PART ONE: SECTION III. IN THE AIR
CHAPTER XV
CREATING A NEW BRANCH OF WARFARE
The United States had to create for itself, after entering the war, not only the new arm of air warfare almost from its very foundation, but also the industry for its development and support. Much controversy raged over the Government’s air program and its progress during almost the entire year and a half and many and loud and long-continued were the charges of inefficiency, incompetence and failure. Mistakes there were, since human beings have not yet ceased the making of them, but when America’s achievement in air warfare is considered in all its phases and as a whole the frank and fair judgment can not fail to be that her development of the air section of her fighting forces deserves to rank among the most notable of all her wartime achievements.
In April, 1917, this country had in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps two small and poorly equipped flying fields, sixty-five officers, 1,120 men and less than 300 second rate planes, most of them for training, and there were ready for its use comparatively few of the many and varied manufacturing industries and the trained workmen necessary for the development of an extensive war aviation program. Nor was there any one who had more than a vague appreciation of the complicated technique that would be required for such a development.
Although aviation had been born in the United States it had not received here the interest and commercial encouragement necessary for its growth and had had to betake itself to Europe to find the means and the opportunity for development. This lack of commercial interest had been reflected in the army and a conservative General Staff had given only the slightest consideration to the military possibilities of aircraft. Not until the summer of 1914 had an aviation section been incorporated in the army and there had been very little increase or betterment in its facilities during the following two and a half years. Even after our declaration of war an important aircraft participation was not contemplated by the General Staff until it was asked for by our war associates.
At the outbreak of the war each of the great belligerents was better equipped for air warfare than was the United States, just as they were better prepared for war in every way—war having been for centuries almost the normal condition of Europe, while wars had been few in America’s short history. But even their planes were comparatively few in number, poorly equipped and of uncertain military value. Aircraft had quickly proved their importance and under the stress and competition of actual warfare there had been already wonderful developments in the size, horse-power, equipment and usefulness of the planes and in the skill of the pilots and the methods of training. But, because the needs at the front were ever changing and it was often necessary to discard one week the successful achievement of the week before and constantly to reach out for new means and new methods, all this development was of less value to the United States than it would have been under more stable conditions. Any of it might have to be scrapped any day because of the developments of the day before. Moreover, so urgent was the need of England, France and Italy for every flier and every plane they possessed that, in justice to their own hard pressed battle lines, they could not offer as much assistance as they would have liked to give to the development of our rapidly planned air program.
That program was instituted in accordance with the urgent representations of the British and French war missions which came to this country soon after our declaration of war. The plans of the Allied forces, formed under the immediate and the clearly foreseen conditions of battle, called for great numbers of planes, pilots and mechanicians at the earliest possible moment they could be sent overseas. Therefore, the Government began at once to provide the industries and institute the training facilities necessary for the creation of this new branch of warfare. The development had to be from the foundation on both the side of production and the side of training. From the cutting of spruce trees in northwestern forests and the weaving of wing fabric to the making of the engines and the oil for their lubrication, the industry of airplane production had to be developed and speeded to the point where it would meet the desires of our war associates. This country had never trained an aviator sufficiently for participation in aerial warfare and it had neither schools, nor flying fields, nor fliers trained for teaching, nor a scheme of instruction. Neither had it the mechanics necessary for the upkeep of training planes nor schools in which to train them. It had to begin at the beginning in all these things, and it had to develop industries and establish schools and prepare fields and train fliers all at the same time. One could not wait upon another phase lest the final result be delayed.
Nineteen months later, when the armistice was signed, the two small and poorly equipped flying fields had increased to thirty-six in the United States and seventeen in France, preparing students for all of the demands of aerial warfare. The sixty-five officers had multiplied to 10,300 flying men and there were 5,460 cadets in training and almost ready to be added to the number of those in the air, while there were nearly 8,000 officers in the non-flying divisions of the service, which contained also 133,600 enlisted men, trained for their specialized work. Within a year and a half the Air Service had been expanded from a beginning of little consequence to a size greater than that of the army in the years before the war and all of it had been trained in the technique of a new branch of warfare. In the production of aircraft and accessories 200,000 men and women were engaged, nearly all of whom had been trained for this skill-demanding work. There had been produced over 12,000 air and sea planes, more than 1,000 balloons and 31,800 aviation engines. During the last month of the war production, which had then reached a quantity basis, had mounted to the rate of 1,500 planes and 5,000 engines per month.
CHAPTER XVI
PROVIDING THE MEANS
Spruce and fir production in the forests of the Northwest for airplane stock was at once pushed forward. I. W. W. agitators endeavored to incite the men of the logging camps to cease work, disable machinery and injure stock. But they were driven away, the loggers and lumbermen of the district formed a Loyal Legion which was assisted by 30,000 enlisted men sent to the Northwest for this purpose, and production was increased to unprecedented figures. The output previously had never exceeded two and a half million feet per month. By the end of hostilities it had reached 25,000,000 feet per month and was still increasing in the effort to reach the goal, as it would have done very shortly, of a million feet per day.
To make this possible several railroads had to be located, the right-of-way cleared and graded and the roads built, all within a few months. One of them, reaching into two fine spruce districts, had thirty-seven miles of main line and twenty-three of spurs. The gravel for the ballasting of its tracks, nearly 5,000 carloads, had to be transported for a hundred miles. Part of the right-of-way had first to be cleared by hand power of huge trees amounting to a million feet of lumber per acre while other portions were covered by thickets so dense they were impenetrable except as opening was made with axes. Half a dozen or more other lines penetrated far into the vast spruce and fir forests of the Northwest. Sawmills were built, great warehouses were constructed and all the cities of the West and Northwest were searched for the enormous necessary equipment of shovels, scrapers, picks, axes, tools of many kinds, steam shovels, pile drivers, horses. Substantial camps were built to house comfortably the thousands of workmen. A kiln-drying plant was erected to insure proper drying of the wood and economize freight charges upon the stock.
A total of 174,000,000 feet of spruce and fir was shipped out for airplane manufacture, of which a large part went to our co-belligerents. It was, indeed, seven months after our entrance into the war before any of it was sent to American factories, the Inter-Allied War Council thus directing the supply across the ocean because the need for airplanes was very great and they could be more quickly made and sent to the front in this way. Not until more spruce was produced than was necessary to satisfy their urgent need was any of it sent to our own factories. By November, 1918, enough spruce was being shipped out of the Northwest to meet the needs of all the associated nations.
For wing covering of airplanes linen had formerly been thought necessary, but the supply of linen was practically exhausted and there was none for the airplanes we must build. The Western Allies had been experimenting upon cotton materials for some time but had thus far produced no fabric possessing the necessary strength. A substitute for linen for the wing coverings of our airplanes was an absolute necessity. American chemists and members of the Signal Corps had already been working upon a series of experiments upon cotton fabrics and they presently devised a method of treatment that made them as good as linen for this purpose and thereafter this substitute was used by both our war associates and ourselves. When the armistice was signed 1,200,000 yards of this material were being manufactured and treated per month. Castor oil was necessary for the lubrication of airplane engines, but the world’s available supply was barely sufficient for the planes of our war associates and we would have to grow the beans and make the oil for the engines of our own planes. Castor beans for seed were rushed from India and planted by the thousand acres and machinery installed for crushing the beans and refining the oil. In the meantime, chemical experiments were being made for the purpose of discovering or devising a substitute. They were finally successful and an oil was produced that was equally good for all except the rotary type of engine.
Not only had the production of airplanes and engines to be provided for but a great variety of accessories of which the country had none was equally necessary. The aviators needed special clothing and equipment; for the battle planes there had to be mechanism synchronizing their machine-gun and propeller action, new kinds of ammunition, bombs and bomb accessories specialized for air combat; planes of all kinds had to be equipped with many kinds of gauges, meters and other instruments requiring the most delicate and exact work in their manufacture, and necessary also were cameras for air use and camera guns for training purposes. The manufacture of all these and many other accessories had to be instituted and rushed forward and, because of the shortage in skilled labor and the need for it in so many kinds of war production at the same time, workers had frequently to be trained for the making of them. At the end of hostilities between three and four hundred manufacturing concerns, employing over 200,000 skilled workers, were supplying the various needs of this highly specialized branch of warfare.
While this preparation and development were going on ground schools and flying fields for the training of the personnel of the Air Service were being planned and built. For the study of airplane engines and of the elements of aviation and for military training arrangements were made with universities and technical institutions in various parts of the country and within a few weeks after the declaration of war young men were at work in “ground schools” at eight of these institutions.
This first step in the training required eight weeks and when the first students to be graduated from it were ready for primary instruction in flying the land for some of the flying fields had been acquired and tents set up. Here, under primitive conditions, they began their work, and kept it up while the fields were being developed underneath the wings of their planes. Construction proceeded rapidly and in a few months every one had its comfortable barracks for the cadets and men of the squadrons, shower baths, lecture buildings, mess halls, officers’ quarters, long rows of hangars for the housing of the planes, and all the usual structures of a large cantonment planned and built according to the principles of sanitary engineering and provided with telephone, electric lighting, water, sewage and garbage disposal systems. One of these fields, representative of them all, although they varied in size, with its hangars, machine shops, machine-gun ranges, landing fields, fire department and its many buildings, covered five square miles—more than 3,000 acres. As the system of training was evolved the fields were specialized and each one was developed according to the purposes for which it was used. In all, thirty-six flying fields were built in the United States, while in France several great air instruction centers, one of them the largest in the world, comprising in all seventeen fields, were prepared and in use when the war came to its sudden end.
America’s war associates had developed a multiplicity of types of both planes and engines, with much resulting loss of economy both in production and in the training of the fliers to operate them and of the mechanics necessary for their upkeep. Profiting by this mistake, the Air Service of the United States endeavored to simplify types. The primary need was a standardized, high-powered motor that could be produced in quantity. Two or three engineers devoted themselves to this problem, working out in a few weeks the Liberty Motor, which proved to be a signal contribution to air warfare and to the possibilities of peace time aeronautics. It soon demonstrated its worth for all except the light pursuit plane and won the highest praise from our own airmen and from those of England, France and Italy. By the time it was ready for manufacture battle front needs had begun to indicate the necessity for a still higher horsepower and the making of these complicated changes delayed its completion. The first contract for its manufacture was signed early in September, 1917, and when the “cease firing” order was passed along the battle lines over 15,000 had been turned out and quantity production at a rate of 2,000 per month had been reached, while 16,000 motors of other types brought the total to 31,800. The month of October had seen a total production of 5,600 airplane motors.
Advising with the air service officials of England, France and Italy, it was decided that this country could render the most efficient aid by specializing in battle and observation planes, rather than by attempting to produce all of the several kinds into which the developments of air warfare were specializing airplane uses. The types of foreign planes selected for these services had to undergo a certain amount of alteration to fit them for the Liberty motor and for other reasons, but when production began it proceeded rapidly, and over 3,000 were built, together with a large quantity of spare parts for repairs. Other types were being adapted to the American engine, which was considered the best engine for these planes, and new designs were being developed when the armistice was signed, and all of these would very soon have been in quantity production. American designers had been spurred to high pressure effort by the needs of the country and among the planes ready for testing, or already tested, approved and ready for manufacture, were several embodying original ideas that would have made them highly efficient as fighting planes. One of these was so simplified for the purpose of speedy production that it required but one-tenth the number of parts of the ordinary service plane of European design.
The first necessity of our plane production was for training purposes, of which we had hitherto made only those for primary instruction. Deliveries of improved models of these planes began in June, 1917, but those for advanced instruction required longer for their manufacture. At the end of hostilities more than 8,000 had been provided. In a year and a half an airplane manufacturing industry had been developed and a total of nearly 12,000 planes had been produced, together with a large quantity of spare parts of every type, and there were orders outstanding for service planes to be ready for early delivery aggregating a value of $125,000,000.
In addition to the means for training flying men, there had to be provided a series of schools for the training of the non-flying officers and men of the Air Service. Engineer officers to direct the upkeep of the equipment, supply officers to keep it on hand in sufficient quantities, and adjutants to have charge of the records were all essential to the Air Service. All had to have a certain amount of training and, at first, schools were provided for each of these special needs. Schools or courses of instruction had also to be instituted for aerial photography, for radio work, for armament and compass officers. Another series of schools for mechanics was necessary in order to train men for the fifty or more trades necessary in the repair and supply shops of flying fields. Much of the work was new to American mechanics and demanded the greatest skill, care and delicacy of execution and in schools for this purpose intensive training was given to them as rapidly as they could be secured. Many of these mechanics had also to be sent overseas, at the request of our co-belligerents, for service in their factories and flying fields, in addition to those who went to work in our own flying fields in France.
CHAPTER XVII
TRAINING THE MEN
Great as was the problem this country faced in the spring of 1917 on the material side of the creation of a new branch of warfare in the American Army—the construction of fields and planes, the development of industries and the procuring of skilled labor—even greater was the problem of working out a new system of training. We are accustomed to the creation of new industries and certain nuclei already existed around which this new one could be formed. We had trained a few civilians and soldiers to fly, but we had not trained an aviator, and had no means of training even one, for usefulness on the battle front. And we were urged to send overseas at the earliest possible moment 5,000 aviators schooled in the developments and the specialties which nearly three years of the hot-house growth of war aeronautics had brought about.
The British, French and Italian Governments detailed to this country, upon our appeal, a few expert fliers and teachers of flying to aid in the early development of our effort and cadets were sent from the United States to the flying fields of Canada, England, France and Italy to hasten their training. Some of these joined the flying forces of those countries and others returned after a few months to become instructors at our own hastily established fields. The few civilians and army men who had learned flying in pre-war days were at once set to work as instructors at the primary fields. The most apt of the American cadets, of whom many took to flying as do birds of the air and quickly became expert, were used as instructors at the home fields instead of being sent overseas for service. And so finally an expert and capable instruction personnel was built up and a system of instruction evolved that represents a work of such diligence, ingenuity, resource and enthusiastic and incessant effort as to make it one of the many memorable achievements of the war.
At the beginning of the evolution of the training system it was necessary to organize medical boards to pronounce upon the physical fitness of candidates. The requirements were rigid and the work was new and therefore the highest available medical skill must be obtained. Fifty or more of these boards were established and in the first year examined nearly 40,000 men, of whom almost half were unable to pass the severe tests. As the months went on, experience developed the methods of determining the applicant’s physical fitness for flying to a remarkable degree of efficiency. The American system of training diverged somewhat, at its very beginning, from that of other nations, since it demanded a higher degree of scholastic attainment, a collegiate degree or a certain amount of collegiate work being a requisite, as it was believed that the mental development thus obtained would enable the student flier to advance more rapidly. As the system was finally developed, the candidate who had passed successfully the initial physical test had first a month of military training at a camp devoted solely to this work to give him due regard for discipline and for accuracy of statement in the making of reports, to inspire him with military morale and to give to his body and spirit a thorough testing in order that those who should fall short under its severe demands might be sifted out at the beginning.
Airplane Ambulance
American Flying Field in France
Then came two months in a ground school, of which there were eight located in as many universities and technical schools in different parts of the country, where the cadet, under military discipline, received practical and theoretical training in the study of motors, airplane construction and other elements of aviation. By means of long hours and close application the young men did as much work during the two months spent at these schools as they would ordinarily have covered during an academic year. The next step was training at a field for primary flying under the dual control system and practice in solo flying until the cadet could pass the requisite tests which permitted him to be graduated as a Reserve Military Aviator, with the rank of second lieutenant. Then he passed on to other fields where he was taught advanced flying, acrobatics, night flying, formation flying and aerial gunnery, and afterward to a specialized field where he qualified to be a pursuit pilot and fly and fight his own machine, or to be a bombing or an observation pilot, or to do reconnoissance or photographic work.
At the close of hostilities fields for every specialty had been constructed and equipped and the system of training was receiving its final development in the establishment of brigades at a large flying center where the men were formed into squadrons, trained for work together and sent overseas as a flying unit. The signing of the armistice found one such great center, ranking among the largest plants the United States had constructed for the prosecution of the war, almost completed, its several coöperating fields able to handle over 7,000 men at a time and turn out a steady weekly installment of air squadrons, each with its eighteen flying officers, five ground officers and 150 service, supply, construction and repair men, trained, organized and ready for the final two or three weeks of experience at the flying fields overseas before being sent to the front.
The system of training thus worked out had been evolved in the face of many difficulties. There were no text-books, no traditions, no bodies of accepted rules and methods. As finally developed, it was modeled somewhat on the British system, with important modifications and differences. But the passing months saw in it, as it evolved, many and sometimes striking changes. It was constantly in a fluid state, subject to the results of experiment and of observation upon the cadets in training, to the conclusions of instructors and field commanders after comparison of experience, and to the evolving ideas of scores of air service men. And especially was it subject to the information, suggestions and orders that came back from the battle front in France, where air warfare was being shaped daily and weekly by war conditions and demands into new methods and new developments. And the training on these fields four thousand miles away had to be kept closely in touch with these constant developments and imperious needs and its methods and aims changed from day to day, if necessary, to meet the requirements.
By experiment, observation, steady thinking at high pressure and comparison of ideas on the part of every instructor, every officer and every cadet at every field, methods of instruction were hammered out for each phase of the work. Each field brought its offering of daily experience and almost every flight contributed something to the accumulation of facts out of which grew, finally, some surety of knowledge. Into the development of methods flowed a steady stream of ideas, discoveries, experiences and experiments, and so day by day the American system of training grew to better results and higher efficiency. Text-books, for the most part, were type-written or mimeographed accounts of results that had been gained the month, or the week, or the day before by following certain methods, with comments and suggestions as to their use.
Many contributions of value to the general theory and practice of training for flying were made by these enthusiastic young men who toiled unceasingly over the problems set by our training fields. One young lieutenant, while studying the causes of airplane accidents and trying to find some means of preventing them, worked out a series of exercises which reproduce the positions that must be taken in advanced flying and so enable the cadet early in his work to find out whether or not he is physically unfit to undertake acrobatic work and also give him a measure of preparation for it. Experiment showed that the motion picture film had possibilities for the flying instructor and when hostilities ended it had been drawn into the system of training and was beginning to be used to hasten and to make safer the cadet’s progress. Sitting safely in his chair, he watched whirling horizons, skies and landscapes, pictured from an airplane going through one acrobatic performance after another, noting the varying appearances of the pictures and his own sensations, and so having his nervous system educated in advance for what he would have to undergo, learning in time whether or not it would unduly affect him and gaining quickly and without danger valuable experience. An important development, worked out and used at American flying fields, was a series of tests of the flier’s physical ability to endure high altitudes. Observation showed that accidents sometimes were the result of inability to endure rarefied atmosphere and by placing the student in a tightly closed room, gradually exhausting the oxygen and noting his reactions it was speedily determined whether or not it was safe for him to attempt high flights, either with or without a device for supplying him with oxygen.
The flight surgeon, specialized out of the army medical officer, was one of the early developments of training for air warfare and soon also there appeared, first devised and used at an American field, the flying ambulance, which enabled him and his assistants to go at once to the help of an injured airman, give him first aid and bring him back in the fuselage of the ambulance plane to the hospital. The end of hostilities saw at least one flight surgeon at every aviation training field in this country and several at each of the large ones. And there had been established a division of flight surgeons for which medical officers could receive a special course under the direction of the Medical Research Board of the Surgeon General’s Office. The flight surgeon’s duty was to keep every aviator under observation, to examine each one physically before and after flying, to note the effects of flight, especially at high altitudes, to determine how frequently he should fly and to discover whether or not he had physical peculiarities which would unfit him for any special kind of air service. To aid in this work, which was producing remarkable results in the way of both efficiency and safety, there had been established at many of the flying fields research laboratories which worked out new tests and special and ingenious apparatus for using them and made examinations and observations of the airmen in training. Associated with the work of the flight surgeon was that of the athletic instructors who, toward the end of the war period, were appointed for service at the flying fields. They were former college athletes and athletic instructors who had received special training for the work of keeping the student aviators in the best possible physical condition.
These phases of the system of training that was worked out at American fields aimed to lessen the chances of accident and to gain greater speed and efficiency in the progress of the cadets. Throughout the war period the United States made a much greater effort to lessen the casualties of training than did any other nation. A longer period of work under dual control and more knowledge and skill before the cadet began solo flying were demanded by our system of training than other nations thought necessary. This and other provisions for the safety of the cadets made our training casualties less than half those of any other nation among our war associates. The record of American flying field casualties showed 278 fliers killed in training, an average of one to each 236,800 miles flown by cadets.
The system of training had not only to produce men for work in the air. It had also to train large numbers for a great variety of work necessary to sustain and coöperate with the flying fighters and observers. In addition to unskilled labor, fifty-two trades and occupations are essential to the aviation service and men had to be either wholly or partially trained in each of them. At first, in order to secure skilled men with the utmost speed, mechanics were sent in detachments to a great number of factories where special training was given them and afterward, as experience began to disclose what would be needed, carefully worked out courses of training were established in nearly a dozen different schools. Government schools giving thorough training, in operation at the end of the first year of war, were graduating 5,000 mechanics every three months. Aerial photography had developed during the war to an exact science, but when we entered the conflict very little was known about it in the United States. Instruction in it was of a threefold character, for observers had to learn how to operate cameras in an airplane, intelligence officers on the ground had to be instructed in the interpretation of the results and enlisted men to be taught to do the developing, printing, and enlarging and to keep the equipment in condition. Schools for training in all these things soon produced the necessary instructors for the flying fields where training in aerial photography was given.
It was a complicated and difficult problem that the United States faced when it undertook to work out a system of air training while it was training the men for air service. But within a year and a half it had evolved an efficient system that set higher standards than did other nations and also better safe-guarded the lives of the men in training, and while doing this it had sent overseas 4,776 trained flying officers, had as many more at home fields, and had in training at home more than 5,000 cadets, of whom nearly half were in advanced stages of the work. In the final test of service at the front the men who had been trained by that system received for their ability, skill and deeds the heartiest and highest praise.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE BALLOON CORPS
The division of ballooning gave important service, although it also had to be developed from a condition of little consequence. The few balloons of all types possessed by both the Army and the Navy were a small fraction of the number that would be needed. The balloon force consisted of eight officers and sixty enlisted men. The only school for ballooning had been rescued from complete abandonment a few months before we entered the war, but it had accommodations for only fifteen officers and 400 men, while its equipment was both obsolete and meager. A program of expansion in the balloon service was instituted and carried out that, in proportion, was comparable with that of the airplane service. Within a year and a half both Army and Navy were well supplied with all of the various types of balloons and up and down the coasts of the United States and of France and over our troops in the battle lines floated observation balloons manned by eagle-eyed watchers, dirigibles were aiding the coast patrols of both shores of the Atlantic and helping to escort troop and supply ships through the danger zone, kite balloons were giving constant and valuable service and balloons for the scattering of propaganda on and behind the enemy lines were undermining the morale of troops and peoples.
For training purposes the one existing school was modernized and enlarged and others were opened, great rubber plants revived the balloon making art, and at the end of hostilities the Army had over 1,000 and the Navy 300 balloons—dirigible, semi-dirigible, supply, target and kite—and the Balloon Corps of the Army contained more than 700 fully trained officers and 16,000 enlisted men, organized into 100 companies, of which 25 were in the battle zone. Plans were then under way to continue the expansion at an increased rate, for developments at the front were constantly making more useful the balloon of every type. To comply with this overseas need arrangements had been completed to increase the Balloon Corps by 1,200 officers and 25,000 men.
One of the most important scientific developments of the war was the result of the endeavor of the American Air Service to find a non-inflammable gas for balloons. Investigation and experiment by the United States Bureau of Mines found a new source for helium in a natural gas field in the Southwest, from which it could be produced so cheaply as to make possible its use for this purpose. Up to that time no more than a few hundred cubic feet had ever been obtained and its value was $1,700 per cubic foot. When the war ended 150,000 cubic feet of helium for balloon inflation had been shipped and plants were under construction that would produce 50,000 cubic feet per day at a cost of about ten cents per foot. As a helium filled balloon could not be destroyed by incendiary bullets it would be comparatively safe from enemy attacks and could carry on over the enemy lines operations of the greatest importance. Both the American and British governments had perfected their plans, when the armistice was signed, to use many dirigibles thus filled in air attacks from which immense quantities of bombs would have been dropped over strategic points in Germany.
Because of the assurance of safety which this non-inflammable gas gives to balloon operations, the usefulness of all balloons, but especially of the dirigible type, has been enormously increased and a new era opened for their service. Working upon the problem of making it possible to send propaganda balloons upon long journeys over the enemy’s country, the meteorological service developed ingenious types of balloons that did remarkable work of that kind during the last months of war and, in addition, give promise of very great usefulness for the days of peace.
CHAPTER XIX
FLYING IN FRANCE
Seventeen large flying fields, divided into seven or more air instruction centers, one of which was the largest in the world, were developed in France for the partial training or final grooming of the men who had already received part or nearly complete preparation at the home fields. During the first year of the war 50,000 enlisted men were sent overseas to rush forward the preparations for our air forces. Most of them went to France, where they made ready the big flying fields at the instruction centers, built assembly depots for American-made planes and, later on, aerodromes near the front. Others were formed into service squadrons and trained in England and France, in order to lessen the pressure upon our hastily developed facilities for such training, and were held in readiness for work with American pilots. Still others took the places in factories of French and English workers in order to release those who were more highly skilled for specialized work on airplanes and their accessories.
Hardly six weeks after the entrance of the United States into the war cadets began sailing for France for training at the French flying fields, in order to get our flying men upon the front at the earliest possible date. Within a year 2,500 young American cadets had gone across the ocean or to Canada to seek instruction at French, English, Italian and Canadian flying schools. But the Allied nations found it impossible, under the staggering blows they were suffering, to furnish as many training planes as they had planned and many of these young men were not able to become effective at the front for a long time. But by the spring of 1918 some five hundred trained American aviators, organized in thirteen American squadrons, were working with the British and French airmen at the front.
It was early in May, 1918, that the first German airplane fell a victim to an American airman in the American service. In that month also the first planes from home were received by the American Expeditionary Forces and early in August the first complete American squadron with American built and equipped airplanes and working with the American Army crossed the German lines.
From various sources, including over 2,600 pursuit, observation and bombing planes furnished by the French Government to aid in the speedy equipment of our fighting forces, the American Army in France at the end of the war had a total of over 10,000 planes for pursuit, bombing, reconnoissance, experiment and training purposes. The United States had shipped overseas nearly 2,000 service planes and over 1,300 of these were at or supporting the front. In the battle zone at the signing of the armistice the American Air Service had 2,160 officers and 22,350 men, in the service of supply were 4,640 officers and 28,350 soldiers, while detailed with the French and British forces were 57 officers and 520 soldiers, making a total air strength of over 6,800 officers and 51,200 men. With the French army there were regiments of air service mechanics including 100 officers and 4,700 enlisted men. Under instruction at the fields and within two or three weeks of readiness for service at the front were pilots for pursuit, observation, and day and night bombing and observers, including artillery and day and night bombing, numbering all told a little over 2,000.
Previous to the time when America became an important factor in air operations, during the late summer and autumn of 1918, superior power in the air had wavered back and forth between the opposing forces. American built planes and American fliers added to the Allied forces the air power necessary to insure supremacy. More and more important during the last year of the war had become bombing operations from the air and the United States had been asked to specialize for bombing and reconnoissance work in both plane production and training of personnel. American air work was therefore largely of this kind and its contribution to the final defeat of the enemy, both in the destruction of enemy troops and material and in the undermining of morale, was of very considerable importance.
How important it was considered by our war associates is shown by the unstinted praise they gave to the ability, the skill and the daring of the American flying men. For their valor and achievements four hundred of those men received decorations. Over sixty of them were “aces”—that is, had received official credit for the bringing down of five enemy planes. The premier “ace” had twenty-six planes to his credit and the next highest had eighteen. Altogether, American fliers accounted for 491 enemy planes whose destruction or capture was confirmed by the very strict evidence required before official credit for them was given and 354 others were reported without this official confirmation. Of enemy balloons the destruction of eighty-two was reported, of which fifty-seven had official confirmation. The American forces lost forty-five balloons and 271 airplanes. Therefore the American Air Service at the front destroyed more than three times as many planes as it lost and almost twice as many balloons. Among the flying men there were 554 casualties, of whom 171 were killed in action.
