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The Old GE, 1886-1986
Chapter 9: New Deals (1931-1945)

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This information is from pp. 227-267 of The Old GE, 1886-1986 by Dr. George Wise (2024). It is copyrighted by Dr. Wise and reproduced here with his permission.

Some linked sources may require use of America's News [SCPL library card required] or JSTOR, which is available at Union College's Schaffer Library.

When the Great Depression hit GE in 1931, the inadequacy of coordinated cooperation quickly became apparent. Gerard Swope did not offer an immediate next step. He did have, however, the energy to take arms against this sea of troubles.

Not so for all his colleagues at the top of GE. The company's usually optimistic Research Director Willis Whitney, fell into a personal depression as deep as the national one. When asked to make up a list of layoffs he is said to have replied "put my name first" before resigning his post and retiring to his country home.

Owen D. Young's reputation as industrial statesman took a serious hit in 1932 when his name appeared in the newspapers as one of the people on a preferred list of early access to lucrative stock market opportunities. This was then neither illegal nor unusual for a person in his position. It conflicted, however, with the enlightened, progressive image he had created for himself. He then suffered serious financial losses in the Wall Street crash. Swope, who had sold his stocks before the crash, bailed out his GE partner. Young retreated to a much reduced Mr. Outside role. (333)

Coordinated Cooperation would also be a casualty of the Great Depression. What caused Coordinated Cooperation's demise? What replaced it? Those are this chapter's questions. That demise and replacement happened via what will be described here as not just one, but three, New Deals. The first New Deal, in 1933-1934 resembled coordinated cooperation, but with key differences. The second, in 1935-1936 definitively buried coordinated cooperation. The third New Deal, the 1939-45 industrial response to World War II, produced coordinated cooperation's successor.

None of this had been anticipated back in 1930, even as the severity of the business downturn became clear. Swope then told his colleagues "If we come to a reduction of salaries in the GE company, it will be a reflection of the fact that we have not done our job, including myself." (334)

The succeeding years would see such salary reductions appear across the board. Swope's own annual pay fell from $100,000 to $60,000, that of a scientist at the GE Research Laboratory from $3000 to $1500, and that of a spot welder at the Schenectady Works from $1000 to $300. Prices also fell. This led GE to claim that those still employed were actually better off in real terms than in 1929. This claim is disputed by at least some later economists such as economic historian Peter Temin. (335)

Behind the statistics were voices."I worked for 22 years," said Paul Adeler, "and was laid off in March, 1932. They were laying them off in hundreds. Of course I laid it to the foreman. Him and I had a little trouble quite a few years back and he told me he would get me. I went back to see Mr. Spicer and they shoved a $500 settlement under my nose." When the Works Managers had first proposed that men like Adeler, aged over 45 and with more than 20 years of service, should be discharged, Swope had objected: "it would be cruel to let those men go." The men were, however, soon let go, the lucky ones with lump sum payouts like Adeler's. (336)

Less lucky was the unnamed employee who wrote to the Socialist newspaper The Citizen in 1932 about, after 20 years service at GE, being given one week's notice of departure, and no cash settlement. "I've stood by the company," he wrote. "Today I have about $500, a mortgaged house, high taxes, and 47 years of age." (337)

The GE unemployment compensation program put in place in the 1920s would continue until 1935, when it gave way to corresponding provisions of the Social Security Act. In December, 1930 Swope increased its payments to $15 a week. Over the next three months some 7600 workers received a total of $330,000. Worker reaction was mixed, ranging from "Fifteen dollars a week — well, the children will still have Christmas" to "is the office force really making contributions… The boys in the shop find this hard to believe." While more than a drop in a bucket, this plan was far from the scale needed to meet a crisis that saw about half the employees of the Schenectady Works laid off. As early as September, 1932, Swope himself was admitting to the plan's inadequacy. (338)

GE hit bottom in 1933. Sales of $130 million were one third the 1929 level. Employment of 45,000 was just over half the 1929 level. Both the company and its workers did what they could to cope. On the company side, Schenectady Works Manager Burton DeLack wrote to Swope in July 1931 that "we have made a vigorous and honest endeavor to remove all married women from our payroll." (339)

Workers also made adjustments. For example, the Sarnacki family was able to send three sons, Joe, Charlie and Hank, to work as messengers at GE despite the depression, while daughter Alice did seamstress work. Father Vincent learned to repair shoes for the family, and used or sold the produce from two grapevines, two peach trees, and a few chickens and ducks. When he was laid off temporarily, GE sent food baskets. Most of the other families focused on in this book were similarly able to keep at least one family member at work at GE. (340)

While reducing his own salary and that of other top executives, Swope unapologetically and publicly kept up the special profit sharing payments to the people identified as the company's top 500 or so contributors. This extra payment in 1932 averaged over $2000 per recipient, more than the average worker's annual wage. GE stockholders also never missed a dividend. In 1933 and 1934 this required paying out more money in dividends than the company earned in profit. Indeed, in those years, only the light bulb and refrigerator businesses made much money. Almost all other businesses recorded losses. In 1932, GE got only one order for a steam turbine. For the first time in memory, there were work days when the usually roaring machine tools in Schenectady's giant Building 60 turbine shop all stood silent. (341)

Swope did more in those dark times than address GE's troubles. In 1931, on an ocean trip via the Panama Canal, he sketched out on scrap paper and the backs of envelopes a plan to save the nation. He first introduced his "Swope Plan" to the public on 16 Sept 1931 in a speech to the National Electrical Manufacturers ' Association at the Hotel Commodore in New York City. He then cooperated with business journalist George Frederick to lay out the details in a book. (342)

A "plan of stabilization" is needed, the book explained, because "America has paid for its economic debauch by a loss of about one half of its national wealth… War is a Sunday school picnic beside it." Needed now, in 1931, was a peacetime version of World War I's "admittedly effective centralized power of the War Industries Board". To achieve this stabilization "production and consumption must be coordinated". However, "coordination of production is impossible under our present laws". Swope's plan of coordination began with employee benefits: "a system of benefits accruing through the life of the worker, and following him where he might go, from shop to shop at a particular company, or from branch to branch of industry as a whole." The package included improved worker compensation for injury, life and disability insurance, old age pensions, and unemployment insurance.

As for business coordination, "All industrial and commercial companies with 50 or more employees doing an interstate business may form a trade association". These trade associations would outline trade practices, business methods, standard accounting methods and other forms of information, aiming to stabilize prices and production levels for the industry as a whole. The antitrust laws would have to be amended to allow all this to be done legally.

The book frankly admitted that the plan raised "questions of power, coercion and dictatorship". The conclusion it reached was stark: "apply in a fully American way the modicum of dictatorship which she seems now ready to admit and that fuller industrial efficiency calls for," The book went on to make three nominations for the post of "Organized Enterprise Appointive Dictatorship." Those were CEOs Walter Gifford of AT&T, Patrick Crowell of the New York Central RR, and Gerard Swope of General Electric.

While getting guarded praise from such progressives as Walter Lippman, the Swope Plan got a scathing rejection in 1931 from President Herbert Hoover. He called it grandiose, statist, unconstitutional, dehumanizingly bureaucratic and probably inspired by the Five Year Plan of the Soviet Union. (343)

This did not disturb Swope. He and and Young were both longtime supporters of the Democratic Party. They had recently advised Hoover's 1932 challenger, Franklin D. Roosevelt. They first anticipated, then welcomed, FDR's November, 1932, victory. "I don't think we have much to fear," Swope told a 1932 GE Management Meeting. "Roosevelt comes from a very good family in the East, a family of coupon clippers. Coupon clippers are never radical." (344)

Roosevelt proceeded in 1933 to announce a Depression fighting program resembling the Swope Plan. Roosevelt's plan, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) quickly passed Congress and became law. It sought control of competition and overproduction via cooperative industry trade organizations, much as Swope had proposed. (345)

There were, however, big differences regarding coordination. Swope would have assigned this job to industry itself (indeed, perhaps to Gerard Swope himself). Government would look on as a sort of referee. The NIRA, in sharp contrast, mandated government coordination. This was put under the command of a dynamic and choleric former Army General, Swope's World War I partner Hugh Johnson. In addition, while the Swope Plan had avoided any mention of unions, Section 7(a) of the NIRA, written by New York's progressive Senator Robert Wagner, empowered workers to be represented by bargaining agents of their own choosing. Swope immediately wrote to NIRA head Johnson to get Works Councils included as acceptable forms of worker representation. (346)

To make that suggestion more palatable the name of GE's Works Councils were changed to Workers Councils. Swope would tell the Schenectady Workers Council in 1933 that "we in GE rather like the idea of collective bargaining." What management sought to avoid was "radical tendencies" of "irresponsible people in the field." (347)

Despite the differences between his plan and Roosevelt's, Swope strongly supported the NIRA. In late 1932 he accepted Roosevelt's request that he serve as Chairman of the new Economic Advisory Board of the Department of Commerce. It would be the most powerful voice of big business in Washington.

