My Tuesdays are meatless;
My Wednesdays are wheatless;
I’m getting more eatless each day.
My home, it is heatless;
My bed, it is sheetless,
They’re all sent to the YMCA.
The barrooms are treatless;
My coffee is sweetless;
Each day I get poorer and wiser.
My stockings are feetless;
My trousers are seatless;
My God, how I do hate the Kaiser!
—The Poet’s Corner, United Mine Workers Journal, January 24, 1918
From atop Collinsville’s western bluffs, the growing St. Louis skyline could be seen in the distance. If St. Louis, a bustling city of over 750,000, was the Gateway to the West, Collinsville, looking down along the National Road, was perhaps the scenic Gateway to St. Louis. Three industrial river towns collared St. Louis on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. With the river and excellent rail access, East St. Louis, Granite City, and Alton provided much of the heavy industrial muscle for the St. Louis region. There were mills for steel and other metals, chemical plants, packinghouses and the whole lot of industries that everyone needs but no one wants as a neighbor.
Collinsville was above those towns and St. Louis, but it was connected to them as conveniently as possible in 1918 by streetcar lines and roads. Between Collinsville and the industrial towns west lie the American Bottoms, a floodplain with rich soil, ideal for farming corn, wheat, and beans. But the city was comfortably perched more than one hundred feet above the industrial fray and pollution that lie in the river valley. From the top of the bluffs, one could see to the east the great plain that comprises the lion’s share of Illinois’s topography. Just outside of Collinsville’s limits, farmers plied their trade on fields where flooding was not a concern.
But it was an unseen geological feature that dominated Collinsville in 1918, a seam of bituminous coal about two hundred feet below ground. The first coal mine in Collinsville had been sunk in 1862, but the venture did not pay big rewards until the Vandalia Railroad ran tracks south and east of town.1 The tracks were literally a stone’s throw from the Cantine Creek area, which had a rich seven-foot-long vein of coal.2 The chief entrepreneur of Collinsville’s coal industry was initially Dr. Octavius Lumaghi, a convivial Italian physician. Smelting of metals generally required about two tons of coal for every one ton of ore, making it most feasible to have smelting works near coal mines. Lumaghi built a zinc smelter next to the railroad and adjacent to his first mine. His company would end up sinking four mines in Collinsville.3
The industrial demands of World War I provided the high water mark for Collinsville’s coal industry.4 Nine mines were located in or adjacent to the city. More than half of Collinsville’s workingmen were employed at mines, and mining-related occupations accounted for many more jobs. Demand was high for experienced miners and laborers, which brought a flood of workers to the town, many of them immigrants.
Collinsville’s population hovered near ten thousand, but immigrant whites or those with at least one immigrant parent made up more than half the residents—a far higher percentage than any other nearby Illinois city.5 Likewise, Collinsville had a higher percentage of foreign-born whites (18 percent) than any of its neighbors, even the industrial towns to the west. Some employers had urged their alien workers to become U.S. citizens, and more than 130 began seeking naturalization in early 1917.6 But the immigrant-heavy demographics provided for instability in the town on the bluffs. In 1918 they would arguably make Collinsville the most volatile town in the area after race riots had already boiled over in East St. Louis in 1917.
Collinsville was primarily developed around four streets, the St. Louis Road from the west, Main and Clay Streets uptown, and Vandalia Avenue headed northeast out of town. Most homes and businesses were built close to those streets as they were served by the East St. Louis and Suburban streetcar system. In 1917 and 1918, the system was the prime means of transportation and connected with most of the surrounding cities and St. Louis. Everyone used mass transit. Homes for sale were advertised with their distance from the rumbling streetcar line.
All roads fed onto the paralleled Main and Clay Streets, where stores and businesses of every sort were located in a six-block stretch. Streetcars ran on both streets, with Clay Street eastbound and Main Street headed west. The Orpheum Opera House on Main Street was the most imposing building in town, although the miner’s labor temple, which was under construction, promised to rival that.7
The social scene was strictly small town. There were church and club affairs. Collinsville Community Band concerts cost ten cents. It was the same price for a balcony seat at the Orpheum, but a main-floor ticket cost twenty cents. When it was too hot for shows indoors, the operation moved to the Airdome across the street. Both hosted moving picture shows and vaudeville acts. Dances were held at Reese Hall, Collinsville Park, and other venues, but were illegal on Sundays. The town had dozens of saloons. Some bars had offered wine rooms in the back where ladies were welcome, but they had been ordered closed by the mayor, lest an unsavory situation develop. Collinsville also had pool halls and at least six restaurants and lunchrooms.
The city was cleaner and less dusty now that most of the outlying streets had been oiled.8 Uptown streets and sidewalks were mostly brick or concrete, but most sidewalks outside that area were still dirt and cinders. Many fancier homes lined Clay, Vandalia, Morrison, and Church Streets, some with fenced yards. Most homes had outbuildings, perhaps a barn or shed. Older places had privies.9
But Collinsville was booming; there was little doubt about that. Collinsville Township included the city, the rural area around it, and the village of Maryville out on Vandalia Street, just north of Collinsville. In 1917 the township had seen seventy new homes built, mostly in the city.10 But the most dramatic increase was in ownership of automobiles. In 1916 there were just 86 “gas wagons” in the township. That number increased to 186 in 1917. Still, less than 2 percent of people owned cars. As one businessman said, few people had them, but everybody wanted one.11
World War I had begun following the June 1914 assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, but it seemed a remote issue to most Americans. The affair got more complicated following the May 1915 sinking of the Lusitania by German Unterseeboot 20, which killed nearly 1,200 people, including 128 of the 197 Americans on board. While the United States was officially a neutral country, a war in someone else’s backyard proved a good thing for U.S. industrial and banking interests. By late 1916 American firms had done $2 billion in war-related business with the Entente nations of France and Great Britain, and American banks had loaned them $2.5 billion. By contrast just $45 million had been loaned to the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria.12 Neutral indeed.
The Lusitania was indeed a passenger ship, but it was also a Royal Navy Auxiliary Cruiser carrying sixty tons of war matèriel and sixty-seven Canadian soldiers.13 Before it set sail, the German Embassy had published warnings that the ship was subject to submarine attack. After the sinking U.S. president Woodrow Wilson issued a stern protest. He told an audience three days later, “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight; there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”14 Many, including former president Theodore Roosevelt, considered Wilson’s response cowardly.
But Wilson’s 1916 presidential campaign continued along those lines. It seemed the right message to a country that had seen the arrival of twelve million immigrants, mostly European, since the turn of the century and was not in the mood for war.15 The U.S. economy was humming, and with the war some three thousand miles away, there seemed no need to get involved. Wilson’s 1916 campaign slogan was “He kept us out of war.”
Both political parties realized the folly of running a pro-war campaign. Republican nominee Charles Hughes and vice presidential candidate Charles Fairbanks advocated a higher level of preparedness for war. The Democratic position was left of that, with Wilson and running mate Thomas Marshall advocating continued neutrality. Marshall was perhaps as humorous as Wilson was, at least publicly, dour. After one U.S. senator had prattled on about what the country needed, the vice president could stand no more. “What this country needs,” Marshall said, “is a really good five-cent cigar.”
After a bitter campaign the Wilson-Marshall ticket won 49 percent of the vote compared to Hughes-Fairbanks’s 46 percent. The 1916 presidential election was a close affair in Collinsville too. Women had won the right to vote on most elected positions in Illinois in 1913, and in 1916 in Collinsville they went for Wilson for president, 1,053 to 935.16 Collinsville men voted in favor of Hughes, 626 to 480. Whether it was the novelty of the new vote or that they took their civic responsibility more seriously, almost twice as many women as men had turned out to cast their ballots in Collinsville on that election day.
