Straight America, a call to national service

by Frances Kellor

I believe that the work of the agitator and propagandist in arousing America is about done. The hundreds of volunteer, happy-go-lucky, hit-and-miss organizations throughout the country that have divided public attention with Congress have accomplished their task. We are entering upon the serious business of investigation, organization, and administration. We are ready for a policy, a program, and a leader. We are ready to act as a nation and not as the spokesman for any section or race.

A thoroughgoing policy of national preparedness to insure national unity and action cannot comprise less than five main divisions, all proceeding together toward a common goal. They are military preparedness, industrial mobilization, universal service, Americanization, and international duty.

Military defense has centered chiefly upon the army and navy and has dealt largely with numbers and appropriations. The pending measures can hardly be said to represent a policy. The conflicting provisions scarcely constitute a program.

Let us see how we have approached this subject: Under the guise of a first and immediate defense step we are urged to provide for a tunnel through the Rocky Mountains; for a road connecting two forts in Georgia; for rifle clubs, the Federal government to supply the rifles; for a national aviation corps school; for volunteer training camps for high school students; for the purchase of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal; for a naval or a military academy in this or that particular state; for a “multiroad highway”; for a marvelous continental army on a voluntary plan, whereby 88,000 men are to enlist for six months, a second 88,000 within sixty days, and so on “as long as in the opinion of the President this procedure is necessary to public welfare.” This last bill well illustrates the detached point of view we have adopted toward the defense issue—an army of volunteers, i.e. whoever see fit, is to be raised overnight, and another army two months later and so on, so long as the President thinks there is any danger. Then this volunteer force is to dissolve into civilian life, and we are all to rest easy again until the next scare comes—when we shall again leave it to the most adventurous or the most conscientious among us to make up a hasty miscellaneous volunteer force to defend our homes and our liberty.

There is the usual supply of academic bills providing for commissions to investigate this or that aspect of defense. No doubt accurate information and therefore investigation on many points is necessary, but—the commission is too often a death chamber. By one bill a joint committee of the House and Senate is instructed as one of a series of academic charges to “investigate the advisability of universal service.” The problem has come upon the horizon, so to speak, and in a leisurely and philosophical way we get out our field glasses to observe it.

We have been doing too many sums in our defense propaganda. How many men in the army, how many millions of dollars for the navy,—all of these important,—but when an adequate plan is worked out for training every man and woman, according to his or her capacity, the numbers will take care of themselves. Until we are all “volunteers” we can dispense with mathematics.

The defense legislation of the year is evidence of heartbreaking national failure. The collection of sectional, personal, sometimes obviously dishonest, and, at best, ill-considered bills, evidences a graver charge than the political “expediencies” to which we are well enough accustomed. They are a testimony to the faithlessness of legislators in the highest places of the land, a miserable failure in patriotism, and that they have gone on so many months unchallenged is another proof of the supine patience, flabbiness, and stupidity of the average American citizen.

What should we have done? We had ample warning when Congress adjourned in 1915 that we would face the issue of preparedness as a vital compelling matter in 1916. Instead of depending upon separate and often conflicting reports from various departments and staff officers, the party in power should have had in hand in December—when Congress reassembled—the outline of a national policy, substantiated by certified facts, along which a series of bills could have been drafted to meet the needs at all points, and to avoid duplications at any point. Then the reserves of the majority party should have begun their own nation-wide campaign to carry their program. Failing this, the minority party in Congress had its opportunity. Such a plan would have rallied all the citizenship force for defense in support of its program and would have avoided the conflicts that now wage throughout the land. This program broadly conceived would have commanded the most comprehensive information in the country; not only from the Interstate Commerce Commission on transportation; from the Federal trade commission on industrial capacities and reserves; from the Public Health Service on port conditions; from the Federal reserve board on credit; from the Department of Labor on conserving men and stabilizing labor and Americanizing aliens, but it would have had the coöperation of such organizations as the American Federation of Labor and the United States Chamber of Commerce. The best thought of the country would have been crystallized, and instead of the prevailing chaos we would have a program free from partisan or sectional influences. Instead of haggling over the number of men, and where to get the money, and resurrecting letters from files to prove responsibility, we would be reapportioning our army posts on the basis of national defense, instead of on the basis of a civil war; we would be locating our munition plants in safe places; we would be building model ammunition plants, we would have an aviation corps and training schools worthy of the name—and Villa would not have raided Texas.

We are about where we started so far as actual accomplishment is concerned. I think but little of writing a statute and appropriating money until we see who is to spend the money and where. Nine tenths of the achievement for success lies in the organization and administration which follows the passing of laws. We are in the Congressional eleventh hour still agitating for a council to gather the necessary information, and propose a plan, which the Cabinet officers should have had in hand and operation jointly months ago. The whole situation has become so muddled that there is no one non-partisan, scientific, accurate, efficient, dependable source to which one can go and obtain the information necessary to formulate a policy or outline a program, and we have not yet established our first line of defense in an unassailable position.

The mobilization of industry is as important as the mobilization of men. The enlisted men must be taken from offices and shops and we must still maintain our output in products, get it to the places it is needed, when it is needed, and in prime condition. Soldiers without supplies and arms are useless; as are civilians behind the line.