V
When the “cub reporter” came to take on his “new job,” he learned for the first time of the conditions at Camp Funston, in Kansas, the big national army training camp of the Middle West, to which his old friend, Major-General Leonard Wood, had been assigned. The drafted men were assembled there from the farms and towns of the Middle West before adequate provision had been made for their care or their training. They were trained with wooden cannon, and broomsticks served in place of rifles. Colonel Roosevelt wrote an editorial entitled “Broomstick Preparedness,” which touched mildly on the conditions at Funston. The expression “Broomstick Preparedness” caught popular fancy as typifying the Administration’s delay in many aspects of war preparation. It stuck in the public mind. It was widely used by newspapers and by speakers who thought the Government was not showing sufficient speed. An editorial, “Broomstick Apologists,” followed, directed at people who answered criticism of delay by making excuses for delay.
From the beginning Colonel Roosevelt had in the main devoted his articles to speeding up the preparations for making war. The boosting of Liberty bonds and the various war drives, the pacifists and hyphenated enemies on our own soil, were not overlooked by any means, but the thing that seared his soul was the lack of speed in making ready for actual warfare. When his connection with The Star began, we had been officially at war nearly six months, and how little the Government had accomplished toward equipping for actual warfare was continuously held up in his articles.
Colonel Roosevelt used the method, followed by newspaper writers who earnestly seek to achieve results, of pounding continually on a few things, dressing each article in different language, but keeping to the front all the time the central idea, presenting the same thoughts in article after article, but striving in each so to change the presentation that the ideas would finally enter the reader’s mind and stir him to action. Mr. Nelson used this method in the conduct of The Star. For many years, beginning with its first publication, The Star advocated parks and boulevards for Kansas City. It hammered away on the subject in nearly every issue. It took almost twenty years to do it, but at the end a splendid system of parks and boulevards stands as a monument to The Star’s persistence.
Article after article Colonel Roosevelt devoted to the slow speed in war-making until there was finally a response in Washington. It heard from public opinion. War-making was speeded up, although at the best and in the end there were many, many deficiencies in our war machine.
Colonel Roosevelt’s criticisms of the Administration were not widely popular. The Star never had any idea they would be popular, but it believed they were right and for the real good of the country. As he had foreseen when the connection was made, “Many of your subscribers will be perfectly furious at The Star for printing my editorials.” They were. They wrote to The Star to denounce the Colonel for writing the articles and The Star for printing them. In popular discussion in the Middle West forms of disapproval ranged from “He should stand by the President” to “He should be stood before a stone wall and shot.” Generally the user of the latter phrase added “at sunrise.” That was an expression often heard. It was used by political orators with effect. Colonel Roosevelt knew full well of the feeling in the West and South toward his articles. He wrote once asking what effect the storm was having on The Star. Never a word from him to show he cared one whit about himself. He knew he was doing the right thing for the country; he went ahead.
The frank truth is, there was a strong and active pacifist element in the territory in which The Star circulated. It had not been for preparedness. It had voted for President Wilson in 1916 largely “because he kept us out of war.” Undeniably that idea was popular. A candidate for governor in a neighboring state, running on the Republican ticket, had made a campaign identical with the Democratic slogan and had carried the state, which at the same time gave its vote to the Democratic presidential candidate. But once we were in war the people of this section responded nobly; they went to the limit, but for a long time after we were in war they did not approve the prodding-up of Washington. The hostility toward the Roosevelt articles in the South was more pronounced. At the beginning of the service ten Southern newspapers were taking it. Their statements about discontinuance ran from “We find further publication inadvisable in our territory” to an apology to their readers for ever having allowed the Roosevelt articles to enter their columns.
Colonel Roosevelt was not without defenders; many of them thought and said he was rendering the greatest service to the country in all his career. But in the excited state of mind in the spring of 1918, when the Germans were driving toward Paris, it required courage to defend the articles. Many, however, spoke out boldly; others did not. Party lines were not followed strictly. Republicans were not so bitter as men of the President’s party. “We must stand by the President” had a popular appeal regardless of whether the Government was functioning efficiently or not. The view was widely held that it was unpatriotic to criticize the President. Frequently it was charged that Colonel Roosevelt’s purposes were political, not patriotic. The articles were often decried as pro-German propaganda and The Star was branded as pro-German for publishing them.
In April, 1918, when this feeling was at its height, when the people in Kansas City’s territory were in a highly inflamed state of feeling toward criticism of the Government, Colonel Roosevelt sent a ringing editorial, “Freedom Stands with her Back to the Wall,” which The Star did not consider it advisable to publish. It had no doubt of the entire righteousness of the criticism passed on the officials at Washington, for the fruition of their slowness was shown in the poor showing America was making in these critical days, but it could see no good to come from the publication: in its opinion the article would only further inflame Colonel Roosevelt’s enemies and irritate his friends. Colonel Roosevelt was informed of the office opinion of this article as he was on a later article (“How Not to Adjourn Politics,” June 25) which was not published. He acquiesced in the decision, saying that he could readily conceive of local conditions which made their publication ill-advised. He asked that they be telegraphed to two other newspapers, which was done. The Star was willing to go as far as it could go without, in its judgment, lessening the effectiveness of the articles in accomplishing the speeding-up of the war, but it would not go beyond this point.
