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The Home Front · Fort Wayne in the First World War, 1917–1919
This section is the home-front companion to the Wars record. The units are there — Batteries B and D of the 150th Field Artillery, Company E folded into Battery D, the county's three thousand five hundred service records, and the dead, whose names belong to the Wars file and the Gold Star Honor Roll, not to this one. What this section holds is the city those men left: the councils that organized it, the draft boards that sorted it, the loan drives that financed the war out of its pay envelopes, the registration that fell on its German neighbors, the gardens in its vacant lots, the women in its railroad shops, and the arch it raised on the courthouse square while the fighting was still on. The chapter's institutional history of the Red Cross is in Charities, and the German community's full story is in Communities; both are cross-referenced here in a line rather than retold. The principal accounts are the ones written at the time: B. J. Griswold's chapter "Fort Wayne's Answer to the Call to War with Germany," written in August 1917 for his 1917 pictorial history; Isabelle H. Taylor's War Work of the Fort Wayne Chapter of the American Red Cross (1919), the chapter's own record; and Walter H. Greenough's The War Purse of Indiana (1922), the Indiana Historical Commission's official account of the state's war finance. Where those accounts disagree on a figure, both figures stand.
The city answers · Lexington Day and the first spring
APRIL–MAY 1917 · THE CITY MOBILIZES
The United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. Fort Wayne's first answer, as Griswold records it, came thirteen days later. On Lexington Day, 19 April 1917, some 30,000 citizens marched in a loyalty parade that moved sixteen abreast and took an hour and twenty minutes to pass a given point. Frank A. Martin, impersonating Paul Revere, rode down Calhoun Street ahead of the procession. On the reviewing stand at the courthouse stood members of the Grand Army of the Republic and the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the loyalty resolutions adopted for the occasion — signed by Mayor William J. Hosey and other civic leaders — were read aloud by Stephen A. Callahan. The chairman of the day was City Attorney Guy Colerick.
The recruiting returns matched the parade. The Fort Wayne recruiting district led the entire nation in the first month of the war: by the end of April 1917 it had filled 75 percent of its quota, against 70 percent for Portland, Oregon, 49 percent for Salt Lake City, and less than 37 percent for Indianapolis — the figures the Journal-Gazette printed and Griswold preserved. The night before the parade week opened, on 13 April, the Quest Club's banquet at the Anthony Hotel had formed the Council of Patriotic Service "to centralize and co-ordinate" every patriotic organization in the city — the body out of which the county's formal war machinery grew.
Sources: Griswold, Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, vol. I (1917), ch. L, "Fort Wayne's Answer to the Call to War with Germany," written 15 August 1917; the Journal-Gazette recruiting figures as quoted there.
The councils · from Patriotic Service to the Council of Defense
27 JUNE 1917 · THE COUNTY'S WAR MACHINERY
The Council of Patriotic Service elected its officers at the Commercial Club before April was out: William H. Scheiman, president; Frank E. Bohn, vice-president; Charles R. Lane, secretary; and J. Ross McCulloch, treasurer. On 27 June 1917 Judge John W. Eggeman, acting at the request of Governor James E. Goodrich, appointed those same officers — together with Fred S. Hunting, the Rev. A. J. Folsom, and Mrs. George Evans — as the Allen County Council of Defense, the county arm of the Indiana Council of Defense. Mrs. Clark Fairbank of Fort Wayne sat on the state council itself by the governor's appointment. The machinery was still in place when the canvassers for Polk's 1918 city directory came through: the directory lists the Council of Defense at 304 Utility Building, Scheiman chairman and Lane secretary.
Under the councils stood the county's uniformed home organizations. The Allen County Home Guard admitted only men who had seen prior military service; under Captain John E. Miller it had enrolled 175 men by mid-July 1917. A Motor Reserve Corps was organized alongside it, and the Officers' Reserve Corps examining board sat under Captain George L. Byroade, with E. H. Kilbourne as chairman. At Concordia College, the faculty announced on 5 May 1917 that every eligible man in the institution had applied for officers' training; eleven were accepted.
Sources: Griswold (1917), ch. L; R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne City Directory, 1918, institutional listings.
