Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run

By Sarah Jo Peterson

Before Franklin Roosevelt declared December 7 to be a “date which will live in infamy”; before American soldiers landed on D-Day; before the B-17s, B-24s, and B-29s roared over Europe and Asia, there was Willow Run. Located twenty-five miles west of Detroit, the bomber plant at Willow Run and the community that grew up around it attracted tens of thousands of workers from across the United States during World War II. Together, they helped build the nation’s “Arsenal of Democracy,” but Willow Run also became the site of repeated political conflicts over how to build suburbia while mobilizing for total war.
In Planning the Home Front, Sarah Jo Peterson offers readers a portrait of the American people—industrialists and labor leaders, federal officials and municipal leaders, social reformers, industrial workers, and their families—that lays bare the foundations of community, the high costs of racism, and the tangled process of negotiation between New Deal visionaries and wartime planners. By tying the history of suburbanization to that of the home front, Peterson uncovers how the United States planned and built industrial regions in the pursuit of war, setting the stage for the suburban explosion that would change the American landscape when the war was won.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: May 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226025568

Book preview

Sarah Jo Peterson is an independent scholar with over twenty years of experience in urban planning.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13       1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02542-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02556-8 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peterson, Sarah Jo, author.

Planning the home front : building bombers and communities at Willow Run / Sarah Jo Peterson.

pages cm.—(Historical studies of urban America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-02542-1 (cloth: alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-02556-8 (e-book)

1. Willow Run Industrial Complex—History.   2. Willow Run (Mich.)—History—20th century.   3. Airplane factories—Michigan—Willow Run.   4. World War, 1939–1945—Influence.   I. Title.   II. Series: Historical studies of urban America.

F574.W5P48 2013

940.53'77435—dc23

2012043150

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Planning the Home Front

Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run

SARAH JO PETERSON

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

HISTORICAL STUDIES OF URBAN AMERICA

Edited by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, James R. Grossman, and Becky M. Nicolaides

ALSO IN THE SERIES:

Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities

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Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago

by Lilia Fernandez

Building a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Industry, 1914–1960

by Richard Harris

Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities

by Carl H. Nightingale

Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago

by Tobias Brinkmann

In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820–1930

by Peter C. Baldwin

Miss Cutler and the Case of the Resurrected Horse: Social Work and the Story of Poverty in America, Australia, and Britain

by Mark Peel

The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin

by Christopher Klemek

I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago

by Cynthia M. Blair

Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City

by Lorrin Thomas

Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia

by Jordan Stanger-Ross

New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era

by Jennifer Fronc

Additional series titles follow index

TO THE PEOPLE OF YPSILANTI

CITY AND TOWNSHIP

PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

Contents

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Chronology

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. The Bomber Plant

CHAPTER 2. The Local Response to Sudden Industrialization

CHAPTER 3. Housing for Defense

CHAPTER 4. The Battle for Bomber City

CHAPTER 5. What’s Wrong with Willow Run?

CHAPTER 6. Building Bombers

CHAPTER 7. Building Communities

CHAPTER 8. A Bomber an Hour

CHAPTER 9. Confronting Race

CONCLUSION

Acknowledgments

Archival Sources and Collection Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Series List

Illustrations

1. The five counties surrounding Detroit, 1941

2. Ypsilanti defense area, 1942

3. Willow Run Bomber Plant, 1942

4. Living in a roughed in house, 1941

5. Advertisement for the Currier Defense Home, 1942

6. Stonorov, Reuther, and Thomas standing behind a model of Defense City, 1941

7. The planned school and town center for the town of Willow Run, 1942

8. Housing designs submitted by Stonorov and Kahn, 1942

9. Bomber plant assembly line, 1943

10. Truman Committee on inspection tour, 1943

11. Trailer housing, March 1943

12. Children in front of trailer home, March 1943

13. An example of engineering for mass production

14. Drill press lineup

15. Demonstrating spot welding

16. Transportation at the bomber plant

17. Federal war housing at Inkster, 1943

18. Federal war housing at Norwayne, 1943

19. Detroit race riot, 1943

20. Park Ridge Recreation Center, Ypsilanti

21. B-24 Liberator flying over Michigan, October 1944

Abbreviations

ACAD

Automotive Council for Air Defense

AFL

American Federal of Labor

AMPC

Area Manpower Priorities Committee

APB

Aircraft Production Board

APUC

Area Production Urgency Committee

ARBA

American Road Builders Association

CCCA

Carver Community Center Association

CCPA

Committee for Congested Production Areas

CDVO

Civilian Defense Volunteer Office (Washtenaw County)

