Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace Part 19

The entire willingness of the Army engineers to subordinate the welfare of the people in every flood-menaced valley to the stubborn determination of the military caste to retain and broaden their own powers and privileges in this one field of action, shows what might be expected from any increase in the members of that caste, or any enlargement of their control over the civil affairs of the country.

The military caste in the United States will never approve any plan for national defense that does not center in and radiate from them. They will oppose it unless it broadens their influence and power, and imbeds it more strongly in the foundations of the Government. A plan such as is advocated in this book, will never have their cooperation, support, or endors.e.m.e.nt, for the very simple reason that its primary object would be to remove the original cause of war and to contribute to the lessening of the power and prestige of the Army. The fact that it would at the same time supply the first and greatest need in the event of war--the need for toughened and trained men who could and would fight and dig trenches as well as seasoned soldiers--would gain no favor for the plan in the eyes of our military caste. The development of that system and the expenditures to be made for that purpose and the control of the men enlisted in it would not be vested in the War Department.

The military caste in this and every country is trained to regard its profession as one whose duty it is to accomplish results by brute force and human slaughter. Its only conception of a soldier is a man-killing machine, whose chief use in time of peace is to serve as a basis for appropriations to sustain a military establishment with all its mult.i.tudinous expenditures. Their conception of war is that it is an inevitable orgy of human slaughter, against which humanity is powerless to protect itself.

That a great force should be organized for patriotic service under civil control instead of military domination, to battle against the destroying forces of Nature, and subjugate and control them for the advancement of humanity and all the arts and victories of peace, runs counter to every fiber of being of the military caste. And yet, none but the most superficial student of history and humanity can fail to realize the necessity for such an army of peace in this country. It is certainly true that wars will never cease until the inspiration and patriotism and national ideals developed by such a peaceful conquest of the forces of Nature has been subst.i.tuted for the tremendous stimulus which the human race has in the past drawn from armed conflicts between nations. And the fact must be clearly recognized that in this way a force can be provided that will be instantly available to take the place of seasoned soldiers at any moment in the event that this nation should be drawn into a war of defense or for the maintenance of any great principle of human rights or justice to humanity.

We might be forced into a war within a year and we might succeed in preserving the peace forever. No man can tell, because no human mind can forecast the future or predict what events may occur that may be beyond our power to control, and which might force us into a war. We do know, however, that the fight against the floods of the Mississippi River, and the fight against the great storms from the Gulf of Mexico, must go on year after year through all the centuries to come during which man continues to inhabit the Delta of the Mississippi River.

The memory of the great disaster to the city of Galveston, and the memory of the great floods of the Mississippi River in 1912 and 1913, are still fresh in the minds of the people. The defense of that part of our common country against such catastrophes in the future is worthy of the same patriotic energy and the same adequate expenditure that would be necessary to defend them against an armed invasion from Mexico or by any nation of the world.

Were such defense afforded, results would be obtained of such enormous benefit to the United States in time of peace, without any regard to its relation to national defense in time of war, that to fail to do it would be as stupid as it would have been to fail to take the gold from the placer mines of California.

The gateway from the Gulf of Mexico to the great central valley of this country opens into a region so vast that the area comprised within the watershed of the Mississippi and its tributaries embraces 41 per cent of the entire United States. This gateway opens into a great waterway system capable of being made continuously navigable all the year around through 20,000 miles of navigable waterways and commerce-carriers.

The gateway from the Gulf opens to a country of greater potential agricultural wealth than any other section of the earth's surface of the same area. The lower Mississippi Valley has well been styled the "Sugar-Bowl" of the continent. The State of Louisiana alone is larger in area by 10,000 square miles than the combined area of Belgium, Holland, and Denmark. It is capable of sustaining a larger population and producing vastly more wealth than those three countries combined.

