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.