Loyalty's edge, the wartime clock, the Armistice — and influenza, the other war

ITEM 4 · 1918 · THE HOME FRONT'S CLOSE

The home front's last year pressed on the town from three directions at once: the loyalty campaigns that watched the county's German names, the wartime clock the nation set by statute, and the epidemic that arrived in the same weeks as the victory it overshadowed. Loyalty's edge, at the grain the record supports: Indiana ran the war's loyalty machinery at full strength — a state Council of Defense with county arms, registration and surveillance of enemy aliens, and a public culture in which German language and German names were suspect — and St. Joseph County, with its German and Polish parishes and its German-born farm families (Lincoln Township's among them, Neighborhoods), lived inside that pressure; no loyalty proceeding, prosecution, or mob action seated on this ground stands in any record reached, and the branch prints the pressure as the documented climate and the local proceeding as unrecorded, not as invented. The wartime clock: the Standard Time Act of March 1918 gave the United States its time zones in law and daylight saving as a war measure — the nation turned its clocks forward that spring to save fuel for the war — and Indiana's borderland time confusion, which this county lived for a century after, begins in that wartime settlement; it is printed here at state grain as the register's pattern orders. The Armistice scene and the homecoming: the Independent's November 1918 file — where the town's whistles, bells, and first welcome-homes would stand — was not reached in this run, and the scene is named as a gap with that settler in the run note rather than reconstructed from the county's joy, which the South Bend press of that week carries at full voice and which is not Walkerton's to borrow. And influenza, the other war: the epidemic struck the county in the autumn of 1918, in the Fourth Loan's own weeks — the county press of October 1918 runs the loan's closing drive and the epidemic's rise in the same pages — closing gatherings and filling the county's sick rooms while the home front was still buying bonds; the disease's course for this ground is carried in this run's epidemics addendum at the county grain the record keeps, there being no town toll. The home front ends, in the record as in life, with the two wars interleaved — and with its town-grain residue named, not filled.

Principal sources: the Standard Time Act of 1918 and Indiana's loyalty-machinery record (state grain); South Bend News-Times, October 1918 (the Fourth Loan's close and the epidemic in one file); this run's epidemics addendum (influenza at the record's grain); the Independent's November 1918 file named as the Armistice scene's settler.