Tag Archives: World War I

“Merchants of Death”?

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World War I begins what I call “the Hell Years” (copyright!) – the Great War, the Spanish influenza, the postwar recession, Prohibition, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, the Great Depression, and World War II.

Here at home, many Americans did very well on the Great War – so much so that some postwar analysts traced our declaration of war to the “Merchants of Death” who made fortunes making, selling, and financing military supplies.

That vastly oversimplified things, but many ordinary people legitimately made good money for a short time, right here in the Finger Lakes, in new industries that blossomed with the war, and would largely shrivel after it.

The most obvious example was GLENN CURTISS. He had just started producing a decent training plane, the Curtiss Jenny, and the British quickly ordered 250, then ran the numbers up into thousands. They also wanted seaplanes, and although the Curtiss shop in Hammondsport was quickly running 24-6, it was noplace near enough. He built, bought, or leased huge new factories in Buffalo, as the Hammondsport plant switched over to all engine production, especially the 90-hp OX-5, to get the Allies into the air.

Glenn employed almost 3000 people just in Hammondsport, but even with his Buffalo plants it still wasn’t enough. The Willys-Morrow factory in Elmira made Curtiss engines and Liberty engines under license, employing women and old men to help make up the numbers. We hear a lot about Rosie the Riveter in World War II, but we should also remember Wanda the Welder (copyright!) from World War I. Women had been working in American factories ever since the factories were created. Now more than ever, with millions of young men in uniform, they were needed. Neta Snook, who later taught Amelia Earhart to fly, worked in Elmira as an expediter for the British government.

As for the old folks, there was no social safety net in those days. You worked until you couldn’t and then you probably died pretty quickly, because you couldn’t pay for food, clothing, housing, or medical care. If you couldn’t work you also had no economic value, so the economy got no benefit from you continuing to hang around.

Up in Geneva, boatmaker Fay & Bowen built hulls for Curtiss seaplanes.

Several fellows who had cut their teeth at Curtiss had opened the Thomas Brothers Aeroplane Company in Bath, but they, like Glenn, had to expand when the war broke out in 1914. Six months later they had shifted to the larger town of Ithaca and forged a merger with Morse Chain Company. Thomas-Morse manufactured airplanes, especially the Thomas-Morse “Scout,” in respectable numbers.

Taylor Instruments in Rochester had been in business for over half a century before the first airplane flew. But by 1914 they were already supplying Curtiss, Thomas, and others with altimeters and other instruments (often under the Tycos brand) needed for flight. Sometimes the instrument face bore the name of the buyer, such as Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company.

By 1916 Ingersoll-Rand in Painted Post employed over 800 men and “several score” of women, and the shops were “running night and day, on war materials for the British and allied governments.” The Rand manufactured ammunition, or more precisely it made shells, with the powder and projectiles installed elsewhere. On a smaller scale Corning Glass Works supplied optical glass for the same governments. They bought Steuben Glass at this time, since the main company was unaccustomed to precision work.

Both the Rand and the Glass Works were patrolled by armed guards, with admission by pass. The Curtiss plant had a scare when a couple of former employees were arrested for espionage, but while details on output might have interested the Central Powers, by that stage Curtiss didn’t have any secrets worth pirating. Some employees were also charged with sabotage, for passing through unacceptable materials in order to make quotas.

No one was expecting war in early June of 1914, but it exploded two months later. By October the New York Times reported that the Curtiss plant was running ’round the clock, six days a week. By year’s end Ingersoll-Rand was filling two boxcars with shells every day. By January Thomas was relocated in Ithaca. By spring Curtiss broke ground for huge new factories in Buffalo. It was good money while it lasted, but tens of thousands would be unemployed without warning, when the Armistice was signed in 1918.

11-11-11

Back in 2008, I was at Dick Kurzenberger’s 90th birthday party in the National Soaring Museum. “Dick,” I asked, “were you actually born ON Armistice Day?”

With his usual big smile, he assured me that he was, and I had visions of Dick being born as bells rang and flags waved and everybody burst out singing. But his obituary a few years later told me that Dick had been born November 11, 1918 IN GERMANY. Now my vision was completely different – a baby boy coming into a world of fear, despair, and defeat.

