No Ordinary Time, Page 56

  The first wave of women war workers had been drawn from women who were already working in lower-paid “feminized” jobs as maids and domestic workers, sewers of clothing, textiles, and shoes. These women needed little convincing to work in defense. Not only was the money substantially higher than anything they could earn elsewhere, but defense jobs were regarded by society as important and valuable. “Finally valued by others,” Sherna Gluck observed in her study of women war workers, “they came to value themselves more.” In the factory, moreover, there was a sense of sharing, of working together for a common goal.

  The second pool of female war workers consisted of young girls, recent high-school graduates. This was the group targeted by the government in its patriotic ads calling on women to do their part in the war, to be “the woman behind the man behind the gun.” In magazines and newsreels, Rosie the Riveter was pictured as a blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked woman with a kerchief on her head, a rivet gun across her lap, and a powder puff in her coverall pocket, the perfect combination of health, strength, and femininity. “Actually what attracted me,” Juanita Loveless explained, “was not the money and it was not the job because I didn’t even know how much money I was going to make. But the ads . . . ‘Do Your Part,’ ‘Uncle Sam Needs You,’ ‘V for Victory!’ I got caught up in that patriotic ‘Win the War, Help the Boys.’ The patriotism that was so strong in everyone then.”

  Eleanor championed the movement of women into the factories. “I’m pretty old, 57 you know, to tell girls what to do with their lives,” she said, “but if I were of a debutante age I would go into a factory—any factory where I could learn a skill and be useful.” Cautioning girls not to marry too hastily from patriotic fervor, she advised them to get “every bit of preparation they could to expand their horizons and contribute to their country.”

  For years, there had remained in Eleanor’s heart a feeling of sadness for having discarded too quickly, under the pressure of her mother-in-law’s negative opinion, the settlement-house work she had loved as a young woman. Now, as new paths were opening up for millions of women who were just starting in life, she was delighted.

  Though recruitment of recent students and women already in the work force before the war provided more than half of the women defense workers, the devouring need for war workers eventually led to the recruitment of full-time homemakers as well. For months, Paul McNutt had resisted the move—directing that “no woman with dependent children should be encouraged or compelled to seek employment until all other sources had been exhausted.” By the fall of 1942, however, the point of exhaustion had been reached, and the recruitment of homemakers was beginning.

  It was dusk when the presidential party left Willow Run. For all the hype, the president observed, Willow Run’s production was nowhere near what Ford had promised. Ford’s initial difficulties delighted North American Aviation’s President J. H. Kindleberger. An outspoken critic of the government’s decision to bring automobile companies into the business of building planes, Kindleberger consistently maintained that mass production of airplanes, each one requiring three hundred thousand rivets and one hundred thousand additional parts, was impossible. “You cannot expect blacksmiths to learn to make watches overnight,” he sneered. But not long after the president’s visit, Willow Run’s production would begin to accelerate. By mid-1943, it would produce three hundred bombers a month, and by 1944, when the plant hit its stride, its monthly output would reach six hundred. Army historians argue further that, “if success is measured in terms of more airframe pounds produced with the least cost in dollars and man-hours,” Willow Run held a decided margin of superiority over the industry average.

  The following morning, Franklin and Eleanor inspected the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, where sixty-three thousand men, supervised by 550 officers, were learning to become radiomen, machinists’ mates, aviation metalsmiths, torpedomen, and hospital corpsmen. At Eleanor’s request, the president stopped at Camp Robert Small, where the first regiment of Negro naval recruits were being trained as gunners, signalmen, yeomen, and quartermasters. The school had been set up in response to Roosevelt’s order the previous spring that Negroes must be trained for a variety of positions beyond that of mess men. As the president and first lady watched, the men went through an obstacle course designed to simulate a real battlefield.