Just as the Collinsville men had voted, Madison County and Illinois also went for the Hughes-Fairbanks ticket. Despite the party’s loss in the presidential race, Republican officeholders were swept in at both the county and the state levels.17
Before President Wilson could even be sworn in for his second term, relations deteriorated rapidly with Germany, which had resumed unrestricted submarine warfare on January 31, 1917. The United States severed formal relations February 3.18 In March three American cargo ships were sunk in a twenty-four-hour period. A telegram from the German foreign secretary was intercepted that encouraged Mexico to join Germany in war against the United States and offered military assistance. The release of the telegram and the revived U-boat attacks on American shipping were enough to finally force the administration to act. Fewer than five months after being elected with a campaign slogan of “He kept us out of war,” Wilson planned to declare just that on Germany.
Wilson called the new Sixty-Fifth Congress into a joint session April 2, 1917, and spoke on the need to join the fray with the British, the French, and others, as “the world must be made safe for democracy.” To not intervene would allow autocracy to spread, war proponents claimed.19
In the spring of 1917, the concept of entering a world war on foreign soil was hard to grasp for many U.S. citizens, as well as for a number of elected officials who would be asked to approve the operation. It was an era long before America saw itself as the world’s protector and policeman and some thirty years before the Truman Doctrine.
The House first approved the president’s declaration of war, followed by the Senate. On April 6, 1917, Good Friday, the United States was officially at war. There had been some debate from people like the Socialist senator Robert La Follette and others, but the Senate and the House voted overwhelmingly for approval. Tax funding for the war, a compulsory draft, and even prohibitions on free speech would be approved thereafter.20 The limited debate that did occur in Washington reiterated many of the assertions of the common people, including that it was a rich man’s war.21 The belief was that industry and banks would reap huge profits from a conflict that would cost the lives of thousands of working-class men, and it was continuously cited by Socialists and other critics.
The implications of declaring war were unclear to many. Told of the cost and needed manpower projections, one senator at a committee hearing asked: “Good Lord, you aren’t going to send troops over there are you?”22 Many thought American involvement would be limited to patrol of the Atlantic Ocean or assumed military service would be voluntary. In the last great U.S. military affair, the Civil War, less than 6 percent of the troops had been drafted.23 Yet those drafts had resulted in riots and other public unrest. But Wilson and military leaders realized how voluntary service had carved up a whole generation of young leaders in Great Britain who had rushed out early to serve in the war. Volunteering had also taken away men who were experienced in providing war-industry needs on the home front. And few army officials believed there would actually be enough volunteers to meet military needs.
After Congress approved war legislation, the task remained of how to convince a splintered nation that entering the conflict was necessary. More than a third of the population was either immigrant or had at least one parent who was.24 Germans had been the predominant immigrant group for decades, and they had mixed feelings at best about waging war against the Fatherland. America had the second highest German population in the world.25 The Irish tended to oppose anything that might benefit Great Britain. Nativists generally felt Great Britain should be supported, as did most Anglo immigrants. The lower classes tended to think the war would benefit only the wealthy. And all that any American had heard from Wilson’s administration for the last two and a half years was that the United States should remain neutral. Wilson now not only wanted Americans’ full support for the war effort; he also sought to establish war controls through voluntary means, not by executive orders. He wanted food and fuel prices set by agreement with the affected industries, not governmental authority. And the only way that level of pervasive patriotic thinking could be cultivated, Wilson believed, was by a wide-reaching public relations bureau. Others would call it simply a government propaganda agency.26
Woodrow Wilson’s name for this agency was the Committee on Public Information. It was created April 14 and chaired by longtime Wilson supporter, muckraker, and public relations man George Creel. The CPI was composed of Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Secretary of War Newton Baker, and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. Given the other members’ wartime responsibilities and Creel’s autocratic ways, it was essentially a one-man committee. In fact, it had just one meeting.27 It was often appropriately referred to as the Creel Committee and would help create a wartime nation teeming with paranoid, hysterical patriots.
Creel built an organization intended to galvanize American support for the war, and he did so by controlling nearly every form of communication to U.S. citizens. He wanted to increase the American war will and get everyone involved in the effort.28 There had to be shared sacrifice for everyone to buy in, he believed. Just one week after the CPI was created, ten-by-twelve-inch “information” cards titled “What the Government Asks of the Press,” were distributed to newspaper and magazine editors nationwide. Concurrent with Wilson’s thinking, requests such as these would be considered not government censorship but guidelines.29 Any form of press restriction would be self-imposed. The only judge, Wilson and Creel said, should be in the court of public opinion.
News announcements on war efforts were most always positive and came in the form of some six thousand major news releases. More than twelve thousand smaller papers, such as the Advertiser and the Herald in Collinsville, got a weekly digest in galley form, ready to be used in print.30 But it would be only months before many U.S. editors adopted the term Creeling to describe CPI reports that were based more on wishful thinking than on fact.31
CPI bureaus were created to produce everything from Liberty Bond posters to flyers alerting people to beware of German spies in their midst. One enduring creation of the era was the image of Uncle Sam saying, “I want you for the U.S. Army.” All told, 122 illustrations were created for streetcars and windows, 310 more for newspaper and magazine use, and 1,438 graphics were designed for buttons, seals, and the like.32 Patriotic ads, often promoting the purchase of Liberty Bonds, were developed for newspapers—with local patriotic companies paying for the advertising space.
All public information related to the war effort went through Creel’s office. Photographs were distributed at the rate of seven hundred per day. Over two hundred thousand slide images were created.33 War expos—described by Creel as having “all the attraction of a circus and all the seriousness of a sermon”—were held in major cities and drew a total of ten million people.34 Adults paid twenty-five cents for admission, and the expos helped improve Liberty Bond sales.
A plethora of printed materials were made, ranging from thirty-page booklets designed to steer the beliefs of the educated businessman to heavily illustrated Loyalty Leaflets for distribution to the working class with their weekly paychecks. An estimated seventy-five million specialized booklets were printed in eighteen months.35 Propaganda materials were literally tailored to each type and class of worker. Traveling salesmen, for example, were given The Kaiserite: 101 German Lies. It told of 101 rumors about the war and described how they were untrue. The salesmen were asked to challenge these rumors if they were to hear them told on their route. If they found the original source of the rumor, they were asked to report it to the CPI office in Washington. “Swat the lie,” they were told. “Don’t be satisfied with hearsay or rumor. You are summoned as specifically as if you were enlisted in the Army or Navy to aid the national cause. Our troops will meet the enemy abroad. You can meet him at home.”
By the fall of 1918, a sixteen-page newspaper had been created for America’s schoolchildren; it reached an estimated twenty million homes.36 A suggested elementary school teaching plan included themes of patriotism, heroism, and sacrifice. Students were also shown how the horrors of war had hurt France and Belgium and were told the same thing would happen here if Germany attacked the United States.37
Magazines and newspapers were the prime purveyors of mass communication in 1917 and 1918, and the federal government controlled nearly all of what was seen by the naive eyes of Americans. The government could not necessarily stop the printing of publications by war opponents, such as the Socialists. But it did stop their national distribution through the U.S. Post Office. Postmaster General Albert Burleson was empowered by the Espionage Act to halt delivery of any publications that he believed could damage government efforts to prosecute the war.38 Burleson, a heavy-handed Texan, took it a step further by not allowing distribution of any publication that even embarrassed the government.
