'The Great Demobilization' (Part 2)
Prof. Frederic Paxson's remarkable 1938 address to the American Historical Association deserves to be better known, if only for highlighting several heresies today's professors are loath to note
For the first part, please see the linked post below:
Emphases and [snark], as well as bottom lines, mine.
‘The Great Demobilization’ (Part 2)
The words mobilization and demobilization entered the American vocabulary with the war. It is not that they were unknown before its day, but they were related to matters so far removed from American experience that few used or thought about them. Military terms they were, dealing principally with armed forces. But war experience had taught, by 1918, that mobilization in a world war meant more than it had in 1898 or in 1861. It involved things as well as men; it comprised not only men under arms but men and women at home, keeping them armed. Procurement had been listed beside mobilization to make its meaning clearer; priority had been added, bringing the implicit certainty that some must go without; conservation had acquired teeth as social habits were coerced to make a surplus; and the bitter term nonessential, as applied to industries and to jobs, had left a fraction of our people hanging out on limbs. Before the full implications of the word mobilization had been digested, demobilization was upon the United States, more completely without foreknowledge than mobilization had been nineteen months before. There are moments in the history of mobilization in which the government of the United States looked like a madhouse; but in demobilization there was lacking even the madhouse in which the crazy might be incarcerated. They were at large [talk about ‘luxury problems’, I suppose, for the contrast to, say, the chaos in Russia (the Soviet Union), Central Europe, and the Middle East was different (worse) by several magnitudes].
First things come first. Among the phases of demobilization to be lived through as the pyramid of effort sagged down to a normal horizon there was demobilization in the field of political control. This had significance for those who lived with it and for the historian, too, since no national effort going either way can be more effective than the political machinery whereby common purpose is translated into action. On the heels of political demobilization came that of the armed forces, with veterans breaking into the oratory of their commanders to inquire profanely, “When do we sail?” There was a demobilization of the civilian effort in which work had been found for every citizen who craved a public activity. A demobilization of the emergency war controls came next–controls improvised from month to month as Congress responded to Administration lead and to pressure from the folks back home. Demobilization hit agriculture when food, planted to win the war, clogged the markets until farm equities evaporated like the morning fog. It hit the labor market, too, when men discharged from service milled around the employment offices. Private spirit, frozen to war harshness, yielded to the thaw; government ceased to commandeer savings for the common fund, and citizens turned from war economy to refill their larders and re-adorn their lives. And finally, national spirit let down as the high tensions of the war relaxed.
But, first of all, demobilization in political control began even before the guns were silent. Among the noiseless agents of that political demobilization was Will H. Hays, chairman of the Republican National Committee, who undertook as early as February, 1918, the task of reassembling the dispersed fragments of what still believed itself to be the dominant American party. It was a complicated task to get ready for the happy day–happy for those at least who thought with him–when there should no longer be a Democratic majority in Congress or a Democrat in the White House. The quiet perambulations of Hays await their historian. He could not, indeed, conceal his movements or deny his talks with every named variety of Republican, but he could, and did, lower his voice. Among those whose domestic feud had given office to Democrats he found everywhere a common bond, not going far beyond the desire to get rid of Democrats but going that far. He uncovered no consensus upon program, unless a temporary program might be found in the inadequacy of the [Wilson] Administration effort to prepare for war. Senator Chamberlain had just declared in public that “the Military Establishment of America has fallen down”; and Chamberlain was the Democratic chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. But what Democrats might say about Democrats was dangerous for Republicans to repeat. The leaders of the opposition had no desire to emerge from the period of Woodrow Wilson with their party damned for a generation by the easy charge of war disloyalty.
Before great headway in anticipation of the congressional election of 1918 could be attained, the defects of mobilization ceased to be negotiable in politics. American troops had taken to the field. Shipments reached a new high. The troops fought well. The American audience, watching performance as the divisions of the First Army went into operation, had little use for appraisals of the wisdom which had sent them there. Even Wilson was hypnotized by the spell of [combat] action, hypnotized into declaring on the very day on which the Germans swept across the Chemin des Dames, “politics is adjourned” [this references the Second Battle of the Marne (Wikipedia) in mid-July 1918]. By midsummer it seemed hardly possible to wage political combat for a Republican regeneration of Congress or to offer good reason for unseating any member who had upheld the war.
The turn of the tide abroad made it more practicable to turn the tide of politics at home. By Labor Day the hope for victory was looking up. Almost simultaneously with the earliest German suggestion of a peace, a claim of superpatriotism among the “outs” burst into the campaign. “Unconditional surrender” became instantly a rallying cry to inspire the opposition. War unity had not been attained without effort. War strain induced a willingness to have it over without having to live forever with the “new freedom” of Woodrow Wilson; and although no one had yet given currency to the word “normalcy”, there was a craving for what normalcy implied.