Swope assembled a distinguished board, including Pierre Du Pont, Walter Gifford of AT&T, Walter Teagle of Standard Oil of New Jersey, Thomas Watson of IBM, Alfred Sloan of GM, and Robert Wood of Sears, Roebuck. The Board would not be "just another committee," Swope wrote to Gifford in 1933. "We will really accomplish something. "The things Swope aimed to accomplish included working with trade associations on trade practices, business ethics, elimination of unfair competition, and the simplification and standardization of products. An overall aim was "to prevent over-production", then believed to be a major cause of the depression. Swope decided to go public with his intentions. In a press release from the Chamber of Commerce in November, 1933, he proclaimed that "It is highly desirable that the great adventure of the NIRA be made permanent." However, he added, it should be done in a way that "would render unnecessary the creation of an extensive Federal organization." Instead, coordination of the economy should be vested in a "National Chamber of Commerce", a sort of industrial senate made up of representatives from the major trade associations. (348)

The furor that exploded over this proposal indicated how badly Swope had misjudged the public mood. Condemnations from New Deal brain trusters, labor leaders, and Congress volleyed through the press. Roosevelt insiders condemned Swope's new plan as "business fascism." The President himself commented that business is "unready for self rule." It was likely at Roosevelt's request that Swope soon went on national radio. He had not, he explained, intended to criticize or undercut the NIRA or the policies of the administration. He had not, it seemed, meant much of anything at all. (349)

With this, any hopes of applying to the nation the principle of coordinated cooperation, with big business as the coordinator, passed from the scene. A perhaps chastened Gerard Swope did not, however, fade away. Instead, as that First New Deal gave way, in 1935, to a Second one, he and GE had perhaps their finest hour of corporate citizenship. For example, in shaping the Social Security Act, Swope and other progressive corporate leaders such as Eastman Kodak's Marion Folsom, played important advisory roles. Historian Daniel Nelson identifies Folsom and Swope as the "outstanding" big business supporters of government administered unemployment insurance. (350)

Swope's most important role, however, was in the field of labor relations. Back in 1933. Swope's acceptance of the NIRA, including Section 7(a), had drawn criticism from industry colleagues. Writing to Swope about an October, 1933, meeting of the electric utility trade association, GE Director B. F. Sunny reported that

At the banquet last night, when one of the songs that was sung, when the line was reached "I've got unions that hound me, "there was shouts of "Swope"… at which there was some laughs and jeers.

"The Chicago men,", Sunny explained, saw "the present situation" as "a destruction of the defense they have created at so great a cost against complete unionization." (351)

Swope was undeterred by this criticism. He proceeded in 1933 to accept a position on FDR's National Labor Board, a collection of industry, labor and government leaders. Swope took a hands-on role, accompanying Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins on road trips explaining Section 7(a) to resisting businessmen. Perkins described one such encounter, in August, 1933. An owner of a Reading, PA hosiery mill was adamantly opposed to unions. Section 7(a) did not prescribe how the workers were to to decide on representation. Swope said, why not let the workers vote on it? Why, asked the owner dismissively, should I do that? Here is how Perkins recalled Swope's answer:

Because, said Swope quietly, though he was boiling and furious by this time, "this is America, and that is the way we do things here!" (352)

Swope's initiative led to a voting procedure called the "Reading Formula" for implementing Section 7(a). Unions won more than 80% of the initial Reading Formula elections. The formula quickly impacted GE. Its Lynn, MA Works had held the company's most effective Workers Council. Two of Lynn's leaders now seized the opportunity that Section 7(a) offered. Al Coulthard was a pattern maker who had served as a foreman before returning to the ranks. He became a formidable opponent, as well as a victim of a Depression layoff. Leary described him to Swope as "Clean cut, the harrier type… hard as nails… intelligent… articulate… non-political". He found an effective ally in Gale Smith, a former clergyman who could appeal as effectively to the native born Protestants as Coulthard could to the Catholics and foreign born. Leary described Smith as "an idealist, but withal a very practical one, well versed in trade union work." Swope called him "a conscientious and serious man, and also a good worker." (353)

Their proposed union was to be an industrial rather than a craft union, much like the one John Bellingham and others had tried unsuccessfully to launch at Schenectady in 1919. Coulthard and Smith's meetings in workers' homes and in the halls of fraternal organizations such as the Odd Fellows and Hibernians showed surprising recruiting success. In 1934 the new union successfully petitioned the New England Regional Labor Council for an election. Swope's response was "let them hold as many elections as they want to." Coulthard described GE as cooperative throughout the election process. In that 1934 election, the new union trounced the Lynn Works Council, 82%-18%. "This is the first defeat of Mr. Swope's much advertised liberalism," Coulthard proclaimed. (354)

Within the rest of GE, Swope's name change to the Workers Council, may have been initially intended as merely cosmetic. In practice, however, it was followed by a significant strengthening of a Council, which even the Company newspaper now admitted had previously been "totally unsatisfactory to the workers." Changes included a broader range of grievances that the Council could handle, and input into wage decisions. When management announced a 10% wage increase in April, 1934, it gave credit to the Workers' Council. The Workers Council also supported, and saw management approve, a 1935 item that was more likely a consequence of slack demand than managerial benevolence. Still, it may have warmed the hearts of any remaining of those women who sang the Eight Hour Hymn as they led the 1915 strikers out of the Works. The item, approved by a vote of 79 to 23, read:

Workers Council approves maximum of 40 hours as the regular work week at the plant. (355)

Individual Workers Council representatives seized these new leadership opportunities. Bill Hodges, for example, a British born cabinet maker had been a long time councilman by the 1930s. He was described by the Cabinet Department's Works News Reporter in 1931 as "our own very active councilman"

a very busy man these days looking after the interests of the unemployed (356) and short-time workers. He is always ready to offer his services and advice to his co workers.

He would evolve from effective Councilman to Council President, and, ultimately, to Vice President of an actual union. May Schilling had gone to work on the refrigerator line and was first elected to the Works Council when that was no great honor. On the Workers' Council she became one of the most effective champions of her fellow workers when they filed grievances against management. Alfred Stevens, who joined management's labor relations ranks in the early 1930s, later recalled Schilling as a capable and determined adversary. GE's Vice President of Manufacturing Wlliam Burrows described her to Swope as "very interesting, very reasonable".

These matters took a new turn in 1934 when the Supreme Court, declared the act creating the NIRA unconstitutional. Section 7(a) became void. In GE, this delayed any union hopes of immediately following up on that Lynn victory with a company wide industrial union. Soon, however, Senator Robert Wagner of New York led the revival of Section 7(a) as the 1936 Wagner Act. It empowered workers to choose their bargaining units by election. It established a National Labor Relations Board to oversee the process. Meanwhile, in Schenectady, there had emerged an industrial union movement paralleling the Lynn effort. The leader of this new Electrical Industry Employees Union was a familiar face: the pre-World War I labor leader, Socialist alderman, post-war turbine inspector and board member of the GE Employees Security Investment Fund, Bill Turnbull. (357)

A second aspiring Schenectady GE union was also in the field. This was the Metal Workers' Industrial Union, a part of the Communist Party's Trade Union Unity League. In June, 1932, under the leadership of Communist organizer Jack Rand, a "Committee of Laid-off GE Workers" held a rally in Schenectady's Crescent Park. Schenectady Works Manager Burton DeLack reported to Swope that most of the crowd of about 200 were not workers. Four who were GE employees accompanied DeLack back to his office for a "pleasant chat " As labor unrest picked up nationwide, uneasiness grew at Schenectady. A Swope informant on the Schenectady labor situation reported back with exaggerated alarm in the Fall of 1934 that "a fighting strike is in the making for next Spring." (358)

Actually the nascent Schenectady unions were far from fighting strength. Turnbull recognized this local weakness, and turned instead to a national stage. He appeared, in February 1935, before a Senate Committee investigating the labor situation. There he presented a list of alleged employer violations at the Schenectady Works, such as forcing some turbine workers into hours of overtime while hundreds of others were laid off, and speeding up the refrigerator assembly line. On the local level, Turnbull again ventured into politics. In 1933 he ran for the New York State Assembly on the Socialist ticket, receiving only 1000 votes out of more than 20,000 cast. It was his last gasp of political partisanship. "Let us concentrate on our big job — perfecting our union in the economic field," he wrote in 1934, "but politically leave our officers free to use their best judgment." (359)

On that local Schenectady political front, the parties on the left were disunited. Charles Noonan continued to run unsuccessfully for office on the Socialist ticket. Two other minor parties, the Socialist Labor and American Labor Parties squabbled over which got to use that word Labor on its ballot line. More success was achieved by the more conventionally progressive Charter League. Here leaders such as GE chemist and former Socialist Irving Langmuir, now a Nobel Laureate, and prominent GE electrical engineer and former Progressive Philip Alger, led an effort that succeeded via referendum in changing the Schenectady city government to a City Manager form. This initiative was, however, quickly captured and tamed by the two established parties. (360)

