war loss CHAPTER XLVI THE NEW AGE THE United States entered the war late, and our borders were remote from the struggle. We made relatively small America's sacrifice. Still eighty thousand American boys lie in French soil, and as many more were irreparably maimed. As to money, aside from huge sums raised by war taxes, our debt is twenty-five billions, without counting the ten billions that our government borrowed from our people to lend to England, France, and Italy. On these loans the Allied countries will perhaps pay the interest (though up to the close of 1920 no payment has been made) and sometime possibly they will repay the principal; but on only the remaining twenty-five billions the interest will each year exceed the total yearly expenditure of the government before the war. This debt is ten times that with which we came out of the Civil War, and it equals all the receipts of the Treasury from George Washington to Woodrow Wilson. Without paying a cent of the principal we shall have to tax ourselves for our national government at least twice as much as ever before. But we must also pay the principal. If we do so in one generation (as probably we shall), that will mean one billion more of taxes a year. As the principal is paid, the interest will lessen; but, taking into account the increased cost of living for the government, it is safe to say that for the next twenty-five years we must raise at least three billion dollars a year, or three fourths as much as in the war years themselves.1 1 In Europe the burden is terrifying. The huge totals of indebtedness in France and Germany have little meaning to us. England has suffered less than the continent, but England's debt is enormous. Merely to keep up the interest, along with ORGANIZED EFFORT 749 (For 1920 the expenditure has been nearly twice that immense sum.) Still there is another side. No war was ever so hideously destructive, but neither did any other ever give birth to so many healing and constructive forces. It is worth Healing while to survey these with view to their utilization forces in peace. To our surprise and to that of the world, America proved that a great democracy, utterly unready for war, could organize for war efficiently and swiftly. The task was not merely to select and train three million soldiers, but to mobilize one hundred million people for team work so as to utilize every resource, with harmony and intelligence, in producing and transporting supplies and supplying funds. The government provided inspiration and guidance through eminent experts in all lines historians, chemists, engineers, heads of great business enterprises- organized in a variety of war boards. The Committee on Public Information created by President Wilson was a new thing in history. If a democracy was to turn from all its ordinary ways of living The war in order to fight zealously, it must be posted boards thoroughly on the danger that threatened it and on the needs of the country. Within a few months, at small expense, this Committee published and circulated in every village in America more than a hundred different pamphlets, brief, readable, forceful, written by leading American scholars and distributed literally by the million. Along with posters and placards, designed by America's foremost illustrators and distributed also by this Committee, these publications did a marvelous work in spreading information and arousing will power-demonstrating that in war itself the pen is mightier than the sword. The same Committee originated also the admirable organization of Four-Minute Men (some 5000 volunteer speakers to explain the causes and needs of the war in their respective communities to audiences gathered at the movies and her old annual expenditure, she must raise five billions of dollars a year, which means per family a burden five times that of the average American family. other entertainments); and it made the plan effective by sending to all the local centers at frequent intervals information and suggestions for speeches. This was one of many boards of which only a few may be mentioned here. A Shipping Board was soon building ships on a scale and with rapidity beyond all precedent not without some blunders and much extravagance,' but fast enough to beat the submarine. The War Labor Board maintained the necessary harmony between capital and labor in war industries, and also did much to advance permanently the condition of the workers by encouraging "shop committees" to share in the management of industry. (Ex-President Taft served as one of the joint chairmen of this body, and his judicial temper and legal skill made his services invaluable. He won, too, lasting gratitude from labor by his sympathetic understanding of its needs.) The Food Commission, headed by Herbert Hoover, induced the American people cheerfully to limit consumption and to "save the waste.' In 1917 a poor crop had given us, by the usual computation, only 20 million bushels of wheat for export; but by doing without and by using substitutes, we did export 141 million bushels or about as much for each man, woman, and child, in England, France, and Italy, as we kept for each one at home. In like manner, a National Economy Board induced manufacturers of clothing to put forth fewer and simpler styles, saving Saving for the public at least a fifth of the usual materials. The mines would have proved wholly unable to meet the war demand for coal except for the regulation of its use through a Fuel Administrator. People learned to heat offices and homes only to 65° instead of to 72°; and in 1918 for many weeks, at government request, churches were closed, and stores and other industries shut down on certain days of the week. A little later, to save the petrol needed for autotrucks and airplanes in France, "gasless" Sunday took its good 1 Disclosures, incomplete at this writing, indicate that this Board, through incompetent or corrupt subordinates, has been sadly victimized by profiteers in the purchase of supplies. ORGANIZED EFFORT 751 place alongside the earlier "wheatless," "meatless," and "heatless" days of each week. Along with saving went work to increase production. Farmers extended their acreage for needed crops, securing the necessary advances for seed and machinery from local or State agencies; and the lack of farm labor was supplied in part by volunteer schoolboys and, especially on fruit farms, by college girls. A huge food supply, too, was produced in cities on "war gardens," from grounds formerly devoted to beauty or pleasure. Other volunteer activities supplemented the work of the National Boards - the unpaid Examining Boards of busy physicians to secure physical fitness for the recruits; the volunteer village schoolteachers working nights and Sundays to classify results from the draft questionnaires; the Red Cross organizations reaching down to every rural schoolhouse. In all the activities, women had a leading part; and indeed behind each man who took up a rifle stood a woman to take up the task he had laid down. In England, as her men were drained off, five million women did men's work; and even in America women ran motor buses, street cars, and elevators, and were largely employed in munition factories. The United States formed no alliance with England or France or Italy, but it recognized that they and we were "associated" as co-workers and that we must give Taxes and them all possible aid. The part of the American loans soldier has been treated. Money, too, we loaned freely most of it, to be sure, used at once by the Allies in buying supplies in America. The direct taxes raised during the war (some four billions a year) came at least half from a graduated income tax bearing heavily on large incomes, inheritance taxes of like character, "excess profits" taxes, and "luxury" taxes. The remaining money for all this war expenditure, our government borrowed from our own people, mainly in a series of "Liberty bond" issues. The bonds were sold in small denominations, down to fifty dollars, and were taken very largely by people of small means at a time, too, when much more profitable investments were open. Blots on the record This glorious record was not written so hurriedly without some grievous blots. In the heat of war passion, gross injustices were committed now and then by honest patriots, and some foolish offenders were punished too severely. Mob violence was permitted, even encouraged, by some local authorities. The methods by which poor men in many places were coerced into taking more bonds than they could afford did not well suit the name Liberty for those bonds. Here and there designing politicians or selfish business interests sought to discredit radical reform movements by accusing the leaders falsely of "pro-Germanism" a desecration of patriotism to cover sinister ambitions that was more hurtful to our war efficiency than all the pro-German plots in America. Basest of all, and most dangerous to American success, were the financial scandals. To prevent the European The profiteers demand for our products from raising prices ruinously, and to check speculation in foodstuffs, the Food Commission took some important steps in fixing prices and regulating profits. But the process did not go far enough. The price of wheat and of wheat flour was fixed; but speculators traded upon the patriotic willingness of the people to use less needed substitutes (as the government requested), like rye flour and oat meal, by raising exorbitantly the prices of these flours. During a great coal strike, in 1919, Mr. McAdoo, ex-Secretary of the Treasury, startled the country by announcing that the coal mine owners, according to their own income tax reports to the government, had made immense profits the preceding year, many of them over 100 per cent on their entire capital stock (which included vast amounts of "water") and some of them 2000 per cent at a time too when their workmen at the request of a government board were toiling patriotically for a lower "real wage" than before the war. And Mr. Basil M. Manly, one of the joint chairmen of the War Labor Board, |