♪ ♪ ♪ (Walter Edgar) In comparison to other wars, particularly in South Carolina, on a scale of remembrance, probably World War II is right up there at the top.

Civil War would be next, and World War I may be a forgotten war.

For South Carolina the war was, in some ways, as it was for the United States, a kind of redemption... a welcoming back into the Union.

(male speaker) Originally, South Carolinians wanted to stay out.

From the outset, there was a great deal of hope that the war might serve as a platform for advancing civil rights for African Americans in this state.

(female speaker) The 371st saw combat at its most gruesome.

They sustained extremely high casualties.

War did bring about the vote for women.

Did it empower them?

They achieved it and then took a deep breath.

You were caught up in something bigger than yourself, yet you could make a difference.

(male speaker) The Army took it over and began construction in June of 1917.

It was like a mining camp all of a sudden.

Small businessmen saw this great opportunity to increase their business.

The flu epidemic probably came through military bases as people were shuffled in and out.

(female speaker) People thought they were experiencing the Black Plague, and there was great fear.

(male speaker) In a way, the lasting effect on the homefront is to turn South Carolina, for the first time in generations, toward the outside.

(Beryl Dakers) The story of the Great War is one of heroism, ingenuity, and perseverance... over there in Europe on the front and also over here.

♪ ♪ While Europeans began fighting the Great War in 1914, the people in South Carolina were still healing wounds from an earlier battle.

South Carolinians, economically, were in a sad state as a result of the Civil War.

The state lost 2/3 of its capital wealth, which had been in human property.

The rest of the values-- land, destruction of buildings, loss of farm animals-- had been horrific.

People turned to cotton, and they produced more, and the price of cotton plummeted.

So South Carolina, economically, was depressed.

Even with the coming of the mills, still the economy was not in good shape.

But the war changed that.

The war brought money to certain folks.

(Dakers) In early 1917, on the eve of America's entry into World War I, South Carolina was more rural than urban, with many people living on farms and relying on horses for transportation.

The textile industry was growing, but farm labor, including picking cotton, was still done by hand.

Jim Crow laws meant South Carolina was strictly segregated.

For African Americans and whites, poverty was widespread, education was limited, and poor health, common.

With their own problems at home, South Carolinians showed little interest in fighting a war across the Atlantic, but by spring of 1917, that attitude was changing.

♪ "He kept us out of the war."

President Woodrow Wilson had won reelection on that slogan.

By late winter 1916, Wilson's determination to find a peaceful solution wasn't enough.

In March, the Germans sank three U.S.

ships, and on April 2, 1917, Wilson urged Congress to keep the world safe for democracy.

Would America-- would South Carolina-- support him?

On the eve of the war, when it looked like we were going to war, within several days of one another, you had a pro-Allied rally in Columbia and a pro-German rally in Lexington.

Many German Americans in this state were not happy about that.

It's interesting to look at the days before April 6th.

Throughout the state, African Americans are holding rallies, holding church meetings, lending their support for the war.

(Dakers) On April 6th, America declared war.

In South Carolina, Governor Richard Manning supported Wilson.

Former Governor Coleman Blease, however, was one of the loudest voices against U.S.

involvement.

Manning and Blease were, in a way, natural enemies, or natural antagonists, Blease being the bombastic, uh... critic of the legislature, not getting along with the legislature, not getting along with the press, having an abrasive personality, having a limited political constituency, but a very loyal political constituency; Manning, on the other hand, being of a very different personality, much more the calm banker, the student of government, the student of public policy who explained things almost in a teacher-like way, who had a broader political appeal, who tried to get things through the legislature.

(Dakers) Manning was refined, a Southern gentleman, while Blease, the lawyer from Newberry, had made his style clear during his tenure as governor in the pre-Manning years.

He was very colorful.

He was very profane.

Some of his veto messages were not printed in the journals of the General Assembly because they were so X-rated.

He and Dick Manning hated one another.

In fact, he resigned from the governorship a few days before Manning's inauguration-- Manning succeeded him-- so he would not have to ride in the carriage with Manning at inauguration.

The first thing Mrs.

Manning did when she became First Lady was to haul every piece of furniture out of the Governor's Mansion and burn it.

[laughing] No love lost there.