If you draw a line straight north from the southernmost point of Texas to the northern line of Oklahoma, and then turn and go straight east, projecting the northern line of Oklahoma past Cairo, Illinois, to the Tennessee River, following up the Tennessee River to the northeast corner of Mississippi, and then follow the eastern boundary line of Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, you have included within these extreme boundaries a territory as large as the whole German Empire. It is a territory possessing greater natural wealth and possibility of development than the German Empire, _provided_ the great problems of water control and river regulation are solved in such a way as to promote the highest development of this region for the benefit of humanity, and _provided further_ that the Coast region of this territory is protected not only from the floods of the river, but from the storms originating in the Gulf of Mexico. Protection from those storms requires the construction of a great dike similar to the dikes of Holland that will hold out the waters of the Gulf not only at their normal height, but will also hold them back when they attain the abnormal height which at rare intervals results from the hurricanes or great storms from the Gulf of Mexico, such as that which overwhelmed Galveston.

Lafcadio Hearn, in "Chita," has described a Gulf Storm better than it will ever again be described. He prefaced the story of that storm with a picture of the havoc wrought by Nature's forces--the ceaseless charging of the "Ocean's Cavalry," that is quoted because it so clearly portrays the necessity for bulwarks of defense built in the spirit of military defenses.

"On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees--when there are any trees--all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five sloping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair--bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed;--for the sea is devouring the land. Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean's cavalry; far out you can see, through a good gla.s.s, the porpoises at play where of old the sugarcane shook out its million bannerets; and shark-fins now seam deep water above a site where pigeons used to coo. Men build dikes; but the besieging tides bring up their battering-rams--whole forests of drift--huge trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress. Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to destroy;--and amid their eternal strife the islands and the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not less fantastically, than the clouds of heaven.

"And worthy of study are those wan battle-grounds where the woods made their last brave stand against the irresistible invasion,--usually at some long point of sea-marsh, widely fringed with billowing sand. Just where the waves curl beyond such a point you may discern a mult.i.tude of blackened, snaggy shapes protruding above the water,--some high enough to resemble ruined chimneys, others bearing a startling likeness to enormous skeleton-feet and skeleton-hands,--with crustaceous white growths clinging to them here and there like remnants of integument. These are bodies and limbs of drowned oaks,--so long drowned that the sh.e.l.l-scurf is inch-thick upon parts of them. Farther in upon the beach immense trunks lie overthrown. Some look like vast broken columns; some suggest colossal torsos imbedded, and seem to reach out mutilated stumps in despair from their deepening graves;--and beside these are others which have kept their feet with astounding obstinacy, although the barbarian tides have been charging them for twenty years, and gradually torn away the soil above and beneath their roots. The sand around,--soft beneath and thinly crusted upon the surface,--is everywhere pierced with holes made by a beautifully mottled and semi-diaphanous crab, with hairy legs, big staring eyes, and milk-white claws;--while in the green sedges beyond there is a perpetual rustling, as of some strong wind bearing among reeds: a marvellous creeping of 'fiddlers,' which the inexperienced visitor might at first mistake for so many peculiar beetles, as they run about sideways, each with his huge single claw folded upon his body like a wing-case. Year by year that rustling strip of green land grows narrower; the sand spreads and sinks, shuddering and wrinkling like a living brown skin; and the last standing corpses of the oaks, ever clinging with naked, dead feet to the sliding beach lean more and more out of the perpendicular. As the sands subside, the stumps appear to creep; their intertwisted ma.s.ses of snakish roots seem to crawl, to writhe,--like the reaching arms of cephalopods.... Grand Terre is going: the sea mines her fort, and will before many years carry the ramparts by storm. Grande Isle is going,--slowly but surely: the Gulf has eaten three miles into her meadowed land. Last Island has gone! How it went I first heard from the lips of a veteran pilot, while we sat one evening together on the trunk of a drifted cypress which some high tide had pressed deeply into the Grande Isle beach. The day had been tropically warm; we had sought the sh.o.r.e for a breath of living air. Sunset came, and with it the ponderous heat lifted,--a sudden breeze blew,--lightnings flickered in the darkening horizon,--wind and water began to strive together,--and soon all the low coast boomed. Then my companion began his story; perhaps the coming of the storm inspired him to speak! And as I listened to him, listening also to the clamoring of the coast, there flashed back to me recollection of a singular Breton fancy: that the Voice of the Sea is never one voice, but a tumult of many voices--voices of drowned men,--the muttering of mult.i.tudinous dead,--the moaning of innumerable ghosts, all rising, to rage against the living, at the great Witch-call of storms...."

