patriotic Americans should strain every nerve to make the sale a
success. Moreover, this happens to be one of those rare cases where the
performance of a patriotic duty is a first-class financial investment.
The patriot is rendering a great service to the Nation while he is also
making a capital investment for himself. If the people do not take the
bonds, they will be taken by the big capitalists. The people have the
first call, and while it is desirable in the interest of everybody to
make this a people’s loan, it is more desirable from the standpoint of
the people themselves. The investment is absolutely safe. The men and
women who fail to take advantage of it are not standing by the country
and they are not standing by their own interests. Every man, from the
day laborer to the bank president, should, according to his means,
invest in the Liberty bonds.
A SQUARE DEAL FOR THE TRAINING CAMPS
OCTOBER 21, 1917
The Playgrounds and Recreation Association of America has undertaken a
capital work in pushing the War Camp Community Committee, of which Mr.
John N. Willys, of Toledo, is chairman. The War Camp Committee work
for Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Colorado has made
Mr. I. R. Kirkwood chairman, and has begun an active drive to get the
three-quarter of a million dollars allotted to this district out of the
total of four million to be raised in the country.
The movement should receive the heartiest backing. It represents much
more even than the very important work of providing amusements for the
hundreds of thousands of enlisted men in the various camps, for it
also has to deal with the moral and sanitary surroundings, not only
in camps, but in the neighboring towns and cities. In former wars the
number of men incapacitated by diseases contracted in the camps often
surpassed the number incapacitated by the sickness due to the hardships
and exposure at the front. This was because of lax supervision of the
neighborhood moral and sanitary conditions, and also from failure to
instruct the soldiers that it is a shameful and unsoldierly thing to
expose themselves to disease due to indulgence in vice.
The committee is working not only in the interests of national morality
and decency. It is also working in the interest of military efficiency,
for it will save scores of thousands of soldiers from being shamefully
incapacitated before reaching the front, and the gain to the Nation
from the economical as well as the moral standpoint, after the war,
will be very great.
The work of the committee will be carried on outside the camps in the
adjacent communities acting in coöperation with churches, clubs, and
organizations of public-spirited men and women. It will be wholly
different from the work inside the camps, which is done by the
Y.M.C.A., the Knights of Columbus, the Y.M.H.A., and similar bodies.
In many places the local authorities already have done much work along
the lines sketched by the national committee, and wherever this is the
case, the national committee will surely aid the local bodies.
All good and patriotic men and women should heartily back this work to
keep Uncle Sam’s soldiers clean, decent, and self-respecting; to make
them better citizens and more formidable fighting men.
THE PASSING OF THE CRIPPLE
OCTOBER 23, 1917
If men are alert, resolute, and energetic, they can usually secure some
compensation from any calamity. This dreadful war, attended by the
killing and crippling of men on a scale hitherto unknown, has brought
as a compensation a determined move to do away with the cripple; that
is, to cease the mere effort to keep a crippled man alive and, instead,
to endeavor by reconstructive surgery to restore him to himself and to
the community as an economic asset.
Surgeon-General Gorgas and his associates have worked out, and are
ready practically to test, an organized system under which any
seemingly crippled man is to be kept under the guidance of the medical
branch of the army until either the usefulness of the damaged part
has been restored or else until he has been trained in other ways so
as to enable him measurably to overcome the handicap. In almost every
case something will be done to make the cripple less of a burden
to himself and others, and in most cases, the army medical service
confidently believes, the cripple will once more become a useful and
therefore a happy citizen. In all our special hospitals that are now
being planned, the curative workshop is part of the plant. The effort
is to be not only for the physical development and physical reëducation
of the wounded part, but also for any intellectual training necessary
to produce new forms of effective ability which will offset any loss
in physical ability. The aim is not merely to save the life of, and
then turn loose, a crippled pensioner who can be little but a burden
on the community; it is to take care of the wounded man until the very
best of which he is capable has been developed, so that when once more
in the outside world he will be a real asset to the Nation. This is a
fine thing for the Nation, and is of incalculable consequence from the
standpoint of the self-respect and happiness of the man.