  The Negro service school at Camp Robert Small was separate from the main service school at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, in Waukegan. The pattern of segregation required duplication of mess halls, sick bays, school instructors, housing and recreational facilities. “It was a luxury and a waste of manpower that the Navy could ill afford,” Dennis Nelson wrote, but it remained in force, because the majority of white personnel desired it, and because the top officers of the navy still believed that abandoning segregation would at best “adversely affect morale, and at worst, result in serious racial conflict and bloodshed.”

  • • •

  That night, as Eleanor flew back to the capital, the president’s train reached the Twin Cities, where he visited the night shift of a cartridge plant that was producing six carloads of small-arms ammunition every day. On the walls, a number of striking posters could be seen. “Keep Sharp—We Have an Axis to Grind,” “Fifty Caliber Zippers for Slant-Eyed Gyppers.” The morale in the plant was infectious. Turning to General Brehon Somervell, the newly designated chief of the Army Service Forces, the president said, “Brehon, that was grand!”

  The work of the Twin Cities cartridge plant had been compromised in recent months by a shortage of copper and brass. Years of experience suggested that brass was the only satisfactory material that could be used in the making of cartridge cases. Brass could be cleaned after firing and used over and over again; brass did not rust; brass was flexible. But so astronomical were the ammunition requirements for both the armed forces and lend-lease that by the summer of 1942 several ordnance plants were operating with less than one week’s supply of brass. To alleviate the situation, ordnance plants were experimenting with steel cartridges. The problems at first seemed insurmountable—the inelasticity of steel caused the cases to expand and stick in the chamber after firing—but eventually steel proved a suitable substitute.

  From Minnesota, the president’s train passed through North Dakota and Montana en route to the West Coast. “Life on the train began to get a little cramped,” journalist Merriman Smith reported. “The porters burned incense in the Pullmans as the dirty laundry piled up.” But the president’s spirits remained high as the train wended its way to Fort Lewis, Washington, an army post just outside Tacoma, and to the Bremerton Navy Yard.

  When the president arrived at the Boeing plant in Seattle, he was joined by the Boettigers—Anna, John, and Anna’s children, Sistie and Buzz. Roosevelt had not seen his daughter for nearly a year; her last visit to Washington had been in the fall of 1941, following Sara’s death. Delighting in Anna’s presence, the president was in the happiest frame of mind as his open car moved slowly past long lines of men and women engaged in the complex process of producing the B-17 bomber. Twelve months earlier, the first B-17 had rolled down the runway of Boeing Field. Hundreds of spectators had lined the fences and the roads that day to watch the birth of “The Flying Fortress,” as the durable B-17 was named. Since that day, with women constituting nearly half of the work force, Boeing had turned out more aircraft per square foot of floor space than any other plant in the United States, earning the company a “joint Army-Navy E” award for excellence.

  No single aircraft would contribute more to the American bombing offensive in Europe than the B-17. Between 1940 and 1945, 12,677 B-17s would be built, equipping thirty-three combat groups overseas. On the ground, the B-17 was a strange-looking creature, its sprouted machine guns extending like the quills of a porcupine. In the air, it commanded universal affection from its pilots. It had an excellent high-altitude capacity and the ability to absorb an exceptional amount of battle damage. “This was an airplane you could trust
,” B-17 pilots testified again and again. “To me,” one bomber-group leader said, “the Flying Fortress was, and always will be, the Queen of the Sky. I owe my life to the Queen.”

  Standing on the Boeing assembly line that day was Inez Sauer, a married woman with two sons who had left behind her life of bridge parties, golf, and country-club luncheons to work in the factory. “My mother was horrified,” she recalled. “She said no one in our family has ever worked in a factory . . . . You don’t know what kind of people you’re going to be associated with . . . . My father was horrified. He said no daughter of his could work in a factory. My husband thought it was utterly ridiculous.”

  Sauer’s mother warned her that she would never go back to being a housewife, and she was right. Working at Boeing changed Sauer’s outlook on life; she joined the union, marched in a labor demonstration, learned to respect people who worked with their hands, and came into contact with blacks for the first time in her life. When the war ended, she decided she could not go back to being a “club woman.”

