WAR YEARS AND BIG CITIES
World War II’s production of war-related material may be the most transformative, certainly dramatic driver of American twentieth-century regional change: “The most important urban development program conducted by the federal government during World War II was … recapitalization of American industry for the war effort”
(Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 104). It hugely affected the course, the pace and the nature of American economic development. It is amazing so little has been written about it; it is every bit as critical to American economic development as Stalin’s 1930s’ collectivization and five-year industrialization plans. Yet the process, the methods, the humaneness that differentiates the two amply demonstrate the range of possibilities that underlay governmental “big pushes.” War Production is a federal government big push to create industrial and logistics capacity to produce sufficient material to win the war. Its scale is unbelievable: “Total additions to the US physical capital plant between 1942 and 1944 amounted to $35.5 billion, almost equal to the entire 1939 value of US manufacturing plant” (Mollenkopf, 1983, p. 104). It was a fully conscious redistribution of the productive capacity of the nation into areas less vulnerable to attack or, conversely, better located to fight a Pacific war.
In chapters to follow, detailing war production’s impact on the South and West, it will be easy to reach the conclusion that World War II war production (and subsequent job migration) triggered the real rise of the Sunbelt. There is precious little research/ history that focuses on war production’s impact on the Big Cities. One might assume that the North and/or the Midwest missed the war production boat entirely or that the federal government, for its own insidious purposes, consciously decentralized war production into new geographies formerly without significant manufacturing capacity. The more adventurous might assert that the federal government embarked on a semi-conscious redevelopment program to promote economic development/prosperity in depressed regions of the nation. Our version of reality is more complex. Crisis management is seldom kind to sophisticated plans and good intentions.
“We Saw Our Opportunities and We Took Them”
Were the populous and industrial Big Cities of the nation’s industrial heartland simply “outmuscled” by the South and West in the latter quest to break from perceived colonial status by importing federal war production facilities? The obvious counter is that most military/naval bases/shipyards were already located in the North and on the Atlantic coast. The allied main effort was against Germany. Detroit and “the 1940 auto alley,” the New England textile industry and the East Coast chemical industries locked in place when war production exploded. The problem, however, was that there was never the remotest possibility that sufficient tanks (ships, rifles, planes, etc.) could be produced from existing facilities. The very nature of a world war meant a sizeable number of new production facilities needed to be built and/or expanded. An enormous expansion of our municipal economic bases resulted from war production—with a spectacular increase in workers/residents in an incredibly short period.
No—the North and Midwest were not outmuscled for federal war production facility investment. Growing from a low base, the “rates” of southern and western growth are spectacular; and, in cities like Los Angeles, raw numbers are spectacular as well—raw numbers tell the better story.13 The Detroit metro garnered the most war production facility investment, more than $1 billion (1940 dollars)—over seven times that of the Dallas/Fort Worth metro. Only Los Angeles attained sufficient investment in the top four metro areas (highest to lowest, Detroit, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles). With the exception of Los Angeles and sixth-ranking Houston, Big Cities captured 10 of the top 12 spots. Thirteenth-ranked San Francisco/Oakland was the next highest ranked Sunbelt city. Tenth-ranked Boston captured 4.5 times more investment than San Jose. Non-Texan southern state investment came principally in the form of military facilities. As shall be discussed in Chapters 12 and 13, the future growth differential of northern investment was in “traditional industrial production facilities”: Texan in petrochemical and aircraft; and aircraft, ships and weaponry in the Pacific. These figures obscure the federal investment “jump-starting” of the gazelles of the Cold War.
