A TALE OF TWO CITIES

n July 1941, fearing that their city was facing an “unemployment catastrophe,” a group of business, labor, and political leaders from Evansville, Indiana, traveled to Washington, D.C., to ask for an economic lifeline in the form of federal defense contracts. As Roy Morris Jr. tells the story in this issue (“World War II’s Can-Do City,” page 70), the Office of Production Management—which after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would be replaced by the War Production Board—came