CHAPTER XX
AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS
As a part of the American effort for effective prosecution of the war in the air, American skill, ingenuity, knowledge and determination in research solved some problems in air navigation and air fighting that will be contributions as important to aeronautics in peace time as they were in war, when they helped to turn the tide of battle against the enemy. The account of American achievement in the delivery of telling strokes would hardly be complete without a summary of these developments, discoveries and new applications of facts or methods already known.
Of great importance was the devising of the Liberty Motor, which met a keenly felt need for a high-powered engine for use in battle and observation planes and also made possible rapid production of motors in large quantities. Not only did this aid our war associates and hasten our own progress toward making our influence decisive at the front but it will have an important influence upon the commercial future of the airplane.
The discovery of a method for obtaining helium in large quantities at a low cost from natural gas will have results of the highest consequence for air navigation. Being non-inflammable it makes the dirigible a safe means of transport by air and so greatly increases the possibilities of long distance flights above both oceans and continents. The propaganda balloons devised by the meteorological and other services of the United States were most useful in the dissemination of information in enemy countries, where the results were important in the undermining of morale. They also make possible the mapping of the air highways across the Atlantic and the observation of air temperatures and air currents—a service which will be of so much importance to the future of aviation that it can not yet be estimated.
The ingenuity and resourcefulness which found a means of treating cotton fabric to make it as good as linen for the covering of airplane wings made a contribution of signal value to American effort in the war, for without it our air program would have been completely balked. Other nations had attempted to solve the same problem and had devised cotton substitutes for linen, but none of them had proved equal to the strain which airplane wings must bear. The American process gave a substitute as good as linen, and better in some respects, and it has already proved a contribution of very great value to the building of airplanes for commercial purposes, for it simplifies the obtaining of raw material and lessens the cost of production.
Many problems connected with work in the air were under study by scientific experts in the army service when the armistice was signed and many smaller problems had been solved and contributions of less value had been made. Among them was the devising of a new and improved compass for air use; the developing of new and more serviceable cameras for airplanes; the construction of a leak-proof tank for airplanes which lessens the dangers of flying; the devising of several kinds of ingenious signaling lamps for both day and night use. Several new types of planes were developed under the urgency of the country’s needs that make important aeronautical advances.
One of the most important of all the airplane improvements of the entire war was the developing and the successful application by members of the Bureau of Aircraft Production to American airplanes of the radio telephone. It made possible voice communication between planes in the air and between the ground and the planes. For some time before the armistice was signed squadrons of American planes at the front were being maneuvered and fought by radio telephone and German orders had been insistent that an American plane thus equipped should be shot down and brought to the rear for examination. Important for war purposes as was this development, the result of months of investigation and experiment, its possibilities and its value for peace time uses are even greater.
Although not completed in time for war use, an invention for the control and direction by wireless from the air of boats and torpedoes in the water and of airplanes from the ground was mainly developed under the spur of war needs and its promise was high for decisive war usefulness, as it is also for peace-time purposes.
To create a new industry and bring it into quantity production; to work out a method of instruction and training; to train thousands of fliers in all the specialized branches of flying to a high degree of skill; to train the tens of thousands of mechanics necessary for the upkeep and supply of a large aviation service; to bring that service up from a point of utter negligibility to a state of such efficiency and importance that it gave aid of high value on the Western front; and during the same time to make contributions of the highest consequence to air navigation—that is the summing up of America’s achievement in the air, in a year and a half, for the prosecution of the war.
PART TWO
THE NATION BEHIND THE FIGHTERS
CHAPTER XXI
FINANCING THE WAR
Statistics of financial operations usually make dull and dreary reading for all who are not professional financiers. But every figure in the financing of our share in the great war glows with interest. For it is illumined by the high flame of patriotism and the eager wish to serve the needs and the ideals of the nation that animated the whole people. The story of the financing of the war is the story of the enthusiastic giving by young and old, rich and poor, high and lowly, all over the country, of all that their government asked in such overflowing measure as far exceeded its requests. Willingly they took up the heavy burden of increased taxes and gladly they carried to triumphant success four huge loans of government bonds, thus providing an enormous reservoir of credit that enabled the government to pay its mountainous bills, to give a helping hand to other nations, to bend all its energies to the prosecution of the war, and to carry the country over from a peace to a war basis without shock or financial disturbance.
The total cost of the war to the United States, down to the signing of the armistice, was, in round numbers, something over $21,000,000,000. The unavoidable continuation for a period of the expenses of the war establishment will have added $10,205,000,000 to that sum by the end of June, 1919, and the complete return of the country to a peace basis will somewhat increase that sum. However, a considerable portion, probably more than one-quarter, will be reclaimed from values gained or salvaged from the properties in which it was invested. Loans to the nations associated with us in the war, of which ten asked for credits, amounted, at the cessation of hostilities, to $8,000,000,000, and were increased by $2,000,000,000 more during the next six months. That sum will in time be removed from the country’s net war expenditure. But $21,000,000,000 in excess of the nation’s usual outlay for the carrying on of its governmental affairs had to be raised quickly and, for the most part, expended as soon as collected. The plan of the Government for financing the war provided for the raising of approximately one-third of this sum by taxation and from customs duties and other usual sources and the remainder by bonds and certificates maturing in from five to thirty years. Therefore the entire cost of the war will be borne practically by those now living who as mature persons have been a part of it or who as children have witnessed or aided the work for it of their elders.
Accustomed hardly at all to direct taxation, the people nevertheless took up readily a war burden of income and excess profits taxes far heavier than anything they had ever dreamed of before. For the first time in their lives millions of people were called upon to make direct contributions to the support of the Federal Government. The sum of $3,694,000,000 raised by direct taxation was the largest tax ever paid by any country and represented a larger proportion of the nation’s war budget than any other belligerent engaged in the great war had been able to defray from tax revenues. About seven-eighths of this sum came from taxes on income and excess profits and the remainder from taxes on liquors and tobacco. Only about $22,000,000 of the revenue from incomes was paid by those having incomes of $3,000 or less, the bulk of it coming from large fortunes and excess profits.
The story of the four great Liberty Loans that preceded the signing of the armistice can never be adequately written. It is regrettable that it cannot be told in all its richness of enthusiasm and desire to be of service, its hard and willing work, and its lavish outpouring of money from men, women and children of every economic class and social condition who thus proved their determination to support the men in khaki who had gone overseas to maintain the integrity and uphold the ideals of the American Union. For if it could be told in all that fullness it would be one of those great stories of humanity that for centuries retain their vital spark and their power to thrill and inspire. A flame of passionate purpose swept the country and caught into its burning ardor almost every home in the land, whether on isolated farms, in remote mountain valleys, in thriving towns, on poor city streets, or on mansion-lined avenues. The nation asked the people to buy, in the four loans, a total of $14,000,000,000 worth of bonds, and they over-subscribed even this vast amount by $4,800,000,000. It was by far the greatest financial achievement ever carried through by any nation in response to appeals to its people.
The First Liberty Loan took place in May and June, 1917, when subscriptions were asked for bonds to the value of $2,000,000,000. There was an oversubscription of more than fifty per cent, amounting, in round numbers, to $1,035,000,000. But as the issue was limited to the amount offered none of the oversubscriptions could be taken. There were over 4,000,000 individual subscriptions, of which ninety-nine per cent were for amounts ranging from $50 to $10,000. There were only twenty-one subscriptions for amounts of $5,000,000 and over, and they aggregated somewhat less than $190,000,000.
The Second Liberty Loan occurred in October, 1917, the amount asked for being $3,000,000,000. The final returns showed an oversubscription of fifty-four per cent, or somewhat more than $1,617,000,000, half of which the Treasury Department was authorized to accept. The loan was taken by 9,400,000 men and women, of whom ninety-nine per cent, subscribing in amounts ranging from $50 to $50,000, took nearly two and a half billion dollars.
The Third Liberty Loan took place in April, 1918, opening on the anniversary of our entrance into the war, when bonds were offered to the amount of $3,000,000,000. These were over-subscribed by more than $1,158,000,000, the full amount being allotted by the Treasury Department. The number of subscribers was 18,300,000, of whom 18,285,000 subscribed for amounts ranging from $50 to $10,000.
The Fourth Liberty Loan followed in October, 1918, the request being for $6,000,000,000. The amount asked for equaled the combined requests of the Second and the Third Loans, all three occurring within one year. It was the largest single loan any nation, at that time, had ever asked of its people and was described by the Secretary of the Treasury as “the greatest financial achievement of all history.” No American can fail to feel that it was a privilege and a milestone in his life to witness and be a part of the patriotic fervor that carried it to a triumphant conclusion. The influenza epidemic that swept the country during the period of the loan kept many hundreds of thousands of people in sick-beds or sent them to their graves, disorganized business for many weeks, closed schools, churches, theaters, and all public assemblies in many places and everywhere interfered seriously with the progress of the campaign. Nevertheless, it was over-subscribed by almost $1,000,000,000. More than 21,000,000 people subscribed for bonds, thus making, if five persons be counted to the family, an average of a bond for every family in the country.
The rising tide of the nation’s spirit was marked by the increase of subscribers from loan to loan. The number subscribing to the second loan doubled those to the first, and the third almost doubled those to the second, while the fourth made a huge leap forward of 3,000,000 subscribers beyond the third. The over-subscription to the Fourth Liberty Loan, all of which was allotted, was sixteen and a half per cent. As in the previous loans, the great bulk of the securities taken was in the smaller amounts, thus proving the almost unlimited extent to which the mass of the people, of small fortune, were willing to stand behind the government with their savings.
Their spirit was all the more notable because of the fact that the American people have never been accustomed to purchase government bonds and have never sought, in any considerable number, bond investments of any kind. Each bond sale, with cumulative energy and enthusiasm that found their climax in the fourth, was made the medium of a great informative and patriotic campaign that sought to bring the meaning of the war, the aims and ideals of America and the imperative necessity of the winning of the conflict as soon as possible straight home to the heart of every American. Hundreds of thousands of workers talked and sang to assemblages and to crowds on the streets, carried on house to house canvasses, received contributions at booths in hotels, banks, public places of every sort. Cities and towns were gay with posters, banners and parades and the flags of America and the Allies floated from poles and house-tops and windows. Soldiers returning from the front told the American people in hundreds of addresses why their money was needed for the men on the fighting lines. Trophies of war, captured from the enemy, taken over the country everywhere aroused enthusiasm. Artists gave their talent and skill in the making of posters that had nation-wide display. Men and women of prominence organized meetings and made addresses, and societies, newspapers and press associations aided in many ways. During the third and fourth campaigns it is estimated that not less than 2,000,000 men and women devoted themselves to helping the sale of the bonds.
The work done by the National Woman’s Liberty Loan Committee, of which more detailed description is given in the chapter dealing with “The Work of Women for the War,” deserves mention here because of the importance of its contribution to the success of the loans. When the committee was appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury in May, 1917, it was made independent of all other loan organizations and given the status of a Bureau of the United States Treasury. It was a unique pioneer, for it was the first executive committee of women in the Government of the United States. When it was established the campaign for the First Liberty Loan was already in full swing, but it made a beginning, produced some good results and then bent its energies to thorough organization. It had a county chairman in practically every one of the thirty-two hundred counties in the United States, with 49,500 associate chairmen organizing subordinate units, and in cities, towns, villages, farming regions, mountain and desert districts, its members canvassed for subscriptions from house to house, by carriage, by motor, by horseback and on foot, in rain or shine, in mud or dust. In the Fourth Liberty Loan campaign there were nearly 1,000,000 working members of the Woman’s Committee, every one of whom was busy as organizer, or canvasser, or both. In the Second Liberty Loan the organization was officially credited with the raising of $1,000,000,000 and in the Third Loan with a similar sum, while in the Fourth the Woman’s Committee sold bonds to the amount of $1,500,000,000. The total contribution of the Committee to the three loans for which it worked was, therefore, one-fourth of the total asked for these three loans and only a slightly smaller proportion of the total subscriptions.
One of the most significant factors in the financing of the war was the contribution of the War Savings Societies. For what they gave was the result of small economies and of a thrift for which the American people have never been notable. Wasteful and prodigal beyond any other nation, America, asked to economize for the sake of her soldiers, began saving pennies and nickels and quarters as nobody had ever dreamed she could, or would. The National War Savings Committee was appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury in December, 1917, and under it state, county, city and town committees were soon organized. All their members began preaching and practicing the gospel of thrift and asking men, women and children to save in every possible way and invest the results of their small savings and economies in thrift stamps costing twenty-five cents each. Sixteen of these stamps were exchangeable, with a cash payment of a few cents, for a war savings certificate redeemable in five years at a value of five dollars.
A nation-wide campaign of education for thrift and economy and of organization for practical result enlisted the services of many men prominent in business affairs. During the first three months of the campaign more than 18,000 incorporated banks and trust companies agreed to become authorized agents for the sale of war savings securities. The work spread all over the country, from Alaska to Panama and from Hawaii to Porto Rico. By the first of November, 1918, 150,000 War Savings Societies had been organized and hundreds of thousands of workers were selling stamps and aiding in the distribution of literature and the work of organization. More than a thousand periodicals gave free space to the advertising of the campaign, affording, approximately, a circulation of 55,000,000. Labor organizations and women’s societies, schools, churches, clubs of many kinds, young people’s organizations, the Boy Scouts being especially efficient, coöperated with important results. Thrift literature was placed in practically every school in the United States. The monthly cash receipts from the sale of thrift and war-savings stamps began with $19,236,000 in December, 1917, and increased with every month, reaching their highest point in the following July with $211,417,000. During the last ten days, of that month the receipts were at the rate of over $7,000,000 for every banking day—enough to have financed the entire United States Government in the years before the war.
Up to November 1, 1918, the cash receipts from the sales of these stamps totaled $834,253,000, representing a maturity value of over $1,000,000,000. The achievements and influence of these societies were so remarkable and so beneficial that probably they will be continued and become a permanent factor in the finances of the nation.
Through the Bureau of War Risk Insurance of the Department of the Treasury the nation made generous provision for its fighting forces and their dependents. No other government had ever provided for them so liberally, nor had any other, not even excepting our own in previous wars, gone about the business in so just and so scientific a manner. Established at the beginning of the world war to insure the hulls and cargoes of American vessels against the risks of war, the scope of the Bureau was enlarged after our entrance into the conflict to include the personnel of the merchant marine and the officers, enlisted men and nurses of the Army and the Navy. It had also in its charge the compensation awards for death or disability to be paid to the men of these services or their dependents and the payment of allotments to their families. So enormous was the work of the Bureau that it soon became one of the greatest of business enterprises and beyond question the largest life insurance concern in the world. It had written, at the end of hostilities, 4,000,000 policies totaling over $37,000,000,000 and equaling in amount the total life insurance in force at that time in all American companies, ordinary, industrial and fraternal, both at home and abroad. The maximum policy that could be taken out was for $10,000 and the average taken was for about $8,750. Premiums to the end of the year amounted to $630,000,000. At the signing of the armistice the Bureau was issuing checks for compensation awards, allotments and insurance averaging a million per month in number and calling for the payment of a million dollars a day. It then had on file 30,000,000 individual insurance records of various kinds and, in addition, there were afterwards brought from France twenty-six tons of such records of insurance issued after the men had gone overseas.
The enormous amount of work done by this Bureau was only one factor in the wartime expansion of the duties of the Treasury Department that brought about grave problems of administration. Thousands of new employees were needed for the vastly increased work of the Internal Revenue Bureau, with its new phases due to the inauguration of direct personal taxation, and thousands more for the work of the War Risk Insurance Bureau, the new tasks of each Bureau calling for special skill. The Insurance Bureau had 13,000 employees, recruited and trained in a year. Other expansions made necessary still more thousands of workers. Office space for them and for the records that must be kept had to be provided, the employees had to be found and the greater part of them had to be trained for their special tasks. The problem of training was met by establishing schools within the Treasury Department in which intensive work prepared applicants for their duties in a short time.
CHAPTER XXII
THE BRIDGE OF BOATS
The primary need of this country when it entered the war was that of ships. The necessity was urgent and it was evident that they would have to be provided in constantly increasing number by dozens and scores and hundreds, for a great army would have to be ferried across the Atlantic, with munitions in enormous amount and mountains of supplies, equipments and food. Unless a bridge of boats could be thrust across the ocean, and it could be renewed as fast as destroyed by submarine warfare, nothing that this nation could do in the prosecution of the war would be of the least value, for all her effort would be paralyzed. The enemy was depending upon submarine operations to paralyze that effort and was confident it could be done.
The U-boats were sinking ships in 1917 at the rate of 6,000,000 tons a year, and destruction had so much exceeded construction that the world’s supply of shipping had been greatly depleted. What remained was not sufficient to meet the already existing needs and the submarine inroads upon it were steadily lessening its tonnage. Therefore the United States would have to build ships, and more ships. If the submarines sunk them, more would have to be produced to take their places. And so the production of ships became for America the primary and most pressing problem of her war effort.
But for many decades America had not been a ship building nation. When she entered the war her ships were carrying a little less than nine and seven-tenths per cent of her own imports and exports. In the whole country there were only sixty-one ship-yards, both steel and wood, totaling 235 ways. About three-quarters of the capacity of the steel ship-yards, of which there were thirty-seven, had been already preëmpted for the essential expansion of the navy, and many of the wooden yards were unfit for modern ship-building. Less than 50,000 men were working in these yards, their number representing, probably, the sum total of the workers in this country whose industrial training had prepared them for ship-building tasks. And among the men accustomed to the organizing and carrying through of great construction enterprises only a scant few had had experience in the building of ships. They had built railroads and engines and cities and bridges and dams and machinery, but not ships. In short, the country was so scantily supplied with the facilities, the experience and the skill needed for the production of ships as to be next door to destitute of them. And ships were its primary and most urgent need.
The nation sprang to meet that need with energy and determination. There were at first delays and faulty organization and disagreements that interfered with the early progress of the work and at the time greatly irritated the country. But at the signing of the armistice the sixty-one shipyards had been increased to more than two hundred, all at work upon steel, wood, or composite ships, the 235 ways had grown to over 1,000, and nearly 400,000 workers were building ships, with 300,000 more in the essential allied trades.
At that time some of the largest shipyards in the world were in the United States, their sites having been transformed in one year from waste land to huge industrial plants already producing ships. By the end of 1918 there had been built, delivered to the Shipping Board and put into service 592 vessels of a total dead-weight tonnage of 3,423,465 and there were under construction steel ships amounting to 3,600,000 tonnage and wood vessels aggregating 1,200,000 tons. Within the jurisdiction of the United States Shipping Board there were, at the beginning of September, 1918, including chartered foreign vessels, 2,600 sea-going steam and sailing vessels of a total of 10,334,000 dead-weight tonnage. A part of this total had been gained by the requisition of ships under construction or contract by American ship yards and speeding up work upon them. In every yard effort was intensified, resulting in one case in three times the deliveries of the previous year. To October 1st, 1918, 255 of these requisitioned ships, of which the keels of only about twenty per cent had been laid when the Fleet Corporation took over the contracts, had been delivered, their tonnage amounting to 1,500,000. A few ships were built in other countries for the United States. Enemy vessels in American ports at our declaration of war were seized and put into American service after the damage inflicted upon them had been repaired. These totaled about 600,000 dead weight tons. Other enemy vessels interned by neutral governments were purchased. More than 300 vessels of about 1,000,000 tonnage were chartered during the year for varying periods from associated and neutral governments.
Thus did the United States Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation, the organization through which the Government functioned in the management of the shipping situation, reach out in every direction and secure every possible ship to aid in building that vitally necessary bridge of boats across the Atlantic. With the help of the Allies the bridge was built and, guarded by the British and American navies, it was able to carry with triumphant success all the men and materials of every sort, in all their vast amounts, that were needed.
But the special achievements in ship construction of the U. S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation deserve more extended mention, for it had built over sixteen per cent of this entire fleet. It devised a new scheme for the rapid production of ships, that of the so-called “fabricating” shipyard. So enormous and so urgent was the need for a large tonnage output that beside it existing facilities were negligible and too much time would be needed for the construction of enough shipyards of the ordinary type. So, while every effort was put forth to renovate and enlarge existing yards and build new ones, several huge yards were constructed for the assembling of the parts of steel ships after they had been made in steel structural works. A ship was designed with simple lines, flat decks and few curves, the design standardized and production of the parts begun in many plants while the building of the big yards was rushed. One of these, having twelve ways for 9,000 ton ships, laid its first keel five months after the signing of the contract for the building of the yard; another, having fifty ways for 7,500 and 8,000 ton ships, laid its first keel, when the yard was half completed, in five months; and another, with twenty-eight ways for 5,000 ton ships, laid its first keel in three months.
These three yards, each of which was built and operated by a contracting company, represented an investment of almost $100,000,000. They were equipped to turn out, together, 270,000 tonnage per month, which is more than the tonnage of all the steel ship yards in the country had produced in any entire year for the last previous nine years. These large yards had begun to come into production only a little while before the signing of the armistice. One of the plants included 139 acres, all of which was waste land, overgrown with weeds and brush, when the company signed its contract in September, 1917. A year later its twenty-eight ways were completed, a ship was under construction on each one, fourteen ships had been launched and one had been completed. Docks, railway sidings, shops, offices, had been built and huge stacks of ship-building material covered the ground. A big, four-sided bulletin board, on which was posted each day the progress of every ship on its twenty-eight ways, voiced the spirit of the workers and the management in a slogan across its top that proclaimed the purpose, in letters that fairly shouted, “Three ships a week or bust!”
Another of these fabricating yards, whose site was chosen because of its nearness to industrial centers and easy accessibility, was located on an island that was an uninhabitable malarial marsh in September, 1917. It was first taken in hand by sanitary engineers, drained, cleared of mosquitoes and flies and put into sanitary condition. Then the plant, covering 846 acres, was built, its fifty ways extending for a mile and a quarter along the water front and its piers having space for twenty-eight vessels, so that seventy-eight ships could be in course of construction and outfitting at the same time. It had eighty miles of railroad track and 250 buildings of various kinds, including a hospital, a hotel, a Y. M. C. A. building, a cafeteria and a trade school. The yard laid its first keel in five months and launched its first ship in less than eleven months from the date of the first stroke of work on the island marsh.
Existing shipyards enlarged their facilities and speeded their work and new ones rushed their ways to completion and began laying keels and driving rivets at the earliest possible moment. In the summer of 1918, 280,000 laborers were engaged on shipyard construction. In a little more than a year 400,000,000 feet of yellow pine lumber for the construction of wood vessels was cut in American forests and transported to shipyards in the Atlantic and Mexican Gulf coastal regions—enough to lay the floor of a bridge twenty-five feet wide from the United States to France. As much more pine and fir lumber was cut for the construction of vessels in Pacific Coast yards. In one month, September, 1918, 15,000,000 feet of yellow pine lumber was used in the building of houses for shipyard workers.
On the Great Lakes, when we entered the war, there were fourteen shipyards with seventy-five ways. The signing of the armistice saw twenty-one yards in that region, with 110 ways, and fifteen more ways under construction. These Great Lakes yards, when the Shipping Board took charge of the shipping program in August, 1917, sent at once a fleet of twenty-one steel vessels which had been used in lake commerce down the St. Lawrence for the government’s use on the ocean. Some of them had to be cut in two to enable them to pass the canal locks, and were then welded together again and soon steamed out of the river’s mouth loaded with cargoes.
A world record of rapid work was made by one of these Great Lakes shipyards which launched a 3,500 ton steel freighter seventeen days after the keel was laid and at the end of seventeen more days delivered the ship to the Shipping Board complete and ready for service. During the fourteen months from the time when the Shipping Board took charge of the shipping program until the end of hostilities the Great Lakes shipyards sent to the ocean a fleet of 181 steel vessels aggregating over 600,000 deadweight tons, which was twice the record prewar output of sea-going ships of 1,500 deadweight tons and over. On the Pacific Coast one shipyard made another world’s record with a wooden ship of 4,000 tons which was launched seventeen and one half days after the laying of the keel and was ready for the sea in eight days more. The Pacific Coast yards built, to the end of September, 1918, 137 vessels totaling over a million deadweight tons.
Delivery of completed ships was often delayed by lack of boilers and other fittings, the manufacture of which had sometimes to wait for steel upon other war necessities. Nevertheless, as yard after yard began to show the results of the speeding of construction, the monthly tale of ships grew by mighty leaps. In August, 1918, at the end of a year, it passed the record monthly production of British ship-yards, which previously had built a larger tonnage than all the rest of the world combined. It kept the lead and broke its own record the next month, and that one also in October when seventy-eight ships of 410,865 deadweight tonnage were delivered to the Shipping Board ready for service—a tonnage in one month exceeding by more than 100,000 tons our greatest annual pre-war output of sea-going vessels.
During the twelve months ending September, 1918, the sea-going tonnage built in the United States aggregated a tonnage equal to 70 per cent of that built in the whole world in 1913, the year before the outbreak of the world war, which until 1918 was the highest total of ship production in any year in the history of ship-building. The total number of merchant vessels under construction throughout the world, excluding the Central Powers, at the end of 1918 was 2,189 ships of 6,921,989 gross tons, a little more than double the largest corresponding tonnage under construction by the world before the war. Of that total the United States was constructing 997 vessels of 3,645,919 gross tons, or almost half the number of vessels and more than half the tonnage.
The official records of the Bureau of Navigation of the Department of Commerce show that there were constructed in the United States during 1918 821 sea-going vessels of 100 gross tons and over totaling 2,597,026 gross tons, an unprecedented total for any country in the history of ship-building. Lloyd’s Register accords the highest previous total of ship production for any one year to the United Kingdom, whose shipyards launched in 1913 1,932,153 gross tons of vessels of 100 gross tons and over. The ship production of the whole world during that year was 3,332,882 gross tons of vessels of 100 gross tons and over. The construction of sea-going vessels in the United States during the last six months of 1918 was at the rate of 3,600,000 gross tons a year.
On a single day, July 4th, 1918, there were launched in American ship-yards for the United States Shipping Board 95 steel, wood and composite vessels of 3,000 deadweight—approximately 2,000 gross—tons and over, totaling 474,464 deadweight, or approximately 316,310 gross, tons. And in the month of October there were completed and delivered to the Shipping Board vessels of 2,000 gross tons or over totaling 283,652 gross tonnage, which exceeded by nearly 100,000 gross tons the highest output of vessels of 100 gross tons and over for any month in the ship-building history of any other country.
From being almost a non-ship-building country the United States had sprung in a year and a half to the position of world leadership in ship construction.
A Shipyard in the Making
Copyright by Brown Bros.
The Fifty Shipways, Each with a Ship in Construction, of the Same Yard One Year After Work Began Upon It
The whole nation hung with eager interest upon the progress of the shipping program and during the first summer of our participation in the war, when it was being hampered by disagreements and delays, there was much anxious protest. The unprecedented winter of 1917-1918, with its bitter weather, shortage of coal and railroad congestion, also interfered with the forward movement of shipping affairs. But when at last it began to be manifest that the urgent need for ships would be met the country threw itself with enthusiasm into a helping attitude. Business and professional men took their vacations in shipyards and in overalls with sleeves rolled up they offered whatever aid, whether muscular or mental, was in their power. Hundreds of college students joined the army of shipyard workers. Business firms offered prizes to stimulate the speed of riveters, among whom were made some world’s records.
