A Patriot's History of the Modern World (22 page)

Of most immediate concern, even before the U.S. declaration of war, was shipping, since it was subject to constant U-boat attacks. High risk for transport demanded high rates, in turn prompting Wilson's treasury secretary William Gibbs McAdoo to accuse shippers of an “orgy of speculation” and of charging “absurdly high” rates.
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In a sharp break from the successful policies of the past, Wilson asked Congress to create the Emergency Fleet Corporation in 1917, giving the U.S. government absolute control over all merchant shipping related to the war. He wisely put steel man Charles Schwab in charge, and Schwab replaced the “cost-plus” system at
shipyards with a “fixed price” system (always preferable when the design is known and risks few), but also allowed for bonuses to be paid to companies that exceeded their quotas or beat their timelines. When necessary, Schwab paid bonuses out of his own pocket; he gave pep talks to shipyard workers; and he buttonholed Rear Admiral Frank Fletcher, convincing him to award medals and flags to overachieving plants.
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Carnegie called it a “record of accomplishment that has never been equaled,” but the Emergency Fleet Corporation was an exception.

Schwab, like many of the “Dollar-a-Year” men (so called because the law prohibited the government from accepting free services, thus they were paid a dollar a year), represented the fusion of business and government. As the ranks of businessmen running programs inside the bureaucracy swelled, their opinion about the ills of government softened. Not surprisingly, after World War I, many spoke less harshly about Uncle Sam's interference and more favorably about regulation if there was money to be made in government contracts. At the same time, government agencies observed firsthand how executives planned their operations, leading to the introduction of business models and planning throughout Washington, most notably in the establishment of the Bureau of the Budget (later, the Office of Management and Budget). Created under the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the bureau was charged with monitoring government expenditures and planning for new revenues.

But in 1917, the newfound affinity of business for government, and vice versa, failed to introduce massive new efficiencies into the procurement of weapons. After a sputtering start, when some thirty-five committees handled forty basic industries—and the committees were begetting more committees—the Wilson administration sought to streamline procurement through the War Industries Board (WIB) created in July 1917.
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The WIB continued to flounder until all power was handed to Bernard Baruch as chairman in March 1918. Branded as an “indefatigable worker of industrial miracles,” Baruch had lobbied for military preparedness for two years as a partner in the A. A. Houseman & Company brokerage firm.
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In 1916, he had left Wall Street to serve on the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense. His main challenge upon assuming his new position as chairman of the WIB was determining what needed to be produced first. As Baruch explained it, “Should locomotives go to [General] Pershing to carry his army to the front or…to Chile to haul nitrates needed to make ammunition…? Should precedents be given to destroyers needed to fight
the U-boats or to merchant ships…being decimated by the German subs?”
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Endowed with powers not granted before to a government agency, the WIB under Baruch had the authority to seize and operate plants and to deal with labor management disputes. Baruch chose subtle methods when possible. He cajoled, bribed, and persuaded, playing on business's traditional respect for the federal government, and it worked to a degree: production increased 20 percent, although nowhere close to the levels American production would attain in the next war.

Ultimately, Baruch had more success getting business to work with the bureaucracy than he did getting the bureaucracy to work with the military. Subject to McAdoo and Baruch, American innovators proved far less productive than they had in the Civil War, when they were generally left to their own devices. Aside from a few inventions—the Browning automatic weapon, the Lewis machine gun, or the Holt caterpillar, which became the basis for the British-designed tank—the U.S. military found itself outclassed by both Allied and enemy gear. (Ironically, J. Walter Christie, unable to sell his designs to the U.S. Army, sold them to the Russians, where one became the basis for the famed T-34 tank.) By the end of the war, the United States was still relying substantially on French-made 75 mm guns, although this was partly by design. Both the British and French feared the United States might not be able to gear up in time for war, leading the French especially to promise to make available all necessary hardware (except rifles and ammunition) if the Americans just transported their soldiers “over there.” A more important factor, however, was the ulterior motive on the part of both the French and British to use American soldiers as mere replacements in their own divisions, so all the Yankee troops needed were their rifles and ammunition.