Registration day · the draft comes to Fort Wayne
5 JUNE 1917 · SELECTIVE CONSCRIPTION
On the evening of 4 June 1917, nearly 6,000 people marched in a "Liberty" parade on the eve of registration. The next day, 5 June, the young men of Fort Wayne between twenty-one and thirty-one presented themselves under the selective conscription act: 7,785 registered in the city. Of those, 4,556 claimed exemption. Of the remainder, 554 were listed as aliens and 61 as alien enemies.
Governor Goodrich appointed the county conscription board: Mayor W. J. Hosey, L. H. Moore, Sheriff George W. Gillie, County Clerk David C. Stout, and Dr. H. A. Duemling. Above the local boards sat the district exemption boards — one for every 30,000 of population — which kept headquarters at the Harmar School, the Hoagland School, and the Elks' Temple, with seventeen members named in Griswold's roster; two of them, William Geake and Gustav W. Boerger, were succeeded in office by Frank E. Stouder and H. G. Keegan. Dr. Miles F. Porter Sr. sat on the federal exemption board by appointment of President Wilson, and Judge Sol A. Wood sat on the government board of appeals. When the national draft lottery was drawn on 20 July 1917, the first call required 490 men from Allen County, 383 of them from Fort Wayne.
Sources: Griswold (1917), ch. L.
The speakers · the Four-Minute Men in brief
1917–1918 · FOUR MINUTES AT A TIME
The national government spoke to the home front through the Four-Minute Men — volunteer speakers of the Committee on Public Information who delivered four-minute talks in theaters, churches, and lodge halls while the reels changed. In Indiana the work ran through the state speakers' bureau, which, Greenough records, was cooperating with the newly organized Four-Minute Men by May 1917, and a four-minute man addressed factory meetings in Indiana war plants during the loan campaigns. No roster of Fort Wayne's own Four-Minute Men survives in the records read for this section; in this city the speaking, like everything else, was organized through the Council of Patriotic Service and the Council of Defense, and the surviving record names the councils rather than the speakers.
Sources: Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (Indiana Historical Commission, 1922); Griswold (1917), ch. L.
The loans · five drives and a county that started slow
JUNE 1917 – MAY 1919 · LIBERTY AND VICTORY LOANS
Allen County's loan organization changed hands as the drives succeeded one another. Greenough's official table names Charles H. Worden — president of the First and Hamilton National Bank — as county chairman for the First and Second Liberty Loans, Byron H. Somers for the Third, and Hugh G. Keegan for the Victory Loan. The First Loan headquarters opened on 4 June 1917 in the former rooms of the Hamilton National Bank, with E. H. McDonald in charge. Griswold, writing in August 1917, records that the ten-day sale reached the city's quota of $2,800,000, helped along by a one-day solicitation of business men under Arthur F. Hall and by easy-payment plans run through the war plants.
The state's official history prints a cooler verdict, and the two accounts are carried here together. Byron H. Somers, the Third Loan chairman, wrote to the Historical Commission on 7 April 1922 that Allen County did not subscribe its quota in either the First or the Second loan — but that in the Third it subscribed its full quota and more than made up the combined deficit of the first two. Griswold's figure is a city quota, Somers's accounting a county one, and the state history does not reconcile them further; what is certain from both is that the county's war finance began behind and finished ahead. The Third Loan quota was $3,800,000. The county, Greenough records, "had not begun its drive until during the last week," yet completed its quota by 24 April 1918 and eventually subscribed 135 percent of it. The Fourth Loan (28 September – 19 October 1918) again ran late: on 15 October Allen stood among twenty-one of the sixty-eight northern counties not yet at quota. The Victory Loan (21 April – 10 May 1919) repeated the pattern at higher speed — the county did not start until the second week, 28 April, and then reported $2,000,000 subscribed on a single day, the second day of its drive; Indiana announced every county quota complete on 10 May 1919.
The women's organization ran parallel to the men's. Alice Foster McCulloch of Fort Wayne was Indiana's woman's chairman for the Liberty Loans — the state's whole women's campaign directed from this city. Allen County's woman's chairman for the Third Loan was Mrs. Margaret B. Crankshaw.
Sources: Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (1922), including the Somers letter of 7 April 1922 and the results table at p. 177; Griswold (1917), ch. L.
