Part 8

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: