The World Remade

by G. J. Meyer

  The American army’s Springfield rifle was considered the best in the world, but not nearly enough had been produced and the only sources were two smallish factories. American manufacturers had sold huge numbers of artillery shells to the Entente over the past thirty months, but the U.S. Army had only enough to last, at Western Front rates of consumption, about nine hours. The tank, which would eventually prove to be the answer to the machine gun and make wars of mobility once again feasible, was under development in Britain, France, and Germany and was slowly, by a painful process of trial and error, becoming an effective weapon. But not one tank, primitive or otherwise, had ever been built in the United States.

  One thing aside from money that the United States had the potential to provide in practically unlimited quantities was manpower. To fulfill the promise that one division would be sent to France without delay, the commander of the southwestern military district was instructed to select three infantry regiments and one regiment of artillery—what would become the core of the army’s First Division, the Big Red One—for transfer to the East Coast. There were two reasons for drawing these units from the Southwest. That district was exceptionally rich in manpower at the time, having been sent large numbers of regular and National Guard troops to deal with the Mexican troubles. And the service record and political connections of the officer in charge there, Brigadier General John J. Pershing, made him a leading candidate to take charge of the new division. He knew his troops well, having commanded the expeditionary force sent south in pursuit of Pancho Villa. He understood that a great deal of work would have to be done to get them ready for service on the Western Front.

  In short order, Pershing received a telegram from the chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee—who happened to be his father-in-law—asking if he spoke French. The general undoubtedly stretched the truth in replying that after spending several months in France in 1908 he had spoken the language “quite fluently,” that he “could read or write very well,” and that he could “easily reacquire satisfactory working knowledge.” Such a white lie is understandable considering the obvious implications of the senator’s question, which was soon followed by orders for Pershing to travel to Washington without delay. He could have had little difficulty guessing what was afoot.

  The First Division’s lack of readiness was of little consequence compared with the fact that hundreds of thousands of men were soon to be drafted and the War Department literally had no place to train them—no place, even, for them to sleep or eat. It was decided that facilities were needed for the training of a million recruits at a time, and that these facilities must be open for business by the first of September. The immensity of the task was obvious. The response, simply stated, was a decision to drown the obstacles in money.

  What was needed was little less than the creation of dozens of new cities in no more than three or four months. The War Department decided that there would be thirty-two of these “cantonments”: sixteen would have wooden barracks for the men being trained for the new National Army, and others would be tent cities for the National Guard. The cantonments became political prizes, and the question of which states and congressional districts would get them set off intense bickering in Washington. The Democrats’ Solid South did well. Georgia became the home of four camps, South Carolina of three. When Florida found itself the only state in the Southeast with none, its senior senator raised such a fuss that Secretary Baker was obliged to find one for him.

  “The cost in most cases could not be considered,” the colonel in charge of the construction program would testify when called before a congressional committee. “The work had to be done, and the only function we could exercise was to do what we could to get it down as low as possible.” Everything was done at maximum speed by hastily chosen contractors working on a cost-plus basis, which gave them no incentive to economize and little reason to worry greatly about the quality of the work being done. By the end of June, all but two of the cantonments were under construction, and by the September 1 deadline, all of them were, if not complete, at least in a state that made it possible for draftees to start moving in.

  Two hundred thousand men were employed on the construction. They consumed two billion nails, twelve million square feet of window glass—overall, thirty thousand tons of building materials per day. Not surprisingly, the results tended to be barely satisfactory at best, a scandal at worst. Even some of the new hospitals lacked proper sanitation, and many buildings were unheated. Where metal tubing was in short supply, plumbing pipes were sometimes made of wood. Republicans wanting to make trouble for the administration found a wealth of ammunition in what recruits encountered when they reported for duty. That the cantonments cost $199 million is less surprising than the fact that that amount would turn out to be barely a quarter of wartime spending on military construction.

  What many in and out of government expected to be the greatest challenge of all, conscripting hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of men, turned out to be almost the easiest. Secretary Baker, as a student of history, knew of the draft riots that had almost destroyed New York City during the Civil War, and he saw in them a warning. The government’s main mistake in 1863, he believed, had been to put the military in charge of conscription, causing it to be seen as something imposed on the population by force. (The Lincoln administration got little for its trouble, by the way. Draftees and men paid to serve in place of draftees ultimately made up only 6 percent of the Union army.)

  Baker removed the uniformed services from the conscription process almost entirely. A national network of local volunteers—business and professional men, educators and clergy—was created to implement a new Selective Service System, and these men reported not to the War Department or to any other part of the federal government but to the governors of the states. (Selective Service was a term of art. It signaled the authority granted to the administration by Congress to decide, on the basis of national need, which groups of men would be inducted and which would not. Service was likewise a felicitous choice—so much less abrasive than conscription.)

