INCREASE OF MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, Tuesday, April 17, 1917. The committee met in confidential and executive session at 11 o'clock a. m., Hon. S. Hubert Dent, jr. (chairman), presiding. (The following letter from the Secretary of War was read:) WAR DEPARTMENT, Washington, April 17, 1917. MY DEAR MR. DENT: I do not know how accurate the account in this morning's Post may be as to the present opinion of the House Committee on Military Affairs, but I think I ought to ask you to read this letter to the committee, as I have a deep conviction that any compromise of the principles governing the bill submitted by the department for the raising of a new Army would be attended by unfortunate results. The bill as drawn preserves so much of the volunteer spirit as can be preserved without embarking on the experiment of a mixed system of draft and volunteering. It makes place for several hundred thousand men above the age of 25 who may be moved to volunteer, and by equalizing the terms and condition of service in the Regular Army, National Guard, and additional forces gives such volunteers entire equality with all others in the national forces. The drafting provision starts at the outset a process by which the forces of the country can be called as they shall be needed according to an equal and just system, and it has these merits: 1. It spreads the burden of military preparation equally throughout the United States. 2. It is certain in its operation, so that after the registration is made every man in the country will know whether he is to be called and when he is to be called upon, allowing those who are not to be called or whose call is postponed to continue their normal pursuits undisturbed by uncertainty as to their duty and unagitated by neighborhood pressure or misunderstanding. 3. It starts at the beginning of the accumulation of these new forces and has none of the character of a penalty which attaches to the draft when it is used after volunteering has been tried and failed. I have studied every report I can secure of the use of the volunteer system abroad and in our own country, and I believe it to be true that in every place where it has been tried, whatever success it has had has been due to a system of compulsion more harassing and almost as drastic as the provisions of a law itself. Old men and young and old women have united to urge young men to volunteer, appealing to local and State pride, and have enforced their appeal by social ostracisms, by pinning yellow ribbons on the coats of young men, and by epithets and outcries which have finally driven the reluctant into the ranks and humilitated both the ready and the reluctant by the methods used.. Such objection as there has been to the draft has, in nearly all cases, been due to the fact that it came as an exercise of the superior power of the Government after a fruitless appeal to the volunteer spirit. In the countries of Europe where the volunteer system has obtained, those responsible for it were excused because they could not have foreseen at the beginning the results, but we have their experience to guide us, and I believe that those responsible in this country for repeating the costly errors which have been made abroad will not be able to make that explanation. I beg, Mr. Chairman, that you and your associates will realize that I am deeply in earnest in this matter. With the greatest deference to the rights and independence of judgment of your committee and the House, I still feel obliged 217 as Secretary of War, and therefore your responsible adviser on this subject, to urge the passage of the bill as drawn. This is the greatest war in the history of the world. Our participation in it is as yet undetermined in many of its modes and wholly as to its duration and extent, but we are called upon tỏ inaugurate a system which, in any event or contingency, will place our country in a situation where it can contribute the trained men and the means necessary to bring this war to a conclusion which will mean a vindication of the principles upon which we entered it. We must therefore prepare to array the Nation, not by haphazard means, and (if I may say so without offense) not by volunteering, either of persons or of property, but by an ordered, systematic devotion of every man and every resource of our Nation to the task, and this can be done only by placing upon the statute books of the Nation a system which assigns to our people each his part according to his strength, and which leads them to forego, in the interest of the common cause, all pride as to method and preference as to service, allowing the organized agencies of our democratic Government to judge where each can best serve his country. In conclusion, I beg to assure you that I have no alarm on the subject of militarism in America, and particularly no alarm of any such consequence from the pending measure, temporary as it is, and designed for this emergency. Militarism is a philosophy; it is the designation given to a selfish or ambitious political system which uses arms as a means of accomplishing its objects. The mobilization and arming of a democracy in defense of the principles upon which it is founded, and in vindication of the common rights of men in the world, is an entirely different thing, and both the people of the United States and the people of the world will be inspired to see that we are brave enough and farsighted enough to lay our peace-time preferences aside in the interest of that form of common effort which will most certainly and most speedily accomplish our national purpose. If the members of your committee, prior to a final decision, will permit me, it will give me great pleasure to appear before them again and to urge more at large the convictions which I