December, 2025

When we visited the Buffalo area this fall to delve into Anna Rosenberg’s groundbreaking “Buffalo Plan,” we were focused on finding images and stories of the women and Black workers who joined the WWII defense workforce.

This gem was unearthed by the Niagara Aerospace Museum: a March 1942 message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed to the workers at the Curtiss-Wright aircraft plant in Buffalo. In it, FDR thanks the defense workers for their “pledge of loyalty” and praises their unity and resolve:

“With such splendid evidence of union and solidarity on the home front,” he writes, “there can be no doubt of our victory in the field.”

The letter was written just a few months after the U.S. entered WWII. Roosevelt hadn’t visited Buffalo since 1940, when he toured key defense facilities: Curtiss-Wright, Bell Aircraft, and Bethlehem Steel, and delivered a rousing campaign speech at Niagara Square. But by the following year, those very plants were grappling with critical labor shortages that threatened wartime production and made victory in the field far from certain.

Enter Anna Rosenberg. By October 1942, Rosenberg had implemented the “Buffalo Plan,” a bold and controversial strategy that prioritized labor deployment and opened industrial jobs to women and Black Americans who had long been excluded. Her work transformed the Buffalo-Niagara region into a model of wartime manpower efficiency. By 1943, Time magazine credited her with helping to break the bottlenecks that had paralyzed war production just a year earlier.

FDR’s letter to Curtiss Wright ties together the leadership of Roosevelt and Rosenberg—both deeply committed to mobilizing people. FDR’s letter is a snapshot of morale and momentum. Anna Rosenberg’s plan was the machinery behind it.

We’re grateful to Kaelynn Beckman at the Niagara Aerospace Museum, for sharing the FDR letter—it’s a reminder that every archive holds unexpected links to the past, kept alive by archivists whose generosity ensures that these artifacts can tell their stories.