Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements

by Frank B. Lord; James William Bryan

So the Selective Service act was introduced in Congress and passed in May, without very serious opposition. At the very start the American people had accepted a principle which had been adopted in the crisis of the Civil War only after two years of disaster and humiliation. It was the estimate of experts that this army would need a year of training before it would be fit for the front line, and a huge system of cantonments was hastily constructed to house the troops, while the nucleus of men trained in the Plattsburg camps was increased by the extension of the Plattsburg system all over the country.

For the leadership of this army General Pershing was selected, not without considerable criticism from those who thought General Wood deserved the position. The reasons which led to the selection of Pershing are not yet officially known to the public, but Pershing's record was to be a sufficient justification of the appointment.

But military and naval measures were only a part of the work needed to win this war. Allied shipping was being sunk by the submarines at an alarming rate, and new ships had to be provided. An enormous American program was laid out, and General Goethals, in whom there was universal confidence, was made head of the Emergency Fleet Corporation charged with its execution. But Goethals could not get along with William Denman, head of the Shipping Board, and changes of personnel were constant through the year until in 1918 Charles M. Schwab was finally put in chief control of the shipbuilding program.

For this and the development of the industrial program necessary for military efficiency the support of labor was essential. Mr. Wilson now reaped once more the benefit of a policy which had previously brought him much criticism. His retreat before the railroad brotherhoods in August of 1916, as well as the general policy of his Administration, had won him the invaluable support of the American Federation of Labor, and this good understanding, together with the unprecedented wage scales which came into operation in most industries with the war emergency, gave to the United States Government much more firm support from organized labor than most of the allied countries had been able to obtain.

But this war touched every department of human affairs. The Allies were short of food, and one of the first achievements of the American Government was the institution of a limited food control in the United States, under the directorship of Herbert Hoover. Saving of food by voluntary effort was popularized, and increased production and reduced consumption prevented the appearance of any serious food crisis in the allied countries. Later a fuel control was instituted under Dr. Harry A. Garfield, and the principle of voluntary self-denial established by the Food Administration was carried on into the field of news, where the newspapers submitted to voluntary restriction of the publication of news that might unfavorably affect military and naval movements. The Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, was in general supervision of this work, and, though it was, on the whole, unpopular and accomplished no very useful purpose at home, it developed during 1918 a service of European propaganda which was of immense value in heartening the Allies, informing the neutrals and discouraging the enemy.

For all this money was needed, and in May and June the first Liberty Loan of $2,000,000,000 was put before the public in an intensive campaign of publicity. Mr. McAdoo proved himself an extremely able advertiser of the public finances, and with the vigorous coöperation of banks and business men the loan was more than 50 per cent oversubscribed. There were other and larger loans later, but after the success of the first one there was no doubt that they would be taken; the first great accomplishment in national financing was almost as much of a surprise to the public as the ready acceptance of the draft.

Early in April the railroads were put in charge of a committee of five railroad Presidents, who were given great powers in the combination of facilities for better service. But the system did not work well, and on Dec. 26, 1917, the President announced the assumption by the Government of control of the railroads for the war emergency, with Mr. McAdoo as Director General.

Nineteen hundred and seventeen, then, saw the Wilson Administration undertaking far heavier burdens than any previous Administration had attempted, and meeting with a measure of success which was beyond all prediction. The most powerful nation in the world was getting ready for war on an enormous scale, getting ready slowly, to be sure, but with a surprising ease and a surprising harmony. The nation which had re-elected the President in November because he had kept it out of war was whole-heartedly behind him from April on as he led it into war.

But great as was the President's moral authority at home, it was still greater abroad. The principles proclaimed in his address of April 2, and repeated and elaborated later in the year, became the creed of almost every political element in Europe except the German military party. The Russian revolution was still a liberalizing influence, in the early part of the year, and self-determination began to be proclaimed over all Europe as the central principle of any satisfactory peace settlement. In the allied countries, where Mr. Wilson's forbearance toward Germany had been heaped with ridicule for the last two years, he became over night the interpreter of the ideals for which the democratic peoples were fighting. Hereafter in any negotiations with Germany the President by general consent acted as the spokesman of all the allied Governments, and the peoples of the allied countries accepted his declarations as a sort of codification of the principles of the war. It must be left for the historian of the future to decide how much of this deference was due to appreciation of the President's service in clarifying the allied ideals, and how much to his position as head of the most powerful nation in the world, whose intervention was expected to bring victory to the Allies.

But in other countries as well, Wilson's ideals had become a dogma to which everybody professed allegiance no matter what his views. The President's principles, as publicly expressed in his speeches, had been in effect a declaration of worthy ends, such as all right thinking persons desired. He had been less concerned with the means to those ends, and consequently all who agreed with his principles were inclined to assert that the President's ideals were exemplified by their own practices. In 1917 the President enjoyed the unusual experience of seeing American liberals, British Laborites, three or four kinds of Russian Socialists, neutral Socialists, neutral clericals, neutral pacifists and even certain groups in the enemy countries all proclaiming their adherence to the ideals of President Wilson.