A few weeks ago in this column I took a close look at Pickens-Bond, the Muskogee- and Little Rock-based construction company that got its start in the 1940s with military and industrial contracts and went on to build most of Little Rock's skyline (the "new and alien splendor" of glass and steel skyscrapers, in the words of Charles Portis) as well as our entire region's shopping malls.
Since then, I've discovered Charles Bolton's article "Turning Point: World War II and the Economic Development of Arkansas," in the Summer 2002 Arkansas Historical Quarterly.
Most federal spending in Arkansas related to World War II went to camps or plants. Camps received a total of $100 million; that includes construction or expansion costs for Camp Chaffee and Camp Robinson, airfields and flying schools at Newport, Stuttgart, Blytheville, and Walnut Ridge, and the Japanese internment camps at Rohwer and Jerome.
Federal spending on defense plants in Arkansas amounted to $240 million. The largest projects were the Pine Bluff Arsenal, Alcoa plants at Bauxite and Jones Mills, ordnance plants at Jacksonville and El Dorado, and the Shumaker Naval Ordnance Plant at Camden.
Bolton notes that assessments of federal spending on World War II projects should begin well before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; they should begin after Congress passed the peacetime draft in 1940 (providing funds to train soldiers and sailors) and run at least until the summer of 1945.
How did all of the camps and plants get built? How did the $340 million actually get spent in Arkansas? The construction division of the Quartermaster Corps had been responsible for domestic military construction during World War I, but after a power struggle, the Army Corps of Engineers took over airfield construction in November 1940 and all defense construction on Dec. 16, 1941.
In Arkansas, many projects begun by the Quartermaster Corps were completed by the Corps of Engineers; both operated by making and supervising contracts. "Private companies and civilian workers," says Bolton, "built and operated almost all of the facilities associated with the defense industry."
Known as Camp Pike until 1937, Camp Robinson was about 6,000 acres in 1940, when the government acquired 39,000 more acres to provide training for up to 25,000 troops. Camp Robinson served only to train National Guard troops until January 1942, when another 1,600 acres were acquired and two regular Army training centers opened.
The first phase of Camp Robinson's expansion cost $11.5 million; $4.5 million of that was spent on labor. Bolton points out that the Camp Robinson expansion set a pattern for hiring for defense projects in Arkansas: 98 percent of the laborers were local, but skilled workers came from out of state. (Skilled workers needed for the Robinson project included structural steel workers, plumbers, and steamfitters.)
In September 1941, on 77,000 acres near Fort Smith, construction began on Camp Chaffee (later Fort Chaffee). The first phase of construction took eight months and employed 6,000 people at its peak. The results: 1,393 structures built out of "40 million board feet of lumber, using 1 million pounds of nails, and covered with 15,000 gallons of paint."
The Army Air Corps offered basic flight training at Newport and Blytheville; bomber pilots trained at Stuttgart and Walnut Ridge. (Little Rock physician and artist Steno Grimes, who died in October, trained at Newport and got his pilot's license at age 16; he had wanted to become a fighter pilot but did not graduate from high school until after World War II was over.)
Expenditures for the construction of Japanese internment camps at Rohwer and Jerome totaled $5 million each; I will address that troubling story in a later column. The University of Arkansas' Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies offers an excellent interactive exhibit about Rohwer, including a 3D reconstruction of the camp.
The Maumelle Ordnance Plant and Jacksonville's Arkansas Ordnance Plant were built mostly of wood and meant to last only five years. The Maumelle Ordnance Works Bunker No. 4 survives, however, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. At its peak, the Arkansas Ordnance Plant employed 13,000 people; about 10,000 of them were women.
Several defense projects could almost be called public-private partnerships. The Ozark Ordnance Plant in El Dorado was run by Lion Chemical Company, a subsidiary of Lion Oil Company, and produced ammonium nitrate and ammonia. Lion Oil Refining Co. and Root Petroleum of El Dorado produced aviation fuel.
Because airplanes require aluminum, the government financed the Alcoa plants at Jones Mills and Hurricane Creek, east of Bauxite.
The Pine Bluff Arsenal was a government project through and through. Occupying a 24-square-mile area, the Arsenal, explains Bolton, contained a manufacturing facility that "loaded magnesium and thermite into incendiary bombs" and made hand grenades and toxic gases, and had a storage area for chemical weapons. The chemical manufacturing facility alone contained 444 buildings.
The Pine Bluff Arsenal and the Shumaker Naval Ordnance Plant at Camden continued to operate after World War II ended. The ordnance plants at Jacksonville and Maumelle shut down, the airfields stopped training pilots, and Camps Robinson and Chaffee "were put on inactive status."
The Reynolds Aluminum Company bought the Alcoa plants at Jones Mills and Bauxite; Lion Oil bought the Ozark Ordnance Plant; all turned to peacetime production.
Bolton supplies evidence of the economic impact of defense spending by many measures; one is total personal income in Arkansas, which was 0.65 percent of the national total in 1940 and 0.79 percent in 1945.
Those gains did not last, but Arkansas between 1939 and 1947 saw its total processing and manufacturing workforce increase from 36,000 to 58,000. The cultural shift to modernity was well underway.