In line with the government’s purpose to carry on its entire war effort in harmony with democratic aims and methods, a systematic program of education was instituted by the U. S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation, whose chief purpose was to increase the efficiency of the workers by enlarging their vision and appealing to their intelligence. In every shipyard stirring talks gave the men information, which many of them at first lacked, about the meaning of the war, why America had entered it, what would be the significance of victory and of defeat to them and to the nation, why the ships were needed and what the labor of each of them meant to the battle lines across the ocean. These talks made the ship-workers see that, under the emergency, to build good ships as rapidly as possible was to give a great service to humanity. The program was well organized and hundreds of speakers—soldiers, ministers, professors, business men—addressed shipyard meetings, explaining, urging and inspiring. Effective posters in every yard gave pictorial point to their message and kept it constantly before the eyes of the men. Pamphlets and circulars were distributed among them that told them in direct and vigorous language the significance and importance of their work. The plan met with signal success and from week to week could be seen a steady growth of enthusiasm and determination, while improved morale and new ideals of citizenship were also evident.
Skilled shipyard laborers were few in number compared with the need for the army of them that sprang out of our entrance into the war. Some new method of training had to be devised that would quickly prepare green men for capable and efficient service. The same idea of intensive training that proved successful in the preparation of officers for the army and of instructors and workers in many branches of war effort was applied to the shipyard problem. Training centers, which finally averaged two for each of the eleven ship-building districts, were established, each with a staff of instructors composed of men who had had both technical and practical experience and also training in effective teaching methods. To these centers were sent bright mechanics, selected for their ability and promise. After a stiff six weeks’ course, each in some special ship-building trade, they were returned to their respective plants, where they joined the yard’s own training staff and aided in the turning of green men into skilled laborers. Training schools to develop efficiency in the instructors of the training centers were also established, in order to make sure that the right kind of training would be given to the mechanics from the shipyards. Special courses were instituted at these training centers for men who wished to advance and broaden their capacity by gaining a knowledge of allied branches of work. Most of the yards organized training departments of their own which utilized all the assistance they could get from the training centers and also made use of skilled and capable mechanics in their own employ by having men trained in teaching methods instruct them in the art of showing others how to do things and then putting unskilled men into their charge. These methods of intensive training proved to both managers and workers that by them skilled labor in large quantities can be quickly provided.
Safety engineering work aiming to secure and maintain better and safer conditions of working and to enlist the interest and coöperation of the employees had such good results as to reduce materially the percentage of accidents. This went down from the average for ship-building of twenty-two per cent before the war to as low as six per cent in one large plant.
Shipyard publications had much to do with creating a fine community spirit, instilling patriotism, broadening outlook and inspiring the workers with zeal for the job in hand. The Health and Sanitation section of the U. S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation carried on a vigilant campaign to protect the health of the shipyard workers by making sure of a pure water supply, endeavoring to protect them from epidemics of disease, doing away with unsanitary restaurants and lunch rooms in the vicinity of the plants and combating by education and medical clinics the scourge of social disease.
The assembling of such large numbers of men as were needed by each and every one of the American shipyards for the country’s program of ship-building produced, for most of them, a housing problem that was almost as difficult and imperative as was the building of the sorely needed ships. It was an acute emergency and to meet it the United States Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation was authorized to expend $75,000,000. When the cessation of hostilities came it had built or was building dwelling houses, apartment houses, dormitories, mess halls, boarding houses and other such structures to the value of $64,000,000 and had enlisted the coöperation of municipalities and public utilities companies. In some cases the increase in workers was absorbed by adjacent cities and in others it was sufficient to erect dormitories and cottages in nearby towns. But in several it became necessary to create new towns, upon newly selected sites, and to build at high speed homes and streets and all the many structures necessary for a community of ten thousand or more people. The aim in the building of these towns was to create permanent and attractive homes provided with the necessities and comforts of modern civilization,—well built and lighted streets, provisions for fire and police departments, churches, libraries, schools and theaters,—such as ordered, contented and intelligent communities desire. Some of the best architects and housing experts in the country contributed their services in the making of the plans for these towns, in which building went on at the rate of twenty or more houses per day.
It was no small part of this huge shipping program to provide officers and crews for the ships that were sliding from their ways with increasing rapidity. For, along with the decrease in ship-building, Americans had lost interest in sea service. It was necessary to begin at once the recruiting and training that would man and officer the new ships. Within two months after we entered the war free navigation and engineering schools had been started, and when hostilities ended more than 6,000 men had been graduated, of whom over 3,000 had received officers’ licenses while many others had entered the navy. And in the dozen or more mammoth Naval Reserve Training Stations established and conducted by the Navy Department many thousands of young men were trained for service in all capacities in the merchant marine.
In so enormous an undertaking, entered upon with such scanty facilities and carried on under the stress of such urgent need, it was inevitable that the outcome should not always have equaled the hopes and desires of the country and that the zealous efforts and patriotic purposes of those engaged in it should not always have won complete success. But it was an achievement, within a year and a half, of plants enlarged and constructed for the building of ships, of labor trained for that building, of ships built and put into service, and of men trained to officer and man the ships that was a potent factor in the winning of the war. It was an immense and rapid industrial development made possible only by the ardent coöperation of all the factors of the entire national life necessary, under the emergency, to bring it to success.
CHAPTER XXIII
ORGANIZING THE NATION
Preceding and following chapters show how important a part organization played in the separate phases of civilian support of the war. In every line of war effort there was voluntary and spontaneous team-work on the part of all especially interested individuals who steadily coöperated with and formed a part of the nation-wide organization of that division of national life. The Food Administration and the Fuel Administration organized, each for its special work, the whole country and brought its own organization into touch with the people of every county and every community in the United States. The financing of the war evolved its own formation of a network of committees covering the land for the sale of bonds and stamps. So also in the mobilizing of industry for the support of the war each division of interest drew together in patriotic coöperation and all combined in voluntary team-work. A wide-spreading organization, inspired and held together by love of country, worked here, there and everywhere to aid in clearing the land of enemy spies and propaganda. Women linked up their existing organizations more closely and created new ones for more efficient work in all of the many kinds of war service which they undertook. Even the upholding of the fighting forces by thought and effort for their welfare and happiness was effectively organized. And so on, through every phase of civilian support of the war, the universal individual eagerness to do everything possible was organized into a systematic, effective coöperation that was comprehensive in its scope and was directed by able leadership along definite policies which converged into the one purpose of applying that mobilized effort to the prosecution of the war.
These were separate organizations, each devoted to its own purpose. But interlocking them all, partly by virtue of having conceived and launched many of them and partly by reason of its own purpose, bringing them all into efficient and harmonious coöperation and at the same time aligning the entire country in one vast organization that practically put the whole nation into one huge civilian army working for the support of the fighting forces, was the Council of National Defense.
Created by an act of Congress in the late summer of 1916, the Council of National Defense was not fully organized until March, 1917, when our entrance into the war had become inevitable. In the creating act the Council was charged with the “coördination of industries and resources for the national security and welfare.” It was to consist of the Secretaries of War, the Navy, the Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor and it was directed to nominate to the President an Advisory Commission of seven persons, each having special knowledge of some industry, public utility or natural resources, or being otherwise specially qualified to give aid and counsel in the stimulation, development and coördination of national activities and “the creation of relations which would render possible in time of need the immediate concentration and utilization of all the resources of the nation.”
Primarily the Council of National Defense was an organizing machinery. It took into its hands the universal eagerness to serve of all the millions of the American people in civilian life and created for them the emergency means by which each and all could join the vast and immediate mobilization of resources and of effort that was necessary. At once it summoned to Washington for conference and the starting of coöperative effort the leaders in science, engineering, industry and other phases of national life. Under this exchange of ideas there was a rapid evolution of plans that were quickly put into operation under its auspices. As they proved workable and grew in importance some were turned over to existing agencies for administration and others developed into separate organizations. But all were so interlocked that they marched forward with harmonious step, each coöperating with and aiding the others.
The coöperation among industrial leaders for the mobilizing of the country’s material resources for war production which was at once instituted by the Council developed later into the War Industries Board, the story of whose work for the war is told in the chapter dealing with “War-Time Management of Trade and Industry.” The Council initiated also the work of stimulating production for aircraft needs, of speeding coal production, of interesting the people in food conservation and of drawing the railroads together into a national transportation policy. Its Committee on Labor drafted the War Risk Insurance Bill, initiated the undertaking and then turned it over to the Treasury Department. The policy of price fixing, which finally developed into a definite organization under the War Industries Board, had its beginning in the informal voluntary agreements entered into between members of the Council in the early days of its existence and representatives of industry. So also the priorities policy, which afterwards became a most important and efficient means of controlling trade and industry and bringing them into direct and effective war service, began with voluntary agreements between leaders of industry and commerce and the Council in the early days of the war. Its Commercial Economy Board, which afterwards became the Conservation Division of the War Industries Board, did a comprehensive and most essential service in the planning and instituting of economical policies for industry of nation-wide application that would release material and labor for war production uses. By the principle of voluntary coöperation which it inspired, initiated and organized into the war machinery of the Government the Council largely eliminated the possibility of profiteering in connection with war effort and so helped to make the conducting of the industrial phases of this war, enormously increased though they were in both magnitude and possibilities, incomparably more honest than it had been in any previous war in which the country had ever engaged.
The Department of Science and Research of the Council of National Defense did particularly valuable work in getting together the scientific and technical men of the country and so organizing and directing their knowledge and skill and their ability in research as to form a war resource of inestimable value. Its membership included a large part of the men representative of the scientific, technical and engineering achievement in the United States and through this Department of the Council their services were at the call of the Government whenever needed. Through its General Medical Board the Council aided in the mobilization of the medical personnel and resources of the country. Its Committee on Engineering and Education brought together the best thought and skill for the solution of engineering problems in connection with the war and for the aligning of educational institutions and facilities behind the country’s war effort. Its Committee on Labor, besides drafting the war-risk insurance bill and initiating that undertaking and aiding in the development of the plan for the War Labor Administration, did valuable work in helping to maintain hearty coöperation between the labor movement and the national war policies by promoting the welfare of industrial workers and by providing a system for the rapid and intensive training of mechanics. Its Highways Transport Committee coöperated with the War Department in facilitating the work of its important motor-truck convoy service, developed rural motor express routes, instituted a movement for the better development and care of highways and assisted the Railroad Administration in its early struggle with the congestion of freight.
As an organizing machinery and provider of means by which the whole nation could be brought into coöperation for war effort swiftly and efficiently, the Council of National Defense did not confine itself to the material phases of the country’s resources but also helped the national spirit to find adequate expression. To that end it organized a great, nation-wide system by which the war machinery was synchronized to harmonious work through every smallest section of the country and through which the national spirit was enabled to find expression in effective action. Under the State Councils Section of the National Council of Defense within a few months there had been organized in every state of the Union a State Council of Defense whose function was to centralize and coördinate the war work within the state, to coöperate with the work of the National Council, to inaugurate whatever new work local conditions rendered advisable and to create and direct local councils. County councils were organized in every county of each state and within most of the counties community councils, usually with the school district serving as the unit, were formed. These community councils were not committees, but were the community itself, with all its citizens and agencies organized for coöperative, effective, national service. It was a neighborhood democracy made effective by organization and it established a direct means of reciprocal communication between the Government and the masses of the people. An immense and closely woven network thus overspread the country consisting, under the State Councils, of 4,000 county organizations, 16,000 women’s divisions and 164,000 community and municipal units, extending through the wards of cities, through towns and villages, across farming countrysides. The Woman’s Committee of the Council, described at more length in the chapter on “The Work of Women for the War,” collaborated constantly, organizing the women of every community for any sort of war work they could do. While the functioning of the Councils, State, County and Community, was kept flexible and responsive to local initiative and local conditions, their most important work was that of translating into action those war policies of the Government that called for the coöperation of the people. Through them were made effective such nation-wide movements as the conservation of food and coal, the increasing of food production, the mobilization of industry, the selling of bonds and war stamps, the marshalling of labor, while there was hardly a war effort of the Government of any sort in which they did not give aid. So remarkable and important has been this unifying of the nation by means of the system brought into life for war purposes by the Council of National Defense that it is likely to remain as a permanent and useful feature of the life of the country in the coming years of peace.
Throughout all the many services of the Council of National Defense during the war, its organization of war machinery, its mobilization of material resources, its bringing together of leaders in all phases of national life and showing them how they could aid the country, its vital work in enabling the humblest individual, and all the individuals in the nation, to become efficient in action for the war, the two most conspicuous features are, the voluntary character of all the effort and the universal willingness of the equally universal coöperation. Of all the vast and varied services which it commanded, from captains of industry and leaders of science to the committee heads in little country towns, practically all, except those of its office staff and clerical assistance, were given gladly to the nation for the sake of love of country and belief in American ideals. And the result proved, in the words of President Wilson, “beyond all question that the highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous coöperation of a free people.”
CHAPTER XXIV
INFORMING THE PUBLIC
America fought ardently in the world war because of the devotion of her people to democratic ideals. Since one of those ideals is to base the participation of the people in public affairs upon a knowledge of those affairs as complete and accurate and universal as the limitations of human nature and human institutions make possible, it was necessary to provide some machinery that would serve as a means of communication between the purposes and the vast undertakings of the Government, functioning for the people, and the people themselves. In common with the spirit and the methods by which all the war activities were carried on—spirit and methods which strikingly exemplified one of the fundamental traits of the national genius—the situation was met by creating an organization for the widest possible spreading of information about the national needs, activities and aims. The Committee on Public Information, created by an executive order of the President soon after our declaration of war, began with a civilian Chairman and the Secretaries of State, War and the Navy as its members. At the close of hostilities it had a world-wide organization which commanded the services of thousands of authors, artists, journalists, speakers, moving picture actors and producers and people of public spirit, most of them giving their services, who were working zealously among our own people, our war associates, our enemies and the neutral nations.
The Committee was not concerned at all with censorship rules and regulations and constantly endeavored to secure, for the widest dissemination, all news of the war activities that would not benefit the enemy or obstruct our efficiency. As always in time of war, the decision upon what should be made public rested with the war making agencies of the Government. The function of the Committee was to secure important news and descriptions of all phases of our war making effort with as little waste as possible of the time and attention of absorbed and over-burdened officials and to make systematic and effective distribution of all this matter at home, among our war associates, in neutral countries and even behind the enemy lines, and to combat enemy propaganda by meeting its lies and perversions with simple truth. It depended always and solely upon facts, whether material or spiritual, and did not in any phase of its work deal in opinions or arguments.
In each of the war making departments of the Government the Committee had a representative experienced in newspaper work under whom, in each of the department’s bureaus, was an assistant whose duty was to know accurately all the phases and details of the bureau’s work, to keep in touch with its progress and production, and to prepare such information concerning it as could be published. All this matter passed through the hands of the Committee’s representative in the department, who was responsible for its accuracy. Connected with his office was the censor for that particular war making agency who decided upon the military advisability of its publication. Of all the many thousands of releases for publication thus made the accuracy of only three or four was ever questioned, and of these one was afterward proved by official dispatches to have been true.
Practically all the reputable newspapers of the United States agreed with the Government to refrain from publishing any news obtained by their own representatives which would hamper the war making program or give information to the enemy and in every large newspaper office the country over hung the Committee’s list of specified classes of information which they were requested not to mention. With one or two disloyal exceptions all the newspapers of the country voluntarily put themselves under this restraint and themselves censored their own columns until the end of the war. In no other country at war was the press ever so little hampered by governmental restrictions, or put upon its honor in this way, or animated by a spirit so unselfishly patriotic.
A Service Bureau of the Committee at a centrally located office in Washington provided information as to the officials, the function and the location of all Government departments and similar matters. In the rapid expansion of all these departments, the creation of new agencies and the overcrowded condition of the capital, due to the thousands of men and women pouring into and going through the city, it saved for all these people many hours and much energy. The inquiries that came to it by personal appeal, by telephone, and by mail mounted to an average of many hundreds daily.
In addition to the news matter which it distributed at home and abroad, the Committee on Public Information sent out an official bulletin which, with a circulation of more than 100,000, gave information concerning all governmental affairs and activities in connection with the war; prepared special articles concerning all phases of the war progress of the nation which were widely published in the Saturday and Sunday magazine sections of newspapers; and published several series of pamphlets, written by authorities upon the questions discussed, which set forth the reasons for our participation in the war, exposed the pretensions of Germany and dealt with other important matters. These pamphlets also had a wide circulation and were especially useful for the hundreds of public speakers who talked to assemblages of people in mines, factories, ship-yards, theaters and other public places. They were intended to give information to all who wanted it and to furnish ammunition for the determined battle the Committee was waging to win the attention and rouse the feeling of a polyglot nation, huge numbers of whose people had not hitherto acquired much knowledge of or developed much interest in their adopted country.
For all this work several hundreds of authors, newspaper and magazine writers, publicists, university professors and others either gave their time and labor freely or took for their services an amount of pay that barely paid their living expenses, and, for the rest, were repaid by the satisfaction of doing something to aid the needs of their country.
An organization of speakers called “Four-Minute Men,” working under the Committee, had a membership of 35,000 and gave short, incisive talks in five or six thousand communities, speaking at motion picture theaters, at factories during the noon hour, at country churches and school houses, at assemblages of every sort. The campaigns in which they took part embraced work for the Red Cross, the welfare organizations. Liberty loans, savings stamps, against German propaganda, and every kind of activity for the winning of the war that the nation engaged in. A bulletin for the use of the Four-Minute Men was prepared by the Committee’s experts for each campaign, giving material for their suggestion and guidance.
In addition to these men, the Committee organized a great national campaign of public speaking which enlisted the services of patriotic men and women in each state, of returning soldiers, of people who had been abroad and had witnessed the fighting or had seen conditions in the belligerent and neutral countries, and of Allied officers. This work was decentralized and, by means of the coöperation of the State Section of the Council of National Defense, was organized in each state. War conferences and war exhibits were held in important centers, the war agencies in each state were brought into unison with the work and the campaign for informing and inspiring the people was carried through, all parts of the state, down to the villages and country districts. A band of a hundred veteran French soldiers,—the famous “Blue Devils”—a Belgian regiment, and a company of American doughboys sent back from the front for this purpose were severally conducted at various times across the country by the Committee on Public Information, with the double aim of helping the American people to realize the war more vividly and of enabling these fighting men to carry back to the front first hand information about what America was doing and what was her spirit.
At the request of the Committee the heads of the various advertising clubs of the country came together and mobilized for the country’s service their organizations and their experts in every phase of advertising. For every one of the great campaigns for the prosecution of the war, these experts, under the direction of the Committee on Public Information, saw to the preparing of posters, advertisements, matter for bill boards, street car cards and all such matter. In the campaign to recruit 250,000 laborers for the shipyards, as a single instance, eighty advertisements were prepared by typographical advertising experts and were carried in magazines and trade papers that donated the space and gave a combined circulation of 8,000,000. In a similar way the Committee organized and utilized the pictorial assistance that could be given by artists. Its Division of Pictorial Publicity included nearly all the best known artists of the United States and to it went every department of the Government that wished to make pictorial appeal to the people. Its hundreds of members contributed, for all purposes, three thousand or more posters, cartoons and drawings and aided much in the inspiring and uniting of sentiment.
Photographs and motion pictures were important factors of the Committee’s work. Through it were distributed all of the photographs taken by permission of the Army and the Navy and thousands upon thousands of these pictures, covering’ every phase of the operations of the war making and war production divisions of the Government, were published in newspapers and magazines, collected by individuals, used for the illustration of lectures and, in connection with some of the actual war making objects and with models of others, shown in exhibits at county and State fairs attended by millions of people. The motion picture division of the Committee’s many-sided activities gave powerful aid in its campaign of education and interpretation both at home and in other countries. Important phases of the preparation at home for war and of the army in training or in battle in France were put into single reel and longer features, some of them providing a full evening’s entertainment, and exhibited in thousands of moving picture houses in the United States and, with their captions translated into many languages, were sent all through Latin America, the Orient, Africa, the Allied and neutral nations of Europe, to carry their message of America’s spirit and America’s purposes.
All of these agencies the Committee on Public Information organized and used for the purpose of widening the horizon and informing and illumining the mind and spirit of our own citizens with regard to the causes, the purposes and the meaning of the war and of America’s participation in it and to combat the specious and wide-spread propaganda of the German Government. That propaganda sought to blind our people to the issues involved, to create sentiment against our war associates, to undermine our faith in our own war agencies and our conviction of the righteousness of the war and the adequacy of our war effort, and was especially insidious and dangerous among the ignorant, among aliens not yet well informed concerning the country and in some of the districts of the South. Wherever it worked the Committee met and endeavored to nullify its efforts.
Equally well organized, determined and successful, but much more difficult, was the struggle the Committee carried on against anti-American propaganda and influences in other countries. It had different phases and features, according to the conditions in the different lands, and it presents, altogether, one of the most dramatic and thrilling of all the stories of civilian effort for the war. But it is possible here only to outline its general features. The United States had for many years been soaked through and through with German propaganda, but so insidiously, so gently and so gradually had the work been carried on that scarcely any one had recognized its extent, its influence and its purpose. The shock of war brought some realization of what had been going on, the efforts of the Committee on Public Information revealed much more, and then the quick reaction of an intensely patriotic people brought against the pro-German campaign, paid for and directed in Germany, such a storm of popular indignation that it had little chance to make headway except among the ignorant and some of the foreign born. But in the neutral countries German propaganda, German effort to win sympathy and belief and set feeling and conviction against America and the Allies was in full possession and had to be combated with care and tact as well as haste and energy. In every one of them America had been misrepresented, jeered at, lied about, pictured in colors that made her and her people the most despicable and loathsome upon the face of the earth, while her war effort was described as so inefficient and so impossible of success as to be ridiculous.
The Committee established an office in the capital of each one of the neutral countries, as it did also in that of each of our co-belligerents. The office head and the greater part of his staff went from home, but at his destination he secured translators and other helpers and had the hearty coöperation of Americans already there. His mission, carried on by every available means, was to oppose German propaganda and spread the truth about America. Publication was procured for news by wireless and cable and for descriptive articles by mail, while pamphlets and leaflets were widely distributed. Particularly well organized and efficient was the machinery for the sending of news by wireless and cable which carried to all the nations of the earth, except Germany and her allies, two thousand words every day about what America was purposing and accomplishing for the war. Until this machinery was started the neutral nations knew next to nothing of what this country was doing except through the perversions and outright lies of German agents. It was by this means that President Wilson’s addresses and messages had almost world-wide distribution as soon as they were published in the home country and the advantage was gained of the striking influence they everywhere exerted.
Next to the news service in importance was the influence exercised by the moving picture films, which everywhere won favor almost instantly, aroused the greatest interest, by their better quality crowded out the German films and in every country brought straight to the people such knowledge of Americans, of their every day life, of their purpose in the war and of their wonderful achievements for its prosecution as amazed them and greatly helped to turn the general sentiment as much in favor of as it had previously been against the United States. These pictures, on the civilian side, were gathered from every phase of American life, showing our cities, our agriculture, our educational institutions, our industries, our homes, our manifold efforts for social welfare, and were used to correct the deplorably mistaken conceptions about this country which had gained vogue almost all over the world. They were always followed by pictures of war work, such as training camp activities, aviation fields, ship building and other matters, with films also of our camps and troops in France.
A Foreign Press Bureau had the services of a long list of authors and publicists, many of them of wide reputation in our own and other countries. It sent every week to each one of the foreign representatives of the Committee a budget of matter that supplemented the daily news service and covered every phase of American life and endeavor. From the different countries came requests by cable for articles on specific subjects of the greatest variety which were prepared by specialists. One of these articles was reprinted by the British Government for use in England, where it distributed 800,000 copies. Through this Bureau and in connection with the matter it issued went posters, captioned in the language of each country to which they were sent, and millions of picture postals and photographs. The Committee representatives in the various lands commandeered the show windows of American business houses and kept up in them a frequently changed display of posters, bulletins and pictures.
In some countries reading rooms were established equipped with American newspapers, magazines and books and decorated with American posters and photographs, and in some cases classes were held in them for the study of English. Sometimes men of American citizenship and of thorough patriotism were sent back to their native countries to talk to and with the people concerning America. A company of newspaper editors from each of several countries toured the United States as guests of the Committee on Public Information and others from Spain, Switzerland, Holland and the Scandinavian countries were taken through the districts of American war works and camps in France. What they saw was so different from their preconceived and Germany-perverted ideas and made such a revolution in their minds that it changed the tone of their papers and had a notable influence upon public opinion in their respective countries.
German propaganda was busy against America even in the countries of our war associates where it sought to undermine confidence in us, create suspicion of our purposes and in each one instill the fear that the United States would join some other of the Allies against that particular one. This presented a problem easier to deal with than did the neutral countries because the Committee had the coöperation of the respective governments. The same means were used as in the neutral countries, the moving picture being a particularly efficient instrument in the work. Russia was the only country in which the Committee failed to win its purpose. Its representatives there worked hard and zealously, but Russia was so big and inarticulate, the German propaganda had behind it such vast sums of money and the Bolsheviki, as soon as they gained the upper hand, shut down so completely upon all freedom of expression except for their own ideas and purposes that they had finally to give up their struggle. But they had used the opportunity to spread information among the advancing German troops, to leave the seeds of some knowledge of America and her desires and aims, and they did achieve some worth-while results in Siberia and in the prison camps of Russia.
Some of the most interesting and valuable work done by the Committee in this war of ideas was in connection with its effort, in which it coöperated with the War Department, to inject some real knowledge of America into the enemy’s troops and into the country behind his armies. The Committee prepared most of the material for this purpose, among those engaged upon the effort to make it efficient being authors, historians, journalists, and advertising and psychological specialists, while the military forces undertook the job of distribution. Immense quantities of material, pamphlets, leaflets, short, pungent statements, speeches, facts about America’s war preparations and intentions, were dropped by the ton upon the troops of the Central Powers and behind the lines upon cities and towns and countrysides. They were carried by airplanes which spread the documents far and wide, they were thrown by rifle grenades, by rockets and by a specially developed type of gun. Balloons of various kinds rained literature upon armies and the country just behind them. Kites dropped leaflets upon the trenches. An American invention was a specialized balloon with a metal container for the literature and a control attachment governing the movements of the balloon and the distribution of the ten thousand leaflets it carried.
There can be no doubt of the effectiveness of this campaign upon the minds of the enemy’s people because, in the first place, both the German and the Austro-Hungarian governments went to the most extreme lengths in the effort to combat it, making death the penalty for touching the literature. Nevertheless, the majority of the prisoners captured by the Americans had it in their pockets. In the next place, the influence of it became evident after the war closed in the temper and attitude of the enemy peoples and their determination to discard crowns and thrones and set up democratic governments. President Wilson’s speeches were found to be especially effective, each one that was sent across the lines being followed invariably by increasing ferment and dissatisfaction among the people. Into Germany, when the German censor had mutilated one of these speeches and distorted its meaning, the Committee at once sent the entire speech in German with the omitted and distorted parts properly printed in red. The result was so evident that the German government soon began to print the President’s addresses correctly and in full.
It was a difficult fight that the Committee waged outside of the home country and the lands of our co-belligerents, for it had to meet a tricky foe who already held possession and would and did use all manner of insidious means and lying statements. But everywhere the Committee presented its claims frankly and openly, telling the authorities just what it wanted to do and what its methods would be, offering to the people plain and true statements and depending upon their honesty, intelligence and sense of justice. One large factor in its success was undoubtedly this openness and honesty of purpose and methods. The completeness with which public opinion in the neutral countries finally swung to the side of the United States and the Allies, the collapse of civilian Germany and the decay of morale among the German and Austro-Hungarian troops all helped to prove the importance and the success of its long, hard struggle. Just how great a portion of these developments was due to the Committee’s work can not yet be estimated. But, because mind and spirit dominate force and its weapons were wholly those of mind and spirit, it is already evident that it deserves no small measure of credit.
CHAPTER XXV
WAR-TIME CONTROL OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY
The entire commercial and industrial life of the country was established on a war basis very soon after war was declared. Trade had to be thus mobilized in order to defeat the efforts of the enemy to supply himself by roundabout and underground means with American products and in order to use efficiently the organization of commerce for the prosecution of the war. Industry had to be mobilized in order to make sure that it would produce all the enormous amounts of every sort that would be needed for war purposes. A people accustomed throughout their history as a nation to a minimum of governmental control of or interference in their business affairs and believing in and practicing the principle of individualism in business suddenly found themselves called upon to surrender that principle and submit to pervasive governmental regulation. It was a sharp and searching test of patriotism and of loyalty to national ideals and it put to thorough trial the mental elasticity, alertness and resourcefulness of the business life of the country.
