“Bangor Will Be Headquarters For Machine Gun Company,” the Bangor Daily Commercial announced in a multi-tiered headline March 12, 1915.
“The plan is to have a company consisting of 50 men, with a captain and two lieutenants … There will be four machine guns,” the story said, describing the latest addition to Bangor’s Maine National Guard contingent.
America’s entry into World War I was still two years away but people were already arguing over whether the country should enter the war. Events in Bangor and hundreds of other cities across the nation, however, showed deep down most people sensed it was only a matter of time before American boys would be in combat.
Preparedness was becoming the watchword.
Recruitment ads for the new machine gun company appeared in the newspapers a week later. Fifty men were wanted between the ages 18 and 45. A dozen horses would carry the disassembled guns and other equipment.
An armory for the group was provided in Central Hall in the Central Building on Central Street. An Army sergeant previously stationed on the Mexican border, where the chance of war also loomed large, was sent to Bangor to drill the new machine gunners.
On April 1, the Bangor Daily News announced two machine guns had been loaned to the city for display purposes to help recruitment. They were Maxim-Hotchkiss make. No red-blooded Bangor boy needed to be told that the inventor of the modern automatic machine gun was none other than Sir Hiram Maxim, who grew up in Sangerville.
About this time, the debate over preparedness for war was taken up by ministers in city newspapers. The Rev. Charles A. Moore of All Souls Church delivered a sermon to a congregation of veterans and regular parishioners on “the German menace and the need of arming for national protection.” The Bangor Daily News published his sermon May 24.
The events of the past month, which included the sinking of the Lusitania and the deaths of many Americans passengers, “ought to arouse us from a fatuous sense of security,” he said. “….we are overconfident in thinking that any nation is beyond the jealous rage of those whose creed is frankly that of empire based on conquest by the sword….”
Next up in the papers was the Rev. Charles R. Joy, a Unitarian divine from Portland. He became the object of controversy after a newspaper quoted him saying he would rather see the flags of Germany and Japan flying over the U.S. Capitol than see war. What he had really meant to say, Joy claimed later, was he would rather see those foreign flags rather than sacrifice the American ideal of world peace.
The difference between these two statements was understandably lost on many people. When Joy visited Bangor to attend a Unitarian conference in the midst of this uproar, his thoughts were thoroughly aired in the Bangor Daily News June 16 and 17. By then, his thoughts had been reduced to the slogan “peace at any price.”
An apparent response to Joy was delivered by Rev. A. R. Scott of Bangor’s Unitarian Church. As reported in the Bangor Daily Commercial June 21, Scott said there were times when war was necessary when certain great principles like “right and liberty” were threatened. The preservation of these principles were more important than human life, he said, citing the American Revolution as an example.
Arguments like these were going on every place where people — natives or foreigners — gathered, including on trains. A drunken riot among 50 “river drivers and bark peelers” — Poles, Russians and French — on their way from Bangor to Dennysville to work in the woods was narrowly averted by railroad employees, the Bangor Daily Commercial reported May 28. Some immigrants had already returned to their home countries to fight in the war.
Meanwhile, Bangoreans continued to prepare for war. An unnamed “Bangor military man” was raising “a battalion of business and professional men to train for national defense,” the Commercial reported July 27. This was similar to a plan adopted by 400 Boston men who had organized and gone to Plattsburg, New York, to receive military instruction from the regular Army officers stationed there.
Two days later, the newspaper reported efforts were under way to revive military drill at the new Bangor High School, rebuilt after the 1911 fire. George W. Wescott, a member of the school board, had just returned from a trip to San Francisco and other western cities, where he said military training for students was being “agitated” everywhere.
Letters from local men who already had enlisted in Canada and other countries for the fighting in Europe were becoming increasingly evident in the city’s newspapers. A lengthy piece on Dr. Edward M. Marquis, an Old Town physician who had joined the American Ambulance Corps in France, appeared in the Bangor Daily Commercial Aug. 3.
Rear Adm. Robert E. Peary, who discovered the North Pole, made a strong plea for war preparedness in a speech to the Portland Rotary Club, the Bangor Daily Commercial reported Aug. 7. The United States needed “aeroplanes, submarines and battle cruisers,” as well as a military system like that adopted by the Swiss for involving a large portion of the citizenry.
A familiar face in Bangor where he gave several speeches before his trek to the Pole, Peary returned in November to preach preparedness in the Queen City.
Meanwhile, a local chapter of a national preparedness organization, The Maine League of National Defense, was founded in September in Bangor. The Hon. Francis Jencks, a prominent Baltimore banker, “reviewed the unpreparedness of the country and urged the necessity of immediate action.” Prominent Maine men, like former Gov. F. W. Plaisted and Col. Isaiah K. Stetson of Bangor, sat on the organizing board.
Reminders of the ongoing European war passed through the city regularly. Several “gold trains” from Halifax, Nova Scotia, bound for New York City banks contained millions of dollars intended for paying British war debts. Steel cars bristling with armed guards passed through Union Station, each time making newspaper headlines.
Perhaps the most definitive sign of preparedness, however, was “the roar of the big guns in Hammond Street,” as the Bangor Daily News described the new National Guard company’s first practice with its new machine guns Aug. 9.
“Bangor’s machine gun company had practice with the new guns at the rifle range out Hammond Street on Sunday. And the terrific power of the weapon was demonstrated to the satisfaction of all present. The rapidity of fire and the accuracy of aim impressed all deeply with the horrors of war when confronted with the latest and most efficient weapon, which discharges slugs so fast as to surprise everyone,” the reporter wrote.
He did not speculate on whether revelations about the horrors of war might have given any of the new recruits pause for thought. Europe still seemed a long way away to youthful patriots.
Wayne E. Reilly’s column on Bangor a century ago appears in the newspaper every other Monday. His latest book, Hidden History of Bangor: From Lumbering Days to the Progressive Era, is available where books are sold. Comments can be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com