In fact, American factories had been filling orders for the Allies for some time, especially for such items as artillery shells, but often on European specifications. Consequently, instead of the 1903 Springfield—the official service rifle, which could not be produced fast enough—the U.S. Army adopted the British Enfield, which already was being produced by the American companies Remington and Winchester. Although a bolt-action rifle, the Enfield was easy to use, reliable, and had a slick mechanism allowing for a high rate of fire. Moreover, it fit perfectly with the American tradition of sharpshooters. As one military historian noted, while doughboys (as the Americans were called) never attained British-level fire discipline, “at least they were well armed.”
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That is, they were “well armed” when they
set foot on French soil. Until that time, many of the men had never trained with the Enfield; virtually none had ever fired a machine gun or thrown a grenade, and were put off when the British tried to teach them the “cricket” style of hurling grenades. Doughboys rebelled at what they considered “sissy” styles, and threw grenades like baseballs.

While Baruch tried to streamline the production of war goods, McAdoo centralized control over finances. The son of a Georgia attorney, McAdoo moved with his family to Knoxville at fourteen, when his father became a professor at the University of Tennessee. Practicing law in Tennessee, he nearly went bankrupt investing in the Knoxville streetcar system before moving to New York City. Forming a new law firm with Francis Pemberton—the son of Confederate general John C. Pemberton and cousin of the inventor of Coca-Cola, John S. Pemberton—McAdoo returned to railway projects, seeking to build a tunnel under the Hudson River and running the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company. An active Democrat, he had caught Wilson's eye in the 1912 campaign before marrying Eleanor Wilson, the president's daughter. Wilson had already tapped him to head the Treasury Department, and it was McAdoo's order to close down the New York Stock Exchange when the Europeans started to withdraw gold from the United States in 1914 that prevented them from draining American gold supplies. A “dry” when it came to alcohol, a pragmatist when it came to stacking the Treasury with talented businessmen, McAdoo is remembered for his quip, “It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument.” As treasury secretary during the war, McAdoo knew the conflict would be phenomenally expensive—ten times the cost of the Civil War in real dollars, or about $112 billion, in addition to $10 billion in loans to the Entente. Both the machinery of the income tax and the Federal Reserve System permitted the government to raise revenues at unprecedented levels. New war bond campaigns, led by movie stars (including Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin), brought in billions. To administer the finances, McAdoo oversaw creation of the War Finance Corporation in 1918, whose chief function was to provide financial support to war-critical industries. Since railroads were also within his expertise, McAdoo was charged by Wilson to take control of the railroads in December 1917, running them through yet another board, the U.S. Railroad Commission, called by one liberal historian the “most drastic mobilization of the war.”
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Socialist Criticisms, Progressive Responses

While the Wilson administration's departure from the tradition of relying on the private sector to supply weapons was noteworthy, it paled next to the domestic centralization the Progressives instituted, beginning with the Espionage Act of June 1917. Under this act, use of the mail to oppose the war was punishable by large fines and/or imprisonment. Under the heavy hand of Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson, the Post Office targeted the Socialist Party, which had passed a resolution for “vigorous resistance” to the war, and which in the summer saw mailing privileges withdrawn for a dozen Socialist newspapers. All foreign-language editorials referring to the U.S. government, any of the belligerents, or the conduct of the war itself had to be translated into English and submitted in advance to the Post Office.

