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WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
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 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 TOKONTO 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 BY 
 
 MARK SULLIVAN 
 
 BetD gotit 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1918 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
6^ 
 
 Copyright, 1918 
 By p. F. Collier and Son 
 
 copyeight, 1918 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and electro typed. Published, April, 1918 
 
 M/iy -9 1918 
 ©CI.A497238 
 
d 
 
 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 THE war did not come to us as 
 it came to Belgium. No Oregon 
 rancher, working in his field on a 
 peaceful afternoon, was disturbed by 
 an odd whirring in the sunny air, and 
 looked toward Mount Hood to see an 
 airplane spitting fire upon his neigh- 
 bouring village. In no New England 
 town did children huddle in the 
 windows and peer at exultant Uhlans 
 prancing down the maple-shaded 
 street. No Maryland farmer from his 
 hilltop field saw a thing that sent him 
 hurrying to the house to gather his 
 
 children into his cart and take to the 
 
 1 
 
2 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 road in fear. No city of ours walked 
 for days in anxiety, listening to the 
 rise and fall of a fateful cannonade. 
 War did not thunder at our doors as at 
 the forts of Liege. 
 
II 
 
 /^ F the way that war came to 
 ^^ Belgium and to France there 
 are two pictures which, among Ameri- 
 can witnesses, surpass all others and 
 are unforgetable. One is in the 
 letters home of an American woman. 
 Miss Mildred Aldrich, who in June 
 preceding the war had gone to a 
 village in rural France for rest. It is 
 part of the irony of the times that in 
 her first letter, written six weeks be- 
 fore the war began, she should have 
 said: "I have come to feel the need 
 of calm and quiet — perfect peace." 
 
 Among the simple, friendly farmers 
 she found the gentle serenity that she 
 sought. She lived alone in her cot- 
 tage, and used to smile at herself for 
 
4 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 keeping up her American precaution 
 of fastening the doors and windows 
 when she went to bed at night. But 
 one day the garde champetre with his 
 drum walked up the country street, 
 stopping at each crossroad to beat the 
 long roll — "A chill ran down my 
 spine," she wrote. Then she began to 
 notice the airplanes hurrying from 
 Paris to the front, and at night the 
 nearby railway rumbled with the troop 
 trains going by. Presently, war rolled 
 right up to her peaceful door-step, a 
 little band of tired and harried 
 soldiers who said quite simply: "We 
 are all that is left of the North Irish 
 Horse." 
 
 The other American, Brand Whit- 
 lock, was Heaven-sent to Belgium. 
 Not for his administrative accomplish- 
 ments as our ambassador; that might 
 well have been done as capably by an- 
 other. But if a survey had been made 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 5 
 
 of all the professional writers in 
 America, if the acutest intelligence had 
 been exerted to find that one writer 
 with the talent and the personality to 
 picture how the greatest tragedy in 
 history blasted its way across the 
 peaceful sunshine of August in Bel- 
 gium, Brand Whitlock might well 
 have been chosen. He had the sensi- 
 tiveness to see and the skill to make 
 vivid. 
 
 "Lovely Brussels," he wrote, "was 
 lovelier than ever, but somehow with 
 a wistful, waning loveliness in- ^ 
 finitely pathetic. All over the 
 Quartier Leopold the white fagades ^ 
 of the houses bloomed with flags, their 
 black and red and yellow colours 
 transparent in the sunlight; in the 
 Foret the sunlight filtered through 
 the leaves, irradiating the green 
 boles of the trees, and through the 
 hazy sunlight that lay on the fields 
 
6 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 the mound of Waterloo was outlined 
 against the sky. In the Bois. in the 
 xziid^ of woodland pe^ce^ the chil- 
 dren were playing and lover? whis- 
 pej^d still their marvellous discover- 
 ies. Who • . . can think of those 
 days . . . without the memon* of 
 that wonderful sunlight which filled 
 them to the hiim? Day after day 
 went by, witli e^ch new morning the 
 miracle was renewed." 
 
 And then: 
 
 *'The crash of the music of a mili- 
 tary band, high, shrill with the fierce, 
 screaming notes, the horrid clang of 
 mammoth brass c^Tubals. not music^ 
 but noise of a calculated savagery, to 
 strike terror. The Prussian officers 
 "with cruel faces scarred by dueling. 
 Some of the heavier type with rolls 
 of fat the mark of the beast, as 
 Emerson calls it. at the back of the 
 nedi, and red, heavy, brutal faces 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 7 
 
 looking aLout over the heads of the 
 silent, awed, saddened crowd, with 
 arrogant, insolent, contemptuous 
 faces! The heavy guns that lurched 
 by, their mouths of steel lowered to- 
 ward the ground. It became terrible, 
 oppressive, unendurable, monstrous, 
 those black guns on grey carriages; 
 those field-grey uniforms, the insolent 
 faces of those supercilious young offi- 
 cers; those dull plodding soldiers, 
 those thews and sinews, the heels of 
 those clumsy boots drumming on the 
 pavements," 
 
Ill 
 
 IVTOT like that did war come to us. 
 "^ ^ It did not assault our eyes, our 
 ears, our nostrils (some day get Will 
 Irwin to tell you of the smell of war) . 
 It did not come to us as a thing spurt- 
 ing blood and belching thunder. To 
 us war came rather as something on 
 paper, as a thing of documents, and 
 statutes and refinements of interna- 
 tional law, a thing of whereases and 
 therefores. Moreover, the quibbling, 
 the note writing, the refining of verbal 
 distinctions, had been going on for 
 more than two years. 
 
 And war having come to us in this 
 way, there was not in it the quality to 
 stir our emotions. "Flag-decked City 
 is Calm," said the headline in the New 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 9 
 
 York Times on the day that President 
 Wilson read his message. And the 
 bloodiest thing that happened to us in 
 connection with the war that day was 
 recorded in headlines of the same size: 
 "Senator Lodge Knocks Down a Paci- 
 j&st." 
 
IV 
 
 A ND, since the war came to us in 
 ■^ ■*• that way, the question was, and a1 
 the end of a year still is, have we the 
 imagination and that sympathy which 
 in sensitive peoples can take the place 
 of eyes and ears? Can we know war 
 vicariously, through feeling for the 
 Belgians and the French? Have we 
 now the emotion of war? Are we 
 really at war in our hearts? Have we 
 felt 
 
 "That leap of heart whereby a people rise 
 Up to a noble anger's height?" 
 
 Have we had the thing that is neces- 
 sary to "stiffen the sinews, summon up 
 the blood, disguise fair nature with 
 hard-favoured rage?" That is part of 
 
 10 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 11 
 
 what is meant when people talk of a 
 nation's "morale." Germany thinks 
 we have not got it, and there are those 
 among the subtle who believe that Ger- 
 many has conducted herself during the 
 past years with an eye to refraining 
 from anything that would give us this 
 lofty anger. For the theory is that 
 without this emotion a nation can not 
 fight with the energy that alone can 
 make effective war. 
 
 War, after all, when you get down 
 to its essencCj is sticking a bayonet 
 into another man's stomach — and 
 pulling it out and sticking it in again. 
 It is the second thrust that is impor- 
 tant; that can only be inspired by 
 high anger. It is not a thing that a 
 man can do except in emotion. It is 
 against all reason. It is against ev- 
 ^ry moral instinct. It is contrary to 
 all the habits of our ordered lives. 
 It bajinot be done in cold blood. One 
 
12 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 wonders if it can be done with the 
 hands, while with the lips you talk 
 peace. 
 
 It is recognized that for war every 
 nation needs this emotion. The ex- 
 citement that supplies it comes some- 
 times one way, sometimes another. In 
 the Civil War, the excitant was sup- 
 plied by the firing on the American 
 flag. The people had endured the se- 
 cession of six States ; they had endured 
 the formal organization of the Confed- 
 erate Government; they had endured 
 the adoption by that Government of a 
 permanent Constitution. But there 
 was still wanting the thing that would 
 make the nation flame. That want 
 was supplied by the firing on the flag 
 at Fort Sumter. J. G. Holland's 
 "Life of Lincoln" expresses it: 
 
 "The North needed just this. Such 
 a universal burst of patriotic indigna- 
 tion as ran over the North under the 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 13 
 
 injfluence of this insult to the National 
 flag has never been witnessed. It 
 swept away all party lines as if it 
 had been flame and they had been 
 wax." 
 