World War I ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The effect had been spoiled a bit by the “false armistice” a few days earlier, when a newspaper reporter’s draft article was mistakenly sent out to the world. But it was for real this time. Businesses closed. Bath, Penn Yan, and Hammondsport had impromptu parades and motorcades. Steuben County’s monthly draft contingent was held at Addison, then told to change trains and go back home. People lined up to pay a quarter (benefit of Red Cross) and ring the Bath fire bell. “Mark this date down in your calendar,” the Hammondsport Herald wrote while monarchies crashed, “as the last day of the Middle Ages.”

Over in England the bells rang and townsfolk shouted in celebration as Wilfred Owen’s parents were handed a telegram. Their son had been killed in action, exactly seven days before. “What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?,” he had written a year earlier. “What candles may be held to speed them all?”

There were downsides to the peace. Within a few weeks the Curtiss Hammondsport plant closed for good, throwing 600 people or so out of work. As agricultural prices collapsed, many farmers staggered under time payments for equipment they had bought while the hands were off in uniform. On top of that, the Spanish influenza was still killing millions.

Over in Germany the fleet had mutinied, the Kaiser fled the country, Communist uprisings seized many local governments. Even before truce negotiations, millions of soldiers had already dropped their guns and started walking home. Corporal Adolf Hitler went hysterically blind.

Pat Buchanan insists that the Allies double-crossed Germany – that Germany only wanted a temporary cease-fire for peace talks, and the Allies forced a surrender. But an “armistice” was only face-saving. The top generals had ordered the Kaiser to quit, and the government to surrender. They had lost, and they knew it, and a quick surrender was the only way to stop complete chaos.

Soldiers soon “forgot” that they had deserted in millions, and the generals proclaimed that THEY hadn’t lost the war, no sir… they’d still have pulled it out, but they were stabbed in the back by civilians – especially socialists, diplomats, and Jews.

Germans were appalled and enraged by how HARSH the peace terms were, though actually they were based on the terms that Germany forced onto France in 1871. Loss of territory. Occupation of territory. Expensive reparations. Plus they lost their emperor, and had to substitute a struggling republican government. All of which seemed utterly unreasonable when applied TO Germany, rather than BY Germany.

Reparations for France and Belgium seem more reasonable when we remember that Germany laid plans long before the war to rule any conquered ground with mass murder, and that’s exactly what they did. In addition to that they stole much of the occupied territories’ industry and took it back to Germany, and as they retreated they destroyed what was left.

German voters rejected Hitler, of course – repeatedly – and he was shoehorned into power by a backroom deal. At the heart of the deal was the filthy truth that President von Hindenburg had decided to destroy democracy… in collaboration with the generals, the industrialists, the financiers, the Catholics, the monarchists, the Nazis, the other right-wing groups, and most of the Protestants.

France, of course, in similar straits following 1870, had pulled itself together, paid its reparations AHEAD of time, and built an honest-to-goodness democracy. The 1918 Armistice ended the Great War, but it didn’t deliver the new world that most people dreamed of. But the problem wasn’t with the peace, or even with the Treaty of Versailles. Germany, Russia, Italy, and Japan were not doomed by destiny. They had plenty of choices on how to use the peace. The choices they made were bad, and they dragged the rest of the world down with them.

Life as a World War I Doughboy

America has always lived a lot of its life by wishful thinking. When we got into World War I, in 1917, the war had already been going on for almost three years. And we weren’t the slightest bit ready.

*Out navy was in adequate shape, thanks in part to Franklin D. Roosevelt, our energetic young assistant secretary of that department. But our army was small and ill-equipped, and horribly unprepared. General Pershing was the only officer who had commanded anything larger than a regiment in the field.

*We beat the recruiting drum to expand our army rapidly, and we started a draft. But even once we got men into the boot camps and induction centers, we often couldn’t give them weapons, or even uniforms. Once our men got to France, many of them would be using British or French rifles, helmets, and artillery.

