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SPRING–SUMMER 1917 · THE MACHINERY AS IT REACHED MISHAWAKA
The frame: Indiana's State Council of Defense was organized May 19, 1917, by Governor J. P. Goodrich at the request of the Council of National Defense, and the system ran downward — state council, county councils, and beneath them township councils. That the system reached all the way down in this county is in print by the following spring: a state news item of May 9, 1918 reports that "a Council of defense has been named for every township in St. Joseph county," each township council to co-operate with the county council of defense — Penn Township, Mishawaka's township, among them by the item's own terms.
The county council at work, July 1917: the South Bend News-Times of July 14, 1917 reports the local delegates home from the State Council of Defense meeting at Indianapolis on Thursday, July 12: the meeting's principal move was that the county council should immediately organize committees to provide four-minute speakers on food conservation and the boys' reserve in the moving-picture houses — the Four Minute Men system, carried into the picture houses of both cities — and J. P. Oliver of South Bend addressed the state meeting with a patriotic speech on the gravity of the situation.
Mishawaka's own committee — a named gap: the membership of a Mishawaka city committee of the council of defense — its chairman and its names — was not found in the records read. The county frame and the township councils are documented; the city's own roster is not. The settling source is named: the Mishawaka Enterprise of spring and summer 1917, the city's paper of record, in the run held by the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library and indexed through Hoosier State Chronicles; county war-history material at the Indiana Archives and Records Administration is the second settler.
Registration days: the National Archives' account of the Selective Service records (Record Group 163) fixes the days on which Mishawaka's men registered with all the nation's: June 5, 1917, for men aged 21 to 31; June 5, 1918, for men who had turned 21 since the first day, with a supplemental registration August 24, 1918; and September 12, 1918, for men aged 18 to 45 — some 24 million registration cards in all, taken by 4,648 local boards, each board serving on average some 30,000 of population. All local, district and medical advisory boards closed March 31, 1919.
The boards that handled Mishawaka men: the News-Times of July 14, 1917, p. 3, fixes the boards' first shape. Headquarters for South Bend's exemption boards, Divisions No. 1 and No. 2, were established at the Farmers' Trust building, open from 9 a.m., Central Standard Time; "headquarters for the county board have not as yet been announced." Mishawaka and Penn Township men fell under that county board — the board for the county outside South Bend's divisions — and as of July 14, 1917 it had no announced seat. The same item carries the first call's apportionment: St. Joseph County, including Mishawaka, was to give 196 men (the item's headline, in the surviving digitized text, garbles the figure; the body text reads 196), and South Bend 44 on the legible reading. A later seat for the county board is not established by the records read here; the settling source is the board's own surviving record in the Selective Service files at the National Archives.
Sources:
- South Bend News-Times, July 14, 1917, p. 3 (exemption-board headquarters; county apportionment; delegates from the July 12 State Council of Defense meeting), Hoosier State Chronicles, Indiana State Library (newspapers.library.in.gov).
- Wanatah Mirror, May 9, 1918, p. 1 (council of defense named for every township in St. Joseph County), newspaperarchive.com.
- National Archives and Records Administration, World War I Selective Service System records, RG 163 / M1509 (registration days; board structure; boards closed March 31, 1919), archives.gov.
- Indiana State Council of Defense, organized May 19, 1917 (state record, via the Indiana Historical Commission's published war records).