Organizations that relied on national mail communication were stymied in their efforts to share their antiwar beliefs, even though they did not directly impede government efforts. Burleson was greatly criticized by socialists, including novelist Upton Sinclair. In a letter to Wilson, Sinclair said: “Your Postmaster-General reveals himself a person of such pitiful and childish ignorance . . . it is simply calamity that in this crisis he should be the person to decide what may or may not be uttered by our radical press. . . . It is hard to draw the line, Mr. President, as to the amount of ignorance permitted to a government official; but Mr. Burleson is assuredly on the wrong side of any line that could be drawn by anyone.”39
And the censorship of mail was not just an issue on the national level. Some local postmasters took it upon themselves to view, censor, delay, or destroy inbound or outbound mail from people or organizations they deemed suspicious.40
War Secretary Newton Baker set a nationwide draft registration day, and it was a big affair in Collinsville. The Commercial Club and the City Council would lead the effort for men to “answer the call of Uncle Sam, when that call comes.” On Tuesday, June 5, registrations started at 7:00 a.m., and a 10:30 a.m. parade brought two thousand people down Main Street, while thousands more looked on. From there the draft-aged men moved on to registration stations, based on their precinct. The crush of men was so great that one of the stations ran out of registration cards.41
The excited young men, ages twenty-one to thirty, filled out registration cards with their name and address, physical characteristics, and date of birth. They were also required to list their occupation and employer, as those in war-critical positions might be eligible for exemption. They were asked for their marital status and whether they had parents, a wife, or children under twelve who were solely dependent on them for support. The registrants were also asked if they were natural-born or a naturalized citizen of the United States. The form was to be marked “Declarant” if they had taken out their first immigration papers and pledged to become a U.S. citizen. Those who had not taken out any immigration papers were marked as “Alien.”42
One reporter focused on two of the registrants in Collinsville: “One blond-haired German miner, who had taken his first papers and who said he was the sole support of his mother, father and sister, said nothing in answer to the questions, but a steely glint in his eye showed that he was made of the heroic stuff that puts country above all other considerations.” Another was a Lithuanian miner who had a wife and three children and also his brother’s three orphaned children in his household. When asked if he had any exemptions, he said: “Only my family. If somebody care for them, I go.”43
Another newspaper reported on a Russian alien who had lived in the United States for nineteen years but still “indicated his lack of affection for the land.”44 The man gave numerous excuses for why he could not serve, not least among them that he was supporting a wife, three children, two parents, and six siblings back in Russia.
Copies of President Wilson’s war declaration speech were distributed to the men. The city council had provided flags and pins stating, “I am Registered, are you?” which young women from the retail clerks’ union or the hosiery workers’ union gave to each of the registrants. The registrants also received green cards as proof that they had fulfilled their patriotic duty.45
“Throughout the day the City wore a holiday aspect,” a newspaper reported. Most businesses and industry closed, but confectionaries and saloons remained open. “While there was no jollification, there was little air of depression among either the men registering or among the citizenry at large.”46
In all 1,079 men from Collinsville would register that day, nearly half of whom declined to list any exemption that might preclude their having to go to war. Nearly 400 indicated that they had dependent family members. Among the registrants were 176 aliens, only two of whom were from Germany.47 Altogether 9,660,000 men across the United States registered on that day; of those, 800,000 would get occupational deferments.48 And to the surprise of some, there was no large-scale draft resistance nationwide. That is not to say everyone agreed, however; the Illinois National Guard was dispatched to Rockford for three days due to antidraft demonstrations in that city.49
Another registration day was held one year later, followed by two more in August and September 1918, bringing a total of more than 24 million registered men; 2,810,296 would later be inducted by 4,650 local draft boards nationwide.50 The total male population of the United States in April 1917 was some 54 million.
A Collinsville newspaper noted that on Monday, June 4, the day before registration, there had been an uptick in the number of marriage licenses issued to draft-eligible men. But no aspersions were cast on these men: “While many of the men seeking matrimony were of conscription age, they are not to be regarded as slackers.”51
The list of eligible Collinsville men was created in the following weeks, but some men would not wait for the exemption and draft process. Probably the first to enlist was Lester Dorris, a tall, red-haired twenty-year-old student at the University of Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in Rolla, who reported for the army on May 4.52 By August Dorris would be promoted to second lieutenant. Forty Collinsville men enlisted together in early July to serve in the Third Illinois Artillery and reported to camp in early August. One of them, Jules Field, had served as secretary of the Collinsville Commercial Club and would later be appointed lieutenant in the Headquarters Company.53
The patriotic call to serve seemed contagious on all social levels in the community. Six Collinsville physicians, including Mayor John Siegel, had signed up and been declared eligible for the Medical Officers Reserve Corp.54 If all had been chosen to go, only two physicians would have been left to serve the town of about ten thousand.
On Friday, July 20, a blindfolded War Secretary Newton Baker, at the Senate Office Building in Washington DC, drew a black capsule from a glass bowl. It contained the first draft number, 258.55 The Collinsville man with that number was Emil Gerken.56 An anxious community was informed of the drawn numbers by the Collinsville Herald, which published two extra editions that evening listing the numbers for all the local registered men. All five hundred copies of the first extra were sold as soon as they came off the press.57
The Collinsville Herald tried to find Gerken for comment and learned he had left his laborer position at St. Louis Smelting and Refining. It speculated that “Gerken had a hunch” his number would be called and implied he had left the area to avoid duty. The newspaper noted that his name was probably Austrian or German.58 Learning what had been printed about him, Gerken sought out the publisher and told him that he had taken a job for a gas company and resented the suggestion that “he might sympathize with the Teutonic Allies,” despite his name. The Herald reported, “He insists he is an American through and through and is ready to fight any time. He is a big, well-built man of 23, and looks every inch a fighter. He has no dependents and waits the pleasure of Uncle Sam.”59
Gerken and some 229 other registered men from Collinsville and the surrounding township would be examined for their fitness to serve in the National Army beginning August 11.60 Shortly thereafter 600 others on the list would receive their notices.61 Charles Maurer had the unique perspective of serving on the local Draft Exemption Board and saw the transition of public opinion from mostly opposed to the war and the draft to supporting the war effort later in 1918. “A lot of people thought it was a moneyed-man’s war, which made it a lot harder on the men that were to go and harder on the people who were doing their duty.” Once the United States declared war, however, the attitude changed to “we had gotten into the war and the only way out was to fight, and to fight hard.” As the war progressed, Maurer said, more-reluctant soldiers came in line as they did not want to be labeled as slackers by townspeople and those already serving.62
On August 17 the Herald published a list of all those who had claimed family support exemptions from serving, mostly due to a dependent wife or children. By the end of the month, it was announced that Collinsville’s district, Madison County Draft Division 3, had surpassed its draft quota.63
Most of Collinsville’s clergy openly supported the war effort, essentially considering it God’s work. Rev. Willis Cleaveland of the Christ Episcopal Church said that the United States faced despotism and the loss of democracy if the war was not won by the Allies, that the soul of America was the hope for the world. Rev. Theodore Cates of the First Methodist Church said it was the “will of God” for the United States to take up arms.64 Some churches had more to prove than others, namely, their patriotism. Membership in the Holy Cross Lutheran and Jerusalem Lutheran Churches and St. John Evangelical Church was predominantly German, and those churches offered German-language services in addition to English. Times being what they were, there were suspicions. Holy Cross hosted a Lutheran regional celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the Reformation on September 2, 1917. The 1,500 people in attendance heard church leaders proclaim that Lutherans were loyal to Uncle Sam, not the kaiser.65 Still, Holy Cross thought it best to cover its stained glass, which had German printing.66
The local papers were filled with patriotic stories, letters, and artwork, much of it supplied by the CPI. The “Star-Spangled Banner” made one edition, while Edward Everett Hale’s “A Man without a Country” ran as a regular column.67 One edition printed James Whitcomb Riley’s poem “The Name of Old Glory.”68 Another column reported on the busy day on a battleship, while the Liberty Loan Committee provided a letter from a Canadian soldier under the title “A Glorious Feeling to Die for Democracy.”69
The first eleven of Collinsville’s drafted men reported for induction on September 5. Before leaving town they were given an informal reception at the Masonic Temple in the Red Cross rooms.70 Each of the men received a comfort bag from the Red Cross before Rev. W. D. Vater of the First Presbyterian Church and Rev. M. F. Bierbaum of St. John Evangelical spoke to them. Mayor Siegel, wearing the uniform of captain in the Medical Reserve Corp, asked the men to uphold the honor of Collinsville while in military service. Then Siegel and two members of the draft board used their automobiles to transport the men thirteen miles west to Madison, Illinois, where they would board a train bound for Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.