  That night, the president had dinner with Anna and John; the next morning, Anna accompanied her father to the Kaiser shipyard in Portland, where she christened a new ship, the U.S.S. Teal, whose keel had been laid only ten days earlier, thereby breaking every shipbuilding record. The president sat in his open car at the top of the ramp while the hull plates were burned away with torches to free the ship from its berth. At that instant, Anna, remembering the lessons her father had given her in her youth on how to swing a baseball bat, pulled her arm back and swung the bottle. A resounding crack was heard when the bottle broke against the hull.

  As the ship floated calmly in the waters of the river, the crowd of workers and dignitaries exploded in applause. “When we finished one of these beautiful ships,” a female worker later recalled, “it was inspiring and thrilling. Once it . . . withstood the test of water your whole body thrilled because you’d done something worthwhile.”

  The U.S.S. Teal was the 576th ship build by the Kaiser shipyards in less than eighteen months, a remarkable record that inspired the president to tell the Kaiser employees that he wished “every man, woman and child” in the country could come to Portland to witness what “a wonderful piece of work” they were doing for their country. “With the help of God we are going to see this thing through together,” he concluded, with a smile and a wave of his hand.

  Standing beside the president, Henry Kaiser could hardly contain his pride. “Just look at those assembly lines,” the heavily built man with the full face exclaimed, as he pointed to the ingenious methods which had allowed him to mass-produce cargo ships at a pace undreamed of before the war. The key to Kaiser’s success, one of his associates said, was his imagination. “He can mentally visualize a whole vast, complex problem. He has enthusiasm, creative ability and the happy faculty of being unafraid to delegate responsibility. He will tackle anything he thinks is right and will do it without following any beaten path.” When, for example, it was discovered that the largest cranes could not carry the immense superstructure of the ship off the assembly line, it was decided to cut the finished structure into four pieces, take each one off the line, and then weld them back together. It was faster to do it this way, even though it meant slicing the ship apart after it was built.

  That afternoon, as the president’s train headed south to California, Anna returned to her home in Seattle. “Your father missed you when you left,” Margaret Suckley wrote her. “The rest of us were less entertaining.” For Anna, the days with her father were filled with wonder. “It was almost too good to be true to have Father out here,” she answered Margaret, “and we all felt that he was getting real rest despite the many inspection trips.”

  In California, the president journeyed to the Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach, where bombers and C-54 cargo planes, the largest transport ships currently in production, were being turned out at the phenomenal rate of four hundred per month. As his car entered the air-cooled building, a blackout structure with no windows, the Douglas executives gaped in amazement. Cheers and handclapping followed him through the plant as stunned men and women realized that the man in the green car was truly FDR.

  The Douglas plant had been slow to hire women and slow to make them feel welcome when they first arrived. The women were “the lipsticks” or “the dollies” to the men. “The factory’s no place for women,” the new arrivals were told. “The happiest day of my life,” one supervisor said, “will be when I say goodbye to each one of you women as I usher you out the front door.” Every day for the first few weeks, as the women walked by the assembly line on their way to the washroom, the men whistled and hooted. When the catcalls continued despite repeated requests to stop, the women took matters into their own hands. As the men streamed out the door for lunch, the women were waiting. Every time a handsome young man walked by, they whistled and shouted. “Look at Tarzan! Isn’t his body beautiful!” The men’s antics ended abruptly. The women felt better, and production went up. “We may have thought a year ago we could never get along with them,” one executive admitted. “Today we know we can never get along without them.”

