American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Mobilizing the Workshop

  The streets of Petrograd, February 23, 1917:

  Thousands of Russian workers riot over food shortages. Soldiers from the city garrison join the protest and fire on police. Within days Czar Nicholas abdicates, the Duma establishes a provisional government, and councils—soviets—of soldiers and workers spring up across the country. France and Britain extend formal recognition to the Duma’s representatives, but it is on the soviets that Lenin’s Bolsheviks pin their hopes. Lenin, meanwhile, leaves Switzerland in a special train provided by the Germans, and makes his way back to Petrograd.

  Allied commanders on the western front were uncertain how to regard the Russian February Revolution. A democratic government might revitalize the Russian army, bringing new pressure to bear on the Germans; on the other hand, with the monarchy gone Russia might collapse altogether or even, as Lenin vociferously advocated, withdraw from the war. Britain’s General Sir Douglas Haig and his French counterpart, Robert Nivelle, decided to wait on neither the Russians nor the newly entered Americans. Overriding the protests of Winston Churchill and the unvoiced fears of the new Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, Haig launched a full-scale assault on German positions near Passchendaele.

  After a ferocious artillery bombardment, British troops lumbered across the Belgian mud toward the enemy trenches—and were stopped almost immediately. For three months, Haig kept up the attack, eventually sacrificing 300,000 men to gain just 10,000 yards of shell-blasted swamp. Of the British dead, some 56,000 sank into the muck and could never be recovered for burial.

  The Nivelle offensive also ended in failure, and in its aftermath fifty divisions of the French army mutinied. Brought in as the new French commander, General Henri Pétain eventually resolved most of the soldiers’ grievances and quelled the mutiny. In the meantime, he vowed that no new offensives would be launched. “We will wait,” he promised, “for the tanks and the Americans.”

  The war hit the American capital like a tidal wave—literally, a tidal wave of people. Within weeks, an estimated 40,000 soldiers, office-seekers, businessmen, clerks, scientists, and foreign dignitaries descended on Washington. Some were transients, but many more stayed to participate in the confusing welter of war work. “Life seemed suddenly to acquire a vivid scarlet lining,” wrote one old-time resident. “The one invariable rule seemed to be that every individual was found doing something he or she had never dreamed of doing before.”

  Peacetime laws and the tiny federal bureaucracy could not cope with the demands of total war. General William Crozier of the Ordnance Department, charged with arming a force of 1 (eventually 3) million men, was prohibited from acquiring new offices or even hiring new clerks without specific authorization from Congress. In time, the regulations were changed, and Crozier’s command grew from less than a hundred men to 68,000 soldiers and 80,000 civilians, but it was among the “slowest mobilizations of the war.”

  Wilson’s response to the confusion was to try to sweep it aside with direct presidential intervention. At his instigation, Senator Lee Overman introduced a bill in Congress authorizing the President to “make such redistribution of functions among executive agencies ... and ... make such regulations and issue such orders as he may deem necessary.” Despite charges from Republicans that the measure “pointed the way toward absolutism,” Congress complied with his request.

  From the Overman bill and other congressional grants of power, Wilson created a series of wartime agencies to direct mobilization. The first need was for men to fill out the ranks of the proposed army in France. When only 32,000 men volunteered in the first weeks after the declaration of war, Wilson called for a draft and established the Selective Service Administration. The actual work of registering, ranking, and exempting potential recruits was delegated to local draft boards appointed by the state governors; thus the federal apparatus was kept relatively small.

  During the Civil War, the draft had sparked riots and desertions, and some political leaders feared that it would again. Senator James Reed of Missouri warned Secretary of War Newton Baker, who would draw the first number of the draft, “You will have the streets of our American cities running with blood on registration day.” But no riots or large-scale protests materialized. The draft boards registered 24 million young men, of whom just over 2 million were inducted into the army.

  Feeding and warming 2 million men was another unprecedented task for the government. Herbert Hoover of the Food Administration and Harry Garfield of the Fuel Administration sought to meet the army’s needs by both increasing production and limiting domestic consumption. Neither agency had any coercive powers and so had to rely on voluntary compliance with the quotas and rations that they established. Hoover launched a massive publicity campaign to promote “meatless” and “wheatless” days each week, limit sugar consumption, and encourage families to plant “victory gardens.” Domestic use of food and fuel did change marginally, but market forces worked the biggest transformations. With increased demand from both the U.S. government and the Allies, prices soared and production was boosted. For farmers and miners, patriotism went hand in hand with undreamed-of profits.

  Less visible was the work of the Shipping Board. German submarines were sinking Allied shipping at a phenomenal rate—900,000 tons in April of 1917 alone—and without ships no American men or even supplies would reach Europe. The board met the need by building, buying, and renting vessels, eventually assembling a merchant marine of over 3.5 million tons. To fight the U-boat menace, the Allies organized merchant ships into convoys protected by destroyers. American shipyards ceased work on battleships and instead concentrated on convoy escorts, several hundred of which were launched by the end of the war. The convoy system proved so effective in reducing ship losses and sinking German submarines that one military historian has described it as the turning point of the war.