Yet for all the public display of patriotism on registration day and hullabaloo over the release of draft numbers in July, the first eleven men who reported on September 5 bore little resemblance to the first eleven local men whose names were drawn in the July draft. First pick Emil Gerken, draft number 258, was on that train. But whether the cause was deferment, family support exemption, war work exemption, or another reason, the next lowest numbered man, Earnest Adams, was 30th on the local list.71 The next lowest man had the 103rd local number drawn. The 11th and final man in the initial contingent had his number drawn as the 265th local pick in July. For all the over-the-top public enthusiasm shown since the war had started, Collinsville’s drafted men were in no hurry to be on that first troop train out of town.
When five times as many of Collinsville’s young men reported to join the others at Camp Taylor two weeks later, the departure became much more emotional. Perhaps it was the large number of draftees or the fact that many of the families went to East St. Louis and watched them board the train, maybe seeing them for the last time. But the impact of the young men leaving September 19 was much more unsettling to the community. The Tuesday evening before their day to report, a farewell meeting planned for city hall had to be moved to the outdoor Airdome on Main Street to accommodate the huge crowd. The following morning seemingly the whole town turned out to see them off outside city hall.
“Mothers, sweethearts, wives and male relatives surged about the place seeking to say a few words to their dear ones,” a reporter noted. One draftee’s elderly mother “clung to his neck with convulsive sobs shaking her frame.” The mood was somber and serious. “There was no braggadocio in evidence. The scene was too solemn for that.”72 At 9:30 a.m. the recruits marched to a line of motorcars for the ride to East St. Louis, and many family members and friends followed.
“They’ve gone,” another newspaper reported. “Bathed in the tears of relatives, their ears ringing from the shouts of goodbyes from the whole city, and followed by hundreds of prayers and good wishes from hungry, vacant hearts, 55 men, the first main contingent of Collinsville’s selected men for the National Army, left Wednesday morning and rolled out of East St. Louis for Camp Taylor.” As a band at the train station played the “Star-Spangled Banner,” the men struggled to pull away from their families and friends. “One pathetic scene after another was enacted throughout the crowd. Few men there were dry at the parting.”73 An awkward half-hour delay of the loaded train at the platform only seemed to make matters worse.
On the heels of the emotional departure of so many of its young men, Collinsville became less tolerant of remarks favoring the Central Powers. “All unexpectedly there has broken out in a few quarters of Collinsville, pro-German utterances which are generally regarded as unpatriotic.” J. O. Monroe, the eccentric new publisher of the Collinsville Herald, noted that at least two different people in the city had made offensive remarks in public. “The mass of public sentiment in Collinsville at present is in no humor to listen calmly to light remarks about the soldiery or insinuations regarding the unjustness of the war we are waging.”74
Two weeks after the contingent of fifty-five men left, twenty-nine more would depart on October 3.75 Another Tuesday evening send-off was well attended, but this time the crowd was much less emotional. The men were taken to their train again by Mayor Siegel and other leading citizens in their machines. Fewer families went to the train station.
Thirty men had been scheduled to report that Wednesday morning, but Joseph Stapen, a twenty-four-year-old Lithuanian miner, was not among them as expected.76 After the drafted men were sent off that morning, Police Chief Tony Staten went in search of Stapen. He found him asleep in bed. Acquaintances said he had not worked in three months, depressed because of the pending draft. He had told them he would not be drafted. Chief Staten told Stapen he would personally take him to the draft induction center the next morning and to be prepared. Before Staten would return, however, the miner put a gun to his head and ended his own life.
There had been twenty-two other recent draft no-shows in the district, two of them from Collinsville.77 Officials listed their names and offered $50 for each deserter turned in to authorities. When the slackers were arrested, they too were sent off to fulfill their obligation starting at Camp Taylor.
Immigrants seemed the most opposed to the draft and the idea of fighting in the European war, Draft Exemption Board member Charles Maurer said. No matter where the immigrant had been born, Maurer generally saw little difference in attitude: “The Italian was hard to handle and also the Poles and Russians were nearly all slackers. If they had no children they would borrow someone else’s to get exemptions.”78 Children who could not be verified were also reported.
Language barriers also may have made it difficult to fully understand the draft requirements and exemption process. In some cases the immigrants had left their native countries just to avoid such military service. Two months after Stapen killed himself, an Italian immigrant who worked at one coal mine was told he would soon get a draft questionnaire. Witnesses said he “went crazy” and spread out his clothes after undressing outdoors on a cold December day. He then proceeded to swim and bathe in the mine’s pond. “How he failed to freeze to death is not known.” An ambulance was summoned, which transported the man to a hospital.79
Others who were escaping any service requirement were aliens who had not filed their first U.S. naturalization papers. These men were effectively in citizenship limbo and by law could not be required to fight for a nation that they were essentially just visiting.80 “This situation has made the draft harder to bear for boys who have been called to go,” a local publisher said.81
As a draft board member, Maurer noted a different perspective on patriotism as it related to inductees: “There was always plenty of patriotism from the fellow that did not have to go. He was continually out to show his patriotism. But the fellow that had to go to camp was always a little, more or less, the other way.”82 The same applied for the draftees’ families. And when a young man was drafted, his family often immediately questioned why a neighbor’s son had not also been sent.
As training camps swelled with the initial call of draftees, the next batch of Collinsville men would not report until February 25, 1918. Those twenty-six men would also be driven to the train station in Madison by civic leaders after a community send-off.83 The army rushed to set up thirty-two new cantonments to handle the influx for training, and that process had just begun to gain momentum in the fall of 1917.84
Draft classifications, those delinquent from registering, those sent to camp, and those who had gotten the various types of exemption continued to be big news in the Collinsville newspapers, which continued to publish long lists of the names of those affected. Madison County would easily meet its quota of 1,284 men for the first call of the Federal Conscription Act of 1917, which was for 687,000 men nationwide.85
Most draftees would get perhaps six months of training stateside before being sent out on a miserably overcrowded troop ship. Another two months of training would be attempted in France, where the English and the French would teach the doughboys about trench warfare. Each new soldier earned $25 a month as a second-class private. Parents were promised that two “safeguards [were] thrown around the Army: Prohibition (and) suppression of social evil.”86 The quintessential doughboy of World War I was a white male in his early twenties, with little education and no prior military experience.87 Yet as the war progressed and manpower needs increased dramatically, training would be significantly reduced. In the second half of 1918, some of the new troops would be sent to France never having fired a rifle.