When the votes were cast on November 5 it was known that Germany was through and that whatever tension had for patriotic reasons kept votes behind a war Administration might safely relax itself. Political demobilization began as the votes were cast. When they were counted, the Democratic control of the House of Representatives was seen to be completely lost. It was figured as well that there was a juggler’s chance that even the Senate had passed into Republican control. This meant that Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts would be chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, to receive from a disavowed President whatever treaty made after victory might be offered as embodying “peace without victory”.
It is easy to say that Woodrow Wilson was blind when he sailed to make his peace; it is just as easy, and quite as true, to say that no one could have foreseen how immediately the American war mind would be demobilized. When the George Washington took out of New York the President and all the eager coadjutors who proposed to write his treaty clauses, he was a “lame duck” leader without knowing it [a political mistake of gargantuan proportions, to say the least]. The hand of his Administration was palsied thereafter; for in our American lame duck intervals, whether in short session after an adverse election or in any biennium in which the President has had to face a hostile Congress, the American executive has been President in little more than name. Yet if Woodrow Wilson had appreciated the result of November 5 and had tried to harmonize his subsequent actions with the fact, he would have had, perhaps, no more influence upon the course of events than he retained while denying the result and holding to the belief that the temper of the people would coerce Republican leaders into compliance with his course. In any event, demobilization in the realm of politics had begun.
Demobilization of the armed forces had begun even before the battle ceased. The spurt in shipping, which after the agreements of March, 1918, turned the American contribution into a genuine reinforcement by armed men, jumped the shipments by transport to some ten thousand men per day. As the American camps were drained out through Hoboken they were refilled from the reservoir of youth. The 18-45 enrollment, authorized in the late summer, gave promise that men should flow to the battlefield so long as there should be a battle front. In the offices of the provost marshal general and of the draft boards there began the work of sorting out the thirteen million new names. The work was never completed because events moved with a rapidity beyond expectation as the enemy sought peace. Before the end of October the President turned over to his foreign military associates the question of a truce which they and the enemy would know to be unconditional surrender in thin disguise. At the beginning of November the army stopped troop shipments without admitting publicly that they were stopped. It had become apparent that the fighting was over. Before the world rejoiced at either the “false” armistice or the real one, the Administration had begun the reversal of its transport machinery for the home-coming.
There was no plan for the demobilization of the armed forces; and none would have been accepted by the men, anxious to be released, or by their people, anxious to have them back. Some of the filing cases now in Washington contain wordy proposals, urged but not adopted, for an orderly return of troops, class by class, to be fitted into jobs as jobs were found or to be sent to work new farms, for the old idea of a workable frontier hung on long after the frontier itself was gone. No theory ruled the return. The men came back from France as ships were available for them at Brest. Inductions in the United States were stopped before the backwash started. There were trains of boys en route to camp whose very trains were reversed in transit. The camps were emptied almost by a gesture. The men in uniform put on the red chevron of discharge and went back to Main Street in some doubt whether they were returning as heroes or as so many pests. They found women in their jobs, and boys, and nonunion workers in places for whose control the labor movement had long fought. Patriotic or not, those who filled the jobs were loath to vacate them.
The numerical measure of the human demobilization is difficult to establish. Nearly 4,500,000 changed from uniforms to civilian clothes, but these represented only a part of the human problem, for perhaps as many more men and women had been in nonfighting jobs made necessary by the fact of war. War contracts were canceled or adjusted to the fact of peace. Half-finished structures, planned to supply those next campaigns which were never to be fought, were left half-finished and their hands paid off. War factories shut down. Those who received their severance pay envelopes entered the labor market to compete with former soldiers.
There was a difference in the demobilization problems as they affected soldiers who were discharged and civilians who were dismissed. Most of the former were young men who had never had named jobs before the war or attained fixed positions in society. They had been approximately ready to settle into their initial ruts when the call for troops diverted them to military duty. They came home to begin again. They now took up a postponed search for positions in the structure of civilian life, with their younger brothers, too young to have been drafted, crowding in, just ready to begin.
The latter group–civilian war workers–included older men, drawn into war work because war work was necessary and because it paid well. Many of these had acquired a more or less established status before they shifted to temporary jobs. They were men, too, whose deferred classification respecting the draft was based partly on essential jobs and partly on their family status and their dependents. These older men were no candidates for first jobs. Among them was the fraction of labor best organized before the war and most sedulously nursed by government labor agencies while they worked. For them the future demanded that they conserve their rights against both the employer and the intruding common worker.
