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The Home Front · South Bend in the First World War, 1917–1919
This section is the home-front companion to the Wars record. The units are there — the 137th Field Artillery's Supply Company, the 139th Machine Gun Battalion's Company C, Notre Dame's cadets, and the county's Gold Star roll of the dead, whose names belong to Wars and War Heroes, not to this one. What this section holds is the city those men left: the councils that organized it, the three draft boards that sorted it, the five loan drives that financed the war out of its pay envelopes and bank accounts, the card index that graded nearly every citizen's capacity to give, the women who registered by the tens of thousands and took factory work by the thousands, the gardens in its vacant lots, the coal it did not have in January 1918, the registration that fell on its German neighbors, and the morning the whistles blew for peace. The Red Cross chapter's institutional history is in Charities and the factories' war orders are in Studebaker and Businesses; both are cross-referenced here rather than retold, and the influenza autumn's disease record is in Epidemics. The principal accounts are the ones written at the time: Walter S. Greenough's The War Purse of Indiana (1922), the Indiana Historical Commission's official history of the state's war finance; the Report of the Woman's Section of the Indiana State Council of Defense (1919), the section's own record, written under a South Bend chairman; the Indiana Bulletin, the state council's weekly organ; and the South Bend News-Times, the city's paper of record. Where those accounts disagree on a figure, both figures stand.
The city answers · the first spring
APRIL – JULY 1917 · THE CITY MOBILIZES
The United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. South Bend's war began, as the state's did, with the building of machinery — councils, boards, and committees whose rosters fill the entries below — and the News-Times of 14 July 1917 preserves the note its leading citizen struck at the start. Joseph D. Oliver, the Oliver Chilled Plow president who would chair the county's council of defense and run the state's war savings campaign from this city, had addressed the State Council of Defense's Indianapolis meeting of 12 July "with a patriotic speech," the paper recorded, and his text was a warning rather than a cheer: "The people do not know what a serious affair this is." The machinery he helped build spent the next nineteen months teaching the city exactly that — through registration days, five bond drives, a card index of its citizens' worth, and a winter without coal.
Sources: South Bend News-Times, 14 July 1917 (Hoosier State Chronicles).
The councils · the county's war machinery
1917 · THE COUNTY COUNCIL OF DEFENSE AND THE WOMAN'S SECTION
The county's war government sat in South Bend. The St. Joseph County Council of Defense, the county arm of the Indiana State Council of Defense, was printed in the state council's Bulletin with this roster: Joseph D. Oliver of South Bend, chairman; Clem W. Smogor of South Bend, secretary; Mrs. Charles Arthur Carlisle of South Bend; R. W. Gaylor of Mishawaka; Francis J. Vurpillat of Notre Dame; Eben W. Cutting of South Bend; and Melville W. Mix of Mishawaka. It was a working cross-section of the county's war — the plow works, the university on the hill, both cities — and its chairman doubled as the state's director of war savings sales, so that two of the war's great civilian campaigns were administered, at county and state level alike, out of the same South Bend office-holders.
The woman's work was chaired from South Bend for the whole state. The Woman's Section of the Indiana State Council of Defense was first headed by Mrs. Caroline Fairbanks; on her illness and resignation, Mrs. Anne Studebaker Carlisle of South Bend — Clement Studebaker's daughter, styled in the section's report as Mrs. Anne (Charles A.) Studebaker Carlisle — was appointed in October 1917, went to Washington to consult the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense, and completed the state organization after a state-wide meeting at Indianapolis in early November 1917. Her seat on the county council passed, the Bulletin records, to Mrs. Victor F. Jones, named the woman member of the County Council of Defense in her place when Carlisle became a member of the state council. The county woman's committee she left behind is carried whole in the registration entry below; her section's state report is one of this section's two principal accounts.
Sources: Indiana Bulletin, vol. I (1917), county council rosters and woman-member items; Report of the Woman's Section of the Indiana State Council of Defense, October 1917 – April 1919 (Indianapolis, 1919), the chairman's narrative.
Registration and the boards · the draft at home
JUNE 1917 – APRIL 1918 · THREE BOARDS AND THE CALLS
Three boards worked the county. Under the selective service system St. Joseph County was served by three local boards: Division No. 1 and Division No. 2 for the city of South Bend, and Division No. 3 for the county outside it. The News-Times of 14 July 1917 announced the city boards' headquarters at the Farmers' Trust building, open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Appeals from the local boards ran to the district board for Division No. 1, headquartered at LaPorte, whose jurisdiction the Provost Marshal General's second report lists as including St. Joseph County. The registration of 5 June 1917 that set the system in motion was the war's first great civic ritual here as everywhere; the county's registration-day totals do not survive in the record reached, and are named among its gaps rather than reconstructed.
