The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization during World War II by Terrance Furgerson (review)

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• The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization during World War II by Terrance Furgerson
• David Foster (bio)

The Dallas Story: The North American Aviation Plant and Industrial Mobilization during World War II
By Terrance Furgerson. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2023. Pp. xii + 403.

Today, Dallas is a major hub within the global aerospace network. But until 1940, aircraft design and production in the United States was concentrated on the two coasts. In this book, Terrance Furgerson shows how and why Dallas got its start in the aviation industry on the eve of World War II and how the showcase North American Aviation (NAA) plant, in turn, brought industrial-scale manufacturing into the heart of North Texas. Texas had long been a key region in the nation’s military activities, going back to the state’s incorporation into the United States in 1845. Early innovations in land- and sea-based aviation had been going on at military bases in San Antonio, Corpus Christi, and elsewhere across the state since the end of World War I, as Texas’s open spaces and favorable weather attracted aviation visionaries, pioneers, and enthusiasts.

The Dallas Story is a welcome addition to the thin extant historiography of the aviation and aerospace industry in Texas. Furgerson’s focus on the political-industrial story in Texas complements Barbara Ganson’s recent Texas Takes Wing (2014) and serves as an important bridge between older titles such as E. C. Barksdale’s The Genesis of the Aviation Industry in North Texas (1958) and Roger Bilstein and Jay Miller’s Aviation in Texas (1985), as well as the numerous studies of the Cold War and post–Cold War eras that invariably center on Texas’s key aerospace role within the broader military-industrial milieu.

NAA’s Dallas plant was up and running by the time the United States entered the war in December 1941, but the demands of wartime production rates, design iterations, and manufacturing expansion stressed the available skilled-labor pool. Further distractions came with an endless stream of official visitors to the Dallas plant for tours and the encouragement of the plant employees. Yet within a few short years, the NAA Dallas plant had produced thousands of AT-6 Texan trainers, B-24 Liberator bombers, and P-51 Mustang fighters for the war effort.

The book is aptly titled. This is truly a story of Dallas-based interests providing the driving force to bring a new industry into the area at a time before the nation’s military-industrial system was widespread, mature, and based out of Washington, D.C. At that time, Texas had a strong aviation culture that had materially contributed to the technical and operational innovations for air travel and mail delivery. Such prominent national Texans as Vice President John Nance Garner and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn were peripheral characters in NAA’s road to Texas. It was the energy and vision of civic and business leaders in Dallas who wanted to expand the local economy [End Page 1065] beyond ranching, railroads, and oil and saw the brewing international storm clouds of the late 1930s as an opportunity to attract aviation manufacturing to the region. These local initiatives combined with the nation’s strategic interest for locating critical material production safely within the interior of the country. By 1944, the NAA Dallas plant was responsible for nearly 80 percent of Dallas’s industrial employment.

The author uses the archives of corporations, museums, and local and national government entities to reveal the interconnections of political, labor, industrial, and social history that, at the local, state, and national levels, surrounded state-of-the-art aircraft design and production. Of particular interest is Furgerson’s use of a variety of local periodicals that create a vivid picture of the local scene across the greater Dallas area as Texas politicians, community planners, trade boosters, business leaders, and neighborhood associations both transformed the economy and tied Dallas into the burgeoning arsenal of democracy. The book is organized into nearly two dozen chapters that skillfully guide the reader from the overseas origins of World War II in the late 1930s through the...