Days of Frantic Perplexity
During the days of frantic perplexity there had been talk of dismantling the factories and shipping their machineries to the interior. But when the owners of the city’s 26,000 manufacturing establishments faced the problem, they realized that it could not be done. They were not like the government that could afford to pull plants apart and move them at more expense than would be involved in building new ones.[146]
They were as helpless as their 500,000 employees. To leave their city meant for owners and workers alike to go away bare-handed and pauperized. There was nothing to do except to stay.
All these manufactories and industries of the city had labored so furiously in the last weeks to produce merchandise and ship it that at last the railroads were unable to handle the rush of freight. Every yard was piled high with goods destined for the interior that could not be loaded. All the sidings were clogged. There were lines of freight trains with not a gap between them stretching from the Hudson River straight across the New Jersey meadows and on into the yards and sidings of New Jersey towns miles from New York.
No freight was coming in. For three days everything had been side-tracked far away from the city, in order to clear the tracks for provisions. The authorities, with the Citizens’ Committee, unable to guess what the enemy might do, had decided that all efforts must be subservient to the effort to stock the town with food.
Already the city had taken over the entire business of distributing food-stuffs. Nothing could be sold except in quantities and at prices fixed by ordinance.
The Edge of Famine
The city’s people often had been told by their statisticians that they always were within a few days of famine. Now they realized what it meant. The congested tracks had cut down their coal supply. All interurban transportation had to be reduced to save power. Somewhere in the narrow valleys leading from Lake Champlain on crowded rails were the enormous rolls of paper needed to feed the city’s presses. The morning newspapers had to be cut down to four pages of small size. There was no sporting news in the papers, no foreign news and no financial news.
Within the short time that had elapsed since the occupation of New England’s mill cities, the city had used up a great part of its stocks of textiles. There was shortage of coffee, of spices, of all the stuffs that ordinarily came in by sea.
Hostile cruisers and destroyers patrolled all the Atlantic coast, taking the precaution merely to stay out of range of the harbor defenses. They captured every vessel, large or small, that