These new conditions, limitations and controls were administered by War Boards of Trade and Industry. That for trade was instituted six months after the declaration of war as a more comprehensive and efficient successor of an Export Administrative Board. The purpose of the War Trade Board was primarily to carry out the provisions of the Act forbidding Trade with the Enemy and certain portions of the Espionage Act. It had under its control the whole of the foreign commerce of the United States, which it managed by means of a system of licenses for exports and imports. Not a pound of goods of any sort could be shipped out of or into the country without a license granted by the War Trade Board, and no license was granted by it without full knowledge of the character of the shipment, its destination if an export and its source if it were inward bound. It had its branch offices in a score of cities, its representatives in foreign countries, its trade advisers and distributors who were men of intimate and extensive knowledge of trade conditions in all commodities at home and abroad, its members who supplied information concerning war trade matters all over the earth, from Iceland to Cape Horn and from Siam round the world to Japan, its bureaus which studied the problems constantly arising and collected data for their solution and for the guidance of the Board. The applications made to the War Trade Board for export licenses, nearly all of which were granted, averaged over 8,000 per day. The transactions which passed daily through its hands represented values of from $40,000,000 to $50,000,000. It had 3,000 employees, most of whom were located in its Washington offices, although its representatives were to be found in every important trading post in the world outside of enemy countries.
The War Trade Board, by limiting exports, conserved the products of the country for the use of our own people and the people of the nations associated with us in the great conflict so that these products might be used in whatever way would best aid the prosecution of the war; it so controlled and supervised the shipping of goods to associated and neutral nations as to conserve shipping space for military uses; it regulated with the closest surveillance the shipping of goods to neutral countries in order to make sure that they would not be re-shipped in covert ways to enemy destinations; it hunted out enemy and enemy-controlled firms in our own and neutral lands, closed up the former and prevented trade with the latter, although it also in neutral countries made every effort to find and list for American merchants, in the place of these forbidden firms, others in the same lines not friendly with the enemy with whom trade could be carried on; and it so arranged trade with neutral nations as to supply them with necessities, under guarantees that these should not be reëxported, in return for their export to the United States and her associates of certain needed products and permission for this country to use their shipping.
This mobilization of the commercial arm of the United States soon proved its value and the government’s control of trade through the War Trade Board was a highly important factor in hastening the winning of the war. The firm hand which was laid on commerce with certain neutral nations of Europe, through which Germany had been getting large amounts of food and supplies, finally made effective the blockade of the enemy. The trade of those nations with the United States during the two and a half years before our entrance into the war had jumped to enormous figures, many times its previous volume. When the War Trade Board assumed control of American commerce it fell, in the case of one nation, to one-twentieth of what it had been in the first year of the war, while the total exports of food stuffs of the neutrals of northern Europe to the Central Powers declined in a few months by from sixty-five to eighty-five per cent of what they had been in the previous year.
The Board procured, by trade arrangements with European neutrals, the use of shipping for the United States and Great Britain amounting to over two million tons, for which there was the greatest need for transportation of troops, munitions, foods and supplies to Europe. For this same purpose the Board conserved much tonnage by practically suspending, for several months, trade in many commodities with South America and the Orient. Working in harmony with the War Industries Board, it prevented the shipment out of the United States of all materials needed by this country and the associated nations for the swift and efficient prosecution of the war.
Both the War Trade Board and the War Industries Board coöperated constantly with the other civilian organizations through which the nation carried on its support of the war, such as the Food Administration, the Fuel Administration, the Council of National Defense, the U. S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation and the Railroad Administration, and by this union of organization kept up a harmonious, smoothly articulated and swiftly moving team-work through which the full resources and powers of the entire nation were mobilized and put to the service of the two direct war agencies of the Government, the War and the Navy Departments.
The function of the War Industries Board in this nation-wide scheme of organization was so to organize and regulate the industries of the country as to insure the materials necessary for the war prosecuting agencies of the Government and at the same time protect the country’s civilian needs. It was charged with providing the nations associated with us in the war with such military supplies as they desired and America could spare and neutral nations with such commodities as they needed and would exchange for materials essential to this country. Thus these two administrative war agencies, the War Trade Board and the War Industries Board, together had practically complete control of all the vast affairs of the whole nation’s industry and commerce. As a sculptor works a piece of clay into any desired form, these two boards took the country’s business life into their hands and moulded and shaped it into a war-making machine.
By a system of priorities that governed both production and distribution the War Industries Board regulated the supply of raw materials to manufacturers and the delivery of finished products. It stimulated production and speeded distribution of whatever was urgently needed for the fighting forces, for exchange with neutrals or for our own people, but limited the supply of raw materials, or coal, or electricity, or labor, and temporarily withheld the facilities of distribution when need was not immediate, or when there would otherwise have been interference with some war-making effort. Every important class of industry in the country, and some that were not of large consequence in so far as the size of their business was concerned, came within the scope of the Board’s operations. The expert leaders of these industries were represented among the advisers of the Board, to which they brought their comprehensive and profound knowledge of resources, conditions, methods of operation, and quantity, quality and ordinary destination of output. Industries were listed, classified and studied to determine the degree of preference to which each was entitled, and in many cases the same method was applied to individual plants within an industry. To those entitled to preferential treatment because they could best subserve some phase of war need was given priority of service in all their requirements, while the needs of others were deferred until the preferred industries or plants were satisfied.
It is not possible to describe all the multiple achievements of the War Industries Board, but a glance at them shows many of vital importance. By establishing maximum prices upon a number of staple raw materials necessary in the war-making program, an executive order of the President putting into legal operation its agreements and decisions, the Price Fixing Committee of the Board stabilized prices and prevented or lessened profiteering in many industries. The Conservation Section reduced wastage in industry in various ways, but especially by curtailing the number of patterns, or varieties, in each of many lines of production, scrutinizing for this purpose nearly two hundred different industries. Thus, the thousand and more different patterns for a buggy step were reduced to two, with resulting economy of both labor and material. A Committee on Emergency Construction took charge, under the Construction Division of the Government, of the vast building program upon which the nation had at once to enter. Cantonments, flying fields, camps, hospitals, embarkation depots, docks, wharves, storehouses, ordnance, powder, explosives and nitrate plants and other structures had to be built with the greatest possible rapidity. The War Industries Board first developed a method for getting the necessary information concerning contractors who could take charge of this enormous building program and devised a scheme of organization and then, by means of its priorities system, made sure that each operation should have at the moment of need the necessary materials, transportation facilities and labor. These structures, finished and in construction, totaled a cost at the end of the war of approximately two billion dollars. The Chemical Division did highly important work in the way of instituting, aiding and speeding scientific investigations and stimulating new chemical industries, such as the potash supply and the dye industry. The Steel Division received the enthusiastic coöperation of the steel manufacturers, who speeded up their plants for the production of the immensely increased quantities needed of this vital product. More and more steel, and ever more steel, was necessary for the making of munitions, guns, cannon, rails, locomotives, shipyards, ships. In the last six months of 1918 the steel products that went into direct and indirect war necessities amounted to 22,000,000 tons, a production of about twenty-five per cent more than would have been the reasonable expectation for the period. The Steel Division handled approximately 40,000,000 tons of steel per year. The Board’s program of speeding work greatly increased the output in many vital industries. For instance, the locomotive industry doubled its production in three months without increasing its facilities or expanding its works. It has been estimated that the industrial capacity of the country was increased by at least twenty per cent.
All over the country business men coöperated with the War Industries Board with patriotic zeal, willingly curtailing their output and reducing their incomes in order to release material, capital, labor, fuel, transportation facilities, for the expediting of work necessary for the winning of the war. Dozens of them left their affairs in the hands of subordinates or gave up high-salaried positions and entered the service of the War Industries Board in order that the nation might have the advantage of their training and their wide and expert knowledge. These men, who were generally known as “the Government’s dollar-a-year men,” because legally the Government can accept no gratuitous service, freely gave to the country, as their contribution to the winning of the war, what it could not have bought for millions of dollars and worked with as much energy and ardor as ever they had done for the making and furthering of their own fortunes.
CHAPTER XXVI
“THE GREATEST MOTHER IN THE WORLD”
Before the world war the American Red Cross would have had ample reason to complain, had it been so minded, of the indifference of the great masses of the American people to its rightful claim upon their interest, sympathy and support. But its world-wide works of compassion during the war, that won for it the loving titles of “The Greatest Mother in the World” and “The Universal Mother,” opened their eyes and their hearts until they almost merged themselves in it and made it the organization through which they themselves functioned for the help of the war-made need and suffering.
The American Red Cross was transformed to a war basis within a month after the United States entered the conflict. It had then less than half a million members. Five months later they numbered five millions. The membership rose to fifteen millions in the following spring and a campaign for new members in December, 1918, for which arrangements had been made before the end of the war, raised the number to nearly 18,000,000, an average of membership in the Red Cross for almost every family in the Union. In addition, the Junior Red Cross, composed of school children organized under their teachers into auxiliaries for Red Cross work suitable to their ages, numbered approximately 10,000,000.
Whatever the Red Cross has asked of the American people for the financing of its vast works of mercy they have given with overflowing hands. In June, 1917, it went to them for a war fund of $100,000,000. They gave it $115,000,000. In May of the following year the Red Cross told them it needed another hundred million dollars and they gave it $176,000,000. Altogether, more than 47,000,000 American people gave to the Red Cross during our war period $325,000,000 in money and manufactured products of a value of $60,000,000.
Of the 8,500 persons who carried on the administrative and executive work of the organization in its national, divisional and foreign headquarters 2,000 were volunteers. Many of these unpaid executives gave up large salaries and important positions in private life to devote their skilled and capable service to this world mother. Of the paid employees more than 5,000 received no more, and some of them less, than $1,500 a year.
Almost 4,000 chapters, with 16,000 branches, covered the entire country with a network of busy groups whose willing hands contributed aid and comfort that the Red Cross carried widely over land and sea. A division in which were organized Americans outside of the continental limits, called the Insular and Foreign Division, girdled the earth and included a membership of 100,000 adults and 125,000 juniors. Its members contributed almost $2,000,000 in money and finished products representing a value of $1,500,000. They were scattered throughout Central and South America, the West Indies, Hawaii, the Philippines, little Guam, China, Japan, Siberia, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland.
In nearly 4,000 Red Cross chapters more than 8,000,000 women gave volunteer service so faithfully that, however untrained they were at the beginning of the war, at its end the big majority of them were skilled workers in all the Red Cross needs. They made a total of 291,000,000 articles, in which were used raw materials costing $40,000,000. All of these articles were standardized, army surgeons establishing the standard for surgical dressings and a committee of women, sent to Europe for that purpose, designing models and illustrations of garments needed in the hospitals and in civilian relief work. Knitted garments and comfort kits were also made by uniform models. Practically every American fighting man who went overseas during the last year of the war and every man in the training camps who needed them were supplied with Red Cross knitted articles, while many of the Allied soldiers and thousands of refugees wore them with gratitude. These volunteer Red Cross workers, who at the same time were busy upon their home duties, made over 250,000,000 surgical dressings, 14,000,000 knitted articles, 1,400,000 garments for refugees and 22,255,000 garments and supplies for hospitals. They also renovated hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ garments and aided in the collection of thousands of tons of clothing for the destitute in Europe.
Through the Home Service section of the Red Cross organization communities all over the country, alike in cities and remote country districts, found the opportunity of giving individual service which would help in the winning of the war by sustaining the morale of soldiers’ families and promoting the public welfare. Through this branch of Red Cross activity, in which 10,000 local committees and 50,000 men and women participated, 300,000 families of soldiers were aided with advice, counsel and practical helpfulness of whatever sort was needed for the solving of business or legal tangles, household perplexities, family problems, difficulties due to illness, worry and loneliness. These Home Service workers carried on a nation-wide campaign to encourage the writing of cheerful letters to the men overseas, they spread a doctrine of neighborliness toward soldiers’ families, they enlisted the aid of physicians, lawyers, business men, teachers and others who could give the special kinds of assistance that were needed and they devoted to this work of conserving morale and promoting welfare some $6,000,000, aside from their personal service, which was far beyond money value. Training courses were instituted to fit for more intelligent and efficient work those wishing to enter this branch and were taken by several thousand persons.
The Red Cross carried on a camp service at all the camps and cantonments in the United States which rendered emergency aid, looked after the welfare of sick soldiers and maintained connection with the Home Service section. It established soon after we entered the war at more than five hundred railway stations a canteen service which furnished refreshments to traveling soldiers and sailors, while its sanitary service coöperated with the public health authorities to maintain healthful conditions in military zones. It coöperated with the Government by organizing base hospitals, naval hospital units, and ambulance companies and by enrolling nurses, of whom over 30,000 answered its call, and forming them into units for service.
Overseas, the army service of the American Red Cross was to be found wherever it could aid in caring for the wounded of the front line forces or in safeguarding the health and improving the comfort of soldiers in the rear of the battle zones. It built huge storehouses for the temporary housing of its supplies at every American port in France, at distributing points, at army concentration camps and behind the lines. It erected two nitrous oxide plants that together produced 25,000 gallons per day. Its canteens and rest rooms were strung along the lines of communication between front and rear, its rolling canteens and hot drink kitchens carried comforts and refreshments even into the front line trenches, it helped to maintain sanitary conditions wherever there were American troops, it cared for the sick and the wounded in base hospitals and convalescent homes, it looked out for American soldiers in enemy prisons, learned their addresses and furnished them with food, clothing and supplies, it searched for the missing, gave counsel to the troubled, and was ready with instant help for any and every need of the soldier or sailor.
While its first interest and care were for the men of the American Expeditionary Forces, its similar services were always ready for the needs of the soldiers of the Allied nations. To the French soldiers the American Red Cross gave especial attention because, on account of the long and desperate struggle which France had carried on with the enemy on her own soil, their need was greatest. The advance guard of the American Red Cross on its war footing which went to France in June, 1917, numbered nineteen men. Within six months it had there 3,000 workers, whose numbers were constantly being augmented, it was providing food, baths and beds to 20,000 French soldiers per day at its canteens and rest rooms on the lines of communication, serving hot and cold drinks from canteens at the front, while at its metropolitan canteens an average of 750,000 French and Allied soldiers were being fed each month and it was giving invaluable aid and service to French hospitals.
Wounded Men in a Hospital Weaving Rugs
Among the populations of the countries that were fighting the common foe the work of the American Red Cross was of incalculable value in the saving of life, the prevention of suffering and the conserving of morale. Its civilian service was wide spread and included the people of Palestine, Roumania, Greece, Serbia, Poland, Russia and Siberia, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, and France. The service it gave varied with the local needs. In Switzerland it dealt mainly with the interned, the refugees and the prisoners that were being returned to their own countries, providing food, clothing, comforts and whatever assistance was needed. In Italy, where at the end of the war the Red Cross had expended almost $17,000,000, its appearance in the summer of 1917, the advance courier of American’s assistance, was of great value in counteracting German propaganda against the United States and proving to the people that they could depend upon American aid. It fed thousands of the refugees from the invaded region: its canteens, rest-houses and distributed comforts cheered the Italian armies at the front and their supporting lines; it furnished hospital supplies and scores of ambulances manned by Red Cross drivers; it sought out the families of soldiers that needed aid and gave help to more than 400,000; it established work rooms for women, nurseries and schools for children, homes and colonies in the mountains and at the seaside for children who were ill; and at the end of the war it had under way a campaign against tuberculosis.
In Belgium it carried on a children’s service by aiding existing hospitals, building new ones, establishing colonies and nurseries for children and organizing the aid of nurses and physicians for baby-saving effort, gave to all in need dispensary and home service and food, and supplied its usual army service for the Belgian soldiers whether at the front, in hospitals or interned in Holland, and gave, in addition, educational help. Among the half million and more Belgian refugees it set up administrative relief units of its own which coöperated with those of Belgium and aided with money, machinery, food, clothing, materials and friendly help of every sort.
In England the Red Cross service was devoted to caring for the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and sailors passing through on their way to and from the front, or in camps, nursing the wounded sent back from France, and providing for those shipwrecked near British shores.
In France, in addition to its very great and important work among the soldiers of our own and the Allied armies, with its many hospitals and convalescent homes, its diet kitchens and hospital huts, its medical supplies, its baths and sterilizing plants, its canteens and kitchen service, and its expert service in searching for missing men, it carried on extensive civilian relief in coöperation with the French Government and with French societies. It cared for refugees, for needy families whose men were at the front, provided clothing, food, medical attention and better housing, helped to rehabilitate battle devastated regions and enable their population to return, inaugurated an anti-tuberculosis campaign and carried on a children’s service for the saving of babies’ lives and the conserving of the health and welfare of children. The American Red Cross had 9,000 persons in all the activities of its service in France during our war period.
Long before the end of the war the Red Cross began to turn its attention to the great problem of the reëducation of blind and maimed soldiers. It gave them training in the use of artificial limbs so that they could use these substitutes deftly and offered vocational training that would fit them to support themselves and their families in new occupations in which their mutilations would not be a handicap. In France it worked in coöperation with the French Government, carrying on by means of moving pictures and lectures an extensive educational propaganda among the wounded in the hospitals to enlist their interest, stimulate their courage and persuade them to undertake the training, giving assistance to existing schools, establishing an electrical training work shop and a large and well equipped farm for agricultural training in modern scientific methods. In the United States it turned the activities of the Red Cross Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men to war service and carried on schools for the training of those who wished to aid in the treatment by vocational therapy of wounded convalescents.
CHAPTER XXVII
FEEDING THE NATIONS
In April, 1917, the long and bitter struggle had so drained the food supply of the Western Allies that they were dependent upon North America for the food that would enable their armies to continue the battle for civilization, prevent the starvation of their civilians and the wholesale death of their children. To this country the neutrals of Europe had also to look for sufficient food to save their people from suffering. There was much grain in Argentina and Australia, but ships could not be spared for the long and dangerous journeys to and from those countries. Submarine warfare had destroyed so much of the shipping, not only of the Allies but of the European neutrals as well, that every available ship was needed for use on the Northern Atlantic. Therefore, North America was the last reservoir of food, the last producer of food, to which the hungry populations of Western Europe could turn for the sustenance of their armies and civilians or the neutral nations and such of the subjugated peoples under the German yoke as could be reached look with hope for any help. All Europe was on the verge of starvation and only North America, which meant chiefly the United States, could give assistance. For this country to produce and conserve vast quantities of food and send them to Europe had become one of the fundamental necessities for the winning of the war.
The United States Food Administration was created, under the Food Control Act passed by Congress in August, 1917, for the purpose of handling this situation in such a way as would give the nations with which we were associated the food they needed and would at the same time protect our own people against food scarcity and excessive prices. A Food Administrator, acting under the informal request of the President, had already been at work for three months, securing data and working out tentative plans, and had opened the way and accomplished much by appealing to the people for voluntary coöperation. The work of the Food Administration throughout the war was another example of the splendid team-work of the whole nation and of the highly efficient coöperation of all the agencies of the Government. In coöperation with it the Department of Agriculture bent its energies to the stimulation of food production, the War Trade Board controlled food movements between this and other countries, the War Industries Board saw to it that such manufacturers as produced goods needed in the production, storage, conservation and movement of food supplies received the necessary raw material. Leaders in the grain trade, familiar with all its phases, gave up their connection with enterprises of profit and at great personal sacrifice volunteered their services to act as managers of the corporation through which the Food Administration purchased its immense grain supplies and controlled the grain situation. Dealers in food stuffs of every sort, both wholesale and retail, willingly deprived themselves of large possible profits and obeyed the requests of the Food Administration. And the people all over the country voluntarily pledged themselves to the necessary program of food conservation. The task of feeding the nations of Europe and the armies of America, England, France and Italy became the task of the whole nation, and the whole nation, guided by and functioning through the Food Administration, took up the task with eager hands.
We entered the war with our national stocks of cereals at a lower level than they had been for many years, due to the heavy demand made upon them by the Allied nations during the previous year. There had been also, for the same reason, a considerable lessening in the number of food animals.
Beginning in the spring of 1917 and continuing through that and the following year the stimulation of production was carried on by setting before the farmers of the country and, indeed, before all the population, the urgent need for more food than the nation had ever before produced. The appeals to grow food went to the owners of back-yard gardens in cities and towns and villages, to all who had or could obtain the use of a few square feet or a few acres of soil, to farmers all over the land. The Agricultural Department used all its avenues of reaching the farming population, agricultural colleges aided the movement, newspapers and magazines published discussions of the subject and advice for the amateur. It has been estimated that during the first year of the war at least 2,000,000 “war gardens” were planted, over and above the usual garden planting, and that number was considerably increased during the second season. Most of them bore good results and their products added immensely to local food supplies and so lessened the drain upon exportable foods. The “war garden army” included men, women and children. Business men spent leisure hours hoeing and planting, thousands of women, in addition to those who worked in home gardens, turned their attention to agricultural labor and did what they could in the lessening of the serious problem of help on the farms. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts did efficient work, school boys who were old enough and strong enough to make their labor right and worth while went by the thousands from cities and towns to country districts to work upon farms.
Guaranteed prices for wheat, established in accordance with the conclusions of the Food Administration and its committee of expert advisers, prevented the sky-rocketing of prices and assured the farmer a staple return for his labor. This, in addition to what the farmers already knew of the need for food, resulted in the planting of immense acreages. In 1917 there were planted 35,000,000 acres of leading crops beyond the average of the five-year period immediately preceding the war, and 22,000,000 acres in excess of the previous year. But 1918 exceeded even this vast acreage with a planting of 289,000,000 acres, an increase over the preceding record of 5,600,000 acres. The bitter winter of 1917-1918 killed much wheat and the next summer drouth withered much corn. Nevertheless, the aggregate yield of the leading cereals in each of these years exceeded that of any preceding year in the nation’s history except that of 1915, when unusually favorable weather produced a more bountiful harvest from a smaller acreage. With the expectation that the war would continue until at least well into the next summer, the Government appealed in 1918 for a still greater production of wheat for the following year. The farmers responded with a planting of winter wheat amounting to over 49,000,000 acres, which, it was calculated, with average winter weather and an average crop of spring wheat, would insure for 1919 a wheat production of over a billion bushels, an excess over that of 1918 of probably 200,000,000 bushels.
All the principal kinds of live stock—horses and mules, in spite of the big exportation to Europe for army needs; milk cows, other cattle, hogs, and even sheep for the first time in many years—were increased in number by from one to twelve millions. Meat, milk and wool production showed signal increase, that of beef of a million pounds and of pork twice that amount.
The zeal of the whole country for increased food production appeared not only in the multiplied thousands of war gardens, the desire of every one who had access even to a few feet of soil to make something eatable grow upon it, and the immensely increased acreage devoted to the sorely needed cereal crops, but also in a striking growth of interest in agricultural matters of all sorts, whether of farm or garden. To all such subjects newspapers and magazines began devoting much more than usual attention, while for books dealing with them publishers noted a sharply increased demand.
The Food Administration was so organized as to decentralize its operations as much as possible and bring them into direct touch with the people. Under the United States Food Administrator, and also appointed by the President, was a food administrator for each state who selected one for each county in his state. These county administrators in turn appointed special committees or committee chairmen to keep track of and solve local food problems and to keep each locality in touch with the aims and operations of the national organization. Upon these local committees were representatives of local grain and food trades, of hotels and restaurants, of clubs and associations of various kinds and directors of educational work. Through these assistants educational campaigns were aided and directed, close watch was kept to prevent both hoarding and profiteering and a nation-wide survey of the food situation was in constant progress. It was all voluntary service, from that of the United States Food Administrator down to the county chairmen and the local committees, given with enthusiasm and the best ability each could bring to the service, with the single-hearted hope of helping the nation to win the war.
The primary purpose of the Food Administration was to make sure that there should be sufficient food to meet the needs of our fighting men on land and sea both at home and abroad, to provide such a supply for our people at home as would maintain them in health and comfort, and to furnish to the nations associated with us for their armies and civilians as much of our surplus as they might need. To make that surplus as large as possible called forth its most strenuous endeavor. In addition, it aimed to maintain an even supply of the essential foods and to stabilize prices by preventing, as far as possible, hoarding, speculation and profiteering.
The problem of food for the Entente warring nations was reduced in the spring of 1917 to the determination of the amount of food that could be drawn from North America, of which, of course, the chief portion would come from the United States. The surplus over our normal consumption, in all classes of food, which we usually exported, had always been small and would have to be multiplied many times over in order to meet pressing needs, in order, even, to win the war. Moreover, we had diverted from eight to ten million men from their usual productive activities and set them to the making of war and supplies for war.
The situation could be met only by a nation-wide program of conservation which would save vast quantities of the sorely needed food out of the usual prodigal consumption and waste of our own people. With complete confidence that the American people would respond of their own good will the conservation measures were all made voluntary. People were asked to eat more carefully, to waste nothing, to use less wheat, meats, fats and sugar, to combine flour from other grains with wheat flour and especially to use more corn. Grocers were directed to see that their customers purchased pound for pound of these other materials and wheat flour. The nation was requested to reduce its sugar consumption by fifteen per cent and housewives and other buyers of food were told that it was necessary to limit their purchases of sugar to three pounds per month for each individual. Homes and hotels and restaurants were counseled to institute wheatless and meatless days. Appeal was made to all who had charge of the providing of food for others and to every individual consumer to waste no food of any sort.
Pledges sent out by the Food Administration which bound every signer to observe its requests and rules were distributed by many thousands of volunteer workers, men, women and children, who saw in the work of securing signatures opportunity for patriotic service. Pamphlets and leaflets setting forth the reasons for what was asked, giving expert advice on the use of foods, analyzing the food situation, and urging compliance with the requests of the Food Administration were sent all over the country. Posters contributed by well known artists were hung on hoardings, in windows, and on home and office walls in cities, towns, villages. There was hardly a newspaper or a magazine of any sort in the whole United States but freely gave space to the always cogent and interesting articles furnished in great quantity by the Food Administration in support of the purposes it had set itself to achieve. Speakers who could present in living words the urgent need of food and the crucial test laid upon the country of producing and saving immense quantities of meat, fats, wheat and sugar addressed general and special audiences in many cities. Experts in home economics gave lectures and demonstrations and conducted classes that were attended by thousands of women, rich and poor alike. Especial effort was made to furnish this sort of education to the women of poor and ignorant families in order that they might learn how to provide food that would give equal nourishment at less expense.
Colleges and schools aligned their vast educational equipment with the food production and conservation movement and gave important service. When the colleges and universities for women or admitting women were asked, at the end of 1917, if they would undertake to give special instruction looking toward the aiding of the Food Administration’s purposes seven hundred of them, practically every such institution in the country, replied within a week asking to be supplied at once with the necessary material. Courses were outlined and supplied, prepared by experts upon the subjects, which dealt with the world food situation and the part the United States should take in it, with food values and the principles of nutrition. During the winter and spring of 1918 40,000 young women took these courses, which were repeated at summer schools in nearly all the colleges of the nation and were offered again in the autumn. They were also opened to men students, who saw in them a means of patriotic service. Under a secretary for each state appointed by the Food Administration, the graduates of these classes were organized and their services directed by the State Food Administrator. They gave to local administrators and committees efficient service of varied sort, depending upon the locality and the need of the moment.
So successful was the initial work of the collegiate section of the Food Administration that its activities were soon enlarged to include the schools also and several text-books were prepared for use in both high and lower grades that would show to the pupils the relation of food to the war and the part they might play in the winning of the conflict and would inculcate the ideal of service. The National Educational Association asked especially for such a text-book to be used by children below the high school grade and by means of an advisory committee coöperated with the Food Administration in its educational program in the schools. So important and enthusiastic was the work of the schools and colleges that a state director of their activities was appointed in each state to correlate their efforts with the other undertakings of the state food administrator and so make team-work for the production and conservation of food more thorough and efficient.
