1865 - 1900
World War I
The Depression Years
The Beginning of a Vast New Pool of Veteran Government Workers
World War II to the Closing of the BNY

Serving in the armed forces has always conferred a host of benefits upon veterans.  One of these has been special consideration in being hired and retained in federal jobs.

1865 - 1900

Near the end of the Civil War, on 3 March 1865, Congress passed legislation giving hiring preference in government jobs to veterans honorably discharged due to wounds or sickness incurred in the line of duty, provided they were capable of doing the job.  Officials in the Brooklyn Navy Yard even went so far as to tell supervisors to review the work of the Yard's present employees and if any were "found wanting in the slightest degree," to discharge and replace them with veterans. [United States Civil Service Commission, Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1937; New York Times, 24 June 1865.]

For a generation this policy boded well for veterans, as the American navy slumped into decay for most of the rest of the century, leaving little work for the country's navy yards to do.  But by the mid-1890s the new industrial age and global politics threatened to render the American navy and America's overseas presence ineffectual.  Determined to build a world-class steel fleet the navy and the government instituted several new policies that included a complete restructuring of warship production on a steel basis and the incorporating of civilian navy workers into the classified civil service, the latter as of 1896.*  A now aging workforce in the navy yards, that included many veterans, was seen as an obstacle by the navy, but one that presented the navy with something of a political dilemma. [*Only the white-collar force was completely brought into the civil service in that year.  The blue-collar workers were not brought in formally until 1912.  However the navy could not change their conditions of work after 1896 without permission from the Civil Service. For American naval history, see George Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890-1990, 1994.]

But production quickly won out over all other concerns.  In 1897 Theodore Roosevelt, then the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, toured many of the navy yards to review the progress then underway in new construction and, also, to serve as a judge for the scores of complaints that navy yard workers had been filing over alleged political discrimination in hirings and firings.  Veterans getting the axe were particularly sore, taking their dismissals as a betrayal of the rights owed them.  Roosevelt spent two days touring the BNY in mid-May and took a fair amount of time to receive workers' grievances.  One such veteran, Abram Demott, said he had been discharged from the iron plating shop two weeks before.  He and 200 others had answered their country's call in 1862 and left the BNY to join the army, and now he had just been fired so that the Master Shipfitter could hire his friends.  After listening to nearly 100 complaints Roosevelt later told reporters that he thought only five or six had any merit to them.  As he bluntly and decisively put it, "most of the complainants are superannuated men who have seen their day and are useless in the yard.  I have made a hasty inspection of the yard, and have been very much interested with what I have seen." [NYT 14 May 1897, 15 May 1987.]

In August 1897 the Navy Department released another report on employment in the navy yards.  In an accompanying statement Roosevelt said that navy yards must be as efficient as possible and many long-term employees had simply become too old and infirm for work.  He claimed that navy yards had generously treated their veterans over the years and that charges of political discrimination held no weight.  Naval policy, not the law, had favored the retaining of veterans even over the more efficient worker, but this attitude could no longer be tolerated.  Workers would now be hired and kept on solely on their ability to do the work as judged by yard officers; the inefficient would be let go.  The officials might make mistakes but "on the whole they will undoubtedly retain the men most capable of doing that work."  Such dismissals and protests continued into the new century, as in one case the New York Times reported in 1903 where the BNY let go a laborer supervisor and a number of laborers. [NYT 12 August 1897, 9 October 1903.]