Two sons of 1911 Socialists now entered the picture seeking to blend far-left politics with union organizing. Leo Jandreau had quietly put in over a decade as a machinist in the GE Turbine Department. Julius Emspak had graduated from Union College in 1933 and begun graduate work in philosophy at Brown. There he had what he described as "a great awakening". He decided that "I had better been back to where I had been if I wanted to find answers." In 1934 he returned to the shop, this time at RCA in Camden, NJ. (361)

There he joined in the union building efforts successfully initiated at the nearby Philco Company by an organizing neophyte, Philip Carey. It was as a member of this new industrial union, soon to bear the name United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE), that Emspak returned to Schenectady. In 1935, Jandreau and Emspak ran as candidates of the United Labor Party in the Schenectady city election. They finished far behind the winners. Their minor party was considered Communist inspired. Whether Emspak and Jandreau were, then or later, members of the Communist Party was a question that would dog their careers. Both denied it. Emspak would be convicted of contempt for refusing to appear before a Red-hunting Congressional Committee. His conviction would be overturned by the Supreme Court. Jandreau's politics were never tested in court. The consensus of subsequent historians is that both, by 1936, were Communists. (362)

Perhaps following both personal predilection and Communist Party instruction, Emspak and Jandreau chose solidarity over conflict in 1935. They and their local of that Metal Workers' Industrial Union joined forces with Turnbull's Electrical Industry Employees Union. This alliance would become UE Local 301. At Schenectady its strategy was two pronged. One was standard union building. This avoided ideology, and concentrated on the resentments chronic to every large industrial plant, and made worse by the Depression.

It was these abuses that some Schenectady union pioneers later recalled most strongly. Alan Townsend remembered being in the bathroom only a moment when the foreman came banging on the door shouting for him to get back on the floor. "They were not fair," Townsend said. "That's why the union won over." Mario Biagnetti recalled his father walking out on Sunday to the foreman's house with a bottle of wine in one hand and a chicken under his arm, as a required tribute payment to the boss. "To get a welding job," he added, "you had to buy a car from the foreman." (363)

The worst abuses took place at the Schenectady Works Employment Office. It was an open secret in the early 1930s that a well placed bribe could secure a GE job that was almost impossible to get by normal means. One applicant recalled waiting in vain in a mob on the street in the bitter winter cold of 1933, then hearing the rumor that only those who had paid the bribe knew the secret hand signal that would gain an interview. The bribery finally resulted, in 1936, in the arrest trial and conviction of the employment office manager. (364)

The other prong of union strategy was an attempted takeover of the Workers' Council. Bill Turnbull, Leo Jandreau, and Julius Emspak's brother Frank became Works Councilmen. This effort fell slightly short of a majority. Company actions such as putting the Works on a 40 hour week, an improved vacation plan, and a 10% pay increase were credited by the company to the Council, not the UE. Motions to the Council by Frank Emspak for another pay increase and recognition of the union were voted down. "At present Schenectady is in a deplorable state," Jandreau wrote to Julius Emspak in April 1936. "The employees don't show any self respect but take anything that is offered to them." (365)

Jandreau looked for a place to mobilize action. In June 1936, he thought he had found one in the Wire Mill. There an effort by management to change the wage formula had created discord. Union leaders called a sit down strike, a tactic recently carried out successfully by rubber workers in Akron, OH. Manager Elmer Spicer stood firm. When the men were back at work, he said, negotiations could begin. Turnbull got UE president Carey to mobilize Miners' Union leader John L. Lewis, who told Labor Secretary Frances Perkins that the strike would shut down Schenectady and spread to other GE plants. The threat was a bluff. Swope, who was well informed about the situation, left matters in local hands. Within a week the strike had collapsed without even temporarily spreading to the rest of the plant, and the Wire Mill was humming smoothly. "We certainly are in one hell of a fix," a union member wrote Emspak. "The 109 [Wire Mill] gang are clamoring for money, they are not satisfied with with being called heroes." (366)

By July, no further action had followed. "If we could get something started," Jandreau wrote to Emspak, "it would have a good effect." That something was found not within the Works, but on the national level. The Wagner Act decreed that with enough signatures on a petition, the union could force a representation election. Through the Spring and Summer of 1936, Turnbull, Jandreau and their union colleagues combed the Schenectady Works for those signatures. (367)

To understand this campaign for signatures, envision the corner of Cable and Braddock Avenues within the Works, at lunchtime on a summer day, August 31, 1936. Bill Turnbull is speaking to lunching shop workers — and also to a company observer who is taking careful notes. "The Company union was founded on the theory that the interests of the employee and the company were identical," Turnbull began, but "the worker's interest lies in shorter hours and higher rates, while the company's lies in longer hours and lower rates." Will workers continue to stand by while a wage earner gets $15 a week compared to the company President's $1750 a week,"even though he could only wear one suit of clothes and one pair of shoes at a time." You can't wait until 99% of the workers join the union to make up your mind, Turnbull said. He told of a bee collecting honey in a field of clover. A cow came along and gobbled up clover and bee. In the cow's mouth, the bee considered stinging and held off. In the throat, the same thing, then in the stomach. That was nice and warm, and the bee fell asleep, "and woke up in the field in the nice bright sun, but the cow was gone. " In an abrupt shift of metaphor, Turnbull concluded: "remember the banana — it's the one that's plucked from the bunch that gets skinned." (368)

By the fall of 1936, the union had collected enough signatures. Now Swope had a decision to make. Other companies similarly subjected to union petitions were stonewalling. The Wagner Act's constitutionality would not be determined by the Supreme Court until 1937, and then by only a 5-4 margin. Even after that decision some companies, notably Ford, Republic Steel, and Westinghouse would be able to stall unionization well into the 1940s. Historian Howell John Harris has categorized corporate responses to unionism after the passage of the Wagner Act. He described Bethlehem Steel, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Du Pont and others as practicing "sophisticated antiunionism." He described others, such as General Motors and U. S. Steel with following "the course of realism". He put U.S. Rubber and General Electric in a class by themselves in their having "accepted the labor movement with little hesitation or apparent regret." (369)

After only weeks, rather than years, of delay, Swope agreed to a vote. Before, however, attributing this entirely to Gerard Swope's devotion to democracy, consider the external circumstances. Arrangements for the vote were not solidified until early December, 1936. In the preceding month, FDR had been re-elected President in U.S. history's greatest landslide — with the strong support of organized labor. No longer could FDR be dismissed as a harmless coupon clipper. "We have a difficult situation ahead of us with Mr. Roosevelt's overwhelming victory," Swope told a GE management group in November 1936 "This is a mandate from the American people, and labor has gone along with him… labor is going to take advantage of it… we must play ball." (370)

In addition GE had reasons to believe it might win the vote. Membership in the UE was still small, 1000 or less in a work force climbing toward 10,000. The Workers Council had made significant strides toward respectability and independence. Hours per week, and wages were heading back up. Would workers really want to rock the boat? (371)

Only eight days separated the final arrangement of election details from the actual election date, December 15, 1936. This was fifty years since the Edison Machine Works had fled unions and moved to Schenectady. Now, at last, each of the 9675 employees at GE's Schenectady Works would have a clear choice: put your X in a box marked "Workers' Council", or in a box marked "United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers".

The short ensuing campaign had its hiccups. The union complained when its attempt to put a spokesman on Schenectady's radio station WGY, a station created by and still licensed to GE, was turned down on the grounds that the election was "of only local, not national interest." Pressed on the matter, GE blamed NBC, the RCA-owned network that ran the station. The decision was then reversed. On its part, the Workers' Council objected, to the exclusion of some 1500 office workers from the voting. This exclusion was not reversed. (372)

Mostly, however, the election was run without conflict or company interference. GE lived up to the 8-point declaration of neutrality it posted throughout the Works, which began "1 — this is a secret ballot." The company stood by as the two sides make their cases. The Workers' Council pointed to its democratic processes of council election, and to the the improvements in wages, hours and benefits it had been a voice in promoting.

The UE emphasized its role as a genuine, rather than a company controlled, union. It denied any intent of radical boat-rocking. "A strong healthy union inside the Schenectady Works does not necessarily mean or foreshadow strike action," said Jandreau. "Organized labor uses the strike weapon only in the way that Uncle Sam uses his battleships — only in emergencies, when all other peace efforts are defeated." (373)

At 12:01 AM of December 15, 1936, voting began for night shift workers. At 9 PM, the 23 polling places around the Works were closed. The ballots were quickly counted, under the supervision of National Labor Relations Board officials Frank Moore and Elinore Herrick. Perhaps the most impressive result was the turnout. Of those 9675 eligible voters, 9272, or 95.8% cast their ballots. Their verdict was decisive. For the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, 5011. For the Workers' Council, 4033. By this 55%-45% margin, the Schenectady Works had become the third link, after Lynn, MA and Ft. Wayne, IN, in what would become a UE-represented chain of GE works and factories.

