Chapter VI (3)

The Red Cross has done an extraordinary work abroad and is doing an extraordinary work at home. Abroad it is in every way supplementing the army and navy medical corps in Europe and is accumulating enormous hospital supplies for the use of our soldiers and sailors. It has sent over a million dollars in money and stores to Italy. It is giving both military and civilian relief in France. It is supplying over thirty-five hundred French military hospitals and two thousand French civil hospitals with surgical dressings, drugs, and supplies. It is helping to care for half a million tuberculosis victims and restore a million and a half French refugees to normal life. At home it is helping to care for the dependent families of our soldiers and sailors. It has organized fifty-seven army and navy base hospitals, over a dozen of which have already been sent to France. Its useful activities in different lines are well-nigh innumerable.

This is the work the Red Cross has done and is doing for America and the world. Now let all Americans in their turn stand by the Red Cross and help in its Christmas membership drive.

BEING BRAYED IN A MORTAR

DECEMBER 18, 1917

President Wilson speaks in military matters through his Secretary of War. The sole importance of the Secretary of War’s report comes from its being the official declaration of the President. I discuss it as such.

According to the reports in the New York World, the Secretary of War states that “he does not favor universal military training as a permanent policy.” Mr. Wilson’s secretary, therefore, takes what is in effect the position of Mr. Bryan, which was picturesquely phrased as being that a million men can at need spring to arms overnight. The Administration’s attitude is less picturesquely expressed, but it is precisely as futile and as unspeakably mischievous from a standpoint of permanent national interest. Moreover, it is taken at the very time when the disastrous effect of the Administration’s policy of complete unpreparedness is being shown by the admissions of General Crozier on the first day of the congressional investigation. Mr. Baker’s report, Mr. Bryan’s theory, and the things already shown by the congressional investigation dovetail into one another. They stand in the relation of cause and effect. The Administration now officially and complacently announces that the policy which at this very moment has proved disastrous is to be persevered in for the future, therefore assumes complete responsibility for every blunder and delay, and for all the misconduct, and announces that these blunders and delays and all this misconduct have taught us nothing, and that we are to amble onward in the same futile path until disaster overtakes. Mr. Wilson’s Administration officially declares that we shall persist in our own folly until we are brayed in the mortar of dreadful calamity.

If the Administration frankly and manfully acknowledged its evil errors in the past and championed a policy which would prevent the repetition of these errors in the future, I would think only of the future and not of the past, but now it is necessary to emphasize the past in order to avoid disaster in the future.

We are in the eleventh month since Germany went to war with us. We have not yet built an aeroplane fit to match the speedy battle planes of our foes. We have not built a heavy field gun; on the contrary, we have had to draw on burdened friends to give us artillery. In the training camps of the national army the artillery regiments still have about ten wooden guns for every old field piece, and they have none of the modern guns they are to use in the war. There are rifles only for every third or fourth man. Until ten months had elapsed there was no target practice save for a few specially selected units. The troops still have only wooden machine guns and the trench mortars they themselves improvise.

Until ten months had elapsed they lacked even the necessary warm clothing. They have endured entirely needless suffering and hardship. Our troops in France have received thousands of coffins, but an insufficient number of shoes. At this moment not more than one tenth of our soldiers, taken altogether, are fit to go to battle. Nine tenths of our gallant and fine-spirited men are still without the training, arms, and equipment that would permit them to meet any trained foes. After ten months of war and the expenditure of huge sums of money, we are still absolutely unable to defend ourselves and owe our own safety only to the fleets and armies of our war-worn allies.

This condition is due solely and entirely to the policy of unpreparedness to which the Administration adhered for two and one half years when even the blind ought to have read the lesson of the great war. The Administration now announces that we are not to alter this policy and that we are to continue the do-nothing policy of refusing to help. If the American people follow the lead thus given them, they will be guilty of criminal folly.

RENDERING A GREAT PUBLIC SERVICE

DECEMBER 20, 1917

Senator Chamberlain has rendered a public service by presenting the bill to provide universal obligatory military training for all the young men of the Nation. Senator Wadsworth has rendered a public service by pushing the senatorial investigation of our lamentable military unpreparedness. Congressman Medill McCormick has rendered a public service by showing that we have heavily burdened our war-worn ally, France, by demanding from her the guns which it was inexcusable in us not previously to have built.

These three services all hang together. Senator Chamberlain’s proposal is to supplant selective conscription after war has begun by universal service, which would probably mean the avoidance of war altogether. It was grave misfortune that at the outset of this war we did not call for a million volunteers and at the same time put all the young men between nineteen and twenty-two into the training camps. There has been some very gross favoritism in granting exemption and, moreover, the men between twenty-two and thirty-one include a high percentage of married men and of others who ought not to go to war at present. This unwise, wasteful, and inefficient system should not be patched up. The Nation sorely needs, both as a war measure and as a permanent policy, the immediate introduction of universal military training and service for all our young men as proposed above.

