Benedict Crowell

“ There was, of course, danger that the wholesale outpouring of ex-soldiers upon an industrial field already complaining of a labor surplus would precipitate a business crisis; yet it seemed certain that a wise guidance of the internal affairs of the nation could avert such a calamity. The world was short of almost everything which man consumes, and it seemed evident that it would take several years of brisk production in every field to build up the reserves wasted by war and overtake industrially the demands of the consuming public. ”

“ No doubt there were hundreds of thousands of Americans who, immediately after the armistice, reading about the excess stores which were overflowing the Government’s enormous warehouses, expected to benefit personally and at once by the situation. It was the opportunity of a lifetime to pick up a new stock of kitchen utensils for a song, or a lawn mower, or a new Dodge car at a knock-down price, or, at least, new supplies of underclothing and other garments, or of food at figures which would make the corner grocer squirm. ”

“ They transformed their manufacturing plants with never a thought for the business they would one day have to resume. They undertook to produce, in quantities never before even projected, intricate materials of warfare the very names of which were unfamiliar to them. Despite the mounting costs of materials and labor, they managed to hammer down the prices of rifles, machine guns, explosives, shrapnel, and other important commodities, delivering to the Government not only a superior product, but a product costing the Government less than other nations at war paid for the same things. ”

“ On Armistice Day, however, the industry was not more than six months away from the planned limit of its fecundity.
For the administration of the industrial enterprise the task ahead was first to bring that momentum to a halt and then to break up the machine. The easiest way was to throw a switch ahead of it—in other words, to issue a blanket stop-order on all military manufacturing projects. But to have done that would have been to court consequences as disastrous as those of war itself. Business and industry would have fallen into chaos and the country would have been filled with jobless men. ”

“ This was to be Armageddon, the last of wars, the war to make safe the unwarlike peoples of the world; and no cynical dictum that man is still too near his neolithic savagery to rely on anything other than might in his international contentions, no Chauvinistic picture of new migrations of Asiatic hordes, can change the fundamental fact that America went to war in the belief that its chiefest object was to end war forever. ”

“ It was the task of the Construction Division to dispose of these cities to such members of the public as cared to buy.
A city, however, is something more than an accumulation of buildings and other tangible facilities. Quite as much as upon foundations of rock, a city rests upon logic—the logic of its location. Naturally the Government built its camps upon cheap land, therefore upon land not in demand by the population, therefore upon land not so located as to make it a logical place for a city. ”

“ We gained, moreover, a state of preparedness for war that would have been impossible of attainment under any other circumstances. In the reserves of supplies we have equipment ready to arm 1,000,000 men as rapidly as they can take the field. In the reserves of machinery we have a potential war industry capable of maintaining such an army until industry generally can take up the manufacture of munitions. Not again during the existence of the present generation should we, if the emergency came, have to experience the uncertainties and delays of 1917 in the production of supplies. ”

“ Altogether, therefore, the Government has either paid out or obligated itself to pay out about one billion dollars for the benefit of men who served in the American forces during the World War.
So much for the post-armistice care of the wounded and otherwise disabled. The other principal phase of welfare work for the Army after the armistice had to do with the able-bodied soldiers; and, concretely, it meant getting jobs for them. The War Department did not regard a soldier as completely demobilized until he was once more placed in an occupation in civilian life. ”

“ It was soon evident to the conferees, however, that the cost-plus contract had come to stay in the war business, regardless of its obvious dangers and disadvantages. If an evil, it was a necessary one. True, the Government could still go into fixed-price contracts for the procurement of many important war supplies. These were such supplies as food, clothing, and tools—commodities essentially like those produced and consumed in time of peace. The producers of these commodities were not perplexed by costs; their facilities and processes were ready to begin production ”

“ The experience demonstrated that our national resources include not only valor in arms in boundless quantity, but also the ability to organize effectively a nation as great as ours for a purpose as complicated as modern war has come to be. ”

“ The building industry of the United States—and it is one of the largest and strongest of our industries—had never before been called upon to provide such expansion in an equal time. It follows that the entire building industry must have been engaged in the construction enterprise, that every available man who could drive a nail or lay a brick must have been employed upon government work. ”

