- After the United States enter the war, the export of funds becomes forbidden, and Steinway & Sons can no longer provide support to its struggling European branch. Nor can the company retrieve money from Germany: over $1,000,000 invested in the Hamburg plant will only become accessible to Steinway family in 1923. The contact with Hamburg factory, only recently re-established, is lost again. Steinway & Sons factories on the opposite sides of the Atlantic contribute to the war effort in the United States against Germany, and in Germany against the United States.
- Frederic Vietor’s Squadron A, New York National Guard, is deployed to France as 105th Machine Gun Batallion of the 27th Division.
- America rages with teutophobia: schools discard and destroy books in German, as well as those written by German authors and translated into English, or any texts mentioning anything related to Germany as good; German language is taboo. Every German enterprise in the United States is under suspicion of harboring spies.
- To keep Steinway & Sons in good standing with society, Friedrich Reidemeister, the company treasurer, buys Liberty Bonds. Steinway & Sons pays hundreds of thousands of dollars in wartime “excess profit” taxes.
- Despite all the business trouble of the war, Steinway & Sons net profit is $520,000.