  The administration announced that all males between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, the slice of the population declared to be eligible by Congress, would be required to register on June 5 at their local post offices, not at any kind of military facility. Baker hoped that this approach could turn June 5 into a kind of celebratory event, almost a holiday. President Wilson invited the public to regard it as “a great day of patriotic devotion and obligation.” Addressing an assembly of Confederate veterans on registration day, he called it “a very happy day, because a day of reunion, a day of noble memories, a day of dedication, a day of renewal of the spirit which has made America great among the peoples of the world.” Still, Washington held its breath amid warnings that Americans would never allow themselves to be herded into the military in the European manner, that the streets were going to run red with blood.

  More than nine and a half million men registered that day, and it all went as smoothly as anyone could have hoped. Any inclination to complain or fail to cooperate had been discouraged both by a Committee on Public Information publicity barrage and by the approving newspaper coverage given to the arrest and swift punishment of those who, in the weeks before June 5, dared to speak out against the draft. (“Death for Treason Awaits Anti-Draft Plotters,” a Los Angeles Times headline crowed on May 25. Readers of The New York Times were assured that “the Selective Service Draft gives a long and sorely needed means of disciplining a certain rather insolent foreign element in the nation.”) More often than not—this happened dozens, then scores, ultimately hundreds of times—those considered to be troublemakers were charged with violating the newly passed Espionage Act. This enabled prosecutors to ask for ruinous fines and decades-long prison sentences.

  Answering the call

  Nine and a half million men registered for the draft on June 5, 1917.

  On July 20, after every registered man had been assigned a
number between 1 and 10,500, a lottery was held to determine which of the men not exempted on occupational, health, or other grounds would be inducted first. Flashbulbs flared as first a blindfolded Secretary Baker, then other officials including the president, drew numbers out of an enormous glass bowl containing 10,500 capsules. The drawing took more than fourteen hours, but again everything went smoothly. After deductions were made for the men who had volunteered to fill vacancies in the regular army and the National Guard, it was announced that 687,000 draftees would be ordered to report for duty on September 1.

  Many thousands of men, by some estimates a hundred thousand or more, did not register as ordered. Over the following five months, six thousand would be arrested and charged with evasion. Criticism of the draft continued all the same, and there were significant disturbances both in cities and in remote rural areas. In August, in probably the largest single incident, some 450 hapless and largely illiterate tenant farmers and sharecroppers were arrested and confined in a penitentiary for participating in an Oklahoma protest that came to be known as the Green Corn Rebellion. A number of them were sentenced to prison terms of as long as ten years, a signal to the nation that further such eruptions would carry a heavy price.

  Meanwhile the cantonments were being thrown together, and various offices of the War Department were struggling to figure out who was going to train the recruits and how they were going to be clothed and fed and provided with medical care. Just finding enough cooks to serve three million meals daily was a major headache.

  The magnitude of the challenge is apparent in the War Department’s calculation that the army, which on April 1 had fewer than six thousand officers on active duty, was going to need two hundred thousand within the next year or so. That number did not include another seventy thousand commissioned officers required in the medical service and other specialized functions. The officer corps was going to have to be more than twice as big as the whole army had been on the day Wilson called for war. Sixteen officer training camps were set up in addition to the thirty-two cantonments. They were modeled on the so-called Plattsburg camps, which General Leonard Wood had begun as a privately organized and financed summer program to make middle- and upper-class volunteers ready to take up commissions when the need arose; these camps had begun to receive federal financing during the preparedness fervor of 1916. An initial intake of more than thirty thousand officer candidates was called to active duty in May. Most were recent college graduates and upperclassmen not willing to wait until graduation to get into the war.

  The immense size of the training programs would have unwelcome consequences for many of the men who had been on active duty with the regular army when the United States went to war. The scarcity of commissioned and noncommissioned officers with sufficient knowledge and experience to train recruits meant that more than half of the regulars would still be at home when the war ended. This was intensely frustrating for career officers like Dwight D. Eisenhower, who spent the year and a half after America’s declaration of war in Kansas, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. He finally got orders for France but was still waiting for embarkation when the fighting ended and his departure was canceled.

  “The cost…could not be considered”

  Throwing together the training camps employed 200,000 men and consumed thirty tons of building materials a day.

  Two great questions remained to be settled that summer, two questions that had become urgent as soon as war was declared. Coming on the heels of the battles over conscription and the Espionage Act (more about that shortly), they would create lasting bitterness and deepen the distrust that now separated the White House from much of Congress.

  The first had to do with food. Consecutive bad wheat harvests in 1916 and 1917, ceaseless demand from overseas, and the shenanigans of speculators were causing shortages, wild price inflation, and smoldering public anger. The situation became critical as demand from the Allies rose to three hundred million bushels annually and an increasing number of transport ships fell victim to the U-boats. The president’s first response was to create, by executive order, a food administration to improve supply and distribution. As its head he appointed Herbert Clark Hoover, a Quaker engineer and self-made millionaire whose management of a massive Belgian relief program had made him an international symbol of selfless and efficient public service.