 Once during this war we had the 
 excitant. Once we had the begin- 
 nings of the emotion. Once we felt 
 in our hearts that rising flame which 
 burns out self and fuses the indi- 
 vidual into the nation. That was the 
 morning after the Lusitania was sunk, 
 when the German nation was revealed 
 to us as something diff'erent from the 
 German friends we knew, as some- 
 thing else than our smiling, good- 
 natured, sentimental friend of the beer 
 garden and the Strauss waltzes; when 
 we learned that the German had sur- 
 rendered his will and his conscience 
 and his soul, and put them at the dis- 
 posal of the cruel will of a pagan 
 autocracy. The German, under the 
 
14 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 yoke and spell of that brutal will, 
 was revealed to us as a man who mur- 
 ders women and children, and then 
 exults over it. And they were our 
 women and children, dependent on 
 our protection, trustful of our will to 
 avenge them. Perhaps as they went 
 down they extracted a measure of 
 noble serenity from the thought that 
 their death would not be in vain, that 
 we would avenge them and that 
 through them Belgium would be 
 avenged, too ; that they were the sacri- 
 fice chosen by fate to rouse this easy- 
 going giant of the West. And we 
 were aroused. Our blood did rise to 
 the call. 
 
 On that sunny morning in May, 
 1915, the tamest and lamest of us 
 would have shouldered a rifle. But 
 President Wilson thought that nego- 
 tiation was better. He threw water 
 on the rising flame. Since the Lusi- 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 15 
 
 tania, now within a few weeks of 
 three years ago, was sunk there has 
 not been any time when this nation 
 has had the feeling of war, the thing 
 that puts punch behind the bayonet. 
 Not yet. 
 
Xp NGLAND'S first year of the war 
 ■■-^ was completed a long time ago, 
 on August 4, 1915. But what a dif- 
 ferent first year it was from ours! 
 On that first anniversary England held 
 a solemn service in St. Paul's Cathe- 
 dral. Solemn it well might be. She 
 numbered her dead in hundreds of 
 thousands. Week after week the 
 lists had come back, a thousand, 
 three thousand, five thousand. The 
 wounded, the wreckage of war, thrust 
 themselves on England's eyes in every 
 street and country road. The enemy 
 had been literally at her throat. He 
 had been on her soil. England had 
 been in the fire. She had passed 
 through Mons and Ypres and the sec- 
 
 16 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 17 
 
 ond Ypres. She had seen new forms 
 of death, ingenious, monstrous. She 
 had tasted horrors — as we have not. 
 
 For although we have been for- 
 mally in the war for exactly a year at 
 the time this is written, we have not 
 yet come to dread the day that brings 
 the week's casualty list, nor learned to 
 cover with silence the fresh draft on 
 our fortitude. When we pick the 
 day's paper up, we have not had the 
 occasion to cover grief with serenity, 
 as a duty to our neighbour with a simi- 
 lar grief. Our wounded have not 
 come limping back to our doorsteps. 
 Our sons have not come home to us 
 in winding sheets. 
 
 In describing that solemn anniver- 
 sary service in St. Paul's, and sum- 
 ming up the first year of the war, the 
 London Times was able to say of the 
 English people: 
 
 "They have borne the ordeal in a 
 
18 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 fashion to which their children may 
 look back with thankfulness and 
 pride. The ordeal has been the hard- 
 est they could have been called upon 
 to undergo . . . They have made un- 
 precedented sacrifices of treasure and 
 blood, they have endured many vicissi- 
 tudes and suffered many disappoint- 
 ments. After all their losses and 
 their efforts, the end is still remote. 
 They know it, and with one accord 
 they face the situation with a rising 
 courage and a gathering resolve. No- 
 where is there a whisper of doubt, of a 
 shadow of irresolution." 
 
 And right there is the difference. 
 We have reached the end of our first 
 year of war. And — it is said not in 
 any spirit of self-reproach but as a 
 simple record of fact — we have noth- 
 ing yet to which ''our children may 
 look back with thankfulness and 
 pride." We have had no ordeal; we 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 19 
 
 have not been touched by the fire. 
 The flower and fruit of war is sacri- 
 fice, and we have made no sacrifice. 
 The spiritual gain of war is sacrifice, 
 and we have gained nothing. We 
 have reaped nothing. 
 But all in good time. 
 
VI 
 
 T^HE people of the United States, 
 -*- during the early weeks of the 
 present year, had what might be de- 
 scribed accurately as their first shock 
 of war. It was not much of a shock. 
 The people awoke one morning to be 
 confronted with an order from their 
 Government commanding them to close 
 down some of their shops and some of 
 their places of amusement for a half a 
 dozen days, more or less. They got 
 very much excited about that. In- 
 deed, I know few things so little to our 
 national credit as the chorus of angry 
 irritation which swept over the land 
 because of that casual inconvenience 
 to our settled ways. To be sure, the 
 
 20 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 21 
 
 order was awkwardly conceived in 
 some of its details, and was put into 
 execution somewhat precipitately. 
 But it was neither as awkward nor as 
 precipitate as shells dropping into 
 your front yard, or a hostile army 
 marching down your principal street. 
 In all the angry outburst I can recall 
 but one newspaper, the New York 
 Globe, among those I happened to 
 read, that took the other note, remind-^ 
 ing its readers that after all we are 
 at war, and I shall always think 
 with pleasure of that one Southern 
 Governor who, when a New York news- 
 paper was soliciting statements for an / 
 organized campaign of denunciation, 
 replied that he did not have access to 
 as many of the facts as Dr. Garfield 
 had, and that in the absence of such 
 knowledge, he chose to assume that the 
 order was justified by some exigency 
 of a nation engaged in war. 
 
22 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 There could be no surer sign that 
 psychologically we are not yet at war 
 than the spirit in which we received 
 that first mild shock, and it did not 
 bode well for our national morale 
 when, ultimately, war calls upon us 
 for real emergencies and sacrifices of 
 the kind that our Allies have come to 
 take as a matter of course. One 
 wonders just how deep our stores of 
 fortitude will turn out to be. 
 
 That first shock last winter was but 
 a premonitory tremor compared to the 
 shocks that are certain to come upon 
 us during the next few months. 
 
 We thought of that recent shock in 
 terms of coal, partly because it came 
 from Dr. Garfield, and partly because 
 Dr. Garfield, not fully understanding 
 it himself, phrased it in terms of coal. 
 In reality it was not a crisis of coal, 
 but a crisis of ships. If the events 
 which led up to the order were set 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 23 
 
 down in sequence, they would read 
 like this: 
 
 England cabled us a call for sup- 
 plies so urgent in its need that any ex- 
 pedient was justifiable; the ships to 
 carry these supplies were in American 
 harbours unable to sail; they were un- 
 able to sail because they had not been 
 coaled. And the reason they had not 
 been coaled was not the lack of coal. 
 The coal was there — but the docks and 
 terminals were so congested with every 
 sort of supplies that it was impossible 
 to get the coal from the sidings on to 
 the ships. Dr. Garfield's closing of 
 factories was designed primarily, not 
 to save coal, but to prevent the further 
 accumulation and congestion of goods 
 which there were no ships to carry. 
 Now if in February this lack of ships 
 is an inconvenience, in July it is going 
 to be a calamity. 
 
VII 
 
 n^HE American people have got to 
 -*- visualize this problem. They 
 have got to put their imaginations on 
 it until they realize it, and carry it 
 about with them as the most important 
 fact of their lives. They must see on 
 one side of the Atlantic Ocean their 
 new-bom army; they must see on the 
 other side of the Atlantic Ocean the 
 food and supplies to keep that army 
 alive. And they must understand that 
 the only thing that joins the two is a 
 thin and fragile line three thousand 
 miles long. There are many dra- 
 matic aspects to this war, but I know 
 of none so appealing as this frail line 
 (which to most of us is merely a series 
 of dots upon a map), made up of ex- 
 
 24 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 25 
 
 ceedingly perishable ships, all too few 
 in number at best, only about one to 
 every two or three miles — and every 
 few hours one of them feels the 
 dreaded shudder, topples and is swal- 
 lowed up. 
 
 This picture is drawn to simplify es- 
 sential truth. It is not overdramatic. 
 That line is the umbilical cord of our 
 little army, and the submarine is 
 gnawing at it every hour of the day. 
 More than that, it is the alimentary 
 canal for a large part of the Allied 
 armies, of the Belgian people, and of 
 the sorely pressed women and children 
 of England, France and Italy. Every 
 rifle made in America is of no avail 
 unless it passes successfully from end 
 to end of that long, thin line. Every 
 shell, every gun, every pound of meat, 
 every grain of wheat, every airplane, 
 the work of every factory in the coun- 
 try, every village making Red Gross 
 
26 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 bandages, every mother writing a let- 
 ter to her soldier son, is dependent 
 upon the maintenance of that line, 
 and it is not being maintained. 
 