The now officially certified Schenectady local still faced a daunting task. It had to translate that vote into sufficient plant-wide union membership to secure the credibility needed to negotiate a contract. Here Bill Turnbull played the key role. He especially appealed to his own generation, whom he described as "life long residents of Schenectady with homes and families here". Many of them had been participants in the union surge that lasted through World War I. Many had endured, a subsequent 15 years of disillusionment with unions. Some had become Works Council stalwarts. "We know that there are men in the works who have high organizational experience," Turnbull said. "We say to them, don't tell us what good union men you used to be in the old days. Get in where you belong and show us how good a union man you are now." (374)

They did. The UE campaign started slowly, was interrupted by the sharp short depression beginning in 1937, but moved on to success. UE 301, which had only 650 members in early 1936, had by the end of 1938 enrolled 8000 of the 10,000 Schenectady GE workers. About 20% of the union members were women, roughly the same fraction as women in the Schenectady GE shop force. (375)

For the future, the new young and radical leaders of UE Local 301 took over from aging sewer socialist Turnbull. "In regards to Bill", Jandreau wrote Emspak in January, 1937, "I did have it out with him… I am preparing the agenda for all meetings… I have the floor… I am free to discuss any motion that might arise, and without being criticized for 'railroad tactics.'" Turnbull would be on the committee that would negotiate with GE national management. He would become a UE national vice-president. In Schenectady, however, his leadership work was done. (376)

Meanwhile, Swope and his management team faced another choice. Should its first formal encounter with this newly recognized union, over a proposed company-wide contract take the form of negotiation or confrontation? The GE leadership chose negotiation.

Again, this was driven not merely by democratic impulses. A pragmatic policy of conciliation also reflected management hopes that, as in the past, the inexperienced new union with its internal ideological divides, might destroy itself. "We have had 95% AF of L union at times and now almost none," a manager wrote on the back of a 1937 draft of a national contract. "We have been completely unionized at Schenectady. These movements go in great swings." When a GE manager asked Swope "Do you consider a signed agreement with such irresponsible people worth the paper it is written on?" Swope gave this answer.

Yes, and for this reason. GM whether it was wise or not, signed an agreement. The very fact that after they signed the agreement the union could not control its people, because its leaders maybe were irresponsible and ignorant communists and the people were undisciplined has shown the people that the brunt of the trouble is with them and not with GM. (377)

If Swope really believed that GE's new, Communist influenced, union would prove undisciplined, ignorant, and irresponsible, he was proved wrong. In the first round of contract negotiations, in 1937, union negotiators Bill Turnbull, Al Coulthard and Leo Jandreau proved disciplined, well informed and responsible. After a slow cautious negotiating minuet, the two sides agreed to a national contract largely adapted from a company policy statement. (378)

Swope again became the New Deal's poster boy for labor peace. Swope and Senator Robert Wagner exchanged letters on a "Dear Gerard" and "Dear Bob" basis. Wagner wrote to Swope in April, 1937, praising GE as "an outstanding example". Thanks to Swope, wrote Wagner, "the reasonable solution offered by the Labor Relations Act triumphed over the alternative recourse of trial by combat." Swope in reply expressed the hope "that its administration will lead to labor peace." (379)

Soon, however, on another front, the Roosevelt administration was gearing up for a trial by combat with GE. For most of the 1930s, busy with regulating the banks, stock market and utility companies, the New Deal administrators had left the giant manufacturing corporations alone. Indeed, the NIRA had encouraged government-coordinated cooperation. Now, after a sharp depression within the Depression, in 1937, a new group of advisers convinced Roosevelt that the corporate giants were a problem. "One of the primary causes of our current difficulties is the absence of price competition", Roosevelt would say in a 1938 speech, "particularly in manufacturing where concentration of economic power is most evident". (380)

As one of those most evident concentrations of economic power, GE was the target of three antitrust lawsuits. One target was GE's oldest and most profitable business, light bulbs. Another was one of its newest products, a new alloy of tungsten and carbon offering unprecedented strength that GE called Carboloy. A third was GE's international business.

The charges against GE Lighting, filed in 1940, claimed that GE was still monopolizing its most profitable business in ways dating back to the company's founding. GE, along with Corning Glass, and NV Phillips of the Netherlands were accused in 1940 of illegally using economic power to prevent entry of new competitors into the incandescent lamp business. Tactics the conspiracy was accused of included threats of harassing patent suits, control over lamp making machinery, price fixing, output quotas, and an agreement under which GE paid NV Phillips to back out of an agreement with Westinghouse on a U.S.bulb making plant. The government pointed out that the key GE lighting patents, Coolidge's on tungsten processing and Langmuir's on gas filled lamps had expired by 1930. Since then, GE had extended its dominance less by invention than by intimidation. For example, a spokesman for competitor Hygrade Sylvania described how, in 1933 negotiations, GE threatened suit for infringement of subsequent patents of a far less fundamental nature than those of Coolidge and Langmuir. "These patents," the spokesman said, "regardless of their validity, would have been made the basis of bona fide suits which would have harassed and annoyed Hygrade and would have caused it vast expenses, damage, and injury, even if unsuccessful." Hygrade gave in, signed a new licensing agreement, and submitted to GE dictation of prices and output." (381)

In its defense, GE pointed out that its behavior, far from bilking consumers, benefited them. The price of a 60 watt incandescent lamp had fallen from 45 cents in 1920 to 13 cents in 1940. Coupled with the falling price of electricity, also in part a GE achievement, this had completed the job of converting electric lighting from a luxury for the few to an amenity for most. Internal to GE, however, surviving documents tell a different story. "Personally I am very sorry that the General Electric Company has ventured to extend the license of the Westinghouse Company," wrote patent attorney F. P. Fish in 1928.

there is a very great danger that the government and the courts will conclude that the renewal of these licenses is primarily for the purposes of stabilizing the incandescent lamp business and restraining competitive conditions… so far as we can see there will be no patents of the slightest consequence in existence after the expiration of the Langmuir Patent… if the General [Electric] Company grants the licenses now, it may very much regret its action (382)

Another major patent case was less threatening to GE's profits, but more threatening to its image. In 1941, the government charged GE with conspiring with the German company Krupp to restrict the availability to U.S. companies of a material crucial to making armor-piercing artillery shells.The newspapers had a field day. "Nazi Monopoly Perils U.S. Arms" read one headline. Yet the story was more commercial than conspiratorial. In 1927, well before the rise of Hitler, GE researchers were looking for a hard metal from which to make better wire-drawing dies for use in the Coolidge light bulb filament making process. They learned of the recent invention, cemented tungsten carbide, for which Krupp held key patents. The GE researchers tried to invent their way around those patents. They failed to do so but obtained improvement patents significant enough to negotiate a patent pooling agreement with Krupp. The two companies, anticipating a limited market and high costs in educating users, agreed in 1928 on a strategy of high price for the new product. During that introductory period GE sustained a loss of more than a million dollars.

So far, little evidence of illegal behavior. GE's subsequent behavior, however, was sometimes cavalier and insensitive. For example, the original Carboloy price of $453 a pound was not the result of economic analysis, but an arbitrary decision to set the price at $1 a gram. Also, GE was still extending its partnership with Krupp as late as December, 1939. By then the threat of Nazism and the military importance of Carboloy had become clear. A GE negotiator did at least have the good sense to suggest "that the Krupp name be kept out of any correspondence." Was all this illegal under the antitrust laws? GE offered in 1940 to accept a consent decree that included dropping the Krupp alliance. The government refused the offer and took the case to trial. (383)

The third suit involved those international agreements Swope had made after World War I. The government charged that this effort at international cartelization had domestic consequences in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

When the three cases came to trial in 1942, GE had a new approach. In letters to the U.S. Attorney General and Secretary of War it explained that trial of these cases "will seriously interfere with the production of War Materials by the General Electric Company." The entreaty succeeded. The cases were postponed for the duration of the war. They would be tried not in the atmosphere of the New Deal, but in the aftermath of a war won with the help of technology, including light bulbs and Carboloy, supplied by the giant corporation that the New Deal had attacked. (384)

The story of GE's contributions to World War II victory have been told in detail elsewhere, including in GE's own book Men and Volts at War. The ability of the Depression-battered U.S. manufacturing industry, GE included, to turn plowshares into swords was a decisive cause — perhaps the decisive cause — of allied victory. It was also a story of remarkable teamwork between those corporations and their previous New Deal critics. Historian Mark Wilson concluded that the war's production miracle owed as much or more to Federal Government effectiveness as to private enterprise productivity. Big Government specified needs, mobilized effort, controlled prices and profits, prevented profiteering, led an uneasy peace between management and labor, built or paid for new plants, guided R&D, and, oh yes, ran a secret project that produced the most fearsome weapon in world history. (385)