CHC

Central Housing Committee

CIO

Congress of Industrial Organizations

DHC

Detroit Housing Commission

DPC

Defense Plant Corporation

DSR

Detroit Street Railways

DVC

Detroit Victory Council

FHA

Federal Housing Administration

FPHA

Federal Public Housing Authority

FSA

Federal Security Agency

FWA

Federal Works Agency

HOLC

Home Owners’ Loan Corporation

NDAC

National Defense Advisory Commission

NHA

National Housing Agency

NLRB

National Labor Relations Board

NRPB

National Resources Planning Board

OPA

Office of Price Administration

OPM

Office of Production Management

OWI

Office of War Information

PBA

Public Buildings Administration

PWA

Public Works Administration

TVA

Tennessee Valley Authority

UAW

United Automobile Workers

UCW

United Construction Workers Organizing Committee

USC

Unitarian Service Committee

USES

United States Employment Service

USHA

United States Housing Authority

WMC

War Manpower Commission

WPA

Work Projects Administration [after 1939]

WPA

Works Progress Administration

WPB

War Production Board

WRARP

Willow Run Area Recreation Project

WRCC

Willow Run Community Council

Chronology

Defense

May 1940

President Roosevelt requests 50,000 new military aircraft.

October 14, 1940

Lanham Act is adopted, funding public housing for defense workers.

February 21, 1941

Army Air Corps issues letters of intent to Ford Motor Company for B-24 production.

March 1, 1941

Senate Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program (Truman Committee) is formed.

March 28, 1941

Title VI added to the National Housing Act, creating a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) program that insures mortgages in defense areas.

April 18, 1941

Ford Motor Company breaks ground for the Willow Run Bomber Plant.

June 28, 1941

Lanham Act is amended to include funds for community public works.

October 1941

Truman Committee investigates the Currier contract for Lanham Act housing in Michigan.

November 12, 1941

President Roosevelt approves a survey of possibilities for the UAW’s Defense City.

War

December 7, 1941

The Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor.

January 21, 1942

Lanham Act amendments allow public war housing to be built to temporary standards.

February 18, 1942

Frederic Delano, chair of the National Resources Planning Board, visits Detroit to coordinate federal plans for Willow Run.

February 24, 1942

Formation of the National Housing Agency (NHA).

February 28, 1942

Sojourner Truth Housing riots in Detroit.

April 9, 1942

War Production Board (WPB) prohibits all nonessential construction.

May 5, 1942

NHA announces plans for Bomber City, a 6,000-unit permanent community for Willow Run workers.

May 26, 1942

Title VI amendments focus the FHA’s programs on housing for war workers.

June 1942

Employment at Willow Run reaches 22,435 workers.

July 22, 1942

Truman Committee holds hearings on Bomber City.

August 27, 1942

Michigan State Police evict bomber plant workers camped out near the plant because of the crowded, unsanitary conditions.

August 29, 1942

WPB approves Bomber City after reducing it to 2,500 units.

September 10, 1942

Willow Run Bomber Plant produces its first B-24.

September 12, 1942

Willow Run access roads are dedicated.

October 6, 1942

Bomber City is converted to temporary housing at the UAW’s request.

December 11, 1942

WPB and NHA codify a joint housing policy, restricting public war housing to temporary construction.

December 1942

Aircraft Production Board adopts production targets under Schedule 8-L.

February 1943

Willow Lodge dormitories open, the first public housing for bomber plant workers.

Employment at Willow Run climbs to 37,133 workers.

Truman Committee begins an investigation into Willow Run’s production problems.

April 5, 1943

Ford agrees to move B-24 production processes away from Willow Run and subcontract with other manufacturers.

April 7, 1943

President Roosevelt issues an executive order creating the Committee for Congested Production Areas.

May 26, 1943

Edsel Ford dies.

June 20, 1943

Detroit race riots.

June 1943

Willow Run employment peaks at 42,506 workers.

August 11, 1943

Army Air Forces confronts Ford on the bomber plant’s repeated failure to meet production schedules.

August 1943

The first temporary family apartments at Willow Village open.

December 3, 1943

Detroit–Willow Run Congested Production Area is designated.

December 1943

Willow Village war population peaks at 1,728 families.

March 1944

Production peaks at Willow Run; one B-24 completed every 63 minutes.

June 1944

Employment at Willow Run falls to 28,411 workers.

July 1944

Willow Village accepts its first African American tenants.

March 9, 1945

Ribbon-cutting ceremony is held for the Willow Run to Detroit expressway.