The calls, as the paper printed them. In mid-July 1917 the News-Times published the state's apportionment of the first call — the net number of men each county and city must furnish after credits for men already in service — under a headline giving the county's and Mishawaka's combined obligation; the figures in the digitized copy are not legible enough to print, and this section does not guess at them. The call the paper documents cleanly came the next spring: on 10 April 1918 the News-Times reported that 191 men from St. Joseph County would be taken in the next draft, to leave for Camp Taylor in the five-day period beginning Friday, 26 April 1918 — Division No. 1 furnishing 69 of them, including ten colored men, the only board figure in the item that survives legibly. The same page carried the county medical society's proposal to speed the draft by correcting registrants' operable defects. Registrations continued through the war: for the June 1918 registration of men newly twenty-one, the paper's Mishawaka report — printed here at boundary size, Mishawaka's record being its own — counted 91 young men registered at the civil service rooms of the post office there, registrars George Lang and Carl W. Wilke, "all the applicants willing and obliging," 35 of them by noon.
The Rev. John Cavanaugh, president of Notre Dame, addressed the county's departing National Army men as the increments left, the state Bulletin recorded, "urging the young men of the new national army to keep fresh in their minds at all times the memory of their mothers and the dear ones at home." Victor F. Jones, secretary of the South Bend Chamber of Commerce, resigned his post that fall to enter the service with the engineers — the chamber's own secretary going where the boards were sending the county's clerks and mechanics.
Sources: South Bend News-Times, 14 July 1917 and 10 April 1918 (Hoosier State Chronicles); Report of the Provost Marshal General, second report (1919), appendix list of district boards; Indiana Bulletin, vol. I (1917), county items.
The First Loan · the county that led the nation
JUNE 1917 · 204 PERCENT
The first Liberty Loan was St. Joseph County's triumph, and Greenough's official history tells it in the dispatch language of the moment. Rome C. Stephenson was county chairman. By 9 June the county reported its full quota met, in company with Decatur and Morgan counties. On 14 June, Greenough records, "St. Joseph went to the top of the state's percentage column, with a record of 204 per cent, a total of $4,000,000 subscribed." The next day the county made the larger claim, in an Indianapolis Star dispatch from South Bend that the state history reprints: St. Joseph claimed to lead all districts in the United States in proportion to population, with $4,250,000 subscribed — $2,391,000 more than its quota. The claim stands here as the record gives it: a contemporary dispatch's figure, carried into the state's official account, with no reconciled table figure beside it.
Sources: Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (Indiana Historical Commission, 1922), First Loan narrative, including the Indianapolis Star dispatch of 15 June 1917.
The Second Loan · the million that was never credited
OCTOBER 1917 · $2,320,050 CREDITED, $3,653,400 SUBSCRIBED
The second drive was chaired by Charles L. Zigler of the First National Bank of South Bend. The state committee's summary gives the county a quota of $2,600,000 and an official credit of $2,320,050 — short of the mark. Zigler's own accounting, in a letter of 20 April 1922 that Greenough prints, tells the other half of the story: more than $1,000,000 subscribed by citizens of the county was never credited to it, because the bonds were bought through the Federal Reserve Bank and through Chicago banks; the total actually subscribed by St. Joseph County citizens was $3,653,400 — well over quota. Both figures stand, the credited and the actual, as the record gives them. The campaign's climactic rally was remembered in a South Bend report Greenough preserves as "the biggest indoor meeting ever held in South Bend" — the loan drives were mass theater as well as finance, and this city's theater, in October 1917, had never been bigger.
Sources: Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (1922), Second Loan narrative, state committee summary, and the Zigler letter of 20 April 1922.
The Third Loan · red fire on the rooftops
APRIL – MAY 1918 · 107 PERCENT, AT THE LAST MINUTE
Arthur D. Baker chaired the third drive. The state table gives the county a quota of $2,500,000 and a subscription of $2,688,000 — 107 percent. The opening was staged for the eye: at the drive's start, red fire was burned on the tops of many buildings in South Bend, and a district preparatory meeting for the drive had been held in the city. The course underneath was anxious. A week before the close the county stood at 48 percent of its allotment, "causing the state officials not a little worry," and it went "white" on the state map — the color of a quota made — only following a big Liberty Loan meeting of the South Bend Rotary Club on 1 May 1918. The plants carried their share in the open: the Indiana Bulletin reported that the Dodge Company of South Bend claimed the state record for the Third Loan — every one of its 1,300 employees a subscriber, $135,000 in all, exceeding the quota set for the plant.
Sources: Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (1922), Third Loan narrative and results table; Indiana Bulletin, vol. I (1918), St. Joseph County items.
The Fourth Loan · the Volunteer Plan
28 SEPTEMBER – 19 OCTOBER 1918 · THE CARD INDEX OF A COUNTY
The drive. F. A. Bryan was county chairman for the fourth loan. William A. McInerny of South Bend served as a district chairman for a group of northern counties, and the state Executive Loan Committee included the Rev. John Cavanaugh, president of Notre Dame. In the Federal Reserve Bank's records the county was officially credited with 97 percent of its quota. Bryan contended the county had in fact subscribed $5,873,600; the contention survives in a memorandum by Guy W. Cooke to the Seventh District statistician, dated 25 January 1919, and Greenough notes that no other data on the controversy was found. Corporate money routed through the county included the International Harvester branch houses' subscriptions of $15,000 each, the South Bend branch among them, and a part of Armour & Co.'s roughly $35,000 Indiana allotment, directed to South Bend by the company's letter of 28 September 1918. Of the Seventh District's expense money for the drive — a little over $11,000 for the whole state — the bulk went to Marion and St. Joseph counties. The drive's last nine days ran under the influenza closure order described at this section's close; the soliciting was done by card and by door, in a city whose halls were shut.
