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Mari I know this will sound like heresy but I am convinced the entire world was different in 1940s and 1950s and that applying modern concepts of safety and employment issues and such to the previous day is not really informative.
For starts the poverty rate was about 30-40% and the country was trying to quickly transition to an industrial economy where there would be far less scarcity.
The life expectancy was different. People died a lot. They smoked a lot -- because they died so much of other things that it wasn't obvious that cigarettes were bad for you.
It was a shock to me to take the Hoover dam tour and learn about the handful of guys who died building it. It wasn't that OSHA didn't exist. It was that it couldn't be done any other way at the time. Safety is a cost that we build into things routinely now, but we simply couldn't afford to do it at the time.
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