Steel City at War: Pittsburgh on the World War II Home Front

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — now one of America's World War II Heritage Cities — was a busy hub of industry and transportation when war came. Its rivers and railways moved troops, equipment and supplies, linking it to factories elsewhere in the country and to the fighting fronts overseas.

What Pittsburgh made

Steel above all: the "Steel City" turned out huge quantities for weapons, ships and tanks. The Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation, for one, developed alloys for aircraft and tanks. But the city also produced:

• aluminum — light and durable, ideal for aircraft, weapons and equipment;
• synthetic rubber for tires and vehicle parts;
• radar systems that the United States and its allies used to detect enemy aircraft and ships;
• machinery and heavy equipment — artillery, locomotives, parts for ships;
• coal, which powered all this production and transportation.

The U.S. Bureau of Mines had its research center in Pittsburgh, studying how explosives behave under heat and impact and how to handle and store them safely. That work helped design a trigger for the atomic bomb for the Manhattan Project — top secret at the time.

Who did the work

About 1.25 million Pennsylvanians served in the armed forces. Industry and the military both needed people, which opened jobs long held by men to women. Male managers and workers at first resisted, out of old prejudice — fearing women could not do the work, or would be a distraction or a liability. The women took the jobs anyway and succeeded.

From Pittsburgh, too, came the Double V campaign of African American workers and service members, begun by James G. Thompson's letter to the Pittsburgh Courier. It called out the discrimination and inequality African Americans faced in the United States, and its influence on the fight for equal rights lasted long after the war.

The cost

• Displacement: the federal government and private industry moved about 8,000 residents out of Homestead, many losing their homes to make way for new steel mills.
• Pollution: mills and factories fouled air, water and soil, harming residents' health. Smoke was what visitors noticed most. The city passed a smoke control ordinance in October 1941, but because of the war its enforcement on industry and railroads was put off five years, to October 1946.

A British ambassador's view, 1942

In October 1942 the Pittsburgh Press followed Lord Halifax, Britain's ambassador to the United States, and Lady Halifax through a two-day industrial tour:

• At the Homestead Works of the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corp., he watched molten metal poured from open hearth furnaces and glowing slabs rolled into sheets, and saw new mill buildings going up where, a year before, about half of Homestead had lived.
• He met Philip Murray, president of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), who had come from Scotland at 16 to work in the mines. They talked about organized labor's part in both countries' war effort, then lunched with CIO and American Federation of Labor leaders. (The two federations later merged as today's AFL-CIO, the largest federation of U.S. unions.)
• At the Dravo shipyards on Neville Island, where launchings kept the Ohio River churning almost constantly, he saw a submarine chaser and a tank-landing ship launched — and a giant press, said to be the world's largest, bend a steel sheet into a keel plate as if it were chewing gum.

At a closing banquet in the William Penn Hotel, he called Pittsburgh the true arsenal of America. He saw no cause for pessimism, he said, but warned that unless people grasped how serious the war was and gave it everything, it could drag on and cause great suffering — and he hoped Britain and America would keep working together after it ended.

The writer Alistair Cooke, who visited the area in 1942, painted a similar picture: a landscape given over to industry, lit all night by the glare of converters and furnaces, with almost every trade pounding away day and night.

Two posters with Pittsburgh roots

"We Can Do It!" — the poster now linked to Rosie the Riveter — was created in 1943 by J. Howard Miller for Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, headquartered in Pittsburgh, to lift the morale of its women workers. The War Production Co-Ordinating Committee then used it in a national campaign encouraging women to join the home front workforce. Westinghouse made more than 8,000 products and contributed research in plastics, radar and atomic energy — and women were part of that work.

"Men Working Together!" started with a steelworker. In October 1941, photographer Alfred T. Palmer, working for the Office for Emergency Management (OEM), took about 80 photos at Allegheny Ludlum Steel. One, of welder George Woolslayer, was set beside a soldier — Army Corporal French L. Vineyard — and a sailor — Navy Radioman First Class John Marshall Evans — for a poster that went up all over the country.

"Men Working Together!" poster. Image from the Office of War Information, Library of Congress

In February 1942, Woolslayer wrote to OEM asking who the soldier and sailor were. That August, the War Information Office arranged for both to visit his mill, and Palmer came back to photograph the meeting. Woolslayer proudly showed them how steel was made for ships, planes and weapons — the mill was so big that six days of touring did not cover it all. Evans told the steelworkers that now he knew where battleships, guns and even radio parts came from, and that with workers like them behind the forces, the war could not be lost. Three unknown men became famous nationwide; the poster ran in many publications and hung in factories and mills.

"A poster comes to life": the three men at Allegheny Steel, Pittsburgh, 1942. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer, Office of War Information, Library of Congress

Sources

Based on "(H)our History Lesson: The Development and Contributions of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, WWII Heritage City," by Sarah Nestor Lane, an educator and consultant with the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education, funded through the National Council on Public History's cooperative agreement with the National Park Service, including an excerpt from The Pittsburgh Press, October 10, 1942, and Alistair Cooke's The American Home Front: 1941–1942; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The lesson's questions and activities are left out, and so are its pictures held by the Pennsylvania State Archives, the Heinz History Center and the "We Can Do It!" poster, which are not federal works.