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

Preface

xi Preface There was no way that I could have known what was in store for me nearly ten years ago when I opened an ordinary-looking folder in the advertising archives at Duke University. The label affixed to the folder simply described its contents as involving a scrap metal drive of some sort. Since I was looking for material on World War II advertising, I almost skipped it altogether. I recall thinking: What do I care about scrap metal? Had I embraced that fleeting thought, I would have missed a flurry of consequences in the subsequent years, all of them good. Inside that folder, it turned out, was a document that would alter much of my research agenda. It eventually led to a journal article in Great Plains Quarterly, a feature story in Nebraska Life magazine, a documentary movie (co-produced with my colleague,Tom Rondinella), and now to this book. The critical document at the heart of these productions was a booklet that had been produced by the Omaha World-Herald in 1942 (and as far as I have been able to tell, Duke’s copy is the only remaining one in existence). I recognized the newspaper’s name immediately, as I’d grown up reading it, especially on fall Sundays when the sports section was filled with exhaustive analysis of and commentary on the Cornhusker football team’s latest exploits. But what did the World-Herald have to do with scrap metal in World War II? I soon found out.The booklet drew me in, and I have hardly stopped ever since to look back at the decisive moment that started it all. xii / Preface The scrappers, too, rarely looked back at the decisive moment that shaped their efforts. Most of them would not even have known where to look. New Englanders competing for bragging rights with their neighbors in the great national scrap metal drive in the fall of 1942, for example, could not have been expected to know that they were following an ambitious plan that had been drawn up in Nebraska. For their part, many Cornhuskers would have known that when they were feverishly collecting radiators, fenders, kitchen utensils, and tractor parts on behalf of their local county’s scrap team, it had something to do with the World-Herald. Far fewer, however, would have known the identity of a certain Henry Doorly, let alone his role in devising the plan. Even many Omaha residents would not have understood that the genesis of their gigantic scrap mountain lay in the awkward moment when Margaret Hitchcock Doorly challenged her husband to stop grousing about the scrap disaster and do something about it. It was a private exchange, to be sure, but it was also decisive, and there can be little doubt that its echoes resounded across the vast home front and even into the world’s various battlefronts. My aim in this book is to examine what led up to that decisive moment and how the plan that emerged from it energized a state and then shocked a nation at war. The articles and the documentary mentioned earlier presented certain aspects of the story, but only a book can provide the rich historical context underlying such a momentous series of events. Only a book, moreover, can foster a narrative history that accurately leads interested readers back to its original sources: the primary accounts of the participants and witnesses who lived through these events back in 1942. Finally, a book is the best sort of venue for exploring the rhetorical and persuasive underpinnings of a massive, localized movement. After all, finding and hauling scrap metal was no walk in the park. Doorly and those leaders who helped him transform Nebraska into a veritable steel forge on the prairie had to figure out how to convince civilians not only that scrap metal was important but that every single person should pitch in. How they did so forms a strong undercurrent in this account. It is worth mentioning that my interest in the scrap drive is also personal . As a Nebraskan by birth, this story drew me in from the moment Preface / xiii I understood its significance. Here was an inspiring tale that involved my own grandparents and their neighbors and friends, all doing their bit to change the course of the greatest war in history. Throughout the course of their efforts, the unadorned, down-to...