Armistice Day, 1918: "great hilarity"

November 11, 1918 · downtown South Bend

The day: The news that the armistice had been signed reached South Bend on Monday, November 11, 1918, and the city celebrated in the streets the same day. The fullest surviving witness reached for this section is the next morning's South Bend News-Times of November 12, 1918, whose front page carried a photograph of the Monday crowd under the caption "One of the Noise-Making Crowds That Featured South Bend's Celebration of End of the War," and the single headline "GREAT HILARITY" over its account. The photograph's own credit line fixes the scene: it was made expressly for the News-Times by E. E. Mangold, at Michigan and Washington streets — downtown's central corner — on Monday afternoon. Noise was the celebration's instrument everywhere that day — whistles, bells, and horns — and the News-Times' caption makes the same point of its own crowd: a noise-making crowd, photographed in the afternoon, was what the end of the war looked like in South Bend. The celebration story's text continues inside that issue, in a digitization too scrambled to quote responsibly; the front page is what this section prints from, and it does not invent the rest.

The observance settles: Within a few years the day had its settled civic form. The News-Times' society pages of November 12, 1922, are given to the Armistice ball — the Armistice Cotillion at the Oliver Hotel, its grand march at nine — the noise of 1918 become an annual dance. For the Second World War's end, this section records a gap plainly: no South Bend-specific account of a V-J Day celebration in August 1945 was found in the record reached for this build. The state's historian, James H. Madison, describes Hoosier victory in 1945 generally — factory whistles, street dancing, parades — but the South Bend crowd of that night, if the Tribune's telling of it survives anywhere reachable, was not reached here, and the home-front war itself is told in Wars & Unrest.

Sources:

1. South Bend News-Times, November 12, 1918 (Hoosier State Chronicles, Indiana State Library) — the front page: the photograph captioned "One of the Noise-Making Crowds That Featured South Bend's Celebration of End of the War," and the headline "GREAT HILARITY."
2. South Bend News-Times, November 12, 1922 (Hoosier State Chronicles) — the society pages on the Armistice ball and cotillion at the Oliver Hotel.
3. James H. Madison, "Hoosiers at War: An Overview of Indiana during World War II," Indiana Historical Bureau — the general Indiana account of the 1945 victory celebrations, against which the absence of a South Bend-specific account is stated.