(Dakers) And though Blease had his supporters, Manning was on the side of Wilson, and to South Carolinians, Wilson was one of their own.

On the whole, loyalty to Wilson always trumped everything else.

Whatever the President did, they were willing to follow.

The South had been quite isolationist, perhaps more than the rest of the country, but as Wilson moved toward war, the South followed him.

(Dakers) Wilson's family had moved to Columbia, where they built the only home they would ever own.

Wilson was 14 when he arrived in Columbia, so he's still, you know, pretty impressionable.

It's here in 1873 that he formally accepts his Christianity and accepts membership into the Presbyterian church.

Woodrow Wilson's experiences as a young boy in Columbia would have been relatively circumscribed by his surroundings.

Everything in his life, for all intents and purposes, radiated out from the theological seminary where his dad taught.

Aside from the fact that he went to school, sort of, that he went with his father to the seminary, we don't know what he did.

We think that he played baseball.

I have heard that he practiced his rhetoric in church... practiced making speeches.

We know that he read.

The family read aloud every night.

But what he did during the day, I'd love to know.

What did he see?

Where did he and his friends go?

Did they go to the river?

Did they go down to the railroad tracks?

Did they watch the rebuilding of the city?

They must have, but we don't know.

The record isn't there, unfortunately.

(Dakers) The family's plan to make Columbia a permanent home fell through.

Wilson's father left his job with the Presbyterian Seminary, and the Wilsons moved on.

Yet they maintained an attachment.

Both of Wilson's parents were buried at First Presbyterian Church cemetery in downtown Columbia.

Columbia was the city with which the family had the deepest attachment.

One of his older sisters married here, married Dr.

George Howe.

That was a tie and an anchor for the family for many years afterward because they moved on to various other places.

(Dakers) South Carolina's affection for Wilson seemed to fuel Coleman Blease's outspoken opposition.

Supported by newspapers in Aiken and Charleston, Blease tried to use race to stir opposition.

First of all, Blease was a vicious racist.

Nobody's going to question that.

But he was elected by people who did not want government regulating their lives.

Blease felt very strongly about this "rich man's war, poor man's fight."

It was a political miscalculation because South Carolinians did rally to the war, even German-American and Irish-American communities.

But before the war actually happened, the state was not unanimous, and that was true all over the country.

♪ (Dakers) Along with loyalty to Wilson, South Carolinians were swept forward by a nationwide propaganda campaign to rally support for the war.

Originally, South Carolinians, like the rest of the country, wanted to stay out of the war.

But once it was apparent that we were going to engage in the war, the propaganda was absolutely necessary to really get the message out, to show South Carolinians what they could really do to support America, to support the war.

(female speaker) In World War I there was this "100% Americanism" campaign.

For example, to show you how touchy the issue was, Columbia College gave up the teaching of German during World War I because that would be seen as supporting the Kaiser.

You also have the silly things like, uh... dachshunds were called liberty pups and sauerkraut was called liberty cabbage and, you know, that kind of silly thing.

People didn't want to play Beethoven and Bach because they were German composers.

But that was true everywhere.

But since we had a large German-American population with a very strong German cultural identity, it made a difference, and a lot of German cultural awareness or solidarity really began to disappear with World War I.

(Dakers) United in opposition to the Kaiser, South Carolinians finally rejoined the Union, thus closing the rift created by the Civil War.

For South Carolina, the war was, in some ways, a kind of redemption.

It was a welcoming back into the Union.

One thing that World War I did-- for white South Carolinians, they began to take another look at the 4th of July.

From the Civil War until World War I, the 4th of July was celebrated primarily by the African-American population in recognition of the Union victory and emancipation.

Most white South Carolinians did not celebrate the 4th of July.

(Dakers) Led by Manning, the state rallied and prepared to support the war in Europe by working here at home.

Communities held bond drives and parades, raising money to support the war effort.

And South Carolina's young men enlisted.

Governor Manning-- all of his sons served in the war.

And there's a very dramatic photograph taken at the Governor's Mansion.

He's on horseback, and there's the service flag, hanging from the front porch of the Governor's Mansion, with a star for each son that's in the war.

So he may have supported the war, but his sons were willing to step forward and to participate.

(Dakers) Eventually, even Coleman Blease changed his position and adopted a pro-war stance.

