The Trouble with Bathrooms

Abstract

Western Electric’s constellation of factories in Baltimore’s Point Breeze section manufactured the kinds of heavy-duty wires and cables that the American military could not get enough of during World War II. That demand turned the company’s workforce into production soldiers, vital clogs in the war machine. Government-issued films and posters urged these women and men to take vitamins, eat healthy, and never miss a single shift. But on an August afternoon in 1942, Western Electric workers were away from their posts. They were gathered in a courtyard as officials from Washington presented Western Electric plant managers with a tri-colored banner and the Army-Navy “E” award. Despite its innocuous sounding name, this honor was not doled out easily. Only five percent of the nation’s 85,000 war production plants earned an “E” award between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day. Before heading back to their posts, each and every Western Electric worker received a lapel pin in recognition of the “quality and quantity” of their contributions to the war effort. But the summer celebrations at Western Electric could not cover up the tensions roiling below the surface, tensions that not even patriotic calls to duty could keep a lid on. By the end of 1942, these pressures boiled over into a “hate strike,” one that mirrored the walk-outs that broke out during the war in response to efforts to integrate Mobile shipyards and Philadelphia trolley car operations. Each of these strikes represented a defense of segregation, and each put race, really whiteness, ahead of wartime unity. Each revealed fractures on the homefront and some of the earliest stirrings of massive resistance against the breakdown of white privilege or what the journalist Isabel Wilkerson has recently described as a caste system that prevailed in the United States long before the 1940s and long afterward. The issue that would trigger white workers at Western Electric was access to bathrooms. This was no accident. Public bathrooms have played a unique role in modern societies. As broad notions of privacy took shape, and as work and home became physically and ideologically separated in the last decades of the nineteenth century, access to a bathroom became an absolute requirement. It was the essential entry point to the public. And quickly, those in favor of exclusion, of upholding caste systems, recognized that cutting off access to a bathroom translated into cutting off access to the public and social equality. The opposite was true as well. Those fighting for equality brought their struggles to the public bathroom door. This article, therefore, reveals the racial tensions of the war years, and at the same time, makes a case for what might be called toilet studies, for the importance of paying attention to the role that public bathrooms played in upholding, and in many cases, creating color lines.