April 1945

War Department awards the Army-Navy E award for production excellence to the Willow Run Bomber Plant.

June 28, 1945

Bomber production ceases at Willow Run with B-24 number 8,685.

Introduction

As the United States watched the conflict in Europe and Asia expanding into World War II, the country turned to its industrial centers for national defense. Detroit, one of the world’s manufacturing powerhouses, figured large in the federal government’s plans. Indeed, Detroit soon became known as the Arsenal of Democracy, and Ford Motor Company’s Willow Run Bomber Plant became one of the most famous industrial facilities of the war. Willow Run, however, was not actually in Detroit, but 25 miles to the west, in mostly rural Washtenaw County near the small city of Ypsilanti. The Arsenal of Democracy, it turned out, was not a city, but a metropolitan area fragmented into cities and suburbs.

In early 1941, Ford Motor Company persuaded a skeptical federal government that an automaker could mass-produce sophisticated four-engine bombing airplanes, winning a contract for B-24 Liberators. Beyond Detroit’s farthest western suburb, a giant factory began rising out of former soybean fields. Located in Ypsilanti Township, just inside Washtenaw County’s eastern border, and named for a nearby creek, the Willow Run Bomber Plant grew to 67 acres under one roof, briefly claiming the title the largest manufacturing plant in the world. The adjoining Willow Run Airport covered 1,400 acres in far western Van Buren Township, in Wayne County. Projected employment reached 100,000 workers, 20,000 more than the entire population of Washtenaw County in 1940. This one mammoth facility, straddling county borders, wrenched Washtenaw County into the world of large-scale industrialization, into metropolitan Detroit, and into World War II.

Three potential solutions, proposed in the latter half of 1941 and early 1942, claimed to solve the problem of the bomber plant’s distance from the thousands of industrial workers in Detroit: an express highway, a model city, and an expansion of existing suburbia. The state highway department, with Ford Motor Company support, proposed tethering the bomber plant to Detroit with Michigan’s first expressway. Promoting dreams of a union-backed model city sheltering defense workers, Oscar Stonorov, an architect, and Walter Reuther, of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union, won over the federal government’s public housing policymakers. The expressway and the model city were experimental visions. They were also solutions looking for the right problem: both ideas predated the bomber plant. Fearing the prospect of a model city built by the federal government, the real estate industry, local governments, and the Federal Housing Administration stepped up efforts to adapt long-standing patterns of suburbanization to changing times. Any urban expansion, they argued, should take place in existing suburban communities with housing built by the private sector.

The expressway, the model city, and suburban expansion vied with one another for federal support and, as defense turned into war, for federal approval. Proponents rallied around their preferred solutions while denigrating competing proposals, and a bit of Ford-led political theater at a critical moment sparked an investigation in the US Senate. Federal officials spent the summer of 1942 wrestling with how to proceed. During the impasse, the deepening war and the military’s pressure on construction materials forced the parties—especially the UAW—to reconsider tying their suburban ambitions to war. The federal government settled on a some-for-all compromise: giving the go-ahead to the expressway and emphasizing dormitories, while trimming the allocation of construction materials to both public housing and the private housing industry.

While waiting for the limited housing approved in the federal compromise, thousands of in-migrants wintered at Willow Run in a suburban slum of haphazardly parked trailers, crowded tarpaper shacks, and tents. Despite the expressway under construction from the bomber plant to Detroit, workers struggled to cope with long commutes compounded by rubber and gasoline rationing. All this hardship, however, may have received little notice except that the celebrated bomber plant, promoted as a symbol of American manufacturing might, began to miss its production schedules. From late 1941 through 1943, Willow Run remained in the national spotlight and received attention critical of the local and federal, public and private, and proposed and actual handling of the area’s industrialization and development. Americans asked themselves, were poor housing, inadequate community facilities, and failing transportation networks in places like Willow Run and Detroit prolonging the war?

Building bombers required building communities, even in wartime, and building communities for Willow Run meant forging alliances to accrue the benefits of cooperation and coordination. Through the efforts of Ypsilanti and the other local communities, the UAW, the military, the government, Ford Motor Company, and—not to be underestimated—the workers and their families, the Willow Run Bomber Plant eventually overcame the handicaps of its distant location and inadequate infrastructure. By 1944, B-24s rolled out of the plant at the stunning rate of a bomber an hour. As production accelerated, the number of workers actually declined, and the disputed public housing units, which had been designated for white workers only, began to empty.

