That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.
Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn't ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6, buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit. The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit.
Some of the ships were all right. The seams opened up -- and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits. That is how the 21, billionaires and millionaires got that way.
It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few. The Senate Nye committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.
Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying "for some time" methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee -- with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator -- to limit profits in war time.
To what extent isn't suggested. Possibly the profits of and and 1, per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure. Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses -- that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three.
Or to limit the loss of life. There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.
Who provides the profits -- these nice little profits of 20, , , 1, and 1, per cent? We all pay them -- in taxation. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds.
The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par -- and above. Then the bankers collected their profits. If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad.
Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50, destroyed men -- men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3, of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.
Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed. Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face"!
This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda.
We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone. In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1, of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches.
These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone. There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement -- the young boys couldn't stand it.
That's a part of the bill. So much for the dead -- they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded -- they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too -- they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam -- on which a profit had been made.
They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain -- with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby. Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money.
During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share -- at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn't bargain for their labor, Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn't.
So by developing the Napoleonic system -- the medal business -- the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out.
It made enlistments easier. In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army. So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it.
With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side. And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious. Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die.
This was the "war to end all wars. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a "glorious adventure. Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too.
All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy when they could get it and kill and kill and kill. Half of that wage just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community.
Then, the most crowning insolence of all -- he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days. Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly -- his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.
When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too -- as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.
And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying. A few profit -- and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. Chapter 3: Who Pays The Bills?. A racket is best War for any other reason is simply a racket.
From a speech. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.
The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in The only trouble was that there raacket only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. Sep 15, Glen Krisch rated it it was amazing. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. Butler received orders to report to San Diego and prepared his family and his belongings for the new assignment.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. In a letter home, he described the action: That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says.
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Dave Edwards. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. He retired in , ran as a Republican Candidate for Senate in , and died in a Philadelphia Naval Hospital in He was awarded two congressional medals of honor, one for the capture of Vera Cruz in Mexico, in ; the other for the capture of Fort Riviere in Haiti, in He also received the distinguished service medal in The speech and accompanying booklet were so well recieved that he wrote a longer version as a small book.
A book which has since gained notoriety as an honest appraisal of modern warfare and the growth of an industry driving it.
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