100 years ago in The Record

Friday, Jan. 18, 1918

“It was a day unique to every person now living in the city, as not even the oldest of Trojans can remember anything approaching it,” The Record reports as a five- day government-mandated shutdown of area factories goes into effect this morning. “The change challenged attention to- day. The trolley cars instead of being crowded to the doors at the rush hours had plenty of seats to spare and the business man going to his store this morning, until he figured out the reason, was puzzled. “The early cars instead of being thronged with collar girl workers were in much the same state and a quiet approaching that of a Sunday settled over the city…. Workers in the mills and factories, for the most part, remained within doors. No whistles blew at the usual hour, 7 o’clock this morning, and many a person who had been accustomed to rising by them and the ringing of the bells missed something that was part of their daily lives.” Federal fuel administrator Henry Garfield’s controversial order covers the entire nation east of the Mississippi. It is designed to free up precious coal resources for trains carrying shipments delayed by winter weather and traffic bottlenecks to eastern ports for shipment across the Atlantic to U.S. troops and their allies in Europe. Garfield’s attempts to explain the shutdown “merely make a bad matter worse,” our editorial writer protests, “All the ships in Atlantic ports could be supplied with bunker coal with much less than a million tons. The order Mr. Garfield has put into effect is to supply 30,000,000 tons. In other words, he has deranged the order of business thirty times as severely as he need have done if his explanation is sincere – which, of course, it is not. It is another indication of the panicky inefficiency of the fuel administrator’s office.” Yesterday’s editorial page demanded the removal of Garfeld by President Woodrow Wilson. The Record repeats that demand today, charging that Garfield “is wholly incapable of fulfilling properly the functions of his office.” At the same time, while “there are seventy-five thousand people in Troy who thoroughly disapprove of the Garfield order,” and “such a course will cause the people to suspect every future act of the administration in conducting the war,” our editors remind our readers that “Everybody must obey that order. “They must obey, not because of threatened fines and imprisonment but because we are at war. Obedience is part of the military scheme….But do not hesitate to protest, for only thus can we get a fuel administrator whose orders are of the kind which need no protest.”