At the same time, the June 1943 Detroit race riot, the deadliest riot of the war, shamed the federal government on the world stage and drew federal and local attention to the plight of African Americans. Willow Run’s vacant government housing pulled Washtenaw County into a metropolitan controversy over whether Detroit or its suburbs should house the increasing numbers of in-migrating African Americans. As both Detroit and its suburbs successfully fought off federal efforts to persuade—even force—communities to accommodate housing for African Americans, Willow Run peacefully accepted its first black tenants.

This is the story of Willow Run, a bomber plant and a community born of war. It is also the story of how the federal government mobilized the American home front. Planned before the official American entry into war, Willow Run became the way federal officials understood the extremes of mobilization during the defense and early war years. Because major decisions about the plant and its workers coincided with crucial transitions in the country’s mobilization policy, federal interactions with Willow Run helped define the limits of federal action. The national press covered Willow Run even before its birth, publicizing each confident step and embarrassing stumble along the way, making the plant and the community important parts of how the American people understood the course of the war effort and their role in it. Any study of the mobilization of the American home front for World War II is not complete without Detroit, Ypsilanti, and Willow Run.

War mobilization wrapped the federal government into the decades-old process of industrial suburbanization. Federal officials recognized that the situation seemed to require a coordinated response guided by a comprehensive perspective on how urban areas functioned: they recognized the need for planning. Attempts at planning, however, quickly appeared to fall short. Indeed, for many, the type of planning the federal government engaged in often made it look like no planning was going on at all. Worse, decision making seemed to become mired in political conflict. Bemoaning the lack of planning on the home front, however, missed the importance of the actual planning process at work. The United States used a participatory planning approach to mobilize the American home front. In this planning process, the top-down engaged the bottom-up, federal production objectives joined local objectives for building communities, and interest group politics were harnessed for total war.

Defense and War

Federal war mobilization was messy. In four years, the federal bureaucratic structure shifted four times, creating an alphabet soup of agencies that made the New Deal look like a thin gruel. The following overview describes the federal government’s mobilization efforts for World War II.

Early Defense

Preparations began in 1938 and 1939 when the federal government embarked on various studies of military capacity and of what it would take to mobilize the country for war.¹ During this time, the Army Air Corps first engaged Consolidated Aircraft in discussions of a large bombing airplane to supplement, and compete with, Boeing’s B-17. Formal organization for defense—preparedness, as it was termed at the time—began in 1940. President Roosevelt reactivated the mobilization structure used for World War I, soon known as the National Defense Advisory Commission (NDAC). Funding from Congress expanded both munitions production and the military forces. On September 16, 1940, the first peacetime draft in American history became law. A month later Congress enacted the Lanham Act, which funded building home front communities for defense and eventually war.

Late Defense

In 1941, defense contracts began flowing, steadily but unevenly. For communities receiving contracts, the defense boom was underway. The need for a more powerful federal agency focused on fulfilling the contracts—getting the factories built, the labor in place, and the assembly lines running—became apparent. The Office of Production Management replaced the National Defense Advisory Commission. Prosperity began to return to the communities hosting defense expansion, but so did the stresses, forgotten since the 1920s, of sudden urban growth. Congress held hearings on the problems caused by defense migration, expanded the Lanham Act, and provided incentives to encourage the private sector to build housing affordable to industrial workers. Determined that African Americans not be left out of the new prosperity, civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph called on 100,000 people to join a march on Washington on July 1, 1941, to protest discrimination in the military and defense jobs. In late June, President Roosevelt issued an executive order prohibiting employment discrimination in defense industries and government.

Competition for resources between military and consumer production resulted in the first scarcity of aluminum, copper, and steel—materials crucial to munitions production—and triggered the beginnings of controls on what had suddenly become the civilian economy. With the strains starting to show in the economy as a whole, a political fracas ensued between the all-outers and the partial-outers. Business leaders seeking to maintain civilian consumption found an unlikely ally in the military, and together they fought pressure to accelerate preparedness coming from a group made up mostly of New Deal liberals. As Donald Nelson, the former Sears executive who joined the federal government during the defense years, said of the officials facing these seemingly irresolvable arguments: They were confronted by too many riddles that time alone could answer.²

Early War

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor ended the uncertainty. Early in 1942, President Roosevelt pushed for a level of war production dwarfing the previous defense expansion. The federal government reorganized for war, creating a host of new agencies and placing the War Production Board (WPB), with Nelson as its chief, in a position seemingly supreme above all. The military soon increased demands beyond even what the all-outers had called for, and the civilian war production officials struggled to convince the military services to rein in their demands to what was feasible. War production officials obsessed over bottlenecks, and accusing a rival of business as usual became an attempt at an insult. Controls descended on the civilian economy in the forms of rationing and the prohibition of all but essential economic activities, including new construction. But since war precipitated even greater migration, debates raged in the executive branch, in Congress, and on the streets of American communities about what basic living standards were indeed essential for a productive workforce. African American newspapers answered this question with the Double V campaign: victory over the enemies abroad and over inequality at home.³

