“You think, from what you see in the newspapers, you bump into a submarine or see a ship—you have an engagement out there—that’s easy,” he said, but that was only because the newspapers didn’t understand the secret work being done by people like them to ensure the engagements happened.
Ensuring that two enemy forces met in a maritime battle was hard. And it only occurred, Redman said, thanks to the work of code breakers who could help pinpoint enemy movements. “The work you are doing—as dull as it may seem to you—is very exciting to someone else, and the information you are able to fire [to] the operating agencies in the field contributes a great deal to that success,” he told the women. “And some days when it is hot, and you feel tired and sleepy, remember that the delay of a few hours in picking up some important information may have a vital bearing upon the operations that are going on out in the ocean.”
The speakers were all high-level. Major General Wilhelm D. Styer, chief of staff of the Army Service Forces, delivered a lecture entitled “Fighting to Win” during which he also endeavored to make clear to the young women “just what a great show we are in.” Though they were by definition fighting on land, he pointed out that Army troops had to cross water to get to their battle engagements in Europe and Asia, and they had to transport supplies across both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. During the prior war, he told the young women, the U.S. Army had one sea route, going from America to Europe. Now it had 106 overseas ports, 122 sea routes, and supply lines in the “Asiatic Theater” that were as much as twelve thousand miles long. He talked about trips he had taken to Marrakesh, Casablanca, and Algiers, and about his first sight of the Chinese soldiers who were U.S. allies. “They are considerably smaller in stature than our own troops, but they are very stocky. And as these are a hand-picked lot, they are a very fine-looking bunch of troops.”
He also shared his view that many of the world’s people “do not look like a happy people. They are sullen—look like they lack ambition. When you get back you are just proud of the fact that you are an American, and you are willing to do anything you can to preserve the standards.”
Perhaps most thrilling was a talk revealing the inner workings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose assistant director, Hugh H. Clegg, came to deliver a lecture called “The Enemy in Our Midst.” Clegg talked about the FBI’s own war—against criminals, informers, kidnappers, spies, and fifth columnists. His remarks contained a half joke that shows just how ferociously the agencies were competing for the women sitting before him. “Immediately upon arrival, I was threatened,” he remarked. “Threatened that if I undertook in any way to try to recruit any of the lovely young ladies of this audience to come down and work in our fingerprint identification bureau, that there would be another casualty of war hobbling back in the general direction of Washington.”
But even as the Arlington women were being educated and courted, they were receiving a subtle message that their very involvement in the war effort—these apartments they were renting together, the furniture they were buying, the meals they were cooking, their newfound independence—was creating troubling social changes. A talk by Charles Taft, titled “America at War,” centered on this idea. Taft, son of the late president William Howard Taft, now served as director of the Office of Community War Services, a new agency created to cope with the disruptions the Second World War was tearing in America’s social fabric.
“I was a little startled as I came around the curtain to see so many girls in one place,” Taft began when he took the podium to talk. He then launched into a speech in which the word “problem” appeared over and over. These problems, he explained, had been developing since the first new industrial plants were built in the United States in response to the bombing of England in 1939 and 1940. As Taft sketched it out, America now was one roiling mass of chaos. Factories and construction projects were drawing workers to communities that were hardly able to hold them. Minority groups were moving to find higher-paying work in places that had never seen them. Black churches from the South were moving entire congregations to California. New industries were setting up overnight, Taft said, without the infrastructure they required: schools, housing, playgrounds, hospitals. He talked about other changes in America’s quotidian rhythms. People were working around the clock, not just men but women too, and it was impossible to do chores in normal hours. “I send my washing home every week and I get it back every week,” confided Taft, whose family lived in Cincinnati. But even he had to contend with grocery shopping. “If you don’t provide some sort of extra night when you can shop out of hours, then you are going to find yourself with a serious problem.”
But the main problem seemed to be—well, them. The women. He pointed out that many people working in factories were female—he mentioned a bag plant “which was to employ almost entirely women”—and 20 percent of those had young children. “And that,” he said, “gets you into some very troubling kinds of problems.” To deal with what he called the “child-care problem,” he said, the government had created a range of federally funded child-care options: “nursery school projects” for small children, aftercare for school-aged kids, and even home care, set up in boardinghouses, for infants. But American mothers were suspicious of child care, he lamented, because it was a “new idea” and nobody had ever offered it to them before. As a result, Taft said, children were running amok, and the government was sending social workers around to try to convince working mothers that putting their children in child care was better for everybody. “Of course, you have among mothers what is perhaps a very natural feeling, whatever trouble may be caused by little Willie, who is the neighbor’s child, that little Johnny, who is our child, doesn’t cause anybody any trouble.”