The next major influx of veterans into the federal workforce came with the ending of the Great War in 1918.  An act of 3 March 1919 amended the civil service hiring procedure by giving a five-point bonus on entrance tests for classified positions in Washington, D.C. to the honorably discharged, their widows, and the wives of veterans too disabled to work.  On 11 July 1919, this bonus was extended to extended to federal jobs nationally.  The pull of veterans was a strong one and in March 1923 President Harding issued an executive order increasing the bonus to ten points for disabled veterans capable of holding a job.  At the very end of his administration, Coolidge issued an executive order increasing the bonus to ten points for the widows and wives.  In addition, the new regulation placed all three groups qualifying for the ten-point bump at the top of their hiring registers.  The bonus award allowed a qualified applicant to earn only a score of 65 [or 60 for disabled veterans] to place them on the job registers. [Note: husbands and widowers of female veterans did not qualify for any bonus.]  Once hired, as long as they maintained an efficiency rating of at least eighty they could not lose their jobs, and if their scores fell lower they still held priority in "reductions of force" over other workers holding an equivalent efficiency rating. [USCSC, ARFY 1933; ARFY 1937;  USCSC, History of Veteran Preference in Federal Employment, 1865-1955; USCSC, General Information Regarding the USCS; Letter, Acting Secretary of the Navy, to AN&MCAC, 21 March 1929; RG181; NA-NY.]

The merit system, based on hiring tests and efficiency ratings once hired, was the very core of the civil service system.  Therefore, what these regulations and orders show is that given a political rationale of some strength, in this case the wish to confer privileges to those who served in the armed forces, that the government was willing to make exception to the principle of merit despite any potential harm to production it might cause.  As we have seen, this contradiction had already caused trouble in the 1890s, and it would continue to do so throughout the life of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  Often, the trouble came when workers in good standing who had not served in the armed forces were laid off in order to accommodate the hiring of veterans.  For instance, in 1920 the national economy fell into depression and the private shipbuilding industry nearly disappeared.  This shock was compounded with the naval disarmament treaty signed that year that placed severe cutbacks and restraints on naval shipbuilding.  Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels ordered navy yards and shore stations to restore to their former position every man who had left noncombatant government work to enter a fighting branch of the service, while making every effort not to leave jobless those other men who had entered the navy yards in their place.  This conflict would be renewed with greater force after the end of the next world war. [NYT, 6 March 1920.]

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The Depression Years
At first, veterans continued to receive some further privileges.  In December 1929, the Attorney-General extended the job protection provision to furloughs.  This was especially important for veterans in the BNY as 1930 marked the nadir of employment in the Yard.  A few months later when the Civil Service lowered the hiring ages for government workers to that necessary to qualify for a pension, it specifically excluded veterans from the restriction. [ Letter, Acting Secretary of the Navy, to AN&MCAC, 16 December 1929; NYT, 6 March 1930. For background, see: Paul P. Van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service; USCSC, History of Veteran Preference.]

But even veterans and their spouses had eventually to give some way to the needs of the moment even if only marginally.  In April 1931, Hoover issued an executive order amending his predecessor's, restricting the ten-point bonus to veterans with service-connected disabilities, or their wives, and limiting the register-bumping to just the disabled veterans.  By looking at employment numbers we can see that in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for a year we have figures, 1931, that as the year began veterans averaged a little over one-third of the work force.  But as work picked up with the commencement of construction on the New Orleans the percentage of veterans slowly declined even as their overall numbers increased, suggesting that under the pressure of the Depression and the need for production that lower-scoring veterans were being separated from the Yard's rolls.  By year's end their discharge perecentage equaled their percentage of the workforce as a whole, where at the start of the year it was lower. [Note: Discharges were often temporary, so figures may reflect workers let go and then re-hired. Memo, Commandant, to Heads of Departments, Divisions, and Offices, 1 June 1931; RG181; NA-NY.]

A. Veterans as a Percentage of the BNY Work Force, 1931
(Figures are for the last day of the month)
	a	b	c	d	e	f
Jan.	3041	1084	36	558	142	25
Feb.	3422	1177	34	75	20	26
Mar.	3330	1179	35	76	32	42
Apr.	3289	1168	36	59	20	33
May	3593	1210	34	123	45	36
Jun.	3604	1170	32	107	34	31
Jul.	3609	1186	33	216	53	24
Aug.	3415	1119	33	177	51	28
Sep.	3448	1114	32	37	12	32
Oct.	3837	1186	31	136	81	59
Nov.	4126	1247	30	59	19	32
Dec.	4126	1254	30	58	15	25
				1681	524	31
a = total number of employees
b = total number of veterans
c = percentage employed that are veterans
d = number of employees discharged
e = number of veterans discharged
f = percentage of force discharged that are veterans
Source: Letter, Commandant, NY Navy Yard, to ASN (NYD), 14 January 1932; RG181; NA-NY.