In 1943, production officials planned to double 1942’s war production. The war production apparatus seemed to flounder at times—indeed, as Nelson acknowledged, more often than not, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. It may not even have met the left hand socially.⁴ Despite this, production facilities opened and materials flowed through them, but how to secure an adequate and stable workforce became an increasing dilemma. Or, as they would have said, they had manpower problems. In response, the various military branches and federal agencies organized ad hoc approaches that attempted to coordinate building communities for war; the only formal organization adopted was the effective—but limited and short-lived—Committee for Congested Production Areas.

Late War

Confronted with the manpower crisis in dozens of industrial areas deemed congested, President Roosevelt created another, more powerful agency—the Office of War Mobilization—to oversee all the federal agencies, including the War Production Board. Controls on workers spread throughout the country. War production in 1944 consisted of managing a more or less successful system while troubleshooting problems in specific plants and localities. Still, any attempts to boost the civilian economy failed in the face of the military’s opposition. In early 1945, President Roosevelt, finally succumbing to the military’s exaggerated fears that the home front was losing interest in the war effort, publicly endorsed national service legislation that amounted to a draft on labor. Behind the scenes and with victory over the Axis powers near, production officials contemplated how to bring the war industries to an end.

A Metropolitan War: Cities, Suburbs, and Planning

From the metropolitan perspective, three characteristics dominated the American home front: industrial expansion, migration, and suburbanization.⁵ The Detroit metropolitan area ranked second only to the New York City metropolitan area in its share of the $180 billion worth of defense and war supply contracts. As millions of Americans moved out of the nation’s interior to coastal and Great Lake states, Michigan was second to only California in terms of numbers of in-migrants. Much of Detroit’s nearly $14 billion in contracts went to plants in the suburbs, as did most of Detroit’s war migrants.⁶

The federal government’s policy of awarding defense contracts for new plants on the periphery of cities accentuated the pattern of industrial suburbanization that had characterized American manufacturing regions for decades. The city of Detroit, contributing to the war effort what Roger Lotchin calls the latent military resources of cities, engaged in production through the conversion of existing factories, receiving only one new war plant. Miles outside of Detroit’s borders, the federal government approved the construction of not only the Willow Run Bomber Plant, but other industrial facilities, including the Chrysler Tank Plant and the Hudson Naval Ordinance.⁷

Given the location of many of the new plants, the in-migrant populations concentrated in the suburban areas of industrial metropolitan regions, not the old central cities. Between April 1, 1940, and June 1, 1944, the population of the four counties surrounding Detroit and Willow Run increased by 200,000 residents, yet Detroit itself only gained 30,000 people. Detroit was actually losing white population during the war years. The total increase in nonwhite population, assumed to be overwhelmingly African American, was double that of the population increase of the city as a whole. The white population of the Detroit metropolitan area was decentralizing, but so was the nonwhite population. Population increases in the black neighborhoods of places like Ypsilanti, Inkster, Ecorse Township, and Royal Oak Township outpaced the rising numbers of African Americans in Detroit. Industrial decentralization and political fragmentation went hand in hand. During the 1940s, the twenty-six cities in the three counties making up the traditional Detroit metropolitan area—Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb—grew into thirty-four cities and seventeen townships with more than 10,000 residents each. And old cities like Ypsilanti, on the far edge of suburbanization, found themselves firmly absorbed into the metropolitan region.⁸

FIGURE 1. Cities in the five counties surrounding Detroit; city boundaries based on a map submitted to the US Senate’s Defense Migration Hearings in 1941. Map by Harry D. Johnson.

Willow Run, in the extremes of its size, location, and importance to the war effort, brought into bold relief the challenges the federal government faced when interacting with the country’s metropolitan regions. With the plant and airport located on unincorporated land 25 miles from Detroit, but with its workforce drawn from a 50-mile radius, this new Willow Run community was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. With whom, exactly, should federal officials be interacting? The industrialists? Labor unions? The business community? State government? The literally dozens of local governments? Or the social agencies that operated separately from both government and private sector? Local leaders recognized that the situation seemed to require regional cooperation, if not regional consolidation, but the situation also allowed local interests to respond to Willow Run as simply not their responsibility.⁹

FIGURE 2. A regional map of the Ypsilanti defense area based on maps prepared by Karl J. Belser in January 1942; Box 3, Belser Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Map by Harry D. Johnson.