Senator Wadsworth and Representative McCormick are in straightforward fashion showing the inevitable results of the policy of unpreparedness which we have followed for three and a half years, and which the Administration, through Secretary Baker, now actually advocates as our permanent policy. Senator Wadsworth has shown, beyond possibility of anything except willful misrepresentation, that he has no partisan purpose whatever and that the investigation is designed solely to rouse the Government and the public to greater efforts in speeding up the war. The Committee on Military Affairs of the Senate is showing no partisanship. They realize that we cannot win the war merely by announcing programmes. They realize that we have a long road to travel and that we have made a slow start. They wish to help the Administration, and in order to do this it is imperative to tell the truth.

Some of the fault for the present situation is due to the shortcomings of individuals during the last ten months, but the major part is due to our failure as a Nation to embark on the policy of preparedness three and a half years ago. Nine tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. Now our people must brace themselves to face unpleasant truths. There is not the slightest reason for discouragement. If we choose, we can, through our governmental representatives, quickly remedy the defects and then exert with decisive effect our tremendous latent powers. But we need to know the truth and then to act with instant and resolute efficiency and with single-minded patriotism.

A BETRAYAL OF DEMOCRACY

DECEMBER 21, 1917

President Wilson has announced that we are in this war to make the world safe for democracy. Either this declaration was worse than empty rhetoric or we are in honor bound to make it good. Indeed, to prove false to it now is to be guilty of peculiarly offensive hypocrisy.

The only way to make the world safe for democracy is to free the people over whom Turkey and Austria tyrannize. Every day’s delay in declaring war on Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria has represented and now represents a betrayal of democracy and of our allies. It is hypocritical to send an encouraging message to Rumania and not to declare war on Bulgaria. It is hypocritical to shed crocodile tears over Armenia and not to declare war on Turkey.

When President Wilson says, “We do not wish in any way to rearrange the Austria-Hungarian Empire; it is no affair of ours what they do,” he is engaged in the betrayal of democracy, and if his present words are to be taken seriously, then his declaration about making the world safe for democracy was false and empty rhetoric. Either one statement or the other must be unsparingly condemned by all honest men. In view of the last statement there is small wonder that the Austrian Foreign Minister says that “it is to our interest to nail down” the statement in question, because it abandons the proposal, or, as the Austrian minister phrases it, “the catch phrase,” to allow all small states to determine their own destinies. No wonder that the leading Vienna paper contemptuously states that President Wilson wishes to act as an “European peace intermediary,” being one of the leaders who “apparently consider a warlike noise the best overture to a peace conference.”

There is also no wonder that the Czech Slovaks feel with intense bitterness about this betrayal. One of their papers in this country describes how loyally they have supported America and the Allies, and describes the dreadful butcheries and persecutions of their men, women, and children in Bohemia, and then asks whether it can be true that America now really proposes to keep them “under the merciless tyranny of the Huns.”

This is precisely what President Wilson proposes when he says that it is no affair of ours to rearrange the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, or, in other words, no affair of ours to free the Czechs, Slovaks, Jugo-Slavs, Italians, and Rumanians, who, together with the Poles, make up the majority of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and who are ground down by tyranny of the Germans and the Magyars.

The President’s proposal represents three separate betrayals.

It is the betrayal of the Slavs of Austria, to whose cause our allies have pledged themselves and who form a democratic population oppressed by a militaristic autocracy.

It is the betrayal of democracy, because we abandon the majority who are our friends into the hands of a minority, who despise and hate us.

It is the betrayal of the free people everywhere to Germany, for Germany is now a world menace, chiefly because Austria and Turkey are her subject allies, and President Wilson’s proposal is to leave them undisturbed.

A peace without a change of frontiers and without indemnification for brutal wrongdoing, a peace which does not create an independent and united Poland and a greater Bohemia and Jugo-Slovak commonwealth, as well as a greater Italy and a greater Rumania, and which does not free and indemnify Belgium, would leave every perilous problem of Europe unsolved. It would be timid and calamitous folly to refuse to touch the disputed questions which, if left unanswered, are absolutely certain to invite a future war.

BROOMSTICK PREPAREDNESS--A STUDY IN CAUSE AND EFFECT

DECEMBER 27, 1917

It is earnestly to be hoped that the congressional investigation into the fruits of our military unpreparedness will keep two objects clearly in mind. First, the aim must be to speed up the work of efficient war preparation by doing away with all the present practices that are wrong. Second, the aim should be to make evident to all our people that our present shameful shortcomings are due to failure to prepare in advance and that never again ought we to allow our governmental leaders to put us in such a humiliating and unworthy position.

It will be quite impossible to get at all the facts of our unpreparedness. Most officers will be very reluctant to testify to the whole truth. They know that they will suffer if they do so, because they have seen the punishment inflicted by the Administration on Major-General Wood for the sole reason that he dared to tell the truth about our shortcomings, and dared to advocate preparedness in advance. For this reason I am not at liberty to quote the generals, colonels, captains, and lieutenants of the artillery, infantry, medical corps, and quartermaster corps who have told me of their troubles with unheated hospitals, insufficient drugs, summer underclothes in winter weather, lack of overcoats, of shoes, of rifles, of ammunition, of cannon. But in the camps I visited I saw some things so evident that no harm can come to any officer from my speaking of them.

