FORTUNE Magazine,Part 2

The Main Street Front
A Report on an American Community After One Year of War

A disaster committee and a motor corps and canteen service have been organized by the Red Cross and six mobile first-aid units are equipped for action. Six hundred women have taken first-aid courses, 1,000 are sewing and knitting, and 150 turning out surgical dressings in the rooms given by the National Bank. High-school girls are taking home-nursing courses. Every physically fit boy in Senior High is in the R.O.T.C., and every senior boy is taking a refresher course in mathematics designed by the U.S. Navy, and studying a series of simple straightforward pamphlets on health, sex, Army regulations, and civics. The study of aeronautics and meteorology is worked into regular science courses, and Superintendent of Schools Howard Black is determined that his boys shall have a headstart when they join the Army or Navy. A good many of them have gone already. Six enlisted last year before graduation, and there are fifty fewer boys in school this year than there were two years ago. Six men teachers have gone into the Army, too, and one woman has joined the WAACs. Two Mattoon High star athletes, Paul Munson and Robert Ingle, have been killed in flight training. War has not dimmed the enthusiasm for sports, and the football season was as important as ever this year though fewer townspeople went to out-of-town games, and many decided that they couldn't drive up for both Dad's Day and Homecoming at the University of Illinois.
Church attendance has increased since the war, particularly on the part of the families of boys in the services. Spiritual life seems to mean more when physical life is so precarious, says the Reverend J. Fred Melvin of the First Methodist Church, who often preaches to a congregation of 1,000 members. People are more generous with money since the war began, he says, and this fall on Black Diamond Sunday, when each member of the congregation was asked to give a penny for each pound of his weight, the collection amounted to over $400, enough to pay the winter's coal bill. Mr. Melvin organized a study class for women, to discuss postwar problems and the establishment of permanent peace, and he reports that "after six weeks of real study and research, the ladies of the study group were definite and unanimous in their feeling and thought we could not be an ostrich any longer in our view of world affairs and world peace. They felt that some kind of a worldwide league should be formed to bring about a just and lasting readjustment of the mess of today." He finds that the boys who talk to him before they leave for camp are unafraid but confused about what they are fighting for. They want to know what is to follow the war, whether they will be "gypped by the politicians after this war as their fathers were after the last."
Except for blaming unfortunate events on "the politicians" the people of Mattoon do not talk much about politics at the moment. Coles County has been pretty consistently Republican for many years until 1932, but in the last three elections Roosevelt has carried the county, by a smaller margin each time. There is no talk about a fourth term, and there are not many, even among the Chicago Tribune readers, who call Roosevelt "that man" and blame the war on the Administration. They have accepted the war and are willing to fight it. They are not isolationists so far as fighting the war goes, and winning the war means complete victory with the Japs and Germans horsewhipped and hog-tied, the U.S. peaceful and prosperous and powerful. But, except for the ladies of Mr. Melvin's study class, people are not thinking much about the postwar world. Most of them think that the U.S. should never have been disarmed, and that after the war has been won "we ought to do something about policing the idiots who are eternally breaking out of the fold and causing trouble."
The Daily Journal-Gazette, published and edited by William B. Hamel, the farm boy from Taylorville who came to Mattoon twenty years ago as a sodajerker, married the daughter of the rich lumber dealer, and now owns a large block of the stock of the newspaper, is all-out for fighting the war and winning the victory. Mr. Hamel's jaunty editorial columns preach a war-bond buying, and tire conservation, and scrap collecting. "There is no speed limit to the scrap-metal drive--the faster the better." "Buying bonds means good sense right now and good dollars in the future." He believes that "the most important functions of the press in this war are: first, to report; second, to criticize; third, to clarify; and fourth, to unify or to make us 'one'." Nearly everybody in town reads the paper, and along with the local news they read the highlights of war news each day and Mr. Hamel's patriotic cartoons and editorials, but their war thinking is more apt to be influenced by radio commentators and newspapers from St. Louis and Chicago. Secretary of the Navy Knox's Daily News is twice as popular as Colonel McCormick's Tribune.