South Carolina was in, with many hoping that war in Europe could solve problems at home.

♪ In 1917, South Carolina's African-American leaders were at a turning point.

Educated and ambitious, a new generation was emerging with the means to create a new way of life.

I think from the outset there was a great deal of hope and anticipation that the war might serve as a platform for advancing civil rights for African Americans in the state.

(Dakers) In South Carolina, the 371st Infantry embodied that hope, but like other attempts to attain equality, this one met with resistance.

(Donaldson) I think the very idea of black men in uniform and black men armed was very much against the large perception that many South Carolinians-- white South Carolinians-- had of African Americans.

W.W.

Ball, a famous journalist, wrote in his diary that to hold arms was a man's profession... a white man's profession.

And I think Governor Manning shared that idea that this would be a dangerous experiment, to place African Americans in uniform and to arm them.

(Dakers) Governor Manning wasn't the only one with doubts.

(Donaldson) If you look at "The State" in the summer of 1917, you will see news articles and editorials that call vociferously against bringing black troops to Camp Jackson, the black troops who became the 371st.

Only later was there a sort of concession: only if these individuals were from the South and only if they were trained and led by white commanders who were from the South as well.

So the 371st emerges as this kind of interesting experiment of training former agricultural laborers, training former sharecroppers, to now engage in military combat.

(Dakers) Russell Wolfe's cousin was a white officer with the newly forming 371st.

I became interested in the 371st right after the death of my father's first cousin, Benjamin Simmons, or Bennie Simmons, of Rowesville, South Carolina.

His widow gave me his unit's history, some additional books, and his platoon leader's whistle.

I started reading about the 371st Infantry and couldn't believe what I was reading.

The fact that I'd never heard of them really got me.

(Dakers) The story that Wolfe discovered was of a unit that fought with exceptional bravery, a unit that became a symbol of what African Americans could contribute... and also a story of how those achievements and those sacrifices would not be enough.

The story is that the 371st was this ragtag assembly of sharecroppers and farmers who were eager to come to Columbia to train, who came tattered, barefoot.

And there well may be an element of that, because indeed, that picture that emerges was probably a fair reflection of the poverty of which many of these men came from.

At the same time, the 371st included very literate, professional men, accomplished people who came as a result of the Selective Service Act.

Some were not immediate volunteers.

Many of them were called upon to serve and really had no choice in serving.

(Wolfe) It turned out these soldiers quickly adjusted to military life, and that's one thing you keep seeing time and time again: how adaptable, flexible these soldiers were, how well they took to training.

And they eventually became the smartest dressed and drilled unit at Camp Jackson.

And they were given accolades by the post commander and the people of Columbia for this.

The black citizens of Columbia adopted this regiment.

You know, they made the flag.

The unit, when it got there, had no regimental flag, and the black citizens of Columbia had the flag made.

♪ (Dakers) At first, the Army didn't intend to send these men into battle, but the demand in France for troops and the confidence of the officers and their men put the 371st in the center of the action.

Not allowed to fight alongside white Americans, they were reassigned to the French army.

Armed with weapons they hadn't trained to use, they faced tough fighting in the trenches.

(Wolfe) They were stripped of all that, and they were trained and reorganized as a French unit.

So again, they were doubly doomed to failure, but they, again, rose above that.

(female speaker) The 371st really saw combat at its most gruesome nature.

They sustained extremely high casualties.

They had over 1,000 troops killed, wounded, or missing, and in fact, over a hundred of these men were killed in active combat.

This wasn't an easy regiment to be a part of.

They really did earn their full glory.

That's why the French army awarded the entire 371st Regiment the French Croix de Guerre for their service.

They were heroes before they left to go to Europe, because these men were invested with a great deal of hope and anticipation and faith.

The assumption was that if these men proved successful, as most hoped they would be, that in turn, the nation would respond by affording certain civil, political, and economic rights that had been long denied.

(Dakers) Their bravery earned them a city-wide welcome home.

No one could deny that they were quite honorable in their service and quite decisive in the French campaign against the Germans.

And so there was, in early February of 1919, a mass parade in Columbia welcoming these men back to the city.

There is the presence of the governor.

There is the presence of the leading African Americans, including many who had some opposition to the war initially.

