War On The Home Front

War on the Home Front 1. Look at Table 1. Describe the general trend in American industrial production, number of people in the armed forces, and government revenue during the war period. Why do you think they traveled in this path?

2. In 1916, the United States was not yet in war. In 1920, the war was over. Yet, if you look at Table 1, in 1920, government revenues, expenditures, and military spending were all much higher than before the war. If we are not fighting anymore, why have all these numbers not returned to their pre-war level?

3. What are the two main ways that the war was financed? In particular, how did the very wealthy finance the war?

4. What is a liberty bond? Were they successful?

5. During the war, what agencies did the government create? How do you think they affected the day-to-day lives of Americans?

Analyzing WWI Propaganda Posters Images

Themes

Stereotypes

Message Overall, what do you think was the effectiveness of the propaganda machine?

Safety vs. Security? As you have read, the United States curbed the civil liberties of its citizens during World War I. This is nothing new during wartime. Abraham Lincoln through suspected traitors in jail with no trial or even attorney during the Civil War. The question to you is: Is this right? As you know, the United States is currently engaged in two military operations, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. In 2001, and reauthorized in 2006, the United States congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, which did, among many things: •

Roving wiretaps: The CIA/FBI may now jump from phone to phone, computer to computer, monitoring what the user is doing without demonstrating to a judge that it is part of an investigation

•

Immunity: Telephone providers (like your cell phone) are authorized to turn in all your calls/messages at the request of the government, and cannot be sued by you

•

Education records: Upon request form the Attorney General, educational records “relevant” to an investigation must be supplied

Many critics contend that all of these provisions undermine our civil liberties; conversely, supporters argue that without the PATRIOT Act, our way of life would be destroyed. Using your knowledge of issues related to World War I and present day civil liberties concerns, defend or refute the following statement in a well organized paragraph: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” --Attributed to Benjamin Franklin, ~1775

Do you think it's more important to be safe, and give up some freedoms? Or is safety not worth your privacy? Please use at least one example from both WWI and from the current era. This paragraph is worth 12 points, and is due _______________________.

U.S. Mobilization into War Mobilizing the Economy The first and most important mobilization decision was the size of the army. When the United States entered the war, the army stood at 200,000, hardly enough to have a decisive impact in Europe. However, on May 18, 1917 a draft was imposed and the numbers were increased rapidly. Initially, the expectation was that the United States would mobilize an army of one million. The number, however, would go much higher. Overall some 4,791,172 Americans would serve in World War I. Some 2,084,000 would reach France, and 1,390,000 would see active combat. Once the size of the Army had been determined, the demands on the economy became obvious, although the means to satisfy them did not: food and clothing, guns and ammunition, places to train, and the means of transport. The Navy also had to be expanded to protect American shipping and the troop transports. Contracts immediately began flowing from the Army and Navy to the private sector. The result, of course, was a rapid increase in federal spending from $477 million in 1916 to a peak of $8,450 million in 1918. (See Table 1 below for this and other data on the war effort.)

Table 1 Selected Economic Variables, 1916-1920 1916

1917 1918

1919

1920

1. Industrial production (1916 =100)

100

132

137

108

2. Revenues of the federal government (millions of dollars)

$930

2,373 4,388

5,889

6,110

139

3. Expenditures of the federal government (millions of dollars) $1,333 7,316 15,585 12,425 5,710 4. Army and Navy spending (millions of dollars)

$477

3,383 8,580

6,685

2,063

5. Military personnel (millions)

.174

.835

1.266

.353

2.968

Financing the War Where did the money come from to buy all these munitions? Then as now there were, the experts agreed, three basic ways to raise the money: (1) raising taxes, (2) borrowing from the public, and (3) printing money. In the Civil War the government had had simply printed the famous greenbacks. [However, now that the United States was firmly on the gold standard, this was impossible to do. Therefore, leaders needed another plan- Mr. Long]. The real choice appeared to be between raising taxes and borrowing from the public. Most economists of the World War I era believed that raising taxes was best [rather than borrowing]. During the war Oliver Morton Sprague, one of the leading economists of the day, offered another reason for avoiding borrowing. It was unfair, Sprague argued, to draft men into the armed forces and then expect them to come home and pay higher taxes to fund the interest and principal on war bonds. Most men of affairs, however, thought that some balance would have to be struck between taxes and borrowing. Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo thought that financing about 50 percent from taxes and 50 percent from bonds would be about right. Financing more from taxes, especially progressive taxes, would frighten the wealthier classes and undermine their support for the war. In October 1917 Congress responded to the call for higher taxes with the War Revenue Act. This act increased the personal and corporate income tax rates...The tax rate for an income of $10,000 with four exemptions (about $140,000 in 2003 dollars) went from 1.2 percent in 1916 to 7.8 percent. For incomes of

