The Home Fronts of Iowa, 1939-1945

3. Bonds, Scrap, and Boys: The Community Front

90 Chapter 3 Bonds, Scrap, and Boys v฀฀The Community Front In 1941 the world wasn’t at peace, and it wasn’t running smoothly. —MacKinlay Kantor, Happy Land (1942) When Thomas Lutman, a pastor from Sheldon, addressed the Iowa Retail Hardware Association’s annual convention in February 1942, he professed that the efforts of men and women on Main Street would win the war and write the peace—phrasing that became quite commonly used.“The nation will become one vast machine shop for the duration of the war,”he began,“but Main Street will endure long after the war.”Lutman envisioned farmers and small-town folk as“the backbone of America ” and contended that Sinclair Lewis had captured only the “shabby” side of Main Street in his popular 1920 novel and not its strength or“basic simplicity.”Lutman added,“Main Street has grown the wheat and the corn and the men that have nourished America. Just as the city draws its water supply from the hills beyond, it also draws its leadership.”1 But Main Street had always represented a rather complex community setting, despite its seeming simplicity. Iowa in 1940 remained a state of small communities; no large urban center dominated either business or social life. The capital, Des Moines, was Iowa’s largest city, but its population measured only about 150,000. Federal and state governments The Community Front 91 developed, cultivated, and needed this sense of the small community to organize and even pressure citizens to contribute money for war bonds and gather scrap for collection drives. The men sent to war, whether draftees or volunteers, especially drew communities together through their common concern, sacrifice, and grief. Main Street became the memory and the motivation for fighting World War II. The federal government perpetuated this mythology of the small town during the war with pamphlets such as Small Town U.S.A, which emphasized the strength of American communities as contained within their small businesses and small talk. The strong beliefs many townspeople held about concepts such as classlessness and cooperation along with a sense of pioneer heritage all contributed to a community’s cohesiveness. This small-town image even became an effective wartime advertising strategy, with such slogans as “Main Street goes to war!”2 Iowa developed and strengthened its own mythology of the perfect small town throughout the war with stories like the pictorial reports on “the old hometown”published in the Des Moines Sunday Register. Boone featured its main drag, old drugstore, and pretty girls; Oskaloosa its soldier honor roll, friendly town police, and more pretty girls; Stratford its bakery, barbershop, and “a country boy in town on Saturday night”; Earlham its town band concerts playing “America the Beautiful”; and West Liberty its return of the horse-drawn milk-wagon and an attentive local barber listening to customers discuss the war. Within this idealization of grassy town squares and tree-lined streets, war seemed hard to imagine, but Iowa’s citizens would be forced to look beyond their state borders to the developing global war.3 Modern war meant total war and involved the entire population. World War II,“the civilians’ war,” meant sacrifice. The community front did not consist of an undirected group of overworked, striving, and sacrificing citizens committed to victory through an unconscious sense of unity. Rather, the resources needed from the community front by a government ill-prepared for war were quite specific: money, salvage, and young men.The first resource—money—people believed to be valuable, of course, but realized it was not such a sacrifice to make the needed war loans. People generally perceived the second resource—salvage—as waste and needed to be persuaded only of its actual worth. The third— their young men—represented a resource the community knew to be 92 The Home Fronts of Iowa, 1939–1945 valuable but only later would find out how much they had sacrificed in them to the machine of total war. To be successful from the community front, citizens needed to agree with the war effort by understanding expectations, feeling sacrifices equally, and completing definite war jobs. The idea of war sacrifices continued to strengthen people’s sense of their significance, as Frank Miles, editor of the Iowa Legionnaire, reminded his listeners in a radio address, when he declared that the war was“a job for everyone.”Miles continued, “This war to save our independence...