“ The Government had become the sole dealer in wool; it was closely regulating the prices of, and determining priorities in the use of, such commodities as copper and steel; through the United States Fuel Administration it was in full control of the production, distribution, and use of fuels; and its position was equally monopolistic toward all other important basic materials. Of the labor, the machinery, and the processes which normally manufactured these materials into the commodities of American commerce, the Government had become almost the only employer ”

“ In 1914 much was made of the thoroughness of German military preparation, which had been such that, when the fatal hour struck and the conscripts by hundreds of thousands left their homes and poured into the German barracks, for every man there was waiting ready a uniform, shoes, a helmet, underclothing, and everything needed to prepare him immediately for service in the field. What Germany had been able to accomplish by premeditated, long, and expensive effort, the United States now derives as a by-product of the war Germany forced it to fight. ”

“ The United States carried further than any other nation in the war the substitution of mechanical power for the power of draft animals in the movement of field artillery. Nothing in our army equipment in France did the French, themselves the premier artillerists of the world, admire more than our motorization of artillery. ”

“ Only through the development of a great independent aircraft industry in this country can the Government be assured of the existence of facilities upon which it can rely to give this nation great power in the air. As conditions now are, the Government itself must be the chief customer of the airplane industry, and on the government orders the industry must live until commercial flying begins to develop on a scale comparable at least to the early development of railway transportation in the United States. ”

“ In the interim between the armistice and that date, the holders of informal and irregular contracts were subjected to an unavoidable injustice, the nature of which will be plain when we have somewhat examined the War Department’s method of terminating its war industry.
The modern contract is the foundation stone of industry and commerce. If the integrity of that foundation be impaired, we come into a condition of anarchy of which Anglo-Saxon civilization knows nothing. ”

“ Packed away compactly were the tools and machinery of an embryonic war industry ready to be expanded at will in the event of another war. Materials, largely of special war value and therefore normally to be regarded as scrap and junk, had been sold to the tune of billions, the exercise of ingenuity in the sales department producing a recovery that was remarkably large, averaging 64 per cent of the war cost.
Such was our war demobilization. No other single business enterprise in all human history compared with it in magnitude ”

“ In 1919 we brought home the first American army that had ever fought in a great war and returned in anything but rags. By special act Congress gave permission to each discharged soldier to keep his uniform and certain other equipment when he returned to civilian life. Even though, for most of the men coming up into the embarkation ports in France, their final discharge was only a few weeks away, nevertheless the military organization there saw to it that every man was decently clad before he began the return voyage, and this often meant the issue of entirely new articles. ”

“ The British war subsidies went all through their war industry. For instance, in order to stimulate production, the British Government had paid subsidies to the makers of silica brick, used in building steel furnaces. The British asked us to stand a part of this subsidy, inasmuch as some of the shell supplied to us had been produced from furnaces built of subsidized brick. The Commission retorted by asking why Great Britain did not also ask us to share the subsidy on the bread the British steel workers had eaten while they were working on the American artillery and shell orders. ”

“ But where one man held out for the last penny of his rights, there could be found half a dozen others who put in no claims at all for money to which they were justly entitled. The great steel-producing industry, in particular, showed an aristocratic contempt of requiring its full due. Many steel producers pocketed their losses without a word: in fact, the Government settled a surprising number of ordnance contracts for the statutory one dollar apiece and thus saved itself millions for which it was legally liable. ”

“ When the war came, the United States was sadly lacking in the very knowledge which these studies will develop. During the war the development of raw materials and the determination of priorities were administered by the Council of National Defense and, later and more successfully, by the War Industries Board, which became perhaps the most powerful and important of all the emergency war organizations. The War Department is thus retaining a nucleus around which another such organization might be built in a future emergency. ”

“ A large part of their cost represented the evanescent element of labor, a value entirely destroyed when buildings are wrecked for the sake of salvaging their materials. The war plant, even incomplete, represented an immense investment, but one which would be almost altogether lost if the plant were to be knocked down for salvage. Therefore it was of advantage to the Government to carry on a surprisingly large amount of war construction after the armistice for the sake of getting the use-value from its investment by occupying these installations with the permanent Army. ”

“ The world situation had forced us to turn American industry into a vast munitions plant which, at the cessation of hostilities, was just beginning to get into production with some of the most essential materials of warfare. ”