The defense of the Gulf gateway of the United States of America not only against Nature's forces, whether coming in the form of an invasion by a mighty flood from the North, or the invasion of a great destroying storm wave from the South, must be accomplished by the adoption of a plan for the protection of that country similar to that proposed for the organization of a Homecroft Reserve in the Colorado River Valley and in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys and in the State of Nevada.

The national government should immediately acquire not less than 1,000,000 acres of land bordering on the Gulf of Mexico and lying between Bayou Lafourche and Atchafalaya Bay and the Atchafalaya River. Then a great dike should be built by the national government from Barataria Bay, following the most practicable course along the sh.o.r.es of the Gulf to and along the eastern sh.o.r.e of the Atchafalaya Bay and River to Morgan City. Thence this great dike should skirt the northeastern sh.o.r.e of Grand Lake to the northern end of that lake. From there it should be continued north to the Mississippi River to a connection with that river near the headwaters of the Atchafalaya River.

The material necessary for the construction of this great embankment and protecting levee from the Gulf north to the Mississippi River should be taken entirely from the eastern side of the embankment, and the channel thus constructed should be enlarged sufficiently to build an adequate protecting levee on the east bank of the channel. The artificial channel thus constructed should be so large as to const.i.tute a controlled outlet and auxiliary flood channel which, with the ten mile wide Atchafalaya wasteway, would take off all of the flood flow of the Mississippi River at that point in excess of the high water level as it rests against the levees in all ordinary flood years. The purpose of this outlet and wasteway would be to make it impossible that in any year of unusual floods the levees or banks should be subjected to any greater hydrostatic pressure than in ordinary years. The point where this controlled outlet would leave the river would be approximately the same place where the great Morganza Creva.s.se broke through the levee and opened a way for the flood to sweep with its devastating force through the country between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Map of Louisiana, showing the Great Controlled Outlet at Old River and the Atchafalaya Wasteway, Auxiliary Flood Water Channels and Ca.n.a.ls; and showing also the Spillways and Controlled Wasteways from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, and the Great Gulf Coast Dike.]

Ten miles west of the great north and south embankment above described, on a north and south line which would pa.s.s close to the town of Melville in Louisiana and follow the west bank of the Atchafalaya River for some distance below Melville, another great embankment should be built, paralleling the one previously described. The material for the construction of this second embankment should be taken from its western side, thus forming a channel which should be used both as a drainage outlet and a navigable ca.n.a.l extending from the Bayou Teche to the Red River. At the point of its junction with the Red River, locks should be constructed which would prevent any of the floods of the Red River from ever entering or pa.s.sing through this navigable drainage ca.n.a.l. From that point another great embankment should be extended by the most practicable route to the west or northwest, where a junction could be formed with the high land in such a way as to turn all the surplus flood drainage from the Red River and all other rivers to the north into the great ten-mile wide wasteway lying between the two embankments and running south from the mouth of the Red River or from Old River to Grand Lake.

The volume of water that would make a flood twenty feet deep in a channel a mile wide could be carried through this wasteway with a flow of only about two feet in depth, and two great benefits thereby attained:

First, the cutting power of the water could be controlled and its danger from that cause obviated.

Second, the sediment carried by the water could be settled across a strip ten miles wide, which could be thereby brought to a level and its fertility enormously enriched by these sedimentary deposits which it would receive only in years of great floods. In the meantime and in other years the land could be used for meadow, or for the production of crops which could be grown after the danger of overflow in any season had pa.s.sed.

This ten-mile wide wasteway, supplemented by the auxiliary flood water channel paralleling its eastern embankment on the east, would completely control and carry to the Gulf all the excess flood water in years of extreme floods, and hold the high water level of the Mississippi River from Old River to the Gulf at an absolutely fixed level above which the river would never rise.