have here sought to press upon their attention. Respectfully, yours, Hon. S. H. DENT, Jr., Chairman Committee on Military Affairs, NEWTON D. BAKER, House of Representatives. STATEMENT OF HON. NEWTON D. BAKER, SECRETARY OF WAR. The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Secretary, I received your letter this morning and have read it to the committee and the committee unanimously agreed to invite you to appear again before us in connection with the subject of the adoption of the bill as prepared in your department. Secretary BAKER. Mr. Chairman, before commenting on that subject I would like to say that President Eliot, the president emeritus of Harvard University, is very anxious to appear before your committee and the Senate committee. When the request came to me it was that I should request you to allow him to appear. I said to whoever brought the request to me that as I understood it the committee had not opened up its hearings to any witnesses other than the department witnesses, and that you were not hearing a general discussion of the subject which he desired to discuss which, as I understand it, is the Swiss military system. The CHAIRMAN. The Swiss military system? Secretary BAKER. I understand so from what he has written me in other connections and what he has printed within the last few weeks. But that I would be very glad to find out what your pleasure in the matter was. He is not here. He is in Boston; but, as I understand it, if your committee and the Senate committee would hear him on that subject, he would like to appear before you and be heard. The CHAIRMAN. This is the situation, Mr. Secretary, at the present time. We have had some additional hearings, other than those of yourself and the department representatives, of people who are opposed to the draft system. Saturday we heard a number of people who were opposed to the draft system, inasmuch as we thought that both sides to the controversy ought to be given an opportunity to be heard, but we agreed that the hearings should be closed as early as possible, so that we could begin the preparation of some form of bill, and therefore the committee voted to close the hearings last Saturday. Secretary BAKER, I am so extremely anxious to have the committee report the bill that it is going to report and get action that I should not feel justified in asking you to delay a minute to hear anybody. The CHAIRMAN. That was the disposition of the committee. They thought the early action was one of the matters of first importance. Secretary BAKER. Very much more important than hearing any-body or everybody, as it seems to me. Now, Mr. Chairman, if I may turn rather abruptly to the situation which I referred to in my letter this morning, I am in the fortunate position of not knowing, except as I may have gathered from the things that were said here, the views of the members of the committee; and so I am basing what I have to say on no assumptions with regard to the committee's attitude. But we have a joint responsibility and a joint accountability. Whatever system of raising these armies is the outcome of this legislation is going to be in part your responsibility and in part mine, and I want to be very sure that the committee are in no doubt about what my views on the subject are. I say that with the greatest deference to the right and the duty of Members of Congress to exercise their own judgment when fully informed; but I think it would be a most unhappy situation if after you have acted there should be any doubt as to what the War Department, as represented by the Secretary, actually thought; and so I am glad to have this chance to make just as explicit a statement as I can make on that subject. I need not go into any history of my own opinions or the growth of my own information on the subject because I think that is relatively immaterial. We are all in a situation where the art of war and the size and character of war have undergone a revolution in our sight. We have just seen the whole thing changed to such an extent that almost no analogies and no historic preconceptions are serviceable any longer. Of course, if the hope of the most optimistic people in this country materialized, and the forces we are proposing to train simply became trained forces at large in the Nation with the war closed, as some people think it is showing signs of closing, before we could actively participate in it, then I should not feel now any such spur of urgency as I feel this morning; but we can not count on this war closing. This war was impossible before it began. It could not last a year until it had lasted one year. It could not last three years. The first man who said it would last three years was deemed an alarmist, an eccentric, and a militarist, and yet it is going to last three years obviously. The Napoleonic wars were impossible. They could not last a year, and yet they lasted 17 years or some such number. We, I think, can not justify taking action which is addressed to a situation as temporary as the most optimistic views of our outlook would seem to take. We are going to have to mobilize the whole Nation, not merely its fighting strength in the old sense of the word, but its industrial strength. You saw in this morning's newspapers that the packing houses in Chicago, the entire packing business, estimated in the newspapers to be worth $1,000,000,000, are through their owners and representatives asking the Government to take charge of their entire establishment and plant and manage and operate and fix the prices and the profits and generally take it all over. The extent to which all the industrial resources of this Nation, its mineral wealth, its raw material sources, and its manufacturing processes are being articulated into the Government system are quite beyond