This represents the complete reversal of the old point of view, which
was that the cripple was turned loose with a pension for less than what
if sound in body he would have earned, and a burden on the community.
The purpose of Surgeon-General Gorgas and his associates is that the
Government shall stand behind the man and invest money in him so as to
develop all his latent resources, fitting him to make good as a citizen
and expecting him thus to make good. There will be, where necessary, a
money compensation for the injury, but the great compensation will be
the return to useful life of the man himself.
The far-reaching effect of such a policy is evident. The purpose is
to insist that every man, no matter how maimed, shall be made of
further use in the world. If once the army acts on this theory, the
great industries will follow suit. The cripple, in the sense of being
a helpless or useless cripple, will largely be eliminated, and out
of this war will have come another step in the slow march of mankind
towards a better and more just life.
THE PEACE OF COMPLETE VICTORY
OCTOBER 23, 1917
It is stated in a press report from Washington that the Allies wish the
United States to stop sending men abroad and use its ships for food and
munitions instead, but that the Administration will not agree to the
plan, and furthermore that the Administration is determined that there
shall be no peace until Germany is completely beaten. If the report is
correct, the Administration is absolutely right on both points.
As to the first point, we can well understand, in view of the steady
U-boat campaign, how greatly the Allies desire food and munitions, and
we regret with bitter shame the folly of our Government in dawdling
and delaying for six vital months after the German note of January 31
last before seriously beginning the work of building big, swift cargo
boats. But this cannot alter the fact that for the sake of our honor
and our future world usefulness we must ourselves fight and not merely
hire others to fight for us. If we do not follow this course, our
children’s heads will be bowed with humiliation. With proper energy we
could already have had some hundreds of thousands of men in the firing
line, and we should send our troops over as rapidly as possible, with
the purpose to put at least two million men against the German lines
next year, an entirely possible programme if the Government will lend
its energies with a single mind to the task.
As regards the second point, every decent citizen should make the
pacifist and the home Hun realize that agitation for a premature
peace, for a peace without victory, is seditious. Shame on every man,
and above all on every public servant and every leader of public
opinion, who endeavors to weaken the determination of America to see
the war through and at all costs secure an overwhelming triumph for
the principles for which we contend. If Germany is left unbeaten,
the Western Hemisphere will stand in cowering dread of an assault by
Germany’s ruthless and barbarous autocracy. The liberties of the free
peoples of the world are at stake.
We must now fight with all our might on European soil beside our allies
or else fear the day when we will have to fight without allies beside
our burning homes. While this war lasts, the cause of our allies is
our cause, their defeat would be our defeat, and whoever assails them
or defends Germany is a traitor to the United States. There must be
no negotiated peace. Belgium is entitled to an enormous indemnity and
France to annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. By her marine murders and
her shore raids and her utter treachery and abominable cruelty, Germany
has made herself the outlaw among nations, and with her we should
negotiate only through the mouths of our cannon. All who now advocate
a negotiated peace with her are seeking to betray civilization in the
interest of brute force and international outrage. The United States
owes her entrance into this war almost as much to the American pacifist
as to the German militarist, and now the former is meanly eager once
more to serve the latter by securing an unjust peace. Let every brave
and patriotic American spurn the base counsels of the pro-Germans
and pacifists, and insist that this country, at whatever cost, fight
steadfastly until the war closes with Germany’s complete overthrow.
