PEACE TIME CONSCRIPTION
Hallinan, Charles A.
Peace Time Conscription Big Daily Papers Conspicuously Ignore This Issue; Big Business and Bolshevists Committed To the Theory By CHARLES A. HALLINAN (Secretary of the American Union Against...
...If I have heard that sentiment once I have heard it a hundred times...
...Senator Wadsworth of New York, who will be chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, has discovered that the military establishment is intensely unpopular...
...In other words, every one of the bills which have thus far been introduced in Congress—the first Chamberlain Bill, the Moseley bill, the Army War College bill, the second Chamberlain bill, Senator New's bill and Julius Kahn's little baby bill (just old enough to toddle into the newspapers of yesterday)—provides not only for compulsory training of the best physical manhood of the country but each and every tne of those bills would hold the youth, after his training, in a permanent reserve for service in time of war or indeed for service in any "national emergency...
...Personally I honor them for the courage and the states manship which they have shown, but I de want to point out that their political phi-losophy is based frankly (if not cynically) on force, on "the dictatorship of the proletariat," and that with scarcely an exception they believe in compulsory military training because that is the only method, they argue, by which the proletariat can be trained to wrest from the propertied and privileged classes the control of the state...
...They have had their day...
...I accept the assignment with pleasure...
...Hays' quaint device for "sounding out" the sentiment of the country and the party...
...BUT the plan, shrewd though it is, is obvious enough...
...And don't let it fool the Republican party into thinking peace-time conscription a safe proposition—that is, if you are one of the people who like the Republican party and wish it well...
...So their plan is to have a vast house-cleaning...
...it's going to be our turn soon...
...Don't be fooled by it...
...A placard in the middle of the exhibit read: "We are skinned to provide women with fashionable furs...
...Plan Is Obvious...
...I would serve notice upon him that while Bour-bonism rampant was undoubtedly killing the Democratic party, the careless adoption of permanent peace time conscription would just as certainly seal the fate of the Republican party...
...I am for universal military training...
...I would sit down and address a letter as follows: HON...
...So that he and his associates taking stock of the situation, realize that they cannot fasten universal training and service upon the country until they have brought the army into better repute...
...A man passed before the window and his harassed expression for a moment gave place to one of sympathy...
...Let 'em train us all how to shoot, how to handle machine guns and hand grenades, how to blow the newspaper offices to pieces...
...ONE of the curious phases of the situation is that the two groups most strenuously committed to compulsory military training and service are big business and the Bolshevists,—a paradox if there ever was one...
...His mail gives him ample evidence of that...
...WILL HAYS, THE LISTENING POST, REPUBLICAN NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS CHICAGO, ILL...
...When you speak to a labor meeting in this country on the subject of universal military training you encounter today a brand new opponent...
...The senators themselves will contribute moving comments from time to time...
...No doubt there is something to that but I can't help recalling that within our short history we have made and broken some ten major political parties...
...He declares that the dictatorship of the working classes would have been impossible of achievement without the use of force against the force mobilized by the other side and that those who were urging complete disarmament by the new Russia were enemies of Bolshevism, etc...
...Washington, D. C. HE HAD BEEN THERE A humane society had secured a show window and filled it with attractive pictures of wild animals in their native haunts...
...Everybody who has a grievance will be invited to air it...
...I know just how you feel, old tops," he muttered...
...THIS is the real meaning of the agitation for universal military training...
...Letters from men and officers overseas prove it up to the handle...
...If I were one of the latter I know what I'd do...
...He will be entrained for camp or barracks, under centralized military control (the Prussian system, not the Swiss...
...Enlisted men who can prove that rank snobbery exists in the American army as at present constituted will be given wide publicity...
...The men, in Congress and out, who talk about the difference between training and service and who imply that all they are interested in is training, are hypocrites and worse...
...From a distance it will look as WHEN men are punished for their convictions why shall it be pretended that they are punished for something else...
...Don't be fooled by it...