Because home-front mobilization meant managing growth on the fringes of industrial metropolitan areas, it required a set of actions commonly caught under the rubric of urban planning. Whether this pattern of industrial suburbanization should be encouraged divided members of the planning profession. Already in July 1940, prominent planners such as Rexford G. Tugwell worried that accelerating industrial suburbanization could well mean that we are going to have to allow the city itself to be ruined, but others in his profession saw things differently. Tracey Augur, who would later join federal planners at Willow Run, posited that if perchance, the very horror of the thought of New York, Chicago, or San Francisco subjected to a rain of shells impels us to a redistribution of these overgrown metropolises on some saner pattern, . . . [the] war will thus have served at least one constructive purpose. The time for debate, however, was short and its conclusions mostly outside the control of planning experts.¹⁰

The more pressing question was how to plan, manage, and support this massive new investment in industrial capacity. Applying urban planning to total war meant applying the understanding of the interrelated functional parts of metropolitan areas and the insights of a comprehensive perspective to a fast-moving set of incremental decisions about mobilizing for war. For Willow Run, the challenge was to integrate the bomber plant into southeastern Michigan’s industrial, social, and political landscape. Take, first, where workers would live. Should they live near the isolated plant, minimizing transportation but requiring new housing, or should workers live in built-up areas, minimizing the need to extend utilities and community services but requiring long commutes? The conclusion that new housing was necessary led to debates about the relative merits of dormitories and family housing, public and for-profit housing, and permanent and temporary housing. Was just housing enough, or did complete communities provide the better approach? The required amounts of housing and infrastructure, moreover, were predicated on expected labor shortages that only in-migration could relieve. The severity of the labor shortages, in turn, depended on how successfully the manufacturers recruited local women and racial minorities into an industrial labor force traditionally dominated by white men. Weighing the myriad alternatives and making the necessary trade-offs to manage the industrial mobilization of metropolitan areas would seem to require all the leadership and expertise in comprehensive planning that the federal government could muster.

But what actually happened was something distant from the ideals of comprehensive planning; the journalist Agnes Meyer captured the national mood when she titled her 1943 tour of the American home front Journey through Chaos. The experience at Willow Run confirms the conclusion of the urban planner and planning historian Mel Scott: Throughout the war, most production centers presented a spectacle of innumerable federal agencies, the military, state and local governments, voluntary organizations, and private enterprises struggling against tremendous odds to achieve a reasonable degree of coordination. That ships slid down ahead of schedule and plants exceeded their production quotas seemed at times inexplicable. For Scott, American production success seemed at times inexplicable because as a professional planner of the time he operated under a paradigm that assumed the need for the comprehensive reorganization of the physical environment. He knew that when it came to mobilizing metropolitan areas for war, no comprehensive planning accounted for America’s prodigious wartime accomplishments.¹¹

Although the New Deal had brought planning techniques and perspectives into the federal government through the housing and public works programs, the Greenbelt new towns, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and most notably the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), planning’s foothold in the federal government was neither wide nor deep. Although the New Deal forged new relationships between the federal government and city governments, the Roosevelt administration worked with and for interest groups identified with urban areas, but did not develop a comprehensive urban program. The suburban Greenbelt new towns, only three of which got off the ground, were meant to be experimental demonstration projects. By the late 1930s, members of the press and others were criticizing the new towns as controversial examples of the New Deal’s tendency to be utopian, expensive, and impractical. The TVA, a laudable experiment in rural regional planning, did not center on urban questions. Nor did it exemplify the strong hand of federally directed planning. The Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) also enlarged the federal capacity to shape the physical landscape by constructing the more mundane structures of built environments—streets, water systems, sewer systems, schools, and hospitals. This capacity, however, developed around using public works to spread unemployment relief, not around the types of disciplined infrastructure interventions that served a war effort. Still, during the 1940s the federal government depended on numerous personnel whose experience developed during their stints in the PWA and WPA.¹²

