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ROW #662 · BRANCH ITEM 2 · GREENOUGH (1922), COUNTY TABLES · PENN'S SHARE TESTED
Indiana's war purse was raised in five drives, and the state's own history — written by the loan headquarters' publicity director from its files and the county chairmen's reports — carries St. Joseph County drive by drive: First Liberty Loan (1917). The state organized county by county in May–June 1917; Greenough's narrative is a rivalry of counties racing to report first over quota (Decatur County led the first published list, 31 May 1917), and his county machinery — a chairman in every county, the state headquarters in Indianapolis, the northern counties in the Seventh Federal Reserve District — is the frame the St. Joseph figures below sit in. No St. Joseph County First Loan total is carried in the portions of Greenough reached for this section, and none is estimated: the drive prints here at organizational strength, with the county total named as GAP-WWI-2 below.
Second Liberty Loan (October 1917). The drive opened across Indiana on 1 October 1917 with bombs fired in the county-seat courthouse yards; the Council of Defense wire of 6 October (previous article) put the councils behind it. Greenough carries the campaign county by county in narrative; the reached portions give no separate St. Joseph total for this drive either — same gap, same settler.
Third Liberty Loan (April–May 1918) — the county's fullest table. St. Joseph County's allotment was 2,500,000 dollars, and the county troubled the state officials doing it: a week before the close it had subscribed only 48 percent of its allotment. On 1 May 1918 a big Liberty Loan meeting of the South Bend Rotary Club turned it, and the county “took its place among the ‘white’ counties” — Greenough's map language for a county over the line. The official county table closes the drive: St. Joseph — chairman Arthur D. Baker — quota 2,500,000 dollars, subscription 2,688,000 dollars, 107 percent. The women's half of that drive is tabled separately in the same volume (next article): St. Joseph's women's committee, Mrs. Victor F. Jones chairman, quota 625,000 dollars, sold 341,900 dollars — printed there beside the county total, at the state's own accounting, and not added into it twice here.
Fourth Liberty Loan (September–October 1918). The county organizations were rebuilt “more compactly” under generally the same leaders, and this drive carries the home front's strangest documented episode, seated in this county: the Mennonite and Amish question. Because a large share of Indiana's Mennonites lived in the northern tier, a conference was called at South Bend on 13 September 1918 — Mennonite church representatives, the county chairmen of St. Joseph and Elkhart counties, and bankers — and it settled that Mennonite and Amish subscribers could meet their quota through ten-year, 4-percent certificates of deposit at banks in South Bend, Mishawaka, Goshen and Elkhart, the banks in turn investing the money in Liberty bonds. A conscience objection was thus answered with a banking instrument, in a meeting this county hosted; Penn Township, whose own Mennonite and Brethren ground the Religion section carries, sat inside the country that settlement was made for. No separate St. Joseph Fourth Loan total is carried in the reached portions — GAP-WWI-2 again.
Victory Loan (21 April–10 May 1919). The fifth drive ran after the Armistice, on the same county machinery; Greenough tables the women's Victory work county by county for the Eighth District in the reached portions, and names, in the state women's organization, Miss Virginia Tutt as St. Joseph County's women's chairman in the Victory campaign's roster. The county's combined Victory total is not in the reached portions — GAP-WWI-2.
GAP-WWI-2 — St. Joseph County's First, Second, Fourth and Victory totals. The Third Loan is DUG whole above; the other four drives' county totals exist in exactly one class of place and are named as its settler: Greenough's county tables for those drives, read whole (the volume is digitised; the Internet Archive copy is the settler), checked against the Tribune's drive-close reports. The Penn test: Greenough's tables are county tables. No Penn Township or Osceola subscription figure — no township subtotal, no Osceola bank figure — is printed in any source reached, and none is derived from the county's by population or any other arithmetic: a derived share would be an invented share. Penn bought its bonds at the county's banks and through its county's committees, at a size the record reached does not separate, and this article says exactly that.
Sources:
- Walter Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana; the five Liberty Loans and War Savings and thrift campaigns in Indiana during the World War (Indiana Historical Commission, 1922) — contents and chapters for the five drives; Third Loan narrative (48 percent, the Rotary meeting of 1 May 1918) and county table (Baker; 2,500,000 / 2,688,000 / 107 percent), p. 107; Fourth Loan Mennonite conference, South Bend, 13 September 1918; women's Third and Victory tables and rosters.