FIGHTING WORK FOR THE MAN OF FIGHTING AGE
OCTOBER 25, 1917
The Y.M.C.A. is one of the most powerful agencies for good in our
military camps here at home and with our armies abroad. It would be
a veritable calamity not to have it do this work. The women and the
elderly men who have gone abroad under present conditions are rendering
a patriotic service of high value, but every young man of fighting age
who has gone abroad for the Y.M.C.A. at this time is a positive damage
to the work and should be instantly sent home. It is an ignoble thing
for an able-bodied man to be in such a position of bodily safety where
his example must naturally excite contempt and resentment among the men
who, unlike him, are risking their lives and have left their families
for the sake of a great ideal. Of course, no man of draft age should
be sent over, but this is not enough. The draft represents merely the
minimum performance of duty. No man of age to permit his entering the
army abroad or at home should be sent over. If any such man is not
in the army, it should be either because he has been turned down by
the army authorities for physical reasons or because his work at home
either for his family or for the Government imperatively demands his
presence here. If he is able to go abroad at all, he should go abroad
in the army. The fact that he is abroad for the Y.M.C.A. is proof
positive that he has no business to be there.
An officer in high command in France recently wrote home a letter,
which I have seen, describing the experiences of the junior
officers of his command with some of the young able-bodied Y.M.C.A.
representatives. He began by an emphatic testimony to the admirable
work the Y.M.C.A. had done and to its great importance, and by an
emphatic statement that it had a thoroughly bad effect on the enlisted
men to see a young man of their own age engaged in such work. He then
illustrated its effect on the young officers with whom these Y.M.C.A.
men messed, writing:
Two young Y.M.C.A. men have been at two of the battalion messes. They
are of the age whose presence here is an annoyance to the army because
they seem to have been exempted from the draft. They have obtained
bullet-proof jobs and their presence here is a bad example to all
the young men in the army. Last night at one mess the officers were
so disgusted with the Y.M.C.A., who was actually wearing a uniform
with an officer’s belt on, that they began to chaff him, telling him
that they were married men and were entitled to play safety first
themselves and thought they would apply for jobs in the Salvation
Army. The Y.M.C.A. had to stand for this because he was the only
unmarried man there, and it is said that his mother persuaded him that
he owed her a duty not to go in a dangerous place. He evidently feels
his duty keenly. The other young fellow from the Y.M.C.A. was a real
man and he left the soft job and has enlisted as a private.
The Y.M.C.A. is so very useful an organization that it is profoundly to
be regretted that it should in any way damage its usefulness. Its work
with the armies abroad should be done exclusively by women and elderly
men. No able-bodied man under forty-five should represent the Y.M.C.A.
in the war zone or with the army camps.
WISE WOMEN AND FOOLISH WOMEN
OCTOBER 27, 1917
There are wise and foolish women just as there are wise and foolish
men, and in any great crisis the welfare of this country depends
upon the extent to which the wise and patriotic men and the wise and
patriotic women can offset or overcome the folly of the foolish.
The woman who bravely and cheerfully sends her men to battle when the
country calls takes her place high on the national honor roll. She
stands beside the mothers and wives of the men of ’76 and of the men
who wore the blue and the gray in the Civil War. Where would this
country now be if Washington’s mother had not raised her boy to be a
soldier for the right?
But the women who do not raise their boys to be soldiers when the
country needs them are unfit to live in this republic. The women who at
this time try to dissuade their husbands or sons who are of military
age from entering the army or navy are thoroughly unworthy citizens.
The kind of affection which shows itself by refusing to allow the boy
to face hard work when it is his duty to do so, the mother who brings
up her boy to be a worthless idler, because she is too fond of him to
see him suffer the discomfort of hard work, and the mother who desires
her boy to play the coward or the shirk, in time of war, are not merely
foolish; they are poor citizens. They are the real enemies of their
sons, for there can be no more dangerous enemy than the human being,
man or woman, who teaches another human being to lose his soul in order
to save his body. The wise mother is the best of all good citizens
and the foolish mother stands almost at the other end of the scale.
I wish every mother in the land could read Theodosia Garrison’s poem,
recently sent out by that stirring body of patriots, the Vigilantes. It
describes the youth of twenty years, eager to play a manly part while
his mother seeks to hold him from the post of danger and duty, and two
of the verses run:
Mother of his twenty years, who holds against his will
The eager heart, the quick blood, and bids them to be still,
What of the young untrammeled soul you seek to blunt and kill?
