by the same conditions that affected the purely military
problems--decentralization and the emergency demands that resulted from
the sudden decision to send a large expeditionary force to France. The
various organizing boards were so many individual solutions for
individual problems. At the beginning of the war the Council of National
Defense represented the only attempt at a central business organization,
and as time went on the importance and the influence of the Council
diminished. The effects of decentralization became painfully apparent
during the bitter cold of the winter months, when the fuel,
transportation, and food crises combined to threaten almost complete
paralysis of the economic and military mobilization.

The distrust and discouragement that followed brought forth furious
attacks upon the President's war policies, led not merely by Roosevelt
and Republican enemies of the Administration, but by Democratic Senators.
The root of the whole difficulty, they contended, lay in the fact that
Wilson had no policy. They demanded practically the abdication of the
presidential control of military affairs, either through the creation of
a Ministry of Munitions or of a War Cabinet. In either case Congress
would control the situation through its definition of the powers of the
new organization and the appointment of its personnel.

President Wilson utilized the revolt to secure the complete
centralization toward which he had been aiming. He fought the new
proposals on the ground that they merely introduced new machinery to
complicate the war organization, and he insisted that true policy
demanded rather an increase in the efficiency of existing machinery. If
the General Staff and the War Industries Board were given power to
supervise and execute as well as to plan, the country would have the
machinery at hand capable of forming a central organization, which could
determine in the first place what was wanted and where, and in the second
place how it could be supplied. All that was necessary was to give the
President a free hand to effect any transfer of organization, funds, or
functions in any of the existing departments of government, without being
compelled to apply to Congress in each case.

The struggle between Wilson and his opponents was sharp, but the
President carried the day. He exerted to the full his influence on
Congress and utilized skillfully the argument that at this moment of
crisis a swapping of horse