Thrift · War Savings Stamps and the 21-cent county
1918–1919 · THE SMALL MONEY
Below the bond drives ran the thrift campaign — War Savings Stamps at twenty-five cents, pasted on cards until sixteen stamps bought a certificate. Polk's 1918 Fort Wayne directory carried the appeal as an advertisement: get a Thrift Stamp "to-day — at any post-office, bank or store." Allen County's chairman for War Savings in 1918 was Martin H. Luecke of Fort Wayne; R. E. Peters of Fort Wayne held the post in 1919. The results, Greenough records, were modest in this city: at 23 June 1919 Allen County's per-capita thrift sales stood at 21 cents, near the bottom of Indiana's city counties — Marion County showed 49 cents, St. Joseph and Vanderburgh 45, Vigo 42 — while rural Scott County led the entire state at $2.27 a head. Indiana's total War Savings sales for 1919 were $5,139,769.37. The bond county that learned to finish its quotas late never did learn to save in small change.
Sources: Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (1922), War Savings chapters and the Hoosier Thrift per-capita table of 23 June 1919; Polk's Fort Wayne directory, 1918, advertising pages.
The Red Cross drives · the chapter's war chest
JUNE 1917 – DECEMBER 1918 · FUND, MEMBERSHIP, AND ROLL CALL
The Fort Wayne chapter's institutional history — its charter of 22 January 1917, its workrooms, its nurses — is told in Charities. What belongs here is the money, which Isabelle H. Taylor's War Work of the Fort Wayne Chapter (1919) prints in its official roster. The First Red Cross War Fund drive ran the week of 18–25 June 1917, in the middle of the national War Fund week. The county quota was $80,000. The subscription passed it by half again: over $112,000 — $92,250 from the city and $19,850 from the county outside it by Griswold's contemporary accounting — from 15,800 subscribers by Taylor's roster. B. Paul Mossman was general chairman, Edward C. Miller chairman of the executive committee, Frank H. Cutshall treasurer, Harry Hogan director of the city campaign and William C. Schwier of the county. The drive opened with a banquet at the Anthony Hotel on 18 June, where ten citizens and firms gave $1,000 each as an "entering wedge," closed with a demonstration at the Elks' Temple on 25 June, and was worked under the slogan "If you don't come across, Germany will!" A month later Fort Wayne was made the central supply depot for the 120 Red Cross chapters north of Indianapolis, with headquarters at 626–628 Calhoun Street in the Foellinger block and Mrs. A. E. Fauve as inspector-in-charge.
The asks kept coming on a schedule. The membership campaign of 16–22 December 1917, under chairman Harry Muller, took in subscriptions the roster prints as $37,797.00. A Red Cross auction sale on 11–14 September 1918, chaired by L. H. Moore with B. J. Griswold himself on publicity, grossed $46,529 and netted $41,959.39 after $4,569.82 of expenses. The Second War Fund drive, in the chapter roster's dates 18–23 May 1918, ran under the same command as the first — Mossman, Miller, Cutshall, Hogan, Schwier, with Mrs. B. H. Hudson directing the women's teams and Mrs. Martin H. Luecke as chairman of organizing — through eighty-three captains and eight hundred workers; the roster prints the organization in full and no total. Last came the Christmas Roll Call of 16–23 December 1918, five weeks after the Armistice: Frank E. Bohn, county manager, reported subscriptions of $26,399.25, of which the women's teams netted 85 percent.
Sources: Taylor, War Work of the Fort Wayne Chapter of the American Red Cross (1919), roster appendix, pp. 119–122; Griswold (1917), ch. L.
A hospital of its own · Unit M
MAY 1917 · TWELVE PHYSICIANS AND TWENTY-ONE NURSES
Fort Wayne sent an organized hospital to the war. Hospital Unit M was formed in early May 1917: twelve physicians and twenty-one graduate nurses under Miss Elizabeth E. Springer, financed by a fund of $6,250 raised from twenty-five individuals and firms. Major Miles F. Porter directed the unit; when Porter and Dr. K. K. Wheelock withdrew after a ruling on the age limit, Dr. Allen Hamilton took command, and the unit's medical staff was filled out in July 1917 with Dr. Harvey H. Martin of LaPorte and Dr. Herbert Senseny. The nurses of the chapter who served overseas, and the two who did not come home, are carried in Charities and in Wars.