  Riding herd over these and other wartime agencies was the War Industries Board headed by Bernard Baruch. Wilson charged the WIB with general oversight of production for both the war effort and the domestic market—an assignment both vague and demanding. Baruch was particularly adept at persuading businessmen voluntarily to join the board in reordering production and prices—thus, his biographer concludes, making the government party to a “conspiracy in restraint of trade for reasons of national security.” The war forced Wilson and Baruch to adopt policies reminiscent of the collectivist aspects of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism.

  Industrialists initially were highly suspicious of Baruch and his agency. No businessman wanted government control of his firm; one vowed to “go out of business before I’ll let them come into my shop and run it.” Instead, Baruch wielded indirect power. In essence, the WIB left companies free to make whatever products they wanted, but it fixed early delivery dates—on a graduated scale of priorities—for war-related goods. Since the government oversaw rail traffic, coal production, and myriad other facets of the economy, in theory it could cut off the fuel and raw materials of any factory that failed to meet its priority deadlines. In fact, however, Baruch seldom had to invoke that threat. In general, the workshops shouldered their war burdens with alacrity.

  With one dramatic exception: America’s entire mobilization effort depended on the railroads, but the giant firms controlling the transport lines proved unequal to the challenge. Massive bottlenecks developed as 1917 wore on. In eastern ports, loaded freight cars piled up because the ships they were supposed to be unloaded into could not sail, the ships could not sail because they could get no fuel, and the fuel could not get to the ships because of the jam of waiting cars. As the tie-ups spread and winter approached, half the country faced the prospect of being cut off from coal shipments.

  The problem stemmed partly from Washington’s priority system, which played havoc with orderly freight schedules. Perhaps the worst bottleneck developed around the steel mills of Pittsburgh, where 85 percent of all cargoes carried priority tags. In the end, Wilson was forced to break the logjam
by direct intervention. He appointed his Treasury Secretary and son-in-law, William G. McAdoo, to head the U.S. Railroad Administration, which in turn simply took over the lines. Gradually, government coordination of traffic and a new “permits” system designed to ensure the timely unloading of cargoes ended the crisis. McAdoo also was able to pool repair efforts on the tracks, add new rolling stock, and expand facilities at crucial freight terminals like Pittsburgh and Chicago.

  Perhaps the main beneficiaries of federal control were the railway workers. The government allowed freight rates to increase 28 percent and passenger fares 18 percent, but railroad wages rose even higher. By executive order, McAdoo instituted equal pay for woman employees and attacked some forms of discrimination against blacks. Railroad unions won government recognition, an eight-hour day, and centralized grievance procedures. The government’s wage commission, meanwhile, recommended a pay settlement based upon “a measure of justice, consideration for the needs of the men, whether organized or unorganized, whether replaceable or not replaceable.” Labor strife on the railways subsided for the first time in years.

  The intricacy of the wartime directed economy was staggering, and its accomplishments were breathtaking—especially when compared to the primitive organization of the Civil War or the brief headlong rush of 1898. Ammunition production alone required a national effort. From the cotton fields of Mississippi, cellulose for smokeless powder traveled up the Illinois Central to the great federal explosives plant in Nashville. Wood pulp crossed the Great Lakes by barge, was loaded into freight cars in Chicago, and then was carried along the Chesapeake & Ohio to another powder mill in Charleston, West Virginia: Toluol, crucial to making TNT, was extracted from the coke ovens of Pittsburgh and Birmingham and then shipped to California along the Union Pacific or the Southern Pacific. In Los Angeles, scientists “cracked” more toluol from crude oil and sent some of it to Wisconsin via the Chicago & North Western. Sulfur, for sulfuric acid, came from Texas and Louisiana along J. P. Morgan’s Southern line. Nitrates too were vital; they reached eastern ports from Chile via the Panama Canal.

  Once the explosives were made they had to be bagged or packed into shells. The smokeless powder again was loaded onto trains, traveling eastward this time over the Pennsylvania or Baltimore & Ohio lines to bagging plants in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The TNT also was shipped to New Jersey, site of the main artillery shell factories. There booster charges, fuses, and adjusters were added—more components, from more parts of the country. At last the ammunition was ready for use. Trainloads fanned out to army bases and navy installations, or to Atlantic ports for shipment to France.

  Over the course of their production the shells and explosives were handled by increasing numbers of female workers. The bagging of smokeless powder, for example, was done almost exclusively by women, in huge new government-run plants. The railroads saw a massive increase in the employment of women, rising from 31,000 in 1917 to 101,785 in the last month of the war. Women serviced engines, moved freight with electric lift trucks, and coupled cars, as well as working in railroad offices across the country.

  Overall female employment, however, did not rise dramatically during the World War. The number of woman workers increased only 6.3 percent, not much higher than the increases of prewar years. The dramatic changes that did occur were in the nature of women’s work: females were able to secure more interesting and higher-paying jobs, some in fields once exclusively the domain of men. In previous years, women had begun moving from domestic service and piecework to jobs in offices, schools, restaurants, factories, and telephone exchanges; the war merely accelerated this trend. Some of women’s more spectacular gains—such as the Railroad Administration’s Women’s Service Section, which successfully fought sexual harassment and discrimination—disappeared after the war. The hostility of organized labor to woman workers remained largely unchanged. The shift in female employment would continue into peacetime, however.

