “sprawled lifeless,” while fires to warm pickets formed “a mighty chain up and down the valley and the river banks.”
A similar clash had taken place at the end of World War I. Unions had won some battles and lost others (including the steel strike), but, in the face of repression, an economic downturn, and a conservative political turn, the net result was a sharp decline in the size and power of the labor movement. The post–World War II strike wave proved a different story. Generally peaceful, with widespread public support, the big strikes ended with an eighteen-and-a-half-cent per hour wage increase (the equivalent of $2.46 in 2017) or something close to it, a huge boost. For the only time, the United States effectively had a national wage settlement. Price hikes soon cut deeply into the wage gains, but the strikes marked just the beginning of a quarter century of dramatic improvements in pay and benefits for industrial workers.9
Before World War II, the newly formed industrial unions had not stressed wage rates, in part because in a deflationary period steady wages meant rising real income. Instead, they fought to check the power of management on the shop floor through union recognition, increasingly detailed contracts, shop stewards, grievance procedures, and the use of seniority in layoffs and jobs assignments. After the war, unions successfully pressed for wage increases and a growing array of employer-provided benefits, including health insurance, pensions to supplement social security, and supplementary unemployment insurance.
The cumulative result was a revolution in the daily lives of workers in large-scale industry, and for their families and communities. Steelworkers’ union president Philip Murray once said that for working people a union meant “pictures on the wall, carpets on the floor and music in the home.” A quarter century after World War II, workers in heavily capitalized, unionized industry had achieved that and much more. Things once unusual or unknown among workers—home ownership, modern appliances, vacations, cars and second cars, children sent to college, retirement while still healthy—became common. Unionism grew so established that in 1949 a critic in a left-wing newspaper could write that “In revealing the beauty of factory architecture, [Charles] Sheeler has become the Raphael of the Fords. Who is it that will be the Giotto of the U.A.W.?”
Higher income and welfare programs provided by the government and employers, including pensions, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, and health insurance, gave workers an unfamiliar sense of security and well-being. Many resented the high price they paid for their improved way of life, especially the continued, if diminished, authoritarianism of Fordist production, the monotony of assembly-line work, and the physical toll of manufacturing labor. Still, as Jack Metzgar, the son of a Johnstown, Pennsylvania, steelworker wrote of his family’s experience, “If what we lived through in the 1950s was not liberation, then liberation never happens in real human lives.”10
Dispersion and Downsizing
While for workers the 1945–46 strike wave launched a trajectory of material improvement and union power, for industrialists it brought home a lesson some had begun to glean during the strikes of the 1930s, the danger of extreme industrial concentration in large-scale facilities. Even before the burst of labor militancy in the mid-1930s, a few large corporations had begun to hedge their bets, building smaller plants to supplement their main production facilities. By the late 1920s, the big three tire makers, Goodyear, Goodrich, and Firestone, in addition to their giant plants in Akron, all had factories in Los Angeles to meet the demands of the West Coast market. In 1928, Goodyear built another tire factory, this time in Gadsden, Alabama, a low-wage, antiunion center far from any major tire market. The purpose seemed primarily to lower labor costs and gain a threat to use against Akron workers. After the 1936 strike at the main Goodyear plant, the company expanded the Alabama factory. Other Akron firms also started decentralizing production. By 1938 the Firestone workforce in Akron had fallen from 10,500 to about 6,000, as the company shifted work to a factory it built in Memphis and to other outlying plants. The Goodyear Akron plant shed a fifth of its workforce.
Labor was not the only reason tire companies began dispersing production. Technological innovations and the increasing standardization of tire sizes made it possible to build mass-production plants that operated efficiently at smaller scales than the Akron monsters. As car ownership spread and population redistributed, siting plants near growing markets meant lower shipping costs.
But the biggest factor seemed to be a desire to stop being held hostage by small groups of workers. The sequential nature of tire production meant that if one department went on strike, a whole plant might be shut down. And that happened repeatedly in Akron, where sit-downs and other strikes, often begun without official union involvement, became endemic, as a volatile worker culture of direct action developed. In an October 1944 strike at the Goodyear factory, just four striking workers idled five thousand others.
When siting new factories, companies looked for locations where labor costs were lower and unionism was less likely to succeed, or at least be of a less militant sort. Repeated prewar efforts by the United Rubber Workers to unionize Goodyear’s Gadsden plant and Firestone’s Memphis plant failed, with a reign of terror in Alabama that included severe beatings of union organizers by company thugs and antiunion workers in cahoots with local law enforcement.11
The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) also reacted quickly to labor militancy. In 1936, a month-long strike, overcoming imported strikebreakers and police violence, led to the unionization of the company’s two-million-square-foot complex in Camden, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, where 9,700 workers (75 percent female) produced nearly all of its products. Almost immediately, RCA began moving operations elsewhere, between 1936 and 1947 setting up a component plant in Indianapolis, a radio plant in Bloomington, Indiana, tube plants in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Marion, Indiana, a record plant in Hollywood, and a cabinet shop in Pulaski, Virginia. By 1953, only three hundred consumer-electronics jobs remained in Camden. The original complex continued to
be an important center for the company, primarily for research and development and manufacturing military equipment, but all mass production of consumer goods had been scattered to smaller plants.12
General Motors likewise realized early the threat labor militancy presented to its integrated production system. A 1935 strike at its Toledo transmission factory forced the shutdown of every Chevrolet plant in North America. Soon after, the company launched a $50 million program to expand and modernize its manufacturing, which included building new plants so that the interruption of production at one factory would not halt operations elsewhere. Most of the new factories, which included a plant in Muncie, Indiana, to duplicate the output of the Toledo factory, were in small towns or cities with weak union movements.13
The GM program came too late to block the UAW’s triumph in 1937. The Flint sit-down and the strikes that followed reinforced the message about industrial concentration. While there might be economies of scale in producing every Chevy engine in a single plant or bodies for all GM cars of a particular body type in a single factory, when workers grew militant it brought danger, too.
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