Last fall I saw thousands of men drilling with broomsticks. I have such a broomstick now before me. Last fall I saw thousands of men drilling with rudely whittled wooden guns. I have one such before me now. I saw them drilling with wooden machine guns as late as the beginning of December. I saw barrels mounted on sticks, on which zealous captains were endeavoring to teach their men how to ride a horse. I saw in the national army camps in Illinois and Ohio scores of wooden cannon. Doubtless any man can see them now if he goes there.

The excellent officers in the camps are as rapidly as possible remedying these deficiencies. I hope and believe that by spring they will all be remedied. But let our people not forget that for one year after Germany went to war with us we were wholly unable to defend ourselves and owed our safety only to the English and French ships and armies.

The cause was our refusal to prepare in advance. President Wilson’s message of December, 1914, in which he ridiculed those who advocated preparedness, was part of the cause. His presidential campaign on the “He kept us out of war” issue was part of the cause. We paid the price later with broomstick rifles, logwood cannon, soldiers without shoes, and epidemics of pneumonia in the camps. We are paying the price now. We pay the price in the doubled cost of necessary war supplies. We pay the price in shortage of coal and congested transportation. The refusal to prepare and the price we now pay because of the refusal stand in the relation of cause and effect.

I do not dwell on these facts to blame anybody. I dwell on them in order to wake our people to the necessity of learning the lesson they teach. Our next and permanent duty is to introduce the policy of universal obligatory military training for all our young men before they are twenty-one.

OUR DUTY FOR THE NEW YEAR

JANUARY 1, 1918

In the papers there recently appeared a brief statement made by an unnamed young American major to his troops in the trenches in France. He said:

We have reached the top in training. If you need anything, come and tell me and I will get it for you if I can. If I do not get it, I do not want to hear about it again, for it means that I cannot get it. We will have three meals a day if we can get them. If we have to miss one meal, we will not be badly off, and if we miss two or three, it will not be much worse. We are expected to work from midnight of one day to midnight of the next day. If there is any chance to sleep between, all right. It will also be all right if there is no chance. Let everybody pitch in. While mud and water must be fought, it may be much worse. The hopes of the Nation are fixed on each man.

The ideal of duty thus set before our soldiers, before the Americans who at this time risk most and suffer most, is substantially the ideal of duty toward which all of the rest of us here in America should, in our turn, likewise strive. We must brace ourselves for effort and for endurance through a hard and dangerous year. High of heart and with unfaltering soul, we must do our part in the grim work of toiling and fighting to bring a little nearer the day when there shall be orderly liberty throughout the world and when justice and mercy and brotherly love shall obtain between man and man and among all the nations of mankind. We must show our faith by our works. We must prove our truth by our endeavor. We must scorn the baseness which uses high-sounding speech to cloak ignoble action and which seems to betray suffering right with the Judas kiss of the treacherous peace.

During the year that is opening we at home will suffer discomfort and privation and wearing anxiety. What of it? What we at home endure will be as nothing compared to that which is faced by the sons and brothers, by the husbands and fathers at the front, and what the fighting men of to-day face and bear will be no harder than what was faced and borne by Washington’s troops at Valley Forge and Trenton and by the soldiers of Grant and Lee when they wrestled in the Wilderness. We inherit as free men this fair and mighty land only because our fathers and forefathers had iron in their blood. We can leave our heritage undiminished to those who come after us only if we in our turn show a resolute and rugged manliness in the dark days of trial that have come upon us.

Let us all individually and collectively do our whole duty with brave hearts. Let us pay our taxes, subscribe to the government loans, work at our several tasks with all our strength, support all the agencies which take care of our troops, and accept the stinting in fuel or food as part of the price we pay. Let our prime care be the welfare and warlike efficiency of the men at the front and in the training camps. Let us hold to sharp account every public servant who in any way comes short of his duty in this respect. But let us also insist that the soldiers at the front and in the camps treat every shortcoming merely as an obstacle to be overcome or remedied or offset by their own energy and courage and resourcefulness. The one absolute essential for our people is to insist that this war be seen through at no matter what cost until it is crowned with the peace of overwhelming victory for the right.

TELL THE TRUTH AND SPEED UP THE WAR

JANUARY 4, 1918

Any man who at this time leaves undone anything to increase our fighting efficiency is a foe of America and a friend of Germany. The man who objects to fearless exposure and criticism of the governmental shortcomings which must be exposed if they are to be corrected is a foe to America and a friend to Germany, and in addition shows that he possesses a thoroughly servile mind. The critic whose criticism is not constructive, or who treats shortcomings as causes for being disheartened about the war instead of as an incentive to strive for the greater efficiency in waging the war and in preparing for the future, is a foe to America and a friend to every present or future foe of America.

