Loyalty's edge, the wartime clock, the Armistice, the homecoming, and influenza at the edge

1917–1919 · THE WAR'S OTHER FRONTS AT HOME

Loyalty's edge, at the strength the open record carries for this county: Indiana's loyalty machinery was state-built: Governor Goodrich's Indiana Liberty Guards — organized late 1917 into 219 companies in 18 regiments statewide, an auxiliary militia whose stated mission was "to stamp out treason, discover disloyalty," train draftees and assist the selective-service boards, disbanded December 1918 — and the State Council of Defense's loyalty work above it. The loan organizations supplied the social edge: the News-Times' June 1917 Red Cross appeal told the county's rich men, in print, that absence from the contributors' list would mark a man — "in the eyes of the community and in the eyes of the world, a slacker … a bloodsucker" — which is loyalty's edge in this county's own newspaper, aimed at money rather than speech. No prosecution, raid, or loyalty incident seated in Clay or Harris township, and no named St. Joseph County disloyalty case, was reached in the open record in this run: TESTED NEGATIVE at web-record strength, settler: the News-Times/Tribune 1917–18 whole and the county scrapbook. The one loyalty-shaped negotiation this county demonstrably held was the Mennonite conference of 13 September 1918 (loans article): conscience accommodated by bond structure, at South Bend, with the county chairmen at the table — the edge, blunted by arrangement, on the record.

The wartime clock — a correction, printed whole: the row names "the 1918 time-zone switch" as a war measure, and the record holds two distinct switches that must not be merged. First, the legal switch: the Standard Time Act of 19 March 1918 (Pub. L. 65-106) created the federal time zones and nationwide daylight saving — clocks forward the last Sunday of March 1918, back the last Sunday of October, repeated in 1919, the daylight provision repealed 20 August 1919 — and the Interstate Commerce Commission's first boundary, effective 1 January 1919, placed all of Indiana in the Central Time Zone. St. Joseph County's legal wartime switch was therefore into Central, with daylight saving in the summers of 1918 and 1919. Second, the local switch that actually agitated this county: South Bend had lived on a split observance — railroads and much of the city on Central, other institutions leaning Eastern toward Michigan and the East — and the News-Times of 14 July 1917 headlines "SOUTH BEND CHURCHES BACK TO CENTRAL TIME" in the same issue whose draft-board headquarters keep "central standard time" hours: a summer-1917 civic fight over which time the city would keep, a full season before the federal act settled the legal question. For Clay and Harris households the practical wartime clock was both: Central by law from 1918, daylight saving in the two war summers, and a county seat that had argued about its clocks in print the summer before. Any claim of a St. Joseph County switch to Eastern in 1918 is dispelled by the ICC record: the Eastern placement of this county belongs to the 1960s settlements, not the war.

The Armistice scene, from the county's paper of the day itself: the South Bend News-Times of Monday 11 November 1918 (Vol. XXXV, No. 315) carries the proclamation — Wilson reading the terms to Congress at 1 p.m. Washington time — and its own local head: "South Bend Join[s] All America in Celebration," with Mayor Franklin's announcement and, in the report's preserved line, a downtown district that "was a seething [mass] of humanity," and one celebrant's verdict quoted in dialect by the paper: "de greatest day in all de histr[y] ob de worl'." The false armistice of 7 November is part of the national record and is not claimed as a separate local scene on this evidence. No township-level Armistice scene — a Harris Prairie schoolhouse, a Granger depot crowd — was reached in any source in this run, and none is composed here: the scene prints at the county seat's strength, which is where this county's crowd demonstrably was.

The homecoming, and influenza at the edge: the county's men came home through 1919 on the national demobilization (some two million men embarked home by the end of 1919; the first Armistice Day observance 11 Nov. 1919), and Wars & Military Service already carries the only township-edge name the rolls tie to this ground — Edward F. Elick, "Penn–Granger," buried in St. Joseph Valley Memorial Park — as a burial, not a homecoming scene. No dated St. Joseph County homecoming parade, banquet or welcome-home observance was reached in the open record in this run: NAMED GAP, settler: the News-Times/Tribune of spring–autumn 1919 and the county scrapbook. Influenza closes the branch where the Health & Care and Epidemics addendum carry it: the pandemic struck this county inside the Fourth Loan drive itself (the October 1918 canvass ran through the epidemic's crest), the county course is South Bend's build's whole, the January 1920 return is counted at state strength in the Epidemics addendum, and the township toll remains GAP-HLT-2, confirmed there as the honest close. The home front and the epidemic are one season in this county's record, and this section leaves them joined exactly so.

Sources:

1. Indiana Liberty Guards record (INGenWeb, Grant County compilation, from the state record) — Goodrich's 1917 organization, 219 companies / 18 regiments, mission as quoted, disbanded December 1918 (212 units at disbanding in the same compilation, printed as its variance).
2. South Bend News-Times, 21 June 1917 — the "slacker / bloodsucker" appeal language; 14 July 1917 — "South Bend Churches Back to Central Time" and the boards' "central standard time"; 11 Nov. 1918 — the Armistice number whole, celebration head, Mayor Franklin, the quoted celebrant.
3. Standard Time Act, Pub. L. 65-106 (19 Mar. 1918) and repeal, Pub. L. 66-40 (20 Aug. 1919); ICC boundaries effective 1 Jan. 1919 (all Indiana Central) — via the tzdata historical notes (Eggert) and the Indiana time histories (Indianapolis Star history; Hoosiers for Eastern Time chronology).
4. U.S. Army, demobilization record — 2,015,000 personnel embarked home by end of 1919; Wilson's first Armistice Day proclamation, 1919. Greenough (1922) — the 13 Sept. 1918 Mennonite conference. the Health & Care and Epidemics addendum of this run — influenza, GAP-HLT-2.