Iowa in the Great War: Iowa Time Machine September 12, 1918

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: On September 12, 1918, a nation at war reached into nearly every Iowa community, asking men from eighteen through forty-five to place their names on draft-registration forms. That day, 283,893 Iowa men in the third and final major registration class entered the Selective Service system.

Registration followed the United States' entry into the war in April 1917 and the establishment of a draft system to build the Army rapidly. The first registration, held June 5, 1917, covered men ages twenty-one through thirty-one; the second in 1918 enrolled men who had reached twenty-one since the first registration. On September 12, the government widened the net to men ages eighteen through forty-five. Across the country, approximately 24 million men registered during the war, roughly 23 percent of the U.S. population in 1918.

For Iowa, the September 12 registration formed the largest single class in a wartime process that recorded more than half a million registrants. 523,478 men registered across the 1917 and 1918 classes, including 217,914 in the first class, 21,671 in the second, and 283,893 in the September class. More than 54,000 Iowans served overseas during the conflict, and 3,576 died. Those numbers remind us that registration was the beginning of a process that could lead to training camps, France, injury, death, or a return home transformed by military experience.

Contemporary state reporting found that farmers and farm laborers made up 51.7 percent of drafted men, a measure of the state’s agricultural character. Yet farm work could also be classified as essential war work, since American farms fed troops and civilians at home and abroad. The war depended on people who put on uniforms, but it also depended on people who remained in Iowa to raise livestock, harvest crops, staff railroads, and sustain local economies. #Iowa #OTD #History #GreatWar #WorldWar1