 "Not being maintained" is an ab- 
 straction. The casual reader may 
 hurry over it without really taking it 
 in. But we all must pause upon it 
 until we do take it in. We must 
 brood upon it. We must force our 
 imaginations to grapple with this 
 statement, until we can visualize it, 
 until we understand what it means in 
 terms of life and death. Every 
 mother must see her son at the head 
 of a trench, in that ultimate contest 
 of hand and will, to which war sooner 
 or later comes. She must see him 
 alone, fighting for life, for his per- 
 sonal life, pouring out his bullets and 
 his strength as he must; she must see 
 him at the first moment when it comes 
 upon him that his bullets and his 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 27 
 
 strength are running low; she must 
 see him in a second of respite turning 
 his head to see if help is coming, if 
 more bullets are being brought to him, 
 if a comrade is hurrying to his sup- 
 port; she must see that quick back- 
 ward look again and again, until at 
 last there is despair in it. She must 
 know that if help does not come it is 
 because there was not at that spot the 
 quantity that we call enough, that 
 quantity than which one bullet less is 
 failure. And if there is not enough, 
 it is because of one thing: the bullets 
 were at the factory in abundant 
 plenty, the soldiers were called and 
 trained and ready in the cantonments; 
 but somewhere in that long thin line, 
 from the lone outpost on the battle 
 front, back to the bullets factory in 
 Pennsylvania, the weakest link had 
 failed. And our weakest link is ships. 
 
VIII 
 
 of w 
 of communications^ — Napo- 
 
 6<nnjjE secret of war is the secret 
 
 LEON. 
 
 "The direction of military affairs 
 is not half of the work of a general; 
 to establish and guard the communi- 
 cations is more important." — Napo- 
 leon. 
 
 "Any organization intended to 
 maintain the efficiency of armies in the 
 field must depend on communications 
 with home being properly main- 
 tained." — Von Schellendorff: 
 "The Duties of the General Staff." 
 
 "The best system of communications 
 is powerless if there is no transport." 
 — FuRSE : "Lines of Communication in 
 War." 
 
 28 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 29 
 
 "It is an axiom that no army in the 
 field can exist for a long time in an 
 efficient condition unless it has safe 
 communications with its base." — 
 Furse: "Lines of Communication in 
 War." 
 
 "The lines of communication . . . 
 are to be considered as so many great 
 vital arteries." — Clausewitz. 
 
 "The attacker should deprive the 
 enemy of his communications without 
 abandoning his own." — Jomini. 
 
 "Special protection is, in addition, 
 required for the lines of communica- 
 tions of the army, by which all the 
 necessaries of life are brought up to 
 it." — Von der Goltz: "The Conduct 
 of War." 
 
 "The main roads in rear of an ad- 
 vancing army should never be allowed 
 to become empty. . . . The boldest 
 
30 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 and best plan will lead to ultimate 
 failure, if the available resources do 
 not hold out until we have successfully 
 gained the final objective, the attain- 
 ment of which ensures peace." — 
 Clausewitz. 
 
 "The defender will often have 
 to abandon advantageous positions 
 merely for the purpose of securing 
 his lines of communication,^' — Von 
 DER GoLTZ: "The Conduct of War." 
 
 "The lines of communication should 
 be made secure before everything." — 
 Von DER GoLTZ: "The Conduct of 
 War." 
 
 "Further than this only general 
 ideas can be drawn up for future ac- 
 tion. As a rule, they will direct at- 
 tention to separating the enemy from 
 his most important communications, 
 without which the further existence of 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 31 
 
 his forces is imperilled. This is the 
 easiest method of destroying the 
 enemy in the sense in which we use the 
 term in military language." — VoN der 
 GoLTz: "The Conduct of War." 
 
IX 
 
 T^HE British Admiralty tells us 
 ■*- once a week through the news- 
 papers that the submarines have sunk 
 ten ships, or eight ships, or twenty 
 ships "of over 1,600 tons" — that is 
 their phrase and in a way it has lulled 
 us to sleep. The layman neglects the 
 word "over"; in his mind he hastily 
 multiplies 1,600 by ten, or even 
 twenty; he thinks that doesn't sound 
 very serious, and turns to the sporting 
 page. But what the British Admiralty 
 knows, and what our Shipping Board 
 knows, and what every practical ship- 
 ping man knows, is that "over 1,600 
 tons" really means over 5,000 tons. 
 Get that formula: over 1,600 tons 
 means 5,000 tons. And the British 
 
 32 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 33 
 
 Admiralty knows, and our Shipping 
 Board knows, that during a week 
 when twenty ships "of over 1,600 
 tons" are reported, the actual tonnage 
 sunk by the submarines, including 
 smaller ships and French ships and 
 American ships and neutral ships, is 
 about 150,000. And they know fur- 
 ther that during the same week the 
 amount of new shipping built by all 
 the yards in all the Allied world was 
 less than half the amount sunk by sub' 
 marines. And they know further, as 
 well as any man can know anything 
 about the future, that the balance in 
 favour of the submarine is going to be 
 maintained for an indefinite time to 
 come, 
 
 I say "an indefinite time to come." 
 And it is literally that. Of course, if 
 the war continues into 1919, and if we 
 are given time to get our shipbuilding 
 under way — the everlastingly long 
 
34 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 time that our inefficiency demands — 
 and if the Germans don't increase their 
 submarine building as fast as we in- 
 crease our shipbuilding, the time will 
 come when we may reduce this appal- 
 ling proportion in the submarine's 
 favour. But that time is in the indefi- 
 nite future. The official promisers 
 hope that by the end of this year we 
 shall have reduced the proportion to 
 only 4 to 3 in the submarine's favour. 
 But imagine that proportion as the ex- 
 pression of a hope! 
 
TT is true we may increase our new 
 ■■■ construction. But when you put 
 the word "may" before your verb, you 
 are dealing in hope, luck, and blue 
 sky. You can plan, you can "lay 
 down a program," as they say; you 
 can promise and get promises in re- 
 turn — but you cannot be sure. You 
 cannot foresee how accidents, or blind 
 fate, or the forces of nature, may work 
 against you. 
 
 The grim and ominous fact is that 
 England, with all the desperation of 
 her need, with all the warning she has 
 had, with all the intelligence and 
 energy which she has put into the ef- 
 fort to build more ships, is actually 
 
 building fewer ships. Her output 
 35 
 
36 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 during the early months of 1918 is 
 only from a half to three-quarters of 
 her output during the late months of 
 1917. The explanation given is that 
 the men are weary, that they have 
 passed the high point of their capacity 
 to do more even under pressure of 
 great need ; that their second wind has 
 come and gone, that human nature 
 can do no more. In this we get a 
 hint of what is meant by the phrase 
 "a war of exhaustion." 
 
 We, in America, are not weary, for 
 we have not exerted ourselves. We 
 may increase our new construction in 
 time. But what I am willing to as- 
 sert is that during the year 1918, now 
 upon us, we shall not increase it 
 to the necessary point. And what a 
 cautious man will consider when he 
 is in the world of "may" is what are 
 the Germans likely to do in the way 
 of increasing their submarines. On 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 37 
 
 this point, the one thing we know cer- 
 tainly is that they have already in- 
 creased their speed and range. That 
 fact is in the world of "is." I can- 
 not see why they should not be able 
 to increase the number of their sub- 
 marines as fast as we increase the 
 number of targets for them. It was 
 just a little over a year ago that the 
 Germans adopted their unrestricted 
 submarine policy. Presumably, since 
 they committed their fortunes to it, 
 they have settled upon a policy of 
 maximum submarine building. As it 
 takes about a year for such a pro- 
 gram of ship construction to get under 
 way, we may assume that the Ger- 
 man submarine builders are just now 
 getting into their stride. 
 
 But let us stay out of the world of 
 speculation. Let us get into the 
 world of past and present. In the 
 realm of known facts this is the un- 
 
38 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 escapable truth: For every one ton of 
 new ships built in 1917 by all the Al- 
 lies and all the neutrals, the sub' 
 marines sank more than two tons. 
 And that proportion continues up to the 
 hour when these words are being writ- 
 ten, late in March, 1918. 
 
 The facts are put thus in order to be 
 simple and to arrive at a form of state- 
 ment which can be readily understood 
 and indisputably proved. Shipping 
 tonnage is a complex subject, and this 
 complexity is one of the conditions that 
 have put a fog about it and kept the 
 public from being aware of the coming 
 crisis. When the British Admiralty 
 speaks of tonnage, it means gross tons ; 
 when our Shipping Board speaks of 
 tonnage, it means dead weight tons; 
 and many commercial authorities and 
 newspapers, when they speak of ton- 
 nage, mean yet other things, net ton- 
 nage, or measurement tonnage, or 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 39 
 
 displacement tonnage. These tech- 
 nicalities need not be explained here. 
 What the reader is assured is this : that 
 the tons which the submarines are 
 sinking are the same kind of tons that 
 the Allies and neutrals are building, 
 and that the record up to the present is 
 more than two to one in favour of the 
 submarine. 
 
XI 
 
 TOURING 1917, the submarine de- 
 -■-^ stroyed 6,618,623 tons. During 
 the same year, Great Britain's entire 
 new building was but 1,163,474 tons. 
 The next largest builder was our- 
 selves; we turned out just about 1,- 
 000,000 tons. After these two, there 
 are no countries that do enough ship- 
 building to count in such totals as the 
 submarine makes us deal in. All the 
 other Allies, France, Italy, Japan, and 
 in addition to them all the neutrals, 
 Norway, Holland, Spain — all told, 
 produced only 539,871. 
 