The ten-mile wide wasteway could be extended north from the mouth of Red River to the bluffs at Helena. Then from Helena south the entire Mississippi Valley would be protected against danger from floods in the Mississippi River in the extraordinary flood years which may come only once in a generation, and yet may come in any two consecutive years as they did in 1912 and 1913. If this ten-mile wide wasteway, with its auxiliary flood water channel paralleling it, between it and the river, were constructed from Helena to the mouth of the Red River, and thence to the Gulf of Mexico, and in turn supplemented by source stream control of the floods of the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers, the lowlands of the Mississippi Valley could be made as safe from overflow or damage by devastating floods as the highlands of the Hudson River or the dry plains of eastern Colorado. The entire area of the Mississippi River Valley now subject to overflow is about 29,000 square miles. This is an area one-third larger than the entire cultivated area of the Empire of j.a.pan, which sustains a farming population of 30,000,000 people. The lands of the Mississippi River Valley are infinitely richer and of greater natural fertility than the farming lands of j.a.pan. Every acre of the rich sedimentary soil of the Delta of the Mississippi River would, if intensively cultivated, produce food enough to feed a family of five, with a large surplus over for distribution to the world's food markets.

The entire 1,000,000 acres to be acquired by the national government in Louisiana should be immediately acquired within the area bounded on the south by the great embankment along the sh.o.r.es of the Gulf of Mexico and on the west by the great wasteway and auxiliary flood channel to be built from the mouth of Red River to Atchafalaya Bay and on the north and east by the Mississippi River.

This entire territory would be so absolutely and completely protected from all possibility of overflow by the proposed system of protection from floods or overflow and from Gulf Storms that any part of it could be safely subdivided into acre-garden-homes or Homecrofts. Every acre would be adequate for the support of a family when properly reclaimed, fertilized, and intensively cultivated. The variety of food that would be available for the people living on these one million Homecrofts would be greater probably than would be within the reach of people living in any other section of the world. The mild and equable climate would make practicable a successful growth of every possible product of garden, orchard, or vineyard, including oranges and grape-fruit. Proximity to the Gulf and a network of ca.n.a.ls that would lace and interlace the country in every direction would furnish them, at trifling cost or none at all, with the most delicious sea-foods, fish, crabs, shrimps, crayfish, and oysters without limit. Every ca.n.a.l and bayou would furnish its quota of fish and the oyster beds of the Louisiana coast are capable of almost limitless extension.

In addition to the cultivation of their Homecrofts for food from the ground, the Homecrofters enlisted in the Louisiana Homecroft Reserve would be afforded abundant occupation in catching or producing sea-food for themselves as well as for export. Anyone not familiar with the country can form no adequate conception of the stupendous possibilities of this bayou and Gulf coast country along this line of production and development.

More than this, the luggermen of the bayous and the Gulf are the best coast-wise and shallow sea sailors in the world, and the bays and bayous of Louisiana, if inhabited by a dense population, would once again breed a race of seafaring people--sailors and fishermen--to man our navy or merchant marine.

The complete adoption of the plan advocated for the reclamation and settlement of these swamp and overflowed lands, and the establishment there of a perpetual reserve available for military service whenever needed of a million seasoned and hardened citizen soldiers, involves doing nothing that has not already been done by other nations of the world.

Holland has built dikes as defenses against the inroads of the ocean greater even than those proposed in Louisiana, and the plans of Holland for reclaiming for agriculture vast areas of land now buried beneath the waters of the Zuyder Zee are much bolder in conception and more difficult of accomplishment.

Australia and New Zealand have both demonstrated the practicability and proved the success of a national policy of land acquisition and colonization. What Australia has done in the reclamation and settlement of her deserts, we can do not only on our deserts but also in our swamps.

Switzerland and Australia have both proved the practicability of a military system similar to that which it is proposed to establish for the defense of the Gulf Gateway of this nation. The plan urged for Louisiana would in many respects be an improvement upon a plan which made it necessary to call men from commercial or industrial employment for military service.

