Freedom's Forge (30 page)

“Five days!” said one old-timer. “Hell, it’ll take ’em five days to even find the keel.”

A huge crowd gathered as midnight approached. Superintendent McFarland, Clay Bedford, and his two sons watched as at exactly 12:01
A
.
M
. the keel was officially laid. Then people began to realize there was method to the madness. One by one the prefabricated pieces began to
disappear in the hull shell. By the time the day shift arrived at 8 o’clock on Sunday, November 8, the ship already looked a week old.
⁴⁰

Sunday was a day to remember, even by Kaiser standards. Some seventeen banks of welding machines were hard at work, carrying out some 152,000 feet of weld line on ninety-three separate prefab sections, while chippers were hacking away at plate ends ten at a time. “It was one seething mass of shipfitters, welders, chippers,” one worker remembered, “hose and cable a foot deep…. The biggest problem that first day,” he added, “was persuading the guys in the rest of the yard not to wander down where all the action was.”
⁴¹

As the Sunday night shift arrived, the hull had taken shape and 1,450 tons of ship had been installed, including the 135-ton engine. “I’ll be blind and deaf by next week,” one worker laughed, “but it’ll be worth it.” By the end of the second day, November 9, the upper deck was done. Now other workers were arriving an hour early to watch the progress: McFarland had to send his men out to clear a path so that the next round of prefab pieces could get installed. Clay Bedford wired Kaiser back in Washington. Because of the thronging crowds, they were going to have to institute a ban on all workers not assigned to Hull No. 440 from coming down to Shipway No. 1.
⁴²

At the end of the third day, deckhouses, masts, and deck equipment were all in place. Excitement was building. This ship wouldn’t be finished in five days, they were saying. It’d be done in four. Clay Bedford gave the go-ahead to McFarland to see if he could beat his own estimate.

November 11 saw teams of workmen completing the last installations, including final welding, electrical wiring, and painting. Elated and exhausted, Bedford and McFarland watched as the final pieces of their giant prefab puzzle slid into place. Neither man had slept much in the past seventy-two hours.

Then, at 3:27
P
.
M
. on November 12, the
Robert E. Peary
was launched, just four days, fifteen hours, and twenty-six minutes after laying the keel. The wife of Jimmy Byrnes, Maude Byrnes, swung the champagne bottle, the crowd roared its approval, and Hull No. 440 entered history. Six minutes later the blocks for laying the keel for the next Liberty ship, Hull No. 443, were in place.
⁴³

Bedford got congratulatory telegrams from Henry Kaiser and from Jerry Land. “Every one of you should be proud of the ship which your sweat and energy built in record time,” wrote the admiral. “Keep up the good work.” But the one that meant the most came from Edgar Kaiser and the work crews up in Portland. Their congratulations came with a postscript: “Now if we cut your record in half, what will you do?”
⁴⁴

Bedford laughed. In fact, no one challenged his record then or later. It remained one of the supreme industrial feats of the war.

It took another three days of cleaning, refitting, and rewiring much of the electrical equipment before the
Robert E. Peary
was truly seaworthy and ready for delivery to the Maritime Commission, and in the end, the accelerated schedule proved too costly to reproduce again. Bedford was already warning Admiral Land that the pace Richmond was setting (Yard Nos. 1 and 2 launched no fewer than eighteen Liberty ships in November, an average of one every other day) couldn’t be sustained because of looming shortages of equipment such as anchor chains, electrical cable, generator engines, and gauges and valves.
⁴⁵
Critics claimed the whole thing had been a publicity stunt, and that all Bedford had done was take two months lining up the ship’s parts and four days to slap it together—although that had been the point.
⁴⁶
All the same, Bedford and the men and women of Richmond No. 2 had proved that the era of mass production had come to shipbuilding.

As for the
Robert E. Peary
, she showed no signs of being worse for wear by being assembled in just over 111 hours. She would log more than 42,000 miles in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters of operation, and in May 1943 set a record of her own, loading 10,500 tons of cargo in just under 35 hours. She continued to be a cargo ship long after the war. It wasn’t until June 1963 that the old ship finally headed for the breaker’s yard in Baltimore.
⁴⁷

The ships were ready. What went in them, comes next.

Artillery shells, Fisher Body Divison, General Motors.
General Motors LLC. Used with permission, GM Media Archives

IF NEW DEAL
progressives had thought Donald Nelson, the head of the new War Production Board, would run the war their way, they were wrong.

Nelson drove down daily from his suite at the Broadmoor Hotel on Connecticut Avenue through Rock Creek to the WPB offices in the Social Security Building. They had been Bill Knudsen’s offices under OPM. Nelson proved Knudsen’s heir in more ways than one.

When he came to Washington from Sears and Roebuck in the summer of 1940, he was the mildest mannered of the dollar-a-year men—the Clark Kent of OPM. Some, reflecting on his bland Midwestern
roots, compared him cruelly to Sinclair Lewis’s George Babbitt.