 Add together all that was done by 
 all the Allied countries and all the 
 neutral countries, all the world out- 
 side of Germany and Austria, and you 
 
 40 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 41 
 
 have but 2,703,345 tons. And the 
 submarines destroyed just two and a 
 half times as many. 
 
 But the case is really worse than 
 that. It is only the sinkings that are 
 reported. The public is not informed 
 of the ships which the submarines 
 have incapacitated, which are towed 
 limping to port, and which often turn 
 out to be a more or less total loss. 
 Nor is any account taken of the ships 
 which are put out of commission 
 through the normal operation of acci- 
 dent or other misadventure. This 
 source of loss is greater now than dur- 
 ing peace times, for ships are badly 
 manned; they run without lights, and 
 in the emergencies of war they take big 
 chances. Nor is any estimate given — 
 it would be hard to make an estimate 
 — of the loss of service due to the 
 slowness of operation forced upon 
 ships by guarding against the sub- 
 
42 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 marine, the waiting for convoys, tlie 
 low speed entailed when every ship 
 must wait upon the slowest in the con- 
 voy, the inability to use some ports, 
 the congestion of others. 
 
 However, you grow desperate with 
 trying to explain it with figures. 
 What you feel like doing is to shout to 
 Heaven that the submarine is beating 
 the builders at the rate of two to one; 
 that we are facing a crisis; that unless 
 we Americans can now, this year, pull 
 ourselves together and turn out as 
 much tonnage in one month as we 
 turned out in the whole year of 1917 
 the world will suffer a calamity that 
 you hesitate to put in words. 
 
XII 
 
 "PEOPLE do not realize what a rela- 
 -*■ tively frail thing and what a 
 relatively small thing this tonnage is, 
 the one institution upon which our 
 civilization, at the moment, depends 
 — the one thing that enables the na- 
 tions to join hands with each other, 
 the fragile thing upon which they rely 
 for the comfort of communication, the 
 stimulus and cheer of mutual help. 
 
 All the ocean-going ships now in the 
 Atlantic Ocean could be floated side 
 by side in a not very big harbour. 
 Their total surface would not be as 
 large as a country town or a large 
 Western farm. And if a few sub- 
 marines got at them, they would work 
 irreparable havoc among them in half 
 
 43 
 
44 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 an afternoon. All the available ships 
 now remaining afloat in the Allied and 
 neutral world do not aggregate more 
 than about 30,000,000 tons. And the 
 submarine is sinking just about a 
 quarter of them this present year. 
 
 When you state it that way, you 
 think of four years as the critical pe- 
 riod. There is something just like 
 this about the whole subject — some- 
 thing that tends to send your mind off 
 on wrong trails into a false security. 
 It is not when the last Allied ship is 
 sunk that the crisis will come. Star- 
 vation does not wait on a nation until 
 the last loaf of bread has been eaten. 
 Starvation begins when the food sup- 
 ply falls a certain percentage, a not 
 very large percentage, below normal. 
 And the Allied shipping has long been 
 below normal. As long ago as Jan- 
 uary 1, 1917, before we were in the 
 war, before our army added to the 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 45 
 
 need, the British estimated that ship- 
 ping had fallen more than 300 vessels 
 below their normal requirements. 
 And bear in mind that our entrance 
 into the war does not help, but makes 
 worse, the shortage of shipping. 
 
 At the present speed of operation, 
 it takes a ton of shipping a year to 
 carry one soldier to France — to carry 
 one soldier just in his clothes without 
 any supplies. To keep him supplied 
 with food and rifles and ammunition 
 and guns and shells and trucks and 
 airplanes and locomotives and rails, 
 takes an amount of shipping variously 
 estimated at from four to ten tons. 
 Call it six tons, and you will have light 
 on some of the talk that we have heard 
 and read about what we are going to 
 do. It has been said in high quarters 
 that we must send seven million sol- 
 diers. And so we ought, and, prob- 
 ably, ultimately must. But to talk 
 
46 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 about that in the present condition of 
 our shipping is a grotesque joke. 
 To send seven million soldiers and 
 keep them supplied would take about 
 twice as many ships as are now on all 
 the oceans of the world. To send two 
 million soldiers would consume the 
 capacity of nearly half the ships afloat. 
 And this would be in addition to pres- 
 ent needs, which are already so great 
 that a crisis is in sight. 
 
 After Secretary Baker's testimony 
 before a Senate investigating commit- 
 tee early this year, the Washington 
 Times ran a headline which read : 
 
 BAKER DECLARES 1,500,000 WILL 
 BE IN FRANCE IN 1918. 
 
 And the New York Herald's headline, 
 equally positive and equally definite, 
 gave the figure as "2,000,000." Now 
 the fact is Secretary Baker did not say 
 that. He didn't say we would have 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 47 
 
 2,000,000 soldiers in France this year. 
 He didn't say we would have 1,500,- 
 000 soldiers in France this year. He 
 didn't say we would have 1,000,000 
 soldiers in France this year. What he 
 did say was this: "We will have 
 more than a half million men in 
 France early in 1918." 
 
 And at that the Secretary is taking a 
 considerable chance. It would be in- 
 teresting to check the figures up on 
 July 1. If, in order to make a record, 
 he does send enough more soldiers to 
 make up half a million, he will run 
 the risk of embarrassing the British 
 and French, who are dependent on us 
 for supplies. And if he gets half a 
 million American soldiers into France 
 during the first half of the year, it will 
 be most interesting to watch what hap- 
 pens the second half. 
 
 As soon as you get half a million 
 soldiers into France at our present 
 
48 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 speed of operation, and considering 
 the bulky nature of some of the things 
 we must send, like airplanes, you have 
 permanently mortgaged three million 
 tons of shipping to keep them sup- 
 plied. But the public, which glances 
 at the headlines and doesn't read the 
 testimony, thinks we are going to have 
 a million and a half or two million 
 soldiers in France this year. Thus 
 another brick is laid in the structure 
 of complacency which the American 
 people have been building up. That 
 brick will be used to hurl at some- 
 body a few months later on, when the 
 structure comes tumbling down. 
 
 Of course, the careless and hasty 
 headline writer is to blame. But 
 there is an additional explanation. I 
 think Secretary Baker is a little to 
 blame. Rather, I should say he is 
 partially responsible — but not so much 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 49 
 
 to blame. There is something about 
 this subject of shipping, a psycholog- 
 ical quality which lends itself to 
 equivocal construction. Everybody in 
 official Washington is that way when 
 talking for publication about ships and 
 submarines. And so this false sense 
 of security about the submarine has 
 grown up. 
 
 I think the explanation is this: the 
 official custodian of the facts about 
 the submarine is England. The few 
 people in Washington who have the 
 figures at all have them as an official 
 secret from the British Admiralty. 
 For purposes of its own that may be 
 good or not, official England has 
 chosen to be cryptic about the facts. 
 And official Washington feels under an 
 obligation to respect England's wishes, 
 whether it thinks secrecy good judg- 
 ment or not — and so, whenever a 
 
50 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 Washington official touches the subject 
 of ships and submarines at all, he does 
 it with an air of pussy-footing which 
 leads the public to a false impression 
 of security. 
 
XIII 
 
 FOR over a year, ever since the "un- 
 restricted" form of submarine 
 warfare began, the proportion has 
 been steadily and continuously more 
 than two to one in favour of the sub- 
 marine. During all that time we have 
 lived through a rapidly accelerating 
 diminution of ships. And yet, during 
 all that time we have seen nothing in 
 the newspapers in the nature of warn- 
 ing. Nor have we received any warn- 
 ing from public men, except one that 
 came from former Chairman Denman 
 of the Shipping Board in May, 1917, 
 and which though repeated in June 
 and July, went unheeded. 
 
 Uniformly, the headlines in the 
 newspapers have sounded optimistic, 
 
 51 
 
52 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 as if the submarine were a peril that 
 had passed, as if, somehow, we had 
 eluded it, and that the laugh was on 
 the Germans. Minor aspects of the 
 situation would be picked out and ex- 
 ploited, like this: "U. S. Adds More 
 Tonnage Than Submarine Sinks." 
 Now that headline was quite true, so 
 far as it went. The United States, 
 by taking over the German and 
 Austrian ships, did add more to Amer- 
 ican tonnage than the submarine sunk 
 — of American tonnage. For there 
 was very little American tonnage for 
 the submarine to sink. The fact dis- 
 closed in this particular piece of news 
 meant nothing as respects the sub- 
 marine situation as a whole. But the 
 American reader got the idea that 
 everything was all right. 
 