*American women were in uniform for the first time, mostly as nurses, and in that area we WERE fairly well prepared. Jane Delano of Watkins Glen headed up Red Cross nursing AND army nursing. She had foreseen a large war on the horizon, and worked to prepare both programs.

*The government commissioned Red Cross and similar agencies to provide care and support for the troops overseas. To finance this, those agencies were given the exclusive right to sell cigarettes to the soldiers, and even men in hospital deathbeds went without smokes unless they ponied up the price of a pack.

*By the way, prewar Americans considered cigarettes an affectation of gigolos and lounge lizards. REAL men smoked cigars or pipes. The war changed all that.

*Likewise men in the prewar carried pocket watches; wrist watches were for women. But in the midst of combat the pocket watch was clearly impractical, and wrist watches became standard wear.

*Assuming he got American equipment, the infantry soldier was probably using a 1903 Springfield rifle, bolt-action and clip-fed, with a five-round magazine. Khaki and olive drab had been adopted in ’03, so at least our men were wearing reasonable colors for modern combat. They got the “Smoky Bear” hat in 1911, but in action mostly wore the British soupbowl “tin hat” or the more substantial French helmet. They also wore puttees, a “mummy wrap” around the lower leg, theoretically serving to keep mud off the uniform.

*Thousands of local fellows served in the war, and scores died. At 4 PM on Friday, April 5, Dave Clark will attend a Steuben County Historical Society presentation in uniform as his great-uncle, PFC Steven Smith, giving us a “first-hand” account of life in the trenches. The free event is at Centenary Methodist Church in Bath. We hope you’ll join us.

The Farming Story Part 4: Prohibition, Depression, Floods, and War

As in the Civil War, so in World War I. The young farm hands went into uniform even as agricultural demand boomed. (We were helping feed France and Britain, as well as ourselves.) There was local agitation to create a Farm Bureau, which as we know was effective, and the Farm Bureau quickly set up tractor workshops. Farms mechanized, BUT the war ended unexpectedly in 1918. Farm prices crashed, and many farmers were now left struggling with time payments on their equipment.

*Then, at the same time, Prohibition came in! This closed the wineries and ruined the grape growers. We think of the Great Depression as starting in 1929. But for many farm families it started ten years earlier, in 1919. With widespread use of the motorcar, community and economic life began to dry up in the hamlets. They had had their own stores, schools, doctors, churches, undertakers. But who needed the little store in Coss Corners or Harrisburg Hollow when you could drive to Bath… or from Perkinsville to Wayland, Bloomerville to Avoca, Hornby to Corning? The rich man of Risingville now ran a shabby little shop in the sticks, with an outhouse in the back, and a kerosene lamp on the counter.

*This is the period in which thousands of Steuben people joined the Ku Klux Klan, which then as now exploited fear and turned it into hate by telling lies about people who are Not Like Us, and blaming THEM for all the trouble.

*When the Great Depression truly set in, one bright star locally (besides the evaporation of the Klan) was the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Charles Fournier came from France to revive Gold Seal with up-to-date practices. Taylor, which had eked its way through the dry years, expanded its operation, and new wineries opened. Every Labor Day growers and buyers met in Penn Yan to hammer out “the grape deal,” establishing prices that would be paid that year.

*This is also the period in which County Agent Bill Stempfle took the lead in reviving and modernizing potato production in the mucklands, bringing in growers from Maine and Long Island who were grateful to find lower land prices, and whose intensive farming practices could offset worn-out land. And, of course, there were New Deal programs to help the farmer.

*BUT this is the period in which the bill came due for almost 150 years of short-sighted land use practices… especially when catastrophic floods struck in 1935, 1936, and 1946. The ’35 flood, which killed 44 people regionwide, was in many ways far worse than the ’72 flood. One Avoca sharecropper in 1935 received as his share for the year one calf. Avoca became a pilot program for New Deal soil conservation practices. From this period we get diking and re-routing of the Conhocton and Canisteo Rivers, the Almond Dam, the Alfred Dam, tree plantations, drainage ditches… much of the work carried out by Civilian Conservation Corps lads from their main camp in Kanona.