the dreams of anybody until this war began. Now, we are proposing to raise an army. It is perfectly obvious that that army can not be raised in five minutes. It can not be raised by passing a bill, and one of the difficulties we are going to have to face is that as soon as the Congress has passed a bill and the President has signed it the people of the United States-some of them-will imagine that there ought to be an army the next day. Well, there will not be. It will take some months before any large number of people can be assembled in one place and months again before the full force assembled can be called out. There will be a very great deal of uncertainty in the country. I can illustrate that by a single instance. A man from Cleveland came to my house on Sunday and said: "What I want to know is, when am I going to be needed? I do not know whether to arrange for my schoolteachers next year and plan to go on with my school or not. If I knew I was wanted now, I would break up my school. If I knew I was wanted the first of next year, I would make my arrangements on that basis." Throughout the entire United States at the present moment every thinking man wants to do something different from what he has been doing and wants to do the thing that will contribute most to the common interest, and wants certainty in his relations between his business and his Government. We may have to call out millions of men. This bill contemplates 500,000 as the first result of the draft. We may have to call out 5,000,000 men. I do not know, and you can not know with any certainty, and I therefore am persuaded that instead of repeating the mistakes which European countries have made and other countries have made-which all admit to be mistakes, we ought to lay down a scheme which is as orderly and precise as the movements of a piece of mechanism and which whenever we need to call additional forces will automatically respond as soon as the decision is made as to the size of the force to be called. I do not want to reargue to you the difficulties of the volunteer system, but I think every observer who has seen the volunteer system at work agrees with the expression of opinion that you will find, perhaps more clearly, in the New Republic of this week, in an article signed by Prof. Fish, a professor of history in Wisconsin, I am told, called "Raising armies." He started out as a believer in the volunteer system, and after having examined the whole history of it he comes to the conclusion that it is unscientific, costly, unfair, undemocratic, and that it is a very grave error for a nation embarking in war under modern conditions to rely upon such a system. The difficulties, I think, are chiefly that the word "volunteer" sounds voluntary, while the word "draft" sounds compulsory, and we assume that the volunteer system is voluntary and that the draft system is compulsory, and on that misconception, as I think, we align ourselves by a prejudice growing out of the sound of words. There never has been a voluntary system which raised any number of men which did not have the most cruel attachments. I think anybody who has been in England during this war, anybody who has been in Canada during this war, will bear me out when I say that the lagging and fretting which has gone on in order to raise volunteers has been more cruel than any compulsory system could be, and I think authorities everywhere agree that if England could now choose how she would start she would not follow the course she did start with, but would have introduced at the beginning the system and method of drafting and assorting her citizens for this task. I recognize the virtue and the morality of the volunteer spirit, and I think a man is a better man who has weighed the value of his country and its institutions to him and decided untroubled by outside influence that they are good enough to die for; but I think a man is a worse man who has weighed that question and decided that his country and its institutions are not good enough to die for; and I think a man who is whipped into the lines by having yellow ribbons pinned on his clothes and by being teased and assailed by shrill voices on every hand goes in to defend his country merely to escape annoyance. Mr. TILSON. Mr. Secretary, would you give your attention for a moment to this side of the question, which, I think, perhaps annoys some of the members of the committee, although it does not annoy me personally so much, and yet I think it is the strongest point, if there is any point, against your method of raising troops, and that is the question of its effect upon public sentiment and the people themselves and whether there is not something to be said in accepting a system that is known to be bad, that is known to be inefficacious, and known to be inadequate rather than create the effect which might be created by a very unpopular measure. Now, I should like to hear from you on that question. Secretary BAKER. I am very glad to have you refer to that, because this is a democracy, and the people of this country are entitled to have what they want, and it is your duty and mine to give them what they want. Now, that does not mean either that we have any way of tabulating their opinion or pleasing an uninformed judgment, but you all know America, and what America wants is to be efficient at this moment. Now, if you pass such a measure as is here provided and send it out to the country as the expression of your judgment that this task is so large and we must prepare for it so seriously as to establish this orderly system that will automatically develop larger and larger forces, the people of this country will accept your judgment on that subject. It may be somewhat shocking to them to find that you regard this as so serious a task, but they will |