Sources: Griswold (1917), ch. L.
The other purses · the YMCA and Catholic war funds
1917 · EVERY ORGANIZATION HAD A QUOTA
The loans and the Red Cross were not the only purses. The YMCA War Fund asked the Fort Wayne district — Allen, Whitley, Adams, Wells, Steuben, Huntington, and DeKalb counties, together forming part of Indiana's $150,000 share of the national $3,000,000 — for $11,600; the district subscribed $14,232, under district chairman B. Paul Mossman, who thus appears in the record at the head of the Red Cross fund, the YMCA fund, and half the county's other war business besides. The Knights of Columbus Catholic War Fund, taken in late July 1917, raised over $9,000 in Allen County — second in the state only to Marion County — under general chairman Maurice C. Niezer, with every Catholic parish in the county organized by districts for the canvass.
Sources: Griswold (1917), ch. L.
The canteen · coffee at the troop trains
JULY 1918 – 1919 · THE FORT WAYNE CANTEEN
Fort Wayne stood on the trunk lines east, and troop trains rolled through it day and night. In the latter part of July 1918 the Red Cross chapter's executive committee organized a canteen service for the trains. Mrs. Will K. Noble was commandant, Mrs. Ralph Magee vice-chairman. Headquarters was a ground-floor room in the Gauntt Building, its equipment donated by merchants and utility companies and its furniture loaned by M. C. Norton. Every canteen worker took an oath of allegiance and secrecy before going on duty: no word concerning any troop movement was to pass from a canteen member until forty-eight hours after the train had left the city — "not to be discussed even with one's family." The corps served the elevated stations of the Pennsylvania and the Wabash, and at the Nickel Plate's West Yards, where railroad men fitted up two little houses with stoves and fuel for the workers. A separate canteen rest room served the Pennsylvania Station under Mrs. Margaret Olds.
The work ran on coffee and doughnuts. The "Commissariat" — Mrs. Margaret S. Olds, styled its Major, and Mrs. J. W. Thompson — made the provisions; Fred H. Feil of the Scherer Baking Company, the canteen's "Doughnut Man," personally made as many as four thousand doughnuts in a single day, and the record day's brewing ran to 160 gallons of coffee. The corps' christening service was the feeding of three thousand Black troops on their way overseas. Taylor's account calls Fort Wayne one of more than seven hundred important railway stations where canteen service had been established by November 1918, and its canteen "recognized as one of the finest of them all, regardless of the size of the city." After the Armistice the movement reversed: the same stations received the returning men, who, Taylor writes, had heard in the eastern camps that they were sure of a welcome, with coffee and doughnuts, when they reached Fort Wayne.
Sources: Taylor, War Work of the Fort Wayne Chapter (1919), pp. 73–75 and roster, p. 122.
Alien enemies · the registration of 1917
APRIL – JUNE 1917 · EIGHT HUNDRED AND FIFTY MEN
The pressure of the war fell first and hardest on the city's Germans. President Wilson's proclamation of 6 April 1917 defined every unnaturalized German resident of fourteen years and upward as an "alien enemy." In Indiana the definition caught men it was never aimed at: the state's declarant law let an immigrant who had filed his first papers vote, so hundreds of substantial Fort Wayne citizens — property holders, voters of many years' standing — woke to find themselves technically enemies of the country they had voted in. The full story of the city's German community in these years is told in Communities; the registration itself belongs here.
Registration was conducted by Special Deputy United States Marshal Harry W. Muller, advised by a local committee and assisted by eighteen assistant special deputy marshals whose names Griswold prints. The deadline was extended from 9 June to 18 June 1917, and when it closed, 850 men stood recorded. Each registrant received a permit bearing his photograph, without which he could not lawfully come within half a mile of the city's war plants — the General Electric works, S. F. Bowser & Co., the Bass Foundry & Machine Co., the Pennsylvania Railroad shops, and the east car shops. Ministers, city firemen, and churchgoers traveling to and from services were exempted from the zones' edge. It was the first time the federal government had ever required Fort Wayne's largest ancestral community to carry papers to walk its own streets.
Sources: Griswold (1917), ch. L.