The central offices of the Food Administration in Washington expanded amazingly as the country leaped to its support and asked for instruction, advice and guidance. It began, a month or more after our entrance into the war, in two rooms, with a Food Administrator, whose office was informal and tentative until Congress in August authorized the program of food control, and two or three assistants. By the first of January it filled a huge structure holding over a thousand employees and in the following summer it crowded both this and another building of equal size. It finally had in its service nearly 8,000 employees and under its coördinating hand were the purchase and control of food-stuffs whose value amounted to $300,000,000 per month. To its staff came men and women of expert knowledge from all over the country, many of them giving voluntary service,—university professors who were specialists in food and other economic subjects, journalists, magazine editors, office experts, scientists whose specialties would throw light upon one or another phase of the food problem.
The Food Administration dealt with prices in the food trades, which were prevented from sky-rocketing above the levels caused by war conditions, and with speculation and profiteering by means of a system of licenses applying to all persons engaged in the importation, manufacture, storage and distribution of certain staple foods and including retailers doing more than $100,000 yearly business. The purpose of the system was to stabilize prices by limiting those charged to a reasonable amount over expense, by preventing the storing of food in large quantities in the hope of speculative profits on a rising market, by keeping all food commodities moving from producer to consumer with as little delay from unnecessary business transactions as possible and by limiting as far as practicable dealings in contracts for future delivery. Every licensee was required to make reports of his dealings once a month and none was allowed to keep on hand or under control food-commodity supplies for more than a certain term in advance, set, with some exceptions, at sixty days. Retailers doing less than $100,000 business annually were exempt from the licensing system but were forbidden by the Food Control Act to hoard or waste food or to charge excessive prices. In the neighborhood of 100,000 licenses were taken out and of all these only an insignificant percentage were ever found guilty of breaking the provisions of the law. Equally rare were attempts to break or evade the law by retail dealers. Nearly all of even these small numbers were brought back to right feeling and right action merely by confronting the violater with proof of his wrong doing. As punishment, if punishment was necessary, his license was revoked or suspended, or there was forced sale of his hoardings, or his place of business was closed for a period, or he was required to refund excess profits or to make a contribution to some patriotic organization. But the whole hearted desire to aid and coöperate with the Food Administration in its efforts to solve the food problem and meet the food necessities of the time was so nearly universal that the few exceptions were noteworthy chiefly because they were so few.
Under war conditions it was inevitable that prices for all food commodities should rise far above their level in pre-war years. But the control of the situation which was kept by the Food Administration and the carefully organized and consolidated buying of our own and other governments, enormous beyond comparison with any market situation in all the history of the world, reduced prices below what they were when we entered the war and kept them down to a level much lower than they would otherwise have reached. When we had been in the war for a year the Food Administration estimated that during that time the price of food commodities had decreased twelve per cent to the consumer and increased eighteen per cent to the producer. For instance, the price of flour, which reached a maximum in 1917 of $16.50 per barrel at the mill-door, at the end of April, 1918, stood at $10.50. Without the stabilizing influence of the Food Administration it would have mounted in that time, in the opinion of experts, to $40 or $50 per barrel.
The plea to conserve food met with enthusiastic response. In the spring of 1918, when there was dire need of more wheat for export, whole towns and counties, in some of the states, pledged themselves to use no wheat until the new crop should be available. A conference of 500 managers of first-class hotels and restaurants voluntarily gave their pledge to one another and to the Food Administration to use no wheat flour in their kitchens until the next harvest was ready. Households innumerable throughout the land did the same thing.
We entered the war with only 20,000,000 bushels of wheat available for export. The need grew sharp in England and France and Italy and we sent them 141,000,000 bushels, having saved 121,000,000 bushels out of what we would ordinarily have eaten ourselves. Because the armies and the peoples across the ocean needed sugar, the request was sent forth that individual consumption of sugar should be limited to three and later to two pounds of sugar per month. Its consumption was voluntarily reduced by about one-third. In four months in the summer of 1918 we saved and sent abroad, out of our usual consumption, 500,000 tons of sugar. Increased production and conservation were responsible for 1,600,000,000 more pounds of pork products ready for export in the fall of 1918 than were available the previous year, while for the three summer months of 1918 the records showed an increase of 190,000,000 pounds of dressed beef.
An illuminating instance of the temper of the people in general toward conservation is afforded by the reports of railway dining cars for two months in the autumn of 1917, in which they saved out of their ordinary consumption 468,000 pounds of meat, 238,000 pounds of wheat flour and 35,000 pounds of sugar. During that time hotels and restaurants reported savings of 17,700,000 pounds of meat, 8,000,000 pounds of flour and 2,000,000 pounds of sugar. That there was a very general attempt to lessen waste of food in cooking and eating was shown by the fact that nearly all cities reported a considerable decrease, amounting in most of them to from ten to thirteen per cent, in the amount of garbage collected.
Unloading Wheat Upon a Lighter at a French Port
Because at the very beginning of our participation in the war we recognized the value of food, mobilized our food forces, enlisting the whole nation in voluntary service, and kept their operation under control for efficient war use, we were able to pour into Europe the food without which the Allied armies could not have continued their necessary effort and the populations behind them retained their health and morale. In the years before the war the United States sent an average of between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 tons of food to Europe each year. In the crop year of 1918 we doubled that amount, sending 11,820,000 tons, and were prepared in the following year to send between 15,000,000 and 20,000,000 tons. In the midst of these bountiful harvests there were no food cards and the only rationing that was necessary was that prescribed by the individual conscience. But that conscience, with the universal enthusiasm for increasing production, enabled us to send to Europe in 1918 an increase over 1917 of $504,000,000 in the value of meat and dairy products and of $170,000,000 in breadstuffs. Our total contribution in 1918 to the food needs of Europe amounted approximately to a value of $2,000,000,000.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE MANAGEMENT OF FUEL
In the world war fuel fought, and food, and steel, as well as men. Fuel quickly became as much of a fighting necessity as were the munitions which could not be made without it and the food for whose transportation it was necessary. It was a war of manufactures, of applied science, and the foundations of both are laid in fuel. And therefore fuel, which means chiefly coal, had to be mobilized for war and its production and distribution so managed that its potency could be applied where needed and when needed without unnecessary detriment to civilian welfare. During the first months of our participation in the war and for nearly a year previous there had been a menacing coal situation in which the increasing demand for coal, inadequate transportation and storage facilities and other causes had combined to send prices to four and even five times their former level and to cause uneasiness and dissatisfaction among consumers and in the ranks of both labor and capital. As soon as Congress gave the necessary authority, in August, 1917, the President fixed schedules of provisional prices and appointed a Fuel Administrator for the United States.
Before the Fuel Administration was created there had unfortunately been published unauthorized and unwarranted assurance of prospective better conditions in the coal situation which had led many to postpone their usual summer and autumn purchases. When the winter set in, at an unusually early date, with its unprecedentedly long continued and bitter cold and frequent storms, this delay on the part of so many buyers added much to the universal difficulties and discomforts. To all the usual demand for coal and the extraordinary demand due to the unwonted weather, there were added the large and increasing fuel needs for war manufacture, for the bunkering of ships, for the heating of the many cantonments and camps, each a goodly sized city in itself, and other war activities. And with all this increased demand, there were fewer workers in the mines, for many had joined the fighting forces or gone to work in munition factories, and transportation facilities were disorganized by the strain upon them and disabled by storms and zero weather. This was the situation with which the Fuel Administration was contending three months after it began its work.
The total coal production of the country during 1917 amounted to 651,402,000 net tons, of which approximately 100,000,000 tons were anthracite and the rest bituminous. This was an increase over all previous production records of more than 60,000,000 tons, but it did not meet the ever increasing demands of the war machine, whose requirements for bituminous coal for 1918 went above this amount by nearly 100,000,000 tons. It was necessary to stir production in the mines to utmost endeavor, to facilitate that production by prompt and adequate distribution and to induce such fuel saving among consumers as would supplement production sufficiently to meet war needs.
Not only was there a decrease of many thousands in the number of men employed in the production of coal, but also in many mines efficiency was lessened by the hatreds and suspicions of the different racial representatives—Magyar, Pole, Italian, Slovak, Jugo-Slav, with their animosities bred in the bone, brought with them from Europe and fanned into fresh activity by the war. Each furbished up anew his old grudge and carried it on his shoulder, where it quickly received the knocking it challenged, and old racial battles were fought over again while the mining of coal was laid aside.
To better conditions and stimulate effort a Production Bureau was formed in the Fuel Administration whose representatives were sent to every mine. There they worked with and through a committee composed of mine operators and mine workers. The Bureau bent its energies incessantly to the influencing of mine operators and managers to establish such conditions and methods as would keep the miners satisfied and busy and of the miners to put forth their utmost efforts. Its representatives dealt tactfully with the racial hatreds, using the foreign language newspapers read by each group and also dealing with individual men in person, allaying suspicions, and showing each group what the success of the Allied and American armies would mean for its people in Europe. Officials of the United Mine Workers toured the mining regions, addressing the workers, informing the men on the questions involved in the war and urging them to do their best. Other speakers, including men returned from army service in France, went up and down through the mining regions, holding meetings, talking to the workers. The President’s proclamation addressed to all engaged in coal mining and appeals from other men of influence among them were distributed everywhere.
The result was a hearty response from the mining men. They dealt amicably with the production committees, they kept the peace with their racial enemies, they agreed to forego holidays and the usual laying off for funeral days, they worked even on Labor Day, they plunged into the increased production program with enthusiasm, they worked more efficiently and many old men who had quit active work on account of age voluntarily took up again the pick and shovel. The average number of days worked by each miner in the bituminous fields was increased over that of the previous year by twelve and by twenty-five over that of 1916. From week to week during the summer and fall of 1918, until November, the weekly production of coal showed an increase in the neighborhood of a million tons over the same week in the previous year. During the half-year period from the first of April to the end of September more coal was mined than ever before in any half year in the history of the American coal industry. In that time the bituminous production was twelve per cent greater than in the corresponding period in 1917, which had itself established a record.
As important as increased production in the mines was the rapid distribution of coal as soon as it was brought to the surface. Coal is not commercially produced until it is distributed, for coal dumped at the mine mouth or lying in cars on railroad switches is of no more use to the consumer than that still underground. It was mainly the efficient work of the Railroad Administration that brought order and successful achievement into this phase of the war coal situation. The manner in which it relieved the freight congestion which had paralyzed traffic during the last months of 1917 is described in the chapter on “Running the Railroads.” By the prompt actions it took it released the tied-up trains of coal, sent them to their destination and made possible the swift, economical and steady service of all cars available for the carrying of coal from mines to consumers’ bins.
But so much in excess of possible production was the amount of coal that was urgently necessary for war making purposes that only a great and general program of coal saving would prevent the slacking of our war effort. The Fuel Administrator turned at once to the American people, confident that, if they understood the need, they would voluntarily endeavor to meet it. Articles explaining the situation and showing why it was necessary for consumers to save in the neighborhood of fifty million tons of coal during the next few months in newspapers and magazines, all of which throughout the country cordially coöperated with the Fuel Administration, brought the responsibility of the continuing of the nation’s prosecution of the war straight to the feet of every individual user of coal, gas and electricity. Widely circulated leaflets urged conservation of coal and posters that met the eye at every turn emphasized their message. Instructions were published in periodicals of every sort for the economical but equally efficient use of coal in manufacturing and domestic furnaces, in kitchen ranges and household stoves. To save each day at least one shovelful of coal was laid upon the conscience of every consumer.
So-called “lightless nights” were established on which was forbidden the use of electricity, gas, oil, or coal for the illumination or display of windows, advertisements or signs and street lighting was reduced to the minimum necessary for safety. In order to aid in the conserving of coal by reducing the amount of artificial light necessary, the daylight saving measure was passed by Congress and the clocks moved ahead for an hour from the end of March to the end of October. Non-war industries had their consumption of coal curtailed.
In January, 1918, the public east of the Mississippi River was asked to observe a series of so-called “heatless days” in which there should be no consumption of fuel except for absolutely necessary uses. The purpose was to make possible the bunkering of two hundred and fifty ships at eastern ports laden with food and war materials for Europe, but unable to move for lack of coal. There was dire need of their cargoes in France. The United States Government had been told that the Western Allies could not continue their war effort unless these cargoes were delivered on the other side of the Atlantic in the quickest possible time. For a five-day period in January and for each following Monday for several weeks the Fuel Administration asked commerce and industry to forego as far as possible the burning of coal in order that it might give priority for deliveries of coal to the waiting ships and to the newly established Railroad Administration, struggling with ice-covered tracks, frozen engines and storm-tied trains, a little time in which to relieve the congestion of cars and set in motion long lines of stalled coal trains. The “heatless day” period was loyally observed and by the day after it ended every one of the two hundred and fifty ships had bunkered and was speeding across the ocean to deliver its sorely needed cargo. There had also been accumulated a stock of coal for the equally necessary bunkering of the other ships that came and went in a steady stream to supply the demands of war.
For all these measures the response of the public was immediate and willing. Manufacturers of nonessentials voluntarily offered to curtail operation if by so doing they could aid the nation’s war effort. Domestic consumers reduced their lights and watched their furnaces and stoves as they had never done before, and everywhere any attempt on the part of merchants, corporations or private individuals to use light or fuel in excess of the Fuel Administration’s requests and rules was frowned down by the public.
The Oil Division of the Fuel Administration played so important a part in the final success of the Allied and Associated nations that if it was true, as a British authority declared, that “we floated to victory on a sea of oil,” the credit belongs largely to the men who directed the American oil supply, for the Western front was dependent almost wholly upon oil from America. There was a constantly increasing production of crude oil, which was speeded by all possible methods, and the proportion of gasoline extracted was continually being increased. Oil-burning vessels in the British, French, Italian and American navies needed the oil and the Motor Transport Services of all the armies needed immense and rapidly increasing quantities of gasoline. Oil production was increased in 1918 to 344,000,000 barrels, which was 50,000,000 barrels more than it had been in 1914. To provide transportation a fleet of oil tankers was built and when the war closed over half the gross tonnage of tankers in service was American.
Gasoline this country sent across the ocean in an ever increasing flood which grew in 1917 by a million and a half of barrels over the previous year and in 1918 amounted to 13,312,000 barrels, an increase of more than 9,000 barrels per day over that sent in the previous year. But so sharp grew the need for it at the front in the summer of 1918 that restriction had to be put upon its use at home. The Allied forces warned by cable that without increased and early deliveries of gasoline their plans were likely to collapse. Marshal Foch’s cablegram said bluntly, “If you don’t keep up your petroleum supply we shall lose the war.” Immediate saving of gasoline was the only answer to the necessity and the Fuel Administration asked the people living east of the Mississippi River to forego the use of motor-propelled vehicles, except for specified necessary purposes, on Sundays. Compliance was voluntary and for military reasons the public could not be told how dire was the necessity.
But so immediate and universal was the response that from every section reports showed that Sunday motoring was almost wholly abandoned, the reduction being from 75 to 99 per cent. During the nearly two months that the restriction continued it was estimated that a saving had been made of approximately 1,000,000 barrels of gasoline, of which more than 500,000 barrels, ten shiploads, had been sent overseas.
A comprehensive plan was worked out by the Fuel Administration for the saving of fuel by conservation of light and power which enlisted the aid of a force of engineers and of other departments of the Government. A study was made by inspectors and engineers of conditions in large manufacturing concerns and in public utilities plants all over the country which brought about, by the willing coöperation of their managers, such rearrangements of machinery and appliances, elimination of duplicating plants and of unnecessary expenses as resulted in important savings, ranging from ten to thirty per cent in the amount of coal consumed, without interfering with the output. The Fuel Administration urged the generation of electric energy from water power instead of steam wherever possible, and enough plants made the change to effect a considerable saving in coal consumption.
A zone system for the distribution of bituminous coal providing for the supply of each section of the country from the nearest mines, put into operation by the Fuel and Railroad Administrations together, eliminated approximately 160,000,000 car miles and affected more than half of the total distribution of bituminous coal. The overcoming of this waste in transportation made possible the swifter and steadier use of rolling stock, thus speeding deliveries and more quickly returning cars and engines to the mines for new loads, and made more effective the railroad consumption of coal, which amounts to about twenty-five per cent of the coal production of the country.
The organization of the Fuel Administration stretched out in a network that touched every community. The fuel administrator of each state, working under the national organization, had under him administrators and local committees for cities and counties whose duty it was to keep in constant touch with the supplies and the needs of their own localities. Upon their reports the state administrator apportioned the supply to be allowed each locality and upon their investigations into business costs were based the maximum local retail prices of coal to be charged. The fixing of local retail prices was in addition to the regulation of prices at the mines and violators of either, whether mine operators, jobbers or retailers, were made to refund their excess profits and were then turned over to the Department of Justice for prosecution. Each of the several divisions of the work of the Fuel Administration, in addition to that of fuel distribution, such as conservation, production and oil, was organized by districts or specialized bureaus for intensive and effective work.
Economies urged by the Fuel Administration resulted in the saving during the first half of 1918 of 12,700,000 tons of coal. Although the coal mining industry lost 100,000 or more workers to other war industries and to the fighting forces, the speeding program of the Fuel Administration resulted in a production of bituminous coal during 1918 of 585,883,000 tons, setting a new high record and exceeding the production of the previous year by 34,000,000 tons. Notwithstanding the enormous and constantly growing increase there had been throughout the preceding eighteen months in the consumption of coal for war purposes, at the end of hostilities the country faced the approaching winter with stocks of coal on hand greatly in excess of previous years.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE
There could not have been a spirit more eager for service, more inspired by patriotic zeal, more willing to do whatever would aid the Government in its prosecution of the war or support the efforts of the fighting forces than was manifest among the great masses of the American people. Whatever they were asked to give to provide the means of war, whether by taxation, by buying of bonds, by outright gift, by sacrifice, by personal effort, they gave with ungrudging heart and overflowing hands. They offered their sacrifices and volunteered their effort without waiting to be asked and they spontaneously aligned themselves in every organized activity for the war and joined their voluntary efforts together for the nation-wide team-work that alone would make it a success. The sense of personal responsibility, the understanding of the importance of individual effort, had a new birth in their hearts and the deep-lying springs of love of country gushed forth anew at the call of her need. There could not have been a more triumphant vindication of the worth to humanity of American institutions and American ideals than was given by the spirit manifested by the American people throughout our participation in the world war. So high, eager and intense, indeed, was the general wish for rapid progress in war production and war making that its desires frequently outran possibilities and led many to demand results that only a miracle could produce.
Men of trade, industry, engineering, of all manner of business and professional life willingly agreed to the curtailment, even the complete stopping of their own affairs if the Government needed their services, their supply of coal, or their raw materials for its war production, or turned to its uses the ships in which they were accustomed to import or export their goods. In and out of the various committees, boards and administrations that directed the country’s business life for war purposes went a constant stream of these men, anxious only to serve their country and ready to make any sacrifice for America’s sake. “Tell me what you want, let me know what I can do, and I’ll do it,” was their unvarying appeal. Every official and every civilian in the temporary service of the Government who came into contact with the business and professional men of the country will bear witness to the patriotic and self-sacrificing spirit that was shown by them from the moment the nation entered the war. Over and over again these officials, permanent and temporary, have said to the writer of this book, in answer to her inquiry as to the spirit of those of whom they had had to ask sacrifices of this sort: “They’ve been splendid”—“Their spirit couldn’t have been finer and more patriotic”—“My experiences with them have made me prouder than ever to be an American and a fellow citizen of such men.”
Great numbers of these men, scores of them, leaders in all kinds of business, experts in technical and engineering fields, gave up their high-salaried positions or left their offices in charge of subordinates and offered their services to the Government. It was a war in which the scientific expert at home, the man of business, the engineer, was of equal consequence with the fighting man and the sum of the ability, the knowledge and the experience thus put into the hands of the Government could not have been purchased at its market value for millions of dollars.
As the Government is forbidden to accept free service they were paid a nominal sum and were known as “The Government’s dollar-a-year men.” Putting their own affairs aside they worked with zeal, long hours and incessantly, drawing upon their knowledge and their connections, making engagements and holding conferences indifferently for noon or midnight, that the nation might get itself upon a war footing quickly and efficiently and make its war stroke mighty and decisive. The chairman of one of the Government boards who had come in contact with many of these men and was familiar with their private position and importance in the business world estimated that they were sacrificing profits and salaries that would aggregate as much as $30,000,000 per year.
The response was equally zealous in every phase of life. Periodicals of every sort—daily and weekly papers, magazines, trade journals—opened their columns for the publication of articles that made known what the Government needed and thus circulated far and wide, through city, town and country, information concerning the need for food production and food conservation and how these could be accomplished, and how and why fuel should be saved, concerning the Red Cross, Liberty Loans, War Saving Stamps, pro-German propaganda. They gave the use of their advertising columns for campaigns for the collecting of money for war sufferers and for the big-brothering of our own fighting men. An expert estimate of the value of this donated space put it at $2,000,000. Hundreds of pages for these and similar purposes were paid for also by business firms. Department stores gave the use of show windows for displays that would aid war work and war relief organizations. Artists and illustrators turned their pencils and brushes to the work of making posters and illustrations for the Food and Fuel Administrations, the Labor Department, the Shipping Board, the Liberty Loan and Savings Stamps campaigns, and other work that would aid in prosecution of the war, giving in all about three thousand poster designs, cartoons, paintings and drawings.
Chambers of Commerce and other business organizations had their war service committees which were on the alert for ways in which such bodies or their individual members could serve the nation. There was hardly a woman’s club in the whole country but had its committee for war work which brought its members into line for war service of varied sorts. Churches and religious bodies set themselves to raise money and to give personal services that would be not only contributions toward the winning of the war but would also be of deep and abiding influence upon the national life. Their members and committees held meetings to further the cause of America in the great war, distributed war literature, furnished workers for the various campaigns for war purposes and war relief, gave Bibles by the hundred thousand to the fighting forces and in the quickening of Christian spirit which was born out of the tense emotions of the time the various denominations united their hearts and hands as they had never done before in common service for the needs of the country.
Young people and children were anxious to do their share, however small, in work for the war. The Boy Scouts were especially efficient and eager in many kinds of service. They sold millions of dollars’ worth of Thrift and War Savings Stamps; they gave noteworthy aid in every Liberty Loan campaign, securing over a million subscriptions; they were active and helpful in the uncovering of certain forms of enemy activity; they located for the Government quantities of walnut trees and groves whose timber was much needed for airplane and gunstock production. Girl Scouts also were busy and useful in the Liberty Loan campaigns, in the selling of Thrift and War Stamps, the cultivating of war gardens, the making of sandwiches and dainties for hospitals and canteens and in Red Cross service. In the School Garden Army for the summer of 1918 there were enrolled 1,500,000 children under sixteen years of age whose garden work produced an amount of food worth an average of $10 for each child. When the armistice was signed the plans were well under way for the tripling of that number of members for the following year. The Boys’ Working Reserve, which admitted only boys over sixteen, had 250,000 members who spent the summer of 1918 in work on farms and in truck gardens. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and other boys’ and girls’ clubs diligently collected nut shells and fruit pits needed for the making of gas masks. In schools all over the country children to the number of nearly 10,000,000, from the kindergarten to the high school, were enrolled in the Junior Red Cross and as its members they sewed and knitted and folded bandages, raised money for its service in many ingenious ways, saved food and money and salvaged all manner of household wastes. As “Victory Boys” and “Victory Girls” they enlisted by the thousands to aid in the great campaign which in November, 1918, raised over $200,000,000 as a war-chest for the seven chief welfare organizations working with the American fighting forces, each one of them agreeing to earn a certain amount for this war service.
The great body of industrial workers, with few and unimportant exceptions, united in the single-hearted and patriotic purpose that moved the whole country. There were some frictions and difficulties, due in part to the workings of enemy agents among them, in part to the influence of racial animosities among those recently come from Europe and in part to the rapidly rising costs of living. There was also in the early months among the foreign born lack of understanding of the issues at stake and the reasons for America’s participation in the war. But adequate information, the clearing out of enemy influences and the efforts of the War Labor Administration to make equitable adjustments of all difficulties between employees and manufacturers soon brought the great mass of workers to enthusiastic support of the nation’s war efforts.
The wonderful story of the financing of the war would have no chapter more interesting and thrilling, if only the facts concerning it could be gathered together, than that which would relate the aid given by industrial workers the country over who bought bonds and stamps to the full extent of their ability. The enthusiasm and unanimity they showed in shipyards, munition plants, coal mines and all places engaged in war production work proved their appreciation of the ideals at stake. In one large munitions plant they worked on Labor Day, offering their time without compensation, in order to give to that holiday a new and more solemn significance. In many manufacturing concerns, shipyards and mines they were willing to forego all the usual holidays in order to increase the output. In plant after plant the employees pledged themselves to work steadily without stop or hindrance and to give their utmost endeavors to their share of the upholding of the men who had gone overseas. Members of the War Labor Administration who took part in the adjustment of difficulties were enthusiastic in their commendation of the loyal spirit shown by the great body of employees and their desire to give their full and hearty support to the Government’s program of production for war purposes.
In nothing did the spirit of the people have more enthusiastic and practical expression than in the effort to increase the production of food which enlisted the services of men, women and children in every walk of life, in cities, towns, villages and country regions, from end to end of the land. It has already been told, in “Feeding the Nations,” how marvelously that production of food was increased. Farmers everywhere, under the spur of the great need, added, if they could, to the area of their cultivation, worked longer hours, and endeavored to improve their methods, while their wives and children took charge of barn-yard chores. Business men in country towns coöperated by lending financial assistance where it was needed. In agricultural states whole communities, or even whole counties, sometimes organized themselves upon a sort of coöperative basis for increase of food production, people in the towns providing needed labor and money.
Business and professional men frequently took their vacations or spent week-ends upon farms, lending a hand in farm labor. Women took up farm work and, as told in “The Work of Women for the War,” a goodly sized army of them aided in the raising of more crops. The home war garden movement swept the country with enthusiasm and in the summer of 1918 planted over 5,000,000 home plots that produced more than $500,000,000 worth of food. In New York City there were in that year 64,000 of these home war gardens, besides the school gardens, the number exceeding even that of the gardens of London. The patriotic, mounting spirit of the people caused the tillage in 1918 of an increase in food producing acreage of 10,700,000 acres, whose produce excelled the value of that of the previous year, itself a record, by $614,000,000.
There was everywhere the greatest eagerness to do anything for the men of the Army and the Navy that would give them help or pleasure. The story of the organized effort for that purpose is told in “Big Brothering the Fighting Forces.” But, in addition, there were numberless movements of smaller scope that enlisted the aid of many people. Hundreds of thousands bought “smileage tickets,” for seats in camp and cantonment theaters, and donated them to welfare organizations for distribution among soldiers and sailors. Many newspapers, clubs and business concerns collected money for the “smokes” of which the Army and the Navy consumed enormous quantities. The support of these tobacco funds enlisted the aid of men, women and children who gave money, organized entertainments, solicited help, did a thousand things to help swell the total. The value of the tobacco, cigars and cigarettes thus contributed for the comfort of our soldiers and sailors amounted to many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The navy needed binoculars, opera glasses and telescopes, and over 50,000 patriotic Americans sent their instruments. Quantities of musical instruments were donated for use in camps and at sea. The work of collecting and distributing phonographs and records was organized into a system that included the whole country, and machines by the hundred and disks by the thousand were given or loaned to it or bought for it and sent out to camps and hospitals, to troop transports, battleships, cruisers, destroyers and in great quantities to the men overseas. The Over-There Theater League, organized and directed by men prominent in theatrical affairs, included among its members and supporters practically all the theatrical managers and the important people of the stage in the United States, all of whom gave their services for the providing of theatrical entertainment for the men overseas. Moving picture actors and managers contributed services to the Liberty Loan campaigns and other phases of war effort.
