The Arsenal of Democracy: Youngstown Goes to War
Near Youngstown, Ohio
When the United States entered the Second World War in December of nineteen forty-one, the Mahoning Valley was already one of the most productive steel regions on earth. What changed overnight was what that steel would become. The mills shifted production toward the war machine, and Youngstown became one of the beating hearts of what President Roosevelt called the arsenal of democracy.
The valley's output went into the ships crossing the Atlantic, the tanks rolling through North Africa and France, the guns carried by infantrymen on both fronts. Republic Steel, one of Youngstown's anchor companies, sharply increased its production after the declaration of war. Across the region, smaller manufacturers converted to military production: artillery casings, aircraft fuel tanks, rocket bodies, landing craft, Sherman tank components.
The workforce shifted as dramatically as the product line. When Youngstown men were drafted into the military, women moved into the mill jobs. They ran cranes, operated furnaces, and performed work that had been defined as men's work for generations. Their presence in the mills was treated as a wartime expedient by management, but it permanently altered what both the workers and the companies knew about who could do the work.
The war years began a long boom for Youngstown steel, one that carried on through a long postwar expansion. But the machinery of that peak was aging, the investment had not kept pace, and the foreign competition that would eventually overwhelm the valley was already gathering. The war had shown what this valley could do when the whole nation needed it. What the valley could not sustain was what would happen when the nation stopped needing it quite so urgently.