$1,000,000 the rate went from 10.3 percent in 1916 to 70.3 percent in 1918. These increase in taxes and the increase in nominal income raised revenues from $930 million in 1916 to $4,388 million in 1918. Federal expenditures, however, increased from $1,333 million in 1916 to $15,585 million in 1918. A huge gap had opened up that would have to be closed by borrowing. Short-term borrowing was undertaken as a stopgap. To reduce the pressure on the Treasury and the danger of a surge in short-term rates, however, it was necessary to issue long-term bonds, so the Treasury created the famous Liberty Bonds...In all, the sale of these bonds raised over $20 billion dollars for the war effort. In order to strengthen the market for Liberty Bonds, Secretary McAdoo launched a series of nationwide campaigns. Huge rallies were held in which famous actors, such as Charlie Chaplin, urged the crowds to buy Liberty Bonds. Table 3 provides a rough breakdown of the means used to finance the war. Of the total cost of the war, about 22 percent was financed by taxes and from 20 to 25 percent by printing money, which meant that from 53 to 58 percent was financed through the bond issues.

Table 3 Financing World War I, March 1917-May 1919 Source of finance

Billions of Dollars

Taxation and nontax receipts

7.3

Borrowing from the public

24

Direct money creation

1.6

Total cost of the war

32.9

The Government’s Role in Mobilization Once the contracts for munitions were issued and the money began flowing, the government might have relied on the price system to allocate resources. This was the policy followed during the Civil War. For a number of reasons, however, the government attempted to manage the allocation of resources from Washington. For one thing, the Wilson administration, reflecting the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party, was suspicious of the market, and doubted its ability to work quickly and efficiently, and to protect the average person against profiteering. Another factor was simply that the European belligerents had adopted wide-ranging economic controls and it made sense for the United States, a latecomer, to follow suit. Food Administration The Food Administration was created by the Lever Food and Fuel Act in August 1917. Herbert Hoover, who had already won international fame as a relief administrator in China and Europe, was appointed to head it. The mission of the Food Administration was to stimulate the production of food and assure a fair distribution among American civilians, the armed forces, and the Allies, and at a fair price. The Food Administration did not attempt to set maximum prices at retail or (with the exception of sugar) to ration food. The Act itself set what then was a high minimum price for wheat – the key grain in international markets – at the farm gate, although the price would eventually go higher. The markups of processors and distributors were controlled by licensing them and threatening to take their licenses away if they did not cooperate. The Food Administration then attempted control prices and quantities at retail through calls for voluntary cooperation. Millers were encouraged to tie the sale of wheat flour to the sale of less desirable flours – corn meal, potato flour, and so on – thus making a virtue out of a practice that would have been regarded as a disreputable evasion of formal price ceilings. Bakers were encouraged to bake "Victory bread," which included a wheat-flour substitute. Finally, Hoover urged Americans to curtail their consumption of the most valuable foodstuffs: there were, for example, Meatless Mondays and Wheatless Wednesdays.

Railroad Administration The Wilson Administration nationalized the railroads and put them under the control of the Railroad Administration in December of 1917, in response to severe congestion in the railway network that was holding up the movement of war goods and coal. Wilson's energetic Secretary of the Treasury (and son-inlaw), William Gibbs McAdoo, was appointed to head it. The railroads would remain under government control for another 26 months. War Industries Board The most important federal agency, at least in terms of the scope of its mission, was the War Industries Board. The Board was established in July of 1917. Its purpose was no less than to assure the full mobilization of the nation's resources for the purpose of winning the war. Initially the Board relied on persuasion to make its orders effective, but rising criticism of the pace of mobilization, and the problems with coal and transport in the winter of 1918, led to a strengthening of its role. In March 1918 the Board was reorganized, and Wilson placed Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street investor, in charge. Baruch installed a "priorities system" to determine the order in which contracts could be filled by manufacturers. Contracts rated AA by the War Industries Board had to be filled before contracts rated A, and so on. Although much hailed at the time, this system proved inadequate when tried in World War II. The War Industries Board also set prices of industrial products such as iron and steel, coke, rubber, and so on. This was handled by the Board's independent Price Fixing Committee. Costs of the War The human and economic costs of the war were substantial. The death rate was high: 48,909 members of the armed forces died in battle, and 63,523 died from disease. Many of those who died from disease, perhaps 40,000, died from pneumonia during the influenza-pneumonia epidemic that hit at the end of the war. Some 230,074 members of the armed forces suffered nonmortal wounds. John Maurice Clark provided what is still the most detailed and thoughtful estimate of the cost of the war; a total amount of about $32 billion. Clark tried to estimate what an economist would call the resource cost of the war. For that reason he included actual federal government spending on the Army and Navy, the amount of foreign obligations, and the difference between what government employees could earn in the private sector and what they actually earned. He excluded interest on the national debt and part of the subsidies paid to the Railroad Administration because he thought they were transfers. His estimate of $32 billion amounted to about 46 percent of GNP in 1918.

Rockoff, Hugh. "US Economy in World War I". EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. February 10, 2008. URL http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/Rockoff.WWI