Tuesday, January 20, 2015
On FDR's Proposal to Use WPA Workers with Zero Experience in the Armaments Industry to Manufacture Fighter-Planes in the Months Leading Up to Our Involvement in WW2
This was such a shaky idea that even the New York Times (a rag almost always sympathetic to the fascistic Roosevelt) didn't like it and that, folks, is saying a lot................................................................................................"It is not desirable to mix relief with national defense in the same program." November 16, 1938, page 22.
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4 comments:
Being retired from the 'armaments industry' FDR's proposal makes sense to me. We many imagine the
response to newspaper ads "wanted
800,000 experienced armaments workers. Nor was it just workers:
in my home town, a tire plant and
housewares factory were rapidly
converted to truck/aircraft tires/jungle boots and artillery shell casings and detonator housings. ...and they hired right off the street. When TCAAP was taken out of mothballs during the
VN conflict, the operation went from 2 security guards to 12,000
workers: there was a tiny core of
older folks that had worked there
during WWII, the rest flocked from
all over the Twin Cities. Consider as well, during the Manhattan Project, DuPont was asked to design, build and operate
a Plutonium plant and did so within a year. Do you suppose they hired 40,000 experienced
radiation experts?
8,000 of the 10,000 aircraft were to be built in privately owned factories by people who were far more skilled. Assuming that we needed 10,000 aircraft in 1938 (a shaky assumption at best), I personally would have had 10,000 of them made in the private plants.
As I recall, we built 80,000 aircraft during WWII: all in
private plants. Rosie the Riveter
seemed to be skilled enough for
them.
You're probably correct on the grand total. The 10,000 number was simply what he proposed in 1938, preparing for the war.
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