Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity

WARTIME SHIPYARD

DOROTHEA LANGE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES

CALIFORNIA

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON,ENGLAND

COPYRIGHT, I947, BY

THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

PREFACE

As THESE PAGES go to press, the war, which was the temporal occasion for their writing, is almost two years distant. The shipyard boom town, their spatial setting, is likewise gone, and the slap-slap of estuary water can be clearly heard in the silence that envelops slips and dry docks once clamorously busy.

But the subject which occupies this study is only incidentally a period past and a situation vanished. Its primary concern is not a wartime shipyard, but the people who during a war worked in a shipyard, and the attitudes they cherished. More specifically, it seeks to analyze these people and their attitudes in reference to the problem of social disunity. Both the war and the shipyard thus become merely the narrow and temporary context for discussion of a problem which extends in space over all the world and in time throughout human history.

The method of this analysis inevitably proceeds from fairly particular experiences to fairly general applications and conclusions. Such intellectual venturing, however, arises quite naturally from the facts which are its base. The wartime shipyard drew within its boundaries an extraordinarily large and representative sampling of the working masses of America. Furthermore, it constrained these workers to endure intimacies of

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contact which seemed almost to have been consciously intended to stimulate the fundamental mechanisms of disunity. The hatreds and suspicions which divide group from group were here displayed in wonderful detail and under brilliant light. No especial recklessness of mind was implied, therefore, in the expansion of shipyard observations into a larger sphere of investigation and debate.

Today in peace, more obviously than in war, the future of man depends on the emergence and the maintenance of inclusive social unities. Indeed, in this atomic age with complete catastrophe a present threat, the need grows ever more imperative for any knowledge which will illuminate the areas of social strain and make possible a strengthening of the communal structure. It is not in the service of a minor or merely academic issue then that this study makes its stand, but rather as a contribution to the understanding of a problem with which the living hopes and fears of men are intimately entangled. To the degree to which the story told here fulfills this purpose it remains, like the problem with which it deals, contemporary.

K. A.

Palo Abo, California

December 5,1946

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CONTENTS

THE SHIPYARD

THE PROBLEM OF DISUNITY

WOMEN IN THE SHIPYARD

OKIES

NEGROES

LESSER MINORITIES

THE PATTERN OF STATUS

UNIONS

CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

SHIPYARD NATIONALISM

SHIPYARD SOCIETY

THE CHALLENGE

THE SHIPYARD

THE SHIPYARD of the war years was a boom town of huddled buildings and long-necked cranes that rose overnight from the mud flats of a bay or river frontage. Through its gates passed twenty or thirty or forty thousand men and women every twenty-four hours. During most of their working time, as they moved singly or in scattered groups from one task to another, they were overshadowed and lost in the mass of what they built and the tools with which they built it. But when, with the rhythmic certainty of sunrise and sunset, the change-of-shift hours came, the real magnitude of the human force impounded behind the gates and miles-long fences became apparent. The inward flow coming on shift spilled into the yard reservoir, and filled it; and the homegoing surge poured forth, at first confined by the narrow funnel of the gates, then spreading out over the wide plain of the surrounding community and dwindling into a multitude of trickling streams. Three times a day, one society with common tasks and purposes was formed at the shipyard entrance while another emerged; but the unity of shipyard society was no greater than that of a boom town which collapses when the vein runs out. The only bond that held together its components, who were drawn from a continent of space and a whole nation of differing social

fl] backgrounds, was the chance and temporary pressure of a wartime need. Ships had to be built.

For months after December 7, 1941, the shipyards of the West Coast were ravenous for men, and they used effective propaganda to lure workers from all corners of the land. The bait was good: the wages offered were high, and the climate was a well-advertised bonus. Moreover, shipbuilding was an industry essential to the war effort, and many draft-age men were not unwilling to enlist in the industrial service. From farms where the lure of the city was legend, from small businesses dying on the vine, from offices where the draft blew icily down white collars, from lunchrooms that paid too little, from kitchen drudgery that had seemed inescapable, from professions that now in the excitement of wartime seemed boresome—f rom all these, and many other places and conditions, multitudes came to the shipyards. And the shipyards absorbed them all. Color, age, sex, soundness of limb did not matter; whoever could walk or lift a welder’s stinger was welcomed.

