Suddenly, in the early months of 1915, the depression lifted. The warring nations of Europe needed arms and ammunition, and the United States--officially neutral--was free to supply both sides. Across the industrial north, factories began to order materials and buy equipment. Plants that had stood nearly idle began producing nails, rivets, nuts, and bolts to send overseas. Steel mills re-stoked their fires and built new furnaces; shipyards began to order lumber again; ammunition plants needed chemicals; railroads purchased track supplies; gun makers ordered lathes and milling machines.(1) And all of these industries, of course, needed workers. Since the onset of the war, however, the flood of immigration from Europe had essentially ceased. At Ellis Island, nearly as many people were leaving--heading east to fight in their homelands--as were arriving in America. And so in the American cities and towns where arms and ammunition were made, the desperate unemployment of 1914 became the labor shortage of 1915. At first the factory owners brought in men from other industries and other towns; but by summer employers began to see that the still gaping shortage of workers would have to be filled by women.
In Bridgeport, Connecticut, the labor shortage hit hard and fast. Seated on the sandy north shore of Long Island Sound, Bridgeport had a divided industrial heritage: it was near enough to the Connecticut River Valley to be bathed in that region's tradition of machine tool and gun-making, but close enough to New York City to catch spillover from the garment trades. Within these two industries, labor followed the conventional division by gender. At Bryant Electric, the Remington Arms factory, or the Union Metallic Cartridge Company, men performed skilled work on machines or hazardous work with explosives. Most of the married women in town did not work for wages, their husbands being skilled mechanics with aspirations for the middle class ideal of a wife free to tend her home and children. The women who did work for wages--roughly a third of them teenagers--were divided among sales, domestic service, office work, and the garment and textile industries. A few women had found their way into the metal trades, but very few.
Above all, for the women, Bridgeport was a center for white goods. The Warner Brothers Company, headed by De Ver H. Warner, a prominent local citizen, employed thousands of hand sewers and machine operators. Others found work at Crown Corset or at La Resista Corset Company.(2) Like the white goods workers of New York, they worked a sixty hour week, tacking on pink ribbons or stitching simple seams. In a large room filled with power sewing machines, the wheels whirred loudly and the wooden floor vibrated, while a hundred needles flashed up and down, driving through the fabric at the rate of a thousand stitches per minute.(3)
Within the garment companies, or in nearby factories, girls, boys, and women assembled paper boxes for packing the white goods. The wages here were even lower than in the corset workrooms, and young women were embarrassed to have it known that they were paper box assemblers.(4) Standing all day at long tables in dusty rooms, with the strong smell of glue filling the air, the workers brushed paste on the cardboard and folded and shaped the boxes. They pasted on strips of muslin to reinforce the corners of each box. Then another group, stationed at cutting machines, trimmed off the ends of the muslin strips. This was the routine: hold the box in place; grasp it firmly so it cannot slip; press on a treadle to bring the blade down, and cut off the excess muslin; remove the box and quickly put another in place; then press the treadle again. Some of the machines had guards to keep a girl's fingers from getting too close to the blade. But the guards slowed down the pace, and a slower pace meant a smaller pay envelope at the end of the week. And so box makers often worked with the guards moved up out of the way. Then fingers were cut, or even cut off, in the relentless race to earn a few extra pennies by making an extra hundred boxes a day.(5) This was considered light, clean work, suitable for young women awaiting marriage. Girls who worked in department stores undoubtedly lost fewer fingers, but their wages were even lower, and they, too, had to stand all day.
Such was the work of the young women of Bridgeport in the spring of 1915, when the local makers of guns and ammunition began receiving orders from abroad. The American-British Company had an order for $2,500,000 worth of shrapnel shells for Russia. The Locomobile Company was making 500 five-ton armored cars. Remington Arms needed a new plant to accommodate its $168,000,000 in orders for small arms. Union Metallic Cartridge, recently merged with Remington, had enormous orders for ammunition. Any company that could make arms or ammunition, it seemed, had enough work lined up to keep busy at full capacity for two or three years.(6)
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The annealing room at the Remington Union Metallic Cartridge plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Photograph courtesy of the National Archives at College Park (RG 86, box 8, Signal Corps photo 28778). |
When the first large war orders came to Bridgeport, workmen began to arrive from around the country. Bridgeport, however, was utterly unprepared for the great rush of newcomers: there was simply no place to put them. Men who brought their families with them were forced to go home again, for lack of housing.(7) Men who came alone, leaving their families behind, crowded into boarding houses.(8) By summer, 25,000 newcomers had arrived, and there was talk of putting up a tent city for 300 homeless families.(9) So rapid was the growth of business that enough men simply could not be found. Then a rumor began to circulate: women would be taken into the munitions plants, and their wages would surpass anything available in the women's trades.
