Freedom's Forge (25 page)

“Can we do it?” Roosevelt wanted to know.

“Yes, sir,” Knudsen answered at once. He and his team had figured out that 45,000 planes of all types for 1942 was not out of the question.

“And the other stuff—ships, guns, ammunition, all the other things. You can step up them, too?”

Knudsen assured him he could.

The next day, Roosevelt told the country in his State of the Union speech that America would produce 60,000 warplanes in 1942 and
125,000
the following year, and threw a couple of zeroes onto the other production numbers, as well. “These figures,” the president said
with dripping irony, “will give the Japanese and Nazis an idea of what they accomplished in the attack at Pearl Harbor.”
⁵

If those numbers didn’t shock Hitler and Tojo, they certainly shocked Knudsen’s assistants. Babe Meigs, his airplane man, was particularly miffed. “I am astounded,” he blurted out, “at the scheduling of 60,000 airplanes and 125,000 for next year. I presume this is done for propaganda purposes.” Every expert had told him 45,000 “is an all-out, almost impossible, figure to shoot at.”
⁶
How in the world were numbers like that possible?

Knudsen told him what he had reminded the president: that he had promised Roosevelt 18,000 planes in 1941 and exceeded it. They could do this, too, now that the plants, machine tools, and small tools were up and running. “After that’s settled,” Knudsen added, “the manufacturer himself can do much more for successful production than any number of committees that can be set up”—including OPM itself.

Those numbers were a way for the president to get the maximum effort out of American industry and the rest of the country, to show the rest of the world that America meant business. “Let’s go ahead on the basis of what the president wants,” Knudsen said, “and adjust our plans” accordingly.
⁷
America’s industrial might would do the rest.

But that wasn’t all that was bothering Meigs. Merrill Church Meigs was the ex-publisher of the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
, and just four years younger than Knudsen. He had grown up on a farm in Malcolm, Iowa, and worked as a threshing machine salesman for a company in Racine, Wisconsin, but his true passion was for the internal combustion engine. Racing cars had managed to gratify that urge until one day in 1927, when he learned about Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic. “I had never been on an airplane in my life,” he later said. Now he became obsessed by them. He flew on American Airlines’ first flight from Chicago to New York, and paid the airlines to fly on their regular airmail routes. Babe Meigs became the country’s first great advocate of civilian air travel, running ads in his newspaper and pushing for creating a passenger airport in downtown Chicago, only ten miles from the Loop (known today as Meigs Field).
⁸

He passed his exam for a pilot’s license in 1929 at the ripe age of forty-six. When rival publisher Colonel McCormick did the same,
Meigs did him one better by getting a commercial pilot’s license. He would offer to teach flying to anyone with a passing interest, and often did (one of his students was a senator from Missouri, Harry S. Truman).

When Knudsen’s original airplane expert, Dr. George Mead, became too ill to continue, Meigs was probably the best-known amateur aviator in America after Lindbergh himself. Babe Meigs’s intimate knowledge of airplanes, his enthusiasm, and his commanding presence and voice made him an unusual but brilliant replacement. “He could make any cloud look bright,” said one Ford executive who worked closely with him.
^9
*

Meigs didn’t just know advertising and aviation. He also understood the ways of Washington, and worried Knudsen didn’t. So after the meeting, he went down to Knudsen’s office and explained the facts of life.

“You’ve made enemies here,” Meigs told his boss, “even though you don’t know it.” And now that America was in the war, he said, “if you think the New Dealers are going to let anyone from private industry, and you especially, get credit for this production job—”

“I don’t care who gets the credit,” Knudsen interrupted, “just so this job gets done.”

“Yes,” Meigs fired back, “I am sure that is how
you
feel—but they don’t feel that way. You’re my boss, and I have no business talking to you this way, but I was a publisher before I came here and I know how these New Dealers operate. They have already started to smear you, and they are getting ready to take over this defense program.”

