Prairie Forge: The Extraordinary Story of the Nebraska Scrap Metal Drive of World War II

4. Mobilizing Greater Nebraska

77 4 Mobilizing Greater Nebraska It’s every county for itself and the larger the county the harder it will fall before us. —“Dundy Holding Third in State Salvage Drive,” Benkelman Post and News-Chronicle (1942) The region of the Great Plains that the Otoe tribe once called Nibrathka has long embodied a sort of wilderness in the imagination of its visitors. Lieutenant Zebulon Pike’s 1806 description of this area of the country as being akin to an African desert set the tone for later impressions. In 1820, Major Stephen H. Long and Dr. Edwin James journeyed west from what would one day become Council Bluffs, Iowa. James, notes the historian Ralph C. Morris, “described the country as having grown less pleasant, less abundantly supplied with game, and less fertile with every mile.” For his part, Major Long published a detailed map of the region and famously affixed the label “Great Desert” on what would eventually become the border between Kansas and Nebraska. Long’s map was highly influential, shaping perceptions of the territory for generations. By 1904, then, it was no surprise to find that a British writer, R. B. Townsend, was casually using the phrase “great empty Plains” to describe the area.1 While the gradual flowering of much of Nebraska under plow and harrow effectively refuted claims that the area was in fact a desert,Townsend’s description was arguably a reasonable fit for much of the state, even 78 / Mobilizing Greater Nebraska as late as 1942. He was certainly correct in describing Nebraska’s vast reaches as great. Pioneers traveling west by caravan on the Great Platte River Road had understood this notion well, since their daily pace typically kept them within the future state’s borders for over a month. By the war years, of course, one could drive that same route, if one could somehow get around the gas rationing. But the slow highway speeds required by the war emergency—not to mention the frequently poor condition of rural roads—made such a long trip inadvisable at best. In some respects, passenger trains would have been a more efficient means of moving around the state’s great spaces during the war. But since trains carrying either troops or military equipment had the right of way on the rails, even regular passenger service was often disrupted, inefficient, and uncomfortable. Remarkably, Nebraska’s great distances seemed to have become even greater under the stresses of war.2 Townsend’s use of the word empty also still had merit, at least in a relative sense. Nebraska’s population density in 1940 hovered at just over 17 people per square mile, a rate that put it at thirty-seventh among the forty-eight states.Yet one in every five of those Nebraskans hailed from Omaha’s Douglas County, an area whose 340 square miles made up only a tiny fraction of the state’s territory. West of Omaha, the concentration of citizens dwindled considerably. In fact, Lincoln’s 82,000 people represented the only other grouping of more than 25,000 residents. In the western half of the state, reported the Federal Writers’ Project in 1939, the “fields give way to the great cattle ranches of the sandhill area . . . [and] the Old West still survives.” In this pastoral region, the writers concluded in apparent awe, “one can travel for hours without finding a sign of human habitation.” By 1942 it had been more than eighty years since the New York Times had printed the ugly phrase “half-peopled wilds of Nebraska.” Yet for anyone who wanted to sponsor a successful statewide campaign, Nebraska’s vast spaces remained an obvious concern.3 Remarkably, however, Henry Doorly’s prospects of motivating anyone outside of Douglas County to embrace scrap metal collection faced an even more formidable obstacle as he began to publicize his campaign: the sporadic history of mistrust and outright antagonism between big-city Mobilizing Greater Nebraska / 79 Omaha and the rest of the state. Dating back to bitter struggles over the location of the territorial capital, this tension was still noticeable in the city folks’ casual (and sometimes contemptuous) use of the term outstate as a blanket designation for the rural and presumably backward reaches of Nebraska. The hostility was generally mutual. Vanity Fair, writing in the midst of the Great Depression, summarized the relationship like this: “Omaha, with its back to Nebraska and its...