The war effort entailed other costs besides flesh and blood. On October 3, 1917, Congress passed the War Revenue Act, which imposed federal taxation on single persons with net earnings over $1,000 per year and married couples netting more than $2,000. Even at those limits, only 5 percent of the population would be required to pay income taxes.88 At the minimum, the tax rate was 2 percent. It increased to 5 percent for net incomes between $5,000 and $7,500. The new graduated schedule provided for continued increased taxes as earnings rose. The tax rate for the top bracket rose from 15 to 67 percent.
But an immediate influx of funds would come from four Liberty Loan bond sale drives conducted after U.S. entry into the war. Bond interest ranged from 3 to 4.5 percent, always below what banks were paying, but interest earnings were tax free. The Liberty Bond sales were tremendously successful nationwide, overselling the intended goal of $17 billion. And the bonds provided an outlet for everyone to show his or her patriotism, whether they served in the military or not. Newspapers, clubs, unions, and employers implored people to buy bonds. Moving-picture star Douglas Fairbanks, most recently appearing in A Modern Musketeer, used a cross-country train trip to raise more than $1 million. Theda Barr, star of Cleopatra, helped sell $300,000 worth in one day in New York City.89 The first Liberty Loan drive began May 14, 1917. The St. Louis Smelting and Refining plant in Collinsville reported nearly half of its employees had purchased Liberty Bonds and that at $23,500 the facility had sold more than any other National Lead plant. But the response in the rest of the Collinsville was not so good, with banks reporting only a limited number of buyers except for the Lead Works employees.90 A newspaper publisher took local residents to task: “Many people who would not hesitate to invest money in a new automobile stock or a wildcat mining venture appear to be afraid to trust Uncle Sam with their money. This is all wrong. It is neither good business nor good patriotism.”91
The second Liberty Loan drive, which started October 1, followed the same trend in Collinsville. A local newspaper promoted the campaign to buy bonds “until it hurts” and included a proclamation about the drive from President Wilson. Madison County had been targeted to raise $2,780,000 but had total sales of $3,731,250 from 9,508 different subscribers.92 Collinsville had been targeted to raise $250,000. Madison County did its part and then some; Collinsville did not.93
The two banks in Collinsville sold $201,950 in bonds to 503 subscribers, nearly 25 percent less than its goal. But the much smaller, perhaps more affluent communities of Highland and Edwardsville had bought some $345,000 and $528,000 in bonds, respectively.94 Reasons for the poor bond sales in Collinsville could have ranged from poor local organization and promotion to silent opposition to U.S. involvement in the war. But in 1917 no community wanted to be pegged as not fully supporting the war effort. U.S. Treasury secretary William McAdoo, speaking to a crowd in California during the second bond drive, said: “Every person who refuses to subscribe or takes the attitude of let the other fellow do it, is a friend of Germany and I would like nothing better than to tell him to his face.”95
As the Collinsville economy thrived, the war impact was similarly felt throughout the nation. Coal was in demand, which meant the mines were in full operation, when labor matters did not interfere. The first industry to settle in Collinsville to be near the coal supply, the Collinsville Zinc Smelter, then of the Picher Lead Company, abruptly stopped operation on April 23, 1917.96 The closure was blamed on the more than thirty nearby property owners who had filed suit against the smelter for damages. Heavy pollution caused by the plant just east of town had given many people health problems and killed crops in the area, it was said. In a nearby Italian neighborhood, grapevines would no longer produce fruit for making wine. But with the economy booming, the loss of the three hundred jobs and a $40,000 monthly payroll hardly impacted the city.97
The Lead Works of St. Louis Smelting and Refining had taken steps to avoid similar lawsuits in 1917 by building a 386-foot smokestack, at a cost of $75,000, to discharge its pollutants higher in the air, so the locals would be less affected.98
Just two months after the closure of the Zinc Smelter, it was announced that coal was drawing another industry to the city. Alunite Company of America, headquartered in Kansas City, had acquired forty acres below the bluffs just southwest of Collinsville for construction of a potash plant that would employ 1,500 people.99 Potash, a munitions component needed for the war effort, was made from firing wood ashes and the burned refuse of sugar beets. Raw materials would be shipped in from Colorado, but coal would be provided by local mines.100
The war effort hadn’t affected just mining and heavy industry. Brooks Tomato Products had been asked to reserve 18 percent of its tomatoes for government use in 1917.101 Tiedemann Milling Company was grinding soft wheat flour for government use; about 2,500 barrels had been produced by the close of 1917.102 Few local industries saw a negative impact from the war. Blum Manufacturing, which produced livestock bells, had some shutdowns due to metal shortages, however.103 But jobs were not in short supply. The draft had taken some of the workforce, but the active coal mines and high demand elsewhere meant no slacker could complain of being unable to find work.
Illinois in 1918 was the top food producing state in the nation. But in the spring of that year, farm labor shortages were severe enough to prompt the Illinois High School Association to cancel sports so that all the boys could work on farms.104 Farmers got top dollar for their wheat in 1917, $2.25 a bushel. It was said that some got greater profit per acre than what they had paid for their farmland.105 Female workers also enjoyed high employment rates. Chester Knitting Mills on Main Street used a primarily female workforce and constantly sought new employees. On May 29, 1917, it had set a production record by knitting 1,053 pairs of hosiery.106
Baseball fans enjoyed watching their local teams, the Maroons and the Candy Kids, but they also got some distraction by reading about the World Series, then in its fifteenth year, in the St. Louis daily papers. Collinsville’s Art Fletcher played shortstop for the New York Giants, but they had dropped the first two games at Chicago’s Comiskey Park to the White Sox October 6 and 7 and would go onto to lose both the game and the series, 4–2, at the Polo Grounds in New York on October 15.107 Fletcher played in all six games and had twenty-five at bats, but hit just .200 in the series.
*
The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France were under the command of General John “Black Jack” Pershing. He sailed for Europe on May 26, 1917, with an explicit order that he maintain a separate, unique, and distinct American army.108 Wilson, Pershing, and other U.S. military officials wanted no part of the trench warfare stalemate that the Great War had become. Artillery and machine guns gave great advantage to defensive positions, and Pershing wanted to drive the Germans into the open and engage them. But with the draft just having started, some months would pass before America would be able to ship significant numbers of trained troops abroad.109
The British and the French governments lobbied hard to have the American troops simply amalgamated into their armies, a bone of contention that would last nearly the whole war.110 But Pershing would have none of it. Aside from having an insufficient number of trained troops ready for combat, a major obstacle became how they would be shipped across the Atlantic. Britain, which dominated world shipping at that time, had the capability to move the troops but not the inclination, since the men would not be amalgamated with other Entente troops.111 Pershing finally allowed some of the meager flow of the first arriving U.S. troops to help reinforce British and French soldiers before a separate American army could be assembled in France.