In GE's case, as indeed in the case of almost all the giants, becoming an arsenal of democracy was done with some controversy, but in general without foot dragging or excess profiteering. By war's end, GE had produced $4 billion worth of military equipment. It won about 4% of the nation's prime wartime defense contracts, the ninth most of all U.S. companies. It had also paid about a billion dollars in taxes. Unlike in World War I, this kept wartime profit rates at, or even below, prewar values. (386)

Those GE contributions sprang from every corner of the company. First and foremost stand the the more than 50,000 GE employees who served in the armed forces. 1051 of them gave their lives. GE's civilian wartime employment would peak at 167,000, twice the prewar level. While operatives and laborers exercised old skills or learned new ones, top executives went to Washington as "dollar a year" men. This included the chosen successors of Swope and Young, president-select Charles E. Wilson and chairman-select Phillip D. Reed. That "dollar-a-year" designation, giving up their salaries of as much as $100,000 per year for that nominal $1 annual wage, proved controversial. Critics suggested that those executives might steer an excessive share of the defense budget to their employers. When peace returned, those grateful employers would more than make up in salaries and perks for that dollar a year sacrifice.

Particularly focused of these charges was the committee investigating national defense expenditures chaired by Senator Harry Truman. A memo by a GE representative attending the Truman Committee hearings noted that "Mr. Philip D. Reed [recently named GE's next Board Chairman] received rather rough treatment during some of the hearings." Some 70% of the nearly $100 billion of U.S. defense contracts did go to the 100 largest U.S. companies. Criticism by Truman and others led to creation of a Smaller War Plants Corporation to increase small business's share. The imbalance, however, seems more related to the technological and labor readiness of the giants than to undue influence of their dollar a year men. (387)

Overall, however, a later study concluded that heavy participation in the war effort did prove a postwar competitive advantage. "Firms most involved in the war effort grew large relative to the others," the study concluded, "while those least involved grew smaller." Sources of that advantage included the Second Revenue Act of 1940, which allowed firms that build plant or equipment used in the war effort, as GE did, to more than double their depreciation rate, to 20%. Firms that built such plants with government assistance during the war were often allowed to buy them at bargain prices after the war, another perk of which GE would take advantage. (388)

What did the nation receive in exchange for such benefits? In World War II, GE's main contribution to war production was doing faster and better in wartime what it already did in peacetime. The protean power of electricity now went on triple duty. It continued to serve the civilian population. It powered newly built, largely private enterprise operated arsenals of democracy. Finally, electricity went directly to work in weapons on sea, in the air, and on land.

At sea, though GE did not make ships, half of the new U.S. warships had their propellers driven by GE turbines, with each of those turbines at least powerful enough to electrify a good sized town. Those major warships were driven through gears. The Navy also, however, found a use for GE's capability to build turbine-electric ship drives. In 1942 it commissioned a new class of anti-submarine vessels, the destroyer escort. GE turbo-electric drives would power 244 of them. Hundreds of naval support vessels and merchant ships were also GE turbine powered and electrically driven. Over all, powering ships was GE's greatest direct military contribution to the war effort. (389)

In the air, though GE did not make airplanes, it became the major supplier of the turbosuperchargers. They enabled B-17s to fly to their targets at unprecedented high altitude. GE built turret drive control and aiming systems. This enabled gunners on bombers to fight back more effectively against enemy fighter planes. On land, GE produced electrical systems providing each tank with the electric power used by a house. It converted houseware and appliance assembly lines to the production of bazookas and howitzers. It put the skills used to make radios to work making radar systems. Scientists Irving Langmuir, Katharine Blodgett, and Vincent Schaeffer applied their research on atoms and molecules to the development of improved smoke screens for hiding ground troops from attack or naval vessels from kamikazes.

Other GE scientists and engineers moved in directions that GE had previously rejected or downplayed. For example, in 1937, Owen D. Young had sent GE Research Director William D. Coolidge a stockholder query. Was GE doing anything about the idea of getting enormous amounts of energy from splitting atoms? Coolidge assured the questioner that GE scientists were aware of the concept, but placed practical atom splitting far in the future, if indeed possible at all. (390)

Just three years later, In February, 1940, the GE Research Lab was using its capabilities in physics and chemistry to separate the rare Uranium isotope U-235 from the vastly more plentiful isotope U-238. Soon a GE researcher was riding the New York Central to New York City carrying half a microgram of pure U-235. This was half the total U.S. supply of that rare and suddenly extraordinarily precious material. At Columbia University a team headed by physicist Enrico Fermi then used that sample to verify experimentally that it was U-235 in which a chain reaction could occur, and therefore it was U-235 from which a bomb could be made. All this happened so early in the U.S. effort that, far from being shrouded in secrecy, the story was featured in the both New York Times and the GE Review. Both stories downplayed the significance of the discovery, stating that hundreds of kilograms of enriched uranium would be needed to produce any practical effects.

By 1941, however, secrecy had been clamped down, and Coolidge was appointed to a National Defense Research Committee evaluating the prospects for nuclear energy. That summer physicist Marcus Oliphant visited Coolidge in Schenectady and told him of a surprising finding achieved by German émigré physicist Rudolf Peirls. Only ten kilograms of U-235 would be needed for a bomb. By 1943 GE was supplying controls, high voltage electrical equipment and mass spectrometers to secret uranium enrichment programs in Tennessee and California, as one of the hundreds of subcontractors on the bomb project. (391)

Another GE meeting raised another radical idea. The February, 1941, meeting of the GE Engineering Council has been called to discuss an old idea that was becoming a new competitive threat. The Swiss company Brown Boveri was selling gas turbines to provide peaking power for electric utilities. Here one of the youngest participants chimed in. "The development," said mechanical engineer Alan Howard, "might lead to gas turbines for airplanes." The meeting's oldest participant then took matters one step further. Sanford Moss' pioneering efforts since before World War I had made GE a world leader at making airplane turbosuperchargers. He now told the meeting about the invention by Great Britain's Frank Whittle of an aircraft engine similar to a turbosupercharger that was a step beyond merely driving a propeller with a gas turbine. That next step was the turbojet. Moss' team at Lynn had analyzed the idea and found it challenging, but feasible. The meeting's chairman, GE Vice President of Engineering quickly brought things back down to earth. GE's interest here was on land based gas turbines for power generation, not aerial inventions. He restricted consideration to whether the company should follow Brown Boveri's land gas turbine initiative. After discussion, GE Research Director William Coolidge summed up the verdict: "I do not see how we can afford not to go ahead." The immediately practical land based gas turbine for electric power generation was approved. The highly speculative turbojet idea was put aside. (392)

While the GE Engineering Council was thus proposing, the wider world was differently disposing. By the time of that 1941 GE meeting, U.S. Army Air Forces General Hap Arnold had already been introduced to that Whittle turbojet. In February of that year, at Arnold's urging, the U.S. government's National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, predecessor of NASA) set up a jet engine research committee, including a GE representative. In April, 1941 British officials offered to the then still officially neutral U.S., via General Arnold, both the plans of the Whittle jet and the consulting services of Whittle himself. This would assure its development for possible use against Germany whatever the fate of Great Britain. By July, 1941, Arnold had chosen GE to make a U.S. copy of Whittle's jet. Soon the plans and an early model of the Whittle jet were on their way via B-17 from England to Lynn, MA. They were followed in 1942 by a visit by Whittle himself, disguised with the not very deceptive alias of Frank Whitley. (393)

The choice of GE to make the U.S. Whittle jet has been given at least three interpretations. One is that Moss' successful turbosupercharger efforts marked GE as the best technical choice. Another interpretation is that the choice avoided distracting aircraft engine makers Pratt and Whitney and Curtiss Wright from their already large piston engine committments. Yet a third is that only a newcomer would have the flexibility to overcome a bias towards the current overwhelming superiority of the entrenched piston engine.

Whatever the balance of these motives, GE's immediate availability of a wide range of diverse technical skills played a major role. The GE engineers immediately began making improvements in its version of the Whittle engine, such as more heat resistant alloys for use in turbine blades. In September, 1941, GE signed the Army Air Force contract. Just over a year later, on 1 Oct 1942, at Muroc Dry Lake, California, two GE-built Whittle type turbojets powered a Bell Airacomet into the air for the first ever U.S. jet flight.

