Albert Ingalls and Jane Taft married in Cincinnati, linking two important Ohio clans, but soon relocated to Cleveland. The young couple lived first in the city, then in Cleveland Heights. They had three children—David, Anne, and Albert. David, the eldest, was born on January 28, 1899. In 1906, the family moved to Bratenahl, one of the city’s early elite residential suburbs on the shores of Lake Erie, known for its prominent families and manicured estates. Residents included members of the region’s financial and industrial elite, including the Hannas, Irelands, Chisholms, Holdens, Kings, McMurrays, and Pickandses. David Ingalls’s lifelong friend and fellow naval aviator, Robert Livingston “Pat” Ireland, lived nearby. Ingalls spent summers at the lakeshore or visiting his many relatives, especially his Taft cousins.
His academic training included time spent at University School in Cleveland, an independent day school founded in 1890. In 1912, Ingalls entered St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1916, having participated in the requisite campus organizations, including the mandolin club, literary society, and scientific association. He played football and tennis and was twice schoolwide squash champion. Ingalls’s most notable exploits came on the ice as a standout hockey player. Some even compared him to the nonpareil athlete Hobey Baker, who preceded him by a few years. At the time, the school was “ardently Anglophile . . . High Church,” and it drew much of its student body from the New York–Philadelphia Main Line. While at St. Paul’s, Ingalls came under the stern influence of Rector Samuel Drury, a former missionary to the Philippines who worked diligently to improve the school’s commitment to ethical and academic standards. Drury often told his charges, “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”11
Ingalls’s schoolboy years, whether at St. Paul’s or at home in Cleveland, exposed him daily to the controversies ignited by the terrible war that broke out in Europe in 1914 and America’s appropriate response to it. As the history of St. Paul’s School documents, there was considerable anti-German feeling at that time, and both students and faculty quickly forged many connections to the fighting. Several masters attended summer military camps. Graduates enlisted with the French or British forces. Students marched in preparedness parades, volunteered for military drill, and carried out raids on various campus buildings.12 Like the strong winds blowing off Lake Erie, news of the war and the fierce debate it generated also buffeted Cleveland, a flourishing city with a yeasty mix of rich and poor, native and immigrant, liberal and conservative. News of the sinking of the Lusitania in early May 1915 covered every inch of the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. When the German consul in Cincinnati released a statement in January 1916 defending his country’s actions in the war, the story received wide circulation throughout the state. That same day, notices informed Clevelanders that new war motion pictures were playing in local theaters.
Residents read about vigorous efforts by pacifist, preparedness, and interventionist groups to sway public opinion. In 1915, Mayor Newton Baker, known for his antimilitarist stance, joined social reformer Jane Addams in praising the antiwar film Lay Down Your Arms. In the same year, Cleveland Women for Peace held a tea to honor delegates to the World Court Congress. Mrs. Baker, the mayor’s spouse, presided at the event. The miners’ union came out against military preparedness in January 1916, and members of the Cleveland Young People’s Socialist League celebrated an antiwar day the following September. In November 1916, Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County voted for President Woodrow Wilson (“He kept us out of war”) by a 52-to-44 percent margin. This result received the approbation of the November 9 Plain Dealer editorial page, which praised Wilson for “his sane Americanism, opposition to war-at-any-price jingoes, and professional hyphenates.”
Cleveland supporters of preparedness and the Allies, however, were also vocal and well represented throughout the prewar period. Many of the city’s Yale graduates urged visiting university president Arthur Hadley to support military preparedness. In July 1915, prominent citizens organized a local chapter of the National Security League and campaigned actively for the next two years. The following summer, Bascom Little, an influential local businessman and philanthropist and member of the National Defense Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, traveled to Washington, D.C., to urge Congress to pass a proposed universal military training bill. Everyone, it seems, had an opinion about the war and what the United States should do about it.13
In the fall of 1916, David Ingalls entered Yale University to pursue medical studies, and he again distinguished himself on the ice as captain of the freshman hockey team. Great-uncle William Howard Taft, former president and now member of the law school faculty, lived just a few blocks away. Somewhere along the way, likely at St. Paul’s or in that first year at Yale, Ingalls acquired the nickname “Crock,” derivation uncertain. (Daughter Jane Ingalls Davison later insisted no one in Cleveland ever called him by that name.) Ingalls soon became close friends with Henry “Harry” Pomeroy Davison Jr., son of J. P. Morgan partner Henry Pomeroy Davison and younger brother of F. Trubee Davison.14 While Ingalls was in New Haven, his childhood fascination with flight, his innate joy in reckless physical action, his social connections to influential fellow students, and the prewar preparedness frenzy sweeping eastern colleges almost inevitably turned his attention toward an aviation unit being formed by Trubee Davison.
By late 1916, concern over events in Europe, where the Great War staggered through its third year, and the debate regarding America’s role in the struggle reached a fever pitch, dominating the national conversation. When war had broken out in the summer of 1914, reaction had been mixed. President Wilson, who “resolutely opposed unjustified war,”15 insisted the United States remain neutral in the struggle and actively resisted planning for possible military intervention. Military historian Harvey DeWeerd observed, “The war was nearly two years old before Wilson allowed government officials to act as if it might sometime involve America.” Newton Baker, now secretary of war, had been a spokesman for the League to Enforce Peace. Editor George B. M. Harvey of Harper’s Weekly responded by calling Baker “a chattering ex-pacifist.” Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, a man of pacifist and isolationist proclivities, proved equally critical of professional soldiers and sailors and general staffs.16
Many citizens concurred. Irish Americans opposed any aid for Britain. German Americans, including thousands in Ohio, tended to support their homeland. Antiwar sentiment ran strongly among reformers, women’s organizations, and church groups. The country’s large socialist movement called the conflict a capitalist conspiracy to generate profits and consume manpower. Traditionally isolationist regions of the United States strongly opposed involvement. Henry Ford chartered a “peace ship” to bring antiwar activists to an international conference held in Stockholm, Sweden in 1916. Reflecting the horrors unfolding on the Western Front, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” reigned as one of the most popular songs of 1915–16.17
Such feelings were not universal, however. In fact, though most Americans supported neutrality and narrowly reelected Woodrow Wilson on the belief that “he kept us out of war,” they still preferred a Franco-British victory to a German triumph. DeWeerd claimed, “The country was pro-Ally and anti-German from the start.”18 Fervent supporters of Great Britain and France saw the war as a struggle between democracy and Western civilization, on the one hand,