Between getting American troops processed and trained stateside and getting them shipped, the flow of doughboys into France was much more a trickle than a flood in late 1917 and early 1918. Four U.S. divisions were either in France or on the way in January. Nine months after Wilson’s declaration of war, this amounted to 183,896 troops, including many noncombat soldiers.112 Pershing’s initial goal of one million doughboys in France by early summer 1918 was not to be.113
Among those to be amalgamated and see the earliest American combat action was the army’s First Infantry Division, the Big Red One. At the start of the war, it was a mix of “veterans” and those who had volunteered after war was declared—those who wouldn’t wait for the draft. Among them was Charles Massa, son of Anna Rossman of Collinsville. The First Division was one of a very limited number of U.S. troops considered ready to go. Massa was nineteen years old when he enlisted on May 9. An adventurer and daredevil at heart, he would later become an airplane wing-walker and make over one hundred parachute jumps. His adventure in 1917 would begin with being sworn in May 12 at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis and then shipped to Fort Bliss, Texas, for less than two weeks of stateside training. By June 1 he was on a train bound for Hoboken, New Jersey, and subsequent shipment to France.
Perhaps the greatest asset this first batch of doughboys brought to France was goodwill and hope, badly needed commodities in a country that had been ripped apart by three years of war.114 With at least some of its soldiers badly undertrained, the First Division would spend part of the next four months learning from the French Alpine Chasseurs, the famed Blue Devils, at Gondrecourt. Assigned to Company F, Second Battalion, Sixteenth Infantry, Massa had been among those to arrive with much fanfare, parading through Paris on July 4, the toast of the town. But on the cold, rainy, miserable night of November 2, he and his comrades had been slipped under cover of darkness into the trenches in the Sommerville sector near Barthelemont. There were no cheering crowds.
Company F, then consisting of forty-six men, was placed that evening along one hundred yards of the forward-most line to relieve French troops.115 Carrying one hundred pounds of gear, they slogged into trenches half-filled with cold water. The area was considered a quiet sector with no serious fighting in over two years. But the opposing German troops knew that the untested Americans were moving in and had their own reception waiting. The Germans were from the Seventh Bavarian Landwehr Regiment, which had acquired a reputation as some of the kaiser’s most brutal troops. At about 3:30 a.m., sixteen German batteries used ninety-six guns to unleash a forty-five-minute box barrage that effectively isolated Company F. This gave way to a half-circle barrage at the rear of the trench to prevent it from being reinforced. By then some 242 Bavarians where right on top of Company F.
At least two of the Germans were reportedly dressed as American soldiers. In the fifteen-minute raid, three Americans were killed, one with his throat slashed, and seven were badly wounded. The main goal had been prisoners, perhaps for intelligence, and eleven doughboys were captured. The Germans also took all the American equipment and removed all their own killed and wounded before retreating. Down to twenty-five men, Company F would not be relieved for another nine days. Charles Massa and fourteen of his compatriots were cited for offering the most stubborn resistance and given the Croix de Guerre, the highest military honor France awards to foreign soldiers.116 Despite their efforts Company F yielded the first three American battlefield deaths of the Great War: Corporal James Gresham, Private Merle Hay, and Private Thomas Enright.
The American deaths made big headlines in the Allied nations. The Chicago Herald banner announced, “Huns Kill 3 Pershing Men.” The London Daily Mail said in an editorial, “Never again will it be possible for Americans to think they have one set of interests and Europe another.”117 Life magazine published a poem by Christopher Morley:
Gresham and Enright and Hay!
There are no words to say
Our love, our noble pride
For these, our first who died.118
Massa’s battle engagement would make Collinsville headlines in late November, as would the pneumonia death of another enlisted man, Sergeant Humphrey Leighton Evatt. He would become the first Collinsville man to die in the war effort on November 20 in Rouen, France. Evatt worked with Base Hospital 21, which was organized at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and had shipped out just six weeks after the United States entered the war. A Collinsville Township High School graduate of 1912, at the time of his enlistment Evatt was in dental school in St. Louis. He had previously worked in the office at St. Louis Smelting and Refining but felt destined to do greater things.119
Evatt was remembered at the Township High School homecoming held in December, just before the Christmas break. It was normally an occasion of much celebration with graduates home from college or work and preparing for the holiday. But homecoming festivities were tempered this year by the absence of forty-nine young men who were serving their nation, at least one of whom would never return. “A solemnity never felt before pervaded our halls and classrooms that day,” said School Superintendent Charles Dorris.120 The school created a roll of honor of those serving in the military. Alongside Evatt’s name was a star with the footnote, “Died in France for His Country.”
Collinsville stores, primarily centered around Main and Clay Streets uptown, reported strong business during the holidays, with many having record years. Many shoppers sought to buy items they could send to the soldiers in camp.121
The New Year brought new regulations from the federal government that required registration of German aliens, often referred to as enemy aliens. These immigrants had not made application for citizenship. Mayor Siegel had the police department handle the matter. The immigrants would be photographed, fingerprinted, and a physical description noted, with one copy kept locally and another sent to federal marshals. The alien would in turn be issued an identification card, which he was required to carry at all times.122 A U.S. marshal’s notice published about the program said, “Persons required to register should understand that in so doing they are giving proof of their peaceful dispositions and of their intentions to conform to the laws of the United States.”123 The regulation applied only to males fourteen years and older. By mid-February twenty-six Germans had registered with the Collinsville Police Department.124 German women and Austrian men and women would later be required to go through the same process.125
Illness would claim two other local soldiers in early 1918. Private Eugene Kohler, twenty-three, died New Years Day 1918 at Camp Taylor of pneumonia, which was rampant in military camps. His remains were brought back to his hometown for burial January 5.126 Pneumonia also claimed Private James Dukes on February 22 in France. He had enlisted in May. The twenty-four-year-old Dukes was survived by his parents, four sisters, and one younger brother. They were grief-stricken, his mother inconsolable. “He was a big strong fellow,” said a press report, “much admired by his friends both for his fine physique and his manly ways.”127
Disease would be the big killer early for the AEF as its troops were trained and slowly amalgamated into Allied fighting forces. By March 15, 1918, nearly one year after the United States entered the fray, just 136 Americans had been killed in action while 641 had died of disease.128 Yet many young men nationwide, and in the Collinsville area, yearned only to serve. St. Louis papers told of a boy, fifteen years old, who came 150 miles from the hamlet of Kansas, Illinois, to enlist at St. Louis. Told he was too young, he stripped and walked in to the Mississippi River and drowned himself, leaving his clothes neatly bundled with an address on the riverbank so that they might be sent to his parents.129 Back in Madison County, Dorris, the Collinsville school superintendent, told of speaking with a man from the same graduating class as Evatt in early 1918. The man had just registered for the draft. He essentially managed the family farm for his elderly father. Knowing this Dorris stated he should have no difficulty getting an exemption. The man looked at Dorris with resentment and responded, “Do you know I can’t look a soldier in the face when I meet him on the street? Why I would be in the service now, had it not been that the folks at home persuaded me to stay and take care of the farm a little longer.”130
All but three of the young man’s 1912 classmates were now in the military. He told Dorris he had read the popular war books Over the Top and Private Peat and registered without exemption. “I think it will be glorious to fight in this war, and I want to have a part in it,” he declared. Dorris thought perhaps he had underestimated the patriotism of many young men who were not yet in uniform.131
At least one of the local papers pledged to send free newspapers to the hometown soldiers. Both papers occasionally published letters home sent by Collinsville soldiers. Leonard Ritter wrote November 4 of the damage he had seen in France, including graves that German soldiers had dug up to get metal from the coffins. “I am glad the war is not in America for I would not like to see America blown up like this place,” Ritter commented. “When Fritz leaves town they take all the young girls and young men with them, then they blow up the place.”132
Sergeant Claude Kitson wrote from Fort McPherson, Georgia, that he had bought a $100 Liberty Bond, as had most of his comrades.133 “When will we go to France?” was a common question for those troops. Kitson described himself as a Sammie, a nickname based on Uncle Sam but later dropped for the term doughboy.
