As if Luther Gulick and the War Production Board didn’t have enough to worry about in the dismal first year of fighting after  Pearl Harbor, a well-meaning businessman, Joseph Anthony Marcus, came forward in September 1942 with a disturbing complaint: coastal shipyard workers were being housed in the most abysmal conditions. Hundreds of war plants and shipyards were unable to attract workers because of the wretched housing, often no more than windowless shacks without plumbing . “No housing, no workers,” Marcus wrote. “No workers, no ships and no tanks and no guns.” He urged the War Production Board to set up a Construction Division with a War Housing Bureau. “The time has come to throw off the gloves and deliver some real punches.”

To enforce his message, Marcus enclosed a clipping from an editorial in the Washington Post that called it  “Scandal No. 1.”

Gulick initially blew him off, insisting that “our office deals entirely with organizational problems and not with personnel.” But he soon relented and met with Marcus, who turned out to be quite a character. A Russian expert with the American Radiator Company, he had spent years in the U.S.S.R. after the Russian Revolution and spoke Russian, Ukrainian, German and Spanish, among some other languages. He was on friendly terms with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, former New York Governor and relief czar Herbert Lehman, Senator Robert F. Wagner and Speaker Sam Rayburn, and had worked in the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Justice, and Agriculture, among others. And after the Great War, he was relief and reconstruction director in Russia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.

To buttress his case on behalf of the shipyard workers, Marcus sent Gulick 17 heartrending photos. Here are some of them. Note the lack of windows and the primitive outhouse (with liquor bottles).

What was done to remedy the problem will require some scholarly research.