And so they acquitted themselves honorably and returned the flag with honor, and I thought that was something very nice.

I've got a copy from the Orangeburg newspaper saying that the men are home, and they did well, nothing negative like you would think at that time.

(Dakers) But the welcome and the recognition by white South Carolina was short-lived.

Though Governor Manning formed an interracial group to address problems, it was obvious to African-American soldiers and community leaders that little had changed.

They are received with open arms.

However, many of these men, for them, military service was perhaps the highlight of their lives because their future was quite dim, given the social reality of life in the state in terms of the economy, in terms of education.

Most of those men who served went back to agricultural labor, went back to low-income wages, and if they were not doing that, they often packed-up and left the state and followed this great trek of South Carolinians who moved north, moved west, moved to other places.

I think African Americans were profoundly disappointed that their service in the military and their support for the war did not yield tangible gains.

(Dakers) Freddie Stowers, a corporal in the 371st, had fought heroically, died in battle, and been nominated for a Medal of Honor.

He saw that there were no leaders left, so he took command, and he took what was left of that unit and led the charge.

And even though he was mortally wounded, he reorganized the men, and they took that position.

Freddie died of wounds soon thereafter, and that was why he was recommended for the Medal of Honor.

(Dakers) But Stowers' Medal of Honor was not awarded until 1991.

(Donaldson) Freddie Stowers, if he were living in South Carolina, could not vote, had very little political leverage.

Therefore, it was not incumbent upon those in Washington to immediately respond to a recommendation for an African American who was unknown, who had very little political or social influence.

So I think race and class come together to make it quite difficult for all the Freddie Stowerses who served early on in the military to be rewarded for their valiant service.

(Dakers) Discouraged by racism and lack of opportunity in the state, many returning African-American soldiers joined the Great Migration north and west.

Despite the establishment in South Carolina of the NAACP in 1917, the emergence of a black middle class, and a new generation of civil rights activists, African Americans who stayed in South Carolina would face a decades-long battle to end Jim Crow.

I think World War I was a pivotal moment for African Americans.

It was a moment to revisit the failed promises of Reconstruction and the Redemption Era.

It was a moment for African Americans to now begin to make increased demands for political, social, and civil rights.

It was a moment for African Americans to begin to develop their own institutions in ways that had not occurred before among black professional and middle-class individuals.

The war is now over, but no, it's not.

The real struggle continues for African Americans to fully realize some of those hopes and ambitions which they entertained in the spring of 1917.

(Dakers) On the South Carolina homefront, both African Americans and women discovered that lasting change was hard to achieve.

♪ When thousands of men showed up at training camps in South Carolina, local businessmen saw opportunity, and so did at least one woman.

In Greenville, Mrs.

Eugenia Duke went into business making sandwiches for the soldiers at Camp Sevier.

She wound up launching a brand of mayonnaise that is an icon of Southern cooking and eating.

Duke's Mayonnaise doesn't use sugar.

It's a recipe that gives it an edge in the market today.

But did Eugenia Duke alter that recipe because of wartime necessity?

She had what she called a family recipe.

I'm not so sure that that family recipe was exactly the one that she used, but it must have been awfully close, because it consisted of eggs, oil, and cider vinegar... no sugar.

Now, by October of 1917, this was a good thing, because sugar was getting much more scarce.

Within two months it would be rationed, and she couldn't have used it.

(Dakers) Eugenia Duke made the sandwiches in her Greenville apartment-- as many as 10,000 in one day.

(Bainbridge) I didn't know her, but I suspect that Eugenia Duke saw an advantage and took it.

I think that she was an entrepreneur all the way, but I suspect that Eugenia Duke was more accepted as an entrepreneur because of this whole layering, if you will, of women doing new things in new ways.

(Dakers) By 1917, South Carolina women were seeing more opportunities for education.

The state saw its first female doctors, lawyers, and realtors in the nineteen-teens.

A number of South Carolina women were involved in the women's suffrage movement, both locally and nationally.

Even after the U.S.

entered World War I, women continued to picket the White House.

Suffrage had united many for a common cause.

World War I brought even more women out of the home and into what had been considered a man's world.

Women turned out for World War I in ways that they had never done before.

Young women from the women's college sold bonds.

