Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People

Chapter 6: The War and After

119 Chapter 6 The War and After World War II brought more excitement to Portland than anything since the great Exposition. In the language of city officials who worried about problems of the home front, the Portland metropolis was a “congested war production area.” But in terms of the pace of daily life, it was a boom town—another Leadville or Dawson City with defense contracts in place of gold and silver mines. Newfound prosperity came from a single industry—shipbuilding. The first federal orders for new ships went to the Commercial Iron Company, the Albina Shipyard, and Albina Iron and Steel in 1940 and 1941. Industrialist Henry Kaiser of California, fresh from helping to build Boulder and Grand Coulee dams, also opened the huge Oregon Shipbuilding Company at St. Johns in 1941. His Swan Island and Vancouver yards went into production two months after Pearl Harbor. At the peak of wartime production in 1943 and 1944, metropolitan Portland counted 140,000 defense workers. Federal contracts totaled $2.4 billion for more than a thousand oceangoing ships. The record-breaker for construction time was a Liberty ship launched on September 23, 1942, less than 11 days after workers laid down its keel. The boom brought thousands of new faces to Portland. The Kaiser yards placed help-wanted ads in 11 states. The response nearly emptied the rest of Oregon, and drew the unemployed from small towns in Idaho and Montana. Workers arrived on chartered trains from the East Coast. The Portland-area population grew from 501,000 to 661,000 between 1940 and 1944. One could safely assume, in the war years, that every third person standing in line for the bus or a double feature was new to town. Phenomenal growth brought unprecedented problems for local governments. The job explosion on the north side of the city strained public 120 portland in three centuries transportation in an era of gasoline and tire rationing. Two hundred new buses, 150 trucks, and ferry service across the Willamette to Swan Island were scarcely enough to keep up with the demand. The tens of thousands of shipyard workers, many of whom were unmarried or without their families, also had money for liquor, gambling, and prostitution. While the circulation of books from the public library dropped, the pari-mutuel handle at the dog tracks skyrocketed. A cleanup drive in 1942 swept out the red-light district north of Burnside. Gamblers, however, simply moved their shops to the side streets, and prostitution dispersed but didn’t disappear. City officials complained that it was difficult to protect public safety when the military services had taken nearly half of the city’s police officers and firefighters. With a seemingly endless demand for workers, the Portland and Vancouver shipyards provided high-paying jobs for tens of thousands of Portland women. By the end of 1943, 20,500 women made up a quarter of the Kaiser workforce. One out of three of these women filled the sorts of office jobs that were already open to women, but hundreds of others who had recently graduated from training classes at Benson High filled jobs as electricians, painters, machinists, and pipefitters. Women at Swan Island, Kaiser-Vancouver, Commercial Ironworks, Willamette Iron and Steel, and smaller firms were tool checkers, shipfitters, warehouse clerks, and shipwright helpers. More than 5,000 earned what was then an impressive $1.20 per hour as welders. Welder Ree Adkins later remembered that “in all this kind of work, the women and men were paid the same . . . there didn’t seem to be a speck of jealousy. The men did the same things that we did.” Another woman recalled of herself and a friend, “We both had to work, we both had children, so we became welders, and if I might say so, damn good ones.” Newly employed mothers relied on a quickly devised child care system made possible by federal subsidies to the schools, to nonprofit agencies, and to employers. Kaiser’s special Women’s Services Department operated child care centers on round-the-clock shifts synchronized with those of the shipyards and provided take-out meals that could be ordered ahead of time and picked up by busy wives on their way home. By the time the United States entered the war, few observers thought Portland would be able to cope with its growth. Long-time residents regarded their new neighbors with mixed emotions—puzzlement, hostility, and often jealousy of their relatively high wages. “The people...