Section three of the Espionage Act contained a clause which could be interpreted by the courts to prove an effective curb on free speech in wartime: “… and whosoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting of enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service of the United States, shall be punished with a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.”
Registration Day passed off quietly. Throughout the nation men lined up at precinct polling places with no more concern than if they were voting in an election. The Census Bureau had estimated that there were something more than ten million men of draft age in the country. When all returns were in it turned out that more than nine million six hundred thousand had registered. The slackers, announced the Department of Justice, would be rounded up in due course.
The administration press hailed the turnout as a plebiscite in favor of the Wilsonian policies. The Republican papers joined in the flagwaving.
The editions that came out on the morning of June 6 had few exceptions to note to the general calm. In Butte, Montana, a small riot was caused by the parade of an Irish society. A radical Finn made a speech which nobody could understand. The mayor, addressing the troublemakers from the roof of a house, induced the crowds to disperse before shooting began. A report from Flagstaff, Arizona, alleged that the Navahos had chased the officer who appeared to register them off their reservation. In New Mexico the governor of the Santo Domingo pueblo was arrested for refusing to produce a list of his people’s names. In Ignacio, Colorado, the Utes took to the hills at the first rumor of a draft and were reported to have furnished themselves with liquor and to be performing war dances and bear dances. At Phoenix three hundred Russian Doukhobor settlers politely but firmly explained to the sheriff that their religion would never allow them to register for war.
With these few exceptions the young men of America stood up to be counted. With registration the war spirit spread. “Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance,” Woodrow Wilson had told Frank Cobb. His words proved prophetic.
From being one of the drowsiest of capitals, Washington, as the summer of 1917 advanced, took on an air of bustle. Fresh faces daily filled the great waiting room of the newly constructed Union Station. As the government departments proved incapable of coping with enormous wartime demands new agencies had to be created. Each new agency imported clerical workers. The government kept taking over apartment houses for offices without providing living accommodations for the people who were going to work in them. A housing shortage developed. Hotel rooms were all taken. Industrialists come to help had to live in their private cars lined up in the railroad yards. Every boarding house was full. Editorials in the newspapers implored respectable residents to do their bit by renting spare rooms to young women secretaries.
TEN THOUSAND NEW CLERICAL WORKERS EXPECTED THIS SUMMER, ran a headline in the Evening Star. According to the Census Bureau the population of the District increased by forty thousand in a year.
The dilatory habits of the federal government died hard. The War Department proved especially incapable of coping with its problems, Civilians had to be called in. Pushing business executives invaded leisurely bureaus where, in high old rooms shuttered against the heat, ailing colonels, often relics of the Indian wars, had for years shuffled yellowed foolscap under slowmoving ceiling fans, with the secretarial assistance provided, as often as not, by needy gentlewomen of Confederate families, who spoke of themselves with some pride as being “in office,” and were loath to be hurried; and offices closed for the day at four in the afternoon. One man, on loan from a busy New York corporation, called in to explain to the Chief of Staff how some problem of procurement could be solved, after having worked his whole office force through several nights to get up the facts and figures, went back to his associates appalled: the elderly general, halfway through the explanation, fell asleep in his chair.
One of the chief wonders of the European war, as seen by American men of affairs, was the effectiveness of German industrial mobilization. For years advocates of preparedness had been calling for the creation of some sort of skeleton agency which might, if the need came, establish contact between the War Department and the industries capable of producing war materials. The navy already had a civilian consulting board, figureheaded by Thomas A. Edison and engaged in a survey of all possible sources of munitions.
So strong was the feeling against military measures of any kind in the Wilson administration and on Capitol Hill that the first moves to create a Council of National Defense had to be almost surreptitious.
Dr. Hollis Godfrey, a Massachusetts engineer and writer of books for boys, who was president of the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, had been propounding a plan for industrial mobilization under such a council ever since, on a trip to England in 1906, he found Campbell-Bannerman and young Winston Churchill in the throes of organizing a war council for the empire.
With the worsening of relations with Germany, Dr. Godfrey’s plan began to assume more than hypothetical importance. He went to work with fresh zest and managed to interest Secretary of War Garrison, who was wearing himself out trying to move the Wilson administration towards preparedness. The chairmen of the Senate and House committees on military affairs approved the project and Elihu Root, who as McKinley’s Secretary of War tried to centralize the administration of the army under a General Staff, drafted a bill. Secretary Baker took time off from the confusions and frustrations of the campaign against Villa to revise the plan and gave it his endorsement. General Wood and T.R. were loud in its favor.
Bringing the projected Council of National Defense to the attention of the President was a ticklish matter. Anything endorsed by Leonard Wood smelt of Wilson’s tormentors in the Republican press. It was deemed advisable that Dr. Godfrey should call on Colonel House at his New York apartment. House approved the plan, revised it again, and, when he judged the time was ripe, presented it to the President. He used such discretion that Woodrow Wilson is reported to have exclaimed, “This is extraordinary, this composite work … It is exactly the putting of this theory of education into government. I am heartily for it.”
The Council of National Defense had to be handled even more gingerly by its sponsors in Congress, for fear of touching off pacifist oratory. A clause was quietly inserted in the National Defense Act giving the President powers towards the mobilization of industry and transportation in case of war. The same act assuaged the suspicions of the antimilitarists by throwing a spoke into the wheels of central military planning. The General Staff was reduced in numbers and more than half its members were forbidden to be stationed in Washington at any one time.
The subsequent Military Appropriations Act set up a Council of National Defense to consist of the Secretaries of War, Navy, the Interior, Agriculture, Commerce and Labor. Provision was made for unpaid advisory commissions of businessmen, manufacturers and technicians. A small appropriation was made for hiring a permanent staff.
McAdoo, who had a good deal to do with the scheme at this point, kept the Treasury off, claiming with some justice that he already had more work than he could handle. It was McAdoo who suggested the appointment of Walter S. Gifford, an inconspicuous young Harvard man from Salem, Massachusetts, who had risen by quiet brains to the post of chief statistician of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company by the time he was thirty, as director, and of Grosvenor B. Clarkson as secretary. The setting up of this novel federal agency met with little comment in Congress or in the press.