CHAPTER XII

_The result of the adoption of the Homecroft Reserve System would be that this generation would bequeath to future generations a country freed forever from the menace of militarism or military despotism, and also freed from the burdens of military and naval establishments. At the same time, the United States would be safeguarded against internal dangers and made impregnable against attack or invasion by any foreign power. Every patriotic citizen of the United States should have that thought graven on his mind. No other plan can be devised that will accomplish those results._

The reasons why they will be accomplished by the Homecroft Reserve System may be briefly summarized.

From the standpoint of national defense, and regarding war as a possibility, the following are the advantages of the system:

_First:_ The maintenance of a Homecroft Reserve of 5,000,000 trained soldiers would ultimately cost the government nothing. The entire investment required for the establishment of the Reserve would be repaid with interest by the revenues from the Homecroft rentals, and ultimately a revenue of $300,000,000 would be annually returned to the national government in excess of the entire expense of the maintenance of the Reserves.

_Second:_ There would be no burden of a pension roll as the result of actual service by the Homecroft Reservists in the event of war. The Life Insurance System embodied in the general plan for a Homecroft Reserve would be subst.i.tuted for a pension system.

_Third:_ Every requirement of necessary military training for actual service in the field would be provided. Each Department of the Homecroft Reserve, embracing a million men, would be concentrated and fully organized, with annual field maneuvers.

_Fourth:_ The whole body of the Homecroft Reserve would be men physically hardened and trained to every duty required of a soldier in actual warfare. They would be inured to long marches and to every hards.h.i.+p of a campaign in the field. They would at all times be mobilized and ready for instant service.

_Fifth:_ The whole 5,000,000 men in the Homecroft Reserve could be sent into active service without calling a man from any industry or commercial employment where he might be needed. The United States could put an army of five million men in the field at a moment's notice, without the slightest interference with commerce, manufacturing, or any branch of industry.

_Sixth:_ No length of actual field service would impose any hards.h.i.+p or privation on the families of any of the Homecroft Reservists. Each family would continue to occupy and get its living from the Homecroft during the absence of the soldier of the family. The routine of the family and community life would continue undisturbed.

For the first fifty year period the cost of maintaining our present standing army of less than _100,000_ men will be _five billion dollars_.

_During that same period_ the revenues from the Homecroft Reserve rentals would repay the entire investment required for the establishment and maintenance of the Reserve, and the ultimate cost to the government of the maintenance for fifty years of a reserve of _five million men_ would be _nothing_.

For the second fifty year period, the net revenues from the Homecroft Reserve rentals, over and above the entire cost of the maintenance of the Reserve, would be fifteen billion dollars,--$300,000,000 a year every year for fifty years,--more than enough to cover the entire expense of our standing Army and Navy, as at present maintained.

In other words, the profit to the government from establis.h.i.+ng a Military Reserve which would be at the same time a great _Educational Inst.i.tution_ for training Citizens as well as Soldiers, and a Peace Establishment for Food Production, would be large enough to cover the entire cost of the nation's regular Military and Naval Establishments. For all time thereafter, the country would be relieved from the heavy financial burdens of maintaining them. The revenues that the regular Military and Naval Establishments will otherwise absorb could be diverted to building internal improvements, highways, waterways, railways, reclaiming lands, safeguarding against floods, preventing forest fires, planting forests, and supporting a great national educational system that would make the Homecroft Slogan the heritage of every child born to citizens.h.i.+p in the United States of America:

_Every child in a Garden, Every mother in a Homecroft, and Individual Industrial Independence For every worker in a Home of his own on the Land._

From the standpoint of peace, if there should never be another war, and as a means of national defense against the dangers that menace the country from within--civil conflict, cla.s.s conflict, social upheaval, racial deterioration, and a degenerated citizens.h.i.+p--the advantages of the Homecroft Reserve System may be epitomized as follows:

_First:_ Every Homecroft Reserve Rural Settlement of 100,000 acres--100,000 Reservists--100,000 families, created by the national government, will be a model for an industrial community which will demonstrate that the cure for city congestion is the Homecroft Life in the suburbs or in nearby Homecroft Villages.