The industrial heartland of America claimed primary advantage and benefit from war contracts: “Michigan was the true arsenal of democracy … With only 4 percent of the nation’s population, Michigan garnered more than 10 percent of defense contracts.” The state capital, Lansing, “manufactured 48 million rounds of ammunition, 140,000 tank cannons and aircraft machine guns … [and] almost 350,000 aircraft engine parts” (Teaford, 1993, p. 186). Detroit, for all its fiscal woes, was king of war production; total employment in metro Detroit more than doubled from 1940 (360,000) to 1943 (867,000). Cleveland, home of the Thompson Aircraft plant and the Fisher Aircraft factory, had over 21,000 workers at these two factories alone. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) claimed that: “Cleveland is one of the nation’s industrial centers which have expanded the most since the beginning of the war.” The War Department touted Rockford Illinois as “the most important city of its size in the country in terms of national defense.” Evanston Indiana produced amphibious landing craft and airplanes, growing its manufacturing sector from 21,000 to over 64,000 workers. Indianapolis manufactured aircraft engines and possessed the largest propeller plant in the nation. In 1942 the city was declared a labor shortage area by the War Department (Teaford, 1993, p. 186; internal citations omitted).
Labor shortages were real; the Southern Diaspora/Great Migration went on steroids. Between 1940 and 1944, the number of African-Americans in the Detroit metro area soared from 170,000 to almost 260,000; within the city, the white population declined by 2 percent and African-Americans increased 41.5 percent. The Ford River Rouge plant employed 15,000 African-Americans alone. The distinction between the two population movements became especially troublesome.
What was distinctive about the Midwest was the magnitude of the white migration from the South during the period … white southern migrants far outnumbered black southern newcomers, creating a population pattern in the cities of the [Midwest] heartland, different from that of the Atlantic seaboard … Thus southern newcomers to midwestern cities were predominantly white, whereas southern migrants to the northeast were predominantly black. (Teaford, 1993, p. 193)
Intra-union solidarity deteriorated and racial conflict intensified. Strikes/shutdowns, anomic violence, sheer racism and riots occurred in many northern/midwestern cities—Detroit (1943) was arguably the worst; Chicago, Tulsa and the Mexican “zoot suit” riots of Los Angeles were terrible indeed.
Industrial Decentralization
Did northern and Midwestern states fight against western and southern industrial decentralization—that is, the federal decision to disperse industrial war-related manufacturing and services production to the South and West for military purposes? The answer is yes!
Eastern and midwestern cities and states were neither morally superior to the contest for martial riches nor asleep at the switch. As early as 1939, Chicago spokesmen had questioned the equity and strategic necessity of aircraft contract distribution. During the war the East and Midwest fought against industrial decentralization. (Lotchin, 1993)
The South/West argued for industrial decentralization to make war production less vulnerable to Nazi attack, a rationale they used until Germany and Japan surrendered. These cities and states understood quite well that they were importing an industrial base at federal expense, which would free them from perceived colonial status. Midwestern/northern states had no illusions that industrial decentralization was seeding future economic competition, and, in the halls of Congress, war production bureaucracies and the White House, “the Frostbelt fought back just as forcefully; throughout the war the controversy over the urban geographic distribution of military spending continued to rend the fabric of national unity” (Lotchin, 1993, pp. 49–50).
William “Bill” Knudsen (Ford’s former senior operations chief, former president of General Motors and chair of FDR’s Office of Production Management/National Defense Advisory Commission) convened a meeting of four automobile component production chiefs in his office in October 1940. Knudsen, the first of the famous “$1 dollar a year men,” asked the question: “Can you make guns—a lot of guns—in a hurry?” In that same month, the Battle of Britain had begun and German bombers were leveling London. Denmark, Norway the Benelux countries and France fell. Japan signed the Axis Pact (and then invaded French Indochina). The Warsaw Ghetto started. The German submarine war wreaked havoc on convoys that month. In addition, the first American selective service draftees (28,000) were selected, while FDR campaigned for his third term, pledging he would keep “our boys out of the war.”
In October 1940 the tools to make the weapons did not exist—no tools, no guns. The tool blueprint designs did not exist. Before actual production of weapons could happen, machine tools that made the guns/parts/ammo, around which assembly lines could be fashioned, still needed design and testing. Assembly lines could be blueprinted, and factories that housed the assembly lines configured to the assembly lines that made the final product. A war contract issued that month for supplies from a new factory required at least 18 months to deliver. Knudsen was in the midst of a spectacular production crisis. Industrial decentralization decisions were made in this atmosphere.