Knudsen scoffed at the idea. But Meigs reminded him that the liberals’ dislike went further back than just the heat they were applying now.
The CIO had fought bitterly with Knudsen when he was at General Motors. New Dealers didn’t like it when he had dared to criticize the Wagner Act.
^†
They especially didn’t like the way he sought to prevent the outright conversion of the auto industry—even though Big Labor’s man on OPM, Sidney Hillman, supported his decision.

“Whether you believe it or not,” Meigs went on, “they are out to get you—and they are shooting to kill.”

“Why should anyone be shooting at me?” Knudsen wanted to know.
¹⁰

Meigs could see he wasn’t getting through. But CIO conspiracy or not, the criticism of Knudsen and the OPM’s methods reached a crescendo after Pearl Harbor, starting with the unions.

“Why should the agencies of government in Washington today,” said CIO chief Philip Murray, “be virtually infested with wealthy men who are supposedly receiving one-dollar-a-year compensation?” Such men were only using war mobilization to pad their old companies’ profits and those of their cronies, the critics said. “Patriotism plus 8 percent,” they called it, while others argued that the only way to overcome the conflict of interest was to create a British-style Ministry of Supply with complete powers over all wartime production.
¹¹

Knudsen had a very different take on who posed the main threat to an all-out war effort. He knew that Sunday, December 7, was supposed to mark the start of a nationwide railway strike, until the news from Pearl Harbor intervened.
¹²
He also knew that on December 16 a strike
was
called at Reuben Fleet’s Consolidated plant in San Diego, where engineers were desperately trying to get a new heavy bomber, the B-24, out the door and into the air—anyone who thought the American labor movement was going to forget its grievances in order to go all out against the Axis was about to get a cold dose of reality.

Knudsen, however, had no time to deal with critics. On January 2 the Japanese took Manila. Three days later Knudsen booked a plane to Detroit. That afternoon he assembled every automobile executive he could get hold of, including some who had been there for the dramatic meeting at the New Center back in October 1940.

He said he knew many of them were already under contract for war production, from tanks to aircraft engines. The numbers were rising rapidly; they would rise even faster in 1942. Now he was going to ask them to make one more effort.

From his pocket he pulled out a memorandum from Undersecretary Patterson. It was titled “Items of Munitions Appropriate for Production by the Automobile Industry.” He produced another from the Navy from the other pocket.

This was about getting the automakers to figure out ways to produce another $5 billion in additional war materiel that had no obvious connection with car production, Knudsen declared.

“We want to know where some of these things will flow from,” Knudsen said. “We want to know if you can make them or want to try and make them. If you can’t, do you know anyone who can?”

Knudsen put his glasses—an old-fashioned pince-nez with a thick black ribbon—firmly on his nose and began reading.

“We want more machine guns,” he said. “Who wants to make machine guns?”

A couple of hands went up hesitantly. Knudsen went down the list.

Who wanted to make turbine engine blades? “Someone ought to be able to forge these things.” More hands went up. And so on, until Knudsen had checked off every item on his list.
¹³

A secretary recorded each company executive’s name as he made his selection. Knudsen’s friend Charlie Wilson of GM, for instance, pledged to take on some $2 billion worth of contracts, including building tanks at four different plants. Chrysler and Ford took another $2 billion, while Ford offered to help out others with the machine tool bottleneck by supplying certain simple parts for new tools.
¹⁴

Knudsen was pleased, but when he returned to Washington, the outrage was palpable. Bureaucrats were shocked; commentators were volubly outraged. The director of OPM was accused of putting the nation’s defense “up for auction,” as
Time
magazine phrased it. The same voices who criticized what he had done wanted to know why all this hadn’t been done a year ago, so that every company capable or willing to manufacture important war materiel was already hard at work at it.

Of course Knudsen knew the truth. A year ago, a month ago, America
had not been at war. No one had had the authority to compel anyone to do anything, not even participate in surveys of the national inventory of machine tools or available factory space for conversion to defense work.
¹⁵
And no one had had the authority to tell industries to go ahead and retool for war work in ways that would have involved a breach of existing union contracts. Indeed, doing that would have invited even more labor trouble.

Indeed, no one had that authority even now. The consequences of Roosevelt’s refusal for the past year and a half to cede authority over rearmament to any single person or agency—his insatiable desire to keep his options open—had finally been exposed. Yet it was Knudsen’s head on the public chopping block.

Then a new problem arose. Days after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had given SPAB some authority to close down unnecessary civilian production. The man in charge was Leon Henderson, who was also the head of Office of Price Administration, and the industry he targeted was everyone’s favorite target, the auto industry. Henderson ordered the complete cessation of new car and truck manufacturing as of January 15. The 450,000 civilian vehicles now in the carmakers’ inventory and the other quarter million still on the assembly line were not to be sold through dealers, Henderson decreed. Instead, they would be rationed out to high-priority users like doctors, hospitals, fire and police departments, and the like.

This was the kind of bold action critics of Knudsen had been urging for more than a year. The results were exactly what Knudsen would have predicted. More than 400,000 auto workers suddenly found themselves out of work, and 44,000 auto dealers around the country had to lay off employees. Many, if not most, had to shut their doors. Instead of speeding the nation toward readiness, stopping civilian car production had led to chaos.
¹⁶

Still, the blame fell not on Henderson but on Knudsen. Why hadn’t he forced Detroit to convert to war production faster, to prevent it hitting it all at once—or at least taken steps to protect these workers thrown out of work and their families, who were facing a future without a paycheck? One of the most vociferous critics was America’s best-known protector of the afflicted and downtrodden, the First Lady
herself, Eleanor Roosevelt. One day, quivering with indignation, she cornered him at the White House. What was he going to do about this?

Knudsen gave her a look “like a great big benevolent bear,” she said later, “as if to say, ‘Now, Mrs. Roosevelt, don’t let’s get excited.’ ”

“I wonder if you know what hunger is?” she wanted to know. “Has any member of your family ever gone hungry?”
¹⁷

Knudsen could have replied no, because he had been working since the age of eight, including setting rivets in a Bronx shipyard. He also could have told her that those unemployed workers and their families would soon enough have plenty to do, as the war production schedule he and his colleagues had hammered out began to take effect and jobs became plentiful and workers scarce, but he didn’t. Yet he would have been right.

Thanks to war work, by D-day total employment in the Detroit area would more than double. The big migraine for Michigan’s war contractors was a worker
shortage
as their employees headed for more lucrative jobs in the Kaiser shipyards and elsewhere. Without the migration of thousands of rural newcomers from the South and Appalachia—for whom war work represented a huge economic opportunity—it was hard to see how the big production numbers the automakers eventually made could have ever been achieved.
^18
‡

At the time, however, Mrs. Roosevelt was not mollified. She described her encounter with Knudsen in a speech to a national meeting of 4H directors, adding this: “The slowness of our officials in seeing ahead … is responsible for the whole [defense] mess.”

Washington insiders sadly shook their heads. If the First Lady felt free to criticize the director of OPM this openly, his days must be numbered.
¹⁹

Knudsen remained oblivious to what was happening. When a staffer offered him a list of talking points with which to respond to media critics, Knudsen tossed it in the garbage. He was only focused on the growing demands of his job and on January 16 was huddled with the
SPAB people going over the new production numbers. At four o’clock the door popped open and a messenger handed a note to Vice President Wallace. He read it and passed it along to Don Nelson. Then both men rose and announced that they had an urgent call at the White House, but urged everyone to continue the meeting.

The remaining men talked for another hour or so, then Knudsen headed for his office. John Lord O’Brian, former federal judge and general counsel for OPM, was working down the hall. Like Meigs, O’Brian had been urging Knudsen for months to publicly defend OPM’s record and himself from the flurry of attacks in the press. O’Brian had finally gotten Knudsen to agree to go on the radio and give the American people a concise report on what OPM had achieved in the ten months of its existence, and what it was planning to do next. The live broadcast was scheduled for that evening, on CBS radio.