When he was summoned to the White House in January 1942 to replace Bill Knudsen, however, he became the Washington media darling. Columnist Walter Lippmann hailed his hitherto-unnoticed talents.
Fortune
magazine was pleased that one man,
any
man, was at last in charge of the war production effort. So was
Time
—although Nelson might have noted its editors had once been enamored of the big Dane from Detroit, as well.
¹

Nelson also discovered the president had given him enormous powers compared to his predecessor. “We had authority to force a manufacturer to accept a contract,” as he described it later, “and we occasionally employed it.” Nelson could also requisition private property for war use, and he could order production of certain civilian goods halted.
²

None of this bothered the New Dealers. Indeed, Nelson was something of a New Dealer himself. He had been a strong supporter of Roosevelt since 1932. As chairman of the wage committee for the textile industry during the National Recovery Act, Nelson was seen by Big Labor as a reliable friend of the workingman.
³

Nelson came with another advantage for the White House: He had none of the independent stature of Bill Knudsen. He was a successful businessman but no titan of industry. Hopkins and others assumed he’d be good at taking orders. Unlike his predecessor, he would help them use conversion to a wartime economy as a tool for taking power away from businessmen and “the blind chances of an allegedly free competitive marketplace,” and investing in “purposeful, detailed, and total economic planning by the national government”—even, as one later enthusiast put it, international government.
⁴

Nelson disappointed them all. His regime turned out to be more like his predecessor’s than anyone had supposed—which also suggested that Knudsen’s approach had more merit than anyone supposed. Bill Harrison, ball-bearings magnate William Batt, who was OPM’s deputy chief of industrial materials and was now vice chairman of WPB, John Lord O’Brian, Stacy May—even Knudsen’s assistants ended up being his. Other dollar-a-year men like Montgomery Ward’s Frank Folsom
and GE’s Charles E. Wilson soon joined them. “On this job we must get the maximum results from American industry,” Nelson declared. “To do that we must have down here men who understand and can deal with industry’s intricate structure and operation.”
⁵

The New Dealers’ disappointment is still reflected in history textbooks that treat Nelson as a bumbling, rather ineffectual figure, lost in the corridors of Washington—or even a pawn of big business.
⁶
Nelson also caught heavy flak from the other side of Constitution Avenue, from the Munitions and Navy buildings. When he refused to give the Army and Navy
exactly
what they wanted, and exactly when they wanted it, they turned on him, as well. When Felix Frankfurter complained to Roosevelt that Nelson “was an utterly weak man incapable of exercising authority or making decisions,” it was a judgment on which both War Department Republicans and New Deal Democrats were, for once, in agreement.
^7
*

After a year in office, Donald Nelson was the most despised man in Washington.

Nelson knew there was nothing he could do about it. He continued to sit at his desk, pipe in mouth and pencil in hand, governing as best he could the thankless task Roosevelt had thrust upon him. No one seemed to notice that he was struggling to implement changes in the procurement system following the Truman investigating committee’s devastating report on OPM, which found millions of dollars misspent through incompetence and fraud—not surprising when Knudsen and his people had no authority to examine how the money was being spent, only to draw up the contracts and count the results.
⁸
No one noticed that the numbers of strikes were easing, and that a concerted effort was under way to find housing for the thousands of defense workers crowding into places both large and small that were unable to handle them.

But the supreme thought governing his every action had governed Knudsen’s, as well. Any sudden switch to centralized government control
over war production, whether by New Dealers or the military, would spell the end of the American system that made the promise of prodigious production possible.

“As I understood my job,” Nelson would write later, “it wasn’t up to me to
tell
industry how to do its job; it was our function to
show
industry what had to be done and then to do everything in our power to enable industry to do it”—including stepping in if the marketplace couldn’t deliver fast enough.
⁹

“We are going to have to rely on our great mass production industries for the bulk of our increase under this war production,” he told an audience of merchandising executives in his very first speech as director of WPB. He was referring to autos, textiles, chemicals, consumer durables, and metallurgies like iron and steel. “The only gauge we can apply to this process is: What method will most quickly give us the greatest volume of war production in this particular industry?” America was going to change the war, but the war wasn’t going to change America.
¹⁰
Once they got Ford, General Electric, Westinghouse, and other companies going, the Axis wouldn’t stand a chance. All America had to do was “step on the gas,” as
Time
magazine put it that May.
¹¹
And Donald Nelson saw his job as quietly, unobtrusively treading on the accelerator pedal.

Yet for the next year and a half, everywhere he went, and in every decision he made, he could make out the footprint of Bill Knudsen ahead of him.

Unlike Knudsen, Donald Nelson was no industrial production man. He was a chemical engineer, with a degree from the University of Missouri—a handy degree when later he had to look at priority claims for materials from the engineers and scientists running the Manhattan Project.
¹²

In 1912, Sears and Roebuck, for almost a quarter century America’s emporium for every product from sewing machines and tractors to overcoats and underwear, hired him to study the chemical composition of the textiles their suppliers were buying. Later they made him check the scientific descriptions of merchandise with what appeared in the
catalogue copy. From that day until the day he became president, Sears never gave him a full-time contract.
¹³

In the meantime Donald Nelson learned more about how nearly every one of the 135,000 products in the catalogue was made by some five thousand companies—from the sources of raw materials to costs and manufacturing methods—than he could have learned from a lifetime in the businesses themselves.

Sears had been a business of razor-thin margins, where lowering cost, even by a few pennies, was everything. Sears had taught Nelson how to get one manufacturer to convert to a line of products suddenly in high demand in the catalogue, like stoves or nylon stockings, and to drop all others. At times he would even act as purchasing agent for a Sears-run company, to make sure the brass or cotton or plate glass it needed to make the product came at a cheaper price.
¹⁴