minds his readers of "the virtuous horror
and stupefaction when they read the manifesto of their ninety-three
German colleagues in defense of the war. To the American academic mind
of 1914 defense of war was inconceivable. From Bernhardi it recoiled as
from a blasphemy, little dreaming that two years later would find it
creating its own cleanly reasons for imposing military service on the
country and for talking of the rough rude currents of health and
regeneration that war would send through the American body politic. They
would have thought any one mad who talked of shipping American men by
the hundreds of thousands--conscripts--to die on the fields of
France...."

The American plutocracy was magnified, deified, and consecrated to the
task of making the world safe for democracy. Exploiters had turned
saviors and were conducting a campaign to raise $100,000,000 for the Red
Cross.[46] The "malefactors of great wealth," the predatory business
forces, the special privileged few who had exploited the American people
for generations, became the prophets and the crusaders, the keepers of
the ark of the covenant of American democracy.

Radicals who had always opposed war, ministers who had spent their lives
preaching peace upon earth, scientists whose work had brought them into
contact with the peoples of the whole world, public men who believed
that the United States could do greater and better work for democracy by
staying out of the war, were branded as traitors and were persecuted as
zealously as though they had sided with Protestantism in Catholic Spain
under the Inquisition.

By a clever move, the plutocrats, wrapped in the flag and proclaiming a
crusade to inaugurate democracy in Germany, rallied to their support the
professional classes of the United States and millions of the common
people.

6. _Business in Control_

After the declaration of war, the mobilization and direction of the
economic war work of the government was placed in the hands of the
Council of National Defense, an organized group of the leading business
men. The Council consisted of six members of the President's Cabinet,
assisted by an Advisory Commission and numerous sub-committees. The
"Advisory Commission" of the Council (the real working body) contained
four business men, an educator, a labor leader and a medical man. ("The
Council of National Defense" a bulletin issued by the Council under date
of June 28, 1917.)

Each member of the A