Four Freedoms
Page 5
had asked for and wouldn’t dispute Henry if Henry had an idea he
liked better. All the Van Damme Aero military craft had the names of
ancient weapons: the A-21 Sword, the F-10 Spear.
“Mace,” Julius said. “Halberd.”
Henry stood; his special chair, designed by himself to accommodate
and conform to his movements, seemed to shrug him forth and then
resume its former posture. He approached the wide windows, canted like
an airship’s, that looked down on the floor where the A-21s moved in
stately procession, growing more complete at every station, though so
slowly it seemed they stood still. Even through two layers of glass he could
hear the gonglike sounds, the thuds and roars, the sizzle of arc welders.
34 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“You won’t be able to build it like you build these,” he said. “It’s
too damn big. You’ll have to go back to the old way. Bring the people
to the plane, a team for each. It’ll cost more, take more time.”
The vice presidents were solemn.
“Nor can we build it here,” Henry said. He’d said that before. “Is
there land we can extend into?”
“Not contiguous to this plant.”
“How about the farms and fields?” The present plant had been built
where once a walnut orchard had stood; they’d said about it then that
the orchard had taken thirty years to grow and had come down in
thirty minutes.
“Almost all of them are producing for the armed forces now,” Julius
said. “Making a mint. If you want them you’d have to get the govern-
ment to invoke eminent domain. Could take a year.”
“Very well, you’re right, it’s a bad idea, take too long, cost too
much. We just have to find someplace new, someplace we can throw up
a lot of big buildings very quick.”
“Very quick,” Julius said. “I’m already working on it.”
“Lots of land out there,” Henry said, motioning eastward. “Across
the mountains. Land that’s flat. Empty. Cheap.”
Julius sighed, and made a note, or pretended to.
The vice president for Employment crossed his legs and slipped a
folder from his case, signaling his readiness to report. Henry turned to
him.
“If you’re planning a very large expansion,” he said, “we’ll have a
labor problem. It’s hard enough to collect ’em in the cities. If you head
out into the desert someplace, I don’t know.”
“Not the desert, ” said Henry mildly.
“We’re doing all right now,” the VP said, looking at his numbers.
“But it’s tight. Men with skills are the tough job. Otherwise we’re
making do, with women, the coloreds, the oldsters, the defectives, the
handicaps. We’ll soon be running out of them.”
“Go out into the highways and the byways,” Henry said. “Bring in
the lame, the halt, and the blind.”
“No place to house them if we can find them,” the VP responded.
Henry Van Damme could just at that moment see, down on the
floor many feet below, two men gesturing to each other strangely, but
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 35
not speaking. Deaf men, he realized, talking with their hands. He
remembered reading about them in the last issue of the Aero. No prob-
lem for THESE fellows communicating on a noisy shop floor!
“We’ll build them houses,” Henry said. “Houses are easy. Sell them
on the installment plan, no money down. Or rent them. Surely we can
design a little house. Or get a plan someplace. Build it cheap.”
He turned to face them all, though mostly they saw his broad sil-
houette against the windows.
“Clinics,” he said. “Free clinics. Dentists. A staffed nursery, so the
ones with kids can come work. This isn’t hard. They’ll come if you give
them what they need.”
“You’d think,” said the Employment VP, who had a son in the Army
Air Corps, “they’d come to help win the damn war. Not ask for so
much at a time like this.”
“They’re just men,” Henry said. “Men and women. No reason to
blame them. They want what they need. We’ll get it for them. We can
and we ought to.”
On the floor now a piercing horn began to blow, not urgently but
imperiously, in a steady rhythm. Henry turned back to the windows to
watch; the line was about to move. The far doors slid apart, opening
onto the falling day. The last ship on the left end of the U-shaped track
was moved out, finished; a new unfinished one was poised to move in
on the right end. All the other ships moved down one place.
“Pax,” Henry said.
“What?” Julius looked at his brother.
“The name,” Henry said. “For this new plane. Not a sword or a
spear or a hammer or any weapon.”
“And why not?” Julius asked incuriously.
“It’s not going to be for war,” Henry said. “If the war even lasts
long enough for this plane to get in it, it’ll be the last one built. You
know it.”
Julius said nothing.
“It’ll be a peacemaker, peacekeeper. Or nothing.”
“All right,” Julius said, uncapping his pen.
“Pax,” Henry said. “Remember.”