You would save the body stainless and complete,
Fetters on the hands of it, shackles on the feet;
And in the crippling of them make soul and body meet.
WHY CRY OVER SPILT MILK?
OCTOBER 28, 1917
Nice, short-sighted persons, when the evil effects of our folly in
failing to prepare are pointed out, sometimes ask, “Why cry over spilt
milk?” The answer is that we wish to be sure that we do not spill it
again, and, unfortunately, the nice persons who bleat against any one
who points out our shortcomings in preparedness or who excuse and
champion those responsible for this unpreparedness, are doing all they
can to invite future disaster for the Nation.
The bleat assumes different expressions in different localities.
Recently the Mayor of Abilene, Texas, expressed his disapproval of my
pointing out that we, as a Nation, had wholly failed to prepare, by
saying that I was “a seditious conspirator who ought to be shot dead,”
and that the editor of the newspaper publishing the article “should be
tarred and feathered.” Although differing in method of expression, this
slightly homicidal bleat of the gentle-souled (and doubtless entirely
harmless) Mayor of Abilene, Texas, is exactly similar in thought to
the utterances of all these sheeplike creatures who raise quavering or
incoherent protests against every honest and patriotic man who points
out the damage done by our failure to prepare.
These persons cannot deny one fact I state. Nine months have passed
since, on January 31, Germany sent us a note which was practically a
declaration of war. We have only just put troops in the trenches; many
of the troops of our draft army training at home have until recently
only had broomsticks, and now only have one old Spanish War rifle for
every eight soldiers; most of the artillery regiments in these camps
either have no guns or wooden guns. After nine months we are still
wholly unable to defend ourselves or to render efficient military aid
to our allies, and we owe safety from invasion only to the protection
of the fleets and armies of the war-worn and weary nations to whose
help we nominally came. No man can truthfully deny these statements,
no man can seriously regard this situation as satisfactory. To try
to cover up the truth by bluster and brag and downright falsehoods
may possibly deceive ourselves, but will deceive no one else, whether
friend or foe. Is such foolish deceit worth while?
Nine tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. We were not wise in time.
Let us learn from our past folly future wisdom. Our first duty is to
win this war, and therefore the Shadow Hun within our gates is our
worst internal foe. Our next and equally important duty is to prepare
against disaster in the future, and therefore our next worst internal
foe is the sheeplike creature who invites national disaster for the
future by bleating against the telling of the truth in the present.
SAVE THE FOODSTUFF
OCTOBER 30, 1917
Mr. Hoover has been appointed as the man to lead us of this Nation in
the vitally important matter of producing and saving as much food as
we possibly can in order that we can send abroad the largest possible
amount for the use of our suffering allies and for the use of our own
gallant soldiers. Mr. Hoover’s preëminent services in Belgium pointed
him out as of all the men in this country the man most fit for the
very position to which he has been appointed. Let us give him our most
hearty and loyal support.
In this great and terrible war the slaughter, starvation, and
exhaustion are on a scale never before known. They are nation-wide.
Therefore every individual of every nation engaged must do his full
part or else must be held to have failed in his duty. The man of
fighting age must fight. The man with especial business capacity or
mechanical skill must produce arms or equipment or ammunition. And
every man, woman, or child must help produce food if possible, and in
any event must help economize it.
Mr. Hoover has asked us during this week to devote ourselves to getting
all our people voluntarily to pledge themselves to certain forms of
food economy,--which are of great consequence from the standpoint of
sending abroad the foodstuffs needed by our Allies and by our own
troops. There are certain foods which are easily transported which are
nourishing and which are peculiarly suited for the use both of our
allies and of our troops in the field. Mr. Hoover’s plan is that we
shall all of us voluntarily limit along strict lines our consumption
of these food products and replace them by other foods which are not
suitable for sending abroad, and that we shall rigidly avoid waste.
Full particulars are given in the pamphlets sent out by Mr. Hoover from
his Washington Bureau of Food Conservation.