Airplane engines and guns were the most complex and the most needed items—right away. On October 15, Knudsen, speaking at a dinner of the Automobile Manufacturers Association Show at Madison Square Garden, got up in front of these company production managers and dumped a huge pile of blueprints on the table. They were airplane blueprints: “We must build big bombers … We need them soon … You’ve got to help.” Edsel Ford, among others, responded [paraphrased] “Tell us what to do. You’re the boss.” In the following weeks a panel (army and air force Generals Billy Mitchell and Jimmy Doolittle were included) was formed:
to figure out the parts, the necessary tools, flexible hard and soft cast dies. From the panel, the elements/blueprints, tools, assembly line designs of converting the automotive industry over to war production would have to be devised—for construction of only aircraft. Knudsen responded calling this series of plans, designs etc. “the arsenal of democracy.” (Herman, 2012, p. 111)
Hundreds of companies were involved.
Then it all stopped. Walter Reuther and other union leaders were furious; this planning had occurred in secret by corporate operations management. Reuther proposed his own plan in December: a plan that did not require significant industrial decentralization; a plan that could use existing facilities with his newly unionized workforce. The press leaped in with support; Reuther had FDR’s ear. But then reality set in:
The auto union leader didn’t seem to realize that whereas the average automobile consisted of 15,000 separate parts, a twin engine bomber like the B-25 demanded 165,000 parts—plus 150,000 rivets. No existing auto plant, no matter how carefully retooled, was ready to produce so complex a piece of machinery, let alone 500 a day of varying sizes and shapes. (Herman, 2012, p. 117)
Reuther backed down. The Reuther Plan gave way to the Knudsen Plan: using America’s largest corporations, ignoring small business and eventually developing organizational hybrid entities that combined military, corporate and political actors to produce specific products in rushed periods. These entities made the logistical and production decisions for the industrial decentralization program, laying the foundation for the infamous military-industrial complex and iron triangles—and resulting in a regional economic and political shift.
The Knudsen war production nexus was the closest America has come to a national industrial policy.
War Production and Suburbia
Despite “the rise of the sunbelt myth,” Big Cities were not outmuscled by western and southern cities, capturing more than their fair share of war production contracts and facilities. I failed to say, however, where these Big City new facilities were located. For many hegemonic Big Cities the new facilities were mostly built on urban peripheries, suburbs and unincorporated areas where vacant land was available (Lewis, 2004). There was little time to tear down neighborhoods to accommodate factory expansion. One could not disrupt production at an existing factory to accommodate new construction. Moreover, new designs and machine tools created a radically different assembly line that required new physical layouts, more space, higher ceilings and more access to different supply/export chains. Making a tank or a plane required differently configured, flatter and larger facilities adjacent to new rail sidings and ports.
Suburbanization of wartime manufacturing facilities was not a regional phenomenon:
95 percent of San Jose’s wartime manufacturing was suburban; Pittsburgh’s 88 percent was the highest ranked Big City. Los Angeles, unsurprisingly, was 82 percent, and the next ranked Big Cities were Detroit and Boston with 69 percent suburban investment. Denver, on the other hand, was less than 1 percent, and Cleveland’s 15 percent suburbanization was the Big City’s lowest ranked. Chicago, Milwaukee, Houston and Philadelphia had between 25 and 31 percent suburbanization. Baltimore, Buffalo and New York City ranged from 47 to 56 percent suburban (CPA, 1946, p. 40).
The personification of a new war production facility was Ford’s mammoth bomber plant in Willow Run, 30 miles outside of Detroit. With 30 buildings spread over 67 acres, described by Lindberg as “a sort of Grand Canyon of the mechanized world,” at its peak it employed over 42,000 workers, 7000 of which were housed in 15 dormitory buildings adjacent to the complex (Teaford, 1993, p. 187).
McDonnell Aircraft located its massive works far beyond the Saint Louis city limits in suburban Saint Louis County, and suburban Long Island was the site of the greatest airplane factories in the New York City area. The situation was similar in Chicago where only three of the area’s eight major war plants located within the central city. (Teaford, 1990, p. 25)
The automobile, highways and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgages were not the only causes of suburban growth in the World War II era.
Ron W. Coan 