Prominent Socialists, such as Upton Sinclair, quickly broke with the national convention to declare their support for the war. George Creel's Committee on Public Information, described by author Jonah Goldberg as “the West's first modern ministry for propaganda,” enlisted the support of such former civil libertarians as Clarence Darrow, who said, “When I hear a man advising the American people to state the terms of peace…I know he is working for Germany.”
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Creel's CPI and the Post Office pressured any group or individual who resisted the censorship of the Sedition Act (banning the “uttering, printing, writing, or publishing of any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government or the military”). The most notable case involved Max Eastman's radical journal
The
Masses
, which was charged with attempting to hamper recruitment by urging men to resist the draft and by opposing the war. Although six editors won hung juries in a New York trial, it hardly constituted a blow for freedom of speech. When three espionage cases came before the United States Supreme Court in 1919, the convictions in each were upheld, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., declaring that “when a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured.”
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During the war, dozens of journals, newspapers, and magazines were censored or banned from the mails for perceived antiwar messages, stories, or even cartoons. Some of the cases were egregious violations of civil rights, such as the state official in Wisconsin who was sentenced to more than two years in jail for criticizing the Red Cross, and the movie producer who received
a ten-year jail sentence for making a film about British troops committing atrocities in the American Revolution.
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After new sedition amendments were added in May 1918, federal prosecutors were given wide latitude to round up offenders, and prosecutions tended to be highest in the western states, where the socialist International Workers of the World (IWW, or “Wobblies”) were active. Lest anyone think Wilson was prepared to return to “normalcy” and suffer criticism, in December 1919 he sought a peacetime version of the Sedition Act to replace the wartime law, but Congress ignored it. After the war, of course, many Progressives would stage a post-hoc criticism of the “excesses,” claiming, as Walter Lippmann did, that society had gotten “too big, too complex” for men to understand, hence the rabid racism, Germanophobia, and xenophobia. What was Lippmann's solution? Another agency, an intelligence bureau under the direction of a “special class” of Progressive intellectuals.

While the Progressives tinkered with social engineering and intellectuals attempted to decide which of the two values, pacifism or Progressivism, was more important, there was still a war to be won. American troops arrived in France in large numbers in 1917, where they constituted the first completely unified American draftee army ever put into the field (as Union and Confederate conscripts had fought against each other). As evidenced in previous wars, the volunteer nature of most U.S. military forces led friend and foe alike to underestimate them as fighters. Certainly there was nothing imposing about the draftees and volunteers who showed up in 1917. The 79th Division of the U.S. Army, for example, “included in its roster a murderer, several moonshiners, and bootleggers, a newspaper reporter, a professional baseball player, several lumber-jacks, a couple of ‘ham' actors, a couple of high school professors and at least one lunatic.”
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Famous gangsters, such as “Wild Bill” Lovett and “Monk” Eastman, were decorated heroes—Lovett won the Distinguished Service Cross, and Eastman was so chewed up by knife and bullet wounds that he nearly flunked the physical. They arrived with similar tales: “I can hardly remember a single instance of serious discussion of…war issues. We men, most of us young, were simply fascinated by the prospect of adventure and heroism,” said one. Another noted, “War had been declared and I thought my country needed me,” and a recent Italian immigrant was even more succinct: “Ma name Tony Monaco. In dees country seex months. Gimme da gun.”
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A third-generation Frenchman, Jean Pierre Godet, enlisted in November 1917, a day his father marked with a “mixed sense of joy and pain.” “I feel,” the elder Godet wrote,
“a strange contradiction between my love for [my son] and my love for America.”
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The Yanks, and Black Jack, Arrive

By October 1917, British and French commanders, their armies already bled white, sought to have Americans fight alongside and within their own units before assuming an independent command. Privately, the British didn't trust the American soldiers to perform, while the French simply needed bodies to plug into the ever-growing number of holes in their ranks. British representatives even argued for doughboys to “be arranged immediately into provisional battalions, and shipped to Europe with little more than the uniforms on their backs,” whereupon they would be trained and used as replacements for British divisions.
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Of course, this meant being trained by British trainers in all things British, but after all, in the British view England had paid to bring American bodies over in British ships, had fed and clothed them, and now deserved to use them in battle.