In July, when criticism had caused the removal of many inefficients at Washington and when American troops were beginning to reach France, The Star was barred from the Public Library at Fulton, Missouri, an intensely Democratic town in Central Missouri, “for disloyalty to the present Administration.” The notice read:
Dear Sir: By order from the library board of the Public Library I am advised to have you discontinue our subscription to The Daily Star and The Times. Disloyalty to the present Administration is the reason given for the action taken.
Yours sincerely
FRANCES F. WATSON
Librarian
Answering this editorially, The Star said that throughout the war it had taken the course of calling attention to the mistakes of the Government rather than remaining silent on its mistakes; that it did not believe in saying the country was doing finely when it was not; that it believed in exposing inefficiency and rooting it out. It directed attention to results already accomplished by criticism in bringing into the war preparations men like Schwab, Goethals, Stettinius, March, Baruch, and others, adding: “The Star is proud to belong to the little group of constructive critics, including preëminently Colonel Roosevelt, who worked to get wrong conditions changed and to contribute to the present result, which to-day is the salvation of the cause we fight for. For it to have done anything else would have been faithlessness to its trust.”
When at last the stirring-up of the Administration had borne fruit and American troops were in France and on the way in considerable, though disappointing, numbers, Colonel Roosevelt slowed down his bombardment of the Washington authorities. His campaign had produced results. He was right in doing all he could to speed up war preparations, and he stood his ground in the face of widespread censure in the way he always did. Hostile newspapers had demanded that the Postmaster-General suppress the circulation of the Roosevelt articles; indeed, a post-office inspector had visited Kansas City with the idea of denying The Star admission to the mails, but the Administration made no further move in this direction.
Even when the turning of the tide had set in, Roosevelt’s demand was for men, more men, and then more men for France. He would have in all six or seven million men in training, and four million American soldiers in France in the spring of 1919. In the first article he sent after the news of Quentin’s death, he said:
Now and always afterwards we of this country will walk with our heads high because of the men who face death and wounds, and so many of whom have given their lives for this nation and for the great ideals of humanity across the sea. But we must not let our pride and our admiration evaporate in mere pride, in mere admiration of what others have done. We must put the whole strength of this nation back of the fighting men at the front. We owe it to them.
Later on the good effect of Colonel Roosevelt’s criticism was widely recognized. The Nation, one of the Colonel’s bitterest opponents, in general a strong supporter of the Administration, said of his editorials: “It is largely to him that we owe our ability to discuss peace terms and to criticize at all.”
Summing up the effect of Colonel Roosevelt’s campaign to speed up our part in the war, The Star said editorially:
There were periods of intolerance when neither Mr. Roosevelt nor The Star was under any illusions as to the reception that would be given frank criticism. But it was essential that such criticism be made in order to correct evils that were really threatening the outcome of the war....
The selective draft was the big achievement of the Administration in 1917. But having prepared this, the Government proceeded in most leisurely fashion, apparently not getting the slightest comprehension of the danger to the Allied cause resulting from Russia’s collapse.
The War Department continued to be run, as it had been in the past, by amiable old gentlemen who were wholly unfit for the task. Although airplanes had become an essential feature of modern warfare, it was not until weeks after war had been declared that the department sent a commission to Europe to learn what a military airplane was. Rifles are usually regarded as a part of the military equipment of troops. But it was two months after the declaration of war before the War Department decided what type of rifle to make. An army of millions of men was certain to need uniforms, but the easy-going quartermaster-general turned down the offer of the wool manufacturers’ association for the entire output of the country and the result was that the soldiers went into the winter without warm clothing or overcoats. As for artillery, the incapacity was complete.
Meanwhile we sent a small expeditionary force to France, and in the autumn began sending troops across in a leisurely way, at the rate of ten thousand a week.
Then suddenly, late in March, with the German army driving straight on Paris and the Allied defenses giving way, under the appeal of Lloyd George we suddenly woke to the fact that we had been playing with the war. From that time on we acted as if we had a man’s job, and we got into the line just in time to save the situation.
All through the fall and winter of last year what Mr. Roosevelt and the other outspoken critics were trying to do was to arouse the country and the Administration to the magnitude of the task and to the danger from delay. They succeeded only partly. But they did succeed to the extent of forcing the removal of incompetent departmental chiefs, and the substitution of efficient men who were able to handle the emergency when the Administration finally discovered that the emergency existed.
Looking back over the events of the last eighteen months, we believe no fair-minded American can fail to perceive the patriotic service done by Mr. Roosevelt and other critics, who were seeking to awaken the Government from a lethargy that just missed proving fatal to the Allied cause.