*When the New Deal started, 10% of American farms had electricity. When it ended eight years later with the advent of World War II, 10% of farms did NOT. However, that 10% included Steuben County. R.E.A. got about 50 miles of wire strung before the needs for another world war cut off their materials. But demand for farm producrs, once again, went up… even as, once again, the prime workers were siphoned away.

Our World — A Hundred Years Ago

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Germany rolled the dice in 1917, accepting war with America by an aggressive unrestricted u-boat campaign that sank anything approaching the British Isles in hopes of starving Britain before America could get organized to fight. When the Germans also used American facilities to send a coded message to Mexico urging war against the U.S., the roof caved in. America was in the Great War.

We’d had three years to get ready, and hadn’t done much of anything. A “Home Guard” quickly formed to protect Corning from attack, and almost as quickly faded away. (The county paid for their shoes and uniforms.) A draft was soon in effect. The Curtiss plant in Hammondsport worked around the clock; when people came over the hill from Bath, they could hear the aircraft engines roaring in their test stands near the Glen.

Thousands of prospective pilots started training on Curtiss Jennys, mostly made in Buffalo. Willys-Morrow in Elmira became a Curtiss subcontractor (making engines), and did Fay & Bowen in Geneva (making seaplane hulls). Katherine Stinson, flying a custom-made Curtiss biplane, set the American distance record at 606 miles. Corning Glass Works produced tons of laboratory glass, formerly made almost exclusively in Germany.

America bought the Danish Virgin Islands, and made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens. An early spring revolution in Russia toppled the Czar, while an early winter revolution brought Lenin’s communists to power. Three children reported visions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima. Exhausted French soldiers began a series of mutinies. Lawrence of Arabia captured Aqaba. The first Pulitzer Prizes were announced. Lions Club was formed. Race riots in East Saint Louis killed perhaps a hundred or more people.

Mata Hari was executed. Arthur Balfour declared that the British “look with favor” on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The U.S. made brutal attacks on people suspected of not fully supporting the war. Germania Winery near Hammondsport changed its name to Jermania. On November 14, prison guards attacked and tortured 33 suffragettes in Virginia. Clemenceau, “the Tiger of France,” became his country’s premiere and announced his policy: “I make war.”

The National Hockey League was formed. Allenby took Jerusalem. In Halifax, the biggest man-made explosion until the atomic bomb killed 2000 people.

New York voters finally approved a constitutional amendment providing for women’s suffrage (Steuben, Chemung, Schuyler, and Yates Counties each voted against.) New York women started voting two years ahead of the national amendment.

Folks in Wheeler and in Mossy Glen (South Corning) formed Granges for themselves — the Wheeler Grange is still in operation.

Buffalo Bill died, along with Admiral Dewey and Count von Zeppelin. So did Scott Joplin, Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, and Mother Cabrini.

Births for 1917 included Zsa Zsa Gabor, Desi Arnaz, Ernest Borgnine, Cyrus Vance, Hans Conried, Ella Fitzgerald, Raymond Burr, Dean Martin, Lena Horne, Andrew Wyeth, Phyllis Diller, Robert Mitchum, Jack Kirby, John F. Kennedy, and Man o’ War.

By the way, 1917 marks the last year that the western world stumbled along with two calendars. The Bolsheviks, eager to modernize Russia, quickly ditched the obsolete Julian calendar and joined the rest of the west in Gregorian dates.

A Hundred Aprils Ago, We Entered World War I

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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!

One Century Back — We Go To War, in 1917

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Germany rolled the dice in 1917, accepting war with America by an aggressive unrestricted u-boat campaign that sank anything approaching the British Isles in hopes of starving Britain before we could get organized to fight.  When the Germans also used American facilities to send a coded message to Mexico urging war against the U.S., the roof caved in.  America was in the Great War.

We’d had three years to get ready, and hadn’t done much of anything.  A “Home Guard” quickly formed to protect Corning from attack, and almost as quickly faded away.  A draft was soon in effect.  Germania Winery changed its name.  The Curtiss plant in Hammondsport worked around the clock.  When people came over the hill from Bath, they could hear the aircraft engines roaring in their test stands near the Glen. 