The general upturn in shipbuilding that began in the mid-1930s was a boon to veterans and helped temper the competition for jobs between them and those who had not served in the military and they were no longer regarded as an interest needing particular attention.  Veterans with a service-connected disability substantiated by certificate from the Veterans Administration within the previous six months still retained their special position.  They could file a job application at any time for any trade or calling in which they were qualified if a register for that job existed, or even if it had already closed, and be placed above all other non-disabled applicants on the lists. [“Addition of Ten Points as Veteran Preference to the earned Mark of a Disabled Veteran,” Memorandum for file, by James H. West, 24 July 1936; RG181; NA-NY. Also, see USCSC, History of Veteran Preference.]

Part of the reason for veteran employment no longer being an issue was the sheer increase not only in warshipbuilding but also in the size of the Rooseveltian executive workforce in general.  At the beginning of Roosevelt's presidency the civil service stood at 565,000 employees.  By 1937 the force grew to 840,000 and three years later it topped 1,000,000. [USCSC, Annual Reports.]

For the civil service as a whole its growth in the president's second term outran the number of veterans available:

B. Veterans hired as total of all hired through Civil Service Commission
		Appt'd	Appt'd	Vets as %
	Total	5 points	10 points	of total hired
FY 34	4929	3755	1174	24.7
FY 35	8401	6224	2177	26.4
FY 36	10,660	7546	3114	25.3
FY 37	8716	6444	2272	19.6
Source: USCSC, Annual Reports, for the above years. Note: Fiscal year ran from 1 July to 30 June.

C. Percentage of Civilian Navy Positions Filled by Veterans
		Total			Total		% Total	% Vets of Total Hired
FY 34	VC	4936		VA	2848		58.9
	Non-VC	12,243		Non-VA	6619		54.1
	TC	17,179		TA	9467		55.1	30.1
FY 36	VC	7116		VA	3817		53.6
	Non-VC	19,349		Non-VA	9636		49.8
	TC	26,349		TA	13,363		50.7	28.9
FY 37	VC	4615		VA	2231		48.3
	Non-VC	14,248		Non-VA	4917		34.5
	TC	18,863		TA	7448		38.4	30.0
VC/VA = Veterans Certified/Appointed
TC/TA = Total Certified/Appointed
Source: USCSC, Annual Reports, for above years.

In the Brooklyn Navy Yard veterans constituted 25.8 percent of the workforce at the end of 1937 and 23.1 percent at the end of December 1941. [Calculated from figures in “Monthly Report of Civil Personnel Statistics,” 1937-1941; RG181; NA-NY.]

The Beginning of a Vast New Pool of Veteran Government Workers
The federal hiring situation became especially complicated when Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act on 16 September 1940, instituting America's first peacetime draft.  The law required all men between 21 and 35 to register and for 1.2 million of them to be drafted for one year of service.  Not only did its passage serve to reduce the pool of labor from which shipyards drew upon, it also made inevitable the creation of a potentially enormous new group of veterans and the resultant problem of their re-entrance into a postwar U.S. economy.  As the Brooklyn Eagle pointed out, the failure to provide for employment for the veterans of the Great War helped worsen the great unemployment rate after that conflict.  The new law sought to help correct for the errors of the previous post-war period by guaranteeing that government workers who were drafted or who volunteered under the terms set out in the law would be restored to their old job or one of “like seniority, status, and pay.”  In addition, on the first year back on the job the restored person could be discharged only for cause.  So as not to dump a large number of veterans on the economy at once, the services would release its soldiers and sailors in stages.  Beginning in September 1941, the War Department had each local draft board establish a re-employment committeeman to oversee this new policy.  The corresponding issue of draft exemptions later proved to be an extremely important and delicate one, especially once America entered the war, but for the time being, government service did not exempt one from being drafted.  The law granted deferment only to those “whose employment in industry, agriculture or other occupations or employment . . . is found . . . to be necessary to the maintenance of the national health, safety, or interest,” this decision to be made by the local draft board.  Once begun, the draft obtained a momentum of its own and in October 1941, Congress extended it for another eighteen months. 

