The Home Fronts of Iowa, 1939-1945 (review)

How does one write about the complexities of World War II, what John Keegan called the largest single event in human history? Lisa L. Ossian, Codirector of the Iowa Studies Center, answers her own question with an analysis of four Iowa home fronts: farm, production, community, and kitchen. The federal government swiftly succeeded in using each to transform isolationist Iowans into soldiers at home, a daunting challenge in a state that in 1940 voted against Franklin Roosevelt, whose running mate and former Secretary of Agriculture was Iowa native Henry Wallace. Ossian casts the four home fronts as operating in spectacular fashion, requiring unparalleled commitment and sacrifice, while presenting what these transformations held for postwar Iowa.

Once Iowans were convinced that tractors were tanks and "agriculture would need to break all previous production records for this war" (22), farmers, faced with a labor shortage as sons and hired farmhands went off to war, bought more and better machinery, a huge shift in a state where almost half of farms still relied on animal power. Corporations (whose advertisements Ossian examined in popular farm journals) and the government contended that "power farming meant freedom and better living . . . and mechanization would create a farm to which sons and daughters would enthusiastically return after war's end, increasing the longevity of the family farm" (26). Power farming, of course, didn't save the family farm. But the corporate farm model—mechanized, consolidated, and more profitable—was thus set in place in Iowa during World War II, Ossian maintains, and it was too hard to resist.

In her analysis of the production home front, Ossian, drawing heavily upon newspaper reports, focuses on ordnance plants in Ankeny (near Des Moines) and Burlington, both of them producing bombs and bullets for the Allies before America's entry into the war. Explosions at the Iowa Ordnance Plant in Burlington—the state's largest construction project ever—five days after Pearl Harbor and another three months later killed thirty-three men. Many Iowa industries converted to wartime production, including Maytag, the world's largest washing machine manufacturer. Ossian agrees with those scholars for whom "Rosie the Riveter as a real worker is really a romantic myth" (81), for women working in the factories were considered second-class employees who would give up the jobs when their men came home from war.

Perhaps the chapter on the community front, "Bonds, Scrap, and Boys," reveals most fully the level of engagement in Iowans' war effort. In a state that totaled almost $2.5 billion during the federal government's eight war bond drives, buying bonds wasn't enough. The federally mandated Women's Salvage Army conducted scrap iron drives in every county, and children, who knew where to find the neighborhood junk, "truly became the heroes of the scrap drives" (102). Here, too, Ossian discusses the ultimate community sacrifice: the deaths of Waterloo's five Sullivan brothers, all aboard the U.S.S. Juneau when it sank, is believed to be the greatest sacrifice by an American family.

But the truest of heroes at home were likely those with the copious ration book in their hands, the women on the kitchen front. They were told by leaders to "ration with ingenuity," something farm wives had already accomplished in World War I, when Food Administrator Herbert Hoover predicted that food would win the war. "The women who coped with rationing the best lived in small towns and on farms" (127), for they were longtime experts at gardening and canning food in quart jars, a useful practice considering that the government named over two hundred foods on its ration list.

The Home Fronts of Iowa presents a startling and clear reason why World War II is remembered as "the good war," reminding us what is possible when patriotism entails more than slapping yellow-ribbon bumper stickers on sport utility vehicles.