The variety of persons engaged in the actual handdirtying work of the yards was not quite infinite, of course. In terms of the social levels which were tapped there was a fairly consistent ceiling. The businessman, the man of wealth or influence, who desired to serve in an essential industry during the war period, seldom got farther inside the gates than the front office; and the

DOROTHEA LANGE

occasional patriotic clubwoman or socialite who ventured to put on a welder’s hood soon took it off and departed from the filth and clamor. For the most part, those who wore overalls in the shipyard had worn them before on the farm or in the factory, or at best, as office clerk or small-time salesman, had known the frayed white collar. The shipyard women were the wives and daughters of such men. The great expansion in the social areas reached by shipyard demands for manpower consisted in the lowering of the floor and the drawing in of the masses of the unskilled who were customarily ignored by peacetime industry. To the unlettered and untaught, the drifters and the failures, farmers and farm workers scrabbling on the borderline of subsistence, Negroes cramped in opportunity by prejudice, and women who in peacetime constituted only a reserve for casual and poorly paid work—to the entire group of the underprivileged, the exploited, and the unorganized the outburst of shipyard activity gave a chance to participate in the skilled trades and to partake of their rewards. Within these limits the shipyard world was extraordinarily mixed, and brought together in a working relationship many groups which ordinarily were separated by geographical and social barriers.

The differences that divide the people of the United States into regional groups and hierarchical layers were painfully juxtaposed in the shipyard settlement. It was a society larger, more varied, and more restless than that to which most of its components were accustomed; a society so irregular, indeed, as to confound every local tradition of proper social relationships. The white workers were compelled to associate with Negroes on terms of intimacy—an intimacy which to the southern whites, at least, was unusual and repugnant. Craftsmen reared in the exacting traditions of their trade were obliged to extract what service they could from the unskilled farm boy and, more shocking still, from women who smelled of the kitchen and the beauty parlor. And the very nature of the shipyards and the work that was done there were a continual reminder of the wartime demand for subordination of cherished localisms to larger social unities. The reminder might be resisted, but it could not be ignored.

The shipyard where I went to work in the late summer of 1942—of the Moore Dry Dock Company, Oakland, California—was representative of them all. Moore Dry Dock was an established industry which for nearly half a century had been carrying on some kind of shipbuilding and repair; it had seen one war boom come and go, and was now entering upon a second period of expansion which was to increase its personnel to the thirty-five thousand mark, add an entire new section to the plant (the West as distinguished from the old East Yard), and finally extend the equipment of modern ship construction and repair over a square mile of what had once been cattail-cluttered slough. It was an institution with some roots in the past; but the fertilization with government contracts produced here a wartime bloom that no old-timer would ever have recognized.

Fences and guarded gates, cranes and huddled buildings, men and women of many backgrounds, and tensions generated by many conflicting insularities—-these, during my first weeks at the yard, were so bewildering that in adapting myself I could not intelligently observe others as they too were affected by the new environment. For the first time in my adult life, moreover, I was brought actually into contact with the working masses of America, the vast group to which I had long since given my theoretical sympathies. I had come to the shipyards as an academician and a liberal whose experience with the social problems of America had been gained in libraries and the occasional concourse of like-thinking minds. My conclusions about the miseries of man, his insufficiencies and his conflicts, were orthodox; my solutions were simple, and, like others of my persuasion, I was confident of possessing truth in all its possible infallibility and brilliance. When I stepped from the world of theory into the wider world of fact, it was as if I had suddenly passed from the dimness of a monastic cell into the glare of an outdoor noon; and for a while, blinking and astonished, I could not distinguish the shapes of what I saw.

As I became adjusted to my new environment, I discovered that the magnitude of fact dwarfed my simple preconceptions. Where logic and liberal theory had promised some sense of unity among the shipyard workers, derived from their common interests and common status, I found in actuality differences and gaps—social abysses so deep that the possibility of spanning them never occurred, apparently, to right-minded people reared after a righteous custom. I found intolerance of slight linguistic and cultural differences so great that the ghosts of feudal snobbery seemed to have come alive. I found insularities so narrow as scarcely to be believed. Even among these people, for whose sake the liberal had contrived his dream of equalitarianism, I found that the lesser inequalities were cherished, and the weaker suppressed by the less weak. Where I had confidently expected unity of purpose and of action, I found only antagonism and turmoil.

