Navajo leaders pledged loyalty in 1940 while the government still recalled the Great Livestock Massacre.
1. AZ: The History of Arizona podcast Episode 244, The Homefront, centers on civilian life in Arizona during World War II.
2. Host David Rickhausen introduces the episode and says he is returning from a short break, with more reading planned on Navajo code talkers.
3. The episode asks what the war meant for Arizona civilians while earlier episodes had focused on military bases, prisoners of war, and Japanese Americans confined as a military necessity.
4. After Pearl Harbor, Phoenix created a Civil Defense Council, Bisbee appointed district captains as air-raid wardens, and Coconino County organized a patrol including 500 Navajo.
5. Rickhausen cites historian Mary Melcher's chapter in Arizona Goes to War and reads Eula K. Baird's June 3, 1942 letter to Governor Sidney P. Osborne.
6. Baird says she is 53, lives on Van Buren Street in Phoenix, can type, has clerical experience, can shoot a rifle, and wants a woman's home guard.
7. The episode also describes women in Tucson turning out for home guard training in 1942 while carrying brooms because they had not been given guns.
8. The discussion turns to Arizona's Amerindian tribes, including the Apache, Navajo, Hopi, and Tohono O'odham, who banned the swastika from traditional crafts in 1940.
9. The Navajo Tribal Council resolution says the 50,000 people they represent stand ready to aid and defend the government and its institutions.
10. Rickhausen places that resolution beside the Great Livestock Massacre and the longer history of conflict between the Navajo and the federal government.
11. He explains that Navajo support for the war came from both job scarcity on the reservation and a sense of defending the homeland.
12. On December 9, 1941, Navajo men from Arizona and New Mexico flooded local recruiting centers two days after Pearl Harbor.
13. The federal response included rationing meat, rubber, leather, and gas, while Governor Osborne called on Arizonans to ration and recycle and to observe meatless Thursdays.
14. Housewives used new recipes and cookbooks to make do without sugar or eggs, and victory gardens supplied food that he says amounted to one-third of national consumption by war's end.
15. Polly Rosenbaum recalls saving gas stamps to reach Nogales for Mexican sugar, using margarine instead of butter, and winning butter in a wager with a dairy owner.
16. Scrap drives collected church bells, iron fencing, rubber, and kitchen fats, and Cañoncito Navajo weighed five tons of scrap on a seesaw to buy war bonds.
17. The episode says the Navajos pledged $3,000 to the Red Cross, $1,000 more than requested, and donated mutton, silver jewelry, rugs, and corn.
18. Phoenix's war housing shortage left defense workers in tents and transient camps such as Stinking Acres near 40th Street and the Grand Canal, while farms faced labor shortages until braceros arrived in 1943.
19. Listeners who follow Arizona wartime labor, rationing, and Native history will find the episode useful.
20. Listeners wanting a fast-moving combat story without home-front detail may skip it.