As a profession and a field, urban planning claimed to contribute by being capable of thinking both comprehensively and long-term, but the discipline struggled in part because defense and war boom conditions across the country often zoomed past sound planning principles and overwhelmed planning studies before they could even get off the ground.¹³ Nothing about defense or war, moreover, changed the role played by planning in American governmental structures; planning was an advisory function. The most visible federal planning agency, the National Resources Planning Board, produced voluminous reports but had no implementation authority. At both federal and local levels, the power to make decisions belonged to others. While all parties recognized that experts had a role to play, they frequently exercised their right to challenge the experts’ conclusions and substitute their own recommendations. Still, persons identified with the profession of urban planning—from luminaries including Frederic Delano, chair of the NRPB, to the unnamed staff in local planning offices producing the numerous field studies—did offer their expertise and services to the many challenges and problems posed by war mobilization.¹⁴

Nor did planners’ comprehensive and long-term perspective lead them to a consistent set of conclusions about the proper metropolitan response to the threat and then reality of war. There were those like Oscar Stonorov and other modern housers who thought comprehensive and longterm meant building entire new communities to advance their vision of recast and revitalized metropolitan areas.¹⁵ Other planners, such as the authors of the Architectural Forum’s 1940 Defense Plan for the City, used their long-term and comprehensive perspective to advise city leaders to balance sudden expansion with maintenance of amenities and financial stability. To avoid the fever of war hysteria that severely damaged many American communities in World War I, the authors argued that cities should negotiate with industrialists, the business community, and the federal government to protect the status quo. They advised their hypothetical City to permit the Chemical Company only a limited expansion to protect the adjacent neighborhood of single-family houses; to scrutinize with skepticism proposals for inexpensive housing on the city’s outskirts; and to inform the War Department that stationing troops at the Old Fort would cause traffic congestion. Yet this sample defense plan took the possibility of war very seriously: one-third of its text describes organizing blackouts and constructing air-raid shelters!¹⁶

And thus, perhaps, it was all for the good that urban planning experts were not in charge, that their voices were just among the many that directed, shaped, and challenged the federal government as it mobilized the country for war.

Democracy, Federalism, and Participatory Planning

The New Deal and World War II are generally considered the high point of what scholars of American intergovernmental relations call cooperative federalism. Under cooperative federalism, no level of government has enough power on its own to achieve its objectives and keep its constituents happy. The federal government needs the cooperation—that is, participation—of state and/or local governments, and vice versa. Involved in an interdependent relationship, the levels of government bind themselves through bargaining and negotiation. But cooperative does not necessarily mean harmonious. Significant conflict can occur, although shared interests keep all parties engaged.¹⁷

The power that the federal government lacked during World War II was not authority, but capacity. It could not fight, and win, the war on its own. Seeking to move quickly while minimizing disruptions, the federal government tried to use existing social and economic structures and avoided, if at all possible, inventing new ways of acting. Already in the defense years, however, the federal government began to pressure metropolitan areas to adopt the federal agenda: the speedy and efficient production of the weapons of war.

Equally important was the commitment to showing the world and the home front that a democracy could marshal itself for total war, and one of the hallmarks of the American democracy was the separation of powers under federalism. Respecting this separation, however, meant that much of what affected how well metropolitan areas functioned was firmly in the province of state and local governments, which, in turn, depended on the private sector. Patriotism, of course, was a powerful motivating tool. The federal government exploited patriotism through the expectation that groups would contribute; federal officials went into negotiations asking How will you help? not Will you help? The appeal to patriotism, though, had its limits. Especially during the defense period, groups across the political spectrum were more than willing to use their patriotism as a bargaining chip. And as victory came into sight, the military became increasingly concerned that voluntary cooperation on the home front was waning.

Winning the war, therefore, was a compelling shared interest, but not necessarily a singular nor even an overwhelming interest. Between 1940 and 1945, metropolitan areas and the nation experienced two distinct phases of interest group politics. In 1940 and 1941, interest groups competed for a share of the expanding pie of federal defense dollars. Though opportunism dominated, the climate cultivated a flowering of innovation. After Pearl Harbor, the competition to be included changed into a competition to avoid being excluded. Without the time or raw materials to provide everything that a normally functioning metropolitan area required, the trade-offs had to be explicit. Instead of just showing how their interest served national defense, advocates had to convince Washington that their interest served the war effort better than a competing group’s interest. This, in turn, led some groups to redefine or narrow what they considered to be in their interest.

The federal government dictated the goal, but federal policy left many of the means to the local level—and often to individuals—creating a type of planning that combined the top-down and the bottom-up, although not always smoothly. Indeed, many of the means would qualify for what Leonie Sandercock calls planning as community building or planning as self-help, community solidarity, and community organizing for social and economic development.¹⁸ Federal officials tolerated debate and dissent over the means, and local interests quickly learned that federal bureaucrats were open to pressure and that mobilization policy was malleable. The mobilization agencies wavered between exerting federal authority to meet war objectives and respecting, even insisting on, local control. This dynamic pressured the fragmented and oftentimes parochial local governments to find ways to cooperate with each other and with higher levels of government and forced local leaders to decide whether to put local interests above what someone else, usually the federal government, insisted was necessary to win the war.

