Her Finest Hour by Robert R. La Du

Author:Robert R. La Du
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.
Published: 2017-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

Summing Up

After christening Kaiser’s first escort carrier in April, 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Northern Permanente Foundation hospital in Vancouver, WA, the direct ancestor of today’s Kaiser Permanente Plan.

Other legacies? First of all, there was peace, a peace attained through unprecedented civilian effort to supply arms and supplies to the American fighting men and their allies. Going about their peacetime daily tasks, the former shipbuilders carried an unspoken but heartfelt glow of pride in their personal contribution toward winning the most widespread conflict the world has ever known. They could face the returning service men now knowing that “I helped too.”Also, Portland was a larger and more prosperous city because of the shipbuilding here. Many of the one hundred thousand workers recruited to the yards from out of state chose to remain in the area after the war ended, bringing not only increased size but increased diversity, with its opportunities and challenges, to the City of Roses. Many people earned more money in the shipyards, with their long hours and overtime pay, than they ever had before. With employment opportunities abounding, two-income families were common. Homes were purchased and in bank accounts, and war bonds113 assets grew that would fuel the postwar manufacturing boom for automobiles, home appliances, and other domestic products. This resulted, also, in full-capacity employment that included thousands of women whose confidence and self-sufficiency had been nurtured by their wartime employment in the shipyards.

Portland shed much of its provincialism as a result of shipbuilding. Customary eight-hour working days were altered with the yards’ 24/7 work schedule, encouraging new ways of looking at even routine customs. New residents from throughout the United States rubbed elbows with native Portlanders, imparting the lesson that New Yorkers and Midwesterners are human too, with much the same hopes, fears, and aspirations as Oregonians. An international mind-set began to appear as the home front followed the war news from around the world, some of it conveyed to them through the frequent shipyard newsletters recounting the successes or misfortunes suffered in the war zones by the ships they had built.

What Portlanders did not shed, however, was a deep-seated prejudice against people of color. The blacks recruited from out of state to the shipyards did not find a level playing field here. Whether on or off the job, equality was largely denied them. To Portland’s shame, it missed a golden opportunity to excel in human relations as it had excelled in shipbuilding. It had achieved marvels in converting steel to ships; it had failed miserably in meeting black fellow Americans halfway, a failure that would take generations to work through.

Apart from that great failure, shipbuilding in the Portland area during the war years was a gigantic accomplishment superbly done. What Admiral Vickery said of Edgar Kaiser and the three shipyards he managed could equally be applied to all of the yards and their suppliers: “It is the finest operation in the United States.”114 Indeed, Portland’s finest hour.

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