VOL. LV.

NUMBER 3

W

ITH the full authority of President Wilson and the Secretary of the Navy, the associated Advertising Clubs of the World, touching American business at practically every point, have placed their entire organization squarely behind the nationwide plans of the Committee on Industrial Preparedness of the Naval Consulting Board of the United States. The advertising men, under the leadership of Herbert S. Houston, President, and a specially appointed committee of leading publishers and advertising experts, will shortly start an advertising campaign in the newspapers and magazines of America in support of the work of the Committee on Industrial Preparedness, which embraces an organization of thirty thousand highly trained engineers, formed for the purpose of making a thorough inventory of American industry for the first time in national history.

In a letter just received by Mr. Houston from Secretary of the Navy Daniels, the Secretary writes: "Through the assistance rendered the Naval Consulting Board by the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World in the accomplishment of industrial mobilization, which lies at the very root of any and every plan for true preparedness, a patriotic service will be rendered to the country that is beyond price."

Howard E. Coffin, Chairman of the Committee on Industrial Preparedness, in accepting for the Naval Consulting Board the services of the

advertising men, has written Mr Houston as follows: "This committee of the Naval Consulting Board takes great pleasure in making formal acceptance of the generous offer upon the part of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World to aid in the work of industrial of industrial preparedness now in the hands of the committee. In this great work of harnessing the full industrial strength of the country in the service of the Army and Navy your organization, with its clean record and splendid trained personnel, can render an incalculable service to the nation."

Mr. Houston, when seen at the offices of the Committee on Industrial Preparedness, in the Engineering Societies Building, in New York, where he was in consultation with Mr. Coffin and W. S. Gifford, Supervising Director of the Committee's work, said:

"The plan which has just been approved by President Wilson, the Secretary of the Navy and the Naval Consulting Board, provides for the active co-operation of our organization with the thirty thousand engineers who will soon undertake the tremendous task of making a card index survey of American industry, so that it may be prepared for national defense, if need comes. Through the great power of advertising we expect to arouse manufacturers, workingmen, business men, in fact, the whole country, to the vital need of making industry the basic line of defense so

that, if necessity arises, it can supply munitions quickly and abundantly.

"This is not a war measure, but a peace measure. The militarist will support it and so will the pacifist, as well as the great body of Americans in between. So we have adopted as the slogan of the advertising campaign 'national defense and international peace,' believing that the two causes will be best served by linking them together. Publishers of leading newspapers, magazines and farm papers, poster men and electric sign men, trade paper publishers and others representing the different advertising interests have already offered space to carry the advertising, without cost to the Government. They are glad to strike hands with the engineers, in the same patriotic and unselfish spirit they are manifesting, and co-operate with them in this broad undertaking." Mr. Houston continued: "While the primary thing, of course, is service to the country, it is manifest that this work of the engineers will be of the greatest service to industry in times of peace. If industry is mobilized for defense, it will be placed on a basis of efficiency to meet the keen competition that will surely follow the present war.

"Let me also point out one very vital thing; this annual distribution of orders will develop our industrial resources for war nationally, in a geographic sense. It will bring to the support of the army and navy industrial centers west of the Alleghanies and away from the exposed seaboards.

"And let me say, finally, that this plan will not only insure against the shutting down of plants in time of war, but will give employment to the maximum number of working men throughout the country even under war conditions, and will prevent suffering through unemployment."

Bascom Little, President of the Cleveland, Ohio, Chamber of Commerce, and Chairman of the National Defense Committee of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, in an interview given out yesterday, states

that his organizations are in thorough accord and co-operation with the work of the committee on industrial preparedness. Mr. Little said:

"The work of Mr. Coffin's committee has seemed to us so very important and so closely related, in such practical ways, to what the business organizations of the country are trying to do to further nationed defense that those with which I am connected immediately formed a union with the committee on learning of its work.

"The thing that has stirred up the business men of the middle west during the past eighteen months has been the lesson they have learned in the making of war materials. It points a very vivid moral to all our people. It all looked very easy when it started a year and a half ago. The plant with which I am associated in Cleveland got an order for 250,000 3-inch high explosive shells. It was a simple enough looking job, just a question of machining. The forgings were shipped to us and we were to finish and deliver. It began to dawn on us when the forgings came that this whole order, that looked so big to us, was less than one day's supply of shells for France or England or Russia, and we felt that in eight months by turning our plant, which is a first-class machine shop, onto this job we could fill the order. In a little while we got up against the process of hardening. That-and mark what I say was fourteen months ago. To date we have shipped and had accepted 130,000 shells, and those, about half our order, are not complete. They still have to be fitted by the fuse maker, then fitted in the brass cartridge cases with the propelling charge, and somewhere, sometime, maybe, they will get on the battlefield of Europe. Up to the present none of them has arrived there.

"Now this is the situation in a high class efficient American plant. This is what happened when it turned to making munitions of war. The same thing has occurred in so many middle western plants that their owners have made up their mind that if they are

ever going to be called upon for service to their own country they must know more about this business. They feel that they are now liabilities to the nation and not assets in case of war. Proud as we may be of our industrial perfection, it has not worked here, and the country-particularly you in the east-may as well know it.

"The Defense Committee of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce has been trying to figure out what sort of relation these private plants should have to the Federal Government in time of war, and we have reached the fundamentals of a plan.

"We feel that there should be, in the first place, a contract made in the open market as we would do business with any other customer, with this main difference: that in case of war there should be no excess profit to anybody arising out of the national necessity, and that the Federal Government should have the use of the private plants of the country in war time at a living wage to the stockholders. It is economically unwise that the stockholders should cease to have dividends from their investment, but the Government should have the right to take over the plants, with their personnel and equipment, on the basis of a living wage, so as to prevent the creation of a profit interest in war.

"We feel that it is very dangerous and un-American to set up any kind of system which will make any part of the community interested in forcing the nation into war, and that if there be war, every person, high or low, in this country must accept his share of the national sacrifice and with all his heart and head work in whatever place his ability can best be applied.

I am absolutely certain that the 30,000 concerns of which the Committee on Industrial Preparedness is about to make an inventory will gladly and with full patriotism support the great constructive work of this committee. I think there will be hardly an exception to this.

Mr. Little concluded:

"Now, speaking as an individual,

let me make a personal expression. I am from Cleveland and I know very well the new Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker. He is of the opposite political faith from my own, but I have the profoundest regard for him personally and for his ability. I have known him a long time, very intimately. I have been over this general question with him, and although it is neither just nor proper that I should say what his ideas on any subject are, I know that the broad plan of the committee will receive from him very sympathetic consideration and that there will be hearty support from the present War Department head to such a sound and loyal plan for national service along the lines which I have discussed."

"So this work of the engineers for industrial preparedness means insurance against war and insurance for prosperity in time of peace. In both matters the great advertising interests of the country, federated in the Associated Advertising Clubs, have a vital interest, along with all business. The Government and the engineers realize that we control the force in the business world that can best meet the present situation and we shall not hesitate to exert this force of advertising to serve both the nation and all its business interests. We are enlisting the services of the most distinguished illustrators in the country, of the best copy writers and engravers, and it is our purpose to have a campaign of advertising that shall be commensurate in quality and power with the great national task which the Government has asked us to join the engineers in undertaking.

"W. C. D'Arcy, President of the D'Arcy Advertising Agency, of St. Louis, the chairman of our National Advertising Committee, and Lafayette Young, Jr., publisher of the Des Moines Capital, the chairman of our National Defense Committee, will share with me the general direction of the campaign. In carrying it forward, we shall work in close co-operation (Continued on page 80)