Everyone was involved in the Victory Bond drives.

They were, of course, always headed by men.

But women were there, participating, as they had not been before.

(Dakers) Women were needed to support soldiers training in South Carolina and to fill jobs so that men could go to the front.

And women enlisted, including 143 from South Carolina who served as Navy Yeomanettes.

This was the first time in American history where women were enlisted with the traditional military instead of holding a paramilitary status or being considered a civilian employee.

These were supposed to be women who did translations, who did some clerical jobs, but some of them did go overseas and served as nurses, and many were in dangerous combat zones and talk about the German air raids on their base hospitals.

So these 143 women, although many didn't see direct combat action, were the first female soldiers from South Carolina that enlisted under their own names.

(Dakers) Women stepped up, more than a thousand of them, to sew uniforms at the Charleston Naval Base, to volunteer with the Red Cross, and to do hard labor usually left to men.

There were a few other opportunities for women to sort of push the boundaries of what they normally would be allowed to do, including the Red Cross Motor Corps, which had female drivers.

They drove ambulances, their personal cars, other buses and vehicles, and they were transporting patients to and from hospitals, they were transporting supplies for the Red Cross canteens or other activities, and they were expected to not only have a chauffeur's license for that, but to take first aid training and a mechanical repair course.

They had to learn to service the vehicles themselves.

So that was quite a bit of difference for the usual activities of women in South Carolina and in America.

(Dakers) Even as women went to work, racial lines kept them separate.

African-American women responded to appeals to do Red Cross work.

They were, generally speaking, not allowed to work in textile mills, which were preserved for the white people.

And they did not have their own women's committee for the national defense.

They were lumped together with African-American men.

(Dakers) Though some felt the war slowed the suffrage movement, women did at last secure the support of President Wilson.

On January 8, 1918, Woodrow Wilson outlined his Fourteen Points to Congress.

And the very next day, January 9th, President Wilson announced his support of the 19th Amendment.

(Clements) He had never been a supporter of women's suffrage.

It was a hot issue, but he tried to avoid it and was successful in doing so.

His daughters were supporters of suffrage, so there was pressure on him to eventually do that.

The argument he used for that was to say that women had done such a wonderful job in supporting the war and had been so loyal that they had earned the right to vote, which I think is kind of patronizing, but that argument enabled him to make a 180-degree turn and become a supporter.

The war did bring about the vote for women.

Did it empower them?

Well, there was no one single issue like suffrage that really united women after 1920.

So there...I don't think that much happened right away.

They achieved it, and then they sort of took a deep breath.

And you'd need to be regalvanized by other issues... say, World War II.

(Dakers) For women, the 19th Amendment promised greater equality, but much remained the same.

Nevertheless, I think it must've been exciting, if you had been at USC or Columbia College or Converse or Winthrop or Claflin or whatever at this time, because you felt you were caught up in something bigger than yourself and that you could make a difference.

(Dakers) Many women returned to their pre-war roles.

A few continued to blaze trails for women.

And Eugenia Duke defied the times and kept working.

She soon went from sandwich lady to mayonnaise entrepreneur.

Many of the men, after the war was over, wrote to her, asked for recipes for the mayonnaise, for the sandwiches, and she was happy to oblige.

But then she figured she could do it herself.

So she got an office in a building that had been erected three years earlier in the west end on Main Street.

And in a former paint shop of the Greenville Coach Factory, she set up a mayonnaise-making operation, and it flourished.

(Dakers) Mrs.

Duke sold her sandwich company to her accountant, and she sold her mayonnaise recipe to the C.F.

Sauer Company, which still produces that recipe in Greenville.

We can make 240 jars of mayonnaise a minute.

This plant here in Greenville probably does about 2.3 million cases a month, so we're selling and making a lot of mayonnaise today.

Much larger than, I'm sure, Eugenia ever imagined back in 1917.

I would think Eugenia Duke would be just delighted to know people are still enjoying her recipe, unchanged for 90 years, delivered and in homes today.

It's just a Southern tradition.

I'm sure she had no idea the magnitude of her initial sandwich business.

♪ (Dakers) In 1917, South Carolinians were swept up in the whirl of training camps, bond drives, and volunteer work, and the promise that war brought to the homefront.