 The pages of this book could be 
 filled with headlines from American 
 newspapers during the past year, all 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 53 
 
 giving an optimistic slant to the news 
 about the submarine. Whenever a 
 week came in which the submarine 
 sunk one or two ships less than the 
 previous week, the newspapers pro- 
 claimed "Submarine Effectiveness 
 Failing." Whenever some enthusiast 
 thought he had invented a non-sinkable 
 ship, the newspapers told the story at 
 length and on the first page. But 
 when the naval experts got around to 
 laughing the invention out of court, 
 the newspapers made nothing of that 
 news. 
 
 It was not deliberate deception on 
 the part of the newspapers and the 
 headline writers. Partly, they were 
 catering to our national psychology. 
 We like to hear the thing of which 
 we can boast, and we shrink from the 
 facts that bring duty and sacrifice be- 
 fore our eyes. 
 
 In some cases the writers were as 
 
54 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 much misled as the rest of us. It 
 wasn't their business to get all the facts 
 about the submarine together and find 
 out the true direction of events. In 
 the nature of things the headline 
 writer cannot be held to a standard of 
 complete knowledge on all the subjects 
 he deals with. To have all these facts 
 together was the business of the British 
 Admiralty. Indeed, the British Ad- 
 miralty throughout the year followed 
 a deliberate policy of keeping the 
 facts away from the public. They 
 knew what the facts were, and they 
 knew what the public thought the facts 
 were; and they did nothing about it. 
 
XIV 
 
 T HAVE been at some pains to find 
 -*- out what was the motive of the 
 British Admiralty in concealing the 
 facts, and giving out such reports as 
 they did give out in the cryptic form of 
 "ships under 1,600 tons" and "ships 
 over 1,600 tons." The reason I got 
 was this: that the submarine com- 
 mander never or rarely can know the 
 size of the ship he sinks; his only op- 
 portunity to look at her lasts but a few 
 seconds ; the consequence is he usually 
 goes home and reports to the German 
 navy that he has sunk a bigger ship 
 than he really has; that later the true 
 facts come out : that this makes friction 
 between the submarine crews and the 
 
 navy officials in Berlin; and that all 
 55 
 
56 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 this helps to break down German 
 morale. That is the reasoning as 
 given to me. It sounds pretty ten- 
 uous and far-fetched. Possibly the 
 British Admiralty did not realize how 
 seriously the American reader, who 
 knows so much less of shipping than 
 the English reader, would miscon- 
 strue the phrase "over 1,600 tons." 
 To every shipping man, the phrase 
 meant an average of over 5,000 tons. 
 But shipping men are very rare in 
 America. If the information had 
 come to us in terms of 5,000 tons, the 
 delusion would not have lasted so long. 
 The loss of a ship of 5,000 tons might 
 have impressed us for what it is, a 
 very serious matter. A ship of 5,000 
 tons is a big and complex machine. 
 To build it took, all told, from plates 
 to completion, the work of a thousand 
 men for a period of several months. 
 Equivocation in a good cause is dan- 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 57 
 
 gerous business. Equivocation be- 
 gun for the purpose of deceiving the 
 Germans led to some things which 
 have been unpleasantly close to equiv- 
 ocation for the sake of deceiving Eng- 
 lishmen and Americans. The British 
 Admiralty several times picked out 
 minor and immaterial aspects of the 
 whole case, and told the public and 
 parliament, in terms of the graphic 
 charts on which statistics are kept, 
 that "the curves are satisfactory." As 
 a matter of fact, there is only one 
 graphic chart that shows the true net 
 of the situation. 
 
 Submarine sinkings may rise or fall 
 in comparison with previous months; 
 the destruction of submarines by de- 
 stroyers may rise; but the only true 
 net is this: the comparison of sub- 
 marine sinkings with new construction, 
 i.e., the state of the whole volume of 
 shipping afloat in the Allied and neu- 
 
58 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 tral world — Is it holding its own? 
 Is it being increased or decreased? 
 A graphic method of showing that 
 for the first year of "unrestricted" sub- 
 marine warfare would look like this: 
 
 Tonnage sunk by submarines 
 New tonnage buih 
 
 Sir Eric Geddes, on the anniversary 
 of the German policy of unrestricted 
 sinking, February 1, gave out a state- 
 ment which included this sentence: 
 "The submarine is held." Naturally 
 that phrase of cryptic optimism was 
 the one which found its way into the 
 headlines. Now, if Sir Eric meant that 
 statement in the narrow sense, that the 
 submarine is not sinking more ships 
 per week, or per month, than for- 
 merly, he may possibly get away with 
 it. But if he meant it in the sense 
 that the American public took it, he 
 cannot defend it. The natural mean- 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 59 
 
 ing of that sentence is that the amount 
 of shipping afloat is not being reduced. 
 And in that sense the statement is 
 fatally incorrect. 
 
 Another of the optimistic statements' 
 given out by the newspapers on Feb- 
 ruary 1, contained the assertion that 
 Great Britain buih last year 2,850,000 
 tons. That statement contains about 
 150 per cent, of inaccuracy. The 
 true amount of tonnage built by Great 
 Britain in 1917 was 1,163,474— a 
 figure ominously below her normal 
 output of new tonnage. And it is the 
 output of new tonnage in its relation 
 to submarine sinkings — the two taken 
 together — that really shows the true 
 condition. 
 
 Under pressure of widespread 
 questioning, late in March of the pres- 
 ent year, the British authorities gave 
 out some of the figures which they had 
 previously kept secret. But again, as 
 
60 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 always, they put out their statement in 
 such a form and accompanied by such 
 an atmosphere of optimistic inference, 
 as was likely to leave the public undis- 
 turbed. The figures, so far as they 
 went, were complete and detailed, and 
 that fact too was calculated to give the 
 public a false sense of assurance. ^^ 
 But, complete and detailed as the fig- 
 ures were, their arrangement was mis- 
 leading. The public do not analyse 
 the figures for themselves ; neither, un- 
 happily, do the writers of the news- 
 paper headlines. Both the public and 
 the headline writers deal in phrases 
 and impressions, and so again we have 
 the chorus of "Submarine Situation 
 Improves." 
 
 The British Admiralty went back to 
 the beginning of the war in August, 
 1914, and gave the total submarine de- 
 struction since that date; then they 
 gave the total of new ship construction 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 61 
 
 since that date. Then they compared 
 the two, and the comparison did not 
 look so bad — 11,827,572 tons sunk 
 against 6,606,275 new tons built. 
 
 But what the public do not realize, 
 and what the British Admiralty realize 
 but avoid pointing out, is this: these 
 totals include thirty months when 
 the submarine was working "re- 
 stricted," working, that is to say, at 
 only about one-third of its capacity; 
 and only eleven months when the sub- 
 marine was operating "unrestricted." 
 This arrangement of figures looks 
 plausible enough; but in truth no bet- 
 ter arrangement could be invented 
 from which to derive misleading to- 
 tals, misleading averages, and to ac- 
 quire a most dangerously misleading 
 impression that, while the submarine 
 is pretty serious, it is not ultimately 
 terrifying. 
 
 The true time to begin with the fig- 
 
62 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 ures is February 1, 1917, the date 
 when the submarine began to operate 
 "unrestricted." We are not able to 
 begin there because the British Ad- 
 mirahy did not give the figures by 
 months, but merely by quarters. But 
 take the figures as they are given to 
 us; give the Admiralty the benefit of 
 a "restricted" month, and begin with 
 January 1, 1917. Here are the re- 
 sults for the year 1917: 
 
 Number of new tons built . . 2,703,355 
 Number of tons sunk by sub- 
 marine 6,623,623 
 
 There you have the true situation. 
 As a matter of fact, it is somewhat 
 worse than this, for these figures, as 
 has been said, include one month when 
 the submarine was operating "re- 
 stricted," at about one-third of its ca- 
 pacity. The fact is that during the 
 year 1917, when the submarine was 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 63 
 
 working at full capacity — ^working the 
 way in which we are fairly entitled to 
 make deductions (because that is the 
 way it is going to be working until 
 the war ends) — during that period the 
 submarine sank two and a half tons 
 to every one ton built. 
 
 To such a relation between sinkings 
 and new building there can be only 
 one end, and that end will be a tragic 
 one for us unless the relation is 
 changed. And, on the day when this is 
 written, April 1, 1918, the relation has 
 not materially changed. So far as it 
 has changed at all, it has changed for 
 the worse, because England and the 
 United States have both been falling 
 down tragically in the work of new 
 construction. 
 
XV 
 
 TT is given out from various author- 
 -*- ties that we are doing better in the 
 way of beating off the submarine. 
 And we are. There can be no crit- 
 icism of the activities of our Navy De- 
 partment and the British navy, in the 
 way of protection. The gallantry 
 and ingenuity of both navies in hunt- 
 ing the submarine down form one of 
 the most cheering chapters of the war. 
 It is not any magic new device that is 
 capturing or checking the submarine. 
 There isn't any magic device, although 
 the newspapers have occasionally 
 printed cryptic news which may well 
 have led a part of the public to sup- 
 pose a specific remedy for the sub- 
 marine has been invented. No, it is 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 65 
 
 only the use of all the old devices to 
 the highest degree of effectiveness. 
 And particularly, it is energy and 
 courage on the part of the officers 
 and crews. 
 
