Armistice Day, 1918: whistles in a closed city

November 11, 1918 · the streets, under the influenza ban

The day and its frame: Mishawaka's Armistice Day stands in the record at two facts' size, and the two facts belong together. The first is the celebration: when the armistice came, the city's factory whistles blew and parades formed on the spot — the commissioned history's summary of the armistice streets, carried in this build's culture record. The second is the frame the celebration happened inside: in the fall of 1918 the Spanish influenza had closed the culture entire — from mid-October to November 15 public gatherings were prohibited and churches and schools shut, in a city that counted more than three hundred cases and some twenty-five dead. November 11 falls inside that window. The record reached for this build does not reconcile the two — it does not say whether the ban was lifted, defied, or simply overtaken by the news — and this entry prints both facts at their documented strength and names the reconciliation as a gap: the Mishawaka Enterprise and the News-Times of November 1918 are the settling sources. The epidemic's own course is the hospitals and culture record's; the day the whistles blew, at the size of its evidence, is this entry's.

Sources:

1. Peter J. De Kever, Mishawaka: A History, as carried in the Culture section of this history — the 1918 armistice streets, whistles and impromptu parades; and the influenza closure, mid-October to November 15, 1918, the gatherings prohibited, the three hundred cases and some twenty-five dead.