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3. Summertime Scrapping in the City
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
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51 3 Summertime Scrapping in the City Omaha, rising far above the muddy waters of the Missouri River, is a scrapper come up the hard way. —Debs Myers, “The Grain Belt’s Golden Buckle,” Holiday, October 1952 They said it was the smell of money.Visitors to wartime Omaha could hardly disagree, even if the air was disagreeable.After all, the city’s stockyards facility was among the largest in the world, processing millions of cattle, sheep, and pigs every year on its 200-acre site in South Omaha. Here, at the ornate Livestock Exchange Building, ambitious investors made their prairie fortunes even as sweaty laborers worked to slaughter enough livestock to feed a nation. No one who came to this restless city on the Great Plains could overlook its fusion of wealth, toil, and commotion , particularly when the southerly summertime breezes spread the stockyard’s unmistakable odor across the bustling metropolis.1 The Omaha stockyards and its teeming synthesis of humans, animals, labor, and ambition were an apt symbol for the conflicted identities of the river city on the eve of World War II. Indeed, the many guises of Omaha were evident to any observer.At the turn of the century, Rudyard Kipling had found it “but a halting-place on the road to Chicago . . . populated entirely by Germans, Poles, Slavs, Hungarians, Croats, Magyars, and all the scum of the Eastern European States.” Two generations later, the 52 / Summertime Scrapping in the City novelist Carl Jonas pointed eloquently to the city’s “bellowing steers being trucked in to the packing houses,” its “men in Levis and spike-heeled boots . . . [the] barking dogs, farm wives hanging out wash, and wind, and the transcontinental buses, the great supermarkets, and man himself, perfectible, but imperfect.”2 In its short history, this remarkable settlement had been defined and redefined by the prairie, by its great river, by the explorers and pioneers and their strained relationship with local native tribes, by the railroads, by the cattle industry, and, most of all, by the area’s dynamic and varied ethnicities and classes. Henry Doorly’s radio listeners on the evening of July 11, 1942, thus hailed from a variety of demographics, lifestyles, and outlooks. On one level, his message had to appeal to every age range. Many in the audience would have been among the ranks of Omaha’s elderly, a multiethnic generation of “oldsters” born as far back as the Civil War and, shortly thereafter, Nebraska’s origin as a state in 1867. Thousands of Omaha’s middle-aged laborers, career men, and married folks—a generation that had primarily come of age during the Great Depression and its attendant struggles—were also listening to the Saturday night broadcast to hear what the publisher of the World-Herald thought was so important. And, of course, many members of the audience would have been local youth, including children from the Omaha Home for Boys and the famed Boys Town campus west of the city limits. In fact, Doorly’s heartfelt remarks addressed “the young ladies and gentlemen especially,” recognizing that youthful optimism and energy would be necessary if the upcoming drive were to be successful.3 On another level, Doorly’s local listening audience was composed of a wide range of ethnicities, nationalities, and classes. Thousands of city residents young and old hailed from haphazardly mixed ethnic neighborhoods filled with crowded rooming houses and boxlike but colorful clapboard homes. South Omaha in particular featured a polyglot series of subcommunities, with Czech, Italian, Polish, Irish, and Danish immigrants frequently communicating in the vibrant languages of the old country, their families supported by breadwinners who worked long hours in the packing and railroad industries. The Near North Side, in contrast, [44.211.117.101] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:24 GMT) Summertime Scrapping in the City / 53 was a segregated neighborhood, home to an active though overcrowded community of some 12,000 black citizens. Meanwhile, large numbers of middle-class residents (and more than a few wealthier families), most of them from relatively distant European heritages, clustered around neighborhoods to the west of the downtown area and in annexed areas around the city’s periphery.4 The Omaha of 1942, then, was less a melting pot and more an undercooked stew, what one might even call “a cauldron of discontent.” Its various ages, neighborhoods, classes, and ethnicities at times got along famously, as when most everyone pitched in to help clean up after the widespread damage...