MANPOWER AND WOMANPOWER

The shortage of manpower is becoming a lot more than a threat in Mattoon and Coles County. The farmers were just able to get their crops harvested this fall by hiring old men and young boys, by importing labor from the unprosperous farms of Southern Illinois, and by paying double the usual wage. The broomcorn crop, a specialty in Coles County, was short this year but, even the broomcorn cutters who normally make $4 or $5 a day had to be paid from $10 to $16, and ordinary farm wages were up 50 per cent. Coles County raises about 70,000 acres of soybeans and 90,000 acres of corn, called Indian corn here to distinguish it from broomcorn. Some of the soybeans were caught by an early September frost but the corn crop was heavy and farmers had to work out a cooperative system to use combines and corn-picking machines and hired hands to the best advantage. Certain farmers were deferred by the draft board for the harvest and a new ruling in Illinois may exempt many of them altogether, but next spring the labor shortage is expected to be so acute that plans are being made to excuse farm boys from school and to recruit businessmen and city workers for a few hours each week. Farming comes very close to Mattoon, both physically and financially, and many businessmen own farms as investments. The Lumpkins, for instance, richest family in town, own a dozen farms as well as the local telephone company, and from Lumpkin Heights, where Mrs. William Cutler Lumpkin and her son Richard live in big town houses, they can see the flat stretch of the cornfields that grow close against the city limits. Sixty-five per cent of the Coles County farms are operated by tenants and there has been an increased amount of investing in farms lately, at an average price of $200 an acre. Farm prices were good this fall. County Farm Advisor Myers says "prices are good compared to what they used to be--but not in comparison." (Which means "parity.") Not many Coles County farmers took time to worry much about the parity struggle in Congress.
Farm girls used to go up to Mattoon to work as domestic servants or as waitresses in restaurants and taverns. Now they are pumping gas at Gene O'Malley's filling station or operating presses at the Journal-Gazette or going into factories to learn how to make brooms or furniture or shoes. Because of gas rationing they rent rooms, if they can find them, in town: they are making $18 and $20 a week, which is more than they ever made before, and spending it in Mattoon. They have no desire to go back to waiting on table at $10 a week or to work on their families' farms for nothing but their room and board.
Atlas (engines), Kuehne (furniture), and Brown (shoes) are the three largest factories in town and Atlas is the only war plant. Last year the Atlas Imperial Diesel Engine Co. had a small factory with only enough business to employ 100 men. This year the company has 550 employees, has added new shops to the plant, and is turning out marine and stationary engines for the Army, Navy and Maritime Commission, making shell casings for the Army. The 450 new employees are not skilled mechanics nor have they been imported from other engine and ordnance plants. They have been recruited from Coles County farms and from white-collar jobs in Mattoon and neighboring towns. A licensed embalmer is a foreman in the engine shop, a broom manufacturer is supervisor of ordnance, a preacher is a heat-treatment worker, a gravedigger is a utility man, and "every auto salesman in town is here." Even the new manager, Muirson Wright, had to be brought in from the outside, from the company's office in Seattle. Karl Mosley, the new (and first) personnel director at Atlas, is pretty near the busiest man in town. His main problem is finding men. He could get them from the furniture factory (average pay 50 cents) but if he hired them away from Kuehne it would cause bad feeling in town. This fall he had to fix up a powder room and hire half a dozen women workers. He thinks women will do well on certain repetitive jobs but he has noticed in other factories that they are likely to be more profane than men and that when they get mad at somebody they stop work and fight it out right there. However, it can't be helped, and there will be more women in there soon.
Women are already doing a large share of the work in the other factories. At the Kuehne furniture plant on the edge of town, 66 of the 450 workers have gone into the services and a lot more have quit for higher paid jobs. Fred Kuehne has hired three times as many women as he used to have, chiefly farm girls or small town girls who had never done any factory work before. Outside organizers for the United Mine Workers have been around for the last six months, and in an election held in the plant last August the U.M.W. won out by two votes. In contract bargaining, Kuehne met the union on everything but wage increases and the negotiations are still bogged down. Mr. Kuehne says he has raised wages 20 per cent this year and that the cost of living in Mattoon is up only 9.3 per cent. Production is off 43 per cent because of the lack of materials. With prices for his dinettes frozen he just doesn't see what he can do about higher wages. Union leaders scoff at Kuehne's hard-luck stories, say he has a long antilabor record (he moved to Mattoon ten years ago to get away from unions), and that he is still making plenty of money.
The company has found it impracticable to convert the plant to war use. A WPB regional advisor came down to see if Army cots and Navy bunks could be made and decided that only a small portion of the plant was suitable for conversion. Gliders were another thing they talked about but it takes a skilled worker to make gliders and there is no worker in Mattoon, a Kuehne official says, who ever saw a micrometer or a blueprint. So, unless "they" think up something to convert to, Fred Kuehne will go on making dinettes until he has to shut down his factory for lack of materials and manpower.
Out at the Brown Shoe Co. (Don't Spend Your Life Two Feet from Happiness) 440 of the 760 employees are women and half of them are new workers brought in to fill the places of men who have left. The girls commute from small towns within a radius of twenty miles of Mattoon and some of the men run farms after putting in an eight-hour day at the factyory. Superintendent Al Pauley doesn't like to think what gas rationing is going to do to them. He's not going to face that problem until he has to, and maybe he won't have to because the Association of Commerce is already doing something about establishing a bus service for factory workers who live outside the city limits.
Bigger than any of the factories, and more essential to the war effort, are the two railroads, the Illinois Central and the Big Four whose main lines meet at Mattoon in a noisy, smoke-hung crisscross of tracks and sidings and yards. Between them they have 1,500 employees, 300 more than last year, and are looking for more. They have already used up all returned pensioners and have hired green men in all the departments. Bud "Speck" Milligan, division superintendent of the Big Four for many years, has to spend a lot of time in his office next to the dispatching room and doesn't have much chance to get off on hunting and fishing trips or to attend to his Indiana farms, or even to work in his garden or sit and admire the oil paintings he collects. To run a greatly augmented schedule without enough trained men is a full-time job. Last year there were sixteen freight trains a day and twelve regular passenger trains on the Big Four. This year there are twenty-three through freight trains every day and twenty passenger trains. The I.C. has sixty-nine trains a day, making a total of 112 for both railroads--or one every twelve and a half minutes, all fully loaded with freight or passengers.