When the Administration stands against universal military training and talks with vague looseness of future paper guarantees against war, it renders it imperatively necessary to bring home to our people the tremendous damage done by our lamentable folly in refusing to prepare since August, 1914. It is a betrayal of our country to protest against telling the truth for this purpose.

This is the twelfth month since Germany in effect declared war on us and we broke relations with Germany. We have developed our military strength so slowly that as yet we would be wholly unable to defend ourselves if we were not protected by the fleets and armies of our allies. No modern armies can fight without training in modern war methods and without modern field guns, auto rifles and airplanes. As yet we only have either cannon borrowed from the hard-pressed French or else wooden cannon. We have no auto rifles. Our airplanes are still unfit to fight modern war planes.

The Patriotic Education Society of Washington has done capital constructive work in truthfully telling our needs. It has fearlessly shown our dreadful shortage in shipbuilding and the deceitful wording of government announcements designed to conceal this shortage. It has shown the vital need of our, at this late time, bending every energy to building ships by working three eight-hour shifts a day in order to put our soldiers and supplies at the front at the earliest possible moment. The building of transport ships was the central feature of the problem we faced on January 31 a year ago. It was not only a misfortune, but a crime, to neglect it, as for nine months afterward it was neglected. The newspapers have just printed the statement that Colonel House’s committee reports that it is of the utmost importance to get our troops quickly to the front. Of course it is. Every man of broad vision has known this for a year. If there had been more fearless truth-telling during the year there would have been much less governmental delay and inefficiency.

Tell the truth and speed up the war. Tell the truth only for constructive purposes and only with the unalterable determination to exert every particle of our strength at the earliest possible moment, so as to win peace by overwhelming victory.

THE COST OF UNPREPAREDNESS

JANUARY 6, 1918

Senator Chamberlain, in order to minimize the chance of future war and to insure us against disaster, if in future war should unhappily come, has introduced a bill for universal military training of our young men under the age of twenty-one. The Administration declares against universal training and therefore for a continuance of the policy of unpreparedness, the fruits of which we are enjoying. Some of these fruits are as follows:

According to the statement of Mr. Fitzgerald, the chairman of the Committee on Appropriations of the House, Congress appropriated during the last year $18,880,000,000 and provided authorization for which cash must be supplied before next July of $2,510,000,000, making our year’s war expenses a grand total of $21,390,000,000. This equals the entire sum Great Britain expended during the first three years of the war. It is over twenty times as great as for any previous year in our history, except the year that saw the close of the Civil War, and it is seventeen times as great as that. The appropriations for the year are twenty-two times as great as the total interest-bearing debt of the United States one year ago. They come within four billion dollars of the total expenditures of the United States Government from 1776 to 1917. They equal the expenditure of twenty dollars a minute for every minute since the birth of Christ.

Had we started to prepare in time, one half of this cost would have been saved. The tremendous pressure coming suddenly caused an immense increase in expenditures, even aside from the futile waste, extravagance, and misdirection. Had we gone into the war when the Lusitania was sunk, we would have saved a third of the sum, for we have provided to loan our allies about seven billions. Our delay in going to war and, above all, delay in preparing, have resulted in a huge increase in the money chest and in the length of the war and in the terrible total of avoidable human suffering.

The lack of preparedness is responsible for the sickness among our soldiers. Take as an example the ravages of pneumonia in the training camps. The men in the training camps are physically of exceptional type and are in the prime of life. Their death-rate ought not normally to be more than a small fraction of that in New York City, where the total population includes the very young, the very old, the weak and sick, the badly nurtured. The population of New York City is 4,800,000. The population of the thirty camps is about six hundred thousand. In the two weeks of last December the death-rate in the city from pneumonia was one to every 16,500 people. In the camps it was one to 2800. Therefore, the specially selected men of the camps suffered from a death-rate six times as great as in the heterogeneous city population. And of every three men attacked, one died.

Doubtless administrative blundering during the last year is largely responsible for this showing. But the prime cause is the failure to prepare in advance. Our first duty at the moment is to speed up the war. Our second duty is to secure real preparedness as outlined in Senator Chamberlain’s bill.

COÖPERATION AND CONTROL

JANUARY 8, 1918

The assumption of control by the Government over the railroads was certainly necessary. Exactly how far it will go is not evident. At present what has been done is merely to introduce government supervision and control over railroads which are required to combine their operations in flat defiance Of the Sherman Law. In other words, the Government has wisely abandoned the effort to enforce competition among the railroads and has introduced the principle of control over corporative organizations.

The Attorney-General has just announced that he will, for the time being, abandon the suits under the Sherman Law to break up the harvester and steel corporations, because it is not wise to do so during the war. Mr. Culbertson, the able expert on the government tariff board, has announced that the Sherman Law is mischievous in international trade. Mr. Francis Heney, than whom in all the country there is no more determined and efficient enemy of wrongdoing corporations, has stated that the Sherman Law, the so-called Anti-Trust Law, is mischievous in our domestic business and should be repealed. In other words, under the strain of the war the Sherman Law has completely broken down and the Government is not merely conniving at, but encouraging, its violation by many different corporations.