  Eleanor rejoined Franklin in Fort Worth, Texas, and they journeyed together to the Consolidated plant, where the longest assembly line in the world was turning out B-24 Liberator planes. Produced in greater quantities than any other American plane, the B-24 would operate over more fronts for a longer period than any enemy bomber. Once again, Eleanor took special pleasure in hearing that women were “doing a swell job, better than they expected.” Supervisors reported that women were more patient with detail, more capable of handling the repetitive jobs without losing interest, more eager to learn, less prone to hide their greenness, more willing to ask directions and take instruction. At Consolidated, one supervisor admitted, the production rate shot up immediately in the departments where they used large percentages of women. Mrs. Frances De Witt was one of Consolidated’s best lathe operators. “I never did anything more mechanical than replace a blown-out fuse,” she said. “But after the war broke out I wasn’t satisfied with keeping house and playing bridge.” After three weeks of craft school, she was hired by Consolidated. “The foreman asked if I could run a lathe. I said, ‘I can, if you’ll show me how.’ He did, and I’ve been at it ever since.”

  “I’ll deny it to the end of my days if you use my name,” one male executive told a female reporter. “Listen, girl, I’ll deny that I ever saw you. But if you want to know how I feel, I’ll tell you . . . . If I had my way now, I’d say ‘to hell with the men. Give me women.’”

  Everywhere she went, Eleanor later reported, the plant managers wanted to know how and where they could get more women. “I hardly saw a man,” she said, “who did not speak to me about the need for women in production.” Her answer was always the same; she urged that special community services be established to alleviate the burdens on working mothers, and that companies make a firm commitment to the new policy of “equal pay for equal work” recently enunciated by the War Labor Board. In a letter to Joe Lash written from Fort Worth, Eleanor reported that “FDR seemed happy with his trip and much amazed at the increase in women workers. At last he is interested in nursery schools, family restaurants, etc.”

  For Negro women, the factory offered a respite from domestic servitude. “Had it not been for the war,” a black riveter, Sybil Lewis, observed, “I would never have had the opportunity to work in different kinds of jobs and make the kind of money I made.” Brought up in a segregated town in Oklahoma, Lewis had begun working at fourteen as a maid, the only job the women in her family had ever held. When the war came, she headed west, riding behind a curtain on a segregated train until she found a job at Douglas Aircraft. Though the jobs Negro women were given were all too often the most grueling and dangerous ones the factory had to offer—working with ammunition and gunpowder, poisonous plastics and acetone, sealing mud and nauseating glue—they relished the camaraderie and better wages of the factory in contrast t
o the loneliness and low pay of domestic work.

  Within the factories and shipyards, prejudice against blacks abounded. The discrimination Sybil Lewis experienced, she later observed, was not “so much about being a woman,” but about being a Negro. One white woman spoke for many when she said: “I still don’t like to be near them, my mother is the same way. I can’t say that the way I feel is right. I suppose it isn’t, but I have been taught that way and that is the way I feel.” Another woman told reporters she had tried to overcome her negative attitude but could not. “It don’t make me no difference how hard I try, I just can’t get used to working with niggers. I’ll be so glad when this war is over and we don’t have to do it no more.”

  In June, several thousand white workers at Hudson Naval Ordnance in Detroit had gone out on a wildcat strike, shutting down 60 percent of the plant’s production, because eight Negro employees, in accordance with seniority rights, had been assigned to machines formerly operated by white men. “You can’t expect the plant to adopt a missionary attitude concerning its colored employees,” one plant manager said. “We can’t buck the whole system. This is a plant and we are forced to produce. We can’t produce if our employees are going to hold up production while they fight out the race question.”

  Still, Eleanor clung to the hope that, with daily contact, attitudes would change, and to some extent they did. “At first I thought I just couldn’t do it,” one female employee from Texas admitted, “but I wouldn’t want to work with nicer people. If every white man could be as nice and polite as that colored man who works with me, he’d have something to be proud of . . . . I always thought colored people were not clean and smelled bad and weren’t as good as white people, but these I have worked with at the plant are just as good as anybody.” Another white woman, who could barely tolerate the idea of associating with Negroes at the start, found herself respecting and even liking a Negro colleague. “Alice,” she told her supervisor in a tone of astonishment, “I said good night to Mary tonight when she left. I actually told a colored girl good night!”