The Waterbury Democrat., 1942-09-30

pressing reports on scrap drives and manpower shortages there are from some few localities reports of tre- mendously successful results in meeting both problems. Omaha conducts a scrap drive which attains such amazing results that the news makes page one headlines all over the country. A community in North Carolina near a British training center recruits the British soldiers for a day to pick and save the local cotton crop which otherwise might have been lost for lack of farm la Dor.
 A Henry J. Kaiser goes into New York and hires the unemployed by the trainload for his west coast shipyards, thereby giving some re- lief to New York's surplus man. power situation over which the local authorities had done little more than wiring their hands.
 Dig into every such good report and you will find that someone with an ounce of gumption, with out waiting for leadership from Washington, had moved in on a bad situation and done something constructive.
 OUCH action is nothing more than D plain old-fashioned American ingenuity, the stuff that is supposed to have made the country. It Is the spirit of Daniel Boone cross ing his frontiers as he came to them, fighting his way through the wilder ness without benefit of any G-2 analysis of Indian psychological warfare or any Manpower Commis- sion economic survey. It is one lit tie band of determined men and women, one community seeing for itself what needed to be done and doing it.
 It is the same spirit that prompted a York. Pa., and a San Jose, Calif., to solve the problems of2 their own small businessmen without waiting months for Con- gress to pass law and the War Production Board to set up a Smaller War Plants Corporation to give the necessary helping hand from Washington.
 It is the stuff that wins wars. If there is a lack of this char acteristic, shrewd native inge- nuitv-a lack of this ability of a local community to solve its own problems things are really in a bad way.
 Is civilian morale shot2 Is local leadership dead? Has the country l in fact been regimented so rlgldly from Washington that local enter prise has been Killed? Are all these things true that the anti New Dealers have been saying Tor the last Il years? Does too much interference from Washington make the people soft? Have too much WPA and CCC and IVA and AAA and FSA made 1t impossible for the American people to fight and VIII the war on the home front.
 IFS it going to take a lot of fancy 1 federal nursing to carry the To- cal communities through the war? Must the civilian population be 9 drag on the military?
 From the military standpoint, g global war such as this one has tc be run from headquarters. There has to be unified command. general staff, a master plan. There can't be lot of four-star gen. erals riding of in all directions But as far as the civilian popula' ton is concerned. there can be lot of guerilla fighting behind th' lines.
 The scrap drives of an Omah;
 shouldn't be the exceptions, bu
 the rule. If every community il
 the country did as well on tn
 scrap drive as Omaha did. tn jobs of lot of Washington CO
 ordinators, directors and govern
 ment propagandists would be un
 necessary.
 It would show local communi
 ties that they could emancipat
 themselves from all this fedora
 pampering not only for the dura
 tion of the war but forever aftei
 Amen.