The Sherman Law, or so-called Anti-Trust Law, is just as mischievous in peace as in war. It represents an effort to meet a great evil in the wrong way. As long as corporations claimed complete immunity from government control, the first necessity was to establish the right of the Government to control them. This right and power of the Government was established by the Northern Securities suit, which prevented all the railroads of the country from being united under one corporation which defied government control. The suits against the Standard Oil and Tobacco trusts followed. The Supreme Court decreed that the trusts had been guilty of grave misconduct and should be dissolved, but not a particle of good followed their dissolution. It is evident that the Sherman Law, or so-called Anti-Trust Law, in no way meets the evils of the industrial world. To try to break up corporations because they are big and efficient is either ineffective or mischievous. What is needed is to exercise government control over them, so as to encourage their efficiency and prosperity, but to insure that the efficiency is used in the public interest and that the prosperity is properly passed around.

Merely to repeal the Sherman Law without putting anything in its place would do harm. It should at once be amended or superseded by a law which would in some shape permit and require the issuing of licenses by the Federal Government to corporations doing an interstate or international business. Corporations which did not take out such licenses or comply with the rules of the Government’s administrative board would be subject to the Sherman Law. The others would be under government control and would be encouraged to coöperate and in every way to become prosperous and efficient, the Government guaranteeing by its supervision that the corporations’ prosperity and efficiency were in the public interest.

THE ARTEMUS WARD THEORY OF WAR

JANUARY 17, 1918

The great American humorist, Artemus Ward, whose writings gave such delight to Abraham Lincoln, once remarked that he was willing to sacrifice all his wife’s relatives on the altar of the country. Mr. Ward was not in President Lincoln’s Cabinet. Mr. Baker is in President Wilson’s Cabinet. He takes substantially the same ground that Artemus Ward took, although possibly with a more unconscious humor. He has just uttered a heroic sentiment expressing his pleased acquiescence in the sacrifice of France and England’s armies for the defense of the common cause.

On Wednesday of last week, discussing the likelihood that the Germans, relieved from anxiety of Russia, would make a tremendous assault on the western front, Mr. Baker said: “The impending German offensive will possibly be their greatest assault. The French and British armies can be relied upon to withstand the shock.” Mr. Baker is President Wilson’s Secretary of War. He holds at this time the most important office in our Government. He thus announces to our allies and the world that in the twelfth month after Germany went to war with us, America, the richest country of the world with a population of one hundred million people, after being at war nearly a year and after such warning as never a nation had before, is wholly unable to send any effective assistance to repel the greatest assault of the war, and that the only military measure which can be taken is to express through Mr. Baker the belief that the British and French armies can be relied upon to do alone the duty which we ought to share with them.

This statement of Mr. Baker absolves us from all necessity of commenting on his ingenuous defense of a system of preparedness which leaves our small army at the front with no artillery except what we get from the French and our army at home with batteries made out of telegraph poles and logwood. It is not necessary to discuss the exact amount of pride we should as a Nation take in the fact that as a Nation after eleven months of war we are proudly emerging from the broomstick rifle stage preparedness into the telegraph pole stage preparedness. Mr. Baker’s statement sums up the situation exactly. We have been at war nearly a year, and when the Germans make their greatest assault our preparedness is only such as to warrant our expressing belief that our allies can win without our help.

The New York Times, a supporter of the Administration, comments truthfully on the situation:

Nine months after entering the war not only are we giving our allies no effective military aid, but all our bustle and stir doesn’t hide the fact that, through incompetence and lack of organization and system, we are far behind in our preparations to supply rifles, ammunition, machine guns, airships, uniforms, clothing for the troops we shall some time have at the front. Our backwardness is naturally disquieting to our allies. If one million American soldiers, or half that number, fully equipped, had stood on the soil of France, Lloyd George would have made no speech to British working-men restating after a fashion the war aims of the Allies. There would have been no occasion, nor demand for a speech telling the labor unions what the troops of Britain are fighting for.

The pacifists and the agencies of German intrigue would not be working for a peace in the interests of the capitalistic and militaristic autonomy of Germany. As the Times well says, the man who now works for such a peace while Germany is unconquered “is the most heartless of militarists or enemy of the world’s peace and freedom.”

THE FRUITS OF WATCHFUL WAITING

JANUARY 18, 1918

We have been at war nearly one year. We have failed to do any damage to Germany, but we have done a great deal of damage to ourselves. Recently the President’s Secretary of War announced that the war was three thousand miles away and so he had not prepared to meet it. Incidentally the feats of the German submarine off Newport in the fall of 1916 showed that if it had not been for the Allied fleets and armies the war would then have been on our own shores. But at the moment it is three thousand miles away, and yet this Nation is suffering the kind of grave economic derangement that we would suffer if a hostile army was on our own shores. We have accomplished very little. We have suffered very much. Both the failure in accomplishment and the amount of avoidable suffering are due to the resolute refusal of our Government to prepare in advance and to its fatuous persistence in the policy of watchful waiting.

