Club History
Responding to World War I
by Rachael E. Martin,
Club #25 Historian

I’ve written about 1911, the year our club was founded, and 1912, the year our club hosted the Rotary international convention in Duluth – both big years for our club.
 

In the book Rotary – As We Saw It, author Max Moore gives a detailed account of our Rotary district. He writes that in 1913 “not much transpired in our area during this period” because “an ominous feeling was generated over the world when international discontent and war rumbles upset the ideas of world peace which Rotary was trying so hard to disseminate.”
 

In 1913 Club #25 did have two club members serving as directors of Rotary International: Ed Filiatrault and Frank Randall.
 

1914 brought the 100th Rotary club into being – Phoenix, Arizona. But the outbreak of “The Great War,” as World War I was called at the time, was the big news.
 

How did our club respond to the war in Europe? Here’s an excerpt from our old club bulletin The Spokesman from July 23, 1914:
 

ROTARY: A Call to Service and to Happiness. Being an Explanation of Rotary Purposes and Principles Done Into Plain Print By Charles H. Mackintosh

* The Rotary Club of Duluth is at present an organization on 130 chosen from among the bigger businessmen of the burgh.
* Noah plagiarized the Rotary plan when he launched the good ship Ark.
* But Rotarians are reproduced thru careful selection from the un-elect, so there needs only a masculine member from each branch of the business family.
* Any Rotary Club could start a new civilization on the moon.
* There is a realestater to plat the townsite, a lawyer to squabble over the titles, a building material man to provide the raw material for terra-cotta tent, a contractor to construct them, a decorator to do them into decency, a furniture man to furnish the Circassian Walnut, a juice-juggler to rival the sun, a plumber to rival Villa, a landscape-gardener to improve on Nature, a doctor to provide the populace and an undertaker to dispose of such as no longer can be used.
* And starting a new civilization is exactly what Rotary Clubs are for.
* Regarding the moon as an unessential ornament however, the Duluth Rotary Club is starting its new civilization in Duluth where it will create the greatest good for a greater number.
* This “new civilization” of ours has taken itself the Golden Rule as a guiding principle.
* It is incorporated as a Society for Social Service.
* Starting with the truism that “he profits most who serves best” it goes on to guide members to the splendid heights of unselfish Service.
* It practices the postulate that people are put here to be happy and that happiness is only another name for worth-while work well done.
* Each week, its many faceted membership gets together to consider ways in which it can benefit individuals, industries, cities, states and even nations, for there are Rotary Clubs in every English-speaking country.
* It benefits the individual by helping him serve better; by giving him business-breeding ideas in exchange for his own, and by keeping ever before him the Rotary standard of unselfish service to society.
* It benefits an industry by building a better man out of the raw product sent to it as a representative of that industry; sending him back to his own inter-industrial meetings and conventions fired with new ideas and with greater ideals.
* It benefits cities and states by letting loose upon them hundreds of practicing prophets of the old New Religion, leavening the multitude with practical examples of the workings of this Law of Service-and-Success.
* In like manner it benefits nations, moreover drawing them closer tighter than ever before since the gregarious mammals ever evolved, back in the Triassic Period twelve million years ago.
* Eventually it aims to bind the whole human brood in the unbreakable bonds of brotherhood; vanquishing War with the force of its loving labor and teaching Trade to follow Service instead of the flag.