Loyalty's local edge · what the record shows, and what it does not
1917–1919 · INVESTIGATION WITHOUT TRIALS
Beyond registration, the surveillance of German Fort Wayne ran through the Bureau of Investigation, whose wartime files on German residents — the "Old German Files" — included residents of this city; that record is carried with the German community's story in Communities. What the records searched for this section do not show is equally part of the record: no prosecution of a Fort Wayne resident under the Espionage Act of 1917 or the Sedition Act of 1918 appears in them. The pressure here ran through registration, permits, investigation files, the renaming of the German-American National Bank as the Lincoln National Bank on 31 May 1918, and, in the legislature's act of February–March 1919, the banning of German from Indiana's schools — not through local trials. An honest absence, stated plainly, as the Wars file states its own.
Sources: the Communities record of the German community, 1914–1919; searches of the Espionage and Sedition Act record for Fort Wayne cases, which returned none.
War gardens · the city plants its vacant lots
SPRING – SUMMER 1917 · FOOD FROM VACANT LOTS
The war's first summer turned Fort Wayne into a farm. Mayor Hosey appointed the Fort Wayne branch of the National Food Relief Committee, with Frank H. Hilgeman as chairman and headquarters at 810 Clinton Street; three hundred citizens donated vacant lots to the cause. A house-to-house canvass by the Boy Scouts in early May counted 3,734 gardens decided upon — 2,790 of them back-yard gardens and 834 on large tracts — with fewer than twenty-seven percent of the homes visited reporting none. The municipal greenhouses at Lawton Park gave out 35,000 cabbage plants. Hilgeman's July report to the committee gives the season's working totals: the committee had plowed 671 lots and 40 acres for 460 families and 80 boys, and leased 486 lots and 112 acres to 275 gardeners — 1,157 lots and 152 acres under cultivation in all — and had sold at cost some 1,200 bushels of seed potatoes and 30 bushels of beans. The work was supervised first by B. P. Stonecifer of Purdue (May), then by Fred W. Gray, who divided the city into thirty districts; City Forester Carl J. Getz and County Agent A. J. Hutchins carried the technical advice.
Putting the food up was the women's half of the campaign: canning demonstrations began on 25 June 1917 under Mrs. J. G. Schwarz of the Woman's Club League and Miss Alma Garvin of Purdue, and from 23 July the "cold pack" demonstrations ran at the Scottish Rite Cathedral. The gardens outlasted the first season. In the fall of 1918 a War Department photographer recorded Fort Wayne's "Liberty Gardens" being plowed by a one-man tractor built by the Automatic Corporation of Fort Wayne — the image now in the National Archives' collection of unofficial war photographs.
Sources: Griswold (1917), ch. L; National Archives, Record Group 165, American Unofficial Collection of World War I Photographs, catalog caption for the Fort Wayne Liberty Gardens photograph, fall 1918.
The food administrator · sugar, coal, and the winter of 1918
JANUARY 1918 · THE FUEL FAMINE
By the war's first full winter the administration of daily life had names and faces. Allen County's food administrator was George M. Haffner. In the first week of January 1918 the county's sugar ran out: the Jasper Weekly Courier of 4 January printed the Fort Wayne item that the city's wholesale grocers were "without a grain of sugar in their warehouses," with little relief in sight until the Cuban crop arrived, and that Haffner was urging every person holding ten pounds of sugar or more to share it with his neighbors. The Journal-Gazette of 16 January profiled the administrator at work — a man past seventy, Griswold's contemporary still on duty, enforcing the food regulations at meeting after meeting of the county's food dealers. The same front page carried the season's other emergency in its headlines: "FUEL FAMINE FACES THE CENTRAL WEST," with the federal fuel administration routing coal and food trains through a zero-weather crisis and the city, in the paper's phrase, facing it "with pluck and good humor." The heatless Mondays and lightless nights ordered nationally by Fuel Administrator Harry A. Garfield that January were the federal frame; the Fort Wayne record of them is the headline, the empty sugar warehouses, and an administrator in his seventies riding circuit among the grocers.
Sources: Journal-Gazette, 16 January 1918, p. 1; Jasper Weekly Courier, 4 January 1918 (Hoosier State Chronicles), printing the Fort Wayne sugar item.
