For the flyboys of the air corps, airplanes were mechanisms for transporting troops and supplies to combat zones, armed wings for pursuing enemies, sky-high launching pads for ship-sinking bombs. They reviewed their vehicles in an exhaustive preflight checkout before climbing into the sky. Mechanics rolled up their sleeves and sharpened their eyes; a broken piston, an improperly locked shoulder harness, a faulty fuel tank light, any one of these could cost lives. But even before the plane responded to its pilot’s knowing caress, its nature, its very DNA—from the shape of its wings to the cowling of its engine—had been manipulated, refined, massaged, deconstructed, and recombined by the engineers next door.
Long before America’s aircraft manufacturers placed one of their newly conceived flying machines into production, they sent a working prototype to the Langley laboratory so that the design could be tested and improved. Nearly every high-performance aircraft model the United States produced made its way to the lab for drag cleanup: the engineers parked the planes in the wind tunnels, making note of air-disturbing surfaces, bloated fuselages, uneven wing geometries. As prudent and thorough as old family doctors, they examined every aspect of the air flowing over the plane, making careful note of the vital signs. NACA test pilots, sometimes with an engineer riding shotgun, took the plane for a flight. Did it roll unexpectedly? Did it stall? Was it hard to maneuver, resisting the pilot like a shopping cart with a bad wheel? The engineers subjected the airplanes to tests, capturing and analyzing the numbers, recommending improvements, some slight, others significant. Even small improvements in speed and efficiency multiplied over millions of pilot miles added up to a difference that could tip the long-term balance of the war in the Allies’ favor.
“Victory through airpower!” Henry Reid, engineer-in-charge of the Langley laboratory, crooned to his employees, the shibboleth a reminder of the importance of the airplane to the war’s outcome. “Victory through airpower!” the NACA-ites repeated to each other, minding each decimal point, poring over differential equations and pressure distribution charts until their eyes tired. In the battle of research, victory would be theirs.
Unless, of course, Melvin Butler failed to feed the three-shift-a-day, six-day-a-week operation with fresh minds. The engineers were one thing, but each engineer required the support of a number of others: craftsmen to build the airplane models tested in the tunnels, mechanics to maintain the tunnels, and nimble number crunchers to process the numerical deluge that issued from the research. Lift and drag, friction and flow. What was a plane but a bundle of physics? Physics, of course, meant math, and math meant mathematicians. And since the middle of the last decade, mathematicians had meant women. Langley’s first female computing pool, started in 1935, had caused an uproar among the men of the laboratory. How could a female mind process something so rigorous and precise as math? The very idea, investing $500 on a calculating machine so it could be used by a girl! But the “girls” had been good, very good—better at computing, in fact, than many of the engineers, the men themselves grudgingly admitted. With only a handful of girls winning the title “mathematician”—a professional designation that put them on equal footing with entry-level male employees—the fact that most computers were designated as lower-paid “subprofessionals” provided a boost to the laboratory’s bottom line.
But in 1943, the girls were harder to come by. Virginia Tucker, Langley’s head computer, ran laps up and down the East Coast searching for coeds with even a modicum of analytical or mechanical skill, hoping for matriculating college students to fill the hundreds of open positions for computers, scientific aides, model makers, laboratory assistants, and yes, even mathematicians. She conscripted what seemed like entire classes of math graduates from her North Carolina alma mater, the Greensboro College for Women, and hunted at Virginia schools like Sweetbriar in Lynchburg and the State Teachers College in Farmville.
Melvin Butler leaned on the US Civil Service Commission and the War Manpower Commission as hard as he could so that the laboratory might get top priority on the limited pool of qualified applicants. He penned ads for the local newspaper, the Daily Press: “Reduce your household duties! Women who are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and do jobs previously filled by men should call the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory,” read one notice. Fervent pleas from the personnel department were published in the employee newsletter Air Scoop: “Are there members of your family or others you know who would like to play a part in gaining supremacy of the air? Have you friends of either sex who would like to do important work toward winning and shortening the war?” With men being absorbed into the military services, with women already in demand by eager employers, the labor market was as exhausted as the war workers themselves.
A bright spot presented itself in the form of another man’s problem. A. Philip Randolph, the head of the largest black labor union in the country, demanded that Roosevelt open lucrative war jobs to Negro applicants, threatening in the summer of 1941 to bring one hundred thousand Negroes to the nation’s capital in protest if the president rebuffed his demand. “Who the hell is this guy Randolph?” fumed Joseph Rauh, the president’s aide. Roosevelt blinked.
A “tall courtly black man with Shakespearean diction and the stare of an eagle,” Asa Philip Randolph, close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, headed the 35,000-strong Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The porters waited on passengers in the nation’s segregated trains, daily enduring prejudice and humiliation from whites. Nevertheless, these jobs were coveted in the black community because they provided a measure of economic stability and social standing. Believing that civil rights were inextricably linked to economic rights, Randolph fought tirelessly for the right of Negro Americans to participate fairly in the wealth of the country they had helped build. Twenty years in the future, Randolph would address the multitudes at another March on Washington, then concede the stage to a young, charismatic minister from Atlanta named Martin Luther King Jr.
Later generations would associate the black freedom movement with King’s name, but in 1941, as the United States oriented every aspect of its society toward war for the second time in less than thirty years, it was Randolph’s long-term vision and the specter of a march that never happened that pried open the door that had been closed like a bank vault since the end of Reconstruction. With two strokes of a pen—Executive Order 8802, ordering the desegregation of the defense industry, and Executive Order 9346, creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to monitor the national project of economic inclusion—Roosevelt primed the pump for a new source of labor to come into the tight production process.