Community Civics and Rural Life

by Arthur William Dunn

Show how the Spanish-American war was fought for the same purpose as that mentioned in the paragraph above.

Write a brief theme on "What the Flag Means to Me."

NATIONAL INTERDEPENDENCE

The attempt to work together in the war made it very apparent how dependent the nation is upon all its parts, and how dependent each part is upon all the others. It was often said that "the farmers would win the war." At other times it was said to be ships, or fuel, or airplanes, or railroad transportation, or trained scientists and technical workers. The truth is, of course, that all these things and many more were absolutely necessary, and that no one of them would have been of much value without all the others.

It is true that the winning of the war depended upon the farmers, because they are the producers of the food and of the raw materials for textiles without which the nation and every group and person in it would have been helpless. But the farmer could not supply food to the nation without machinery for its production, and without city markets and railroads and ships for its distribution. Machinery could not be made, nor ships and locomotives built, without steel. For the manufacture of steel there must be iron and fuel and tungsten and other materials. And for all these things there must be inventors and skilled mechanics, and to produce these there must be schools. And so we could go on indefinitely to show how the war made us feel our interdependence. What we need to understand, however, is that THIS INTERDEPENDENCE IS CHARACTERISTIC OF OUR NATIONAL LIFE AT ALL TIMES; the war only made us feel it more keenly.

NATION-BUILDING IN WAR TIME

During the war, strange as it may seem, while we were devoting our national energies to the work of destruction incident to war, we as a nation made astonishing progress in many ways other than in the art of war—in what we might call nation-building.

In some ways we made progress in a year or two that under ordinary circumstances might have required a generation. A striking illustration of this is in the development of a great fleet of merchant ships at a rate that would have been impossible before the war. Beginning with almost nothing when the war began, we had, in less than two years, a merchant fleet larger than that of any other nation, and that in spite of the constant destruction of ships by the enemy. The chairman of the shipping board of the United States government says that this is because the necessities of the war made the whole nation see how much it depends upon ships, and caused not only ship-builders, but also engineers and manufacturers and businessmen and the Navy department of the government, and many others, to concentrate upon this problem, with the result that we discovered methods of shipbuilding, and of loading and unloading and operating ships when they were built, that will probably enable us to maintain permanently a merchant marine, the lack of which we have deplored for many years.

In a similar way we discovered and brought into use valuable natural resources of whose existence we had largely been ignorant and for which we had been dependent upon other nations. We made astonishing progress in scientific knowledge, and especially in the application of this knowledge to invention and to industrial enterprises. We developed a new interest in agriculture, and learned the food values of many products that had formerly been neglected. We were led to attack seriously the great problem of suitable housing for workmen, and had an important lesson in the relation between wholesome home-life and industrial efficiency (see Chapter X, pp. 112-113). Foundations were laid for the adjustment of the unfortunate differences that have long existed between workmen and their employers. The war suggested changes in our educational methods, some of which will doubtless become effective, to the great improvement of our public schools, colleges, and technical schools.

We shall study some of these things more fully in later chapters. They are mentioned now to illustrate how OUR NATIONAL PROGRESS WAS STIMULATED WHEN THE WAR FORCED US TO SEE THE RELATION OF ALL THESE THINGS TO ONE ANOTHER AND TO THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF OUR NATIONAL PURPOSE. On the other hand, failure to recognize this national interdependence means slow progress as a national community. When the war began, our nation was said to be "unprepared." Insofar as this was true—and it was true in many particulars—it was because in the times of peace before the war we had not thought enough about the dependence of our national strength and safety upon all these factors in our national life WORKING TOGETHER. And so, in the times of peace AFTER THE WAR, if the purposes for which our nation fought are to be fulfilled, we must continue to profit by this lesson which the war has taught us.