“ There was nothing like it in the United States. A man could walk briskly for an hour in a single direction at Le Mans and see nothing but tents, barracks, drill fields, and troops lined up for preliminary or final inspections. The task of feeding this city full of guests was so great that the camp administration found it economical to build a narrow-gauge railroad system connecting the kitchens with the warehouses. Food moved up to the camp cookstoves by the trainload, and the same locomotives that brought the supplies hauled away the refuse. ”

“ In a lump-sum contract the profit of the contractor increased according as he was able to keep down his costs. If his costs ran too high, he faced actual loss. In the cost-plus contract of the simplest form—cost of production, plus a percentage of the cost as profit—it was just the other way. The higher a producer’s costs, the greater his profit ”

“ Believing that chemical warfare has come to stay as long as there shall be wars, the Chemical Warfare Service has sought since the armistice to develop peace-time uses for war gases in order that there may be a continuous production of them, with a simultaneous training of chemists on whom the Government can rely in time of war. ”

“ A few claimants are stubborn and insist upon the ultimate legal redress guaranteed them by the terms of their contracts. The administration in Washington has changed, and some few of the claims once settled—as it was believed, finally—are being reopened. And then, on the credit side of the war ledger there is the same indefiniteness. Surpluses of war supplies are indeterminate—expanding or contracting as policies change, as the military establishment finds need of materials once declared surplus, as war reserves deteriorate. ”

“ The care of military patients did not become a predominant medical activity in the United States until the late summer of 1918, when, simultaneously, the A. E. F. began sending home its first shiploads of wounded men and the influenza epidemic invaded the training camps. Meanwhile the care of war’s disabled had taken on a new meaning for the American military medical authorities. In former wars, as soon as a sick man or a wounded man had gained strength enough to travel, he was usually furloughed to his home, there to win his own way back to health if he could. ”

“ The great reserves of engineering supplies in France, as contrasted with permanent installations, were indeed an asset, but not so much of an asset as one would think. In the first place, to sell them to private buyers in the European markets would have been a work of several years, during which time the American Government would have had to maintain in France216 a force of perhaps 5,000 men. Moreover, all that time the engineering stores would have been constantly deteriorating, so that their average value would not have been nearly so great as their value at the time of the armistice. ”

“ There is perhaps no branch of modern mechanical development to which applied science pays more attention than it does to perfecting the means of communication. Progress is rapid, and therefore any large reserves of supplies set aside by the Signal Corps were likely to become obsolete and without value after a few years. Moreover, although the war industry of the Signal Corps scored its greatest production records with such common things as telephone and telegraph instruments and wire, all this equipment was of special design unknown in ordinary commercial use and therefore without value to it. ”

“ The effects piled up in the Hoboken pier contained many a pathetic reminder of the invincible curiosity and enterprise of the American boys in France and of their passion for souvenirs of the war. The dead men had collected from almost every part of Europe thousands of keepsakes of every description. In the baggage of one deceased soldier was found a German machine gun which he had acquired in some manner and had succeeded in identifying as his personal property. Occasionally those going over the effects found the contraband loaded shell and grenades. ”

“ The principle of selective military service has been established by the precedent set in the World War. As long as that experience is remembered there will be no danger that America would ever return, in any serious emergency, to the unscientific volunteer system that takes the brave and the enterprising and leaves behind the indolent and timorous. Above all, we must count as gain from the war the confirmation it gave us in our faith in our ability to continue our existence as a nation. ”

“ There are numerous reasons why an optical glass industry is not likely to survive in the United States, at least on any large scale. The total normal American consumption of optical glass amounts to less than $1,000,000 a year—not enough to support many glass-making establishments. Secondly, nearly all the Allies developed war glass industries of their own, and the result is that the world has a large surplus of optical glass, which, if of good quality, does not deteriorate in storage. ”

“ For purely the creature comforts—food, clothing, and shelter—the Army spent far more money than it did for its weapons and ammunition; but the activities of the army quartermasters embraced a much wider range of supplies than these. Theorize as you will about the evolution of the Army’s purchasing offices during the war until they were brought together into a single centralized purchasing agency, the fact remains that the ultimate purchasing agency was essentially the Quartermaster Service, magnified and expanded in power. ”