THE PROBLEM OF DISUNITY

SOCIAL DISUNITY is as wide as the world and as deep as human history. Its larger consequences in war and revolution have been a chief source of the moralist’s sorrow and the cynic’s acrid scorn. Indeed, some students, observing the centrifugal forces continually at work within society, have defined the social bond as an artificial union of disparate elements which resist all constraint. Historical manifestations of social disunity have been twofold: vertical conflict has existed between competing classes, hierarchically arranged within a given social unit; and horizontal conflict has existed between separate groups which, while standing on a plain of relative equality, have marked their borderlines with fire and blood. In the course of centuries of restless struggle, sectors of the conflict have quieted in a partial settlement of their differences; the processes of democracy have begun to solve the difficulties arising from class distinctions, and expansion of the state has relieved several of the severest tensions of intergroup antagonism. But the problem of disunity as a whole still finds its unequivocal solution only in the realm of Utopian fancy and the uninhibited dream.

A unique poignancy attaches to the problem of social disunity as it exists in the American scene. For three centuries America gladly played host to the discontented and oppressed: there were horizons to be crossed, countless tasks in cities, forests, and mines awaited doing, and America asked few questions of those who came. The vision arose of this land as the crucible into which many elements of an old world could be melted, to emerge at last an alloy in one piece and of one quality. The conviction was widespread that the difference between classes, the ancient burden of those who came to America, would prove no lengthy problem to the wonderful metallurgy of the melting pot.

Confidence has since been lessened. To begin with, the economic basis of American civilization has changed. The far horizons are no more; the unexploited resources have dwindled, and as a consequence the children’s children of immigrants have chosen to exclude the immigrant lest the nation’s wealth be subjected to further sharing. More than two decades have passed since the door was shut on Europe and Asia—time enough for America’s continuities, its established boundaries and common traditions, to exert uninterrupted force upon the task of integrating a heterogeneous people; but that the crucible has failed to work its miracles has become more obvious, the deeper observers have probed into the presumed unity of American life. With the shock and horror of those who, after the dust storms, looked about and found eroded the once-level plains of the Southwest, the students of American society have awakened to find their dream plains of unity gashed by canyons which time serves only to deepen.

As the approach of World War II reemphasized America’s disunities, they became a subject of increasing concern; for war, of course, demands subordination of lesser disputes to the service of the common battle. In the frantic search for a unity of thought and action America discovered the depth of its social canyons. Regional antagonisms, race riots, class distinctions— these physical facts rudely disturbed the dream of One America. Facts they are, the facts of ever more devastating wars, and of continual cold hostilities between peoples which even more effectively have obscured the vision of a united world. A thousand facts, more resistant than stone, stand between the theorist and the dearest hope he cherishes of a society which from one viewpoint is single and indivisible and from another is exactly as diverse as the number of personalities composing it.

To the facts which are the basis of social disunity, to the deeds and attitudes which produce and maintain it, the academic liberal whose anxieties are centered in society and its fate must somehow find his way. With a sense of urgency befitting the time—for as the techniques of mass destruction grow more effective, the menace of disunity increases—he must pursue his search for the facts which are significant to analysis, explanation, and solution of the problem. These facts, moreover, are not primarily to be found in the writings of social theorists and philosophers, nor in the pronouncements of statesmen and the leaders of the mass, where heretofore they have commonly been sought, but rather in the obscure depths of society, in the back streets of cities and of small towns of the hinterland, and in the ordinary relationships of ordinary folk. For the tower of a structure is no more secure than the foundation on which it rests, and at the point of trial the ideals of world unity are no more substantial than the attitudes of the common people.

By many liberals, much responsibility for advance toward the equalitarian and universalistic goal has been credited to the common people. Tracing the connection between the disunities of society and the predatory interests of a ruling class, liberals have tended to assume that with the removal of the pernicious influences of power and of the insecurities which are the corollaries of a system of predation, group antagonism and oppression of minorities will at least be greatly ameliorated. The masses, they argue, are disunited against their own judgment and inclination, and inevitably will rediscover their rightful unity, first as a class and eventually in the vast harmony of an equalitarian society.

The logic of liberal reasoning is indisputable since