Old men and women who were too disabled to do anything else joined the ranks of the knitters and made helmets, sweaters and mufflers, to go with the mountainous stacks of these articles made for the Army and the Navy. Hundreds of ministers, college and university professors and other professional and business men spent in the shipyards, or in munitions factories or on the farms their summer vacations of from two to twelve weeks, while some of them even gave up their positions in order to remain in this most necessary work. Many people owning country homes or estates turned them over to the Government to be used as hospitals or convalescent homes for wounded men. Every community in or near which were camps of any sort opened its homes to the soldiers and sailors and gave them hospitality, friendship, entertainment.
When the Red Cross asked for 5,000 tons of clothing for the destitute in France and Belgium the people gave it 10,000 tons. Successful men of business gave their time, their experience, their best thought and work to the directing of relief organizations. There were many of these, perhaps two score, in addition to the seven most important and every one of them was generously supported. So willing were the people to give that crooks and criminals made rich harvests by collecting money under false pretenses. Many millions of dollars were stolen in this way whose givers believed it was to be used for the benefit of their country’s fighting men. It was estimated by those familiar with the work of the relief organizations that the American people contributed for these several welfare purposes close to $4,000,000,000.
Throughout the war the American people gave whatever was needed for its prosecution, whether themselves, their loved ones, their energy, their labor, their time, their thought or their money, with an ever increasing ardor of patriotism and intensity of purpose. A spendthrift and wasteful nation disciplined itself to the practice of care and economy, and a nation of individualists, jealous of personal rights, acceded willingly to Government interference in private business and Government control of business relations for the sake of the country’s need. Hating war with a profound unanimity of feeling and conviction, the whole people joined hands with an equal depth of conviction and feeling that this war must be pushed through to a victorious conclusion in the quickest possible time.
The spirit of the American soldiers at Belleau Wood and in the Argonne Forest was the same spirit that animated the people at home and it brought the whole nation into a closer union and a more understanding comradeship than it had ever previously known. In the army at the front were three hundred thousand negroes, among the most valiant of its fighters; representatives of fourteen tribes of Indians, as contemptuous of death as any of their forefathers and as devoted to their country as any of their comrades; men of almost every racial strain under the sun, and all of them loyal soldiers of America. And, just as all these troops in uniform were joined together in the democracy of their crusading spirit, so all the people of the nation behind them were joined together in feeling and effort and purpose—the purpose that America should win the war for democracy’s sake, the utmost effort needed to realize that aim, a passionate patriotism that blazed at white heat in every heart.
The occasional rumbles of dissatisfaction that were heard in some of the centers of alien population during the first months of our participation in the war, due chiefly to enemy propaganda of one or another form, soon ceased as better information was spread among them and the country’s cause had no more whole-hearted and self-sacrificing support than was given by those same crowded centers of foreign born people. Thoroughly representative of this rapidly changing spirit and of our foreign-born citizens throughout the land was the East Side of New York City, where German propaganda and disloyal socialism together did their best to create trouble. But the American Army contained no better and more valiant soldiers and none more inspired by the crusading spirit than the thousands of lads from that region, whose unyielding courage, soldierly qualities and loyalty to their comrades in battle won the praise of all who shared with them the dangers of shell fire, gas and machine gun bullets.
And just as fine and staunch in its different way was the patriotism of their families at home, for whom the absence of their men meant much self-sacrifice and even sometimes serious financial troubles. But they proudly hung their service flags in their windows and supported the Government’s war program in every way in their power. Their purchases of thrift and war stamps constantly increased and in the second Liberty Loan campaign they more than doubled their subscription to the first, in the third they multiplied their subscription to the second by sixty and in the fourth they more than trebled their subscription to the third, buying in it $50,000,000 worth of bonds.
It was on the East Side of New York City that the “block party” had its birth—unique fruit of the war and symbolic of the war’s influence upon the people of the nation. For such a party all the people living in a block, or several adjoining blocks, decorated their houses and the street with flags, colored lanterns, ropes of greens, bright fabrics; and on the appointed night everybody swarmed into the street and to the accompaniment of music and cheers speeches were made, a huge service flag, with a star for every man of the block in service, was strung across the street and then all the nations and races represented among them told one another the news they had heard from their soldier and sailor lads, sang patriotic songs and danced on the pavement and sidewalk all the rest of the evening. Soon the block party spread to all parts of the city and established itself even in the exclusive residence districts where men, women and children, janitors and those whom they served, house maids and mistresses, met on the pavements, talked and sang and cheered and danced together as the service flag of their block was swung to its place and floated above them, their bond of union in common devotion to their country.
The block party, although it did not make its appearance in just that form in all sections, yet was significant of what was taking place in the hearts of the people all over the land. For out of their universal spirit and its white heat of devotion was being born a fresh realization of democracy and of its meaning to humanity and a new dedication to its ideals.
CHAPTER XXX
LABOR AND THE WAR
Such vast quantities of manufactured products—machines, munitions, clothing, food, supplies of every sort—were consumed in the war and had to be speedily produced for immediate destruction that for the first time in the history of the world the forces of production at home became of as much consequence for the winning of the war as were the fighting forces at the front. This fact, because it was so new a feature of warfare, was not at first recognized by the Entente Allies in its full significance and consequently their efforts lost much in possible effectiveness during the first year or more of the struggle. Nor did the United States at once realize the necessity of mobilizing the productive forces and directing their employment along lines that made for martial efficiency. But the first few months of war effort developed friction between employers and employed, competition in the bidding for labor by the various war agencies of the Government and the private employers engaged in production of war necessities, bungling and waste in the distribution of labor and a tendency to backsliding in labor conditions. The Government had become the greatest employer of labor in the world and it soon became evident that to correlate the activities of all its war making agencies and induce efficient coöperation between them and private employers new machinery would have to be devised for the handling of the forces of production.
For this purpose there was created the War Labor Administration, including in its machinery and its duties those of the Department of Labor, but expanding such of them as dealt with labor in its relation to the war and adding others that would meet new needs and aid in the solution of new problems, with the Secretary of Labor as its responsible head. In order to carry out the immensely enlarged program which war emergencies made necessary in a broad, comprehending and coöperative spirit, the Secretary called to his assistance an Advisory Council whose members represented all phases of interest in industrial work. To its preliminary study and careful planning was due in large measure the efficient and harmonious working of the big undertakings of the War Labor Administration. By its advice and as a part of the machinery for the correlation of effort there was devised the War Labor Policies Board on which were represented the War, Navy, Agriculture and Labor Departments, the Fuel, Food and Railroad Administrations, the U. S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation and the War Industries Board, and to which were attached advisers representing labor, business management and technical fields. It unified labor policies and harmonized the industrial activities of the different branches of the Government, ensuring more efficient team-work for the prosecution of the war.
The War Labor Policies Board was thus the organization through which spoke the voice of all the industrial agencies of the Government and behind its administration of industrial relations was all the power of the Government. It worked out a national policy for the distribution of labor which was executed through the agency of the United States Employment Service. By means of conferences between the representatives of organized labor and industrial management it did much toward the standardizing and stabilizing of wages. It endeavored to bring about proper standards and satisfactory conditions of labor. By anti-child-labor regulations in all Government contracts it kept a restraining hand on the evident tendency toward employment of children that had been induced on the part of employers by the need for labor and on the part of parents by the possibility of greatly increased earnings. It adopted a policy toward the employment of women in industry which aimed to keep women out of unfit occupations and to provide such standards and conditions in the occupations to which they were admitted as would conserve their health and welfare. It advised the more general employment of older men for many kinds of work rather than that of women or boys, and largely because of its support of this policy the age of engaging men advanced during the war by ten years, until men of fifty were able to find employment.
The first task which the War Labor Policies Board undertook was that of bringing order out of the chaotic condition which had quickly developed through the bidding for labor against one another of all employers, both public and private, and the working out of a national policy for the distribution of labor. The existing machinery of the United States Employment Service, very greatly enlarged and strengthened as soon as funds for that purpose were available, was used in the execution of this policy. Offices were established in the several states, their number soon totaling 400, and a decentralized system was worked out consisting of state and community labor boards, upon all of which there was joint representation of employers, employees and the United States Employment Service. These made it possible to list and keep constant check upon the supply of labor and the demand for it in every part of the country and within a very short time to move an excess of the supply in one place to another in which there was need. These community labor boards were organized in every state of the Union and by the first of September, 1918, were at work in 1000 industrial centers. In every application for work the schooling and the occupational experience and training of the applicant were stated, thus making it easy to match the job with the man. By the end of the summer the U. S. Employment Service had made placements of almost 2,000,000 wage earners.
The production departments of the Government agreed to employ unskilled labor only through the U. S. Employment Service and private employers, with very rare exceptions, were quickly brought to see the necessity of coöperation and readily responded to the plea that was made to their patriotism and their intelligence. The Employment Service aided in the weeding out of men from non-essential industries and helped to transfer them to those upon which the nation’s life depended. It gave efficient assistance also in the important work of preventing the drafting into the army of skilled workers whose labor was needed in war industries. Through its 15,000 enrollment agents it reached out into towns and villages, tapped every potential supply of wage earners, and registered in advance men for specified trades for which one or another war emergency would soon make demand. Its division for farm service made it possible to harvest the 1918 crop with far less than the usual loss due to lack of harvest hands, notwithstanding the fact that there was little unemployment in any part of the country. For the guidance of boys in their latter teens the section of the U. S. Boys’ Working Reserve directed the work in 1918 of 250,000 boys of high school age who wished to devote the summer vacation to productive civilian work that would aid the prosecution of the war, exercising upon this great body of future citizens through various agencies and by varied methods a notable influence for manly spirit, patriotism and citizenship ideals.
A section of the War Labor Administration that had under its charge the informing of the public as to its activities and the education of those engaged in war emergency production was a part of the democratic methods of the whole national war program and did much to stimulate patriotic effort and bring divergent interests into harmony. Through thousands of magazines, newspapers and periodicals of every sort it brought the efforts being made by the War Labor Administration to general knowledge and aroused interest in industrial problems. It sent out hundreds of speakers who talked upon subjects dealing with labor and the war before chambers of commerce, clubs, trade unions and other organizations, and meetings of employees in plants devoted to war industries. It distributed 1,000,000 posters a month, which, changed every two or three weeks, were displayed in workshops, factories, stores and railway stations, and it supplemented these and the spoken word with a campaign of motion picture service. It formed committees among the employees of over 12,000 plants to establish personal contact between those employed in war industry, their employers and the representatives of the Labor Department, promote better understanding between them and so increase production.
A serious problem grew early in the war out of the immense expansion in size and man-power of plants engaged in war industry and the creation of many others—the problem of the housing or transportation of their employees. Almost overnight the population of the vicinity of an industrial plant would increase so greatly that transportation facilities would be swamped and housing accommodations become utterly inadequate. Appropriations amounting to $100,000,000 were provided for the solving of this problem, half of which was to be devoted to industrial housing. At the end of September, 1918, houses, apartment houses and flats capable of accommodating 9,000 families had been built or were under construction and financial allotments had been made for as many more projects which were under consideration and about to be developed. To relieve situations where it was possible for the incoming workers to be absorbed by surrounding or nearby communities there had been built up in more than fifty cities organizations in which councils of defense, chambers of commerce, housing associations, Y. W. C. A. and other local bodies coöperated with this division of the War Labor Administration. Such an organization would investigate living conditions and list vacant houses, flats and rooms, frequently showing the existence of sufficient housing facilities to make construction unnecessary.
Among the most important of the agencies developed by the War Labor Administration was that of the National War Labor Board, created for the purpose of adjusting difficulties between wage workers and employers in industries directly or indirectly concerned with production for the war. It was appointed by the Secretary of Labor at the end of our first year of participation in the war and consisted of five representatives each of employers and wage-earners and two joint chairmen acceptable to both sides. It served as a sort of court of appeal, only such cases of disagreement being considered by it as the Conciliation Service of the Labor Department failed to adjust.
In form and purpose the War Labor Board was a new departure for even a democratic nation to take. It had no precedents behind it and no body of law with which to enforce its decisions. To make its work effective it depended upon the general sense of justice and fair play, the confidence of workers and employers in the justice of the policies by which it was guided and the loyalty and patriotism of both the opposing sides of industrial controversies. Its purpose was to secure maximum production of all war necessities by preventing strikes and lockouts, and also proper conditions of labor and of living that would aid in making possible that maximum production. With regard to labor unions the Board based all its procedure upon the right of labor to organize and to bargain collectively with employers, but forbade any coercion by labor unions or their members of either employers or employees. Employers were not allowed to discharge workers or to penalize them, directly or indirectly, for attempting to organize, although shops were to be continued as closed or open, on their existing status, for the period of the war. In open shops the union standard of wages and conditions was to be maintained. The Board would not use its power to compel open shops to become union shops, but employers agreed to recognize the right of the employees of a shop to form a full organization of their own members if they chose. The Board recognized the basic eight-hour day as applying in all cases where required by the existing law and in other cases it pledged itself to settle the question with due regard to the welfare of the workers and to governmental necessities. In the case of women workers it insisted upon equal pay for equal work and said that their tasks must be proportioned to their strength.
The National War Labor Board called to its aid a large number of men and women trained in the investigation of labor problems and when its services were necessary the case was studied by several of these agents, the sides respectively of labor and of management being investigated each by those sympathetic with its point of view. They studied each case on its own merits, listed the grievances, collected evidence and selected witnesses to appear before the Board. In some cases, in order to expedite the work, trained examiners conducted hearings at which both sides were represented and then reported to the Board with an analysis and summary of the case.
At the date of October first, 1918, the offices of the National War Labor Board had been invoked in 531 controversies involving the employment of more than 2,000,000 workers, of which 266 were still pending. Awards had been made directly in forty-four cases, others had been referred to other governmental agencies or settled in other ways, and others had been withdrawn or dropped. In only four cases had the members of the Board failed to come to unanimous decision concerning the award and in only three instances had there been refusal to accept its conclusions. In two of these cases the result was the taking over by the Government, in one, of telegraph and telephone lines, and in the other of a munitions plant, while in the third, also a munitions plant, the striking workers decided, upon appeal to their patriotism, to accept the award and to resume work.
The work and the decisions of the National War Labor Board had a profoundly beneficent influence upon the war production of the country, reducing to a minimum the deterrent effects of labor troubles. The policies to which it pledged itself and the general confidence in its purpose to deal fairly with both sides greatly decreased the probable number of cases of serious trouble, as in many which otherwise would have grown into strikes or lockouts the opposing parties found they were able to settle their differences between themselves. The work of the Board raised the wages directly of approximately a million workers and of perhaps twice that number indirectly and it strongly influenced for the better the relations between wage earners and employers.
The just and scientific management of labor problems in connection with the war resulted in a minimum of labor trouble, an enthusiastic and patriotic response of labor to the needs of the nation and an enormous and very slightly interrupted production of all goods needed for war purposes.
CHAPTER XXXI
BIG-BROTHERING THE FIGHTING FORCES
Never in all the history of wars was an army so big-brothered, its welfare so lovingly and efficiently cared for, as were the fighting forces of the United States in the world war. To the whole nation, from President down to street gamin, they were “our boys,” seldom spoken of by any other term, and whatever the nation thought they wanted and could have it gave with full heart and overflowing hands. At the very beginning of our war effort, the desire of the War Department that the men should be so environed and trained on this side the ocean and so cared for on the other that they should be not only better soldiers but also should return to their homes better men than when they left, with no scars other than the honored ones gained in battle, and its initial undertakings toward that aim won instant and whole-hearted response from end to end of the country.
Various organizations, to the number of a dozen or more, some of them newly created and others of long life and experience, were soon working, with their hundreds of thousands of members, for the health, the comfort, the welfare, the happiness of the men of the fighting forces. The twin Commissions on Training Camp Activities for the Army and the Navy entered at once upon their program of activities in all the cantonments and camps for the training of soldiers and sailors. Their athletic directors, boxing instructors, song leaders, theater managers, dramatic entertainment coaches were all experts in their several lines and took up with enthusiasm the work of furnishing entertainment and recreation and of training the men to provide entertainment for themselves. These two commissions were appointed by the War and Navy Departments and were a part of the system of training for war. They have been described in the sections dealing with the Army and the Navy and, except for the approval and support given to them by the whole people and the coöperation with them of civilian agencies, do not rightfully belong in an account of how practically all the nation stood on its tiptoes behind the fighters in its zeal to serve them and care for them. These two commissions, while they were similar to the other agencies in methods and spirit, were of governmental origin, support and direction, while the others were civilian.
The activities of the civilian societies gave expression to the heart of the whole people. At first they worked separately, each supported by its own members and followers, but after a time smaller societies merged themselves in or coöperated with larger ones and the seven chief organizations which finally comprised the bulk of the effort so arranged their work as to avoid duplication and overlapping and so eliminate waste. These seven were the War Camp Community Service, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Salvation Army, the Jewish Welfare Board, the Knights of Columbus, the Young Men’s Christian Association and the American Library Association.
Supplementing the work of the Commissions on Training Camp Activities for the Army and Navy, the War Camp Community Service operated in the regions immediately surrounding or near the training camps. It bettered moral conditions in camp environments, provided sleeping quarters, baths, canteens, information booths, clubs, reading rooms, arranged dances and theatrical entertainments, served as a medium through which the hospitable desires of the community might reach the men, thus making possible their entertainment in hundreds of thousands of homes. Its work was established in one hundred and twenty-eight cities, in every state in the Union, and two million men registered at its clubs. In the work of the Service in New York City alone one million men in uniform were provided with beds and baths, it had 9,000 beds available every night, it served meals to more than 50,000 men, 75,000 soldiers and sailors attended its dances and almost as many were taken on Sunday sight-seeing trips through the city, while hundreds of thousands enjoyed the theatrical entertainments it furnished.
Coöperating with the War Camp Community Service, the National League for Women’s Service with its 300,000 members ran its own clubs and canteens, furnished workers for those of other organizations and for information booths, recruited a Woman’s Motor Corps whose members were ready for work as motor drivers for any war service organization served as the distributing agency for florists all over the country who contributed flowers for the wounded in hospitals, and collected and sent books, magazines, games, phonographs and records to army and navy camps at home and overseas.
The Over-There Theater League, under the leadership of men prominent in the theatrical world, secured actors and actresses, arranged theatrical tours, staged entertainments and, under the auspices of the Y. M. C. A., carried their performances from camp to camp. During the “Slacker Record Week” 15,000 men and women engaged in the campaign to secure phonographs and records to be sent overseas for the pleasure of the soldiers. To provide moving pictures for the camps at home and on the other side a great number of writers, actors and producers worked with zeal, and the Community Motion Picture Bureau, in charge of the service under the Y. M. C. A., made careful investigation to find out what kind of pictures were best liked in the different places. In the camps and cantonments at home it showed 8,000,000 feet of films per week. It had 2,000,000 feet of films in service on the transports that carried the troops to France. Its films were sent out to the ships of the Atlantic fleet and circulated from one cruiser to another. In France, and wherever there were American troops, the movie was ready for their entertainment in camps and hospitals from the port of debarkation to the rear of the firing line.
The contribution of the Y. W. C. A. to the work of big-brothering the army gave a peculiar touch which, unprecedented in war as the whole movement was, carried in a still more unusual and original way the atmosphere of the home and the influence of the social fabric through the training camps and across the ocean. In more than a hundred camps and cantonments its Hostess Houses, accommodating from 500 to 5,000, offered welcome to women friends and relatives visiting soldiers and sailors. The Hostess House, with its flowers and rugs and easy chairs, its desks for writing and tables offering books and magazines, its cheerful, blazing fireplace in winter and its verandas in summer, its pleasant and well conducted cafeteria and its general homelike air, was a charming bit of the outside world set down in the midst of military activities. There mother, wife, sister, sweetheart, friend could meet her soldier or sailor lad, could spend the night if necessary and have good, inexpensive meals. It was the scene of many impromptu weddings, the hostess of the house and her assistants taking charge of the arrangements, when lovers decided suddenly to be married before the ocean and the chances of battle should separate them. The Y. W. C. A. carried its work to France, and in its Hostess Houses there looked after the welfare of the women workers for the American Expeditionary Force and its canteens followed the American troops even to north Russia, where they were established in Murmansk and Archangel.
All of the great religious bodies of the country joined at once in the effort to lessen for the army and navy men the hardships of war, to surround them with as many as possible of the comforts of civilized life and to uphold them physically, mentally and morally. People of Protestant faith gave their support mainly to the long established and widely reaching organization of the Y. M. C. A., members of the Catholic Church, working through the National Catholic War Council, supported the endeavors of the Knights of Columbus, and the Jewish Welfare Board, with American Jewry behind it, turned its attention especially to soldiers of that faith. And the Salvation Army, with its years of experience in caring for the needs of humanity and upholding morale, was early in the field. All these organizations coöperated in the most cordial way, supplementing one another’s effort and joining their endeavors whenever the best results could be gained in that way, two or more of them sometimes using the same building. The friendly hand, the good cheer, the comforts each had to offer were ready for any man in uniform without a thought as to his religious affiliations. Each held its religious ministrations in reserve for those who asked for them and, for the rest, based its abundant and many-sided service solely on the desire to help the American Army fight the battle of justice and liberty. Their one purpose was to big-brother the fighting forces of the nation and, whether in training camp or debarkation port, on transport or battleship, behind the lines in France or at the very front, to be ready with whatever help and cheer and comfort it was in their power to give when it was wanted.
In a Red Triangle Hut in the Battle Zone
The Jewish Welfare Board was the youngest of all these organizations, having been formed after our entrance into the conflict for the purpose of helping to win the war by carrying out the policies of the War Department with regard to the welfare and the morale of the soldiers. Behind it were three and a half million citizens of the Jewish faith and, while it functioned on its religious side for the benefit of the 175,000 men of the Jewish religion in the Army and Navy, in all its other activities it was nonsectarian and worked as generously and cordially for one as for another. In the training camps of the Army and the Navy in the United States it had many huts and nearly three hundred field workers who arranged entertainments, classes and study groups, provided religious services, and taught the English language and the principles of American citizenship to men new to America. In two hundred communities near training stations the representatives of the Welfare Board coöperated with the War Camp Community Service in all the phases of its activities. Overseas it had headquarters in Paris and at the end of hostilities it was preparing to establish others at debarkation ports and in cities near the large camps of the A. E. F. and was ready to send a hundred men and women workers to take charge of them. Its club rooms in Paris were equipped with books, music, games and other means of social enjoyment and the organization, by coöperation with a French society, arranged to have Jewish soldiers entertained in French homes of their own faith. Through the suggestion of the Welfare Board a number of rabbis were commissioned as chaplains with the fighting forces, each of them being provided with a monthly allowance to expend upon small comforts for his boys. They held Jewish holyday services back of and almost in the front line trenches, in cities and villages, once in the ruins of a Roman Catholic Cathedral and again in a large Y. M. C. A. hut. At one service, at which the rabbi, coming from another sector, arrived a little late, he found that the local Knights of Columbus Chaplain had kept the meeting together for him and opened it with a preliminary prayer.
The National Catholic War Council, organized to direct the war-aiding activities of all Catholic forces, operated a million-dollar chain of Visitors’ Houses at army and navy training camps and of service clubs in communities and embarkation ports, where it worked in coöperation with the War Camp Community Service. Under its supervision was the society of the Knights of Columbus which, at the close of hostilities, had in the United States several hundred buildings and 700 secretaries and overseas more than a hundred buildings and huts, with many more in preparation, and over 900 workers. It had service clubs in London and Paris which provided reading, lounging and sleeping rooms, and all such club comforts, while its huts behind the lines furnished centers of comfort, cheer, entertainment and small services of many sorts. It operated a great fleet of motor trucks which carried supplies up to the firing line and into the front trenches. Nothing was more welcome to the battle-weary soldiers relieved from front line duty than these “K. C.” rolling canteens with their hot drinks, cigarettes and other comforts. The organization shipped to the other side and gave to soldiers and sailors many tons of supplies, including cigarettes by the hundreds of millions and huge amounts of chewing gum, soap, towels, stationery, candy and chocolate. It had more than a hundred voluntary chaplains on service with the troops, many of whom carried money furnished by the society to aid in providing comforts for the welfare of the soldiers.
The Salvation Army won a peculiar place in the hearts of our fighting men by the simple hominess and complete self-abnegation of its service. Its huts and hostels were in all the important training camps at home, while overseas the Salvation Army uniform in some kind of a structure or dugout welcomed the army lad in the big camp areas, in the supporting lines and in the forward troop movements up to the rear of the front line forces and trenches. It had overseas more than 1200 officers, men and women, operating 500 huts of one sort or another, rest rooms and hostels. It had forty chaplains serving under Government appointment and it supplied nearly fifty ambulances. Its method was to put a husband and wife in charge of a canteen or hut, the man making himself useful in any way that offered, the woman making doughnuts and pies, chocolate and coffee for the ever hungry doughboys, and doing for them whatever small motherly service was possible. In their huts the men could always find warmth and light and good cheer, music and games and good things to eat that were touchingly reminiscent of boyhood and home. Shells screamed overhead, gas floated back from the front and the earth shook with the roar of battle, but the Salvation Army workers stood to their self-imposed duties regardless of their own comfort or danger and had ready for the long lines of soldiers coming and going a smiling, heartfelt welcome and huge quantities of pies and doughnuts and hot drinks. Its canteens were always open, day and night, and none of its workers was sent overseas without special training.
By far the largest, oldest and most important of these welfare organizations was the Young Men’s Christian Association, which expanded a total of nearly $80,000,000 on a system of war service so vast that the sun was rising upon it through every hour of the day. Within a few hours after the United States entered the war the Y. M. C. A. offered its entire resources to the Government. At the end of hostilities it had overseas over 7,000 workers, of whom 1,600 were women; in the American Expeditionary Forces it had 1,900 war service centers, nearly 1,500 in the French armies, several hundred in Italy, with more in Russia and Siberia; in the United States it had 950 of these centers and 6,000 workers and it was represented in every cantonment and training camp for Army or Navy from end to end of the country. On this side, it paid for its huts and their equipment a total of more than $6,000,000, while overseas the similar expenditure went beyond $5,000,000, making a total of well over $11,000,000 invested in the equipment with which to give our soldiers and sailors rest and cheer, entertainment and comfort. The cost of the operation of these centers amounted, for the duration of the war, to over $6,550,000.
In the home camps and cantonments the “Y” centers had an average of nearly 20,000,000 visits from soldiers and sailors per month, while in them at the same time were written letters on free Red Triangle stationery numbering more than 14,000,000 and its entertainments, lectures and motion picture shows were attended by 5,000,000 men. It established and carried on thousands of educational classes, French being the most popular study. Its work was especially valuable in the education of illiterates and of foreigners who did not understand English. Some 50,000 who could not read or write when they entered the training camps received in this way the rudiments of a common school education. On troop trains and transports the “Y” workers were present, giving whatever service the conditions made possible.
Overseas the hut of the Red Triangle was to be found wherever there were American fighting men—in England, Ireland, Scotland, in France and Italy, Russia and Siberia, from Gibraltar to Vladivostok, from the Caucasus to the Murman coast. Sometimes the “hut” was a dugout, sometimes a ruined chateau, again it was a freight car on a siding, or a temporary shack, or a substantial building. But, whatever its form and appearance, it stood for home, for the democratic social fabric for which the men were fighting, and within it they could always find light and warmth, cheer and good fellowship, books, games, music, entertainment, smokes and toothsome dainties.
Motion picture films for the Y. M. C. A. to the average length of fifteen miles were shipped every week, and at its moving picture shows there was an average weekly attendance of 2,500,500. Scores of actors and actresses canceled their engagements and went overseas to interest and amuse the soldiers and sailors with performances of all kinds on the hut circuit, organized and directed by the Over-There Theater League, under the Y. M. C. A. During the latter months a hundred performances daily, on the average, were put on in the various camps. None of the players received a salary and shows of all kinds were free. There were concerts, lectures, readings, as well as movies and every kind of theatrical performance. A department of plays and costumes maintained in Paris sent out to the camps facilities for amateur performances and fifty professional coaches went from the United States to encourage and train the soldiers to produce entertainments of their own. Violins, banjos, mandolins, ukeleles and cornets were sent over by the thousands, to say nothing of smaller instruments and sheets of music.