The Volunteer Plan. What Greenough prints as a model for the state was Bryan's machinery, built from late July 1918: a systematic card tabulation of the ability of the citizens of South Bend and St. Joseph County to purchase bonds. F. L. Dennis — the home guards' major — was chosen director of clearing house and statistics. The survey ran on a block system; each city ward except the Sixth had a woman chairman, and the Sixth, "owing to its cosmopolitan character," had three. The survey card recorded the citizen's name, ward, precinct and block, occupation and employer, whether he owned his home, his marital state and children at home, the bank he used, the amount of each Liberty Bond issue he already owned, the members of his family in United States service and their branch — and the canvasser's estimate of his total net worth, his annual income, and the amount of the Fourth Loan issue he was willing to buy. A special volunteer button was awarded only when the individual purchased the amount the committee had agreed upon; anyone tendering less had "insufficient" marked on his card, and was visited personally. F. A. Miller directed the drive's publicity. It was the most complete instrument the home front built in this county: a census of means, taken in wartime, by one's neighbors.
The women's half. Miss Alice Jenkins was county women's chairman for the Fourth Loan. The printed women's report in Greenough — the state women's chairman Alice Foster McCulloch's accounting — gives St. Joseph County 1,200 women workers, a women's quota of $5,000,000, and $2,900,000 credited to the women's committee; in counties working the voluntary plan, the women's committee was credited with 50 percent of the entire amount sold, which is how the women's table reaches its figure. The county woman's committee's own report claims a different sum for its loan work; the two accounts are set side by side in the factory-women entry below and are not reconciled here, because the record does not reconcile them.
Sources: Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (1922), Fourth Loan narrative, the Cooke memorandum of 25 January 1919, the Wilsey and Armour correspondence, and the women's Fourth Loan report; Indiana Bulletin, vol. I (19 July 1918), the county's Fourth Loan organization.
The Victory Loan · black on the seventh, white on the ninth
21 APRIL – 10 MAY 1919 · THE LAST DRIVE
W. L. Chandler chaired the Victory Loan, the war's last ask, made five months after the fighting stopped. The state's official history follows the county's color on the map: on 7 May St. Joseph was still "black" — behind its allotment — in company with Allen, Delaware, Tippecanoe and Vigo; on the afternoon of 9 May, Allen, Laporte, St. Joseph and Shelby reported the completion of their allotments. The drive was built statewide toward the homecoming itself: Indiana's soldiers of the 150th Field Artillery came home as the center of the state's Welcome Home Day at Indianapolis on 7 May, in the loan's closing week, and Greenough records that the home-coming appeal was "utilized to the fullest throughout the state" — the returning men, in the last drive's own language, were its closing argument.
Sources: Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (1922), Victory Loan narrative.
Thrift · the war savings state run from South Bend
1918 – MARCH 1919 · HEADQUARTERS AT SOUTH BEND
For the whole of 1918, Indiana's thrift campaign was administered from this city. Joseph D. Oliver of South Bend was Indiana's Director of Sales for War Savings Stamps for the campaign's first division, from late 1917 to the close of 1918; Frank E. Hering of South Bend was Vice-Director, and Oliver's executive committee was Oliver himself, Will H. Hays — chairman of the Indiana State Council of Defense — and Hering. The complete file of the Indiana W.S.S. Bulletin that Greenough used was Hering's own file, kept at the headquarters from which county reports came in "to state headquarters at South Bend." Oliver launched the campaign on 7 January 1918 with the appeal "For Our Country's Cause," casting war savings in a pioneer's metaphor: the stamps were the "chinkin'" — the mud-plaster chinking that sealed the log cabin's frame. Indiana's 1918 quota was $58,323,860. For the Thirteenth District, the district chairman was Rome Stephenson of South Bend, succeeded by L. M. Hammerschmidt of South Bend. In March 1919 the directorship passed to Robert E. Springsteen of Indianapolis, and state headquarters moved from South Bend to Indianapolis with it. The county's own chairman through both the 1918 and 1919 organizations was John A. Herzog — of Mishawaka, printed here as the county's chairman at the boundary's size.
The county's small money. The Bulletin followed the work into the schools: the county's teachers were "especially active" in pushing war thrift certificates and savings stamps, 120 of them meeting at the courthouse for instruction from the county superintendent, with the county working on a quota amounting to $2,057,000 and members of the University Club of South Bend volunteering in the campaign. In December 1917 the South Bend Watch Company gave war savings certificates to 400 of its employees as Christmas gifts. St. Joseph County was among the counties reported "over" in Thrift Stamp Week, 27 May – 3 June 1918. And the state history preserves the county's smallest first: the first mention of War Savings and Thrift stamps as "Baby Bonds" was credited to the St. Joseph County Savings Bank of South Bend, in its advertising, as the W.S.S. Bulletin of 4 February 1918 noted. The final reckoning was cooler. In the Hoosier Thrift table of per-capita sales at 23 June 1919, St. Joseph County stood at 45 cents — among the lagging city counties, with Marion at 49 cents, Vanderburgh at 45, Vigo at 42 and Allen at 21, while rural Scott County led the state at $2.27 a head. The county that led the nation in the First Loan's percentages, and ran the state's thrift office, saved its own small change at the middle of the table.
