time had enlisted one hundred and fifty-six members, including one lady and her two young sons. The project came to grief because of a generous order for some uniforms, costing something like $1,000, which was placed with a local clothing firm and had to be paid for. It is too bad, because the organization also had a ladies' auxiliary, his wife being president thereof. This is only one of a very great number of cases of imposters parading as officers of this or that country.
Bradford, Pennsylvania, is in the heart of the big oil country, and it had its own troubles by reason of its necessarily motley population. A very interesting report on local conditions, submitted by the Chief of McKean County Division, says:
At the outset we were confronted with a situation fast
becoming serious, as so many industrial claims had been
allowed by the district board. Only one or two young men of
social prominence had been inducted into the service, and
charges were frequently made that the Government did not
intend taking men of wealth or prominence and that it was
the laboring men who would have to do the fighting. The
Socialist element was quick to take advantage of this situation,
and men who left here for the service went away feeling
that they had been discriminated against.
We took up this situation with the Department of Justice, who sent us a Special Agent. A contingent of boys leaving for the front did some printing reflecting very seriously on the methods of the draft board and scoring the local slackers. They had planned to put a banner on their train with such inscriptions as, "My father owns an oil well, but I didn't claim exemption"; "We have a garden in our back yard, but I am not a farmer"; etc. We headed off this plan, but the worst thing about it was that many of the names upon the slacker list referred to were of men who had legitimate reasons for exemption. At the same time, there were some men named who clearly ought to have been inducted into the service. To silence criticism, we had a district draft board man come to Bradford, and with him we went over a lot of cases which had caused trouble. As a result, many of these cases were reclassified, and many men inducted into the service. This caused an entire change of opinion here, and since then we have had no trouble of that nature.
We had one exemption claimer, a young Jewish merchant, who told a very pathetic story about dependents—among