♪ "I am not unaware of history "and have been frequently chided "for such a callous statement, but World War I became, for Columbia, a wonderful war in every way."

So wrote Margaret Devereux in her memoir.

Some people might have thought it was a lovely war, except if they were receiving a telegram saying your father, your son, your brother has been killed.

Some people thought that World War I was romantic... which, I guess, is kind of sad.

But the South Carolinians who fought didn't have any ideas that it was romantic.

War was a bloody, nasty business.

(Dakers) War was also big business, a fact not lost on South Carolina leaders in their quest to bring Camp Jackson to Columbia.

A group of Columbia businessmen met one afternoon, raised the money, bought the initial acreage-- you know, 10,000 or 12,000 acres-- and made a gift to the federal government.

(Dakers) There was little time to lose.

On June 2, 1917, Camp Jackson was established, and just 11 days after the construction contract was signed, the first trainees arrived.

When the Army began construction in June of 1917, it was like a mining camp all of a sudden.

They had to build tram rails out from the city to it and railways because that was the main way to get supplies and men out there.

By the peak of construction, there were 10,000 laborers working to build barracks, mess halls, auditoriums, stables for horses... they even had an airfield there, amongst many other things.

So these things went up very quickly.

(Edgar) If you look at the photographs-- and we've got fabulous photographs of all of these places-- they're in World War I uniforms, but some of them look like stockades from... the B-cowboy movies I used to watch in the 1940s and 1950s.

I mean, you're talking about wooden installations.

I mean mud, tents... nothing permanent.

(Dakers) Hundreds of buildings went up, and three months after the start of construction, some 8,000 more draftees came to the camp.

The mood was bright among local businesses as owners got ready to welcome soldiers and sell them goods and services.

Initially, there seems to have been tremendous support because they saw the same kind of potential.

Small businessmen saw this as a great opportunity to increase their business.

(Dakers) Columbia wasn't the only South Carolina community to welcome soldiers and the economic boom they brought.

In Greenville, Camp Sevier went up rapidly on the site of Paris School, becoming the training site for the Old Hickory Division.

In Spartanburg, Camp Wadsworth was built to train the New York National Guard.

Soldiers included a number of wealthy New Yorkers and the famed 369th Infantry, an African-American unit known as the Harlem Hellfighters, which also included a number of jazz greats.

Parris Island, near Beaufort, had begun training Marines by 1915, and the Charleston Navy Yard continued to bring money to the Lowcountry.

From all over South Carolina came many Medal of Honor recipients.

The impact on the state went beyond simply training soldiers for the Great War.

Therefore the communities, as well as the businesses, welcomed the soldiers too.

For young women, it was a boom, because they did meet a lot of young men, many of whom were not from around here.

This was an adventure, and because most young women in South Carolina had rarely had the opportunity to leave the state, here's a way to meet new people and find out about the world.

We don't have it for Columbia, but a there was a young woman, Kathryn Johnston, in Spartanburg, who kept a signature book, and in it she got soldiers at Camp Wadsworth to sign it.

These guys were celebrities for many of these homegrown people, particularly young women.

They were kind of like heroes.

I think you could have found the same thing in Columbia and Charleston and Greenville.

Camps had dances at mess halls.

They also had auditoriums where they would hold dances, and women would be invited, of course, with chaperones.

There are those stories.

Then they would invite the soldiers home for dinner, especially on Sundays.

(Dakers) In 1917, soldiers brought hope, excitement, and prosperity to communities across South Carolina.

They didn't realize it, but they also brought a deadly epidemic.

♪ Like the thousands who came to Camp Jackson, Camp Sevier, and Camp Wadsworth, Norman Rockwell arrived at the Charleston Navy Yard in the summer of 1917.

Rockwell was already a well-known illustrator.

The Navy had no intention of treating him like a regular recruit.

Little did they know that keeping him away from the action would put him at risk of dying from Spanish influenza.

Rockwell was assigned to boost morale by creating cartoons for the Navy newspaper and by painting officers' portraits.

He was also allowed to continue his professional work.

In his autobiography, Rockwell recounts catching the flu and being sent away from the base hospital, back to his barracks.

The doctor told him, "Get out of here.

"This place will kill you.

The germs are as thick as blackstrap molasses."

There are various theories on how the flu epidemic began.

