Detroit: New Era Begins

At 3:18 of a snowy afternoon, in Flint, Mich, a little knot of men stood around a shiny black Chevrolet coupe in Assembly Plant Number Two. Someone had scrawled on its rear window in white crayon: last Chevrolet off Jan. 30, 1942. A reporter and a veteran Chevrolet workman climbed into the car. The reporter stepped on the starter, drove off the assembly line, turned the lights on & off, honked the horn. The strident little beep, echoing through the acres of suddenly silent machinery, signaled the end of an epoch in U.S. industrial history.

The men grinned, joked, washed up and wandered outside to line up before the pay window. A passing workman gave the last Chevrolet an affectionate kick in the rear--as it might be a farmer slapping an old horse. They knew that a chapter in their lives was over. Some current of emotion--half-abashed, selfconscious, a sentiment that seemed a little ridiculous when dedicated to inanimate machinery--moved through the crowd, finding its outlet in the horseplay, the offhand talk, the what-the-hells with which American workmen cover up what they feel.

It was the same at Dodge, at Plymouth, at Pontiac. Throughout the vast automobile industry, except for a few isolated plants still winding up their quotas, civilian manufacture had ended --and no one knew when it would begin again.

This end meant also a beginning, of something greater than anything Detroit has seen in the 40-odd years of the motor industry. The industry had literally died and was being reborn--new, bigger, and completely different.

For 200,000 or 250,000 auto workers it meant a layoff before arms production could employ them--and last week Detroit argued about how long that would be. "Several months to a year," said United Automobile Workers President R. J. Thomas.

The workmen themselves, used to seasonal layoffs, confident of the power of the industry to rehire them, were not greatly worried-their estimates ran from two weeks to two months.

Except to eyewitnesses, except by translating statistics that could not even be quoted in wartime, it was impossible to communicate the extent of the change that was sweeping Detroit.

Last week some 20 top-flight newspapermen rushed from plant to plant to view the outward evidences of that change. From 9 in the morning until dusk they raced from plant to plant in cars that moved at 70 m.p.h. They grabbed lunch on the way from the tank arsenal to the River Rouge plant. They saw, on the outskirts of Detroit, where a cornfield flourished a few months ago, a tank factory where huge sections of armor plate and steel castings moved down a production line five miles long.

Ernest Kanzler, onetime Ford production chief, whom Donald Nelson appointed to see to it that every auto plant in Detroit is geared to war production, last week held his first press conference. It was unexciting. Said Mr. Kanzler: "I am here only to serve as the catalyst"--which meant, said hard-boiled newspapermen, that he would be the gadfly to spur dunderheaded laggards into speedup. Much of the U.S. public had expected Kanzler to announce resoundingly that the automobile industry would forthwith be converted to defense. But Detroit knew that the industry was already converted.

The industry was converted but not its machines. Most of its machines probably never will be converted. (Studebaker calculated that of its 3,000 peacetime machine tools, only 64 could be used for war work.) For the efficiency of the motor industry has relied on tools that performed complete functions such as stamping out great sections of an automobile body, Clang! at one stroke.

Such tools cannot be used for tanks, for example, because tanks aren't the same shape and are made of tough armor. So the great bulk of Detroit's tools cannot be converted. Some of the great body presses set on deep foundations and too heavy to move are being walled up. Other tools-spot-welding machines, great dies and fixtures--single-purpose tools built for one operation to produce one particular product and good for nothing else--are being hauled out to the parking lots, covered with grease and heavy paper, abandoned for the duration.

The visiting correspondents were given details of production which they could not print, accounts of the difficulties of production which they could not understand, a picture of what industry had done which they could not quite believe.

General Motors expects to employ 450,000 persons (previous top: 303,000); Ford 200,000, including 25,000 women among the 100,000 employes of its bomber plant; Chrysler--130,000 compared to its previous high of 65.000. The correspondents wrote about production lines miles long. . . . Chrysler making at least $675,000,000 worth of tanks, planes and guns in 1942. . . . Ford with eleven miles of airplane runways at Willow Run . . . eleven miles of statistics which all boil down to the biggest, the best, the fastest, the most. . . .

Detroit knew that the war production effort was succeeding. In the arms factories, where morale was high, the men knew that so many tanks already had been built, so many planes, so many guns. But it was Detroit's misfortune that the rest of the country did not know and could not be adequately told the terrific things that Detroit was doing. Before Pearl Harbor, the nation had been given cruelly revealing figures about how badly production had gone. After Pearl Harbor, with industry taking seven-league strides, the figures of accomplishment were military secrets. Industry had taken the past blame, but it was not given the credit it now deserves.

Walter Lippmann had said that there cannot be a high U.S. morale "unless and until Mr. Roosevelt forms the habit of confiding in the American people as Mr. Churchill confides in the British people."

Detroit felt that he spoke a mouthful. Its victories were being won, but the communiques did not mention them.

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