Thousands of prospective pilots started training on Curtiss Jennys, mostly made in Buffalo.  Willys-Morrow in Elmira became a Curtiss subcontractor (making engines), and so did Fay & Bowen in Geneva (making seaplane hulls).  Katherine Stinson, flying a custom-made Curtiss biplane, set the American distance record at 606 miles.

America bought the Danish Virgin Islands, and made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens.  An early spring revolution in Russia toppled the Czar, while an early winter revolution brought Lenin’s communists to power.  Three children reported visions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima.  Exhausted French soldiers began a series of mutinies.  Lawrence of Arabia captured Aqaba.  The first Pulitzer Prizes were announced.  Lions Club was formed.  Race riots in East Saint Louis killed dozens of people.

Mata Hari was executed.  Arthur Balfour declared that the British “look with favor” on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.  U.S. “patriots” brutally attacked people suspected of not fully supporting the war.  Germania Winery near Hammondsport changed its name to Jermania.  On November 14, prison guards attacked and tortured 33 suffragettes in Virginia. 

Clemenceau, “the Tiger of France,” became his country’s premiere and announced his policy: “I make war.” The National Hockey League was formed.  Allenby took Jerusalem.  In Halifax, the biggest man-made explosion until the atomic bomb killed 2000 people.

Folks in Wheeler and in Mossy Glen (South Corning) formed Granges — the Wheeler Grange is still in operation. New York men approved a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage, three years before it came on the national level. (Voters in Steuben, Chemung, Schuyler, and Yates all rejected it.)

Buffalo Bill died, along with Admiral Dewey and Count von Zeppelin.  So did Scott Joplin, Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, and Mother Cabrini.

Births for 1917 included Zsa Zsa Gabor, Desi Arnaz, Ernest Borgnine, Cyrus Vance, Hans Conried, Ella Fitzgerald, Raymond Burr, Dean Martin, Lena Horne, Andrew Wyeth, Phyllis Diller, Robert Mitchum, Jack Kirby, John F. Kennedy, and Man o’ War. For them, the war would be gone even before they knew about it.

T – 50: Half a Century BEFORE “Star Trek”

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A week or so back in this space, we looked fifty years behind us to 1966… the year in which Star Trek debuted. It’s thought-provoking to think about what life was like, and how different it is now… but also how much it’s still the same.

*But if our own time now is T (for Trek) + 50, there was also a time of T – 50… a time 50 years before that debut, just as our time is 50 years after. Despite our computers and cell phones and independent Africa and an African American president, that half-century before Star Trek probably brought more changes than the half-century since.

*Do you know what was closer to Star Trek than we are? World War I. When Star Trek debuted, the war had been over for 47 years and 10 months. All the horror of Spanish influenza, the Great Depression, the rape of Nanking, World War II, the Hitler genocide, the Korean War, the nuclear axe swinging over us, and the early years of Vietnam were crammed into less than 48 years.

*On the other hand, those same years brought forth penicillin, polio vaccine, television, jets, satellites, space travel, direct dialing, and rural electrification.

*What was going on in 1916… at T – 50?

*Woodrow Wilson was re-elected President, beating former New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes. In New York, and in most other states, women couldn’t vote.

*Corning Glass Works introduced Pyrex to the buying pubic. Glenn Curtiss sold controlling interest in his company for seven million dollars. Endicott Johnson gave everybody a 40-hour week.

*On our northern border, we signed the Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada. On the south, Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico, killing almost 20 people. General Pershing led 10,000 troops, along with a dozen Curtiss Jenny biplanes, in an unsuccessful punitive invasion of Mexico.

*In Jersey City German saboteurs blew up two million pounds of ammunition at Black Tom, damaging the Statue of Liberty and doing wreckage to the tune of half-a-billion in today’s dollars.

*The German-backed Easter Rising in Ireland was crushed, but set the stage for independence five years later. The British-backed Arab Revolt, egged on by Lawrence of Arabia, also broke out. It would be far more successful, only to be betrayed by the British and French, setting up hostility between the regions today.