Sources: Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (1922), War Savings chapters and the Hoosier Thrift per-capita table of 23 June 1919; Indiana Bulletin, vol. I (1917–1918), St. Joseph County thrift items.
The Mennonite conference · conscience, accommodated
13 SEPTEMBER 1918 · AT SOUTH BEND
One of the state's most delicate pieces of war finance was transacted in this city. Because a large share of Indiana's Mennonites lived in the northern tier, a conference was called at South Bend on 13 September 1918, bringing together representatives of the Mennonite church, the Liberty Loan chairmen of St. Joseph and Elkhart counties, and bankers. Members of the Mennonite and Amish churches, whose faith forbade them to buy bonds that directly supported the war, would subscribe their share if shown a way that did not: they subscribed instead for certificates of deposit — ten-year term, four percent — at banks in South Bend, Mishawaka, Goshen and Elkhart, and the banks in turn invested the money in Liberty bonds. The church committee further agreed to furnish the South Bend Liberty Loan chairman the names and addresses of their people, including the Amish of Elkhart County, to help value members' property and determine each member's allotment, and to solicit the subscriptions; the results flowed through the township chairmen to the county chairman. The arrangement stands in the state's official history without editorial comment, as a working settlement between the war's demands and a people's conscience — negotiated, significantly, not in Indianapolis but here, where the northern counties' chairmen could sit down with the church's own men.
Sources: Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (1922), Fourth Loan narrative, the Mennonite conference account.
The Red Cross at war · the chapter's war work
1917 – 1918 · HOME SERVICE, KNITTING, AND THE $25,000 FUND
The St. Joseph County chapter's institutional line — its organization in the spring of 1917, its first members, and the June 1917 war fund drive, in which the county's quota was $70,000, $22,900 was in hand after two days, and the Studebaker Corporation's $3,000 led the contributor list of 20 June 1917 — is told in Charities. What belongs here is the chapter at war, as the state Bulletin recorded it. Its executive committee, elected in the autumn of 1917, seated the county's whole civic bench: the Rev. C. A. Lippincott, Mrs. D. L. Guilfoyle, Victor F. Jones, A. L. Hubbard, the Rev. John Cavanaugh, J. D. Oliver, C. C. Hanch, Clem Smogor, F. E. Hering, T. H. Brandon, Mrs. V. H. Jones, Miss Eva Hotzenpiller, Miles W. O'Brien, E. T. Bond, A. R. Erskine, William Happ, Mrs. L. Levan, Samuel Parker, Samuel Adler and F. W. Keller, with branch officers at North Liberty, New Carlisle, Osceola and Walkerton.
Home service was the chapter's professional work. Its committee on civilian relief organized a training institute for the care of soldiers' families: a course of seven weeks, one evening each week, free to the public, which started 5 October 1917. The program printed in the Bulletin ran from Dr. Lippincott on the organization and work of the Red Cross, through Miss Edna G. Henry of Indiana University on the family — its normal problems, and the special problems when the bread-winner leaves home — to effective methods of social work, delinquency under Judge McGinn, relief problems, and co-operation under Mr. Manning; a corps of volunteer workers was organized alongside it, and neighboring communities were invited to send representatives. By the following year the chapter had provided, in addition to its other activities, a fund of $25,000 with which to care for the dependents of the soldiers who went to the colors from St. Joseph County.
The workrooms were everywhere. South Bend's Red Cross workers did their war work, the Bulletin noted, "in prominent display windows." Knitting ran under Mrs. L. T. McCollum as chairman, with an extension committee under Mrs. G. H. Warner. The employees of Robertson Brothers' department store gave a Red Cross dance on 26 September 1917 whose proceeds bought yarn for soldiers' garments; the high school juniors danced on 28 September under Miss Katherine Klingel's sponsorship; the Worth While Red Cross Auxiliary staged a musical entertainment for the winter work. The Orpheum Theatre gave the gross receipts of its afternoon of 7 December to the chapter. Twenty-nine Polish girls of South Bend enlisted for a course in Red Cross work after a mass meeting addressed by members of the Polish military commission. Across the courthouse lobby hung the chapter's largest single artifact: a service flag twenty by fifty feet carrying 3,582 stars, for the men who had gone into the service and the women in Red Cross service abroad. The parishes raised their own: St. Joseph's church a flag for thirty men of the congregation, whose names the Bulletin prints, and St. Patrick's one carrying thirty-six stars. The chapter's home-nursing teaching reached across the city line — Miss Margaret Parker of Epworth Hospital, South Bend, delivering a series of talks before the Mishawaka Women's Club, whose members expected to organize a large class — and is printed at that boundary's size. The chapter's Second War Fund result of May 1918 and its Christmas Roll Call figures do not survive in the record reached; Fort Wayne's chapter printed its full roster of drives in its own 1919 history, and no equivalent South Bend volume was found.
