The Pine Bluff Arsenal dates to the period just before Pearl Harbor, when a congressman “aware of the economic benefits of such an installation on the state’s depressed economy” brought the project home to his constituents. In 1940, Arkansas’ per capita income was 43.7% of the national average. By 1950, it was 59.8%. “World War II,” one historian has written, “set in motion the most important economic change in Arkansas since the introduction of cotton production a century before.”
The War Department encountered resistance from “some business and plantation owners,” one of whom warned that the Arsenal would subvert the social order “by reducing the farm labor workforce” and “by raising wages [and] possibly forcing plantations and some businesses into bankruptcy.” They still held a monopoly on official violence, but the planters did have something to worry about. In 1940, the population of Pine Bluff was 21,000. The Arsenal alone would employ over 9,000. The labor market drained further as Arkansans migrated en masse to even better jobs in other states.
The Arsenal employed men and women, black and white. The local paper gushed that “the walls of prejudice in industry are crumbling.” Perhaps white people thought so, but it went without saying that the factory (like all of Pine Bluff, not to mention the US Army) was segregated, with black workers shunted into dirtier and more dangerous jobs. This dynamic has a special meaning when “dirty anddangerous” meant explosive: at Pine Bluff, 15 people died from accidents during WWII.
It would take another post to catalog all the weird things once made or stored at Pine Bluff. The Arsenal originated under the Chemical Warfare Service, making mustard gas in WWII and “binary chemical weapons” under Reagan. On-site “igloos” held stockpiles of sarin, etc, and chemicals captured from Nazi Germans. In the 1960s, the Arsenal loaded munitions with a hallucinogen called BZ. Pine Bluff was a headquarters of our biological weapons program, suspended in 1971. When activists mobilized against stockpile incineration, they found that:
The Army, back so long ago, had indeed chosen its sites well. An insulated community that has perceived the Army and its local Depot as an economic patriarch for half a century or more is not prone to critical reevaluations of how that Army or that Depot conducts its business. To question the modus operandi of the Army was to assault the town itself.