We Love You, S.J.!

Regardless of any lingering animosity among local farmers toward our man of mystery, County Agent S.J. Craig found himself the object of a grassroots love fest in early 1918.

First of all I must say that I don't fully understand how a county agricultural agent got into office or who paid his salary. I have the vague impression that he somehow represented the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but whether he was appointed by a governmental or academic body, or elected by the people, I don't know. Nor do I intend to research such a tedious subject to find out. As for the county agent's functions, what I've seen of them seem to involve promoting practices that improved agricultural production (crop and animal testing and the use of better feeds and fertilizers), and also, in cooperation with veterinarians and health officers, educating farmers about sanitary practices and overseeing the control of disease among farm animals. (His performance of that last duty during the 1914 foot-and-mouth-disease outbreak was the primary reason for the attempt by John Gruel et al. to oust him.)

Anyway, with S.J.'s four-year term of office ready to expire at the end of January 1918, he was up for possible re-election or reappointment, and he faced considerable difficulties. Lake County Auditor Ed Simon had made the last year of S.J.'s term miserable by holding up the payment of many of his expenses, including the wages of one of S.J.'s employees, for what Simon claimed was a question of legality but what I suspect may have been political motives: S.J. had powerful enemies. Chief among them was Purdue University's Professor Thomas Coleman, who was in charge of county agents. It isn't clear why, but according to the Gazette, the influential university was "greatly at variance" with S.J. and wanted him gone.

All of this resulted in a "spirited meeting" on January 4, 1918, when the Lake County Board of Education and the Lake County Agricultural Society met at Crown Point. S.J. was present, as was Prof. Coleman, who openly backed another candidate for the office. The Board of Education and the Agricultural Society backed S.J. So did the 40 farmers who attended, but even that show of support could not change Purdue's position. By the end of the meeting, however, the Agricultural Society representatives had said that they were determined to have S.J. back, with or without the cooperation of Purdue, and if necessary they would pay his $3,000 salary out of their own funds. "Lake county is satisfied with Mr. Craig," the Gazette reported, "and [will] back him in his splendid work…. Mr. Craig is counted one of the best experts in the country, and Lake county will stand by him."

On January 24, S.J. was one of the speakers at the Hobart Township Farmers' Institute, meeting in the Hobart High School auditorium. He reported on the previous summer's tests of different varieties of corn and oats.

Four days later the News numbered among his supporters some 700 Lake County dairy farmers, who backed the Lake County Agricultural Association's defiance of Purdue University. The Association had passed a resolution in support of S.J. and mailed copies of it to Purdue and to Indiana Governor James Goodrich. Again the Association stated its intention to pay S.J.'s salary from funds raised by those hundreds of farmers supporting him, if only he would consent to continue in office — "Lake county will secede from the University's dictation in agricultural matters," as one newspaper put it.

By mid-February, with S.J.'s term expired, Purdue still adamantly opposing his return to office and Lake County farmers still supporting him, the outcome was uncertain and all anyone could bet on was that there were bad feelings all around.



Sources:
♦ "County Agent Craig Gets Relief." Hobart Gazette 11 Jan. 1918.
♦ "County Agent Craig Re-Elected." Hobart Gazette 11 Jan. 1918.
♦ "Craig's Job Is At Stake." Lake County Times 7 Jan. 1918.
♦ "Hobart Township Farmer's Institute, High School Auditorium, Hobart, Indiana, Jan. 24, 1918." Hobart Gazette 18 Jan. 1918.
♦ "Local and Personal." Hobart News 24 Jan. 1918; 14 Feb. 1918.

Wildflowers of Ainsworth: Small-flowered Crowfoot

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Found in the soybean field by Deep River County Park.

I had trouble identifying this because the specimens I was finding all had different numbers of petals — four, five, six, seven or more. Finally by process of elimination I figured out it's supposed to have five petals.

Also known as Kidney-leaf Buttercup.

What the Grand Trunk Agent Earned, 1914

1914 GT Rules and Wages for Telegraphers

From page 35 of this little booklet (page 19 of the PDF) we learn that the Grand Trunk agent at the Ainsworth depot earned $60.00 a month (about $1,308.34 in today's dollars). It wasn't as much as the Sedley agent made, and look — Sedley had two operators besides, just like Valparaiso. I had no idea Sedley was such a big operation.

The railroad did not provide the Ainsworth agent with a house, fuel or light. I gather the agent (and his family, if he had one) rented rooms with some local family; e.g., we've already seen Agent P.H. Swain rooming with the Dotzers and then the Chesters.

Wildflowers of Ainsworth: Large-flowered Bellwort

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These guys look like the Morning After the Night Before, if you ask me. And their scientific name, Uvularia grandiflora, sounds like a hymn to the porcelain god.

Found in the woods in Deep River County Park.