 The only tested way to meet the sub- 
 marine is the way that enemies and 
 danger have always been met, if met 
 successfully — by hunting it, by search- 
 ing it out and chasing it up and down 
 the ocean. It is being met not so 
 much by any easy, patented protection, 
 as by aggressive pursuit of it. 
 
 And yet withal, the final, solemn un- 
 escapable fact is that the submarine 
 today, with our navy and the British 
 navy both pursuing it, is doing just 
 about as much damage to the Allies, 
 all the factors considered, as it did 
 more than a year ago with only the 
 British navy opposing it. The thing 
 we lose sight of is that, while our de- 
 fensive improves, the submarine of- 
 
66 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 fensive improves too, and at a rate 
 that, for practical purposes, all fac- 
 tors considered, is step by step with 
 our defence. 
 
 When we talk about the real offset 
 to the submarine, the building of new 
 ships, there is no answer to it except 
 a humiliating searching of hearts. 
 Barring the warnings which were is- 
 sued during the early days of the war, 
 by former Chairman Denman of the 
 Shipping Board, the Government has 
 fed to us and to itself the most fatal 
 kind of optimism. 
 
 One who has been on the ground, 
 who has studied the conditions, and 
 who has no motive to feed the people 
 with false incentives to hope, is able 
 to say that we are falling down on the 
 estimates that have been given as 
 necessary to meet the need. The fixed 
 fact of history is that during 1917, 
 and right up to the present, we — 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 67 
 
 meaning by "we" not merely the 
 United States but all the Allies, and 
 all the neutrals as well — we have been 
 building less than half as many ships 
 as the submarine has been destroying. 
 As a matter of history, this opulent 
 United States, with all its facilities and 
 resources, during the month of Jan- 
 uary, 1918, buih only 52,000 gross 
 tons. And England built only a little 
 more, about 58,000 tons. And that is 
 all that was built. (The building of 
 ships in other Allied and neutral coun- 
 tries has become negligible.) Of the 
 destruction by submarines during that 
 month, the figures have not been given 
 out; but if it was an average month, 
 the submarine sunk just about five 
 times as many tons as were built. 
 
XVI 
 
 1\ /[" OST of our talk has been of our 
 ■^'-■- "program." "Program" is a 
 word of the future and is tolerant of 
 loose talk. It is in the world of hope, 
 luck and blue sky. The President sev- 
 eral months ago spoke of "the 6,000,- 
 000 tons we will build in 1918." We 
 shall not build them. The Chairman 
 of the Shipping Board, Mr. Hurley, 
 has spoken of 4,000,000 or 5,000,000. 
 We shall not build them. We shall 
 not build more than 3,000,000 tons. 
 And 3,000,000 tons is not enough to 
 avert calamity. 
 
 What we are doing, primarily, is not 
 building ships, but getting ready to 
 build ships. Mr. Hurley knows this, 
 
 and is sensible enough to say so. Be- 
 es 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 69 
 
 fore the Senate Committee he testified : 
 "The work thus far has been in many- 
 cases preparatory, and has carried 
 with it the usual amount of annoyances 
 and disappointments." 
 
 We are engaged in an effort to in- 
 crease, within a year, our ship-build- 
 ing capacity between 1,200 and 1,500 
 per cent. That is an immense task, 
 and confusion has attended it. We 
 are not a shipping nation any more 
 than we are a military nation, and we 
 are going through the awkward stum- 
 blings of learning at one and the same 
 time to fight on land and swim on 
 water. But although we are not a 
 shipping nation we are decidedly sup- 
 posed to be a business nation. And 
 it is in the field of business that we 
 have fallen down. Our vital mistakes 
 have occurred not in aquatics but in 
 the field of business organization. 
 Mr. Hurley recited one in his testi- 
 
70 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 mony before tlie investigating com- 
 mittee of tlie Senate: 
 
 ''"We sent Uso tourist sleeping cars 
 loaded witli men for Western ship- 
 yards a short while ago. and we were 
 asked to give tlieni priority to get tliem 
 out tliere. .\nd tlien the Eastern ship- 
 yards went out tliere and employed 
 riveters awa^' from those veiy* yards on 
 tlie Pacific Coast. . . . Tlie new ship- 
 yards starting in difi'erent localities 
 impaired tlie efficiency of the old-es- 
 tablished yards, because they went out 
 and hired men away from each odier. 
 The new yard would give a bonus to a 
 man to get him to work for tliem, and 
 take him away from the other yard." 
 
 That is to say, men w^ho are building 
 ships have been hired away to build 
 yards in which to get ready to build 
 ships. 
 
 Now that sort of blundering has 
 notliing to do witli aquatics. No 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 71 
 
 amount of knowledge of shipping, or 
 experience in it, would have taught 
 us how to avoid that particular kind 
 of inefficiency. The qualities of or- 
 ganization that apply to all big busi- 
 ness are the ones that have been miss- 
 ing in that kind of mistake. One be- 
 gins to be dubious about the "busi- 
 ness efficiency" America has boasted 
 about. 
 
 Another of the causes of our woeful 
 delay in getting down to business in 
 ship-building was described by Mr. 
 Homer Ferguson, President of the 
 Newport News Shipbuilding Com- 
 pany, one of the big companies relied 
 upon to construct the larger items in 
 our program. Newport News, at the 
 time we went to war, was a comfortable 
 little city of 30,000. A year later it 
 had 60,000 people, with all the inde- 
 scribable confusion of new streets, new 
 sewers, and new houses that results 
 
72 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 when a town more than doubles its 
 population in a few months. Was the 
 increase in population due to an in- 
 crease in ship-building capacity? If 
 it were, there would be comfort in the 
 confusion. It was not. The primary 
 cause of this boom was the action of 
 the War Department in creating, 
 alongside this little city devoted to 
 shipbuilding, a new army encamp- 
 ment, with all its demands on labour 
 and housing. "Our situation was 
 rendered ridiculous," said Mr. Fergu- 
 son to the Senate Committee, "by this 
 action of the War Department. ... I 
 have information this morning that 
 they could not get any water in the 
 shipyard. The army has 15,000 
 horses there, all using water, and we 
 have 20,000 soldiers there using 
 water. 
 
 "We have the Navy Department 
 work, which we are directed to expe- 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 73 
 
 dite in every possible way, and we 
 have the Shipping Board work, which 
 we are directed to expedite as much as 
 possible; and in the same week I have 
 instructions from either one of the 
 Government departments to give their 
 work priority, and in the meantime 
 the very people we are trying to 
 serve are absorbing the facilities we 
 must have for our people in order to 
 do this work. ... I took this mat- 
 ter up with the Secretary of War, and 
 wrote him a letter, and discussed it 
 with everybody in Washington I could 
 discuss it with, and the Secretary is 
 investigating and, I understand, pro- 
 poses to put up some temporary quar- 
 ters for the soldiers and the regular 
 officers." 
 
 When this was stated to the com- 
 mittee Senator Johnson said: "That 
 indicates lack of management and ut- 
 ter lack of co-operation?" and Mr. 
 
74 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 Ferguson replied: "It is due to the 
 fact that the people have the power to 
 arbitrarily give orders without know- 
 ing the consequences of the orders they 
 give." 
 
 Senator Johnson added: "And 
 without knowing who else gives 
 orders?" 
 
 "Yes, Sir," replied Mr. Ferguson. 
 
 Here with all the map of the United 
 States to choose from, the War De- 
 partment selected, as the place to 
 build a cantonment (with all its de- 
 mands on local labour and housing), 
 a small city which was already relied 
 upon by the navy and the Shipping 
 Board to expand to double its size in 
 taking care of the requirements of 
 those two departments. 
 
 The answer, of course, is that these 
 three departments had never been 
 brought together. There was no cen- 
 tral planning and co-ordination — no 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 75 
 
 "top-planning." It has not been in- 
 experience in ship-building that has 
 caused the worst blunders. It has 
 been a lack of those qualities of busi- 
 ness administration in which America 
 has so long boasted her pre-eminence. 
 
XVII 
 
 I HAVE dwelt upon the necessity for 
 more tonnage. And by more ton- 
 nage, I mean new tonnage, tonnage ac- 
 quired through work. 
 
