0.3 Great war (part ii)  (Page 3/16)

Armistice did not end anti-German hysteria. While most Americans were celebrating the end of the war, 38 “dangerous enemy aliens” were rounded up in New York and were sent to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia for undetermined lengths of time, to include three officers of the Bayer Company (a German pharmaceutical firm known for its aspirin that opened a branch office in the United States in the early twentieth century).

The Home Front

In 1914, Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act, which created the Cooperative Extension Service in order to develop more effective agricultural and animal husbandry classes, programs, and use in and of land grant institutions such as Washington State University, Texas Agriculture&Mining, and the University of Wisconsin. Yet the Act also mandated land grant universities to share their knowledge with non-students (hence the “Extension” part of the title).

Once the US openly joined the war, Congress worked to ensure that Americans at home and abroad had sufficient resources and thus Congress adopted the Fuel and Food Control Act in 1917. The Fuel Administration controlled the production, distribution, and price of fuels (oil, gas, and coal, for example) and was led by Dr. Harry A. Garfield –son of and witness to the assassination of President James B. Garfield in 1881. Like many of the men whom Wilson surrounded himself, Garfield was an academic serving as a professor at Princeton (when Wilson presided as the college’s president) and as the president of Williams College in Massachusetts.

Although Garfield was a Republican, Wilson and Garfield were connected as academics as well as Progressive thinkers who believed in the transformative nature of the human spirit. According to Garfield, academia was the place were “cultivated men, earnest and seeking by all ways to advance the cause of civilization.” And thus, as Wilson’s Secretary of War Newton Baker said, “The President had unlimited confidence in Garfield.” Unlike Garfield’s colleagues on Wilson’s Cabinet and heading various war time organizations, Garfield did not seek absolute power within the organization he led nor throughout American society.

At a meeting of the Academy of Political Science, Garfield offered a justification for the Fuel Administration’s existence as well as assurances that under his watch the Fuel Administration will not nationalize the fuel industry. In his speech entitled “Task of the Fuel Administration,” the gap between the fuel needs of a country at war compared to the needs of the US in 1916 would be largely met through conservation, he argued. In an example of the government-academic cooperation that will be a characteristic of American society ever since World War II, Garfield turned to scientists and mathematicians in academia to resolve some of the issues pertaining to fuel conservation.

Using the authority of the 1917 Act, President Wilson issued Executive Order 2679A, creating the US Food Administration. Headed by future president Herbert Hoover, the Food Administration was tasked with assuring the supply, distribution, and conservation of food during the war, facilitating transportation of food, preventing monopolies and hoarding, and maintaining governmental power over foods by using voluntary agreements and a licensing system. In trying to get Americans to conserve what they have and to use less of what can be grown or made, Hoover promoted “Meatless Mondays” and “Wheatless Wednesdays.”