100 years ago in The Saratogian

Sunday, Nov. 18, 1917

While most of Saratoga County has been raising money for the Y.M.C.A. War Work fund for the past week, fundraisers in Mechanicville are just getting started.

The city has a $5,000 quota as part of a nationwide $35,000,000 fundraising goal. After this afternoon’s mass meeting in the Park Avenue Theater, the fund already has $3,909. The fund will support the Y.M.C.A.’s services to American soldiers at home and in Europe during the war against Germany.

State senator George H. Whitney presides at the meeting, but yields the floor to state supreme court justice Michael A. Tierney of Troy, who “delivered one of the finest addresses ever heard in this city,” The Saratogian’s Mechanicville correspondent reports.

Tierney tells the “fair sized crowd” that he “was a bit astonished when Senator Whitney stated that 180 of your young men have answered their country’s call. I did not know you had sent so many. The record of this city and county in American warfare furnishes an inspiration for the boys.”

Joining Tierney on the podium are two of those local soldiers, Sgt. James Noonan and Pvt. George C. Traver, both visiting from the Camp Devens training facility in Ayer MA. “If you cannot give money for this splendid purpose then look these boys in the face,” Tierney challenges the crowd.

“They do not give money but their very lives that Democracy shall be safe, and to defeat the one intent of the Kaiser to make the world come under the rule of the Aristocracy of Prussia. We ought not to think of laying aside a single dollar while this war is on. This nation can only be preserved by the winning of this war.”

Explaining that “If the war is won, America must win it,” Tierney turns his attention to “those who are sowing the seeds of discontent in our midst,” e.g. antiwar activists and labor agitators. “I do not know what to do with them, but I wish that they might take the places of our gallant boys who go over the top and do not come back,” he says.

Noonan and Traver then get their chances to speak. Noonan assures the crowd that “every dollar given for this cause will increase one hundred fold the morale and spirit of the army.”

Both Noonan and Traver include praise for the Knights of Columbus, which works alongside the Y. “When the matter is simmered down the Y.M.C.A. and the K. of C. are the soldiers’ homes and do much for the comfort that otherwise the men would not get,” Traver says.