Photo by Signal Corps
POSTER USED IN REËMPLOYMENT CAMPAIGN
Felix J. Koch Photo
EMPLOYMENT OFFICE AT CAMP SHERMAN
The American Red Cross sponsored a poster by Dan Smith, the artist, bearing to employers the slogan: “Put Fighting Blood in your Business!” A file of helmeted Yanks obliquely below a shield on which were inscribed the names of the principal engagements in which the A. E. F. participated; below that, the lines: “Here’s his record. Does he get a job?”—such was the display.
Publications of every sort, motion picture theatres, ministers in their pulpits, and school-teachers in their classrooms joined in the effort to make the whole United States think of its obligations to the returning troops. The War Department conferred a so-called citation upon employers who agreed to take back all of their former employees who had joined the Army or Navy. The leading business organizations of the country worked with their members to secure a complete reëmployment of former service men. The thoroughness of the effort accounts for the large degree of its success.
At the same time the War Department constituted itself an employment agency for placing soldiers with technical training in the best positions that could be obtained for them. Such soldiers were usually commissioned officers. The Department asked these men to send to Washington statements of their qualifications and their wishes as to employment. The Department then circularized some 25,000 business firms of the United States as to their needs for men with technical training. By this method about 8,000 men were placed in responsible positions at good salaries.
The employment organization encountered and overcame an abuse of the army uniform that was particularly flagrant for the first few months after the armistice. On the streets of most large cities were men in uniform, wearing the red chevron indicating their honorable discharge from the service, selling cheap or worthless articles or begging outright. There may have been a shadow of excuse for this during the early weeks of the winter of 1918–1919; but as industry recovered and revived it became possible for every ex-service man who desired a respectable job to secure one. Street solicitation, however, was highly profitable, and many professional beggars and sharpers, who had never been in the Service at all, secured uniforms and posed as discharged soldiers. The American Legion instituted a campaign against these men, urging the public not to give money to them. The reëmployment forces persuaded local authorities to refuse peddling licenses to men in uniform. Thus the evil was largely stamped out after a few months.