Do Your Bit! Women on the Home Front

 

W. T. Benda, “You can help–American Red Cross,” 1918. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, WWI Posters, LC-USZC4-9645

The King City Chronicle announced in its September 14, 1917, issue that the national Red Cross had granted King City permission to form a local branch. The first meeting, to be held a week later, would show ways to “be better enabled to ‘Do Your Bit’ to aid in the great cause . . . for the rights of humanity and of nations.” Businesses were asked to close during the time of the meeting, between 2 and 3 pm.

King City wasn’t alone in setting up a Red Cross chapter. After President Wilson established the War Council for the American Red Cross in May 1917, the relief organization mounted an impressive campaign to win public support in raising money, volunteering, and producing items “for the benefit of soldiers.”

The campaign succeeded. Between 1914 and 1918, Red Cross chapters grew in number from 107 to 3,864, and membership swelled from 16,000 to over 20 million adults, plus an additional 11 million children in the Junior Red Cross.*

Within weeks of that September meeting in King City, residents had formed committees and started to work. The Military Relief Committee oversaw the kind of work my family did–knitting, making hospital supplies, comfort kits, and–here’s a surprise–“snipping.”  (My mind swerved over to “snippy” as I wondered why there was need to organize that activity.)  The Chronicle ran a special explanation.

King City Chronicle, October 19, 1917.

My family certainly “did their bit.” Grandma, her younger sister Mary, and their mother made over 200 garments, most of them sewn, for the Red Cross and other agencies, according to an account of my great-grandmother. Many of these pieces were bandages needed in hospitals, here and abroad, for injured soldiers. Just as my great-grandmother kept track of what they’d made, so did Red Cross chapters. On November 23, 1917, the Chronicle ran a first-page story, noting “King City Chapter has turned out more knitted garments than any other chapter in the County.”

I imagine settings like this, in a farmhouse parlor, where women gathered to work on wartime projects. From our family collection of photographs, undated and women unidentified.

Down the road about nine miles, residents in Union Star (population 400, then and now) had also been busy knitting, sending articles to Camp Funston. Grandpa reported he didn’t receive any, as the captain thought him “rich.”

Letter to Grandma, January 4, 1918

In tiny Amity, Missouri, where Grandpa was born and about 100 people lived at the time of the war, residents sent fruit. On November 17, 1917, Grandpa wrote, “we Dekalb co boys got a barrel of pears from Amity.” The next day, while his group was under quarantine for illnesses, he reported they had made preserves with the pears, adding “the Livingston co boys got a barrel of canned fruit and we served it for dinner, was fine, several kinds of fruit.” Other delicacies from home included homemade candies and cakes.

The generosity of the folks back home often exceeded the needs of the soldiers. Trench and Camp, the weekly newspaper at Camp Funston, ran a column before Christmas, 1917, asking “thoughtful ones at home” not to send food in holiday boxes. “Men receiving foodstuffs nibble between meals; stomachs get upset, and where the sender of foodstuffs started out to be kind and thoughtful, they may be the cause of sending a loved one on ‘sick report.'” In short, the U.S. Army was serving enough food.

And those knitted articles being made at home? By the end of 1917, Trench and Camp reported that Camp Funston had distributed “35,999 sweaters, 25,737 pairs of socks, besides many helmets and wristlets.” And, by the end of March 1918, the growing supply of knitted articles, mostly from the Red Cross, led–as reported in Trench and Camp–to an order that required an inventory, a system of equitable distribution in accordance “with actual needs,” and a monitoring plan “to see to it that they are not sold or otherwise indiscriminately disposed of by enlisted men.” (As a knitter, I laughed and sighed at what I know is true: men don’t always like sweaters knitted with love. So, knitted hats off to the Army to control this behavior!)

Even as friends and families “did their bit” to keep up the spirits of their soldier boys, the hardships of training and war found their way home. There were personal costs. One showed up in letters Grandpa wrote his “dear girl” in early 1918.

 

*The Red Cross includes these statistics in their history of the Red Cross in World War One, at www.redcross.org/about-us/history.

 

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News from King City, Missouri

Grandpa spent Christmas at home, recuperating from weeks of illness. He didn’t write letters during that ten-day furlough. I decided, in their absence, to read something else: hometown news from the King City Chronicle, the paper delivered to my grandparents’ separate farms, once a week on Friday.

I’d like to think that Trouble, the name given to generations of Boston terriers in my family, is waiting for the Chronicle.

I wanted to read what my grandparents were reading about the war, a hundred years ago, over the summer and fall of 1917. And I was curious to see what coverage, if any, the Chronicle gave to women engaged in the war effort from their homes in King City.

News of the war in Europe showed up in every issue I read. There were reports of battles, matched with maps to identify the locations. Statements by President Wilson were published, including this one, which Wilson issued to the national army on September 3, 1917, when the first recruits were sent to training camps.

“The eyes of all the world will be upon you because you are in some special sense the soldiers of freedom,” Wilson proclaimed. “Let us set for ourselves a standard so high that it will be a glory to live up to it, and then let us live up to it and add a new laurel to the crown of America. My affectionate confidence goes with you in every battle and every test. God keep and guide you.”

In King City, the drum of patriotism beat through every issue. Lists of local men inducted, and this meant all King City-area men between the ages of 21 and 30, ran alongside stories of the celebrations held to honor these brave “soldier boys.” On September 7, the women of the Presbyterian church provided a “big banquet and program” for a “finer lot of young men seldom, if ever, seen together.” A band played, speeches given and prayers offered before the meal was served in the church basement, decorated with flags and bunting. (I smile at this familiar scene, having enjoyed many dinners prepared by my grandmother and her friends in church basements. I wonder (but probably don’t have to) if they served my favorite: bite-sized white bread sandwiches, no crusts, filled with one ingredient: country butter!)

The Chronicle published, several times, the list of exemptions available to drafted men. But they also ran stories criticizing draft evaders, pacifists, and slackers, the term my grandfather used. The paper followed the story of draft resisters in Oklahoma, where authorities sought the death penalty for treason. And, closer to home, the Chronicle reported on draft fraud, running a statement from the county’s Exemption Board, requesting tips on men trying to get out of the draft. “We will see that the man trying to perpetrate fraud is one of the first sent to the front.”

Grandpa enclosed this poem about the “exempted” in a January letter he sent Grandma:

This clipping had no identifying elements–not the name or author of poem, nor the source.

After the King City “boys” left for training, the Chronicle began publishing letters from the soldiers. The one Grandpa penned on October 16 was published the next week. He reported on the Y.M.C.A, “several here,” and all with nightly entertainment, as well as “good desks to write on,” stationery provided. His letter ended with a P.S. “I forgot to tell you I get the Chronicle, and sure appreciate it, and will look forward for it each week.” The newspaper provided issues, free of charge, to soldiers at training camps and also in France. “Boys, we’re for you, either at home or abroad,” they announced in their August 10 issue.

The newspaper played a central role, it seems, in keeping the home folks informed of the war (training and later, combat) and the soldiers connected to their communities. They reported on people driving, or “auto-ing,” to Funston, some 200 miles away. In the November 2 issue, they ran a column, “To Camp Funston Visitors,” informing readers to only visit on weekends, and only after asking permission to visit, and to carry a “box or basket” for their trash. The column concluded with this useful tip: “If possible, delay your visit until completion of Rest House for women now under construction, where toilet facilities will be provided.”

For women who preferred to stay at home, close to the comforts of home, many responded to the slogan of the American Red Cross, to “Do Your Bit!” More on the great work of King City women, including Grandma and her family, in the next post.