Published by The Evansville Courier

Evansville's population in 1940 was 97,000 people, of which about 18,000 were employed in manufacturing. Forty percent of local production was cars and refrigerators.

By 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "arsenal of democracy" was requiring more and more raw materials, and with America on the brink of war, local leaders worried about difficult economic times.

Mayor William H. Dress formed a local steering committee to look at Evansville's options. One member of that committee was Evansville Courier editor Don Scism.

In September 1941 - three months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor - Dress, at the behest of his committee, invited leaders of cities with populations below 250,000 in 11 Midwestern states to a meeting in Chicago.

Dress fell ill and Vanderburgh Circuit Judge John W. Spencer presided in his stead. More than 900 people attended the meeting and formed a committee to press the federal government to find ways to keep defense priorities from having a negative impact on local industries.

The Courier, which had a circulation of 38,708 in 1940, gave prominent coverage to the Chicago meeting. It also reported on other efforts to head off massive unemployment should local manufacturers fail to get raw materials for domestic production or land defense contracts.

Another harbinger of war was the nation's first peacetime draft, which was signed into law in September 1940. Scism, who had trumpeted the dangers of Germany's Adolf Hitler in his editorials during the 1930s, had supported the Selective Training and Service Act.

The efforts of local leaders, particularly Louis Ruthenburg at Servel, Walter Koch and Rufus Carnes at International Steel and C. Nelson Smith at Hoosier Lamp and Stamping, would make certain that Evansville did not fall victim to the war effort.