1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder by Arthur Herman

Author:Arthur Herman [Herman, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780062570925
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

AS THE FALL of 1917 moved on into winter, mobilization wasn’t moving anywhere.

The U.S. Shipping Board had spent half a billion dollars but hadn’t built a single ship. A similar Aircraft Board had spent even more and hadn’t launched a single plane. The War Industries Board had turned out to be nothing more than a title and a suite of offices; it couldn’t sign a contract or revise an existing one held by the War Department or the navy. Stories were coming out from army training camps of high rates of sickness, absenteeism, and shortages of everything from food and medicine to weapons and ammunition.31

It was turning out that much of the administrative machinery Wilson had put in place to organize mobilization was faulty and badly conceived. It was also split by personal feuds and rivalries. The Shipping Board, for example, was bogged down in an argument between a member of its board, William Denman, and Gen. George Goethals of the board’s Emergency Fleet Corporation over what kinds of merchant ships to build. Should they be made of steel, which was more durable but in demand for other war materials, or of wood? The argument went back and forth. Then Goethals, who favored steel and felt he was losing the argument, turned to the newspapers for support. The Hearst syndicate ran a series of exposés of how Denman, who favored wood, was poised to profit from his connections with certain California timber businesses. It was a less than edifying spectacle, and in the end, Wilson had to ask for the resignations of both Denman and Goethals—and not a ship was built.32

No one was more disgusted, or frustrated, by how things were going than Henry Cabot Lodge. He blamed Wilson’s failure to get the country mobilized for war months or even years before, as well as incompetence in the present. “The utter failure in making preparation,” he wrote to Roosevelt, “and the wanton waste of the time which has elapsed since the beginning of the war in 1914 have thrown us into the war with the work of years to be done in a few months.”

Another major problem was Wilson’s approach to contracts with private business. “The primary object of the administration,” Lodge said, “appears to be to cut all the industries down to the barest living profit, and yet to the earning of our industries, both agricultural and industrial, we must look for our taxes and our loans.” He concluded bitterly, “[W]e cannot carry on a war against American business and a war against Germany at the same time.”33

From Lodge’s point of view, a good example of the chaos was what was happening with the manufacture of machine guns. The army had decided to stop making the Lewis gun, a British design, and to substitute an American-made design from gun maker John Browning. That was on June 17, Lodge told Roosevelt; six months later, not a single gun had been manufactured. “The English are using 70,000 Lewis guns at this moment,” Lodge reported.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.