 To a certain extent the responsible 
 officials have been deluding themselves 
 and the public by a process of beating 
 the devil around the stump. When 
 Secretary Baker was asked by the 
 Senate Investigating Committee how 
 he would be able to send to France so 
 large a number of troops as he had 
 said he would send, he disclosed the 
 fact that among other devices he 
 hoped to be able to get some ships 
 from the Japanese. And it was a fact 
 that negotiations with the Japanese 
 were under way at that time. But im- 
 
 76 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 77 
 
 mediately thereafter there arose the 
 crisis which made it necessary for the 
 Japanese to consider their own prob- 
 lem of possibly taking an army of 
 their own to Siberia. Finally, when 
 the negotiations came to an end, all 
 that Japan gave us was 250,000 tons, 
 about a two-weeks meal for the sub- 
 marine. So long as you rely on 
 makeshifts of this kind, the accidents 
 are apt to run counter to your hopes. 
 The Dutch ships have been taken 
 over; but the Dutch ships were just as 
 available for most of the Allied serv- 
 ice when they were neutral as when 
 they are under United States registry. 
 Much has been made of the taking 
 over of the German and Austrian in- 
 terned ships. But all this is mere ex- 
 pedient. It provides no new resource. 
 It is the sort of thing a man does when 
 bankruptcy threatens him; he digs up 
 little stores from here and there. But 
 
78 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 the only thing that can surely save him 
 is a new source of revenue. And the 
 thing that we must have is a continu- 
 ously flowing reservoir of new ton- 
 nage, with a flow which must be at 
 least as great as the rate of submarine 
 destruction, and ought to be very much 
 greater. 
 
 There is nothing for it but new ships 
 from new ship-yards. There is noth- 
 ing for it but work. 
 
XVIII 
 
 THE problem is primarily one of 
 new ships. But it is also one of 
 ships plus speed of operation. For if 
 a ship is consuming sixty days for each 
 round-trip, and you cut that down to 
 thirty, you have, in effect, double the 
 quantity of available tonnage. 
 
 The director of operations for the 
 United States Shipping Board is Mr. 
 Edward F. Carry. As he was testify- 
 ing before the Senate Investigating 
 Committee, Senator Bankhead asked 
 him this question: 
 
 "How many days are required to 
 make the round trip from New York 
 and back?" 
 
 Mr. Carry — "Under normal condi- 
 tions you mean?" 
 
 79 
 
80 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 Senator Bankhead — "Yes.'* 
 
 Mr. Carry — "They ought to make a 
 round trip in three weeks. Now that 
 the congestion is so great, it takes 
 from fifty to sixty days to make a 
 round trip." 
 
 That point, so grim in its signifi- 
 cance, passed unnoticed by the sena- 
 torial investigators. Consider this: 
 with this speed of operation, it takes 
 about one ton of shipping one year to 
 carry one soldier to Europe. That, if 
 you reflect upon it, is appalling. 
 Some of the facts that make it ap- 
 palling are unescapable and must be 
 faced. The rest arise from intoler- 
 able inefficiency. 
 
 One of the seized German ships now 
 used in carrying our soldiers to 
 France, has a tonnage of about 20,000. 
 With this capacity she carries about 
 3,500 soldiers per trip. To carry as 
 many soldiers as her tonnage, 20,000, 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 81 
 
 she must make six trips. Under pres- 
 ent conditions she is making at the 
 rate of just six trips a year. She con- 
 sumes sixty days for each round trip. 
 She ought to make it in less than thirty 
 days. When she was operated by her 
 German captain and his Hamburg- 
 American crew she used to make the 
 round trip in three weeks. The dif- 
 ference between sixty days and twenty- 
 one days is not wholly accounted for 
 by war. The submarine is not re- 
 sponsible for all of that. 
 
 To be sure, a fast passenger ship 
 cannot go at top speed because she 
 must keep step with her convoy. But 
 that only accounts for a few days. 
 The difference between sixty days and 
 thirty days is the difference between 
 Hamburg-American management and 
 unhyphenated American management. 
 It is the difference between German 
 efficiency and — where did we hear that 
 
82 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 phrase before — American efficiency. 
 As a Washington official said in the 
 safety of private conversation: "The 
 great American bluff is being called, 
 and the show-down isn't pretty to look 
 at. We are turning out to be two- 
 spots; and in a show-down two-spots 
 are valuable only when found in a 
 rigidly limited order and arrange- 
 ment." 
 
 We used to laugh a good deal at 
 Russia about the congestion at Arch- 
 angel. Returning travellers and the 
 newspapers used to tell us about the 
 acres and acres of supplies piled up 
 on the docks, and for miles back of 
 the docks, both at Archangel and Vla- 
 divostok, without adequate transporta- 
 tion facilities to get them to the front, 
 where they were needed. We used to 
 say, with kindly tolerance, that Russia 
 wasn't a grown-up nation, that she 
 hadn't developed the genius for or- 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 83 
 
 ganization. Well, within a few 
 months that Russian situation is going 
 to be duplicated in the United States. 
 We are making guns, rifles, shells, air- 
 planes, and other supplies many times 
 as fast as we can possibly transport 
 them to the only point where they are 
 of any use. Mr. Hurley says there 
 are munitions now in the United 
 States, already manufactured, which 
 will not reach France for two years, 
 because of the lack of ships. 
 
 Everything comes back to ships. 
 This nation is manufacturing muni- 
 tions at the rate of five times the carry- 
 ing capacity of our shipping. We are 
 turning out some millions of tons of 
 goods which are of use only at one 
 spot on the earth's surface, the battle 
 front in France. And we have not 
 got, because we did not plan and co- 
 ordinate, one-fifth the amount of ship- 
 ping necessary to carry those muni- 
 
84 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 tions to the spot where they must go. 
 It is as if we had built a huge factory 
 with only a two-by-five door out of 
 which to move the finished product 
 and with only a narrow-gauge rail- 
 road and a donkey engine to get it to 
 market. 
 
 The result is going to be worse than 
 you will realize unless you reflect 
 upon it. The stuff is going to pile 
 up on our docks, and back up on our 
 switches, and congest our railroads to 
 the point of paralysis, and our great 
 war machine will have to slow down 
 before it has fairly got under way. 
 The consequences, economic and mili- 
 tary, are going to be extremely seri- 
 ous. And they will be on us in only 
 a few weeks. 
 
 It is just a year ago the sixth of 
 next month that we began to manufac- 
 ture shells and guns. And it is only 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 85 
 
 today that we are trying frantically to 
 get the men to build the yards to build 
 the ships to carry these shells and guns 
 to France. 
 
XIX 
 
 "EVERYTHING comes back to this 
 -" one word — ships. The recent 
 order of President Wilson and Mr. 
 Hoover, enforcing a reduced consump- 
 tion of wheat, was called a food order. 
 In reality it had to do, not with a 
 scarcity of food, but with the scarcity 
 of ships. The wheat is there — mil- 
 lions of bushels of it, but there are no 
 ships to carry it. Thereby hangs one 
 of the most picturesque incidents of 
 the war. 
 
 Three years ago the Australian 
 Government bought and contracted 
 for all the wheat crop of that country. 
 Then it bought some twenty-one ships 
 to carry the wheat to Europe. But the 
 submarine has had its way with those 
 
 86 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 87 
 
 ships, and today not more than four or 
 five of them are left. Meantime the 
 wheat has been piling up along the 
 Australian docks and railroads. 
 They put some of it in sacks, made 
 walls of the sacked wheat, and poured 
 the rest within the walls. 
 
 Along the railroads in the interior 
 of Australia there were great bins of 
 wheat ten or twenty feet high and 
 wide, and more than ten miles long. 
 Soon mice appeared. . They began to 
 gnaw through the bags, and the 
 hempen walls collapsed. Under such 
 favourable conditions, the mice mul- 
 tiplied until they became a plague. 
 The Government put its shoulder to the 
 perfectly serious business of fighting 
 mice. It had special ways of catch- 
 ing them, and crews of men with 
 specially constructed incinerators. 
 Night after night they burned five to 
 ten tons of mice in a single night. 
 
88 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 But the mice continued to increase. 
 On the soil of Australia, for a few 
 days, man's age-long contest with the 
 forces of nature became an acute 
 pitched battle. Man won a respite 
 only when some mysterious law of na- 
 ture brought a plague upon the mice, 
 a disease described as a sort of soft 
 ringworm. Then the mice, fleeing 
 from the infection, deserted the wheat 
 piles and ravaged the fields, so that 
 the new crop of Australian wheat is 
 only a fraction of what normally it 
 ought to be. 
 
 Meantime, men who had been try- 
 ing to salvage the piled-up wheat were 
 infected by the disease whose germs 
 had been left in the wheat by the de- 
 parting mice. From the workmen the 
 infection spread to their families and 
 neighbors. That is the story as given 
 to me by an Australian official. It 
 ought to be tempting to some writer 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 89 
 
 who has the talent to do it justice and 
 the leisure to get more of the details. 
 There in Australia — about as far 
 away from the battle fields as you can 
 get and remain on this earth — is a 
 sort of huge cancer, a direct result of 
 the war — more specifically a direct 
 result of the famine in ships, a direct 
 result of the submarine. 
 
