Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

The people of the lower Mississippi Valley have for years endeavored to secure the construction of controlled outlets and spillways, but their most urgent efforts have fallen dead at the door of the Army engineers or their associates or subordinates. The contractors profit financially by the "Levees Only" system. The politicians share the power developed by the local political machines which control the huge expenditures for levee construction and maintenance. Both are ardent advocates and devotees of the military caste system which perpetuates their powers, privileges, and perquisites. The rest of the people, wherever they dare to entertain an independent opinion, recognize that the Mississippi Valley can never be rightly developed so long as the present "Levees Only" system continues to prevail.

An engineering service composed entirely of engineers in civil life should be created to take over all the work relating to river regulation, flood control, and inland waterway construction, operation, and maintenance. The opposition to such a system for the administration of civil affairs by civil officials, instead of by the Army, has been based upon the plea that nobody but army officers can be trusted to be honest in the expenditure of the funds of the national government. Such an opposition is an insult to the civil engineering profession of the United States and is completely refuted by the splendid constructive accomplishments of the United States Reclamation Service. No one questions the personal honesty of the Army engineers, but their methods are enormously wasteful and without results anywhere near commensurate to the amount of their expenditures. The system championed and supported by them has resulted in the waste of about $200,000,000. That vast sum, if it had been wisely and economically expended, would have gone a long way towards creating conditions on our river systems in which the water that now runs to waste in devastating floods would have been put into the river at the low water season to float boats on that would carry our inland commerce.

There never can be any escape from this carnival of waste and extravagance and impotent and useless expenditure until the whole system of river control and improvement is changed. Control of it must be taken away from the Army and vested in civil control. Another reason for divorcing the Army entirely from control of river work is that it seems impossible for an Army engineer to recognize or reason back to original causes. He can see in a flood only something against which he must build a fortification after the flood has been formed. This is well illustrated by the blind adherence of the Army engineers, or at least of their chiefs, to the delusion that floods of the lower Mississippi Valley can be safeguarded against by the "Levees Only" system of flood protection in that valley. They utterly ignore the cause of the floods and therefore refuse to consider any system of source stream control or of controlled outlets, spillways, and wasteways.

Another illustration of this persistent adherence to mere local protection, instead of safeguarding against an original cause, is furnished by the work of the Army engineers in building the Stockton cut-off canal in California. This canal was built ostensibly to prevent the Stockton channel from being filled with sediment to the detriment of navigation. In fact it was built to protect the city of Stockton from overflow and flood damage.

The first big flood that came filled up the cut-off canal and it is now useless. It would be clearly unavailing to reëxcavate it, because it would fill up again with the next big flood. The sediment which filled the canal was gathered by the river after it left the foothills and tore its way as a raging torrent through farms and fertile fields. It washed or caved them into the river and carried down and deposited the earth material in the cut-off canal.

The Army engineers, however, or at least their chiefs, had steadfastly set their faces against reservoir construction for flood control. But for this they might have built the great Calaveras Reservoir which would have afforded complete protection for the city of Stockton against floods. By controlling the flood at its source, storing the flood waters, and letting them into the river below only in a volume not larger than the channel would carry, all damage to the valley and to farms lying between the foothills and the city of Stockton would have been avoided. No sediment would have been carried into the Stockton channel to impede navigation. The surplus flood water instead of running to waste would have been conserved and held back until needed for beneficial use.

Any such plan as this would have been contrary to all the precedents and theories of the military engineers. All the damages resulting from failure to adopt it merely illustrate the necessity of escaping from those precedents and theories, and the pride of opinion which clings to them with such desperate tenacity. That escape must be accomplished, if we are ever to get river regulation and flood protection in this country. Stockton will never get it until the Calaveras Reservoir has been built, and no flood-menaced section of the country will get protection until it is afforded to it by engineering and constructive forces dominated by the civil and not by the military authority of the Government.

The whole training of an Army engineer is wrong, when it comes to dealing with river problems and the control of floods which can only be safeguarded against by controlling the remote causes which result in the formation of the flood. The idea of preventing the formation of floods by controlling those original causes, preserving forest and woodland cover, preserving the porosity of the soil, slowing up the run-off from the watershed, or holding back the flood waters in reservoirs or storage basins, seems to be beyond the scope of the powers of conception and construction of the military engineers of the United States Army. They see only results, and seem unable to comprehend original causes. Not only this, but they also oppose, by all the political arts in which the Army engineers are so well versed, every proposition to coördinate the work of the Army engineers in the field of channel work and local flood defense, with the work of other departments of the national government. Every department of the national government must be coördinated which deals with water control, or with any beneficial use of water that would check rapid run off and hold back the flood water on the watershed where it originated, and in that way prevent the formation of a destructive flood.

The entire willingness of the Army engineers to subordinate the welfare of the people in every flood-menaced valley to the stubborn determination of the military caste to retain and broaden their own powers and privileges in this one field of action, shows what might be expected from any increase in the members of that caste, or any enlargement of their control over the civil affairs of the country.

The military caste in the United States will never approve any plan for national defense that does not center in and radiate from them. They will oppose it unless it broadens their influence and power, and imbeds it more strongly in the foundations of the Government. A plan such as is advocated in this book, will never have their coöperation, support, or endorsement, for the very simple reason that its primary object would be to remove the original cause of war and to contribute to the lessening of the power and prestige of the Army. The fact that it would at the same time supply the first and greatest need in the event of war—the need for toughened and trained men who could and would fight and dig trenches as well as seasoned soldiers—would gain no favor for the plan in the eyes of our military caste. The development of that system and the expenditures to be made for that purpose and the control of the men enlisted in it would not be vested in the War Department.