One of the popular ones right now is that it got started in Kansas at Camp Funston in February of 1918, where you had a large concentration of men next to huge livestock holds that were needed for the military.

The flu epidemic probably came through the military training bases as people were shuffled in and out.

What was interesting is, this influenza struck the group that you'd think was the healthiest-- people in their late teens and early twenties and thirties-- the go-to-war kind of young men and women.

That group seemed to be hit the hardest, but that was also the group that was congregating the most, whether it was in colleges, the workforce, or the military.

(Hamer) Doctors didn't know what to do, the nurses, and everyone's focus had to be on trying to find a way to help the sick.

And those helping the sick, many of them came down with the same disease.

So even while this was going on, the government-- President Wilson and his medical advisors-- didn't pay attention to it, didn't feel that this was as extreme as it was turning out to be, and so they continued to allow infected men, many of whom at the time didn't show symptoms, they allowed them to go overseas, to be transported to other camps, and of course, this quickly spread the disease.

In fact, there was a horrible little song that became popular at this time: "I had a little bird.

"His name was Enza.

I opened the cage and in-flu-enza."

I mean, it's-- people were-- don't ask me why it was a popular song, given the tens of thousands of Americans who died.

But that was sort of the beginning of the Jazz Age, the Roaring 20s.

People were looking at things in a different way.

(Dakers) By September of 1918, the flu had arrived full force in South Carolina, making its way from military camps into towns and rural areas.

(Bainbridge) It came on so quickly.

This wasn't something that, you know, you were alright, and then you didn't feel good, and then you didn't feel better, and then it sort of... In two or three days, it was a full-fledged case, and it took a long time for many people to recuperate: three, four, five weeks.

It was a high fever that reached 105, 106 degrees, led to pneumonia, which developed all this phlegm in the lungs, and often, people drowned in their own phlegm because of what this pneumonia did.

You would hear reports of people turning blue, their lips blue, their extremities blue, because the oxygen wasn't able-- they couldn't get the oxygen to their bodies, and they literally drowned.

(Dakers) Dr.

Joe Gettys is 100 years old now.

He was just 11 when the flu epidemic reached his family in rural York County.

With the rest of his family sick, it fell to Joe to take potatoes from his farm into town to be sold.

Big me, 11 years old, took the wagon to Rock Hill, and before I got there, I had it too.

The merchant that we traded with unloaded the wagon, put two bags of flour and one of sugar in the wagon, and I started home.

At that time, Rock Hill was just a village almost, and four miles from Rock Hill, there was a sharp right turn.

I lay with my head on a sack of flour until I got close.

I made sure the mules turned right at that particular turn, and I let them go on home.

They stopped when they got in the yard.

My brother came and took care of the flour and sugar and the mules.

I went to bed for eight days.

(Dakers) Hospitals were rare in those days.

Many local doctors had enlisted, and with no drugs to treat the Spanish influenza, the few doctors left in South Carolina could provide little help.

Many families came down with the flu, and there was no one to look after them.

So you can imagine what the state of the household would be in that case.

And they survived or died, based on their own constitution.

(Bainbridge) They said that the caskets would come in on the train from Camp Sevier and were piled at the railroad station on Washington Street, ready to be shipped elsewhere.

People dressed in black.

It was bad enough that the war was going on in Europe.

The month that it was hitting so hard at home, that's the month of the breaking of the Hindenburg Line, of massive assaults in France, and tremendous numbers of men killed there too.

So you're getting it from both ends: the horrors in France paralleled by the horrors here.

(Dakers) Quarantined, some kept busy making masks to contain the flu, while others looked for ways to treat it.

You had physicians working for the federal government and the military in Philadelphia and Boston working hours and days-- 18, 20 hours a day-- trying to come up with cultures of this disease and figure out what was an antidote.

(Dakers) Desperate for any remedy, some doctors in South Carolina prescribed a stiff drink.

There was a lot of confiscated alcohol in state coffers, so the state health board approached the governor and asked for permission to take this out and allow doctors to use it for patients.

It probably didn't do anything, but they didn't have anything else.

So they turned to this as a last-ditch measure.

(Dakers) In a span of months, a nation stretched thin by war faced the duel challenge of fighting a deadly battle both in Europe and on the homefront.