Sources: Indiana Bulletin, vol. I (1917–1918), St. Joseph County Red Cross items, including the executive committee list, the home service course program, and the $25,000 fund item; Charities, for the chapter's spring 1917 organization and the June 1917 war fund.
The other purses · at the size the record gives
1917 – 1918 · THE UNFIGURED DRIVES
The loans and the Red Cross were not the only asks. The YMCA's war work fund campaigns of November 1917 and the autumn of 1918, the YWCA's and the Salvation Army's war drives, and the Knights of Columbus fund all ran in this city as they ran in every city in the state, through the institutions whose local histories are carried in Charities. For none of them does a South Bend quota or result survive in the record reached — no figure is printed here, because none was found that the record states. The city's documented giving in this war is the giving the loans, the thrift office and the Red Cross counted; the rest of the purses passed through South Bend uncounted, at least in every account.
Sources: the searches of the Indiana Bulletin, the News-Times and the state reports named in this section's note, which returned no South Bend figure for these drives.
The women's registration · 27,575 cards
1917 – 1919 · THE COUNTY WOMAN'S COMMITTEE AT WORK
The county committee. The St. Joseph County woman's committee of the Council of Defense was chaired by Mrs. K. C. De Rhodes of South Bend, and its executive committee — every member of South Bend — divided the whole home front among fourteen portfolios: Registration for Woman's Service under Mrs. Thomas A. Olney; Food Production under Miss Amanda McCombs; Home Economics and Food Conservation under Mrs. Victor L. Jones and Miss Adah Hillier; Child Welfare under Mrs. George O'Brien; Liberty Loan under Miss Alice Jenkins and Mrs. Victor Jones; Home and Foreign Relief under Mrs. Horace L. Greene; Maintaining Existing Social Service Agencies under Mrs. A. J. Austin; Educational Propaganda under Miss Maud Heath; Publicity under Mrs. Maurice L. Kahn; Women in Industry under Miss Lottie Peffley; Americanization under Mrs. Homer Miller; the Motor Corps under Geraldine Robertson, captain; and the Fourteen-Minute Women under Mrs. De Rhodes herself.
The registration. In the committee's registration for woman's service, 27,575 women of the county registered — their names, capacities and availability taken on cards that the committee then worked as a labor exchange. Factories holding war contracts drew workers from the cards, and the section's report records that the employers expressed complete satisfaction; the Bulletin's digest of the county's registration work puts documented placements at twenty-six munitions workers and three government workers in factories, and notes a Belgian section of the county found especially eager to work if someone would organize it. The committee furnished clerical help to the Liberty Loan committee from the cards; 500 cards were filled out and sent to drafted men for dental examination; and when the influenza came, the cards were used to find nurses for stricken families and for the Visiting Nurses' Association. Night classes in the public schools — typewriting, stenography, sewing, cooking, bookkeeping, French and English — were organized from the cards, more than 400 women notified. The child welfare campaign weighed and measured the county's small children on a scale the report counts exactly: 7,433 children under six, each examined by a physician, in 175 clinics, with 75 physicians, 87 nurses and 495 volunteer workers, the follow-up carried by the Children's Dispensary nurses; the committee's Back to School drive, run through essays in the public and parochial schools and printed in the Sunday paper on Child Labor Day, was credited with keeping in school children who had meant to leave for work.
Americanization, wheels, and comforts. The committee's Americanization work ran through South Bend's community centers and playgrounds: the Fourth of July municipal picnic carried three patriotic addresses, a pageant, and a "pageant of citizenship" given by newly naturalized Americans, planned by the Women's Civic League; Liberty choruses were formed in stores, factories, clubs and schools. The county Motor Corps — Captain Robertson's — "answered all calls for war service," the Olive Township produce clearing house among them; in the state corps organized in May 1918, Miss Catherine Oliver of South Bend commanded the northwestern section, commissioned a major by Governor Goodrich that June. The committee's comforts went where the county's men were: a box of Christmas gifts to the boys of the U.S.S. Indiana through the Navy Comforts Committee; 726 phonograph records and one machine collected and shipped to the Phonograph Recruiting Corps of New York; and, by the Public Library's report, 6,000 books sent to soldiers and sailors and $2,288 collected to buy technical books. Its Fourteen-Minute Women — the county's answer to the Four-Minute Men — made more than 200 speeches in the county.
Sources: Report of the Woman's Section of the Indiana State Council of Defense (1919), the St. Joseph County report, pp. 116–119, and the Motor Corps narrative; Indiana Bulletin, vol. I, the county registration items.
Women in the factories · 2,713, and the girls' school
1917 – 1919 · THE LABOR THE WAR LEFT AT HOME
The counted workforce. The woman's committee counted the city's new industrial army in its own report: 2,713 women were employed in factories in South Bend. The school board answered the youngest of them: the Public School Board organized a continuation school for 350 employed girls aged fourteen to sixteen in South Bend — two of the classes held in the factories themselves — teaching arithmetic, English, domestic science and sewing; night classes for women in industry were organized with factory representatives, in domestic science, millinery, sewing and English. The state's women-in-industry legislative conferences were held in nine Indiana cities, South Bend among them, with Miss Agnes Peterson of the United States Department of Labor's Women in Industry Service and Miss Anne Davis of the Children's Bureau speaking; more than 3,000 copies of the federal industrial survey of Indiana went out through the committee. The influx these women joined is written in the censuses: the city grew from 53,684 people in 1910 to 70,983 in 1920, as Population records, and among the newcomers the war began this city's part in the great migration north — the Rev. Buford Gordon's The Negro in South Bend, written in 1922, dates the beginning of Black migration to the city in earnest to the moment white factory workers left for the war and the factories' expansion opened the jobs, a story told at its full size in Black History.