XX 
 
 THE war is 3000 miles away from 
 us. You can tell the nature of 
 a man by the way he speaks of this 
 3000 miles. To the timid it gives an 
 \ agreeable sense of security. To the 
 half-hearted, it is a source of satisfac- 
 tion. To those who hope there will be 
 a negotiated peace, or that the war 
 will be ended somehow without our 
 making any serious sacrifice, this 
 3000 miles is an advantage. But to 
 the brave this distance is not a safe- 
 guard; it is a difficulty. If we really 
 want to fight, if we wish to be in the 
 war, if we want to come to grips with 
 the enemy, then this three thousand 
 miles is our greatest handicap. 
 
 90 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 91 
 
 If there were such a thing as calling 
 for a miracle and getting it, if an 
 omnipotent being should do the one 
 thing that would help us most toward 
 throwing all our strength against Ger- 
 many, the thing he would do would be 
 this: He would pick up this conti- 
 nent of ours and set it down along side 
 France, New York touching Havre, 
 Savannah touching Bordeaux. Pic- 
 ture how that would change the face 
 of the war. But there is no answer 
 to a prayer except it starts from our 
 own hearts; and the only miracle that 
 springs to our help in time of des- 
 perate need is the miracle of our own 
 capacity when necessity makes us dip 
 the bucket to the very bottom of the 
 resources within ourselves. Never- 
 theless the truth is this particular 
 miracle can be approximated. We 
 can put across the Atlantic Ocean 
 what in effect would be a bridge join- 
 
92 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 ing us to France. We can, if we go to 
 the highest of our energies and the 
 deepest of our resources, build ships 
 so many, so fast and so co-ordinated 
 that soldiers and supplies can go on to 
 the battle-front as expeditiously as if 
 the two continents were touching. 
 But we can only achieve this by the 
 uttermost effort of our capacities. 
 
 William James has an allusion to 
 the familiar phenomenon called "sec- 
 ond-wind," that higher and quicker 
 functioning of lungs and heart and 
 spirit which comes to us only after we 
 have exhausted what is our ordinary 
 best. Ordinarily we pass into second- 
 wind only when there is the stimulus 
 of some terrible need, when we are 
 pursued by a devil of desperation. 
 But James' essay makes the point that 
 in place of a devil of desperation, we 
 can substitute our own will-power, if 
 we have the will-power; that all of us, 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 93 
 
 if our wills were strong enough and 
 well-disciplined enough could go 
 through life or second-wind all the 
 time. The occasional man who does 
 this becomes, in the eyes of the in- 
 dolent rest of us, a sort of super-man. 
 But all of us can do it. If this crisis 
 of shipping could be made vivid 
 enough to us, we would see in it just 
 such a devil of menace as would 
 stimulate us to our second-wind. 
 
 Some one of our ancestors who 
 invented the metaphors which still 
 form the bulk of our figures of speech, 
 spoke of "the crack of doom," hence 
 we all think of doom as something 
 that comes with a crash, something 
 that startles us and is easily recogniza- 
 ble. The truth is that only occasion- 
 ally does doom come in that way. 
 It generally comes gradually, fur- 
 tively, by the slow, unnoticed disin- 
 tegration of one prop after another. 
 
94 . WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 It is only the completed thing, the ac- 
 cumulated product that makes a 
 noise. It is hardly of the nature of 
 doom to announce itself with trum- 
 pets. It is part of the devilishness of 
 most forms of doom that they creep 
 upon us. 
 
 I wonder would this situation reach 
 our hearts if we should send couriers 
 through the country like Paul Revere, 
 calling out "two to one; two to one"; 
 if we should have the police in the 
 cities warn each home just as he would 
 give warning of fire or of flood ; if we 
 should adopt a code for all our bells 
 and whistles and gongs, and sound 
 them as we do when fire threatens. 
 The menace is not less great, only the 
 nature of it is such that it appears 
 distant, furtive and scattered. 
 
 Mr. Edward A. Filene, an official 
 of the United States Chamber of Com- 
 merce, is a citizen who has grasped 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 95 
 
 this situation, and is doing what he 
 can to make others see it. He travels 
 about the country, calling meetings of 
 citizens, and pointing out that this 
 business of shipbuilding is a work not 
 merely for the men who handle rivets 
 and swing sledges and receive wages 
 from the ship-yard, that it is the con- 
 cern of everybody, and that everybody 
 can find a way to help. 
 
 One of his suggestions has appealed 
 to me especially because it is a means 
 of bringing average citizens into di- 
 rect and vital participation in the 
 work. He points out that in many 
 cases, the sudden expansion of ship- 
 building activity near a city, and the 
 congestion of labour on the water- 
 front, has more or less paralysed the 
 ordinary street-car facilities which 
 carry workmen from their homes to 
 the shipyard ; and he suggests that the 
 private owners of automobiles take 
 
96 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 to themselves the task of carrying the 
 men to and from their work. 
 
 I like this because it provides a way 
 for the maximum number of people 
 to volunteer. It is of the nature of 
 the things we do in an emergency, and 
 what is needed is that we should all 
 recognize that it is an emergency, just 
 as much an emergency as if a fire 
 were sweeping the town. 
 
 We should do our best, and we 
 are not doing our best. At the end of 
 a year of war we have a hundred and 
 fifty thousand men building ships. 
 We ought to have a million. We 
 should build ships and ships and 
 ships. And then we should build 
 faster ships. And after that we 
 should build more ships. We should 
 build steel ships and wooden ships 
 and concrete ships and composite 
 ships. We should build anything that 
 will float. If it is not adapted to de- 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 97 
 
 fence against the submarine, we can 
 use it to bring manganese from Brazil 
 for our guns and rubber from Ceylon 
 for our military trucks. 
 
 Not only must we maintain that 
 line of ships between ourselves and 
 our little newborn army. There is an- 
 other need just as essential. En- 
 dowed as this country is for the manu- 
 facture of munitions, there are a few 
 essential elements which we have not 
 got, or have in insufficient quantity; 
 we are compelled to bring these 
 across water. Among them are 
 manganese and rubber and chrome 
 and nitrates and hemp. We cannot 
 have too many ships. There is no 
 such thing as too many ships. If a 
 Cajun fisherman in the swamps of 
 Louisiana can hollow out a log big 
 enough to float a bale of sisal hemp 
 across from Yucatan by all means 
 urge him to do it. 
 
98 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 In San Francisco, two business men, 
 who had no more responsibility for 
 the situation than the general respon- 
 sibility of all of us, and who had no 
 experience in ship-building, have 
 made possible an experiment in ships 
 built of concrete. They ventured the 
 very large sum of money required, and 
 hired a house architect to make the ex- 
 periment. At the time this book is 
 written, the tests are not yet complete, 
 for while the structure is afloat it has 
 not yet been tried with the engines at 
 work in it. If the experiment is suc- 
 cessful, it will be an important 
 achievement, for it adds a new and 
 easily procured material to the limited 
 number out of which ships can be 
 built. But apart from all that, the 
 spirit of the group who made the ex- 
 periment is the important thing. 
 That is the kind of spirit that will 
 master the emergency. 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 99 
 
 There is a way in which all can 
 help. It must be accepted, that any 
 one who can help will want to help, 
 for such a belief rests upon our faith 
 in human nature. Every one can 
 help by saving the last available bit 
 of man-power for the building of 
 ships. We have a given quantity of 
 man-power in the country. It cannot 
 be increased or stimulated. Famine 
 in it cannot be escaped, and all other 
 famines and scarcities go back to this 
 one famine. 
 
 Upon the reserves of man-power 
 war has already made enormous de- 
 mands. To consider but one ex- 
 ample, the aviation department of 
 our army, when we entered the war, 
 a year ago, consisted of eleven officers 
 and seventy-five men. Today it con- 
 sists of over a hundred thousand men. 
 That is an increase of more than ten 
 thousand per cent. The increases in 
 
100 WAKE UP AMERICA! 
 
 other essential military activities are 
 on the same scale, and all these in- 
 creases must come from the same fixed 
 quantity of man-power. 
 
 Under these circumstances the 
 thing that any thoughtful, patriotic 
 person must do is to avoid the use 
 of any man-power that he can 
 possibly get along without. Such a 
 determination will express itself 
 chiefly in refusal to use luxuries. 
 Some of our luxuries come from 
 abroad. In coming from abroad they 
 consume ship space which otherwise 
 could be carrying wheat and bullets to 
 France. And the rest of our luxur- 
 ies, made in this country, consume 
 man-power which otherwise could be 
 building ships. 
 
 During the Napoleonic wars, there 
 was a fine old Scotch Presbyterian 
 preacher who, from his pulpit in 
 Edinburgh used to pour forth the 
 
WAKE UP AMERICA! 101 
 
 stores of his eloquence in order that 
 he might keep his people in fortitude 
 and right faiths of living during that 
 twenty-six years' strain of contest 
 against autocracy. Once Thomas 
 Chalmers said: "If I were a states- 
 man I should not hesitate to deprive 
 my countrymen of the last of their 
 luxuries, so long as the first of their 
 liberties were in danger." 
 
 THE END 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
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