Freedom's Forge (41 page)

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 not 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

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

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