The money the women moved — and the two accounts of it. The county's loan chairwomen ran by drive: Mrs. Victor F. Jones for the Third Loan, Miss Alice Jenkins for the Fourth, Miss Virginia Tutt for the Victory Loan, with Mrs. C. E. Banta as the county's foreign-language women's chairman for the Victory drive. What the women's organization was credited with selling, the record states twice and differently. Greenough's printed Fourth Loan women's report credits the St. Joseph County women's committee with $2,900,000 for the Fourth Loan alone — on the plan, explained in the Fourth Loan entry above, by which the women's committee received credit for half of all the county sold. The Woman's Section's own report credits the county woman's committee with securing subscriptions amounting to $3,241,900 in the Third and Fourth campaigns combined. Both figures stand as printed, attributed to their own accounts; no third record reached reconciles them.
No roster of the county's Four-Minute Men — the men's four-minute speakers of the Committee on Public Information — survives in the records read for this section. The documented speakers' corps here is the women's: the Fourteen-Minute Women, and their 200 speeches.
Sources: Report of the Woman's Section (1919), St. Joseph County report and Women in Industry committee report; Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (1922), women's loan organization rosters and the Fourth Loan women's report; Gordon, The Negro in South Bend (1922), as the migration's beginning is documented there.
Food · 15,615 gardens
1917 – 1918 · PLEDGES, DEMONSTRATIONS, AND THE LUNCH ROOM
The food war was administered in this county, as the federal design intended, largely by women, and the county committee's report counts it like a quartermaster. A March letter went out to 1,740 women; township chairmen canvassed for gardens, and for cane for sorghum and sugar beets against the sugar shortage. The Garden Department of the Municipal Recreation Committee estimated 15,615 gardens in the county. The teaching ran at demonstration scale: 111 food demonstrations and 100 canning demonstrations, with approximately 7,974 in attendance; 13,000 cook books sold; approximately 40,000 leaflets distributed; 103 food clubs organized; and 13,363 food pledge cards signed and handed in. In the October 1917 Hoover pledge canvass the city's women had organized the work street by street, dividing South Bend into districts for the signing. The Olive Township women's produce clearing house gave its output to the Orphans' Home — 300 quarts of fruit and vegetables, sacks of produce, and donated chocolate bars for every child — the Motor Corps trucking it from New Carlisle. At the daily level the Bulletin caught the rules in a lunch room: the South Bend high school lunch room observed one wheatless day each week, corn products substituted, and candy was cut from the lunch-room stock to save sugar. The federal frame over it all was Indiana's Federal Food Administrator, Dr. Harry E. Barnard, with Professor G. I. Christie directing the state's food production campaigns; the county's record is the gardens, the demonstrations, and the pledge cards counted above.
Sources: Report of the Woman's Section (1919), St. Joseph County report, food production and conservation sections; Indiana Bulletin, vol. I (October – November 1917), the pledge canvass and high school lunch room items.
The fuel winter · Hardy, Carson, and the heatless Mondays
JANUARY – FEBRUARY 1918 · THE COAL FAMINE
The storm came first. On Saturday, 12 January 1918, South Bend took what the News-Times called the worst storm in years: the whole Chicago Division of the New York Central in the grip of the blizzard, rail traffic tied up east and west, temperatures below zero. The city's fuel administrator — the paper names him Hardy — announced that he had the promise of several dealers to attempt deliveries that day in the most urgent cases, and warned that with rail traffic cut off the local supply might be exhausted in another day. The milk situation threatened to turn critical, a few of the bravest milkmen getting out to make partial deliveries. Churches announced no services for the Sunday, both to conserve coal and to avoid the intense cold; most downtown stores closed through the day; several factories never blew their usual morning whistle; and the storm's toll in the city stood at three dead and one missing. The fuel famine and the blizzard arrived as one event, and the paper covered them as one story.
