Thrift, Red Cross and the other purses at counted size

BRANCH · THE WWI HOME FRONT · 1917–1919 · THE SMALL PURSES

Lead: Below the bond drives ran the small-denomination war: twenty-five-cent thrift stamps, Red Cross dollars, Y.M.C.A. pledges and women's registration cards. Each prints here at the size the record actually counts it — state or county — and the purses the record does not count for this county are named, not estimated.

Thrift and War Savings. Indiana had the distinction of being the first state in the Union to go over the top in War Savings Societies, against a state quota of 9,173 societies. Sales built through the winter: $6,500,000 of War Savings and Thrift stamps sold in Indiana by 1 April 1918, and $11,358,272.87 — a per capita of $3.88 — by 10 June, a week after Thrift Week (27 May–3 June) closed with St. Joseph named among the counties reported over the top. The county's War Savings chairman for 1918 was John A. Herzog of Mishawaka. The women's loan organization is counted separately in Greenough's women's chapter: in the Third Loan, St. Joseph's women's committee under Mrs. Victor F. Jones carried a $625,000 quota and sold $341,900; across the fifty-three reporting northern counties in the Fourth Loan, women's organizations were credited with $51,098,030.

The other purses. The Y.M.C.A. war-work fund prints counted at city grain: South Bend's share was $30,000 of Indiana's $1,000,000 quota in the November 1917 national drive, opened in the churches on a Sunday. The women's registration — the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense canvassing every woman sixteen and over for her skills, in April–June 1918 — prints counted only where cards survive: neighboring Miami County's official final report counted 8,503 registrants, one of a handful of surviving sets in the nation. No St. Joseph County registration total was found, and the Indiana Woman's Section's own report (October 1917–April 1919) stands as its settler. The Red Cross prints the same way: nationally the chapters grew from 555 in April 1917 to 3,874 and the December 1917 drive enrolled 22,000,000 members, but no St. Joseph chapter membership, work-room output or drive total was found in the record read — for this town the Red Cross remains the banked UNREAD settler in War Heroes, and its county course is a named gap, not a number invented here. Food and fuel print at state grain: the “fourteen-minute women” — organized by Julia C. Henderson for food-conservation speaking in the Seventh District, so effective they were taken into state service in January 1918 — carried Hoover's conservation message club to club, and in the fuel winter, Indiana Fuel Administrator Evans Woollen wired the state's mine owners in December 1917 to give rigorous preference to utilities and domestic consumers while factories making non-essentials felt the pinch; by January 1918 the federal fuel holidays were being observed, in town after town, almost to a perfect degree. War-garden counts and women-in-factory counts for this county were not found in any instrument read; both are named gaps in the closure.

Sources:

1. Greenough, War Purse of Indiana, chs. VII–VIII, Parts 18, 20, 22 — War Savings societies and sales totals, Thrift Week county list, W.S.S. county chairmen, women's Third and Fourth Loan tables.
2. South Bend News-Times, 10 November 1917 — Y.M.C.A. war fund, South Bend's $30,000 share.
3. Council of National Defense, Women's Committee registration cards, Miami County Museum index — the surviving Indiana registration count and the card system's form.
4. Indiana History Blog, “Fourteen-Minute Women” — food-conservation speakers' bureau, Seventh District origin and January 1918 state expansion.
5. Hammond Times, 19 December 1917, and Decatur Daily Democrat, 21 January 1918 (Hoosier State Chronicles) — the fuel administration's preference order and the observed fuel holidays.