CHAPTER XLVIII WAR PREPARATION "THE departments at Washington were never conceived or organized to meet the modern needs incident to mobilizing a nation," said the Philadelphia Public Ledger in comment upon the rush of citizens to Washington to volunteer their services. The dismissal of von Bernstorff started a period of national mobilization for the war that seemed unavoidable. The Council of National Defense, created in the preceding summer to assist and direct such mobilization, completed its organization and that of its Advisory Committee early in February, and sat behind closed doors at the War Department listening to the reports of Kuhn, late military attaché at Berlin, Hoover, whose experiences in Belgium revealed the completeness with which the civil populations were organized, and Stettinius, the New York banker who had been the American purchasing agent for the Allies for many months. Council of The Council of National Defense, an ex-officio body whose members were all busy with their regular Cabinet departments, did business through its Advisory Commission, of which Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was made chairman. The seven civilian experts on the Advisory Commission organized as many national committees to deal with raw materials, supplies, munitions, transportation, labor, medicine, and education. To assist in running these committees business men were taken from their offices at "a dollar a year" or less, and there grew up in Washington, beside the agencies of peace-time government, a civilian war machine. The function of the Council of National Defense was to create and advise rather than administer. Its numerous committees were brought into existence to meet needs that were supposed to exist, and if they functioned usefully were liable to be taken away from the Council that created them and to be set up independently or attached to an appropriate branch of the Government. Before the declaration of war, all of the great committees were in operation. In many instances the experiences of the European belligerents were drawn upon; the military lesson of the war as thus far seen was that victory would go to the nation functioning most nearly as a unit. Samuel Gompers, one of the seven members of the Advisory Commission, organized a labor committee in the latter part of February, and brought to its sup- Labor and port the full strength of the American Federa- the war tion of Labor and the conservative labor groups. With armies calling for the military man power of every nation, and with the military program demanding relentless labor from the man power left at home, national military strength was closely connected with the spirit and devotion of wageearners in every country. On March 12 the labor committee held a conference at which the representatives of three million organized workmen were present, and adopted a manifesto "to stand unreservedly by the standards of liberty and the safety and preservation of the institutions and ideals of our republic." The Government accepted the general principle that the livelihood of the wage-earners should not be allowed to deteriorate because of the war, and labor agreed to accept the principles of peaceful settlement in meeting the adjustments made necessary by the shifting of labor to war occupations, the congestion of workers in war plants, and the rising costs of living. The declaration of war on April 6 was accepted with a high degree of national unity in which the expressed convictions of organized labor had a large share. The Socialist degree of this unity was measured in part by split the roar of condemnation that greeted the action of an emergency convention of the Socialist Party held at Chicago on April 7. Here the majority of the convention, presided over by a Russian immigrant and supported by other foreign-born leaders, passed resolutions attacking the war as a conspiracy of capitalism. A minority of the party left it on this issue under the leadership of American Socialists. "The proclamation reads like a speech by Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg," said John Spargo, one of the resigning leaders. "It requires language so strong that it sounds like the use of epithets to describe the scuttling of the socialist party by German nationalistic jingoes and anarchistic impossibilities at St. Louis," said another. The pro-war Socialists became one of the most active groups in interpreting the issues of the war to the aliens among whom Socialist and radical labor propaganda found their readiest adherents. Committee on Public Information Every private agency for or against the war shouted its advice at the country during the weeks in which the emergency was at its height. On April 14 President Wilson added an official voice for the Government itself by creating a Committee on Public Information, consisting of the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy, with George Creel, a journalist, as chairman. The C.P.I. opened offices across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, and became at once a distributing point for news of war activities of the Government. Its chairman devoted his time to lifting the lid of secrecy that all branches of the Government tended to clamp down because of the war, and his organization acted upon the assumption that the more the country knew about the facts of the war and its causes, the more completely would a united national opinion stand behind its prosecution. In the Official Bulletin, a daily newspaper which the C.P.I. published first on May 10, 1917, the facts that were released at Washington were reprinted for circulation throughout the country. As the war went on, pamphlets were issued by the million, films were produced, patriotic societies were encouraged, and press agencies were established in neutral and Allied countries, all for the purpose of laying before the world the facts relating to the war. The nature of American participation in the war was uncertain at the date of its declaration, but was generally Fleet Corporation believed to be of economic rather than military character. There were no ships available to carry troops Emergency to Europe, even if there had been troops to be transported. "Ships will win the war" was the first phrase that caught the ear of the public, and was reenforced by the urging of Lloyd George, the English Prime Minister, before an American audience in London. Up to the beginning of 1917 the Allies had lost more than 7,000,ooo deadweight tons of shipping; 9,500,000 tons more were to be lost during 1917. The hopes of Germany were founded upon her ability to hold her Eastern conquests while her submarines in unrestricted warfare sunk the shipping of the Allies, broke their morale, and starved them into submission. The frantic efforts of the Allied Powers to replace their lost tonnage were unable to keep up with the destruction. During 1915 and 1916, their needs had brought unwonted activity to American shipyards, all of whose shipways came into use while new ways were laid down to meet the foreign demand. The United States Shipping Board was organized during the winter of 1917, and during March and April accepted in a general way the idea of building a "bridge of wooden ships" across the Atlantic. The yards equipped to build steel ships were already working at their fullest capacity, and the time necessary to establish new yards seemed prohibitive. The supplies of wood, however, were abundant; labor was more plentiful in the regions of the Southern and Northwestern forests than in the Eastern industrial centers; the program of quantity production of wooden steam freight ships of about thirty-five hundred tons capacity was accepted; Major-General George W. Goethals was drawn into the service of the Shipping Board to direct the construction; and the Emergency Fleet Corporation took out its charter on April 16, 1917. The Government-owned corporation, of which the Emergency Fleet Corporation was the first, was a new and distinctive contribution of the war to the American science of government. All of the stock was purchased with funds provided by Congress and became the capital of the corporation, which was thereafter able to operate with the freedom of any commercial corporation, unhampered by the restrictions over expenditure with which Government agencies are habitually tied up. The members of the Shipping Board elected themselves directors and officers of the corporation, which they thus interlocked with the governmental agency, while retaining by the corporation device a freedom and directness of action otherwise unattainable. The Emergency Fleet Corporation took up the program of wooden ships and let contracts for the building of vessels, the enlargement of existing yards, and the laying-out of new ones. It developed also the idea of a standardized steel ship, whose plates and parts were to be made in quantity in hundreds of factories throughout the country. The parts were to be entirely standardized and shipped to assembling plants of which the greatest was built below Philadelphia on the Delaware, at Hog Island. Here fifty shipways were provided, with the idea of turning out an endless series of fabricated steel ships to beat the submarine. Before May was over General Goethals and Chairman William Denman of the Shipping Board were in open disagreement as to the extent to which the shipping program should depend upon the construction of wooden ships. Goethals shortly resigned his position, and Denman was relieved by the President, but the work of ship construction continued to expand until the war was over. Food and the war. The view that the United States could best assist by supplying the Allies with the means of war rather than by contributing armies led to the second of the formulas that "Food will win the war." Germany, most narrowly encircled by the state of war, had been driven to create a food dictator in May, 1916, who pro、 ceeded to apply a ration system in order to equalize distribution of food resources. The shortage of which this policy was the result grew out of the close investment of Germany by the Allied blockade, and gave rise to the demands from German sources for a neutral embargo against |