When 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip fired two shots from a pistol in the streets of Sarajevo on a late June morning in 1914, Vermonters had no idea what troubles the incident would trigger for the people of their state.
The point-blank shots killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, and set off a series of events that led to World War I.
For the next few years, Vermonters remained unscathed by the horrors enveloping so much of the world, but their good fortune didn’t last. Events finally dragged Vermont men off to war, sparked the deadliest epidemic of the last century, and led to a crackdown on civil liberties in the state.
The United States finally entered the war in April 1917, on the side of the Allies, which included France, Britain, Russia and Italy. But Vermont had already beaten the United States to the punch. A week before President Woodrow Wilson called on Congress to declare war, Gov. Horace Graham called on the Legislature to respond to the conflict. Days later, the Legislature approved $1 million to supply the Vermont National Guard and authorized borrowing an additional $3 million to support the war if needed.
Farming to win
Enough Vermont men enlisted that a draft was hardly needed. More than 14,000 Vermonters served during the war.
The enlistment raised concerns of labor shortages in Vermont, as roughly 15 percent of men ages 19 to 50 served. Vermonters at home joined the war effort. Many offered financial support by buying war bonds. An estimated 30,000 Vermont schoolchildren worked to increase the state’s food production, as did thousands of women.
Another response was the creation of Camp Vail in Lyndonville during the summer of 1917. The camp trained young men, ages 16 to 20, to work on farms. The trainees were drawn mainly from larger communities, where young men were unfamiliar with farm labor. The camp was run in a quasi-military style, with a bugler sounding reveille, the young men marching to and from the fields and sometimes singing songs mocking Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm: “Camp Vail’s awake tonight, Camp Vail’s awake! It holds a lively bunch, that’s no mistake. We’re out to lick the Hun, William to break. As our row we hoe, Kaiser Bill will know Camp Vail’s awake.”
The state and towns worked to protect strategic resources, including Vermont’s utilities. Armed private citizens guarded bridges into the state, on the lookout for German saboteurs. The Legislature approved Gov. Graham’s call for warrantless arrests and authorized the death penalty for anyone convicted of a war-related attack on people or property.
Patriotic enough?
Vermont’s war fervor landed a Baptist minister in Windsor in serious trouble. President Wilson declared Oct. 21, 1917, “Liberty Loan Sunday,” and he expected the nation’s clergy to decorate their churches in red, white and blue, and to lead their congregations in singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The idea was to encourage congregants to buy Liberty Bonds to fund the war.
Across the country, clergy members complied. But Clarence Waldron, minister at Windsor’s First Baptist Church, held an ordinary service that Sunday. He said he did so on religious grounds: He found it inappropriate to discuss earthly matters in church, where he believed the Gospels were the only proper subject.
A threatening mob, estimated at between 300 and 1,000 people, gathered that day outside the church. Under pressure to prove his patriotism, Waldron literally wrapped himself in the American flag and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It wasn’t enough. Waldron was soon fired from his church.
Then a federal grand jury in Brattleboro indicted him for violating the Espionage Act, for allegedly trying to dissuade young men from enlisting. At his trial, Waldron said he was a pacifist on religious grounds. After his first trial ended in a hung jury, Waldron was convicted in a second trial and sentenced to 15 years in prison. President Wilson pardoned him a year later, after the war had ended.
Waldron was not the only Vermonter prosecuted or persecuted for his beliefs. A Wilmington high school student was hounded out of town, along with his parents, after refusing to salute the flag; a professor of German at the University of Vermont was bullied into resigning; and Frazier Metzger, a onetime Progressive Party candidate for governor, was labeled a German spy by the U.S. State Department, based on a false rumor that was apparently started because of Metzger’s German last name.
This last incident was too much for Gov. Graham. When he received a written report about Metzger’s supposed treachery, he wrote on it, “This is a damned lie,” and Metzger’s name was cleared.
Anti-German sentiment grew so strong that U.S. postal officials changed the name of the Berlin post office to Riverton. Some people pushed to change the name of the town itself, but residents resisted.
A greater enemy
By the summer of 1918, the Allies won a series of important battles and the end of the war seemed near. But by September, a new battle had broken out on the home front, as the United States grappled with a mysterious illness that had been exacerbated by the war. Globally, the so-called Spanish influenza would kill at least 20 million people. Some estimates put the number at 100 million.
The origins of the epidemic are much debated, though it probably didn’t start in Spain, despite its name. It might have begun at a British military base in northern France, at a Kansas pig farm, or perhaps somewhere in Asia.
Whatever its origins, its deadliness was greatly increased by the war, which forced together large groups of people who were under stress, and who therefore had compromised immune systems.
The disease spread far from the battlefield. It reached Vermont by late summer. On Sept. 21, 1918, the Rutland Herald reported that 40 students at Middlebury College and 60 at Norwich University were sick. They were among the first of an estimated 50,000 Vermonters who would be stricken.
Graham, at home in Craftsbury, was disturbed by the newspaper reports he was reading. He wrote Charles Dalton, secretary of the state Board of Health, asking whether the state should ban public gatherings. Graham worried that a ban would hurt the sale of war bonds. Dalton said no ban was necessary, but as the disease spread over the coming days, he reversed his decision and prohibited all public gatherings, including at schools and churches.
In late September, Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Calvin Coolidge wired surrounding states, asking for doctors to treat the ailing in his state. Graham responded that none could be spared. Nationwide, one-quarter of all the nation’s doctors and one-third of its nurses were serving in the military.
The epidemic peaked in mid-October and quickly declined. On Oct. 31, Dalton lifted the ban on public gatherings. Less than two weeks later, on Nov. 11, 1918, World War I, the war that was supposed to end all wars, came to an end. It had claimed the lives of 642 Vermonters.
The epidemic, which the war had helped fuel, had killed nearly three times that many in Vermont. The pandemic struck the state again in the new year, killing several hundred more Vermonters, but it got less attention in the state’s newspapers. Exhausted from the turmoil, suffering and death brought by war and plague, Vermonters apparently wanted to move on.