LET'S RIDE OUT TO LOU'S

Richard A. Lumpkin, principal stockholder of the Illinois Consolidated Telephone Co., which has thirty-three exchanges in Central Illinois, is a dollar-a-year man now with the Communications Branch of the WPB in Washington, but he still comes home once in a while to see how things are going. So far as business goes he finds that his company's toll calls have dropped 4 per cent since the war began--in contrast to a rise of 25 per cent throughout the U.S.--and he attributes the drop to the lack of war plants in Mattoon. He finds that there is a tremendous turnover in labor, every six months where it used to be every two years. Linemen are hard to get, and operators' minimum wages are 50 per cent higher than the maximum in the big year of 1929. In terms of war consciousness he finds Mattoon very different from Washington--not that Mattoon is less patriotic than Washington, but that the manifestations of patriotism are different. The war is not talked about half so much here as in Washington (and no one has just heard from someone who knows all about everything that such and such a thing is going to happen). Older men and men with families do not enlist as they do in the East, and fewer men and women volunteer for civilian duties. All these things, Mr. Lumpkin believes, are entirely natural, given the geographical location of Mattoon. Dick Lumpkin himself may try to get back into naval Aviation or he may stay with WPB, but whatever he does, he's coming home to live in Mattoon as soon as the war is over. When he first got out of college he thought of going to work in Chicago or New York, but now he has decided that Mattoon is good enough for him.
Most of the citizens think Mattoon is good enough for them. They've been in lots of other small cities, and big ones, too, but there's something different about Mattoon, they say. It's prosperous and progressive and friendly, and everybody has a good time. Almost everybody, that is. To a few rather "queer" people, Mattoon isn't the finest little city in the country. Those few are bored and don't want to take their boredom out in drinking. There are the Rotary Institute of Understanding lectures to go to, and the few concerts that are sponsored by the Civic Music Associaton but there sn't much else to do, they say, besides going to the movies and playing bridge. They even go so far as to think that Mattoon's prosperity is smug and its progressiveness unimaginative and imitative. But there aren't many of these eccentrics and they don't have influence enough to change the town. For the most part, everyone is getting along all right. The mayor of Mattoon, Dr. E.E. Richardson, doesn't need to worry much about how the city is getting along, and doesn't spend much of his time on municipal duties. "It's not a full-time job, and I'm just mayor because nobody else wants to be. Nothing much exciting happens and we never have any trouble--it's just a plain town and everything goes along peacefully."
The WPA finished a drainage project out by the city waterworks last mot a that wspactcally the endof the WPA in Matoon. (The yes ago there wer 661 men on the rolls.) Thereaeos for anyone able to work, and the city relief load has been cut from 1,434 people (in 1936) to 133. The dislocation of employment is still a problem in Mattoon but so far it has been more stimulating than harmful. New jobs have meant new interests and new security. No one has been deeply affected by shortages of food or clothing--in fact many people have more food and clothing than they ever had before. For the busy merchants, curtailed vacations last summer simply meant more parties at the Country Club, more weekends at Lake Mattoon.

FORTUNE Magazine, July 1943