Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

Floods of that character are national catastrophes, as are likewise such floods as that which devastated the Ohio Valley in 1913, and the more recent floods in Southern California and Texas. Floods should be safeguarded against by an organized national system for flood protection. That National System for River Regulation and Flood Control should be brought into being and impelled to action by an overwhelming mental force, generated in the minds of the whole people. It should be a power as irresistible as that which projected us into the war with Spain, after the Maine was blown up in Havana harbor.

The ungoverned floods which for years have periodically devastated the Great Central Valley of the United States can never be wholly safeguarded against by any sort of local defense. They must be controlled at their sources. The problem is interstate and national. Works to prevent floods in the Lower Mississippi Valley from Cairo to the Gulf of Mexico, must be constructed, maintained, and operated on every tributary of the Ohio, the Upper Mississippi, and the Missouri Rivers—a stupendous project but entirely practicable.

The water must be conserved and controlled where it originally falls. It must be held back on the watershed of every source stream. If this were done, the floods of the Ohio River Valley could be so reduced, and the flow of the river so regulated, as never in the future to cause damage or destruction.

The same is true of the Missouri and the Upper Mississippi Rivers. If the floods were controlled on the source streams and upper tributaries, the floods of the Lower Mississippi could be protected against by levees, supplemented by controlled outlets and spillways as additional safeguards. Millions of garden homes could in that way be made as safe in the delta of the Mississippi River now annually menaced by overflow as anywhere on the high bench lands or plateaus of the Missouri Valley.

To do this work would be to defend a territory twice as large as the entire cultivated area of the Empire of Japan against the annual menace of destruction by Nature's forces.

Is not that a national work that is worth doing? Is not that the right sort of national defense? Is it not an undertaking large enough to arouse and inspire the whole people of this great nation to demand its accomplishment?

To do it right, and to do it thoroughly and effectively, necessitates the systematic organization of a Construction Corps under national direction for that work. It would require that we should put forth national energy as powerful, and mental and physical effort as vigorously effective, as that demanded by war.

Why then should not a National Construction Reserve be organized to do that work as efficiently in time of peace as it could be done by a military organization in time of war, if the doing of it were a war necessity instead of a peace measure?

If we ever succeed in safeguarding this and other nations against war, it will be because we have learned to do the work of peace with the same energy, efficiency, patriotism, and individual self-sacrifice that is now given to the work of war. It is because Germany learned this lesson three centuries ago with reference to her forests and her waterways that she now has a system of forests and waterways built by the hand of man and built better than those of any other nation of the world.

This great work of safeguarding and defending the Mississippi Valley, the Ohio Valley, and the Missouri Valley from flood invasion, if done by the United States for those valleys, must, in the same way and to the same extent, be done by the nation for all other flood-menaced valleys throughout the country.