[An Act “To provide for the common defense by increasing the personnel of the armed forces of the the United States and providing for its training,” 16 September 1940, Public, no. 783;  “Employees subject to registration under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 - time off for Registration,” Commandant's Instructions No 47-40, to HDDO, 11 October 1940; “General Information regarding Military Service,” Circular Letter, from ASN (Piozet, Director of Personnel), to AN&MCAC, 22 July 1941; encloses copy of Civil Service Circular #255, of 16 April 1941, outlining these regulations; RG181; NA-NY; BE, 3 September 1941; Black, Charlestown Navy Yard; Joint Resolution, “To extend the periods of service of persons in the military service, and for other purposes,” 18 August 1941, Public Law 213.]

World War II to the Closing of the BNY
During the second world war over 800 medically discharged veterans worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, most from New York.  They applied either directly through the Yard's Labor Board or through the Veterans Administration Division of the Civil Service Commission.  The Yard brought on approximately eight per day, placing them in a suitable job, or, if they had no special skill, sending them to a yard trade school.  In an article in the New York Times a reporter gave several examples of injured servicemen taking up new jobs.  One man who lost his left leg and hurt his back when his tank hit a mine at Casablanca became a property clerk in a warehouse, using crutches in a warehouse and expected to receive an artificial leg in due time.  Another, a marine whose ankle was crushed by mortar fire at Bougainville was learning to be an electrician. [NYT, 14 August 1944.]

The employment situation in the BNY after the end of World War II soon became intense.  From its war-time peak of about 68,000 workers the Yard down-sized its force to approximately 10,000 by 1950.  While many workers left on their own [the Yard was already down to 48,000 by the end of 1945] this figure was achieved mostly through periodic mass layoffs, such as the one in October 1949 of 2500, which brought the workforce down to 9650 workers.  And during this downsizing the navy yard had to rehire the veterans who wanted their old jobs back.  Needless to say these reductions in force, RIFs as they were called, angered those who worked in the Yard during the war.  The Yard, according to some sources ended up removing many of its most senior workers.  At that final mass layoff, Yard supporters said employees with over thirty years of experience had been released, while leaving war veterans untouched.  Many of the released workers had wanted to serve, but the Yard had deemed them essential "war workers" and refused them permission to leave.  They felt they were being categorized as being of less worth than the veterans; one politician had gone so far as to refer to Yard work as no better than WPA [i.e., relief] work.  Later, in the 1960s, one BNY naval officer claimed that the Yard had let go up to 15,000 of its best workers in favor of those who they had allowed to be drafted. [Navy Department. Office of Industrial Relation. Personnel Studies and Statistics Branch, "Civilian Personnel of Naval Shore Establishments: A Summary Report, 30 June 1938 - 31 December 1945"; NYT, 29 August 1949, 27 October 1949; Lynda Carlson, "The Closing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard: A Case Study in Group Politics," Ph.D. diss., U. of Illinois, Champagne, 1974.]

According to one observer, the BNY was largely staffed by these veterans up to its closing in 1966, and their perceived lack of initiative lay the Yard open to criticism by the forces pushing for the privatization of warship-building in the post-war years.  They were one of the many factors cited by the anti-navy yard forces in their prolonged and successful and at times scurrilous effort to close down the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  The head of the lobbying effort for the private shipbuilders, Hanson Baldwin, even accused veterans as belonging to a group, which included the civil service workers [basically every civilian working in the Yard], that held "privileged status," receiving higher pay and allowances than those who worked in southern, non-union shipyards, and through their power in Congress they had become a "management within management," slowing efficient production and in general ratcheting up costs. [Carlson, "Closing the BNY"; NYT, 21 November 1964.]

The Brooklyn Navy Yard in the Inter-War Era                                                                                                                                                              Top



John R Stobo         ©         February 2006