  The constitutionality of establishing a large and powerful agency by presidential fiat was dubious. This brought Hoover’s authority, and the legitimacy of the food administration, into question. It obliged Wilson to send to Congress a bill that would put the new operation on a solidly lawful footing and extend its powers even to the setting of prices. The article having to do with prices provoked storms of opposition. The middlemen in the long chain of transactions by which agricultural produce moved from farmers’ fields to kitchen tables were reaping unprecedented profits, and many thought it outrageous that the government should tell them how much of a cut they could take. Republicans and Democrats alike were wary of extensions of presidential power, and many wanted no government intrusion into the marketplace. Meanwhile farmers and speculators were hoarding not only wheat but other crops as well, knowing that scarcity would make continued price increases all but certain.

  Appeals to patriotism and fair play had no effect. Not for the first or last time in Great War America, citizens facing a choice between the common good and fast fat profits showed a decided preference for the latter. As the young but already distinguished journalist Walter Lippmann observed, “There are political and commercial groups who see in this whole thing nothing but opportunity to secure concessions, manipulate tariffs and extend the bureaucracies.” The result, for Congress and the White House, was another bitter and protracted legislative battle. The public, looking on, grew ever more indignant.

  Herbert Hoover, relief administrator

  Having fought to prevent starvation, he warned that the Paris peace treaty could only end in new trouble.

  The House of Representatives did not approve the administration’s bill until June 23. It empowered Hoover’s agency to set some prices and regulate distribution, but the prohibitionists succeeded in inserting a clause forbidding the use of crops for alcohol production. Senate approval appeared improbable. Most of the Senate’s old guard Republicans and no few Democrats objected as a matter of principle to what they saw as a socialistic measure. Other Democrats were simply fed up with the Wilson administration’s presumption in neglecting to consult Congress except when it had no choice. Even senators long friendly to Wilson were losing patience with his remoteness and apparent expectation that Congress should do his bidding without question. One such senator, the progressive Democrat Henry Hollis of New Hampshire, sent a note warning the president that “it is too late to put the [food] bill through by an appeal to the friendliness of the senators.” Wilson was running perilously short of friends.

  Organizations representing the cotton growers of the South and the wheat farmers of the western plains were immovable in their opposition to controls. The senators from their states, especially the Bourbon Democrats, were potent voting blocs and chaired a disproportionate number of important committees. They had been the first to oppose the food bill, and other interests soon decided that they could only lose out by failing to do the same. The president reverted to a tactic that had worked for him in the past, appealing over the heads of the legislators to an exasperated public. Though this made a number of senators unhappier than ever, Wilson had much of the press on his side. He was able to generate sufficient pressure that a bill he was willing to sign finally made it to his desk on August 10.

  This, too, was a limited victory, one preceded by several subsidiary fights. With much difficulty and no small expenditure of political capital, the administration managed to kill a clause that would have taken food control out of Hoover’s hands and given it to an independent board. No less difficult was the defeat of a second attempt to create a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. In th
e end wheat prices were capped, but restraints on cotton proved unachievable. Cotton prices, driven by demand, hoarders, and speculators, continued a rise that would eventually quadruple the prewar level. The Republican establishment, western farmers, Democrats from outside the South—these groups and others emerged from the fray feeling cheated. Many were inclined to blame Woodrow Wilson.

  Hanging over everything was the issue of money, still unresolved. The question, as always, was not whether sufficient funds would be found to satisfy the demands of the War Department and the Allies. Everyone accepted that they would be, so that few saw much reason to worry about budgets. But how were the needed billions to be raised? The president’s preference for taxation, first expressed when he called upon Congress to declare war, was having little effect; there was too much opposition. While bills authorizing the sale of bonds reached his desk in lightning time—they troubled no special interests, as few business barons objected to government borrowing if the alternative was reduced profits—his tax bill remained stuck in Congress, a bone of endless contention. Congress was similarly sluggish in handling appropriations bills, further increasing the government’s dependence on bonds.

  As originally sent to Capitol Hill, the administration’s revenue bill entailed an increase in taxes on the highest incomes, with particular emphasis on profits being made out of the war. This was popular in the South and West, the regions where enthusiasm for the war was faintest and resentment of the eastern business establishment strongest. The industrialists and bankers of the North, to no one’s surprise, were loud in their expressions of horror. The arguments used by the likes of J. P. Morgan, Jr., remain both widely held and controversial today: high taxes punish enterprise and initiative and retard productive investment. Low taxes ultimately benefit every level of society. Tax increases might demoralize those patriots without whose humming factories nothing would be possible.