4
Ponca City was an oil town, made rich by successive strikes, none
greater than the fabulous Burbank pool discovered in the Osage
country. Around there in the 1940s we could still get those
comic postcards of hook-nosed Indians piling their blanket-
wrapped squaws and papooses into Pierce-Arrows bought with their
royalties. In Ponca City, oil money built the pretty Shingle Style man-
sions, the great stony castle on the hill, the Spanish Oriental movie
palace, the new high school (1927), and the straight streets of houses
that by the time the war started were beginning to look settled and
placid, tree shaded and shrubbery enclosed. Beside the proud little city
another one arose—the towered and bright-lit one of the refinery. Its
tank farm spread to the southwest, uniform gray drums picked out
with lights. All day and night the flare stacks burned off gases, some-
times blowing off a bad batch with a noise like thunder and lighting
the night, millions of cubic feet, “darkness visible,” as though the city
beyond was a nice neighborhood of Hell. By the time the Van Damme
brothers settled on the empty land outside the city for their plant and
town, the oil boomers were dead or bought out, the oil was just a
steady flow, the natural gas was firing the town’s ovens and refrigera-
tors, but the smell of crude and the wastes of the refinery lay always
over the place; locals had ceased to notice, or liked to say they had.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 37
Van Damme Aero worked out an arrangement with the Continental
Oil Company, taking up land a couple of miles to the north of the refin-
ery dotted at wide intervals with the black nodding pumps called grass-
hoppers. A hundred blue Elcar trailers came first, bringing workers and
engineers and surveyors to build the settlement that Julius jokingly called
Henryville and then wasn’t able to change, not to West Ponca or Bomber<
br />
City or Victoryburg. It was Henryville. A spur line of the Atchison,
Topeka and Santa Fe was laid to reach the Van Damme acreage, and
while huge Bucyrus steam cranes, brought in on railcars, lifted and fitted
into place the steel beams of the plant buildings, surveyors laid out the
streets, all lettered north to south and numbered east to west, with
hardly a natural feature to be got around, though Henry Van Damme
insisted that as many trees as possible be left, to breathe out healthful
ozone. Even before the sidewalks were laid or the tar of the roadways
was hard the houses started to arrive in boxcars, and the workers
offloaded them and they went up like things built in a film where magi-
cally everything takes but a second, people flit like demons, and build-
ings seem to assemble themselves. The Homasote company’s Precision
Junior was the model chosen, fifty-six of them a day sent out ready to go,
all the lumber—sills, plates, joints, rafters—cut to size and numbered
like toys to be assembled on Christmas Eve for Junior and Sis. Homasote:
a miracle building material made from compressed newspaper, heavy
and fireproof and gray, strangely cold to the touch. It took two and a
half days to set a house up on its concrete slab, then they’d tarpaper the
flat roof, hook up the water and electricity, and spray the outside walls
with paint mixed with sand to give the stucco effect. Metal-framed win-
dows that never quite fit, the wind whispered at them, woke you some-
times thinking you’d heard your name spoken.
Van Damme signed on with the Federal Public Housing Adminis-
tration to borrow the money to build the houses and public buildings,
and the FHA guaranteed the mortgages, which you could get for a
dollar down; you could own the house for $3,000, or lease it, or rent it,
or rent and sublet (there’d be guest entrances in the houses for sublet-
ters to enter by, or for others to use who might not want to bang on the
front door toward which the neighbors’ windows were turned). You
got a stove and a tub and, most wonderful, that gas refrigerator, Van
Damme’d insisted, and got them all as necessary war materials. Faint
38 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
crackle of the ice cubes in their metal trays when you opened the
door.
A couple of large dormitories (Henry Van Damme had toyed with
lodge and residence and habitation before giving in to the standard word) were put up too, one for women and one for men, this because
of the bad Ford experience at Willow Run, where a mixed-sex dormi-
tory had quickly become a mass of troubles, lots of keyed-up well-paid
workers looking to unlax, nonrationed rum flowing, parties moving
from floor to floor, high-stakes strip poker only one rumored aberra-
tion, the whole system falling into depths of vice, lost work time, and
bad press before being segregated.
