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government through the agencies which he might designate;1 and he could compel individuals or corporations operating grain elevators, cold-storage plants, packing-houses, coal mines, or farm-machinery factories to take out licenses if their products entered into interstate commerce. He appointed Mr. Hoover as Food Administrator and Mr. H. A. Garfield as Fuel Administrator under the Lever Act. State and local food and fuel administrators were also chosen. The country was called upon to observe wheatless, meatless, and heatless days. The sugar bowls were removed from the tables of hotels and restaurants. Housewives and bakers were pledged to make "victory bread" with corn, rice, or barley flour instead of wheat. Front lawns were turned into vegetable gardens. Society ladies took lessons in canning and preserving. The Department of Agriculture, working in close coöperation with the Food Administration, sent out millions of leaflets and pamphlets instructing the people how to make their contribution to winning the war in the homely matters of kitchen, pantry, and garden. The value of our food products sent to the Allies in the year 1918 was over $2,000,000,000.

The Trading-with-the-Enemy Act of October 6 prohibited dealing with persons residing in countries or doing business in countries at war with the United States. It authorized the President to place an embargo on imports and to establish a censorship of communication by mail, cable, or wireless with foreign countries. It provided for the creation of a custodianship of alien property in the United States. Every citizen of an enemy country or its ally doing business in the United States was obliged to take out a license, and every newspaper printed in a foreign language was obliged to furnish the Postmaster-General with English translations of everything that it published concerning the war. A. Mitchell Palmer, the Alien Property Custodian, collected enemy property in the country to the amount of some $700,000,000. For this property he acted as a trustee,

1 The Federal Food Administration Grain Corporation (capital $150,000,000) was created on August 14, with the monopoly of the purchase of wheat. A clause of the Lever Act forbade the use of grain for the manufacture of distilled liquors during the period of the war.

depositing with the Treasury, to be invested in United States bonds, such moneys or securities as he collected. Business properties might be transferred, in the discretion of the custodian, to be operated by American citizens. The eventual disposition of the property taken by the custodian was to be determined by Congress.1

So long as neutrality was maintained, opposition to our entrance into the war was a right of citizens; but with the declaration of April 6, 1917, any attempt to obstruct the government in the prosecution of the war was equivalent to giving aid and comfort to the enemy, and as such was treason to the United States. Of course no declaration of Congress could alter the honest convictions of the pacifists and the "conscientious objectors" to war, but active opposition was confined to a comparatively small group. The government took precautions to bar enemy aliens from places where they might do mischief. They were compelled to register, were forbidden to go up in balloons or airplanes, to come within one hundred yards of wharves or piers, or to be found in waters within three miles of the shore line. The Espionage Act of June 15 imposed severe penalties upon persons disclosing any information respecting places connected with the national defense, advocating treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to the laws of the United States, carrying false reports intended to interfere with the operation of the military or naval forces, encouraging insubordination, disloyalty, or the refusal of military duty, or obstructing the recruiting service of the United States. Provision was made for the few thousand conscientious objectors who belonged to "any well-organized religious sect whose creed or principles forbade its members to participate in war in any form" to enter the

1 Later, authority was given to the custodian to sell alien property. "The word 'enemy' for the purposes of the work of the Alien Property Custodian covers all persons within the military or naval lines of the Central Powers, and all persons residing outside the United States transacting business with anyone within such military or naval lines. A German citizen in the United States (unless interested) is not an enemy under the Trading-with-the-Enemy Act, whereas an American citizen in Germany may be so considered" (Bertram Benedict, "A History of the Great War," Vol. I, p. 376).

various classes of noncombatant service which were enumerated by the President's proclamation (medical corps, quartermaster's department, engineering, construction, and repair departments). For the extremists who could not tolerate any kind of uniformed service under military control, work on farms was permitted under the surveillance of the War Department. All but about five hundred conscientious objectors accepted one form or another of noncombatant service. The recalcitrants were imprisoned, along with some fifteen hundred to two thousand offenders against the Espionage Act-chiefly leaders of radical groups, alien agitators, paid agents of the Central Powers, and certain of the Socialists.1