William Selkirk was a sergeant in officer’s training at Fort Bliss, Texas. His account of a raid on a U.S. border town by men suspected to be connected with Pancho Villa was reported in a Collinsville newspaper. Soldiers jumped at the chance to be able to go after the raiders. Selkirk remarked, “You can plainly see the boys in khaki are anxious to have a little mix up.”134
The Collinsville draftees ended up at Camp Taylor in Kentucky, as did all the early conscripted troops from southern Illinois. This prompted a visit from August Schimpff, the editor and publisher of the Collinsville Advertiser. He was struck by the size of the camp, thirty-five square miles, just south of Louisville. The camp was clean, he reported, and the boys were well fed and played baseball and basketball during free time. Home to forty-thousand troops, it had ten YMCA buildings and five Knights of Columbus buildings that provided homelike settings with pianos, record players, comfortable furniture, and the like. The men could go into Louisville but were not allowed to drink. Schimpff wrote, “The demeanor of the boys in training camp is that of a young colt, full of playfulness, and such training as they have had, has made all the boys vastly changed in appearance. No protruding stomachs are to be seen, but the men look like conditioned athletes.”135 The most requested thing by the Collinsville troops: letters from home.
In the early part of the twentieth century, clubs, lodges, and societies provided some disability and death benefits and played a major part in the social life of any town, and Collinsville was no exception. It was home to about forty such organizations in this period, ranging from the Order of Owls, Collinsville Nest 1247, to the Daughters of Pocahontas, Leota Council 18, to the Woodmen of America, Camp 373.136 The group meetings, usually two evenings per month, provided much of the out-of-family social contact. Meetings were usually hosted at halls above local businesses, often saloons that could provide refreshments or meals. Many of the groups seemingly competed to do as much as they could to help the war effort, primarily by contributing to the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, or the YMCA. The Improved Order of Redmen, Tallapoosa Tribe 101, voted to contribute $100 to help the state association of Redmen provide a Red Cross ambulance for military use.137
A new Red Cross chapter was formed in Collinsville in June, and it provided the outlet for many women, including those who had sons in the military, to do their part. R. Guy Kneedler, city attorney and former mayor, was elected chairman, although most of the active members were female. The group provided comfort bags to soldiers upon induction, and at Christmas time it again sent comfort kits to the local boys. Listings of those who had joined or donated as little as twenty-five cents to the Red Cross filled the columns of the Collinsville Herald.138
The Red Cross used rooms at the Masonic Temple to collect and prepare donated sheets and linen for bandages and to knit sweaters, socks, mufflers, and the like. The work was considered important enough that women who had previously refrained, for religious reasons, from doing any “fancy work” on the Sunday Sabbath regularly made an exception for their own war effort.139 While some questioned the legitimate value of all the women knitting across the nation, others saw it as critically important to the military. When a prominent evangelist suggested that a German spy had entered the Atlanta Red Cross headquarters and damaged nineteen sweaters, local leaders allayed his overwrought fears: “Germans had nothing to do with it. Mice did it.”140
Red Cross membership in Collinsville was 197 in June, helped when more than 50 employees of the Chester Knitting Mills joined en masse.141 In December 1917 the local chapter boasted of 1,810 members. By the end of World War I, the American Red Cross nationwide would have nearly four thousand chapters and over thirty million members. The Commercial Club decided to cancel its annual fall festival and instead give the money to the Red Cross. A charity baseball game was held in July between the Moose Lodge and the Eagles Lodge, and nearly two thousand people attended, raising $1,400 for the local chapter. The navy sent several sailors and its St. Louis Fife and Drum Corps to the event and left with the names of fourteen potential recruits from Collinsville. With nearly four thousand members by war’s end, the Red Cross would be Collinsville’s largest support organization, giving residents a public opportunity to show their patriotism, although the chapter’s War Fund collections would pale in comparison to many Illinois communities.142
Community expectations of patriotism only increased in 1918, when more and more American troops reached foreign soil. Collinsville’s teachers were required not only to sign a pledge of their loyalty to Uncle Sam but also to participate in groups such as the Red Cross and the State Council of Defense and to purchase Liberty Bonds.143
One of the biggest controversies for the Wilson administration during the war was prompted in part by the brutally cold winter of 1917–18, when high industrial and foreign demand and rail distribution problems left many unable to buy coal.144 Local officials elsewhere commandeered coal trains moving through their areas while ships blocked East Coast harbors, unable to be loaded with coal. The situation was not a problem in Collinsville, where local mines supplied all the coal that was needed.
But the crisis out east would force a January 17 mandate from Wilson’s fuel administrator, Harry Garfield, who ordered all factories east of the Mississippi shut down for four days to allow bottlenecked coal supplies to reach eastern ports.145 That measure may not have been enforced in southwestern Illinois, but officials did restrict use of coal for most businesses on Mondays, starting January 21 and continuing for the next ten weeks. This meant most businesses would close both Sunday and Monday.
There were a few exemptions for industries that ran seven days per week, but in Collinsville it appeared the regulation would most significantly affect the lead smelter and the Chester Knitting Mills. The only businesses that would be exempt were those heated by natural gas, which was uncommon in 1918.146 Local businessmen bristled at the new regulation, which they felt should not apply to communities that had local mines selling coal for regional use. “The only thing to do,” a local newspaper opined, “is to make the best of the situation.”147
There was also much complaint about the industrial shutdowns on the national level, not just from Republicans but also from Wilson’s own Democrats. Opponents attacked the Wilson administration’s organizational abilities. Whether because of political pressure or logistical brilliance, the coal supply bottleneck was quickly broken and the industrial shutdowns were discontinued.148 But the Heatless Monday program continued. Most Collinsville businesses, even saloons, did close for four Mondays beginning January 21, as the grumbling continued. “The fellow with the burning thirst was also disconsolate at finding all the thirst parlors closed,” a Collinsville newspaper reported.149
There was less outcry when the government enacted the Standard Time Act, a 1918 version of Daylight Savings Time, as an energy-saving measure beginning March 31. Most Collinsville stores and businesses complied, although the law was unpopular nationally, and the nation reverted to traditional standard time at the end of the war. Earlier restrictions barring the use of electric sign advertising two nights a week drew little complaint. With few automobile drivers, gasless Sundays later in the war would likewise ruffle only a few feathers.