To provide for athletics and physical recreation for the soldiers and sailors overseas the Y. M. C. A. expended more than a million and a half dollars. It sent over 1,200 sports leaders and its shipments included huge quantities of baseballs and bats, boxing gloves, footballs, ping-pong balls, racquets, nets, tennis balls, running shoes, and all the paraphernalia of indoor and outdoor sports, to the value of $2,000,000, which were free for the asking.
The post canteens of the army were taken over by the Y. M. C. A., at the urgent request of the commander of the American forces and against its own desire, and operated throughout the war. This entailed the running of a huge merchandising proposition foreign to its customary activities and the work was assumed in addition to its chosen program of fostering the morale and cherishing the welfare of the fighting forces. For this post exchange service it furnished buildings and service without charge and sold to the soldiers at cost goods to the value of $3,000,000 per month. Its workers often carried packs of goods into the trenches and distributed them freely. Because it was all a question of service the organization itself bore the very considerable loss at which it operated the canteens.
A system of “leave-areas” conducted by the Y. M. C. A. provided recreation for the men on the seven days’ furlough given to each one after four months of service. It was not thought desirable by the military authorities to turn the men loose for their holiday and therefore several resorts were taken over to furnish interesting places for them to visit and were put into the hands of the Y. M. C. A. as hosts and entertainers. Aix-les-Bains was the first and twenty-five others were added until the men had a wide range of selection ranging from famed resorts in the Alps to others on the shores of the Mediterranean. It was a kind of entertainment that had to be created, for it was entirely without precedent. Largely in the hands of women workers in the Y. M. C. A., they and their men helpers and advisers bent their utmost endeavor, resourcefulness and loving care to the work of giving the men a good time and sending them back to their duties at the end of their leaves physically and mentally refreshed. Each area had its athletic field in which every day there were sports going on and there were mountain climbs, picnics, bicycle rides, and, in the evening, movies, theatrical entertainments, concerts, music and dancing.
The women’s contingent of the Y. M. C. A. did effective work both in these leave areas and in the canteens. Their service was not enlisted until a year after our entrance into the conflict, but at the end of hostilities a thousand women were engaged in it, and so insistent was the call for them that they were recruited as rapidly as possible, a thousand more being sent over during the next three months. They were given a week or more of intensive training before sailing to fit them for the duties they would have to undertake.
Unique in all army as well as in all educational history was the great educational system which the Y. M. C. A. undertook to establish, under the authority and with the coöperation of the War Department. Beginning in the home camps, it was carried across the sea, developed more and more as time went on, and found its climax in the “Khaki University.” The final and complete plans were ready only in time for use with the Army of Occupation in Germany and in the camps abroad and at home in which the men waited for demobilization, when $2,000,000 worth of text-books had been ordered for the work. Some of the foremost educational experts of the United States, numbering several hundred, were engaged in the organizing and supervision of the system and many hundreds of others, members of the alumni and faculties of American educational institutions who were enrolled among the fighting forces, undertook the work of instruction. The scheme enabled soldiers and sailors to continue their studies without expense, whether they desired elementary, collegiate or professional instruction or agricultural, technical or commercial training. The scheme, which was finally taken over by the Army, is described at more length in the chapter on “The Welfare of the Soldiers.”
So successful and important was the work of the Y. M. C. A. with the American forces that both the French and the Italian Governments requested it to establish service centers with their respective armies. This it did, the American workers who initiated and supervised the program of recreation and fostering of morale being assisted, in the respective armies, by French and Italians.
A Pleasant Evening in a Hostess House
Salvation Army Lassies at the Front
The prodigious program of the Y. M. C. A. with the American forces, which it has not been possible to more than outline, was carried through largely by volunteer workers who wished to undertake it as the best way in which they could help to win the war. Men who were too old to fight or were physically unfit for military service joyfully welcomed the opportunity to do something that would aid the fighting men. Many gave up large salaries and left their situations for the sake of this important service. Others who were financially unable to leave dependents accepted for them an allowance much smaller than they could have earned themselves and gladly took up the work upon the mere payment of their expenses.
The “Y” workers were on the troop trains that carried the men from their homes to the training camps and the Red Triangle was at the fighting man’s side from that moment until he was ready to go over the top. And sometimes the “Y” worker even went forward in the charge with the men for whose welfare he was giving his service. Shell fire not infrequently destroyed the trucks upon which the goods of the Y. M. C. A. were being carried to the front, its huts were sometimes shattered in the same way and nine of its workers, two of them women, were killed by bursting shells. Fifty-seven died in the service, most of them from wounds, over-work and exposure. Twenty-three were seriously injured or gassed. Of its workers 152 received official recognition for distinguished services, to thirteen of whom was awarded the Croix de Guerre and to fifty more other famous decorations.
The American Army was a reading and thinking army and that one of the seven great big-brothering organizations which undertook to supply it with reading matter, the American Library Association, was kept busy. The Library War Service of the Association had in each of forty-eight large army and navy training camps and in seventy hospitals in the United States a central library building, or library quarters, with branches and stations radiating all over the camp or hospital area to render its volumes easy of access. It had collections of books in nearly two hundred hospitals and Red Cross Houses. It equipped with these collections over five hundred military camps and posts and aviation fields, schools and repair depots. It supplied with libraries 260 naval and marine stations and 750 vessels. It had nearly 2,000 branches and stations placed in Y. M. C. A. and K. of C. huts, barracks and mess halls. It shipped overseas 2,000,000 books and 64,000 magazines and distributed 5,000,000 magazines donated by the public through the mails. In its war service libraries there were over 5,000,000 volumes. Three hundred and forty trained librarians supervised its service. Accepted books to the number of 4,000,000 were given by the American people, who provided also the money with which were bought 1,300,000 more. Book donations were well sifted before the books were accepted for war service and the authorities of the association estimated that probably twice as many were given as were finally used.
But even these enormous quantities of books and magazines were no more than sufficient to meet the desire for reading shown throughout the Army and the Navy. The Library War Service of the Association did its best to supply to every fighting man in the training camps at home, on the transports, on the cruisers and battleships, in the stations overseas, in the camps and rest billets, the book he needed when he wanted it, whether it was light fiction, or a technical treatise, or a work of history, economics, philosophy or travel. It supplied books in practically all the modern languages—about forty were represented in each of the large camps—for both study and reading and its lists were filled with titles of scientific, technical and other works that covered the whole range of modern knowledge and activity, philosophy, literature, history, biography, poetry, art, music, fiction, drama, economics, sociology, business, travel. There was demand for them all. Toward the end of the war and after the armistice the Library War Service bent its energies to meeting the greatly increased call for vocational books that would enable the fighting man to become more efficient in his special job or to get a better one when he should presently be returned to civil life.
To support this vast enterprise of big-brothering the Army the American people gave without stint to the organizations by which the work was systematized and carried through. They gave money and effort and thought and love, because it was for “our boys.” They responded with more than was asked by each organization in its separate appeals made during the first year and a half of our war effort. Then, in order that the appeal for funds might be made more efficiently and economically, the seven chief organizations united in a great, nation-wide drive, the money that was subscribed to be divided proportionately among them. They asked for $170,000,000. All the preparations had been made for it before the armistice was signed and it began on that day. Every one believed that the war was over, but because “our boys” were still overseas and for many weeks to come would need care, recreation, comforts and entertainment, no hand withheld its gift. When the week’s drive was over it was found that $203,179,000 had been subscribed to continue the work of big-brothering the fighting forces.
CHAPTER XXXII
RUNNING THE RAILROADS
During the first nine months of our participation in the war the railroads did their best to meet the unusual and mounting demands upon their facilities and methods. But the entire railroad system had developed under the principle of competition and, composed as it was of so many diverse parts and divergent interests, all accustomed by theory, tradition and practice to competitive methods, it presently became evident that the coördinated management and coöperative effort demanded by the emergency would be impossible under continued private control. The immense increase in traffic caused by war conditions had strained the existing system to its utmost effort, and had resulted by the autumn of 1917 in hopeless congestion of freight at eastern terminals and along the railway lines far inland. There had been such rapid increase in operating expenses that the financial situation of the railroads was very bad, and, under the general financial conditions of the time, had become a serious menace. The country was at war and its first and most pressing duty was to prosecute that war to early and complete victory, which it could not do under the paralysis that was threatening the transportation system.
For the Government to take control of the railroads was an almost revolutionary procedure, so opposed was it to American economic theory, conviction and practice. But the problem was rapidly being reduced to the bare alternatives of governmental railroad control or the losing of the war, or, at least, its long-drawn out continuance. But one solution was possible, and, disregarding all theory and all deeply rooted custom, the President, in accordance with powers already conferred upon him by Congress, took possession and assumed control of the entire railroad system of the United States at the end of December, 1917.
Management of transportation by rail and water was thereupon put into the hands of a Director General of Railroads, who thus found himself at the head of more than 265,000 miles of railway, many times the mileage of any other nation, and of 2,300,000 employees. There were about 180 separate operating companies having operating revenues of $1,000,000 or more per year each and several hundred more with less than that yearly revenue. The Railroad Administration, which decentralized its work by dividing the country into districts, each under a regional director, began its task in the face of weather conditions without parallel in the history of the country, which had already almost paralyzed transportation and were to continue for ten weeks longer.
There was a shortage of freight cars and of locomotives and the railroads, in common with all the country, were menaced with a shortage of coal, due mainly to the immensely increased demand and the breakdown of transportation. So great was the congestion of freight that in the area north of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers and east of Chicago and the Mississippi there were 62,000 carloads waiting to be sent to their destination, while along the lines west and south of that area there were over 85,000 more carloads held back by this congestion. Nearly all of it was destined for the eastern seaboard north of Baltimore.
In addition to the usual transportation business of the country, hundreds of thousands, mounting into the millions, of soldiers had to be carried from their homes to cantonments and from cantonments to ports of debarkation and billions of tons of munitions, food, supplies and materials of many kinds had to be carried from all parts of the country upon lines that converged toward eastern ports, while the immense war building program of the nation—cantonments, camps, munition plants, shipyards and ships, warehouses, structures of many sorts—called for the transportation of vast quantities of material.
By the first of the following May practically all of this congestion had been cleared up and through the rest of the year there was no more transportation stringency, although traffic grew constantly heavier until the end of hostilities. It will illumine the conditions under which the Railroad Administration achieved its results to mention a few of its items of transportation. During the ten months ending with October it handled 740,000 more cars of bituminous coal than had been loaded during the same period of the previous year. From the Pacific Northwest there were brought, from April to November, for the building of airplanes, ships and other governmental activities and for shipment overseas, 150,000 cars of lumber. During the year 630,000 cars of grain were carried to their destination, the increase from July to November over the previous year being 135,000 cars. Livestock movement was especially heavy, showing in all kinds a large increase. Five hundred and sixty thousand carloads of material were moved to encampments, shipyards and other Government projects. From the middle of May to the end of the year the car-record office showed a total movement of 1,026,000 cars, an average of 5,700 daily.
Comparison of the physical performance of the roads during the first ten months of 1918 with that of the similar period in 1917, reduced to fundamentals, showed an increase in the number of ton-miles per mile of road per day, in number of tons per loaded car, in number of tons per freight train mile, in total ton-miles per freight locomotive per day. The constant purpose was to keep each locomotive and car employed to its capacity and to make each produce the maximum of ton-miles with the minimum of train, locomotive and car miles.
Highly important among the achievements of the Railroad Administration was the movement of troops. From the first of the year until November 10th there were transported over the roads 6,496,000 troops, an average of 625,000 per month, the troop movements requiring 193,000 cars of all types, with an average of twelve cars to the train. Outstanding features of the troop movement were that 1,785,000 men were picked up from 4,500 separate points and moved on schedule to their training camps, that 1,900,000 were brought into the crowded port terminals for embarkation without interference with the heavy traffic of other kinds already being handled there and in the adjacent territory, that 4,038,000 were carried an average distance of 855 miles, undoubtedly the largest long distance troop movement ever made. During one period of thirty days over twenty troop trains were brought each day into the port of New York. During the entire period from January to November including these huge troop movements there were but fourteen train accidents involving death or injury to the men.
To all the necessities of the wartime effort of the railroads—the enormously increased quantities of freight that had to be moved expeditiously and the transportation of troops—was added a considerable increase in the ordinary passenger traffic. Notwithstanding the earnest and repeated requests of the Railroad Administration that only necessary journeys should be taken by civilians, a request that was, indeed, very generally heeded, and the increase in passenger rates, the passenger traffic all over the country was much heavier than in any previous year, the increase amounting in the region east of Chicago to twenty-five per cent.
The efficient handling of all this enormous freight and passenger traffic was made possible by the policies that were adopted. The handling of the whole vast network of railroads as one system eliminated competition and the wasteful use of time, effort and equipment. The previous usage of the roads in accepting freight at the convenience of the consignor without regard to the ability of the consignee to receive it had resulted in the appalling congestion of terminals and lines in the autumn of 1917. The Railroad Administration based its policy upon the principle that the consignee must be considered first and that if he could not receive the freight it was worse than useless to fill up switches and yards with loaded cars. In order thus to control traffic at its source a permit system was adopted which prevented the loading of traffic unless there was assurance that it could be disposed of at its destination. This policy proved to be the chief factor in the ability of the transportation system to meet the enormous demands upon it.
Modification of demurrage rules and regulations induced more rapid unloading of cars and their quicker return to active use. Consolidation of terminals, both freight and passenger, greatly facilitated the handling of cars. Locomotives that could be spared were transferred from all parts of the country to the congested eastern region. Coördination of shop work increased the amount of repairs upon equipment that could be done and kept locomotives and cars in better condition while new ones were ordered and work upon them speeded. Rolling stock and motive power were economized by doing away with circuitous routing of freight and sending it instead by routes as short and direct as possible, a policy which saved almost 17,000,000 car miles in the Eastern and Northeastern Region.
A plan was devised for making up solid trains of live stock and of perishable freight and also consolidated trains of export freight at Western points and forwarding them on certain days of the week directly and rapidly to their destinations. Passenger trains that had been mainly competitive and such others as could be spared were dropped, resulting in the elimination during the first seven months of Federal control of 47,000,000 passenger train miles—an economy in motive power and equipment without which the successful movement of troops would have been impossible. Equipment was standardized, making possible its universal use, and freight cars were more heavily loaded. In place of the separate ticket offices made necessary by private and competitive ownership consolidated ticket offices were opened in all large cities, 101 of these doing the work of the former 564. The result aimed at was both economy and a better distribution of the passenger traffic.
The Railroad Administration saw in the inland and coastal waterways and the coastwise shipping service an important possible aid in its task of making transportation equal to wartime needs, and so mid-Western rivers and Eastern canals were brought into coöperation with railway service and several coast-wise lines of steamships were made a part of its facilities.
The rental, or return, guaranteed to the railroad companies amounted for the year approximately to $950,000,000. Upon the advice of a commission appointed to investigate the matter of wages and living costs among railroad employees, wages were raised and threatened labor trouble thereby averted, the increase amounting to between $600,000,000 and $700,000,000 for the year. In the ten months ending November 1st the railroad receipts from freight, passenger and other sources aggregated over $4,000,000,000 and were almost as large as for the whole of the previous year. The receipts were greater by 20 per cent, but operating expenses also had increased by more than $1,000,000,000, the year 1918 breaking all records for both revenues and expenses. The increase in wages, in cost of coal, and in all maintenance and operating costs was responsible for the increase of expenses, which would have been much greater but for the economies introduced. Freight rates were raised during the year to help meet the raise of wages, while a substantial increase in passenger rates was put in force both to help in that result and to discourage unnecessary passenger traffic during wartime conditions. There was a final balance against the Government, as between the net income of the roads and the guaranteed return to their owners, of between $150,000,000 and $200,000,000.
The sole purpose of the Government in taking over control of the railroads was to achieve a more efficient prosecution of the war by more rapidly forwarding our own war effort and by giving more effective coöperation to our war associates. Thus, early in the winter of 1918 the Western Allies made it known to the United States Government that unless the food promised by the Food Administration could be delivered to them very soon they could not continue their war effort. This was immediately after the Railroad Administration had taken charge of the railroads and was struggling with the freight congestion extending through the eastern half of the country, with coal shortage and blizzard weather. Every possible facility of the Railroad Administration and of the roads it was operating was brought to the emergency, and railroad officials and employees worked day and night, with the results that by the middle of March all the available vessels of the Allies had been filled with food and dispatched across the Atlantic, while at Eastern seaports were 6,000 more carloads ready for later shipment.
In carrying out this war-furthering purpose the Railroad Administration coöperated constantly with the other war administrative and war prosecuting agencies of the Government, the Food and Fuel Administrations, the War Trade and War Industries Boards, the Shipping Board, the Army and Navy Departments. Just as food, fuel, trade, industry, labor were each and all mobilized for war effort and all brought into harmonious and effective teamwork, so the transportation agencies were all bent, first of all, to the same purpose. Roads, motive power, freight and passenger equipment were devoted first to the necessities of carrying men from homes to cantonments and camps and thence to ports of embarkation and of moving food, munitions, supplies and raw materials to camps, to shipment points and to places of manufacture for war purposes. After these war needs were met whatever remained of transportation facilities was at the disposal of the ordinary commercial traffic of the country.
In order that the public might better understand the situation and in order also to better the service of the roads there was instituted a Bureau of Complaints and Suggestions which dealt with all dissatisfactions and considered suggested improvements. A very large number of the railroad employees of all kinds, efficient through years of service, joined the fighting forces of the nation or engaged in work more directly concerned with the war and so made it necessary to fill their places with untrained help. To remedy this condition training schools were established with successful results.
In the summer of 1918 all express companies were combined and placed under the management of the Railroad Administration and a little later telegraph and telephone companies, because of their refusal to accept an award of the War Labor Board, were unified and placed under the control of the Postmaster General, as, in the autumn, was done also with the cable companies.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE WORK OF WOMEN FOR THE WAR
While the women of the United States did not enter war service by means of work in industries and auxiliary organizations to the extent of their enlistment in England, because the man-power problem had not yet, at the end of hostilities, become serious in this country, the many and varied kinds of work for the war in which they did engage was of great importance and it had the devoted and enthusiastic aid of almost every woman and girl throughout the land. From the mother who sent her sons across the ocean to the little Girl Scout who ran errands for a Red Cross chapter, they were ready for any sacrifice it should be necessary for them to make and any service they could render. Their spirit was as high, their patriotism as ardent and their wish to serve as keen as that of their husbands, fathers and brothers, and their spirit and their service were essential factors in the war achievements of America. Their spirit was always the same, but their services were of the greatest variety, being, for the greater part, such as they could render without leaving their homes. Being undertaken in addition to their usual duties in the care of homes and families, their war labors were less outstanding and much less likely to impress the superficial observer than if they had been detached from woman’s usual environment. But they were none the less essential.
The shutting down or curtailment of non-essential industries and the rapid expansion of those directly or indirectly engaged in war production shifted many women already possessing some degree of industrial training into war work plants of one sort or another, while the need for workers and the desire to give service of direct consequence led many women to enter factories who had not before undertaken industrial work. Among the latter class were many of collegiate education, or of independent means, or engaged in office work who were moved by patriotism to undertake factory work for the war. The flow of women into war industrial work increased steadily throughout the year and a half of our participation and would have been very greatly augmented if the war had continued long enough to call the men of the second draft from their situations.
By the end of September, 1918, women were working in munition plants of many kinds, making shells, grenade belts, fuses, gas masks, metal parts of rifles, revolvers and machine guns, and many other sorts of the direct supplies of war. Accurate statistics of their numbers made in the early summer of 1918 showed that about 1,500,000 women were engaged in the industrial work directly or indirectly connected with the Government’s war program, while subsequent estimates added about 500,000 to that number to cover those entering such work down to the signing of the armistice.
Woman’s Land Army Members Sorting and Grading Potatoes
By Permission of Woman’s Land Army
Training Camp of Woman’s Land Army
The former report, covering the conditions at the end of our first year of war, showed 100,000 women working in private munition plants and Government owned arsenals, another 100,000 in trades necessary for the prosecution of the war, such as work in airplane factories, in chemical plants, in those making electrical appliances and in metal trades making bolts, screws and other small parts necessary for the building of many war essentials. More than 600,000 women were engaged in the manufacture of things necessary for the soldier’s equipment and 800,000 more in industries necessary to feed and clothe him. All these numbers were greatly augmented during the seven following months until the close of the war.
Training classes and entering schools were established in scores of plants for the training of unskilled women workers. Practically all the employers of women bore testimony to the efficiency with which they worked. In order to protect their welfare the United States Department of Labor organized a Woman in Industry Service which, by means of a council of representatives from all the Federal agencies for the prosecution of the war in which women were employed, established standards and policies for the controlling of wages and industrial conditions in plants employing women.
More than 100,000 women entered the service of the Railroad Administration, where they undertook capably many forms of unskilled labor and held many varieties of positions requiring knowledge and experience, from bookkeeping to office superintendency, while many thousands more filled places left vacant by men on surface, elevated and subway car lines.
It is impossible even to estimate the number of women who engaged in the production of food for the purpose of aiding the war. They cultivated war gardens from end to end of the country; in the South young women of social station, because of the lack of the usual labor, helped to gather cotton and other crops; in the Northwest women volunteered their help in the harvesting season and in some localities they formed half or more of the workers who shocked the grain in the fields; in other regions they picked berries and gathered fruit; they went from cities and towns to country districts to help the farmers’ wives; they took an active part, individually and through clubs, in the increase of poultry, hog and dairy production; in state after state they registered for farm work; and they organized the Woman’s Land Army which gave much and efficient aid in many parts of the country.
The Woman’s Land Army of America, numbering 15,000 members, was composed of women who had previously done little or no farm work and who enlisted in it primarily for the sake of doing something of consequence to help win the war. It was organized in seventeen states, the state organizations uniting under the national organization and each one forming and training its own farm units. In one state, New York, there were forty of these land units, each established at a camp under a woman supervisor. They lived at the camp, boarding themselves, and were carried in their own auto-truck to and fro between the camp and the farms where they worked by the eight hour day. They were carefully selected from volunteers for the work on the basis of physical qualification and probable morale and among their numbers were represented teachers, college girls, art students, telephone operators, stenographers, women of leisure. They planted, plowed and hoed, aided in the harvesting, drove horses and tractors, gathered fruit, did dairy work, cared for poultry and stock and proved themselves equal to all the usual work of truck, dairy and general farming. There were, altogether, one hundred and twenty-seven units, ranging from twenty to one hundred and fifty members each. Farmers who employed them found them capable and efficient and their labor proved to be a welcome factor in solving the problem of increasing farm production when farm help had been seriously depleted by the draft and the munition factories. So successful was the Woman’s Land Army during the first year of its existence that in the autumn of 1918 an enthusiastic campaign was started for increasing its numbers the following year and plans were laid for courses of training during the winter.
In the conservation of food women everywhere coöperated with the Government in many ways. They enthusiastically supported the requests of the Food Administration, their organizations sent out food experts, dieticians, conservation instructors through country districts, into villages and towns and among the women of the poorer quarters in cities to give free instruction in the economical but efficient use of foods and in the best ways of canning, preserving and dehydrating fruits and vegetables.
In the financing of the war the women of the country gave noteworthy help. The National Woman’s Liberty Loan Committee was organized by the Secretary of the Treasury in May, 1917, as an independent bureau of the Treasury Department, the first and thus far the only executive committee of women in the Government of the United States. It was created too late to give much assistance in the first Liberty Loan, but it was active in all the succeeding ones and was thoroughly organized all over the country, for the greater part by states, with county organizations under the state or the district. It had 3,200 county chairmen and under these, reaching out into every community, 49,500 associate chairmen, while 800,000 women were engaged in its work. They organized meetings, engaged speakers and secured booths and workers for the sale of bonds, but the greater part of the work of the organization was done by canvassing from house to house.
This they did in cities, towns, villages, country districts, on foot, on horse-back, by carriage. They did not stop for rain, or sun, or wind, for dust, or mud. If it was planting time and all the horses of the farm were in use, the chairman of a rural committee walked miles upon miles to cover her territory. In two or three counties of the southern mountain region famous for their bloody feuds women rode on horseback up and down the mountain sides day after day canvassing for the Liberty Loans and carrying the counties over the top triumphantly with subscriptions above their quotas early in the course of each campaign. In these counties so many men had enlisted in the army before the draft went into effect that the burden of taking care of the loans fell to women.
In state after state the Woman’s Committee raised from one-third to one-half the quotas of the entire state and in the three Liberty Loans in which it worked it sold $3,500,000,000 worth of bonds. It was equally active in the campaigns for the sale of War Savings Stamps and its aid proved so important that in several of the Federal Reserve Districts it was asked to take over the entire work.
The importance of the aid American women gave to the Red Cross was beyond computation and was so varied in kind and enormous in quantity that anything more than the merest outline of it is impossible. Volunteer women workers, nearly all of them doing the work at odd moments in addition to their home or other duties, knitted and sewed so busily that they made nearly 300,000,000 articles, valued at $60,000,000, for the Red Cross, to be used in training camps, by our fighting forces, in hospitals at home and abroad and by the refugees and sufferers in the war ridden countries of Europe.
Many thousands of women worked in canteens, poured coffee, tea and chocolate and carried baskets of cakes and cigarettes for the refreshment of soldiers as their troop trains stopped at stations on their way to and from cantonments or poured into and out of ports of embarkation. More than a million and a half of the soldiers of America as they boarded their transports had their last touch of home at the hands of Red Cross women who, no matter what the hour of day or night, were ready at the piers with buns and cigarettes and cans of steaming hot drinks.
Many other thousands enlisted for the Red Cross Home Defense work and in its offices or as home visitors gave advice, aid, comfort to the families of soldiers and sailors, helped them to meet their problems, material, financial, spiritual, and procured for them, when necessary, professional advice and assistance, thus aiding morale at the front by upholding that of the family at home. Other thousands of women wearing the Red Cross insignia worked in the hospitals overseas and in convalescent homes on both sides of the ocean. No less than 8,000,000 women, and probably more, were actively working for the Red Cross throughout the war, organizing, directing and aiding the work of its chapters and making hospital bandages, sweaters and other knitted articles, clothing for refugees, and repairing soldiers’ garments.
More than 16,000 trained nurses enlisted in war service and worked in hospitals at home and overseas and 10,000 more had enrolled for service at the end of hostilities. The organization of the American Women’s Hospitals of the Red Cross recruited, organized and sent to France several units, each consisting of ten women physicians and as many aids, with the necessary hospital equipment.
Several hundred women entered the navy as yeomen and gave capable and efficient service. Others joined the Signal Corps of the army, 233 of these going to France, where their work as telephone and telegraph operators received high praise from army officers.
In work for the welfare of the fighting forces the women of every part of the country took a very prominent part. The War Camp Community Service, described in “Big-Brothering the Fighting Forces,” was carried on largely by their efforts. Organizations of women of many kinds drew together women of similar occupations for welfare work or brought together those of the greatest variety for the same ends. The Stage Women’s War Relief, composed of actresses, made and sent abroad or to hospitals at home great quantities of comfort kits, knitted articles, bandages, hospital supplies, dainties to tempt the appetite of convalescents, clothing for refugees, cigarettes and tobacco. The members of the Young Women’s Christian Association were to be found in active work for the war in nearly all the camps and cantonments of the United States, and also in France, and even in the frozen north of Russia, where in several cities their Hostess Houses and canteens offered cheer and comfort to soldiers and sailors.