Then the orders began to collide. Federal Fuel Administrator Harry A. Garfield's January orders — the industrial shutdown of 18–22 January and the heatless Mondays that followed — reached South Bend through local hands, and the News-Times of 20 January reported a day of "orders, proclamations, counter orders and mandates" from Fuel Administrator Hardy and Mayor V. R. Carson, until merchants and theater men were, in the paper's phrase, running around like Hector's pup in pursuit of his caudal appendage. Hardy, who had closed the city's places of amusement — pool and billiard halls, bowling alleys, dance halls, theaters and picture shows, and saloons — rescinded his order to keep the county's regulations in thorough conformity with Garfield's; Carson's fiat then declared the closed places permitted to open beginning Tuesday, 22 January — the theaters on the 21st — subject always to the federal regulations, the Monday closing among them. The confusion had its comedy, which the paper printed whole: a special dispensation let a cigar stand at the Oliver hotel operate on a permit from the mayor carried by Assistant Chief of Police Cassidy, the manager Abe Frank pleading that the hotel was burning coal anyway to keep heated — until word that federal authorities at Indianapolis had heard of it sent the mayor by telephone to Hardy's side of the question. By 31 January the administration had settled to its working form: Hardy made public Garfield's letter appealing to the patriotism of citizens to make Monday a closing day even where the letter of the order could not compel it; coal dealers met with Hardy that night; and the police were directed to make public the names of coal hoarders, cooperating with the fuel administration against households found with a ton in the cellar and two more on order. The thaw in the record comes on 12 February: twelve more cars of coal arrived in South Bend that Tuesday morning, the demand had fallen off considerably, and the calls at the fuel administrator's office were dropping — the warmer weather and the increased supply between them ending the famine as the storm had begun it, by weather.
Sources: South Bend News-Times, 13 January, 20 January, 31 January and 13 February 1918 (Hoosier State Chronicles).
The home guards and the boys · the uniformed home
1917 – 1918 · SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY CALLED, EIGHT HUNDRED ENLISTED
The county raised its own soldiers for home duty. At the initial meeting for the organization of home defense units in South Bend and Mishawaka, Major Charles Calvert, in charge of the organization, enrolled 310 men, the Bulletin reported, and the number steadily increased. The county's design was ten companies of sixty-five men each — a quota of 650 — and some 800 enlisted, 150 more than full war strength required. Reviewed by Major F. L. Dennis — the Fourth Loan's clearing-house director in his other capacity — and by Calvert, who "praised the personnel and efficiency of the troops," the guards drilled in company and squad drill, military courtesy and definitions, and the school of the soldier. Mishawaka's companies, at the boundary's size, ran a "Get a Recruit" slogan, each man bound to secure one additional volunteer. Below draft age stood the United States Boys' Working Reserve, the federal organization that signed schoolboys for the farm and shop labor the draft had drained away: John G. Yeagley was its county chairman, and the Bulletin shows him renewing the county's effort with the personal help of Isaac D. Straus of Ligonier, the state director of the work.
Sources: Indiana Bulletin, vol. I (1917), home defense and Boys' Working Reserve items for St. Joseph County.
Alien enemies · the cards that were never claimed
FEBRUARY – MARCH 1918 · REGISTRATION AT POLICE HEADQUARTERS
The pressure of the war fell on the city's Germans through a card. Under the President's alien-enemy proclamation, German men not naturalized registered in February 1918 — the national registration ran 4–9 February — and in South Bend the registration was conducted at police headquarters, where each registrant was to call for his registration card. On 6 March 1918 the News-Times put the default on its front page: "ALIEN ENEMIES FAIL TO GET CARDS — Nearly 200 in South Bend Who Ignore President's Proclamation." Nearly two hundred German alien enemies in the city who had registered during the February period had failed to call at police headquarters to obtain their cards, laying themselves liable, the paper reported, to arrest and internment. Chief of Police Kline had received no specific instructions from Washington; other Indiana departments, the paper noted, were arresting card-less alien enemies.
Sources: South Bend News-Times, 6 March 1918, p. 1 (Hoosier State Chronicles).
Loyalty's local edge · what the record shows, and what it does not
1917 – 1919 · SURVEILLANCE BY CARD INDEX, NOT BY TRIAL
Beyond the alien-enemy registration, the documented pressure on this city's German and immigrant life ran through paper rather than prosecution. The war's most searching local instrument was not a detective's but the Fourth Loan's: the Volunteer Plan's survey card, described in its own entry above, on which a canvasser estimated every citizen's net worth and income and marked the unwilling "insufficient" for a personal visit. The city's German-language press died in these years: the Indiana Historical Bureau's marker on the demise of Indiana's German newspapers — erected in 2017 with the Indiana German Heritage Society — names South Bend among the Indiana cities whose German-language papers ceased publication by 1918. Indiana's ban on the teaching of German in the schools came in the legislature's act of 25 February 1919 — three months after the Armistice, a postwar law, printed here at the size of a pointer; no action by South Bend's own school board on German instruction in 1918 appears in the record reached. What the records searched for this section do not show is stated as plainly: no prosecution of a South Bend or St. Joseph County resident under the Espionage Act of 1917 or the Sedition Act of 1918 appears in them, and no South Bend division of the American Protective League is documented in the record reached. The community institutions through which German South Bend lived — its parishes, its benevolent society, its pastors — are carried in Communities and Religion; the wartime course this section can document for them is the registration, the card index, the dead newspaper, and the absence of trials.
Sources: the News-Times and Indiana Bulletin runs and the state reports searched for this section, which returned no local Espionage or Sedition case; Indiana Historical Bureau, "German Newspapers' Demise" marker (2017); the Indiana act of 25 February 1919 as reported by the Indiana Historical Bureau's history blog.