The American labor movement had never learned what to do with common labor; nor has it yet. But the men turned loose from the war plants faced the employer, afraid lest with the return to peace he lower wages and load burdens upon his workers. They faced also mere labor, fearing lest the unorganized should thrust themselves into the choicer jobs, upon which union men had already laid their hands. Those of us who look back for causes of the present conflict on the labor front and note the clash between the crafts and common labor must pause to examine this uneven incidence of the burden of human demobilization and to measure its importance for us in the postwar decades.
Demobilization untied the knots with which a network of voluntary civilian organizations had enmeshed the nation. It had been hard for the United States, in a minute, to reverse its trains of thought, abandon the economic policy of the Sherman Act [anti-trust legislation of 1890 (Wikipedia)] whereby combination had been proscribed as illegal conspiracy, and improvise in place of this philosophy a doctrine of united effort brought to a sharp and single focus [let’s not mince words here: the Sherman Act was subverted by Big Business perhaps from before a single word had been written; let’s also note the ‘trust-busting’ of the so-called ‘Progressive Era’ in the run-up to the First World War (unmentioned by Prof. Paxson) and the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 (similarly unmentioned here)].
Even in advance of the declaration of war the Department of Justice had put together the outlines of an organization of listeners, working in anonymity, to apprehend sedition [highlighted in case you thought that the post-9/11 experiences brought to light by Ed Snowden are somehow ‘special’]. The Food Administration found it could function best in liaison with state administrations of the same name; and these in turn had built up county and city structures, with committees to patrol each block. Five thousand draft boards decentralized the war, made it an effort of localities, and tied the citizen into the common effort. The Council of National Defense encouraged the creation of state councils, and these the creation of a close-meshed net resting on the grass-roots. [George] Creel [he served on the so-called Committee on Public Information, the US gov’t’s propaganda machine, (Wikipedia)] spread a screen of oratorical skirmishers across the land, with his Four-Minute Men. Through the Federal Reserve Districts the Treasury organized the bond salesmen and their neighbors, with movie stars to ornament them, and sent them out as flying squads to float war loans. The Red Cross had its local units by the thousand, with members, officers, missions, and an interlock with the War Council of the American Red Cross. Channels of communication ran freely from the home to the battle front. Anyone who should collect today the badges and buttons with which zealous cooperators advertised to their fellows their integral relationship with the common front would need a large showcase.
It is still to be determined how far this harnessing of good will advanced victory; at the very least it occupied the mind, made dissent more uncomfortable than it would otherwise have been, and made war-loyalty self-enforcing. A vacuum was left when the nets were all at once withdrawn. It had been a temporary harness, which chafed in spots. With the “false” armistice it began to relax; before Christmas most of it was gone. There came a deflation of spirit as the necessary follow-up of prolonged activity, and with this slump came other things which the student of demobilization must study.
Bottom Lines (Part 2)
During the gigantic conflict, it was above all the American gov’t that changed beyond recognition.
Even a cursory glance at, e.g., the number of soldiers or public officials at the federal level indicates that ‘limited gov’t’ wasn’t a mere slogan (as it is today).
Once the US gov’t entered the fray, this all changed; by contrast, the European powers had already gone through these changes (distortions) well before the turn of the century, with Germany and France leading that charge with their high-geared conscription systems and subsidies for Big Business.
In many ways, Big Business, High Finance, and Big Gov’t are the unholy trinity of modern capitalism, and their combined—and mutually reinforcing—consequences were related by none other than Max Weber (1864-1920) in his seminal tract The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), from which the following quote is taken (p. 124 of the 2001 reprint; emphases mine, references omitted):
Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. To-day the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of [material] wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’
Remember: Weber wrote these lines, in particular that latter paragraph, in 1904/05.
I call—he was spot-on, and his scathing verdict almost to the spot anticipates (describes) the post-Cold War world; I think, to some extent, it also relates quite aptly to Cold War experiences, however, there were ‘new prophets’ (e.g., Mao, JFK, John Paul II); there was a ‘rebirth of old ideals and ideals’—most prominently, I would argue, what came to be known as ‘neoliberalism’ and, of course, whatever name you wish to bestow on China after Deng Xiaoping.
With at least the Western pseudo-creed having apparently ran out of steam some time ago, the sentiment Weber espoused in that last sentence in the above quote, I’d argue, virtually perfectly encapsulates the West’s situation:
Mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.
None of the great problems bedevilling the West these days are unknown, or were un-knowable over a century ago.
That much also comes to the fore in Prof. Paxson’s 1938 speech.
During WW2, a decision was made to remain on a war-footing, if only to avoid the harsh decisions that demobilisation would entail.
Today’s circumstances are as much a manifestation of these disastrous decisions as they are the cancer that wastes away whatever vestiges that remain from a once-vibrant civilisation.
I’ll give the last word to Weber once more who so aptly described the Western professional class, irrespective of academia, business, politics, or the like:
For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’