The performance of this pioneering effort, howwever, proved disappointing. Improvement proved difficult and slow. Despite the early start, by the war's end U.S.-made jet powered aircraft had not advanced beyond the testing and training stages, and never saw combat. They had, however, put General Electric into the aircraft engine business to stay. (394)

Meanwhile, other secret wartime military products presaged future civilian spinoffs. For example, a key wartime material was industrial diamond, used for cutting metals used in shells and armor. The main supplier of that diamond, South Africa, was a questionable ally. To insure an adequate supply, the U.S. enlisted the world leader in high pressure physics, Nobel laureate Percy Bridgman of Harvard. He led in a project to make diamond by squeezing graphite hard enough to change its structure. GE was brought in because Bridgman needed that hard metal Carboloy to make his diamond press. Bridgman's project did not succeed. A few years after the war, however, GE would pick the project up again, with results to be discussed later.

Similarly, the wartime demands of a Navy procurement officer named Hyman Rickover for better insulating materials led for support for a new GE Research Lab process for making a versatile new class of polymers called silicones. This was the first step in turning a previously minor GE Plastics business into a major GE advanced materials moneymaker.

GE would later publicly emphasize peaceful spinoffs of its wartime work, such as wire developed for heated flying suits that was later used in electric blankets. The biggest result of GE's weapons work was, however, more weapons work. This would range from an electric motor driven version of the Civil War Gatling Gun to ballistic missile re-entry vehicles to devices for triggering H-bombs. Labeled publicly with the peaceful sounding label "Aerospace", this weapons work ultimately rose to over one fourth of company sales.

In wartime labor relations, change was more evolutionary than revolutionary. "No general conversion was needed" wrote a GE induction motor engineer. A main challenge was doubling production and the work force while replacing military volunteers and draftees. By war's end, GE had doubled the number of its manufacturing locations, from 34 to 68. For management purposes, many of the new war plants were satellites of the older Works: for example, Fitchburg and Everett, MA were satellites of the Lynn Works, Syracuse and Fort Edward, NY were satellites of the Schenectady Works, Darby, PA of the Philadelphia Works, Buffalo, NY of the Erie Works, and Kokomo, IN of the Fort Wayne Works. Almost all the new plants were in that industrial belt quadilateral bounded by St. Louis, MO, Minneapolis, MN, Portland, ME and Baltimore, MD. A significant exception was a new plant at Oakland, CA. (395)

Veteran workers of those war years expressed pride in the sense of unity that permeated those wartime plants. They warned, however, against overglamorizing wartime unity. Meyer Siegel, a 50 year old World War I veteran, found at the Schenectady Works a way to contribute to another war effort. He also found, however, scrawled on the wall of a Works restroom, the words "You dirty Jews. You kikes go home. Get out of GE. Go back to Palestine." (396)

Woman workers too encountered an ambiguous welcome. Their share of the growing GE Schenectady Work force rose from a prewar 15% to over 30%. Those women initially encountered ongoing wage discrimination dating back over the company's entire history. The UE took the lead in battling this discrimination. "Sex discrimination must end", proclaimed bargaining agent Leo Jandreau in a June, 1942, issue of the UE News. Making this happen proved complicated. Some male workers feared equality might be approached not by raising women's pay, but by reducing that of the men. In 1945, the National War Labor Board did decree wage equality. That decree, however, went away with war's end. The tide was however turning, and, with continued union pressure, wage equality would be achieved. (397)

As significant as what women were paid was what they did. For many, probably most, women workers, wartime jobs were not all that different from the jobs women had been doing since the creation of the electrical manufacturing industry. Nell Giles, a reporter for the Boston Globe, spent eight weeks working at GE's West Lynn, MA Meter and Instruments Factory and reported on this typical experience. Manual dexterity was the main thing female applicants were tested on. The half that passed were told to come back the next day with their nails cut short. They were then taught three basic movements called the finger, the shoulder and the hip-and-back, and practiced keeping both hands doing different moves at once. Actual work began with simple tasks, such as blowing off metal chips with an air blast. Giles moved on to operating a small drill press. "Once you mastered the technique of the job," Giles wrote, "your mind slides into a beautiful vacuum of space, cool and green." Breaking a drill bit brought from the setup man a brusque "helping Hitler again?" Completing 1000 operations without breaking a drill bit brought an approving "Hi babe." Giles noted that constant patriotic exhortation did not prevent a daily absenteeism of 6%. Nor was there any management response to suggestions that might help lower that absentee rate, such as the suggestion that "day nurseries might keep more women at work." (398)

Unlike in World War I, however, many women moved into skilled jobs requiring initiative and skills. As a GE spokesman said at a 1948 Congressional hearing, before the war "It was not the practice to have men and women working on identcal jobs" and that in the past GE had paid men and women differently for "roughly comparable" work. During the war years, however, "of necessity" women took over many of the jobs performed exclusively by men. The pay system had become by 1948 based primarily on skill, and secondarily on physical labor required. From 1940 to 1948, GE's average hourly wage rate for men increased 62% while the average hourly rate for women increased by 98%. (399)

Exemplifying these changes was Helen Quirini. In 1941 she was a recent high school graduate who could not afford college. Nor could she save enough money for it by running with her brothers a small grocery store. Applying to Schenectady GE, she was offered the choice of an office or a shop job. For her, the choice was easy. She had heard that a shop piece worker could make 15% more than an office worker. She began in the radio transmitter department. The job had a set Anticipated Earning Rate. A beginner was given 4 weeks to show that she could meet that rate. Quirini not only passed that test, but quickly moved on to wiring jobs that required not merely repeated motions, but skill, initiative and understanding. She read blueprints, interpreted wiring diagrams, and wielded a soldering iron. After six months on the job, she was earning as much as her sister, a GE office worker who had been with the company for five years.

Urged to join UE Local 301, she replied that in her neighborhood and family the union was "not held in high regard". Many believed it to be Communist. Quirini instead initially participated in company sponsored activities, playing on the company basketball and softball teams, and serving as a board member of the GE Athletic Association and as a reporter for the GE Works News.

What changed her views began after UE 301 had secured the placement of one union Shop Steward for every foreman. Working beside one female Shop Steward, Quirini heard the standard stories of the pre-union days: exploitive and abusive foremen, favoritism in layoffs, job selling at the employment office. "Then," recalls Quirini, "I asked her the $64 question: are you a Communist?" She replied, "I am not." Admiration of this particular person helped Quirini choose to join the union.

Subsequently, "I looked for any evidence that communism was a factor," she recalled. "I found none." This communist question was a prominent one throughout the U.S. labor movement at this time, and especially in regard to the UE. It will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. (400)

For some women workers, some of the greatest changes went beyond shop jobs or secretarial duties. Adelaide Oppenheim had not set out to work in technology or for GE. She was a Cornell history graduate who went on to write an M.A. thesis on Thomas Mann's ideas on space, time, and death. To earn money, she first sold eggs, then worked as a home lighting advisor. Then, in 1941, she applied for a job at GE Schenectady. After false starts as a blueprint tracer and a file clerk, she tried the GE General Engineering Laboratory. The hiring manager said, "Oh, you are a history major. What did you think about Spengler's Decline of the West?" Though not having read it, she took the hint and proclaimed it a great book. He proceeded to mansplain Spengler for half an hour, then offer her a job.

The job was as a calculator. A top GE engineer who brought her problems noticed her aptitude ran far beyond operating a mechanical adding machine. She wound up replacing a junior engineer who had been drafted. There she worked beside other women, many of them teachers of math and science at women's colleges. They were hired with the understanding that after the war they would return to the classroom, giving their GE jobs back to the "real" engineers. Oppenheim did not have a classroom to go back to. She stayed at GE and entered a new field called project engineering. She did project analysis at the plutonium plant GE ran at Hanford, WA, wrote part of the proposal for GE's first nuclear reactor, and ended up managing a group of 35 people. She became the first woman admitted to that earlier mentioned elite Elfun Society. (401)

Though Oppenheim's career path was exceptional, many women stayed on the job after the war. Post-war female employment at GE Schenectady stayed well above the prewar share of 15%, going as high as 25%. The range of jobs done by women also, though at first only slowly, expanded irreversibly. Women were admitted into the Apprentice Program, and subsequently into engineering and finance training programs.