The whole settlement filled fast, and even the trailers were left
there when the job was done, to put more people in—eventually most
of the colored workers were housed there, happier with their own
kind said the VP for Employment, you had to conform to local cus-
toms if you could and Oklahoma had the distinction of being the
first state in these States to establish segregated phone booths. Van
Damme Aero had addressed the workforce problem by shifting their
West Coast employees ( associates as management named them,
workers as the union went on stubbornly calling them) to the Ponca
City plant, and hiring new people for the older plant from among the
migrants always coming in. Van Damme paid a bonus to the associ-
ates who’d go east, then pretty soon raised the bonus, what the hell,
and that’s how Al and Sal Mass and Violet Harbison and Horse
Offen and so many others had been summoned (Horse Offen put it
that way in the Aero) to Oklahoma and that wind that came sweeping
down the plain, which were being celebrated at that very moment on
Broadway far away. Some of the associates were originally from
there, having left the dust bowl farms and sold-up towns to get in on
the good times on the Gold Coast, and now strangely come back
again. As more were needed and Van Damme’s recruiters went
nationwide and the word spread about the new city as foursquare
and purposeful and wealthy as the communes dreamed of by Brigham
Young or Mother Ann Lee, people began arriving from everywhere
else, shading their eyes against the gleam of it coming into view in
the salty sunlight.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 39
Prosper Olander began his journey from a northern city with its own
aircraft plant, though not one that would hire someone like himself.
He was headed for the West Coast, like so many others (when the war
was over it would be found that four million of us came out from where
we lived to the West Coast, and most never went back). On a winter
morning he stood on a street corner of that city, by the stairs that led
up to the tracks of the elevated train that could take him to the city
center where he could buy a ticket for the West; he had money enough
in the wallet tucked into the inner pocket of his houndstooth sport
coat, and another fifty that his aunt May had sewn into the coat’s
lining, which he’d promised to return if he never needed it. A woolen
scarf around his neck. Everything else he had decided to bring was
packed into an old army knapsack that was slung over his shoulders,
somewhat spoiling the lines of his jacket (he thought) and smelling a
bit musty, but necessary for someone like himself, propelled by his
arms and his wooden crutches.
He hadn’t moved from where he stood for some minutes. He was
contemplating the stairs leading up to the El, and thinking of the stairs
that would certainly lead down into the station when he reached it.
He’d never been there, had never before had a reason to go there. And
so what if he got a cab, flagged one down, spent the money, got himself
to that station—could he get himself inside it? And then the high
narrow stairs of the train coaches he’d have to mount—he’d seen them
in the movies—and all the stairs up and down from here on, as though
the way west were one long flight of them.
Alone too, it was certain now, though he hadn’t set out alone.
He turned himself away from the El as a laughing couple went by
him to go up—he didn’t care to appear as though he himself wanted
to go up and couldn’t. Across the street a small open car was parked
by a sign that said no parking! and showed a fat-faced cartoon cop
blowing an angry whistle and holding up a white-gloved hand. Lean-
ing against the fender was a small elderly man, arms folded before
him, one foot crossed over the other, looking down the street as
though in some disgust. Waiting for a tow? Prosper Olander, unwilling
40 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
to think of his own dilemma, contemplated this man’s. Expecting a
woman? Stood up? Prosper had reason to consider that explanation.
The man now turned to where Prosper stood in the tiger-striped shad-
often did that. At length—for no real reason, maybe just to be in
motion—Prosper walked toward the man and the car. The man
seemed to come to attention at Prosper’s approach, unsurprised and
already rooting in his pocket for the coin he assumed Prosper was
about to ask him for—Prosper was familiar with the look. Prosper
pointed to the car.
“Out of gas?”
“Not quite,” said the gent. “But near enough that I have decided I
won’t go farther without a plan to get more.”
“Can’t get any, or can’t find any?”
“Both.” He looked down at the machine, an old Chrysler Zephyr,
gray and dispirited and now seeming to shrink in shame. The plates
were from a neighboring state. “You may know there’s a shortage on,
though you yourself may not have experienced it. I don’t know.”
“I’ve heard,” Prosper said.
“I was doing pretty well, what with one thing and another,” said
the man, “until on driving into this town I began to run low, and all
the gas stations I passed were all out, or so they claimed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then a gasoline truck went by me, going the other way,” he said.
“Good luck! You could tell by the way he drove—slouching around
corners—he was full. Gravid you might say. A line of cars had figured
that out and were following him. I turned around and got in line too,
but I was cut off by others on the way, and fell behind, and was further
supplanted till when the station was reached I was far in the rear. I do
not like to battle for precedence or advantage. I don’t do it.”
“You’re a lover not a fighter,” Prosper ventured.
“Well. By the time I got my heap up to the front of the line—after
every car passing by wedged itself in too, and a fight or two had broken
out—the well was dry. I had just enough left to get me this far.”
“They say the shortages are local. Farther south they have a lot.”
“The Big Inch,” said the gent.
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 41
“The what?”
“The great pipeline that’ll bring oil from down there up this way.
When it’s done.”
“Oh.”
“We make do now with the Little Inch.”
“Oh.”
“In any case finding the gas wouldn’t have done me much good. I