Doubtless part of the present trouble in connection with coal is due to unwisdom in the price-fixing of bituminous coal. Doubtless part of it is due to the railway congestion, which in its turn is due to the complete lack of system and consequent chaos due to suddenly imposing on well-meaning, stodgy government officials of average capacity the duty of dealing in a tremendous hurry with a situation of unprecedented size, complexity, and importance, but the temporary causes are all secondary to the great cause of complete failure to prepare in advance.

Our economic unpreparedness is just as complete as our military unpreparedness and is one of the chief factors therein. We are now paying bitterly for the fact that two and three years ago it was deemed politically wise to shape our governmental policy along the lines of “Watchful waiting” and “He kept us out of war.”

If three years ago we had begun in good faith and earnestly to prepare, and if, when the Lusitania was sunk, we had acted as precisely as we did act with no more provocation in February, last, this war would now have been over. An immense amount of bloodshed would have been spared and the danger of German militarism would have been forever averted. In such case we would have greatly developed the trained administrators and the coherent system necessary to deal wisely with the economic no less than the military features of a great war. Our refusal to prepare in advance and our fatuous acceptance of rhetorical platitudes as a substitute for preparations have resulted in our present military impotence and profound and far-reaching economic derangement. The profound business distrust, the unrest of labor, the coal famine, the congestion of traffic, and the shutting down of industries at the time when it is most important that production should be speeded to the highest point, all are due primarily to the refusal to face facts during the first two years and a half of the World War and the seething welter of inefficiency and confusion in which the policy of watchful waiting finally plunged us. Nine tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. All far-sighted patriots most earnestly hope that this Nation will learn the bitter lesson and that never again will we be caught so shamefully unprepared, spiritually, economically, and from the military standpoint as has been the case in the year that is now passing.

TELL THE TRUTH

JANUARY 21, 1918

Nearly a year has passed since, on February 3, by formally breaking relations with Germany, we reluctantly admitted that she had gone to war with us. During that year it has been incessantly insisted that it was unpatriotic under any consideration to tell an unpleasant truth or to point out a governmental shortcoming. The result has not been happy.

The famous war correspondent, Mr. Caspar Whitney, has returned from the front so that he might avoid our fatuous and sinister censorship, and tell our people the truth about our army in France. He shows that this army, which, Secretary Baker had just assured our people, was admirably equipped, in reality had no cannon or machine guns except those it had borrowed from the hard-pressed French; that there was a lamentable shortage of shoes; that the motor cars were poor; that we had no airplanes. From another source it appeared that many thousand coffins had been sent over. Our troops had no shoes, but they had plenty of coffins. Their ammunition was defective, and they had neither cannon nor auto rifles; but they had plenty of coffins.

At the same time the death of gallant Major Gardner from pneumonia called sharp attention to the evil health conditions in most of our home training camps, and the Senate investigating committee showed a really appalling slackness and inefficiency in the management of the War Department under Mr. Baker. There is no particular reason to blame Mr. Baker; he did not appoint himself; he did not seek the office. Logwood cannon and wooden auto rifles are mostly incidental features of the inevitable outcome.

All this was done in the face of repeated and explicit warnings from the best authority. Major-General Leonard Wood told the military committee of the Senate and of the House in detail about our shortcomings two years ago, and again one year ago. The Administration not only refused to remedy these shortcomings, but has spitefully punished General Wood ever since.

Criticism should be both truthful and constructive. I have told not the whole truth, but the minimum truth absolutely necessary in order that we may, before it is too late, speed up the war, and in order that we may insist on the passage of the Chamberlain Bill, so that never again may we be caught utterly and shamefully unprepared. Let us insist that the truth be told. The truth only harms weaklings. The American people wish the truth, and can stand the truth.

JUSTIFICATION OF CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM

JANUARY 28, 1918

Senator Chamberlain and his excellent committee have already seen the justification of their investigation. They have forced the appointment of Mr. Stettinius, a trained and capable expert, as head of the war supplies purchasing department. The fact that the appointment is made in order to obviate the need of following Senator Chamberlain’s more thoroughgoing programme does not alter the fact that it represents a certain advance and that this advance is primarily due to the investigation by Senator Chamberlain’s committee. It is a striking tribute to the necessity for and the good results of that investigation.

The investigation has been wholly non-partisan. It has been conducted with an eye single to the needs of the army and of our country. Senator Chamberlain is a Democrat, just as Secretary Baker is a Democrat. The committee has fearlessly exposed very grave abuses and shortcomings and has taken constructive action to remedy them. Secretary Baker’s testimony shows that, to use the language of Senator Chamberlain, the President has been misled as to the facts. His statements as to the satisfactory condition of things in the camps are not in accord with the facts. It is, of course, exceedingly difficult to get testimony from army officers because they have vividly before their eyes the signal punishment inflicted by the Administration on General Wood for fearlessly telling the truth, and those of us who have examined conditions and know how bad they are cannot give our authorities in many cases because we will not expose good officers to punishment in order to save ourselves from contradiction.