Respecting free enterprise and local control meant holding each, in turn, responsible for meeting the challenge of war. None exemplified this attitude better than Donald Nelson. He blasted those who thought the federal government should solve all problems related to war: the manufacturer who dares assume [that he needs federal help] until he has gone out and done every imaginable thing he can do to defeat his own troubles is simply asking his country to assume that this free system is out of date. By every imaginable thing, Nelson meant cooperating with other manufacturers and civic leaders to mobilize industries and regions for defense and war. He touted the York Plan, in which local civic leaders in York, Pennsylvania, organized manufacturers and coordinated efforts to attract and fulfill contracts, including ensuring that the community supported the basic housing and health needs of defense workers. The York Plan, for Nelson, embodied the American way, the opposite of being eager to rush behind the skirts of the federal government.¹⁹

The federal government also wielded a combination of carrots and sticks. For businesses and workers, the government offered the carrot of contracts for weapons and war supplies. For local governments, the federal government offered the Lanham Act and other funding for community improvements. The difference, though, between the New Deal’s grants-in-aid and war-related community funding was that the federal government could not let a local government unilaterally control or refuse its offer of assistance. Given shortages of materials and labor and the desire for speed, federal objectives needed to take priority. The federal government required a stick, and this stick needed to operate at the level of entire industrial regions, not just one plant or one suburb.

The federal government would find its stick, though not until 1943, in exactly the means that it had used to tap into the capacity of the American industrial regions. The first federal stick was to threaten to withdraw the carrot. A simple example of how this worked: prostitution and venereal disease around military camps worried federal officials. Although the May Act gave the federal government the power to usurp local police powers to protect the health and integrity of military camps, officials invoked the May Act only when other means had been exhausted. Camp commanders had an intermediate and possibly more effective threat: declare any city that would not cooperate with the military services to clean up vice and check venereal disease off limits to military personnel and their spending. Threatening such bans gave local businesses an incentive to pressure municipal leaders and the police into action.²⁰

For war supply contracts a similar dynamic existed. Though the federal government could take over a troubled plant, once production officials recognized that excess capacity existed in American industrial regions, they instead threatened to relocate contracts. They combined this threat with a second stick: increasing controls on the movement of workers, which impinged on the prerogatives of both management and labor, with the ultimate threat being a labor draft. Because manpower problems typically manifested at the metropolitan level, this pressured industrialists, labor unions, and civic leaders to cooperate, binding the public and private sectors in institutions such as the Detroit Victory Council. Closer to Willow Run, Ford Motor Company chose not to take the lead, challenging Nelson’s paradigm, but local civic leaders eventually found a partner in the UAW’s Local 50. Although the federal threats were real, when wielded properly they functioned to ensure engagement, to bring all the parties together instead of driving them apart.²¹

As this planning process played out at Willow Run, it instilled in some a sense that something was wrong with American-style planning. Alistair Cooke, then a young journalist from Britain touring his newly adopted country, wrote of Willow Run, unless there is a deliberate revolution in the pattern of our emerging industrial democracy . . . [i]t will be doomed to frightful decay if in enlarging and intensifying the techniques of mass production, we only enlarge and intensify the mass poverty of the nineteenth-century factory town.²² That Americans had used political conflict instead of deferring to the experts to make planning decisions for Willow Run also greatly disturbed two University of Michigan sociologists. Lowell J. Carr and James E. Stermer witnessed the local and national squabbles, the months of dithering and delay, and the extent of the subsequent privation, which they analyzed in Willow Run: A Study of Industrialization and Cultural Inadequacy, published in 1952. Grasping for simplistic solutions, Carr and Stermer concluded that during certain periods in history democratic ends even in civilian life can best be served by authoritarian means.²³

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All urban planning involves trade-offs, and urban planning in a democracy, to its credit, magnifies the trade-offs instead of hiding them. Though the perfect solution—through which everyone wins and no one loses—may exist, it is rarely proposed and even less frequently implemented. And thus, there are two interpretations of what happened at Willow Run during World War II. In the first, self-interested groups and failures of leadership created scandal and hardship and brought into question whether democracy is capable of total war. In the second, a strong democracy engaged in participatory planning, ran through its paces, and eventually learned how to bring the bomber plant, and nation, to success. Both have truth: that the first could take