America at War: Governing the Home Front

AMERICA AT WAR: GOVERNING THE HOME FRONT

An Expanded Military

Prior to World War I the United States defense budget was comparatively small. From 1900 to 1914 the country spent less than 1 percent of its gross national product (GNP) on defense. But in May 1916, with tensions between Mexico and the United States high, and war raging in Europe, Congress had increased U.S. military strength by passing the National Defense Act, authorizing an army of 223,000 and a National Guard of 450,000. This act was augmented on 18 May 1917 with the passage of the Selective Service Act, initiating the wartime draft. By 1918 the U.S. Army reached a peak strength of 3.7 million men (2.8 million of whom had been drafted), and by 1917 only Britain and Germany had more naval tonnage than the United States. U.S. war expenditures eventually totaled $17.1 billion, exceeded only by those of Britain and Germany. At home the executive branch of the federal government gained extraordinary wartime powers. Through a series of executive-agency war boards, the Wilson administration effectively controlled the nation's economy with a careful mixture of voluntarism and compulsion.

Financing the War

The American war effort was financed in large part by five multibillion-dollar federal bond issues. The bonds paid only modest rates of interest (the first, for example, was a thirty-year bond offering 3.5 percent interest—less than market rate). Given such low rates of return, many Americans might well have avoided buying these bonds had it not been for a government propaganda campaign to drum up support for the American war effort. Wilson's secretary of the treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, dubbed the bond issues "Liberty Loans," and, engaging in one of the biggest federal advertising campaigns in U.S. history, he was able to capitalize on what he called "the profound impulse called patriotism." In 1917-1918, with the help of some 75,000 "four-minute" men and women—who delivered short speeches in theaters, public parks, and other gathering places on patriotic themes such as the importance of purchasing "Liberty Loans"—all five of the government bond issues were oversubscribed.

The Council of National Defense

Organizing the nation for war placed many demands on the Wilson administration and Congress, which responded with a series of measures creating new government agencies, expanding federal power, and limiting dissent. One of the new agencies, established in August 1916, in advance of the declaration of war, was the Council of National Defense (CND). The CND was the parent organization for the bureaus and boards that mobilized industry for the war effort. The CND was directed by six members of President Wilson's cabinet: the secretaries of agriculture, commerce, interior, labor, navy, and war. These cabinet members were aided by an "advisory commission," which actually did much of the work, forming more than a hundred subcommittees in industries across the country and gathering information on production capacities, pricing practices, and transportation availability. The CND allocated federal contracts to manufacturers and coordinated production of goods and services. In summer 1917 the CND created the War Industries Board to continue the move from a free-trade peacetime economy to a planned wartime economy, and thereafter the CND occupied itself with postwar planning and citizen morale.

The War Industries Board

The effectiveness of the War Industries Board (WIB) was greatly enhanced by the president's appointment of Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch as WIB chairman in March 1918. The legal authority of the WIB to dictate policy to the nation's industries remained unclear, but Baruch's masterful mixing of patriotic and personal appeals with profit guarantees resulted in the voluntary cooperation of businesses in the war effort. To administer "commodity sections" of the economy, negotiate production-output agreements, and fix prices, the six-member WIB hired many "dollar-a-year men" (wealthy industrial experts who were willing to work for the government at that nominal salary because they could live well on their corporate profits). Though a creature of the wartime emergency, the board was an example of long-held progressive beliefs in the possibility of government regulation of economic activity guided by impartial "experts" fixed on serving the public interest.

The Overman Act

The Overman Act, passed on 20 May 1918, authorized President Wilson to centralize the governmental bureaucracy. Pressured by exigencies of war, the federal government closely monitored, regulated, and at points took control of the nation's industries, railroads, labor supply, and merchant marine.

The War Labor Board

The War Labor Board (WLB) was formed in April 1918 to oversee labor-management relations in an effort to maximize production and minimize labor disputes that could hamper the war effort. Its members were chosen by national organizations of labor and management. By guaranteeing profits to industrialists, the WLB boosted workers' wages. Permitting union organization during the war while discouraging strikes, the WLB served as a mediator between labor and capital, handling more than twelve hundred cases in its yearlong existence (April 1918-April 1919). While WLB decisions (like those of the WIB) were not legally binding, the WLB effectively used popular sentiment favoring wartime cooperation to place pressure on contesting parties. Unions hailed the WLB for allowing collective bargaining, for acknowledging workers' needs for living wages, and for trying to enforce union-recognition provisions in wartime government contracts, thus allowing unions to grow. In return Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), made a wartime "no strike" pledge on the part of unions affiliated with the AFL.

The Shipping Act of 1916

The Shipping Act of 1916, which became law on 7 September, allocated $50 million to the federally created U.S. Shipping Board to build or buy merchant ships to serve as "naval auxiliaries" in the advent of war. The Shipping Board was empowered to regulate all U.S. commercial shipping by setting rates and services. The Emergency Fleet Corporation of the U.S. Shipping Board expanded the fleet by ten million tons by war's end. Congress, however, indicated the temporary nature of these measures by mandating that all ships under the board's control be returned to private ownership within five years after the war.

The Federal Railroad Administration. In

December 1917, amid nationwide demands for improvements in rail deliveries, President Wilson announced the creation of the Railroad Administration. This administration orchestrated the wartime hauling of passengers, foodstuffs, raw materials, and manufactured goods along more than 250,000 miles of track. It coordinated the efforts of 532 companies with combined assets of more than $18 billion. Though many progressives wanted to see continued government operation of railroads in the peacetime economy, control of the rails returned to private companies with the passage of the Railroad Act of 1920.

The Espionage Act

Following Wilson's request for a declaration of war on 2 April 1917, Sen. Charles Culberson of Texas and Rep. Edwin Webb of North Carolina proposed the Espionage Act, which Congress passed on 5 June 1917. Persons found guilty of obstructing recruitment or military operations were liable for fines of up to $10,000 and prison terms of twenty years; those found guilty of sending seditious materials through the mail could be fined up to $5,000 and be sentenced to five years in prison. On 16 May 1918 the Espionage Act was strengthened by a series of amendments that came to be known as the Sedition Act. These amendments prohibited "any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy." Socialist leader and perennial presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs and anarchist Emma Goldman were among those eventually jailed under the Espionage Act. In all 6,000 arrests were made, and 1,055 convictions were attained under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson used the law to ban Socialist Party literature from the mails. In Abrams v. United States (1919) the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Espionage Act, which expired in 1921.

The Committee on Public Information

The Committee on Public Information (CPI) was established by President Wilson on 14 April 1917. Headed by the journalist George Creel, the committee also included the secretary of state, the secretary of war, and the secretary of the navy. Often called the Creel Committee, the CPI spent more than $2 million in two years on designing and distributing pro-war pamphlets, movies, and posters. It also sponsored the "four-minute" men. As part of its pro-Allied stance, the CPI fanned the flames of anti-German sentiment. One CPI flyer declared: "German agents are everywhere.…Do not discuss in public, or with strangers, any news of troop and transport movements, or bits of gossip as to our military preparations." Such caution seemed warranted when, on 24 July 1915, the U.S. Secret Service confiscated documents showing that U.S. resident Dr. Heinrich Albert was paid $28 million dollars by Germany to sabotage American munitions plants and depots. Anti-Germanism was so commonplace that people referred to the German measles as "liberty measles" and to sauerkraut as "liberty cabbage."

Sources:

Robert D. Cuff, The War Industries Board (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973);

Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modem Order, second edition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).