Hands for the war · women in the shops, boys in the fields
AUGUST 1917 · THE LABOR THE WAR LEFT AT HOME
Women in the shops. In early August 1917, E. E. Greist, master mechanic of the Pennsylvania Railroad, appealed for one hundred women to work in the road's main shops, east shops, and roundhouses at Fort Wayne. The terms Griswold records were remarkable for their time and are printed here as he gives them: the women's wages were made equal to the men's for like work, and rest rooms were provided for them. At the General Electric works and elsewhere in the war plants, women workers adopted the one-piece "jumper" suit as their shop dress.
The Boys' Working Reserve. The same month, the Boys' Working Reserve opened enrollment — from 13 August 1917 at the Harmar, Hanna, Hoagland, and Jefferson schools and at centers across the townships — signing schoolboys for the farm and shop labor the draft had drained away. L. O. Wetzel directed the reserve for Fort Wayne; D. O. McComb directed it for the townships.
Sources: Griswold (1917), ch. L.
Eastern time · the city's wartime clock
1 – 12 MAY 1917 · AN HOUR AHEAD
The smallest change the war made in Fort Wayne is the one its people still live with. On 1 May 1917 the common council voted, fourteen to one, to adopt the "daylight saving" plan, and on Saturday, 12 May 1917, the city set its clocks one hour ahead. Griswold treats the vote as what it amounted to — the city's adoption of Eastern time — and gives the reason of the season: the war gardeners, planting their lots after factory hours, wanted the evening hour of light, and the garden campaign hastened the change. Fort Wayne had moved itself an hour east a full ten months before Congress acted. The sequel, in brief: the federal Standard Time Act of 19 March 1918 made daylight saving the law of the whole country; Congress repealed daylight saving on 20 August 1919, the repeal taking effect the last Sunday of that October; and the question of which hour Indiana — and this city, sitting near the line the railroads drew — should keep became one of the longest-running arguments in the state's public life. That argument's later chapters belong to the city's general record; its first page is the council's fourteen-to-one vote in the first spring of the war.
Sources: Griswold (1917), ch. L; Public Law 65-106 (Standard Time Act, 19 March 1918) and Public Law 66-40 (repeal of daylight saving, 20 August 1919), Statutes at Large.
The arch and the homecoming · names on the square
SEPTEMBER 1918 – OCTOBER 1919 · THE CITY RECEIVES ITS OWN
Fort Wayne began memorializing its dead before the war had ended. In September 1918, while the last offensives were still being fought, a wooden memorial went up at the northeast corner of Berry and Calhoun — the record dates its erection to 28 September 1918 — and a large temporary "Liberty Memorial Arch," designed by the architect Marshall Mahurin, was built on the sidewalk at the southwest corner of the courthouse square, carrying the names of the local war dead. When the arch was taken down in 1921, the Gold Star parents were promised that a permanent memorial listing the deceased would be erected in its place; the promise was kept at Memorial Park in 1928, as the Wars file records. The Gold Star mothers' own organizational history in this city has not been recovered in the records read for this section; their trace in it is that promise, made to them by name as a class, and kept.
The welcome home ran through the stations and the calendar rather than through a single ceremony. The canteen corps met the returning troop trains through 1919 with the coffee and doughnuts the men had been promised by reputation. No separate municipal welcome-home for the returning batteries appears in the records read for this section. What the city staged instead, in the first autumn of the peace, was the Peace Centennial of 29 September – 4 October 1919 — the hundredth anniversary of the evacuation of the old fort in 1819, when Major Josiah N. Vose marched his ninety-six men away and left the place to its civilians. The celebration joined the centennial to a made-in-Fort-Wayne exposition, a War Show of the late war's hardware, a style show, a decorated-automobile parade, and the crowning, on 4 October, of a Queen of the Peace Centennial: Miss Martha Schultz, a telephone operator at the Journal-Gazette, chosen with 16,385 ballots and presented with a $250 diamond ring. A century after the soldiers left the fort, the city that had just sent 3,500 of its own to France celebrated the peace by exhibiting what it made.
Sources: the History Center's account of the Liberty Memorial Arch as compiled by the Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, WWI resources page; Fort Wayne News and Sentinel and Journal-Gazette, August–October 1919, Peace Centennial coverage as compiled by ACGSI; Taylor (1919), canteen chapter.