The fuel crisis was just another example, critics said, of the Wilson administration’s inability to efficiently prosecute the war. Troops shivered in U.S. camps and abroad while stocks of winter clothing went undelivered. Hundreds of millions spent to design and build military ships and planes by early 1918 had not resulted in any delivery of either.150 It didn’t help matters when Quentin Roosevelt, the son of Wilson critic and former president Teddy Roosevelt, was shot down and killed flying a second-rate French Nieuport 28.151 One U.S. Army general compared the nation’s war effort to a new driver learning to operate a stick shift, with both the clutch and the accelerator simultaneously engaged: “The engine is whirling around and a tremendous noise is being made, but there is no application of power.”152
One of the first home-front agencies created by the federal government after the declaration of war was the Food Administration. Wilson appointed future president Herbert Hoover food administrator. Food demand had increased as the United States helped supply Allied nations, while some poor crop yields in 1916 and 1917 reduced available foodstuffs.153 Building the new U.S. Armed Forces would further strain the food-supply system. Grumbling also resulted when Hoover ordered a 30 percent reduction in grain used by breweries, reducing the alcohol content of beer to no more 2.75 percent.154 But like Wilson, Hoover did not want rationing; instead he relied on promoting meatless, sweetless, and wheatless days and hoped patriotic enthusiasm would get the job done.155 In a letter to food retailers, Hoover asked for “cooperation rather than coercion.” Press releases appeared in local papers, calling for women to conserve food. One story denied the report that the government could seize the food stocks of housewives: “These rumors were originated partly by pro-German propagandists and partly by conscious-less grafters.”156
Lumber company owner A. C. Gauen was appointed Collinsville food administrator. He worked with a committee of grocers, bakers, butchers, and others beginning in January 1918 to set a range of prices that buyers might see for foodstuffs and list prices that the retailer had paid buying in bulk.157 The list was regularly printed in the local papers in the hope that prices would not range too far above state averages.
Sugar sales were limited to fewer than five pounds per week. By February the committee had worked with local grocers to incorporate a program in which shoppers would be asked to buy one pound of cornmeal or other substitute for every pound of flour purchased. A Collinsville newspaper columnist took to task a buyer who complained of having to purchase the same quantity of substitute meal. The man had told the grocer he would have laid in several hundred pounds of flour had he known the restrictions were coming. The columnist remarked, “How patriotic some people are with their eating habits was shown in a striking and unconscious way Friday morning by one of the indirect friends of the Kaiser.”158
Lunch counters and restaurants were reminded that the new “regulations” applied to them too. Collinsville grocer Sam Galinat fell under scrutiny when it was learned he had sold three hundred pounds of flour to one person. Galinat was forced to reclaim the flour from the buyer and refund his money.159 The flour was then confiscated by the food administrator. The irony of the enforcement effort in Collinsville was that the dealers, restaurateurs, and public were apparently deluded into thinking that they could be charged with violation of federal law if they disregarded the restrictions. In actuality the heaviest sentence a scofflaw could have gotten would have been a rebuke in the court of patriotic public opinion. Still the local newspaper columnists continued their rants: “The time has come to enforce the rulings with a strict hand, and those who imagine that they can pull the wool over the eyes of the government will find that heavy punishment is in store for them.”160 People were urged to report violators to the local food administrator.
Inflation drove up most prices after the war began, but wages had increased too. Just as the farmers had benefited from the agreed-on price for wheat, coal miners benefited from the higher price that had been accepted for coal. The local economy flourished. In the winter of 1918 in Collinsville, Isenberg’s store sold men’s pants for $2.98 and women’s silk skirts for $5.98. Ford dealer J. C. McLanahan sold touring cars for $360, sedans for $695. A haircut would cost a man 35 cents weekdays, 50 cents on Saturdays.
One of the most successful Committee on Public Information programs was the Four Minute Men, so named because the participating men were allotted four minutes to speak in the time it took to change reels at a moving-picture show, in what was a live patriotic commercial at the theater. The unpaid speakers were community leaders, nominated by local officials and approved at the state level. They were given topics and guidelines for their speeches but were largely unscripted. Their patriotic themes promoted such things as buying war bonds, conserving food, or fuel or vilified Germany’s leaders or its army.161
Collinsville did not come on board with the Four Minute Men program until February 1918. Its speaker’s list was a who’s who of influential men from the city, headed up by A. C. Gauen. The Collinsville Four Minute Men included former Mayor Kneedler, School Superintendent Dorris, two pastors from prominent churches, both newspaper publishers, and four others.162 One man would speak each night of the week, except Sunday, when there were movies or other productions at the Opera House or the Airdome.
By the Armistice there would be seventy-five thousand Four Minute Men nationwide who gave more than 7.5 million speeches.163 The young film industry also helped bolster domestic support of the war, ferreting out any theme that might be deemed unpatriotic. It helped build the growing anti-German frenzy with films such as Draft 258, The Beast of Berlin, Face to Face with Kaiserism, and The Slacker.164 With the nearly subservient movie industry and the Four Minute Men, the CPI took advantage of the one last form of mass communication that was not already under tight government control. There seemed no escaping the CPI’s patriotic messages, which were bludgeoned into the minds of every American in 1917 and 1918.
Superintendent Dorris’s involvement in the Four Minute Men was most appropriate, as his was probably the “first family” of the war effort in Collinsville. Like many in the community, he was not initially in favor of U.S. involvement but jumped in with both feet when war was declared. Aside from his school duties, he was an accomplished speaker and community leader, active in the State Council of Defense, the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army, and he served as a registrar on the draft board. He was also an “operative” of the American Protective League.165 Dorris’s wife, Susan, was active in the Red Cross and chaired the local Women’s Committee of the National Council of Defense, which concerned itself primarily with food conservation issues. Both of their sons had enlisted; Lester Dorris was the first local man to enter the service, and Milburn Dorris joined the navy later in 1917. When the Armistice was signed November 11, 1918, word would not reach Collinsville until after 3:00 a.m. But when it did, Dorris would awaken and walk seven blocks to ring the bell at Webster School to let the city know.166
In early 1918 Dorris strongly believed that many in Collinsville did not do enough to support the war effort. In a speech given February 2, he described a common local affliction:
We are patriots so long as we can capitalize our patriotism. We join the Red Cross and hang 100 percent signs in our windows. We subscribe to the YMCA and get our names published in the newspaper, and charge it up to advertising. We wear Liberty Bond buttons and hang our service flags when our clerk goes to war. We swear at the German people generally and the Kaiser in particular and think we are patriotic. But we raise a terrible fuss when Mr. Hoover places a limit on the profit on the food we sell, or when he asks us to eat corn bread once a week, in order that our soldiers may not suffer. Our patriotic ardor cools considerably when the government reduces the amount of alcohol in our beer and when it asks us to promise to eat less meat and more potatoes.
The hostile reception which was accorded the fuel conservation order of Dr. Garfield a few days ago was a disgrace to the citizenship of this country. . . . Our people are for the war, but so far have not shown a willingness to pay the price necessary for its prosecution.167
Disease was a prevalent killer of people of all ages in 1917 and 1918. Young men living in close quarters for the first time in military camps and society’s increased mobility can be blamed to some degree. Pneumonia and typhoid were common. By mid-1917 over 1,300 cases of tuberculosis had been reported in Madison County.168 The Spanish influenza would not become pandemic until later in 1918, but Collinsville would suffer through a smallpox epidemic starting in December 1917.169 The city physician, Dr. M. W. Harrison, ordered those who had a skin eruption that might be a smallpox lesion to notify a doctor. Although smallpox had been considered under control since the turn of the century in the United States, the epidemic continued in Collinsville through March 1918 because a handful of residents refused to be treated or remain under quarantine. Some doctors had also failed to report cases to Harrison or state health officials.
By February the state was assisting with a vaccination program, which was mandatory for school children and strongly recommended for adults. Approximately 2,500 residents, 90 percent of them children, had been immunized by late February, when there were still twenty-four known cases in Collinsville and eleven more in nearby Maryville.170 A nine-year-old boy from the city died in April due to the aftereffects of smallpox, but by early March the disease was largely under control.171 Five people were charged with not complying with quarantine or reporting requirements.172
It was all typical 1918 wartime life in Collinsville, with problems not unlike those found in small towns across the nation. What escalated tensions locally was the firm grip coal mining and the coal miners maintained over the Collinsville community.