What Mr. Hoover asks entails not the slightest real hardship on any of
us. It merely requires each of us to exercise a little self-control and
perhaps to make some trivial sacrifice of personal preference in what
we eat. Surely this is a very, very small service to be rendered by us
stay-at-homes in support of our sons and brothers who have gone or are
going to risk their lives in battle for us and mankind.
ON THE FIRING LINE
OCTOBER 31, 1917
Our men are now actually on the firing line, and while, of course, they
are as yet there primarily for purposes of instruction, nevertheless,
they are there. They are at times under fire. They are at any moment
liable to death in upholding the honor of their country, of your
country, my reader, and of mine.
General Pershing’s original division under his direction and
the direction of his lieutenants, such as Major-General Sibert,
Brigadier-General Duncan, and their associates, has evidently been
trained to a high point of efficiency. The accounts show that the
infantry effected their entrance to the trenches with the precision
of veterans. Evidently the artillery is being handled with similar
efficiency. Apparently, from the account, our artillerymen are using
French guns.
All Americans must feel a glow of pride as he reads of the soldierly
manner in which our American troops have made their entry into the
fire zone. But we must not confine ourselves merely to feeling pride
in our fellow countrymen who are at the front risking their lives
in doing their duty on behalf of all of us. We must back them up.
We must support the Government in every movement taken efficiently
to put the strength of this Nation behind our soldiers, and we must
vigilantly insist upon the efficiency including the speed absolutely
indispensable. We must support the Liberty Loans, conserve food,
cheerfully pay taxes, and tolerate neither improper profit-making out
of the war by capitalists or strikers,--nor slackness and malingering
which interferes with our military efficiency by laboring men. Every
American civilian should now do his work with the same sense of duty as
is shown by the soldiers in the field.
And now let good patriots keep in mind that the Huns within our gates
from this time on are the allies of the Huns who are actually doing
battle against our soldiers at the front. The men who directly or
indirectly advise people not to take Liberty bonds, the men who clamor
for an early peace, an inconclusive or negotiated peace, the men who
condone the offenses of Germany directly or indirectly, the men who say
we have not ample cause for war against Germany, the men who attack our
allies or seek to breed dissension between them and us, are each and
every one to a greater or less degree acting as friends of Germany and
therefore as enemies of the United States. Every patriotic American
should now clearly understand what is really implied in the attitude
taken during the last nine months by the Stones and La Follettes,
the Hearsts and Hillquits. These men are out of place in America.
It is sincerely to be regretted that they cannot be put where they
belong--under the Hohenzollerns.
NINE TENTHS OF WISDOM IS BEING WISE IN TIME
NOVEMBER 1, 1917
A few days ago I expressed in The Star the regret and uneasiness
felt by all men with knowledge of international matters at the
failure of this country to declare war on Austria and Turkey. Various
Administration, and, of course, the leading pro-German, newspapers took
exception to this statement and announced that the procedure advocated
would be unwise or improper. Since then the great defeat of the Italian
army by the Germans and Austrians has occurred, and among the Italians
there has been much bitter criticism of our failure to help them,
although we have now for many months been at war, at least in theory,
with Germany.
A leading Administration newspaper of high standing, the Brooklyn
Eagle, accurately states the case as follows:
Italy’s defeat is shocking and alarming. Only its unexpectedness
excuses the failure of Italy’s allies, including ourselves, to meet
it. This Government cannot evade responsibility if Italy is lost, for
we have been up to the present, quite as indifferent as the rest of
the Entente to Italy’s fate. Italy suffers and is endangered by our
own negative attitude. We have loaned her money, but we are not at
war with Austria, and we have failed to give Italy such whole-hearted
support as her critical position demands. No time should be lost in
reversing this policy. Italy is fighting our battles as well as her
own. She is a valuable ally; her cause is just. No effort should be
spared to save her. There is no time to compromise or equivocate. Our
own soldiers in Europe will have to pay in blood for every hour’s
delay in throwing all possible help to Italy.