  The wartime demands that opened new job opportunities for women also helped change the lives of many Southern blacks. Over the war years more than 400,000 black men and women traveled north in search of work, most of them settling in cities along the trunk rail lines. For many, their first jobs were provided by the railroads themselves; the Pennsylvania and Erie lines, among others, actively recruited Southern blacks for such menial tasks as road work and car-cleaning. The majority of blacks, however, were able to take advantage of the war boom in employment once the railroads had taken them north. There were job openings in a variety of places and fields: the steel mills of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts war plants, the wire factories and brick yards of New Jersey.

  One Connecticut city, Hartford, received 3,000 black immigrants in 1917 alone. The new climate and culture, coupled with an acute housing shortage, took its toll. “Unused to city life,” one magazine wrote of the new arrivals, “crowded into dark rooms, their clothing and utensils unsuitable, the stoves they have brought being too small to heat even the tiny rooms they have procured … shivering with the cold from which they do not know how to protect themselves, it is small wonder that illness has overtaken large numbers.” Various religious and voluntary organizations attempted to meet the housing crisis, but the more basic problem—that black workers received lower wages than whites and were forced to pay higher rents—went largely unaddressed.

  The mobilization of women and the migration of blacks were great changes, but even these paled in comparison to the upheaval of sending 2 million draftees and nearly a million more soldiers, sailors, Guardsmen, and Marines to war. For this vast legion of men, 1917 was a time of tedious drilling in camps all across America; only a handful reached the fighting in France before year’s end.

  In July, the first token U.S. force, a division of army regulars and a battalion of Marines, debarked in St. Nazaire. Two months later, the first volunteers arrived—men wearing spring parade uniforms, uncertain how to fire their rifles, and with just ten rounds of ammunition apiece. “To have sent us to the front at that time,” one soldier recalled, “would have been murder.” General John J. Pershing, commander of the budding American Expeditionary Force, wisely held his men back for several more months of training and then committed the first regiments to a quiet sector of the front. On November 3, the Germans tested the mettle of the newcomers: the enemy hit an American platoon in a night trench raid, killing three of the “doughboys” and capturing eleven while leaving three of their own dead behind. The Americans had neither run nor won; their first taste of the war was of bloody stalemate. One way or another, however, the deadlock in France was about to end.

  “Nous Voilà, Lafayette!”

  On November 6, 1917, just three days after the first clash between German and American troops in Alsace, Lenin’s Bolsheviks had seized control of the Russian capital and declared the formation of a Marxist Soviet regime. Although he had only tenuous control of a few major cities, Lenin had taken immediate steps to secure the “just and democratic” peace the Bolsheviks had promised. Lev Davidovich Trotsky, a principal Bolshevik lieutenant, met with German representatives at Brest-Litovsk and reluctantly accepted the draconic terms that they imposed. Thereafter, while Russia lapsed into civil war between Lenin’s forces and various opposing factions, the Germans had been able to transfer a million men to the western front. With them General Erich Ludendorff hoped to win the war before America could make its weight felt.

  On the morning of March 21, 1918, out of a fog of smoke shells and poison gas, sixty-three German divisions attacked the British forces near St. Quentin and Arras. Hitting the Allied line at its weakest point, the Germans broke through for the first time since 1914. Forced out of their trenches, the British reeled back, losing 100,000 men and a thousand cannon in a single week. German troops reached the rail center at Amiens, threatening to cut the British off from the French and drive them into the sea.

  When the British checked his first thrust at Arras and Amiens, Ludendorff launched two more attack
s. The first hit the British at Ypres; the second broke through the French lines at Chemin des Dames. In this moment of crisis, with the British in retreat and German columns only fifty miles from Paris, General Pershing relented his insistence on keeping the American divisions together to fight as an independent army. The American commander dispatched two units to support the British at Amiens and sent a third to bolster the French at Château-Thierry. The U.S. 2nd Division, meanwhile, marched toward the Belleau Wood, there to meet the spearhead of the German advance on Paris.

  The 2nd U.S. was a composite division, a brigade of doughboys paired with a brigade of Marines. The Americans reached Belleau Wood on June l, only to be told by French officers on the spot that they would have to retreat. “Retreat, hell,” replied Marine Captain Lloyd Williams, “we just got here!” The lone U.S. unit stopped five German divisions on the far side of the woods; then, on June 6, the Americans attacked. More than fifty percent of the American troops were killed or wounded in the frontal assault on the German positions, but the Germans were driven out of the woods and forced to retreat. The threat to Paris was over.

  Ludendorff had been set back again, but he still had enough fresh troops to launch two more offensives. One drive, on Amiens, was quickly thwarted by a French counterattack. The other, however, thrust across the Marne, surrounding the 38th U.S. Infantry Regiment on three sides. Then the new Allied Supreme Commander, General Ferdinand Foch, counterpunched with a mixed force of Frenchmen, Americans, and Moroccans. Again the Germans were driven back; from then on, the strategic initiative belonged to the Allies.