*In the main war, battleships clashed at Jutland. The battle of the Somme began, and the Battle of Verdun ended. Tanks were first used in significant numbers.

*Down at the bottom of the globe, Ernest Shackleton and his select crew made a desperate and unprecedented small-boat journey through polar seas, followed by the scaling of a cliff and an epic trek across South Georgia island.

*The toggle switch for electric lights first appeared. So did oxycodone. So did the Sopwith Camel. So, in silent movie cartoons, did Farmer Al Falfa.

*Dwight D. Eisenhower was at Fort Sam Houston. Franklin D. Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the navy. Harry Truman was farming. Lyndon Johnson was eight years old, and Ronald Reagan was five. John F. Kennedy would be born in the following year.

*Emma Goldman was arrested for providing birth control information.

*The National Park Service came to be.

*Americans lynched 54 other Americans in 1916, but still the national government refused to act. So did the state governments. So did the local governments. James Weldon Johnson became field secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., which proved to be a turning point for the struggling young organization.

*Jack London died, and so, after considerable struggle, did Rasputin.

*Jackie Gleason was born, as was Dinah Shore. Eugene McCarthy and Beverly Cleary first saw the light of day. Kirk Douglas, Walter Cronkite, and C. Everett Koop all drew their first breaths in 1916.

*It would be years before the names of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Amelia Earhart, Charles A. Lindbergh, and Billy Graham became household words.

*So – 1916 was just as far from the debut of Star Trek as we are. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?

World War I in the Air

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Glenn Curtiss had war on his mind practically from the first time he took his seat in an airplane. He practiced dropping mock bombs onto a mock battleship on Keuka Lake. He flew an army officer who sat on the wing and fired his Springfield rifle at a ground target, despite fears that the recoil might throw the airplane out of control. As cadets cheered when he flew over West Point in 1910, he was brooding on how easy it would be to bomb the place.

*There had been crude uses of airplanes in battle before the Great War. At least three American pilots, flying airplanes from three manufacturers, had contracts to fly and drop bombs for various factions in Mexico. On one of our many invasions of Mexico, a Curtiss seaplane took minor damage from ground fire near Vera Cruz, for the first combat flight in U.S. history.

*Our Curtiss Jennys searched for Pancho Villa in Mexico. They never found him, and they all broke down. Their open cockpits flooded in thunderstorms, and they told horror stories about carving new propellers with a jackknife. (Just tall tales… you can’t do that.)

*Still, for most militaries, the only real use they could think of was scouting. In maneuvers off Cuba, Curtiss seaplanes spotted an approaching enemy fleet, giving their own fleet enough warning to meet the mock attack. Future admiral John Towers in an airplane spotted a submerged submarine commanded by future admiral Chester Nimitz, kicking off decades of very cranky relations between the two.

*In 1903, Wright brothers made first airplane flight. In 1906, Santos-Dumont made the first flight in Europe. In 1908, Curtiss and his associates made their first flights.

*But by 1909, when Curtiss flew spectacularly in the Grande Semaine d’Aviation in Reims, he was the only American pilot, and he had the only American-built airplane. How and why had the Europeans advanced so rapidly in just three years?

*Although some would argue otherwise, and although their effect may be overstated, I think that the Wright patent suits had some chilling effect on American research and development. But more important than what we DIDN’T do is what the Europeans DID do, and what circumstances drove them.

*Simply put, military aviation posed no threat to America. Neither Mexico nor Canada was likely to send swarms of warplanes across the border, and if they had they’d only have been threatening El Paso or Bar Harbor.

*All the strong European nations, on the other hand, had OTHER strong European nations right on their borders. They had to know what the guy on the other side of the hill was doing, and preferably they had to stay one jump ahead of him.

*This urgency only deepened, of course, once war actually got under way. So Europeans had an incentive, even a desperation, to innovate in their military aviation, where America did not. Even once Europe was at war, we still took a lackadaisical approach, with the result that with one exception, no American-designed airplanes were used in World War I combat, because none of them were equal to World War I combat. Our pilots flew British and French designs, such as SPADs.

