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America declared war on April 6, 1917, and St. Joseph County's first answers are in its press within days. The South Bend News-Times of April 15, 1917 reported the recruiting stations' week: sixty-six men enlisted at the Army station and twenty-seven at the Navy station, with consignments of ten more to go on each of the next two days — county strength, from the county seat, printed at its size. The machinery of compulsion followed at the same address. Under the Selective Service Act the national registration days ran June 5, 1917 (men twenty-one to thirty) and September 12, 1918 (men eighteen to forty-five); and by July 14, 1917 the News-Times was printing the first apportionment: Indiana's quota 17,600-odd men under Provost Marshal Crowder's figures, of which St. Joseph County, including Mishawaka, was to give 196 in the first call, its exemption boards organising with the South Bend boards' headquarters established in the Farmers' Trust building and the county board's headquarters not yet announced — the OCR of the surviving page garbles the South Bend city sub-figure, and it is not printed rather than guessed. The civilian machinery organised in parallel: the Indiana State Council of Defense was organised on May 19, 1917, headed by former Vice-President Charles W. Fairbanks, with county councils beneath it directed, among their first tasks, to organise committees to supply four-minute speakers on food conservation and the boys' reserve to the moving-picture houses of the state — a direction the county's own delegates brought home from the Indianapolis meeting and reported in the same July News-Times. The state council's Woman's Section was chaired by a South Bend woman, Anne Studebaker Carlisle, Clement Studebaker's daughter — the county's seat at the head of the state's women's war work. The settler is named: the South Bend Tribune's 1917–19 files and the Indiana Historical Commission's St. Joseph County scrapbook (Indiana State Library, under “St. Joseph County Indiana History European War”), read for Penn by name.
Sources: South Bend News-Times, April 15, 1917 (the week's enlistments) and July 14, 1917 (the draft apportionment; the county council delegates' report), via Hoosier State Chronicles — OCR strength, flagged in the text. Indiana Historical Commission / Hoosier State Chronicles background on the State Council of Defense (organised May 19, 1917; Fairbanks; the Woman's Section's officers). Indiana State Library, World War I Resources guide (the county scrapbook series, named as settler).