But certain vitally important facts are easily attainable. At the very time that Secretary Baker was testifying that the army had enough rifles, the governor of Mississippi in the public press on January 17 stated that he had been helpless to prevent the burning alive of a negro because the home guards had no rifles and because “there are over five hundred national guardsmen at Camp Jackson, but they are equally helpless because they have no rifles.” Many deficiencies can be covered up or their existence denied, but some cannot thus be concealed. Any one can see the wooden cannon and wooden machine guns in the training camps, every one knows that our army at the front has French cannon and French machine guns. Will not Secretary Baker state frankly when our own cannon and machine guns will be ready? After one year of war we have none. Must we wait another year before getting them? Caspar Whitney, a responsible man, has stated lamentable shortcomings of our army at the front. Will not the Secretary advise us what steps he has taken to investigate this statement and remedy the shortcomings?

The appointment of Mr. Stettinius is a good thing, but it does not represent even a half step toward bringing order out of the administrative chaos at Washington. Drastic action is needed to secure a plan providing for coördination, responsibility and efficiency, and above all, for securing the right men to administer the plan.

SECRETARY BAKER’S GENERAL DENIAL

FEBRUARY 2, 1918

Secretary Baker’s denial of any serious shortcomings in the administration of the War Department comes under several heads. Part of it is prophecy, which we all hope will turn out to be justified. Part of it is explanation or denials of facts, as to which it is easy to get first-hand information. With this part I shall deal in my next editorial. Part of it relates to allegations as to which it is almost impossible to get first-hand information except from officers whose names cannot be quoted, because this would probably entail punishment upon them. It is with this part that I now deal.

General Wood two years ago, before the congressional committee, and again one year ago, before the congressional committee, set forth in detail our unpreparedness. Every fact he stated has proved to be true and to be but a small part of the truth. Yet he has been singled out for punishment because of thus having told Congress the truth, and this although we and our allies are now paying dearly for our failure to act on the truth which he thus told. Under such conditions it is impossible to make public the names of the officers and enlisted men through whom we occasionally learn of abuses. Nevertheless, it is imperative to try to correct the abuses. If the Administration had not punished General Wood for telling the truth, the complaints would be at once laid before the department and the wrongs remedied. Under existing conditions it is imperative to call public attention to them.

A major-general informed me in October that he had one hundred rifles for twenty thousand men, and most strongly felt that these men should not have been brought to the camp until the hospitals, barracks, heating arrangements, clothes, and arms were ready for them. Another major-general told me, in explanation of the shortage of supplies abroad, that one shipload of big coast defense guns had to be returned because when they reached France it was discovered that there were no carriages for them. Hundreds of officers and non-commissioned officers have told me of lack of overcoats, of winter under-clothing, of heavy socks. One quartermaster, being unable otherwise to get woolen gloves for the men in cold weather, finally got them from the Red Cross and was officially reprimanded for so doing. Two officers informed me that when in France there was a shortage of shoes. They were told it was due to a shipment of coffins, one being told that they were not regular coffins, but boxes containing grave-clothes. The newspaper correspondents repeatedly have told of the shortage of shoes, one recent statement being that a shipment of clay pigeons, not coffins, was sent over, while Mr. Caspar Whitney recites that the surplusage was a large shipment of hospital cots. At any rate, the shortage of shoes is unquestioned, whether their places were taken by coffins, clay pigeons, or hospital cots. A leading New York business man has just written me of the complete lack of hospital and medical facilities in one camp. The superintendent of a Bible teachers’ training school writes that his son volunteered, leaving a wife and two little children; that his pay was over a month in arrears, and that at Christmas time he wrote as follows:

We have not yet received our November pay. At this time of the year the boys don’t want it for themselves; they want to send some little thing home to their mothers or wives or sweethearts, and in lots of cases to their children, to whom just a little something from daddy means so much. Yet even that little pleasure is denied us. Can you not bring this to the attention of the people who are supporting this Government?

I have received many hundreds such appeals. To give the names of the writers would insure their punishment. To pay no heed to their appeals means that the abuses go unremedied. Doubtless an occasional informant is in error in his statement. But Senator Chamberlain’s speech and the testimony taken before his committee prove that the important statements I have made during the last few months as to the shortcomings in our army have been more than warranted by the facts.

LET GEORGE SPEED UP THE WAR

FEBRUARY 3, 1918

In my last editorial I spoke of the things of which Secretary Baker explicitly or implicitly denies the existence, in justifying the Administration for the military delay and shortcomings that have marked our entry into war. But as to the major facts there is no room for denial. As to these Secretary Baker falls back on the comfortable doctrine that all our shortcomings are of no consequence because they are made good anyhow by the efforts of our allies--who, by the way, with preposterous silliness, are in official circles merely termed our associates. Secretary Baker explains that, although our forces in France have no field artillery or auto rifles, this is of no consequence because the French love to give us artillery and auto rifles. He explains that the greatest German offensive movement of the war is about to take place, an offensive movement which, if successful, means that we have lost the war, and he adds that we can trust England and France to repel this offensive. This is a naked statement that we are to let George do it. We are to announce that after being at war just a year our delays have been so great that we are almost negligible in the military sense and that we must trust to our allies to speed up the war.