*Besides airplanes, Europeans, especially Germans, were also ahead in airSHIPS… lighter-than-air craft, most famously the Zeppelins.
But what the powers were still lacking was a doctrine for the use of aircraft – a set of ideas as to how they were best employed. When doctrine was developed, it often embodied wooly thinking about this perplexing new invention. (Remember that almost all the top political and military leadership were born BEFORE the Civil War.)

*Even so, the First WORLD War was the first AIR war. And that’s the topic of the free presentation I’ll be giving for the next Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture, 4 PM Friday March 4 at Bath Fire Hall. Hope you’ll join us!

Spanish Flu Devastated Our Area, Almost a Hundred Years Ago

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Some years ago, while studying how Hammondsport experienced the First World War, I read through all the 1917-1918 issues of the Hammondsport Herald. I was puzzled to see that while there was much discussion of the so-called Spanish influenza, the Hammondsport region appeared to have been spared any deaths.
While this was possible, it also seemed to be awfully unlikely. By some calculations, this global pandemic killed one human being out of every twenty on earth. It was one of the greatest natural disasters ever, killing as many (or more) in four months than the Great War did in four years. It was a catastrophe on a par with the “Black Death,” or Native America’s population crash under European diseases. The Curtiss plant with its hundreds of overcrowded employees, and officials visiting from around the world, meant that the flu surely hit Hammondsport hard.
I later learned that information about the flu was often kept quiet — either because the whole thing was feared to be German biological warfare, or at least to prevent the enemy from learning how debilitated our forces might be.
Of course the Germans were suffering just as badly, and behaving with equal suspicion. This helps explain why the flu became Spanish. Spain was the only large neutral country in Europe, and so the only one without censorship — lots of flu news came from Spain, while everyone else was playing it close to the vest.
Also making it hard to sort out information is the fact that death certificates often specified pneumonia as the cause, which was functionally accurate, but ignores the fact that the pneumonia had been caused by the flu. The whole secrecy thing may also have encouraged pneumonia diagnoses.
Having had no luck in 1997 with the Hammondsport Herald, in 2014 I struck it rich with the Steuben Advocate, one of two weekly papers in Bath at the time and since merged with the Courier. Like today’s paper, the Advocate covered a wide circulation area, including Hammondsport.
There were two major spikes of the disease, one in early 1918 and another, even deadlier, in August through November. I looked particularly at the period which seemed worst locally — the issues of October 16, October 23, and October 30.
Screening out deaths from military causes, and deaths that were obviously not flu-related, I totted up the deaths reported in these three issues of the weekly paper, and I found deaths ascribed to:
Pneumonia 25
Influenza 14
Unstated 42
Or 81 deaths, not counting those excluded above. (In some cases these were local folks who had died elsewhere.)
By comparison, in 2014 the last three October issues of the Courier listed 11 deaths.
During this period of 1918 schools closed in Bath, Avoca, Corning, Hammondsport, Savona, and parts of Wheeler. Churches canceled services in Avoca, Corning, Prattsburgh, and South Bradford.
In Mount Morris, horse-drawn scrapers were digging graves for multiple burials. Dansville and Bath were reported as being hit hard.
Public places were closed in the Corning area, where about 3500 became ill and something like 70 died. Emergency hospitals were set up in Corning and Painted Post… the latter unit supervised by Ingersoll-Rand.
Hammondsport school children were ordered to stay on their own premises under pain of arrest. Quarantined families were kept alive by neighbors leaving food on doorstep. Churches and lodges were asked to close — BUT a suggestion to close saloons and pool rooms “met no response.” One newspaper grumpily observed that the government’s call to conserve coal conflicted with the government’s advice to keep warm and avoid the flu.
Although cases would continue for months, the worst outbreak tailed off so quickly it was almost bewildering… perhaps due as much to mutation in the virus as it was to the quarantine. By November 6, the Hammondsport flu quarantine was lifted (November 8 in Bath), just in time for jubilant crowds to celebrate the Armistice, on the eleventh day of that eleventh month.