Loyalty's edge and the wartime clock

BRANCH · THE WWI HOME FRONT · 1917–1919 · LOYALTY, TIME, ARMISTICE, INFLUENZA AT THE EDGE

Lead: The home front had an edge, and this county felt it in its clocks before it felt it in its courts. In July 1917, while the draft boards were still setting up, the South Bend News-Times reported South Bend's churches going back to Central time: the Ministerial Association resolved that from a Sunday in July all churches of South Bend and Mishawaka would return to Central Standard Time, five churches moving a week early, and the Lee Company announced its establishment would follow after its employees voted Central time a three-to-one favorite. A town that had been keeping advanced time gave it up as a war measure of order — a year before Washington acted.

Washington acted with the Standard Time Act of 19 March 1918: the first nationwide legal time standard, all of Indiana placed in the Central Time Zone, and daylight saving imposed across the country as a fuel-saving war measure — clocks forward the last Sunday of March, back the last Sunday of October, in 1918 and 1919. Congress repealed the daylight-saving portion in 1919 (Public Law 66-40, 20 August 1919), leaving the patchwork Indiana kept for decades. Loyalty's harder edge ran on the same machinery as the loans: county councils helping boards ferret out slackers, the State Council's public-opinion power applied to men who would not buy, and, at its legislative end, the campaign against the German language itself — German classes were being struck from Indiana curricula before the United States even entered the war, and on 25 February 1919, three months after the Armistice, Governor Goodrich signed Senator Franklin McCray's act banning German instruction in elementary, parochial and correctional schools, under penalty of a fine of up to $100 and six months in jail. The liberal South Bend News-Times called the bill legislative overreach, noting most German-Americans were already adopting English in church and school. No loyalty prosecution, bond-slacker case or German-language closure in New Carlisle itself was found in the record read; the edge prints at state and county grain, where it is documented.

The end came twice. Notre Dame's history records the factory whistles of South Bend announcing the “false armistice” at midnight — Goshen celebrated the same false news on 7 November with flags, parades and horns — and the real Armistice days later. On 11 November the News-Times headlined South Bend joining all America in celebration, its downtown a seething mass of humanity; Greenough's Indiana is bells, cannon, whistles and marching thousands at 3 a.m. The homecoming prints at state grain — 20,000 cheering the Welcome Home Parade at Indianapolis on 7 May 1919 — because no New Carlisle homecoming was found in the reachable record. And at the edge stands the other war, printed here only as the town met it: the first local influenza death, a one-year-old boy in Mishawaka, on 27 September 1918; South Bend Health Officer Dr. Emil G. Freyermuth's 11 October order forbidding all public gatherings — schools, theatres, clubs and churches closed until 9 November, streetcars ordered to run with windows open, flu homes placarded QUARANTINE; at least 1,500 cases counted in St. Joseph County in October, and 185 county deaths by 20 November, 152 of them in South Bend. The county's full flu course belongs to the Epidemics branch; here it closes the home front, as it closed the autumn of 1918.

Sources:

1. South Bend News-Times, 14 July 1917; 11 and 20 November 1918 (Hoosier State Chronicles) — churches back to Central time; Armistice celebration; influenza investigation.
2. Standard Time Act, Pub. L. 65-106 (1918) and repeal, Pub. L. 66-40 (1919), via tz database legal notes — Indiana in Central, wartime daylight saving 1918–19.
3. Indiana History Blog / Indiana Magazine of History, on the 1919 anti-German-language act — McCray bill, 25 February 1919 signing, penalties, News-Times dissent.
4. Arthur J. Hope, Notre Dame — One Hundred Years, ch. XXIII (Notre Dame Archives) — S.A.T.C., influenza on campus, false and real armistice whistles.
5. Notre Dame Magazine, “Another Deadly Contagion” — Freyermuth closure order, county case and death counts.