This verifies the prediction of von Hindenburg and von Tirpitz that it would take us eighteen months to become a real factor in the war. Americans laughed at this statement, but the ruthless and brutal and intelligent Germans were right and our own soft sentimentalities were their efficient allies. We are in the position of letting George speed up the war. Are the citizens of a proud and high-spirited Nation to be content with such a position?

Our major shortcomings can neither be concealed nor denied. In October I personally saw thousands of infantrymen drilling with sticks. In December, I still saw artillerymen with sticks instead of rifles. A month ago most of the cannon in the national army camps, which I saw, were made of logs or of sections of telegraph poles and all the machine guns I saw were wooden dummies. The daily press has repeatedly published photos of these wooden rifles, cannon, and machine guns. Secretary Baker cannot deny this nor can he deny that in modern war an army without artillery is helpless. We are now getting a small number of machine guns. We are turning some heavy coast guns into field artillery, but as yet gallant General Pershing and his gallant men in France have to trust to the French for artillery and machine guns and war planes, and, thanks to our dawdling and indecision, we have an utterly insufficient number of cargo ships.

We have been at war for a year. In April Congress stated that Germany had already committed repeated acts of war against us and that our own declaration of war was formal. It was then too late to undo the criminal mischief caused by our refusal to prepare during the preceding two and a half years, but we aggravated the damage immensely by our delays and follies. If we had exercised reasonable energy we would in six months have achieved more than we have actually achieved in a year. The least we can do now is to speed up the war ourselves. Let us insist that this be the end toward which with all our energy we now strive.

LET UNCLE SAM GET INTO THE GAME

FEBRUARY 5, 1918

No one can tell how long this war will last. It may last three years more, and we should prepare accordingly. But it may close this year, and it is unpardonable of us not to act with such speed as to make our help available in substantial form at once. Uncle Sam must not be put in the position of the sub, who only gets into the game just before the whistle blows. Above all, he must not so act as to rouse suspicion that this attitude is due to deliberate shirking on his part.

The prime aid in getting Uncle Sam into the game has come from the men who, in order to achieve this object, have truthfully set forth the unpleasant facts about our delay, military inefficiency, and total unpreparedness. The critics of these men have been either unwise or insincere. The most fatuous form of objection to such truth-telling is the assertion that it tends to prolong the war. It is the only thing that will shorten the war. Suppression of the truth as the habitual governmental policy has been successful in preventing our people from realizing our mistakes and even more successful in preventing their remedy.

An excellent example of this policy of falsehood is furnished in a letter from a news agency offering to various newspapers cartoons assailing me because I had “criticized our unpreparedness and urged an immediate movement toward universal obligatory military training,” the cartoonist saying that I had said that I had seen artillerymen drilling with “wooden guns made from pieces of telegraph poles.” The writer admitted this, but stated that “these wooden imitations were as efficient for the purposes of learning as the real guns.” I suppose that this particular Champion of military inefficiency would believe that a rifle team could train for a championship match with dummy rifles of wood.

Every important criticism made of our military unpreparedness and inefficiency during the past six months, and indeed during the preceding three years, has been proved true and in no case has there been correction of the abuse until it was exposed. General Pershing has just written home a scathing indictment of the military shortcomings of our higher officers abroad. This is after we have been at war a year, and it is directly due to the character of both the civilian and the military control that has been exercised from the swivel chairs of the War Department during this year.

Our duty is solely to the country and to every official high or low precisely to the extent to which he loyally, disinterestedly, and efficiently serves the country. Let us get behind the United States. Let us think only of our patriotic duty. I care not a rap for politics at such a time as this. I supported Senator Chamberlain, my political and to some extent my personal opponent in the past, because on the great issue now up he served the country. I supported General Crowder, of whose politics I know nothing and care less, because he served the country. Stand behind America.

CONSERVATION IS IMPORTANT AND PRODUCTION IS MORE IMPORTANT

FEBRUARY 15, 1918

It is very important that we should conserve many things, but especially food. It is, however, very much more important that we shall produce the food in order to conserve it. The governmental attitude toward production during the past year has been, at points, very unwise. There has not only been failure to encourage producing the one thing vitally necessary to this Nation at this time, but there has been at times, by unwise price-fixing, a direct discouragement of producing.

We have suffered severely during this winter because of this attitude in the matter of coal production. One of the factors in producing the misery and discomfort, especially among people of limited means during the severe weather of the last few months, was the improperly low price rate established last summer, and the uncertain and contradictory attitude of the Government on the question of coal production.