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  • Prairie Forge: The Extraordinary Story of the Nebraska Scrap Metal Drive of World War II by James J. Kimble
  • Denise M. Bostdorff
Prairie Forge: The Extraordinary Story of the Nebraska Scrap Metal Drive of World War II. By James J. Kimble. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014; pp. xv + 217. $19.95 paper.

More than a decade ago, James Kimble—in search of examples of World War II advertising in the Duke University archives—almost passed over a folder that purported to deal with a scrap metal drive. We can consider ourselves fortunate that he opened it. Inside, Kimble found material pertaining to the Nebraska Plan, a summer 1942 scrap metal drive initiated by the Omaha World-Herald that gathered nearly 104 pounds of scrap per Nebraskan in only three weeks. The drive also set the themes for a nationwide fall campaign that collected 82 pounds of scrap for every U.S. citizen and provided steel companies with the material they desperately needed to produce steel for tanks, planes, ships, munitions, and other instruments of war.

In Prairie Forge, Kimble argues that the Nebraska Plan addressed a critical shortage at a key moment in World War II when the U.S. military [End Page 138] was planning a late 1942 invasion of North Africa but had inadequate equipment. Moreover, public opinion polls in the six months following Pearl Harbor revealed that almost one-third of Americans reported not understanding why the United States had gone to war. The rhetoric of the Nebraska Plan and the national campaign that followed, Kimble contends, “brought the war home to civilians, enabling them to participate directly in the battle as something akin to combatants” (6). While the militarization of the home “front” would become a standard feature of many domestic campaigns in the later years of the war, the Nebraska scrap metal drive “was one of the earliest and one of the most influential of these quasi-military campaigns” (8–9).

Prairie Forge begins by explaining how most nations, rather than pursuing an expensive process of producing steel from veins of iron ore alone, had instead developed the infrastructure for a less costly process that mixed new iron ore with significant amounts of melted scrap. As a result, Japan and other would-be belligerents began buying up scrap metal from U.S. sources before the United States entered the war. This drain on scrap, combined with additional demands for steel in the civilian sector and in lend-lease exports to Britain, led to a 45 percent decrease in scrap supplies by the end of 1941 and a steel industry unable to keep up with demand even before Pearl Harbor took place. The War Production Board attempted a scrap metal drive in spring 1942, but it proved unsuccessful, largely because of its lack of coordination with local communities and means of collection.

Kimble details how Henry Doorly, the publisher of the Omaha World-Herald, worried aloud to his wife about the scrap metal situation and its implications for the war effort. She then challenged, “What did you do about it?” (34). In response, Doorly and his newspaper embarked on an ambitious campaign that drew on three key ingredients. First, they secured a collection site in Omaha for scrap donations, solicited both volunteers and donated trucks, and gained the support of the mayor and city council. Second, Doorly and the Omaha World-Herald convinced leaders from around the state—politicians, newspaper publishers, and civic leaders—to participate and to organize similar collection schemes in their own communities. Finally, Doorly’s campaign used rhetorical appeals that drew on the values of both competition among counties (and business and civic groups) and patriotism among Nebraskans, while depicting every donation—from tractors [End Page 139] to tricycles—as important to create a sense of inclusiveness among potential donors. Furthermore, the campaign emphasized not only the facts of the steel shortage and how it could lead the United States to lose the war but also what Kimble calls “fancy” by weaponizing scrap and depicting Nebraskan civilians as soldiers in the war. The World-Herald, for instance, explained that a steam iron could be turned into two combat helmets...

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