The Great War had been raging for almost three years by the time the U.S. declared war on Germany in April, 1917, and it was already affecting our country deeply.
*When Jack Vilas came to Hammondsport to buy an airplane in 1913, he later stated, it was clear that cash was short in the Curtiss operation. Two years later Glenn Curtiss sold controlling interest in his company for seven million dollars in cash and stock. The war made him a fortune, and the old Hammondsport plant — by then the smallest in Curtiss’s empire — was soon employing more people than lived in the village, straining Hammondsport and Bath beyond the limit.
*But if the war was lining local pockets by making the Curtiss company boom, it had the opposite effect on the Thomas Brothers Aeroplane Company. As orders piled up the Thomases abandoned Bath for Ithaca, where they could find more labor, not to mention added capital needed to expand.
*Corning Glass Works was already benefiting from the war. German lab-ware had long been considered the best on the market. But with imports closed off, first by blockade and then by the state of war, Corning rushed into the market vacuum. The same pattern would follow, after the war, with Christmas ornaments — buying German was no longer popular.
*In fact, nothing German was popular. Germania Winery in Hammondsport changed its name (temporarily) to Jermania. The fact that many vinters (Frey and Freidell in Hammondsport, Widmer and Reisinger in Naples) and brewers (Schwarzenbach in Hornell) had German names fueled demands for Prohibition, on the theory that debilitating America through alcohol was a German plot.
*The buildup to the declaration of war took weeks, giving German nationals a chance to flee the country, often for neutral Mexico (Canada being already at war). Citizens of other Central Powers may have done the same, though we didn’t go to war with Austria-Hungary until December, and never declared war on Bulgaria or the Ottoman Empire.
*With much of the French and Belgian agricultural heartland in enemy hands, and with Britain requiring massive food imports even in the best of times, agricultural prices boomed. Since it was clear that large numbers of young farmhands would soon be going into uniform, and also clear that the money was flowing well, many farmers turned to mechanization. The Extension Service sponsored tractor workshops in Hornell, and many farmers invested. This modernization marked a turning point in local agriculture, but when the war ended abruptly and unexpectedly in 1918, many farmers found themselves with low farm prices and high monthly payments. The first component of the Great Depression was in place, more than a decade before the stock market crash.
*Crashing demand for grapes and wine also hurt locally, and so did the closure of the Curtiss plant with the end of the war.
*The lads in their hundreds came in for the war. Some experienced it as an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. For others, it was the end of their lives… we’ll see more about that in another column. Women too now wore America’s uniform, for the first time in America’s history. Members of the Army Nurse Corps were not contractors, or civilian employees. They were military personnel. In 1909 the army asked Jane Delano of Montour Falls to take command. She blended the Corps with the Red Cross Nursing Service and with the American Nurses Association… both of which she also headed. She was frantically preparing for on oncoming gigantic war which she, almost alone, had seen on the horizon.
*Besides advancing into the army, women also won the vote in New York, thanks to a statewide referendum in November, 1917. All-male voters had turned it down two years earlier… men in Steuben, Chemung, Schuyler, and Yates STILL voted no… but New York women had full voting rights as of 1918, two years ahead of national women’s suffrage.
*Corning and Painted Post between them fielded three Home Defense Unit companies, complete with uniforms and rifles. Given that we already had an army, navy, reserves, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and National Guard… and the fact that no attack on Corning seemed imminent… these units were pretty much superfluous and soon quit drilling, becoming largely ceremonial.
*Rationing, spy scares, and Liberty Bonds still lay ahead. Stay tuned!