The President described the council as maintaining “subordinate bodies of specially qualified persons … capable of organizing to the utmost the resources of the country.” He added that these commissions would be nonpartisan. Secretary Baker, who contributed his mouselike presence to the first meetings as permanent chairman, seems to have seen to it that they remained so.
When Clarkson, who was a Republican, wrote up his history of the vast organizations that developed out of these vague beginnings, he went out of his way to state with some solemnity that he was unable to “recall a single instance in which Mr. Baker or the council requested him to make an appointment or take an administrative action on a personal or partisan basis … a demonstration of nonpartisanship in a crisis that the writer would not have deemed possible before going to Washington … The credit,” he added, “is no less due to Mr. Baker by reason of the fact that this attitude reflected the policy of the President … politics simply did not enter into the makeup of the American war machine.”
The Council of National Defense, in itself formal and inert, proved, under the continually increasing demands of the war machine, to be the fertile parent of a series of commissions that, acting by rule of thumb, without theory or legal basis, organized American industry, as the President put it “to the utmost,” for the war effort.
First came the Advisory Commission. On December 7, 1916, a group of somewhat bewildered tycoons was brought together in a Washington hotel room. In their derby hats and overcoats, they were photographed with the appropriate cabinet officers on the steps of the War Department. Besides Dr. Godfrey who fathered the scheme, there was Daniel Willard of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; Howard E. Coffin of the Hudson Motor Company, a champion of preparedness so energetic that his colleagues described him as giving the impression of a gale of wind when he came into the room; shy Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck and Co., who as much as Henry Ford was an energumen of mass distribution; Dr. Franklin Martin of the American College of Surgeons; the canny old cigarmaker Samuel Gompers who had created the American Federation of Labor in his own image, and Bernard Baruch. When a reporter asked Baruch what his business was he answered tersely: “Speculator.”
When the journalists began to catch on to the scope of the activities of the chairmen of the various commissions spawned by the Council of National Defense they tagged the commissioners “dollar a year men,” taking a hint from the President’s words: “They serve the government without remuneration, efficiency being their sole object and Americanism their only motive.”
The War Department’s separate procurement agencies, following time-honored procedures in the name of the Signal Corps, or the Engineers, or the Medical Corps, were proving incapable of serving even the needs of the force of around a hundred and thirty thousand men that existed before the passage of the National Defense Act. The Quartermaster Corps had a staff of about sixty. Many of their methods dated from the Civil War.
With the taking over of the National Guard, and the prospect of a greater army to come, agencies had to be improvised if the troops were to have shoes and uniforms and guns. The Advisory Commission kept bringing fresh groups of businessmen to Washington to create them.
As a disgruntled Republican congressman, George Scott Graham of Pennsylvania, investigating in 1919 what he called “the secret government of the United States” reported after reading the records of the Advisory Commission: “An examination of these minutes discloses the fact that a commission of seven men chosen by the President seem to have devised the entire system of purchasing war supplies, planned a press censorship, designed a system of food control and selected Herbert Hoover as its director, determined on a daylight saving scheme, and in a word, designed practically every war measure which Congress subsequently enacted; and did all this behind closed doors, weeks and even months before the Congress of the United States declared war on Germany.”
Grosvenor Clarkson considered these words such a handsome tribute to his organization that he quoted them in his Industrial America in the World War.
“Reference and deference are the curse of bureaucracy” wrote this same Mr. Clarkson when he became their historian after acting as secretary of both the formal Council, which functioned merely to endorse with the majesty of the presidential mandate the acts of the subsidiary commissions, and of the allimportant Advisory Commission. The administrators who crowded into Washington hotels and hall bedrooms to man the subcommissions that kept separating off from the parent body had one thing in common: a fear and hatred of bureaucratic methods.
They were raised in the school of getting things done. Their system was to find a man who could do a job and let him do it no matter how and no questions asked. “My notion of organization,” Herbert Hoover told the President, when he was called to Washington from his Belgian Relief to head the Food Administration which grew out of one of the projects of the Advisory Commission, “is to size up the problem, then send for the best man or woman in the country who has the ‘know how,’ give him a room, table, chair, pencil, paper and wastebasket — and the injunction to get other people to help, and then solve it.”
All through the frustrating summer of 1917 executives who had come to Washington at real personal sacrifice sweated long hours in airless offices laying, amid confusion and heartbreak, the groundwork for the efficient procedures of the following year. Already in the Advisory Commission they were talking of an army of a million men.
The first efforts had to go towards changing the methods of procurement already established. The army, navy and the allied purchasing commissions must be kept from bidding against each other for scarce supplies. Every method from patriotic appeal to brute force had to be used to curb the catastrophic rise in prices. A system of priorities had to be invented, and a clearing house established, where the needs of the various services and of the Allies could be appraised. Communications had to be kept open between Washington and the local committees of the various industries and chambers of commerce. The railroads had to be induced to drop competitive systems favored by the Sherman Act. Ships, wooden ships, steel ships, concrete ships — anything that would float — had to be built on a scale and at a speed never before imagined.
It was inevitable that duplications and conflicts should arise. Each commission tended to struggle with its own problems without reference to the work of its neighbors. “We used the words coordination and cooperation until they were worn out” wrote Herbert Hoover of this period. “We surrounded ourselves with coordinators and spent hours in endless discussions with no court of appeal for final decisions.”
The President had become almost unapproachable in the White House. Tumulty could always be reached, but he never pretended to understand industrial problems; politics was his field. Even the faithful secretary’s private opinions had to be transmitted by letter. All he could do was lay documents on the President’s desk.
The Secretary of War was engrossed with the complications of the expanding army. McAdoo at the Treasury took a broad view of the needs of the war machine, but, although still Mac, and a member of the family at White House meals, he was not listened to as carefully as in the past: Edith Wilson suspected him of having been opposed to her marrying the President.