Here's a nice tidbit from a website about Wildwood Park in Virginia:

The genus name Uvularia comes from the Latin uvula, the name for the little organ that dangles in the back of your throat. Presumably the dangling flowers were thought to resemble uvulas. A Medieval philosophy called the Doctrine of Signatures claimed that God had given mankind clues to the medicinal uses of plants by shaping them to look like the organs they were useful in treating. For this reason bellworts were thought useful in treating sore or inflamed throats. However, they appear not to have been very effective as I can find no mention of them in more modern books of medicinal plants. The species name grandiflora comes from Latin and simply means "large flower." The English name bellwort is not at all mysterious; bell refers to the shape of the flower, and wort is an old English word for plant.

Unity

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From the Hobart News of Jan. 24, 1918.

So is this the beginning of the Unity shoe store that is still operating on Main Street in Hobart?


From the Hobart News of February 28, 1918.

Wild Mushrooms of Ainsworth: Morel

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Found in the woods north of Big Maple Lake.

As we walked along in the woods, Maya veered off the path. "Where are you going, you idiot?" I said, but I followed. Then I saw the morels. I've heard of truffle-sniffing pigs; have I got a morel-sniffing dog?

These are edible — "choice," says my guide. Once in my childhood I had a dinner of morels, at my aunt and uncle's farm in southern Missouri. (It didn't occur to me then to be worried about eating mushrooms that someone had just gone out and picked.) As a child I generally didn't like mushrooms, but those butter-fried morels were delicious.

Railroad Takeover

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This public service announcement asking for cooperation in using railcars efficiently appeared in the Hobart News of January 3, 1918. It reflected serious problems the nation's railways were having with equipment shortages and traffic tie-ups.

Now we come to that episode of which I was ignorant before I got my hands on that 1918 timetable — the federal takeover of the railroads.

In its first issue of January 1918, the Gazette summed up the situation: "President Wilson, under his war powers, has assumed possession and control of all the railroads and steamship lines within the United States." Congress had given him such power under the Army Appropriation Act of 1916.

Over the previous 30 years or so, railroads had become increasingly important to the U.S. economy, and when the U.S. entered World War I they became vital to the movement of troops and supplies. But a decade of economic warfare between shippers and railroads had resulted in lagging capital improvements, neglected maintenance and depressed wages. By 1916 the railroads were already suffering from congestion at terminals and shortages of cars. The shortages were exacerbated by shippers' longstanding practice of using cars as rolling warehouses, allowing them to stand loaded and unmoving for days or weeks at a time.

President Wilson chose at first not to exercise his power with regard to the railroads. The heads of the railroad companies themselves formed the Railroads' War Board in an attempt to coordinate use of cars and rails to handle increasing traffic. But as the war went on, the volume of traffic rose beyond the capacity of this loose organization, and when the railroads tried to collaborate more closely, the U.S. Justice Department threatened to sue them for violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. An early attempt by the federal government to implement traffic rationing failed due to competing bureaucracies and an ineffective administrator.

The autumn of 1917 saw a plentiful harvest, and its fruits needed to be shipped by rail; the early winter of 1917 proved severe, and everywhere people were ordering coal by rail. The result was rail gridlock, waste and shortages. On December 26, 1917, Wilson finally put control of the rails into the hands of the United States Railroad Administration.

He appointed as the USRA's director general William G. McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury — and Wilson's own son-in-law, as McAdoo had married Eleanor Randolph Wilson at a ceremony in the White House in 1914.


William Gibbs McAdoo
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

McAdoo had been an attorney in private practice since 1892. In 1902 he became president of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company, which built the first traffic tunnel under the Hudson River. During the presidential campaign of 1912, McAdoo was a vocal supporter of Wilson and chaired the Democratic National Committee. When Wilson became President, he appointed McAdoo Secretary of the Treasury. (According to one biographical sketch, McAdoo "is best remembered for having said, 'It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.'")

The USRA did not own the physical railroads — those remained the property of the railroad companies, and most of those companies continued to be run by the same management teams. But the railroads rented their tracks to the federal government, and in all matters of railroad traffic, the final say was McAdoo's.

In March of 1918 Congress passed the Federal Control Act, which gave the USRA sweeping powers: to override the Interstate Commerce Commission, state regulatory commissions, and shippers' orders; to set traffic priority for all other governmental departments as well as private shippers; to raise shipping rates and capital for needed improvements; to grant wage increases to railroad workers; and to do all of this with immunity from the antitrust laws.

♦    ♦    ♦
Well, that would have made a nice essay for a high-school history class; only 35 years late. Tomorrow we'll get back to Ainsworth, or Hobart, at any rate, since Ainsworth news is still scarce, nobody having yet answered the call of the News for "a regular correspondent at Ainsworth."


Sources:
♦ Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. "William G. McAdoo (1913–1918): Secretary of the Treasury." American President: An Online Reference Resource. http://millercenter.org/president/wilson/essays/cabinet/463 (accessed 11 Jan. 2011).
♦ Northrup, Cynthia Clark. The American Economy: A Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2003.
♦ "President Takes Over RRs." Hobart Gazette 4 Jan. 1918.
♦ Venzon, Anne Cipriano (ed.) The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge, 1999.