A strict censorship of the press was advocated by President Wilson, and a provision to that effect was put into the Espionage Act by the Department of Justice. But the House rejected the censorship clause by a vote of 184 to 144. Freedom of the press was guaranteed by the Constitution. Henry Watterson, the veteran Democratic editor of the Louisville Courier Journal, wrote: "That the war involves autocracy, I understand well enough, but in the field, not in the White House. . . . I reject, loathe, and spit upon the plea that because of war the press should abdicate its duty to the people." Nevertheless the administration took measures to commend its own policies to the reading public. A week after the declaration of war the President set up a Committee on Public Information under the management of George Creel. Beginning May 10, a daily Official Bulletin was published by the administration, containing the war news which it wished to have disseminated. In the spring of 1918 a drastic amendment to the Espionage Act imposed penalties on

1 An emergency convention of the Socialist party held at Chicago the day after war was declared passed resolutions denouncing the war as "a conspiracy of capitalism." On July 1 the party as a whole condemned our entrance into the war by a referendum vote of 21,639 to 2752. Thereupon prominent American Socialists, like John Spargo, William English Walling, J. G. Phelps Stokes, Upton Sinclair, and Allan Benson (the presidential candidate of 1916), withdrew from the party, declaring that it had been "scuttled by German nationalist jingoes and anarchistic impossibilities."

any persons who "used abusive language about the government or institutions of the country," and empowered the PostmasterGeneral to refuse the delivery of mail matter to any person who, in his opinion, was using the postal service in violation of the act. Under these provisions several newspapers and periodicals which criticized the policies of the administration or protested against the "denatured news from the government news factories" felt the heavy hand of the Postmaster-General.1

It is a difficult and delicate question how far the government should interfere with the freedom of speech and of the press in time of war-one on which the American people will never be in agreement. Professor W. E. Dodd, in his enthusiastic defense of President Wilson, points to the fact that he never proclaimed martial law, or suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus, or placed armed men at election polls, or threw suspected men into prison without charges being preferred against them, or ordered any traitor before a firing squad, as did Abraham Lincoln, "the great political saint of the country" ("Woodrow Wilson and his Work," pp. 224-225). This is all true; but, on the other hand, the exigencies of the Civil War were vastly different (as the late Professor W. A. Dunning showed in his comparison of the repressive policies of Presidents Lincoln and Wilson in the American Historical Review for July, 1919) from the conditions of a war waged more than three thousand miles from our shores. Most of the criticism that was rebuked by the Wilson administration was anything but "seditious" in character, having for its purpose, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, "to tell the truth and speed up the war." Disregarding the grosser charges that the Committee on Public Information was merely a political agency disseminating willfully distorted news in order to cover up the inefficiency of the departments and build up the reputa

1 For the experiences of the New York Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, the Detroit News, the New York Times (foreign edition), and the Philadelphia North American see E. W. Young's "The Wilson Administration and the Great War," pp. 159-167; also an article by George R. Brown in the North American Review for June, 1919.

tion and influence of President Wilson,' we may still have grave doubts whether there were beneficial results of the committee's activities to any degree commensurate with the millions of dollars which it spent.

That there were some American citizens who put loyalty to the ideal of peace above loyalty to their country; some, even, who worked for the defeat of the cause for which their government was fighting, was unfortunately true; but they were, after all, comparatively few, and the most effective answer to them was not an overzealous campaign of suspicion, which invariably tends to confound the innocent with the guilty, but the spectacle of the millions of Americans who rallied to the support of the government's war policies and to the call to the colors.

"OVER THERE”

President Wilson had no immediate intention, when we entered the war, of sending American troops overseas. Even if the few tens of thousands of disciplined officers and soldiers of our regular army could have been spared from the work of training the volunteers and the drafted men at home, they would have been only a tiny addition to the millions on the western battle front of Europe, which, for the rest, was comparatively quiet in the spring of 1917. Our task was first to create an efficient army, instead of launching a small trained force into the fray and leaving an undisciplined mob at home. However, soon after our declaration of war, high commissioners were sent to America by the governments of Great Britain and France (followed later by the Belgians, Russians, Italians, Rumanians, and Japanese) to bring the thanks of their countries and to discuss methods of

1" The real purpose of the propaganda in which Creel is the most active figure is to overlay the facts of history with studied inventions. . . . False in substance and implication, this propaganda under the present circumstances is an especially atrocious thing. For Washington authority behind it causes it to find reflection in the press of the allied countries, which pay glowing tribute to President Wilson for having overcome the reluctance and stimulated the patriotism of his countrymen, so that they have at last been aroused to defend themselves and civilization" (editorial in the Philadelphia North American, August 28, 1918).

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