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