the final deciding
factor. A nation unjustly titled the "Dollar Nation," believed by
Germany and by other countries to be soft, selfish and wasteful, became
over night hard as tempered steel, self-sacrificing with an altruism
that inspired the world and thrifty beyond all precedent in order that
not only its own armies but the armies of the Allies might be fed and
munitioned.

Leading American thought and American action, President Wilson stood out
as the prophet of the democracies of the world. Not only did he inspire
America and the Allies to a military and naval effort beyond precedent,
but he inspired the civilian populations of the world to extraordinary
effort, efforts that eventually won the war. For the decision was gained
quite as certainly on the wheat fields of Western America, in the shops
and the mines and the homes of America as it was upon the battle-field.

This effort came in response to the following appeal by the President:

These, then, are the things we must do, and do well, besides
fighting--the things without which mere fighting would be fruitless:

We must supply abundant food for ourselves and for our armies and our
seamen not only, but also for a large part of the nations with whom we
have now made common cause, in whose support and by whose sides we shall
be fighting;

We must supply ships by the hundreds out of our shipyards to carry to
the other side of the sea, submarines or no submarines, what will every
day be needed there; and--

Abundant materials out of our fields and our mines and our factories
with which not only to clothe and equip our own forces on land and sea
but also to clothe and support our people for whom the gallant fellows
under arms can no longer work, to help clothe and equip the armies with
which we are co-operating in Europe, and to keep the looms and
manufactories there in raw material;

Coal to keep the fires going in ships at sea and in the furnaces of
hundreds of factories across the sea;

Steel out of which to make arms and ammunition both here and there;

Rails for worn-out railways back of the fighting fronts;

Locomotives and rolling stock to take the place of those every day going
to pieces;

Everything with which the people of England and France and Italy and
Russia have usually supplied themselves, but cannot now afford the men,
the materials, or the machinery to make.

I particularly appeal to the farmers of the South to plant abundant
foods