The wartime clock · back to Central time
JULY 1917 · AN HOUR THE CITY GAVE BACK
The smallest change the war made in South Bend's daily life is dated by the News-Times of 14 July 1917. The city had been keeping "fast time" that spring — the local version of the daylight-saving experiments the war set off across the country — and gave it up in the war's first summer. The South Bend Ministerial Association resolved that from Sunday, 22 July [1917], all the churches of South Bend and Mishawaka would return to Central standard time; five churches — Grace M.E., First United Brethren, First Baptist, Mizpah Evangelical, and Lowell Heights M.E. — returned a week early because of engagements already made. The Lee company, as the paper names it, announced that its establishment would return to Central time from Monday, 16 July, after a vote among its employees favored Central time three to one. The item is the whole of the documented story here — a city that had moved its clocks for the war's first spring, and moved them back before the first summer was out, by resolution of its ministers and a three-to-one vote of a factory's hands.
Sources: South Bend News-Times, 14 July 1917 (Hoosier State Chronicles).
The Armistice · a seething mass of humanity
11 NOVEMBER 1918 · THE WHISTLES
The news came by wire on the morning of 11 November 1918, and the News-Times — which with the Herald brought the first word of peace to South Bend — covered the city's answer the same day. Factory whistles sounded across the city. The downtown district became, in the paper's phrase, "a seething mass of humanity"; improvised bands formed; automobiles, hearses and motor trucks joined the procession with every noisemaking contraption the city could assemble; the celebration, the paper said, was two and a half hours of "a perfect bedlam." Notre Dame's Students' Army Training Corps cadets — the university had a branch of the SATC that fall, its young men in training while they studied — were permitted to leave campus to join the downtown parade, and newspaper reports as relayed by the university's magazine put the gathering at an estimated 50,000 people. The paper's photograph of one of the noise-making crowds ran in the issue of 12 November. The celebration was the first great public gathering of the peace: the influenza closure order that had shut the city's schools, theaters, churches and meetings since 11 October had expired two days before, on 9 November — a sequence the next entry keeps at its proper size.
Sources: South Bend News-Times, 11 and 12 November 1918 (Hoosier State Chronicles); Notre Dame Magazine, "The Fall of 1918," for the SATC cadets' release and the newspaper estimate of 50,000.
The homecoming · a state day, and a hero's September
1919 · THE MEN COME HOME
South Bend's returning companies — the 137th's and the 139th's men, whose service and losses are Wars' record — came home through the spring of 1919 into a welcome the state had organized as a single day. Indiana's Welcome Home Day, 7 May 1919 at Indianapolis, was designed as every county's celebration: Governor James P. Goodrich declared that he wanted every county in the state to feel it was as much a part of the celebration as the county in which the capital stood, and 20,000 men and women marched in the capital's welcome parade, the Indiana Historical Bureau's account records, with the 150th Field Artillery — Indiana's largest unit — as the day's center and the Victory Loan's last week built around it. No single municipal welcome-home ceremony for South Bend's own returning companies appears in the record reached; the city's welcome ran, as the state's did, through the day at the capital and through the separate returns, and the gap is named in this section's note with the route that would close it.
The city's most famous single homecoming was a hero's. Sergeant Alexander Arch, the Hungarian immigrant from South Bend who had fired the first American shot of the war — his service record is carried in War Heroes — was received in triumph in Indiana in September 1919: honored before the House of Representatives, photographed with his Hungarian relatives at 239 North Sadie Street, and written up in the News-Times of 28–29 September 1919, the Hoosier State Chronicles' own history blog recounts, before his mustering-out at Camp Zachary Taylor and his return to work as a machinist and auto worker, probably at the Studebaker plant. The memorial planning that would give the county's grief its permanent forms began in these same years and belongs to Veterans, where the Notre Dame memorial committee of January 1923 and its "God, Country, Notre Dame" door are carried; it is cross-referenced here and not retold.
Sources: Greenough, The War Purse of Indiana (1922), the Welcome Home Day account; the Decatur Daily Democrat, 28 April 1919, for Governor Goodrich's statement; the Indiana History Blog (Indiana Historical Bureau), the Welcome Home Day and Sergeant Arch accounts, drawing on the South Bend News-Times of 28–29 September 1919.
The other war · the influenza autumn at the home front's edge
OCTOBER – NOVEMBER 1918 · A POINTER
The epidemic's record — its cases, its course through the city and the campus, and its dead — is told in Epidemics, and is not repeated here. What belongs to the home front is the closure order's place in its calendar. On 11 October 1918 Dr. Emil G. Freyermuth, the city's health officer, forbade all public gatherings until further notice: schools, theaters, clubs and churches closed, public funerals, meetings and dances canceled, the streetcars ordered to run with their windows open. The order stood until 9 November. It fell across the last nine days of the Fourth Liberty Loan, which the county's canvassers finished by card and doorstep in a city whose halls were shut; it drove the woman's committee to its registration cards to find nurses for the Visiting Nurses' Association and for stricken families, as the registration entry above records; and it lifted two days before the Armistice let the same streets fill with 50,000 people. The home front's two wars — the one against Germany and the one against the influenza — met in those five weeks, and the second one's history is in Epidemics.
Sources: Notre Dame Magazine, "The Fall of 1918," relaying the South Bend News-Times of October – November 1918; Epidemics, for the epidemic's own record.