...I'd let him sound me out...
...So was I...
...I hope I have made that point so it will stick because I want to go to another...
...After the tumult and the shouting dies, it will be the same old military establishment that will gather in your boy for six months, or a year or even two years (the goal of the Army War College) of compulsory training...
...Why go through all the forms of legality in order to read out of existence the undeniable fact that men are imprisoned and tortured because of their opinions and beliefs...
...Some day the National City Bank will get wind of that and then I predict a great falling off in their zeal for universal military training...
...You encounter a young man in the audience— sometimes in uniform, sometimes not—who gets up and says something like this: What Russians Think "WHILE I agree, in general, with what the speaker has said I have come to the conclusion that the Russians are right and that the working people in this country can never seize the power until every workingman has been trained how to use a gun...
...Let them train us if they are fools enough to do so...
...Here goes: When the various so-called "defense leagues" talk about compulsory military training, they are very fond of stressing the difference between compulsory training and compulsory service, and they teach thousands of gentle souls to go around repeating the distinction...
...Hays that it would do no harm and it might do good...
...I'd tell Mr...
...Senator Wadsworth and his associates are counting upon that streak in the American temperament which makes us feel that as soon as a thing has been publicly "investigated" with great hue and cry, it has somehow been permanently and definitely improved...
...The Real Difference...
...said "listening post" being Mr...
...The National Guard, which firmly believes it was shabbily treated, will be given a chance to get its troubles off its chest...
...He would be called to the colors, by "classes," in the most approved European fashion...
...They had a chance to make this a real republic but they turned it over to plutocracy and the only way we can ever get it back is by bloodshed and superior force...
...The proposed commission will bring in an adroitly worded report, elaborately and severely scoring the evils in the present army system, denouncing the court-martial system, providing possibly for promotion from the ranks—"if you are very, very good" as Gilbert and Sullivan put it!—and recommending a "democratic army," based "upon universal military training...
...I have before me a very able pamphlet bf Lenin in which he vigorously attacks the Russian "pacifists" who were, as he claimed, undermining the morale of the fighting Bolshevists...
...College professors are fond of saying that the American people are not "political minded," that they do not know how to express themselves through political parties...
...There has recently been a tidal wave of editorials, all very much alike in tone and even in phrasing, sweeping over the press of the country all to the effect that there is a difference "which people should bear in mind" between universal training and universal service...
...They propose an investigation of the present military establishment from top to bottom...
...with a court-martial system hanging over his head which may send him to the penitentiary for the most trivial offense, wasting his best years in bitterness, boredom and worse —solely to make places for a huge permanent officers' caste and to give certain powerful interests in this country a great standing army under a thin democratic disguise...
...Why not db away with the hypocrisy and red tape of it all, and say frankly that in war time men may not have conscientious objections to war...
...though the millenium were certainly approaching...
...I strongly suspect that if we have to we can break and make some more...
...Big Business and Bolshevists Committed To the Theory By CHARLES A. HALLINAN (Secretary of the American Union Against Militarism) LA FOLLETTE'S has asked me to give briefly some of the phases of the light on universal military training which the big daily papers are conspicuously ignoring...
...He would be a peace-time conscript, without further act of Congress, up to the age of forty-five...
...Now, what the National City Bank of New York City does not seem to realize is that Lenin's idea has already occurred to millions of people in this country...
...Well, it's all true enough, God knows, but what these treacherous shepherds carefully omit to tell their sheep, is that the war party in this country has no intention whatever of observing that distinction...
...They will discover that after all we don't really need it, that state constabularies for domestic troubles and a great navy for international effect will be plenty...
...I have no desire to join the company of the penny-a-liners who yelp at the heels of the Bolshevists...
...I want the readers of LA FOLLETTE'S to get the true inwardness of the great "house-cleaning" to which the American military establishment is shortly to be treated...
...In the meantime if you want to educate your local banker on the subject, go to it...
Vol. 11 • May 1919 • No. 5