The Association established a War Work Council which devised and carried out methods by which it could aid in the prosecution of the war. Its Hostess Houses in camps and cantonments were links between the men in training and the life they had put behind them, where their relatives and friends could meet them in pleasant surroundings. The type of the Hostess House was created for the Y. W. C. A. by a woman architect at the beginning of the war and was planned for the special needs which the Association foresaw. It combined the features of restaurant, reading and lounging rooms, and sleeping rooms for relatives who might have to stay overnight in the camp, while its semblance was that of a pleasant country club. The Hostess Houses were the scenes of many war weddings, of occasional christenings, of first meetings between returning happy soldier or sailor fathers and their children born in their absence, and they were sometimes a welcome refuge for mother or wife, sister or sweetheart, summoned to the camp by the fatal illness of a loved one.
The Association had a total of almost one hundred and fifty Hostess Houses in this country, in the camps and cantonments for both white and colored troops, in which were over four hundred workers. In France it carried on fifteen of these or similar houses for American women directly engaged in war work, such as those in the Signal Corps, and for women connected with the British auxiliary organizations, twenty-one for nurses in base hospitals and eighteen for French women working in munition factories, offices, stores and for the American army. The Y. W. C. A. gave much assistance also in the providing of emergency housing for women engaged in work for the war in this country, while its endeavors for the improving of morale and the inculcating of American ideals among foreign born and colored women and girls aided in rousing their patriotic spirit. It operated War Service Industrial Clubs with cafeterias and recreation halls and a variety of entertainments and classes for study in centers of war industry where women were employed.
A Woman’s Division was instituted by the Young Men’s Christian Association at the end of our first war year and during the next seven months its work grew to important proportions. Carefully chosen for the service, the women were given just before they sailed a week of intensive training for their duties on the other side. Instruction in hygiene taught them how to keep themselves fit under conditions that would call for all their strength; their knowledge of French was freshened; they had lectures on the kind of cooking needed for canteen work and talks on the geography, history, customs and characteristics of France, in order to give them a degree of sympathetic understanding of the people among whom they would have to work; they were encouraged to practice any sort of special facility for the entertainment of groups of men which they might possess; and they were expected to be accomplished dancers before they were enlisted. On the other side they worked in canteens and were especially useful in the recreation centers described in “Big-Brothering the Fighting Forces,” of which twenty-six were organized in different parts of France. In these recreation camps, or “leave areas,” in the “Y” centers in Paris and other French cities, in canteens in camps and behind the front lines, the Red Triangle women made and poured coffee and chocolate and tea, distributed candy, cakes, gum, cigarettes and tobacco, provided Christmas boxes, sang, danced, recited, played games and did whatever the moment demanded for the welfare and the entertainment of the American fighting men. The women practically created the service of the “leave areas,” which was something entirely new in warfare. They went with the canteens to the front lines, advanced with the Army of Occupation through Luxemburg and Alsace, and settled down with it in Germany. They worked also with the American forces in England and Scotland, Russia and Italy. After the armistice, when many of the men secretaries of the Y. M. C. A. began to return to their neglected business in the United States, the women took over more and more of the canteen and other work. When hostilities ended, a thousand women were engaged in Red Triangle work overseas and so important was their service that in response to the call for them that number was doubled during the next three months, and the Association was then still recruiting, training and sending them to France.
Three organizations enlisted women as automobile drivers for war service,—the Motor and Ambulance Corps of the American Red Cross, the Motor Corps of America and the Motor Corps of the National League for Woman’s Service. Together they had an estimated membership of several thousand women, most of whom were women of leisure who owned their own cars and were glad to give for the country’s needs their own time and work and the service of their automobiles. Before being received in either of the organizations they had to undergo a course of intensive training averaging six weeks and including revolver shooting, first aid treatment, surgery clinics as a test and training for the nerves, clinics for the handling of the insane because mentally unbalanced soldiers had to be transferred by ambulance from transport to hospital, military drill twice a week and a course in mechanics. A member of a woman’s motor corps had to know how her car was built and be able to take it apart, if necessary, and put it together again and if it balked to discover what was the matter and apply the needed remedy. The Motor Corps women served both at home and overseas and they drove trucks, ambulances and cars. Their service was ready for any war organization that needed them, their vehicles plied between transports and hospitals, carried convalescent soldiers out for an airing, were on duty at cantonments and camps and answered many similar calls. Their rules demanded at least nine hours per day on duty, but actual service often stretched to fifteen or twenty hours out of the twenty-four.
The National League for Woman’s Service, by which one of these corps was recruited and directed, was organized for patriotic purposes two months before America entered the war and upon that event was ready to begin active work in the coördinating of women’s organizations and the enlisting and directing of all manner of women’s resources and abilities that would aid the nation in the prosecution of the war. Its organization spread into almost every state of the Union and numbered 300,000 members. Its Motor Corps Service, which was recognized by the Surgeon General of the Army, had throughout the country seventy-eight chapters with a membership of about five hundred women car owners. Its social and welfare division established many soldiers’ and sailors’ club rooms and club houses, with reading and lounging rooms, billiard and pool tables, dances and entertainments, and classes in French and English. It also conducted classes for the instruction of women in occupational therapy and handicraft who worked in hospitals and camps, recruited and trained women to serve as nurses’ aids, and coöperated with the War Camp Community Service in many ways. Its members worked in canteens and clubs, gave their services in workrooms where clothing and supplies were made for hospitals and for soldiers and sailors, distributed the thousands upon thousands of flower donations made to hospitals by florists, worked with the Food Administration by distributing food pledges, establishing emergency and community kitchens and providing experts in home economics who gave instruction in food conservation. The League collected books, magazines, games and tobacco for the fighting forces, recruited a Woman’s Reserve Camouflage Corps which gave some important services, enlisted the aid of authors and artists for the publicity needs of one or another department of the Government, and served, in general, as a means of mustering and directing the resources and abilities of women for war work.
Women’s clubs of every sort all over the country had their war service committees, or mobilized all their members for that purpose, and these were closely linked together through their federations so that their work, which included assistance for every war making and war assisting agency of Government or people, could be done without overlapping or waste. Women’s colleges and women students in co-educational institutions also took up war work, as described in “Feeding the Nations.” As the men students of the colleges mobilized for training for the war in the Students’ Army Training Corps, the women students mobilized for work to uphold the war. The Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, with membership spread all through the Union, organized itself for war effort with especial reference to the task of bringing home to people everywhere the fundamental issues involved in the war, the necessity of fighting it through to a completely victorious conclusion and the dangers that would lurk in a premature peace. The Association coöperated with the Committee on Public Information, held college women’s rallies, formed local speakers’ bureaus, helped to procure trained workers for various forms of national service, set on foot a movement to provide in colleges preparatory nursing courses for women, and worked with and for all of the war sustaining agencies of the Government.
Coöperating with all these and with the many other women’s organizations for war effort and comprehending in its nation-wide scope all the women of the country was the Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense, which interlocked in effective team-work all organizations of women and, reaching out to almost every community in the land, inspired those outside such organizations to definite, regular, organized effort for war service especially fitted for women’s hands. It served solely among women, just as the Council of National Defense, of which it was a part, joined in team-work all war sustaining and war producing agencies and organized the communities, as told in “Organizing the Nation.”
The Woman’s Committee was created in April, 1917, and very soon had its divisions organized in each of the forty-eight states and also in Alaska, Hawaii, Porto Rico and the District of Columbia. Upon each State Committee were represented both the state-wide women’s organizations and the women not connected with any organization, and these committees organized the states into small units. Over 15,000 of these subordinate units had been formed and were at work by mid-summer of 1918, including 2,500 counties and 8,500 cities, towns and townships and, in addition, many thousand smaller units, such as school districts, wards, precincts, city blocks. These small units brought the organization into direct touch with women everywhere and enlisted them as individuals and as groups in the great army of patriotic women who were giving everything in their power for the prosecution of the war.
In half or more of the states women registered for war work, stating the amount of time they could give, the special service for which they were fitted and the kinds of work they could do. When the request came for volunteers for any particular service, or when it became known that there was some new need for woman’s assistance, the leader of each unit knew just where to look for the necessary help. The Woman’s Committee, from its central offices in Washington to the members of local units in city block or country district, worked with the Food Administration for the increased production and the conservation of food and, similarly, gave their help to the conservation program of the Fuel Administration. So also, they coöperated with the War Camp Community Service and the Training Camp Commissions, with the Liberty Loan and War Savings Stamps campaigns, aided in the campaign to recruit nurses and in that to secure workers for the ship yards, and helped to find trained women workers who were needed at once by the rapidly expanding departments and the new boards and commissions at Washington.
The Woman’s Committee endeavored always, while aiding in the work of the war agencies, to preserve and improve the peace time standards and values of life. And therefore not a little of its work was along the lines of maintaining the health and protecting the welfare of women and children. It had a department of Child Welfare and carried on a vigorous campaign to further these aims while it endeavored to promote public sentiment in favor of proper living and working conditions for women in industry.
The Woman’s Committee of the Council of National Defense, in short, mobilized in one great, enthusiastic, democratic army the women of all the land, rich and poor, ignorant and cultured, of many races, of foreign birth and of American ancestry, and by organization enabled them to use their time, ability and effort in the way and at the time when they would be of best service.
CHAPTER XXXIV
FIGHTING THE UNDERGROUND ENEMY
For years before it plunged the world into war the German Government, as in every country in which it could obtain the necessary foothold, had been applying in the United States its policy of “peaceful penetration.” Toward that end it had endeavored by many apparently innocent means to hold the loyalty of American citizens or residents of German birth or extraction, to create a dominant body of sentiment in favor of anything and everything German, and to secure the open or concealed control of vast quantities of business through which it could operate for the furtherance of German interests, political, industrial, financial or cultural. German methods and ideals accepted in schools and colleges; German departments in universities that were centers of influence for the spreading of admiration of everything German; in some regions Germanized public schools; a country-wide net-work of German societies and associations through which love and loyalty for the “fatherland” were kept alive; millions of dollars of German money invested in American business, frequently under disguised ownership; German and Austro-Hungarian diplomats using their offices and privileges for the promotion of all manner of intrigue against the interests of the country; plots for the control of industry, the destruction of property, the inciting of sedition, the hatching of conspiracies, the rousing of enmity against us in friendly nations—these were some of the things the American people found had been going on under their very noses, many of which they had thoughtlessly aided, when the shock of war opened their eyes to the character and the methods of the enemy who, for the sake of civilization, had to be rendered innocuous. It was an enemy who had not only to be fought on the open battlefield but foiled in all the underground tricks and activities in which he was exceptionally expert and incessantly busy.
Before our entrance into the war Germany had used her own and the Austro-Hungarian embassies and her well organized spy system to carry on operations against England and France, her diplomatic representatives and her agents secretly concocting and directing activities that would interfere with the efficiency of the Entente Allies and might also be depended upon to create friction and possibly even war between them and the United States. After the two ambassadors and their staffs had been sent home because of these machinations and the United States had declared war, there still remained the spy system, which had been greatly increased and strengthened during the first years of the war. Huge sums of money financed it and it was directed and carried on by some of the most experienced agents of the German Foreign Office. To aid them Germany had sent to this country many professional men, scientists and others with instructions to advance German interests and to assist in the carrying on of her underground activities in every possible way. The Intelligence Division of the United States War Department estimated that Germany maintained in this country, before and after our entrance into the war, an immense, secretly operating force of between 200,000 and 300,000 paid and volunteer workers. There was also the wide-spreading net-work of business firms, apparently innocent, but really a cover and medium for enemy machinations.
Emissaries to blow up bridges and railroads and do other damage were sent into Canada. Malcontents from Ireland and India were sought out and financed and aided in the laying of plots to create dissatisfaction, riots and, if possible, revolution in their home countries. A French traitor was brought to the United States and furnished with money for setting on foot a traitorous scheme in France. Much ingenuity was expanded in the endeavor to create friction between this country and Japan. In Mexico Germany diligently spread propaganda to influence the people and government of that country against the United States and aided and financed terroristic movements and activities whose purpose was to embroil the two nations in war.
Germany’s underground activities in the United States, some of them dating before our entrance into the war, some of them carried into the period of our war participation, and others not begun until after we became a belligerent, included many and varied schemes to prevent this country from exercising its rights under international law, to interfere with its effective prosecution of the war and to undermine its political and trade relations with other countries. An effort was made to gain control of airplane building. There was an attempt to secure a similar hold upon the munitions industry, by maneuvering it into the hands of German capital so camouflaged that its character would not be recognized. A particularly well organized and cunningly concealed scheme, directed and financed in the United States, was set on foot to buy up and hoard wool and woolen and other textiles, in both North and South America, needed for the clothing of our own and our associates’ armies.
Plots were laid and feverishly pushed forward for blowing up ships bearing troops or war cargoes across the Atlantic and for wrecking munition plants and other war industries. German agents sent throughout the Southern states did their best to incite race riots among the negroes and to instigate a race war, working among them in their homes and churches and following them into cotton fields and mills and even into the army camps. Much effort and ingenuity were expended in the attempt to cause dissatisfaction and strikes among the workers in war industries and strife among those of different nationalities.
Propaganda, both open and concealed, was carried on by innumerable methods in the hope of influencing sentiment against the war, in favor of Germany, or against our war associates. For this purpose there were used moving pictures, the pastors of German churches, the German language press, the newspapers of other languages, writers in German pay who contributed articles and correspondence to American newspapers and magazines, German owned or controlled periodicals whose directing influence was well concealed, and a great number of societies having for their ostensible purpose the aiding of the aims of labor, or of pacifist sentiment, or of socialism.
The United States Department of Justice discovered, in the course of its investigations, that the German Government had placed in this country for the use of these various underground activities over $27,000,000, of which $7,500,000 had been spent in propaganda.
For measuring forces with an enemy of this sort the United States, when it entered the war, was inadequately equipped with laws. A friendly people, believing in square and open dealing between nations as between individuals and trusting those to whom it had given citizenship and business and professional hospitality, as it would expect to be trusted in another land, had never thought it necessary to enact such laws as this emergency demanded. The only weapon of consequence which the Government had ready for conflict with the underground enemy was a statute which had been in force more than a hundred years permitting the arrest and internment by executive order of an alien enemy believed to be a menace to the public safety. Advantage was taken of this at once and some of the most dangerous agents of Germany were soon under guard and innocuous for the duration of the war. This internment statute was a powerful weapon in putting down enemy activities, while the severity with which it was enforced from the very beginning was effective in discouraging the continued hatching of plots.
An espionage law enacted two months after our declaration of war and strengthened later on and a sabotage bill dealing with injury to property gave the needed means for dealing with a difficulty the nation had never before encountered. The espionage act was effective against organized or deliberate enemy or disloyal propaganda, but it was not intended to curtail the rights of free speech or of a free press and in its enforcement the courts made every effort to protect these rights as the basis of our political institutions. In the emotional tensity of the time it was inevitable that there should be bitter charges of excessive leniency on one side and, on the other, of unnecessary severity from those who feared the undermining of our principles of freedom. But in the end there were few who did not recognize that substantial justice had been meted out in most of the many cases. German alien enemies were required to register and 480,000 men and women were thus listed. A system of permits governed their movements and debarred them, without special permission, from the District of Columbia and from specified zones surrounding fortifications, docks, piers, wharves, warehouses, and other places important for war purposes. They were forbidden also to enter or leave the United States.
Much more lenient treatment was given to the subjects of Austro-Hungary, upon whom the only restriction was that of not leaving the country, although they were also subject to arrest and internment if guilty of dangerous activities. They proved to be worthy of the trust placed in them, for, although there were seven or eight times as many of these enemy aliens as of those of German citizenship, they gave little trouble of any sort, their labor helped importantly in much of our war production and throughout the war they were quiet, industrious and law-abiding.
Germany’s spies and agents were of several nationalities and in order to keep an effective watch upon their movements a stringent passport system was instituted which made impossible the departure from this country of any one whose purpose was not clear and proper. Private persons were forbidden to carry mail out of or into the country, as a means of preventing enemy agents from sending reports by others. Officers and crews of neutral ships were not allowed to land at United States ports without permits from the Department of State. A large force of picked and trained men, numbering several hundreds, scrutinized every ship coming into or going out of the important ports, her cargo and her passengers, to make sure that no enemy agent was among them or material of any sort intended for the enemy secreted in hold, or quarters, or cabins.
Supplementing the six secret service agencies of the Government, all of which were immediately and very greatly increased to enforce these provisions and deal with enemy activities, there sprang into life, almost over-night, the American Protective League. An organization of citizen volunteers, it was a unique development of the situation and in spirit and methods thoroughly characteristic of the American people. The League was born out of a realization of the danger the country faced, overrun as it was with enemy agents directed by some of the most skillful intriguers and spy captains that a nation specializing in spying and intrigue had been able to train, and out of the loyal wish to serve.
The American Protective League, which had its beginning almost simultaneously with our declaration of war, was a volunteer auxiliary of the Department of Justice. Its organizer, a private citizen who saw the necessity of such service and the possibility of securing the effective coöperation of selected persons everywhere, had it in operation within a few weeks, with several thousand members. It grew rapidly and within a year had 250,000 members working for it in their own communities. The organization was established in every state in the Union, the country being cut up into divisions, each under a chief, and each division into districts with a captain in command of each one, while each captain recruited his own working squads and put them under lieutenants. This organization by territory was reënforced by another whose divisions were along the lines of important industries, trades and professions, the two bureaus working constantly in coöperation. In the membership of the League was represented every section and phase of American life—college professors and day laborers, bank presidents and mechanics, journalists, lawyers, janitors, ministers, carpenters, judges. The very great value of its service was due to this variety and to the intelligence and character of its membership, for it was able to penetrate into all circles, to be on the watch everywhere in city, town and country and to follow a suspect through the most devious of wanderings. It investigated pro-German propaganda of every sort, sabotage cases, suspected spies and their activities, seditious speeches and printed matter, efforts to evade the selective service act, lying reports circulated by the “whispering propaganda” method about American organizations or individuals, and suspected treasonable conspiracies.
The members of the League, undertaking its work in addition to the duties of their regular occupations, served without pay and without rendering expense accounts. It carried on 3,000,000 investigations upon which it made reports, a great many resulting in the uncovering of serious disloyalties or enemy activities. So efficient was the organization that it won the warmest praise from the Attorney General of the United States, who declared that not only were its active services of very great value but that its passive effect was of equal importance, because the knowledge that its eyes and ears were everywhere had a most discouraging influence upon enemy and disloyal intentions.
Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, passed early in our war progress, an Alien Property Custodian took charge of properties and businesses belonging to enemy aliens in this country or operated for the benefit of enemy subjects elsewhere. The investigations which uncovered these business operations, many of them deeply and cleverly concealed, revealed startling facts as to the extent to which German subjects had gained commercial and industrial footholds in the United States, the methods which they had used and the purposes to which they had applied their resources and their knowledge of the nation’s business and industrial life. More than thirty thousand cases of enemy owned business were handled by the Custodian, while enemy owned stock, ranging in the several cases from fifteen to one hundred per cent of the total, was found in nearly three hundred corporations. He seized enemy owned property in the first year of his work to the value of more than $700,000,000, the businesses in which it was engaged running the whole gamut of American industry in mining, manufacturing, buying and selling. Frequently the enemy ownership was so cleverly and persistently concealed that months of investigation were necessary to uncover the truth. A great many of these German owned industrial establishments were used as spy centers and were filled with the agents of Germany plotting for political and industrial domination. In order to protect the country in the future and prevent a repetition of this attempt to conceal a knife meant for her heart, the Alien Property Custodian was authorized by Congress to sell to American citizens all enemy owned businesses, the proceeds to be deposited in the United States Treasury to await decision concerning it by the Peace Congress which should settle the problems growing out of the war.
Not only did the volunteer organization of the American Protective League undertake to uncover and stop enemy and disloyal activities, but a large percentage of the American people individually endeavored to aid the authorities in the same way. So intense was the general indignation against Germany and the Germans because of their insidious methods and the extent to which they had abused the friendly attitude of America and so high was the spirit of loyalty that young and old, rich and poor, were everywhere on the watch for signs of disloyal sentiment. Sometimes this eagerness overstepped common sense and degenerated into unthinking persecution of people of German birth or extraction who were good and loyal citizens. It resulted also in the circulation of many wild rumors of spy activity without basis of truth. But it also had undoubted good result in the discouraging of the underground activities of the enemy.
Germany expected confidently that her well organized and richly provided spy service, her extensive propaganda and her hold upon business would enable her to undermine and palsy America’s war effort. But all her careful preparations and the huge sums of money she expended profited her scarcely at all. The great majority of American citizens of German blood or birth proved to be loyal to the United States. The swift hand of justice at once grasped and put under guard so many of Germany’s agents that the rest were unwilling to run the risk of continued activity. Over 6,000 enemy aliens were arrested under warrants and 4,000 were interned in army detention camps for the period of the war. Systematic disloyal propaganda failed so completely to produce its desired results, was everywhere so frowned upon and was so likely to be fraught with danger for those behind it that it dwindled rapidly. By the end of our first year of war pro-German and anti-American propagandists had realized the futility of their attempts.
Notwithstanding all the preparations and efforts of the enemy to breed disloyalty and create disorder and lawlessness and our own lack at first of legal machinery with which to meet the situation, Germany’s underground operations were squarely met and wholly defeated and the country was never more quiet and law-abiding than it was during all the period of the war.
CHAPTER XXXV
AT THE HEART OF THE NATION
In the memory of those who knew it during the war Washington will ever stand out as an epitome of the titanic achievements of the country. There beat the heart of the nation and there could be felt, as nowhere else, its mighty and determined pulses. There was the source of every great activity and there, with the burning intensity of sunbeams focused through a lens, the spirit of the people was making itself manifest.
The war found the capital of the United States, just as it had been for many years, quiet and leisurely, aloof from business and industry, spacious and restful and lovely. And the war transformed it with lightning speed into a busy hive of war making industry, crammed with people, humming with prodigious labors, striving mightily to achieve what seemed the impossible in a hundred different ways at the same time.
The vast expansion in every war making or war administration agency of the Government and the creation of new agencies that began at once had, of course, their source and direction in Washington and there their machinery had to be housed and operated. First to outgrow its former allocation of space in the huge State, War and Navy Building, ample for the peace time needs of all three Departments, was the War Department. As the expansion in each of its divisions increased from day to day, it overflowed into other buildings, and one immense structure after another, nearly a dozen in all, was rushed to completion to house its activities. The Navy Department and the Treasury Department each had its own difficulties, although in neither was the expansion so great as in that of War. In the great Treasury building entrances were closed and corridors screened to make more desk room and buildings and office space were leased elsewhere to accommodate the many thousands of new employees who were needed for the vast amount of expert and clerical work suddenly made necessary in connection with the income tax, the War Risk Insurance, the Liberty Loan bonds, the War Stamps. The War Risk Insurance Bureau, newly created, alone required 17,000 workers. The new agencies that were being formed, each one of them growing like a Jonah’s gourd—such as the Food Administration, the Fuel Administration, the Council of National Defense, the War Trade Board, the War Industries Board,—each had to be put under a roof big enough for its constantly expanding forces.
An enormous building program was instituted almost overnight, planned and executed in an amazingly short time. And in the meantime these new, or expanding, war activities had to be housed anywhere that a vacant building or a few rooms could be found. Perhaps two or three old dwellings, hastily remodeled inside for office purposes, were thrown together, or a vacant theater was taken over, or rooms were rented in office buildings. The Council of National Defense began its work in three rooms in an office building and a year later it was overflowing into two other buildings from a huge structure of its own containing four hundred rooms which had been built from foundation to its last electric light fixture in seven weeks. The Food Administration grew within six months from two rooms and three people to an enormous organization whose headquarters in Washington filled a structure of nearly a thousand rooms, each room containing from two to ten people, and within the next year it had overflowed into and filled another building of almost equal size. The War Trade Building covered an entire block of space and in it were 2,200 employees while its mail, handled by its own service, numbered from 4,000 to 5,000 pieces daily. And the histories of the other war agencies are repetitions of these.
Altogether there were built a score of these huge buildings for various war work purposes. If massed together they would have covered sixty acres. Speed and economy were the two essentials in their construction and each of them grew with startling rapidity. Three months was a long time for the erection of any one of them. Seven or eight or ten weeks was the more usual time to elapse from the moment work was begun until the building was ready for occupancy, equipped with steam heating, electric lighting and sprinkler systems, aero fire alarm signals or fire towers, and telephone systems comprising in each one from four hundred to a thousand instruments. Some of the buildings were two and some three stories high. Most of them were built of metal lath finished on the outside with stucco and on the inside with wall board, but in the enormous War and Navy buildings the materials were steel and concrete.
View from Washington Monument, August, 1917
Same View One Year Later, Showing War Buildings Constructed in the Meantime
Measuring approximately from four to six hundred feet by from two to four hundred, each of these great structures covered from three to five acres of ground space, while its floor space, if two stories high, was between 300,000 and 400,000 square feet, but from eight to fifteen acres if higher. Its long corridors, stretching out in separate wings in parallel lines from the front section, or “head house,” with rows of offices upon each side, if set end to end would have measured a mile, a mile and a half, three miles, in length. Office boys had to use roller skates up and down these hallways in order to economize time. Last and most enormous of these structures were the huge Army and Navy buildings, standing side by side, of steel and concrete, three stories high, containing forty-three acres of floor space and affording accommodations for 10,000 employees. The Navy Department building has a front section or “head house” 860 feet long with nine wings extending from it each 500 feet long and 60 feet wide, while the “head house” of the War Department building is 784 feet long and its eight wings of similar size. The contract for these two buildings was let at the end of February, 1918, and by the middle of the following August the occupants had begun to move in and six weeks later their offices were fully occupied. The cost of the entire building program for the housing of war activities at the capital was $15,000,000.
The work to be done required as much expansion in personnel as in buildings. From all over the country people went to Washington to put their hands, their heads, their shoulders, to the rushing forward of the Government’s war program. There was something almost magical in the suddenness of their appearance and the steadiness with which this stream of humanity poured into the capital. From East and West and North and South came these thousands of men and women, from the seaboards and the mountains, from the middle plains and valleys—business men, captains of industry, lawyers, physicians, bankers, clergymen, college professors, magazine editors, scientific and technical experts, artists, authors, journalists, librarians, welfare workers, stenographers, secretaries, clerks, and each and every one of them found all that his or her hands could do. A great many of them, more than will ever be known, gave their services and the rest received salaries that were hardly more than sufficient, as prices were in wartime Washington, to cover their expenses. They were representative Americans, the cream of America in ability, training, character, patriotism and devotion to democratic ideals, and to see them at their work, to come into touch with their enthusiasm, their eagerness to render service, their teeming ideas, their resourcefulness, their efficiency, energy and determination and to witness the effective running and vast achievements of the huge organizations they were inspiring and directing was to watch the steady, sure beating of the very heart of the nation.
In April, 1917, Washington had a population of 360,000, with scant facilities for receiving and caring for the army of workers that almost at once began to stream into it. At the end of the next seven months a careful census that did not include transients nor men in camps within the city showed that 50,000 people had been added to the population. And they were still coming in answer to the need of departments and boards and commissions for more, and more, and ever more workers to carry on every phase of the planning, directing and speeding of the war. The War Department alone had 25,000 civilians in its employ. Each of the other great war agencies was using two, three, five or six thousand men and women, and each of them was still expanding. At the end of the first year of war the population of Washington had been increased by 90,000, and probably twenty or thirty thousand more were added before the signing of the armistice. Thus the capital’s population was increased during the year and a half by about one-third of its initial size. And, altogether, the expansion in building and population during that brief time makes a story more sensational than that of any mining town which ever leaped suddenly into world-wide fame.
This rapid increase in population led to serious housing problems and difficulties. House to house canvasses for the listing of available rooms, the seizing of vacant buildings and such emergency measures were not sufficient to provide even the most temporary and crowded of homes for all of the hundred thousand new residents. The problem could be met only by Government assistance and $10,000,000 was appropriated for the building of dormitories and apartments for the housing of the newcomers. Experts on apartment house and residence hall construction, on women’s welfare work, on heating, lighting and sanitation were consulted and buildings that would afford comfortable living accommodations for several thousand people were under construction when the armistice was signed.