Another employment issue also got off to a slower and more controversial start. Wrote Nell Giles in 1943, "there was a problem ahead with Negroes." No longer confined to "the yard" and janitorial duties, wartime demand sent some black applicants into the offices and shops. It also led some White female workers to complain "do we have to share a bathroom with these Negro women?" At Schenectady, a group of white women launched a grievance on this issue, seeking segregated rest rooms. UE 301 refused to support them. The company rejected the grievance all the way up the management chain. Partly out of wartime needs, opportunities for Black workers slowly increased. Edna Bailey Miller had attended Howard University and worked as a secretary before she applied for a job at the Schenectady Works in 1942. She was offered the choice of sweeper or elevator operator. She left, and came back with a form to be sent to the Federal Government protesting GE's illegal discrimination. This time she was offered a factory job. Helen Quirini later recalled Miller saying that, on her first day on the new job, when she walked down the long aisle to the foreman's office "she knew how a convict feels as he walks down the aisle to execution." She was, however, accepted on the factory floor. She subsequently left for wartime Army service, then returned to GE and a career as a worker and equal rights advocate. (402)

Another milestone had been passed just before the war. Two decades after Wendell King had been driven from a summer job in a Schenectady GE Works machine shop, Jim Stamper became GE's first Black machinist . He was born in Atlanta, GA in 1913. After the death of his father, a bricklayer, his mother brought Jim in 1930 to Schenectady. He found it, he said later, "like a little Southern city up North, only with the racism subterranean." There his uncle, head waiter at the city's best hotel, provided him with his first job. In 1937, Stamper graduated from high school, completing a technical training course. He was initially turned down by GE. Then his high school shop instructor told the GE personnel department that if it turned down an applicant as outstanding as Stamper, the school would send no more applicants to GE. This got the verdict reversed, and GE hired Stamper as a machinist. After serving in the military in World War II, Stampler would return to GE and go on to become the Schenectady Works' first Black Supervisor, and one of Schenectady's leading civil rights advocates. Another milestone was passed in the early 1950s when Lytle Cheeks became the first Black graduate of the Schenectady Apprentice Program. (403)

For Black employment at the Schenectady Works, however, time was out of joint. Just as a black migration into Schenectady was turning upward, in 1945-1955, employment at the Schenectady Works peaked and was turning downward. GE would never provide to Schenectady's Black population the upward mobility opportunities it had earlier provided to White ethnic groups.

In summary, decades after what turned out to be a false alarm in 1900-1920, GE came by 1945 to accept, however reluctantly, the very things it had been fleeing since its origins; crowding, politics, and unions. Regarding crowding, the Schenectady Works was in 1945, packed with 30,000 people, working in three shifts. In the city, housing was nearly impossible to obtain. The streets for the four wartime years were clogged with traffic, sometimes including tanks on tests runs after their production at the city's ALCO locomotive plant. Politically, industry went to Washington in the form of dollar a year men. Controversy ranged over distribution of contracts between big and small business. Even before D-day, a debate over reconversion to peacetime production began. GE and other Giants were accused of delaying that reconversion so they could milk the last dollar out of of their war contracts while monopolizing the scarce materials that smaller companies were hoping to use to get a peacetime head start. Unions were now solidly installed not merely in a few GE plants, as in World War I, but company wide. This time around they would not be routed immediately after the war by a depression and an employer offensive.

So, to answer this chapter's questions, what caused Coordinated Cooperation's demise? What replaced it? Coordinated cooperation had proved not to be a destination, but a stop in the road to this new world of vastly bigger government, vastly more powerful unions, and more gigantic than ever, but less independently dominant, corporations. Moving along this road, GE had not been guided by top management visible hand strategizing. It had adapted to circumstances. Those circumstances were a depression, the rapid growth of Federal Government power, and another world war. In completing these changes, World War II had proved to be, for GE, nothing less than a third New Deal. The first New Deal had replaced industry-coordinated cooperation with the somewhat similar but government coordinated NIRA. The Second New Deal finished the demise of coordinated cooperation, replacing its welfare and labor relations policies with Social Security and the Wagner Act. The Third New Deal of wartime mobilization solidly entrenched unions as a countervailing power to management.

Gerard Swope, a model of graceful and constructive adaptation to those new circumstances, now turned over the reins of GE to a very different company president. Swope would die in 1957. GE tradition holds that at his own previous request, he was buried, without ceremony or headstone in the garden of his Ossining, NY estate. If so, he lacks an epitaph. A good one might be: "this is America, and that is the way we do things here!"

