Victory at Home: Manpower and Race in the American South during World War II (review)

As Charles D. Chamberlain of the Louisiana State Museum points out, some of the greatest victories of World War II were won at home. The economic gains of workers, especially minority workers from the South, were among the most important of these, but as in the war against Germany and Japan, not every battle ended in triumph.

Chamberlain begins with the problems surrounding military construction projects in the South. Workers and their families flocked from far and wide to build these facilities, but poverty and lack of local housing led many to live in tents, trailers, and shack towns before moving on to other opportunities. Chamberlain is critical of the housing problems and regards the outcome as somewhat of a lost battle, but to this economist the outcome seems predictable and even optimal, given the costs of building more permanent housing and the need for speed in the overall strategy of the wartime economy.

As the war effort geared up, labor shortages plagued shipyards across the South. Yet few of these employers would hire black workers to fill the openings, especially in skilled positions. Black leaders battled to remove the barriers, but with little success. Ultimately, many skilled black workers left the region to find war jobs elsewhere. Why this self-inflicted wound? Chamberlain's primary villains are unions who blocked employers from hiring black workers, especially the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. In the most intriguing episode, Chamberlain recounts the plans of a New Orleans shipbuilder, Andrew Jackson Higgins, to hire skilled blacks on a Liberty ship contract. Before this breakthrough could be achieved, the contract was cancelled, perhaps as a result of machinations in the U.S. Maritime Commission, perhaps because of powerful local interests. Some of the story's details seem odd: for example, how could a $30 million contract have supported 40,000 to 100,000 jobs? Unfortunately, the sources do not allow Chamberlain to go much beyond what was reported in the local press.

While often turning away skilled black labor, southern employers sought to hang on to their low-paid, unskilled workers (white, black, and Hispanic), sometimes attempting to use the law to immobilize them. Local boards granted draft deferments to those with agricultural jobs, threatening to revoke the deferments if the workers left. To avoid labor "pirating," authorities made it illegal in many cases to hire a worker without a "statement of availability." In one notable case, a labor recruiter was jailed for a year for his unlicensed activities. Yet such efforts appear to have been haphazard and generally ineffective. Often government authorities battled among themselves, some promoting migration, others attempting to thwart it. Their efforts seem to have been a mere sideshow, as ambitious, determined workers were "on the train and gone" to better opportunities before anyone could do anything about it. In addition, some southern employers were not even allowed to compete, as they were locked into low pay by wage controls. Southern workers apparently found their most welcome reception in the West, where black workers made significant, though limited, progress in challenging racial segregation.

The end of the war, with the help of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), granted black workers increased opportunities in the southern defense industry (especially the aircraft industry). Chamberlain describes the process by which black leaders pried these doors open, negotiating more openings for black workers. Although he details many dates and names, again his sources cannot take him to the heart of the matter: Why did some employers open up while others did not? What did black leaders and FEPC officials say and do? Chamberlain credits their success to persuasion rather than to any implicit threat of force. Did employers want to open up in order to increase their...