An even greater expansion of plant was to be observed throughout the country. The plant set up for the Army mobilized against Germany was a practically new creation, specialized for exactly the sort of war in which we were engaged. It was a war in which land transportation had to be linked to ocean transportation, and therefore the plant included vast facilities for the embarkation of troops and a string of mighty export terminals, or bases, strung out along the coast in order to make difficult any blockade of our overseas supply line. It was a war essentially industrial in type, with unusual emphasis laid upon the development of special industrial products, such as powder and explosives; and therefore the plant included dozens of new mills and factories, several of them industrial centers so large as to be virtually small cities in themselves, with housing and modern municipal conveniences for their employees. It was a war in which new and hitherto unknown forms of combat had sprung into existence, and therefore the plant included equipped fields for the training of soldiers in such arts as flying and the employment of poisons as weapons. Above all, it was a war which called upon the ultimate resources of American man power; and, as it turned out, the plant had to be adequate to house, school, amuse, care for, and maintain at least two million men, with all that that implies in barracks, drill grounds, parks for vehicles, water and sewer systems, lighting systems, roads, hospitals, and (in the maintenance line) depots and warehouses for supplies.
It was all fresh creation, new construction. The building industry of the United States—and it is one of the largest and strongest of our industries—had never before been called upon to provide such expansion in an equal time. It follows that the entire building industry must have been engaged in the construction enterprise, that every available man who could drive a nail or lay a brick must have been employed upon government work. If he was not, he should have been; for those in charge of the construction, unable to secure sufficient labor from the entire building industry of the United States, sent ships to Porto Rico and the Bahamas and brought back thousands of workmen to help out. The Construction Division, the war-begotten organization which was in charge of this activity, with 427,000 men on its contractors’ pay rolls at the peak of its industriousness, yielded only to the United States Railroad Administration the title of greatest employer of war labor. It engaged in 581 separate construction projects, which called for an expenditure of over $1,100,000,000; and it completed most of them.
Miles of docks, hundreds of acres of covered storage, hundreds of power plants and complete water systems, thousands of miles of roads, railroads, water mains, and sewer lines—the list grows monotonous simply because of the size of its items, which are not to be visualized by stating them in terms of acres and miles. The activity was at its height at the signing of the armistice, when it became incumbent upon the Construction Division to terminate the work.
Four hundred and fifty army construction projects were under way on the day of the armistice. One hundred and thirty-one stood completed. The incomplete projects included some of the largest and costliest ones. But the salvage value of buildings is small unless they can be sold to purchasers able to make use of them as and where they stand. Few war buildings were adapted to civilian use. They were highly specialized for a purely war use, and they were not often located where they could be of economic benefit to the country. A large part of their cost represented the evanescent element of labor, a value entirely destroyed when buildings are wrecked for the sake of salvaging their materials. The war plant, even incomplete, represented an immense investment, but one which would be almost altogether lost if the plant were to be knocked down for salvage. Therefore it was of advantage to the Government to carry on a surprisingly large amount of war construction after the armistice for the sake of getting the use-value from its investment by occupying these installations with the permanent Army.
But there were other reasons for continuing work. Among the largest and costliest of the construction projects were those which provided the ocean terminal bases at Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, and New Orleans. These installations were all of durable, fireproof construction; and, with their piers, their great warehouses equipped with labor-saving machinery, trackage, and the like, they were the last word of modern constructional science in developments of this sort. In appropriating the money for these port works, Congress had stipulated that after the war they should be used in the development of American foreign trade. Consequently the Construction Division went ahead after the armistice and finished up these buildings.
The port works alone were enough to account for a large portion of the money expended on construction after the armistice, but in addition other great unfinished projects were carried through. As we have shown, the storage problem became acute only after the armistice, when the wasteful field consumption of supplies ceased and the materials coming from the war factories banked up in this country. Every warehouse and depot project incomplete on the day of the armistice was pressed to completion thereafter in order to provide shelter for valuable and perishable materials. This was another great branch of post-armistice construction. Add to these the continued construction of hospitals (which had to be prepared to receive the thousands of wounded men in France on the day of the armistice), and it becomes evident why thousands of the war builders were kept on the job after the war itself had come to an end.
The fate of every incomplete army construction project on the day of the armistice was submitted to the Operations Division of the General Staff, which looked at the percentage of completion, noted whether the Government owned the ground on which the construction was going forward, studied the availability of the building for commercial use, and determined whether it was needed in the military plans, and then recommended that the construction be abandoned, curtailed, or completed. In general, the projects abandoned were those providing additional facilities for the assembling and training of troops and those providing plants for the production of destructive munitions, such as toxic gas, powder, and loaded shell. Of the 450 projects incomplete on the day of the armistice, 182 were abandoned and 268 carried through.
The completion of so large a quantity of the war construction after the armistice enabled the Construction Division to go through the demobilization of its industry without accumulating large stores of surplus materials. Although in form, at any rate, the Division dealt directly only with contractors who took the various jobs, actually the Division itself procured the lumber, cement, brick, structural steel, roofing, hardware, and the like, for the builders. The demand of the war construction upon the supplies of building materials was so great that nothing less than a centralized stimulation and control of the entire market could have procured the materials in the quantities needed. The Construction Division’s Procurement Division located the supplies and then arranged each building contractor’s deals for them, even stipulating the producers, quantities, and the prices which must be paid for materials. This last was important, because the war builders worked under a sharply safeguarded cost-plus contract form, and therefore the Government was keenly interested in what the materials cost. In addition to procuring supplies for the contractors, the Procurement Division also purchased equipment for the war buildings—heating, ventilating, and power plants, fire extinguishers, refrigeration equipment, boilers, engines, and machinery of many sorts. Its purchases ran at the rate of $2,000,000 a day in the early autumn of 1918.
After the armistice and after the temporary suspension of effort requested in order to give the Construction Division time in which to take stock of its position, the production of building materials and supplies of which the Government would be able to make no use was rapidly terminated. The Procurement Division was made up of experts in all branches of building construction, and therefore this Division was made over after the armistice into the Construction Division Claims Board for liquidating its war business under the direction of the War Department Claims Board. In six months practically all the terminated contracts had been finally settled by this organization, at an average cancellation cost of 5 per cent of the face value of the contracts.
The termination of supply contracts and of contracts with constructors of buildings not needed by the War Department after the armistice, left the Construction Division with large quantities of supplies on its hands. But these were by no means surplus supplies. The completion of a large quantity of war construction after the armistice saved the Construction Division from having to solve the problem of disposing of much surplus. Supplies accumulated for the terminated jobs were simply diverted to those ordered completed and thus utilized.