Notes

  1. Wise, George, 1986. Willis R. Whitney. Columbia U. Case, Josephine Young and Case, Everett. 1982. Owen D. Young. Godine. Friedel, Frank. 1979. FDR: Launching the New Deal. Little, Brown. p. 39.
  2. Swope to Camp Incas. 25 July 1930. Swope Papers. MiSci.
  3. "Wage Rates in GE". Report 113-22, Swope Papers. MiSci. Research Lab salary data from Louis Navias. Temin quoted in Dimand, Robert W. 1994. Irving Fisher's Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions. Review of Social Thought. 51. 92-107. p. 100.
  4. Paul Adeler quoted in Report on GE Stockholders' Meeting, Rice Hall, Schenectady, 21 April 1936. Swope to William Burrows. 28 Oct 1930. Swope Papers. MiSci.
  5. The Citizen 22 April 1932.
  6. Hammond, J. W. 1931. The GE Employees Unemployment Plan. Copy in Swope Papers. Swope to Works Council. Schenectady, 19 Sept 1932. Swope Papers. MiSci.
  7. Burton DeLack to Swope 2 July 1931. Swope Papers, Box 16 Folder 113.3B. MiSci.
  8. Sarnacki, Ray. 2020. A Brief History of My Grandparents. Project to Discover Schenectady County's Eastern European Roots Newsletter, Vol. 7, No. 3.
  9. Warren, Glenn B. to Herman Hill, 1 Apr 1974. Glen Warren Papers Box 1, 95.78.18 MiSci.
  10. Loth, David. 1958. Swope of GE. Simon & Schuster. p. 202. Frederick, George. 1931. The Swope Plan. Business Bourse.
  11. Wilson, Joan Hoff, 1975. Herbert Hoover, Forgotten Progressive. Little, Brown. pp. 152-154
  12. Swope to Cleveland Elfuns, 25 Aug 1932. Swope Papers. MiSci.
  13. Committee of Industrial Analysis. 1937. The National Recovery Administration. Washington, DC 17 Feb 1937.
  14. Swope to Hugh Johnson 2 June 1932. "Plan for Industrial Collective Bargaining" 10 Aug 1933. Swope Papers. Box 16. Folder 113.D. MiSci.
  15. Fn 15 Swope, Address to Workers's Council 18 Oct 1933. Swope Papers. MiSci.
  16. Swope to Walter S. Gifford 5 July 1933, Swope Papers. Swope, "Memo — Suggestions to Discuss with Secretary Roper", 28 June 1933. Minutes of 4 June 1933 Organization Meeting in Daniel Roper to Swope 6 June 1933, Swope Papers. Opening Statement of Gerard Swope at Meeting of Business Advisory Council. Released 1 Nov 1933. Swope Papers. MiSci.
  17. For examples of Press reaction see New York Times 1 Nov 1933 p. 1 and New York Herald Tribune 1 Nov 1933, p. 1. Roosevelt's remark is in the Herald Tribune story. Text of Swope radio address, 4 Nov 1933, Swope Papers. MiSci.
  18. Nelson, Daniel. 1969. Unemployment Insurance. Wisconsin. pp. 45-47. Brents, Barbara. 1984. Capitalism, Corporate Liberalism, and Social Policy. Mid American Review of Sociology. 9.23-40.
  19. Fn 23 B. F. Sunny to Swope 10 Oct 1933, Swope Papers. MiSci.
  20. Perkins, Frances. 1946. The Roosevelt I Knew. Viking. p. 239; Severn, Bill. 1976. Frances Perkins. Hawthorn. p. 156.
  21. Leary to Swope 5 April 1934, Swope Papers. MiSci. Nevachea, Gerardo. Emergence, Development and change of a local union. MA thesis, U-Mass Boston. 1971. UE Archives. Leary to Raymond Moley. 22 Aug 1934, Swope to Leary, 21 Aug 1936. Swope Papers. MiSci.
  22. Fn 32 Handler and Bartlett, 8 Mar 1934, NLRB-Box 108, Misc., U.S. National Archives. Coulthard to John Burns 30 Mar 1934. Coulthard to J. Colburn, 31 Mar 1934, copies in Swope Papers. MiSci.
  23. Fn 26 Schenectady Works News 9 Nov 1933, 1 Apr 1934, 13 April 1934, 23 August 1935, p. 1.
  24. Works News 18 Sept 1931. Burrows to Swope 5 Oct 1932. Interview With A. C. Stevens.
  25. The following discussion of the unionization of the Schenectady Works relies heavily on Schatz, Ronald. 1983. The Electrical Workers. Illinois. and Kannenberg, Lisa. 1999. The Product of GE's Progress. Rutgers Ph.D. Dissertation.
  26. Kannenberg, Lisa. 1999. The Product of GE's Progress. Ph.D. Dissertation, Rutgers. pp. 31-43. Burton DeLack to Swope 3 June 1932, Swope Papers. Col. E. Z. Steever to Swope, 12 Sept 1934. Swope Papers. MiSci.
  27. Turnbull testimony 27 Feb 1935. Swope Papers Box 16. Folder 113.2 MiSci. D. Turnbull to Philip Carey. 11 Oct 1925. File 17BLE UE Papers, U. of Pittsburgh.
  28. Schenectady Gazette 2 Nov 1936, p. 7.
  29. Julius Emspak Oral History. Columbia University.
  30. Zahavi, Gerald. 1996. Passionate Commitments: Race, Sex and Communism at Schenectady General Electric. 1932-1954. Journal of American History. 93. 514-548. Professor Zahavi is the authority on Communism in Schenectady, and this illuminating article goes far beyond the GE part sketched out here.
  31. Labor at General Electric. Program at Schenectady County Public Library. 10 Jan 1983.
  32. Works News 9 Oct 1936.
  33. Jandreau to Emspak. 24 April 1936. File 160. Local 301, Jandreau. UE Archives, U. of Pittsburgh.
  34. The Wire Mill Strike is described in RG 260, 165-1632. U.S. Department of Labor. National Archives. Suitland, MD.
  35. Jandreau to Emspak. 11 July 1936. Local 301 Correspondence. File 161. UE Archives, U. of Pittsburgh.
  36. Speech delivered at the corner of Cable and Braddock Ave., August 31, 1936. Swope Papers. Box 16. Folder 113.2 D. MiSci.
  37. Howell, Harris John. 1982. The Right to Manage. Wisconsin. p. 32. A similar conclusion is reached in Mizruchi, Mark. 2013. The Fracturing of the U.S. Corporate Elite. Harvard. p. 86. See also Schatz, Ronald. 1983. The Electrical Workers. Illinois. pp. 70-75.
  38. Speech manuscript, Swope to Elfun Society, November, 1936, Swope papers. MiSci.
  39. Howell, Harris John. 1982. The Right to Manage. Wisconsin. pp. 34, 44 also attributes GE's response to "GE's confidence in its own power and the weakness of the UE."
  40. Details of the election are in Schatz, Ronald. Union Pioneers: The Founders of Local Unions at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1933-1937. Journal of American History, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Dec., 1979), pp. 586-602. Schenectady Gazette 7 Dec 1936, p. 2; 9 Dec 1936, p. 6.
  41. Schenectady Gazette 9 Dec 1936 p. 11; Dec 1936, p. 1; 12 Dec 1936 p. 9; 14 Dec 1936 p. 6.
  42. Schenectady Gazette 21 Dec 1936 , p. 11.
  43. Kannenberg, Lisa. 1999. The Product of GE's Progress. Ph.D. Dissertation, Rutgers. p. 54. Matles, James, and Higgins, James. 1974. Them and Us. Beacon. p. 65.
  44. Jandreau to Emspak, 11 July 1936. Local 301 Correspondence, File 161, UE Archives, U. of Pittsburgh.
  45. Note on the back of "Draft 10 Points presented to the Electrical Industry Employees Union by the Managers of Several Apparatus Works, 1937. Swope Papers. Swope to Camp Manufacturing, 11 July 1937. Swope Papers. MiSci.
  46. For details on both Bill Turnbull's key role in organizing GE, and the subsequent contract negotiations, see Matles, James, and Higgins, James. 1974. Them and Us. Beacon. p. 61-88.
  47. Sen. Robert Wagner to Gerard Swope 8 April 1937, Swope to Wagner 13 April 1937. Swope Papers. Box 16 FF 113.2C. MiSci.
  48. Kirat, Thierry and Marty, Frederick. The Late Emerging Consensus on Economic Ideas in the 2nd New Deal. History of Economic Ideas 39. 11-51. p. 20.
  49. U.S. of A. vs. Corning Glass Works et al. Docket #C-108-164. District Court of the U.S. for the Southern District of New York. August Term 1940. Copy in Swope Papers. MiSci.
  50. F. D. Fish to Charles Neave 25 September 1928, Reed File, Swope Papers; Testimony of Philip D. Reed in U.S. vs. GE, 20 March 1946, p. 1892, Reed File, Swope Papers. MiSci.
  51. F. Gerald Toye to P. Reed, 14 April 1942; Summary Statement of John Henry Lewin, 14 April 1942, Swope Papers. MiSci Interview with Sam Hoyt, 6 Feb 1979. Draft Statement "To the Employees and Stockholders of GE" 5 September 1940. Mogerman, W. D. 1973. Zay Jeffries. American Society of Metals, 1973. Philip D. Reed to Thurman Arnold, 1 August, 1940; Thurman Arnold to Philip D. Reed, 13 August, 1940, Swope Papers. MiSci U.S. vs. GE, Fried Aktiengesellschaft et. al. August term, 1940, District Court of the U.S. for the Second District of N.Y., August Term, 1940. A later scholar found that the story was less a matter of monopoly and aiding the Nazis that it was a complex story of a new material that was a "hard sell" to U.S. companies in the 1930s. Gaffard, Hermione, 2015. A Hard Sell. Technology and Culture. 56. 895-922.
  52. Vaughan, Floyd. 1956. The U.S. Patent System. Greenwood Press. p. 164. Flanigan, M. L. 1945. International Co-Operation and Control in the Electrical Industry. Notes on Conference between Mr. Arnold and his Associates and GE Counsel for the Defendants in U.S. vs. GE, 6 April, 1942; Charles E. Wilson to Secretary of War et. al. 4 April 1942, Reed File, Swope Papers. MiSci.
  53. Wilson, Mark. 2016. Destructive Creation. U. of Pennsylvania. pp. 1-5.
  54. McCraw, Thomas. 2000. American Business 1920-2000. Harlan Davidson. p. 94.
  55. Koistinen, Paul. 2004. Arsenal of World War II. Kansas. p. 328-329. Memorandum on the U.S. Senate Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program. Owen D. Young Papers, Box 24, FF 9-24 #4. MiSci. Herman, Arthur. 2012. Freedom's Forge. Random House. esp. p. 118, 248.
  56. Luchansky, Bill and Hooks, Gregory. 1996. Corporate Beneficiaries of the Mid-Century Wars. Social Science Quarterly. 77. 301-313.
  57. Study of Monopoly Power. Hearings Before the Committee on Judiciary of the House of Representatives. Nov 21-30, 1949. Serial #14. Part 2B. U.S. GPO. 1950. Miller, John. 1947. Men and Volts at War. McGraw Hill. p. 6.
  58. William D. Coolidge to Henry L. Doherty, 8 Nov 1937. Owen D. Young Papers, ODY File 2-74-A.
  59. Hewlett, Richard and Anderson, Oscar. 1972. The New World. [free PDF viewer required] History of the Atomic Energy Commission Vol. 1. U.S. AEC. pp. 43-46, 128. "From Submarines to A-Bombs", GE Research Laboratory Bulletin, 1959. "Another Step Toward Atomic Power." 1940. General Electric Review. 43. 40-42.
  60. Minutes of the Meeting of the Engineering Council. 24 Feb 1941. Swope Papers. MiSci.
  61. Giffard, Hermione. 2016. Making Jet Engines in World War II. Chicago. pp. 140-145.
  62. Dawson, Virginia. 1991. Engines and Innovation. [free PDF viewer required] NASA/U.S. GPO. pp. 41-55. Garvin, Robert. 1998. Starting Something Big. AIAA. pp. 5-10.
  63. Report Department. On the War Years of the Induction Motor Department. 1 May 1945. General Electric Hall of Electrical History, MiSci. Miller, John. 1947. Men and Volts at War. McGraw Hill p. 240.
  64. Siegel, Meyer. Und. Memoirs. American Jewish Archives. Cincinnati Campus. Hebrew Union College &8212; Jewish Institute of Religion. Cincinnati, OH.
  65. Kannenberg, Lisa. 1999. The Product of GE's Progress. Rutgers Ph.D. Dissertation. pp. 100-103. Matles, James, and Higgins, James. 1974. Them and Us. Beacon. p. 147.
  66. Giles, Nell. Punch In, Susie! A Woman's War Factory Diary. 1943. Harpers.
  67. House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Education and Labor. Equal Pay for Equal Work for Women. 1948. 80th Cong. Second Session. Feb 1948. p. 247.
  68. Quirini, Helen. 1997. Helen Quirini and General Electric. [free PDF viewer required] On file at Schenectady County Historical Society. The full story of Communism in Schenectady can be found in Zahavi, Gerald. 1996. Passionate Commitments: Race, Sex and Communism at Schenectady General Electric, 1932-1954. Journal of American History. 93. 514-548.
  69. Adelaide Oppenheim, Interview by Ruth Anne Evans for the Columbia Oral History Project. 30 April 1976. Copy in Oral History Collection, General Electric Hall of Electrical History, MiSci.
  70. Giles, Nell. Punch In, Susie! A Woman's War Factory Diary. 1943. Harpers. Quirini, Helen. 1997. Helen Quirini and General Electric. [free PDF viewer required] Privately Printed. Ira R. Terry. Oral History. March 1981. Copy in Oral History Collection, General Electric Hall of Electrical History, MiSci.
  71. Williams, Matthew N. 1994. Redefining the Apprentice. M.A. Thesis, U. Albany. Schenectady Gazette 29 Nov 2006; Albany Times Union 28 May 1996.

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