Well, it was desperate.

The community didn't have the personnel to build the coffins, to take the bodies out of the households, at least in the peak period of the disease.

Stories here and in other places in the state and the nation, of the dead lying in bed for days before people discovered that they had passed away and they could remove them.

It was a pretty smelly, pretty desperate, grim place to be.

(Dakers) Because of the flu epidemic, almost six times as many Americans died on the homefront as died fighting the war.

Across South Carolina, an estimated 8,000-10,000 people died in a 2-month period.

In the world, it's much more difficult, because it affected just about every place in the world, and keeping records was a lot less... it wasn't done very well in a third world like Africa, but one estimate thrown out is 20-25 million people died worldwide.

People thought they were experiencing the Black Plague, and there was great fear.

It was a truly terrible time.

If you go in old cemeteries and walk around, you'll see a number of gravestones, the sheer number that have the death date 1918.

It was during the influenza pandemic.

♪ ♪ (Dakers) Norman Rockwell was, of course, one of the lucky ones.

Despite being 17 pounds underweight when he joined the Navy, Rockwell recovered fully, just in time for the armistice.

The armistice, on November 11, 1918, brought the end of a terrible war and the return of soldiers home.

But what lasting change did it bring on the homefront?

For South Carolina, World War I brought unity and initiated many of the changes we'd see throughout the 20th century.

After the armistice, Camp Jackson emptied, barely a year after it had been completed.

The site was reopened permanently as Fort Jackson during World War II, and today it is the Army's largest basic training post.

True to the city fathers' vision in 1917, Fort Jackson today is an engine for the Columbia economy.

The Charleston Naval Yard, where artist Norman Rockwell painted, is no longer a federal military operation.

Now privately owned, it houses, among others, artists, architects, and craftsman working in the same buildings that Rockwell would have walked by in his Navy days.

South Carolina not only rejoined the Union, it opened its eyes to the world.

♪ World War I is called a forgotten war by some.

(Edgar) In comparison to other wars, particularly in South Carolina, if you put it on a scale of remembrance, World War II is right up there at the top.

Civil War would be next, then maybe the American Revolution.

I don't think Vietnam or Korea would rank, and World War I may be forgotten.

I think what's striking is how prolonged the war was, when you begin to look beneath the surface of the public rhetoric and the propaganda, how violent it was, how devastating it was, the number of horrific deaths that emerged in German combat and atrocities in Europe.

That's something I don't think is really realized or appreciated.

This was not simply a chapter in American history, but a defining chapter and a violent chapter in American history.

The idea was that this was a war to end all wars.

Well, the armistice is signed, and the peace treaty at Versailles is promulgated and signed in 1919, and people come out of it, on both sides, disillusioned.

World War I was a big disappointment, really, and so World War II is, in a sense, although some historians will try to quibble with this, a way to resolve what wasn't resolved in World War I. And so if you see that, it's kind of easy to understand why World War II overshadows the first one.

In a way, the lasting effect on the homefront is to turn South Carolina, maybe for the first time in generations, toward the outside.

I don't think it had an impact again until the 1950s, but there was the potential for an openness.

I really feel that there's an important need for South Carolinians to learn more about World War I, and largely because there's so much focus on the American Revolution and the Civil War in this state because we have remnants of the battlefields that took place.

So it really took place on the homefront.

This was really the first involvement in a war that took place off American soil, but had an incredible impact on South Carolina and an incredible involvement of South Carolinians.

A lot of people have tended to forget about the Great War, but it's important for every South Carolinian to really recognize what was done in this state through them, through their ancestors, to support America in, really, what became our first international conflict.

♪ ♪ ♪ Captioned by: CompuScripts Captioning, Inc.

www.compuscriptsinc.com ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (Hamer) When we look at South Carolina, for the first time since the Civil War, you have large numbers of people--outsiders-- coming into the state, bringing new ideas that we had been largely isolated from.

It also sent a lot of our young men out of state to train at other installations and to go overseas.

So they're exposed to new ideas.

(Donaldson) As much as the war was about a struggle against foreign powers, it was a real struggle for the nation to come to grips with the real meaning of democracy.

It is quite ironic that we are engaged in battle abroad, and there are very intense and violent episodes in South Carolina.

♪