And so women simply walked away from their sewing machines and their paper box tables. They left their clerking positions in the department stores of Bridgeport and nearby towns. Suddenly there was a shortage of domestic servants in New York City.(10) By mid-summer, five thousand young women had begun working at the Remington Arms-Union Metallic company alone.
The new work was no more complicated than women's accustomed tasks. Long before the introduction of women into these industries, many jobs had been mechanized and subdivided so that they could be done by unskilled or semi-skilled immigrant men who had no leisure for training and little or no command of English. A woman who had stamped out buttons by machine could easily learn to draw out brass cartridges. A young girl who had inspected corsets could inspect or pack rifle shells, and a sewing machine operator could learn to run a wire winding machine. Even a fourteen-year-old box maker could fill cartridges with powder. Accustomed to earning six or eight dollars a week, young women suddenly had the chance to earn $10 a week at the cartridge factory or at Bryant Electric.
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Shellmaker. Women's Bureau photograph, courtesy of the National Archives at College Park (RG 86G-8A-3). |
The shop floor itself was different from a garment factory. The machines were larger and required more power than a sewing machine or a button-holer or a grommet fastener. Somewhere within the long brick factory building, an enormous steam engine drove the overhead shafting that ran the length of each room. Lined up under the shaft, fifty or a hundred machines might draw their power from one spinning iron flywheel. Leather belting connected the overhead shaft to the individual machines, each with its own gears and wheels turning at high speed. An overhead wooden stick allowed the operator to disengage her machine from the line shaft while she put her work piece in place, then re-engage with the spinning shaft. Except for those who had worked in textile mills, the women must have been astonished by the noise: the steady rumble of the line shafts, the slapping of leather belts, and the screech of tool-grade steel cutting or shaping softer metals.
The future cartridges came to the women as small brass cups, several boxes full arriving at one time. Placing the brass cups into hollow dies, the worker then passed them under a punch machine which would draw out the brass into long, thin cylinders.(11) The work took close attention, and a moment's distraction could cause the machine to jam. Sometimes, a woman found that her machine overheated, and she had to stop to let it cool off. After the cartridges had been stretched to the right size and shape, another worker--on another machine--would trim them to make them all exactly the same length. The cartridges then moved on for "heading." At the heading machine, a woman fitted each cartridge with a small percussion cap, already filled with a powerful explosive: fulminate of mercury.(12)
Fulminate of mercury inflamed the women's eyes and sometimes left open sores on their skin. Sinks had been installed in the workrooms, but some foremen only allowed the workers to wash at the end of a shift.(13) That meant eight hours of handling chemicals with not even an apron for protection.(14) No one kept records on this industrial poisoning, but Amy Hewes was able to investigate the rate of injury from accidents. Once every week, on average, one woman was injured badly enough to miss ten or more days at work. Sometimes fingers would be crushed in presses. That much might have happened in the traditional women's trades. But another day a big machine might overheat and send parts flying. Worst of all were the accidental explosions of the powder: "We always run," one worker told her, "but you never really have time to get away. It's all over before you know what's happened. It's just as if a big wind came and blew you across the room."(15)
Then there were the threats of sabotage. In February, the rumor spread through Bridgeport that seven bombs had been found in one of the Remington plants, supposedly put there by German spies or sympathizers. Company officials denied the bombs, but claimed that spies had spread that rumor to keep them from hiring more workers.(16)
A month later, just after seven o'clock on a snowy morning in late March, a loud explosion shook the UMC plant and startled everyone in the neighborhood. When the girls in the primer department heard the explosion, they rushed to the window. There, out in the yard, they saw a bleeding and mangled man, both his legs lacerated, his left side battered, and his left hand blown off almost to the wrist. A crowd of men rushed into the yard and an ambulance soon arrived to take the man, William Bergold, to the hospital, where the remainder of his hand was amputated at the wrist. The stress of the explosion proved too much for some of the young women. A few of them, according to the next morning's paper, became "hysterical and ... were sent home for the day."(17) At the moment of the explosion, everyone probably thought first of the bomb rumors, but a quick survey of the yard made the true cause clear. Bergold, had been carrying a two pound box of explosives from a mixing shed into the main building. Apparently he slipped on the snow, and when the rubber box of fulminate hit the ground it exploded. In this plant, any danger had more to do with lack of industrial safety than with sabotage. And yet the explosion reminded everyone that the war was coming closer to America.