Part 46

Now, pave the way. Show us how we can tie the fund up, and help us to help the people of the nation to preserve the men who are the wards of the nation. We must not demoralize them; we must not make them mendicants; we must not encourage them to leave their normal, legitimate employment to become wards of the nation; but we must encourage these men in every way that we can to become so useful that they will be able to help themselves and be willing to do it, and not depend upon the nation.

If I have been able to express a thought at all here that will be of any value in the long run, I shall feel well repaid for having come. I know of no more patriotic men than those who confront me, and no more patriotic women than those who devoted themselves to the service of the nation during the war. There are no more patriotic men and women than these anywhere. They made the sacrifice during the darkest hours. Many of you men could go out and, as far as dollars go, be much better off; but you prefer to do a service to the nation.

Now, couple with your medical service the two suggestions that I made. Let me repeat them,—the up-building of the moral standard, and the maintenance of an economic expenditure of the funds that may be placed under your charge.

Thank You.”

GENERAL SAWYER: “Fellows, as an expression of your appreciation of the presence of Congressman Madden this morning, I would ask you to rise to your feet, that he may know we believe in him and are for him.”

The assembly responded by standing up.

GENERAL SAWYER: I would lose a great opportunity if I did not take advantage of this particular moment to say to you that I should like—being a doctor myself—that we relieve ourselves of the charge of not being business men. Certainly in the administration of year affairs you have the greatest opportunity that can come to men now to demonstrate that you have some business sense as well as professional sense, and to me it is a great pleasure to have this program this morning because it gives us a new idea of what it means to think in the language of dollars and cents.

This administration has great ambitions to develop within the Government a business organization. The President of the United States believes that the machinery conducting the affairs of the Government of the United States is about as complete, is about as capable as any machinery that could possibly be devised, providing it has a perfect system of organization and business operation of these affairs.

The experiences of the past have shown that we have gone on in our governmental affairs without due regard to where we were to get out. We have depended upon deficiency bills to help us in our extravagance or our over-expenditures. The time has come when that policy is a matter of the past.

Realizing that it was only possible to carry on the affairs of our Government along business lines, the President sought what he regards—and I know this personally because I have heard him express it many times—one of the biggest and best and most potent business men of the United States of America to take charge of the direction of the budget; and I now have great pleasure in introducing to you, follows, my dearest, closest friend, General Charles G. Dawes, of Chicago, Illinois.

“Mr. Chairman and Members of the Conference:

The trouble with most of the Government meetings is that they do not assume the nature of a business meeting. We have something that is entirely different from the atmosphere which surrounds the meeting of any private business organization.

In my work down here for this year, I look upon the Government simply as a business organization and unless I get formality out of my mind, I do not get close to the people with whom I do business. So this morning I just simply want to explain—because when you can give the reasons for the imposition of discipline and rules of action, you make these rules of action doubly effective.

I want to explain, and grasp this opportunity to explain something of the working of the machinery which has been set in motion by the President, creating by Executive Order for the first time, a machine for the imposition of an Executive plan, and a pressure upon Governmental business. In other words, the President, for the first time, has assumed his responsibility as business head of the organization. He has established certain agencies for the imposition of executive policies and I wanted to explain something about them.

This meeting, itself, is the result of the creation of one of these coordinating agencies by Executive Order. And what is involved in this meeting?

Suppose a private corporation was spending, apart from the interest it paid on its debts, about one-fourth of all its expenditures along one certain line of activity. That is what this Government is doing through the Boards represented here,—Army, Navy, Veterans’ Bureau, etc. Supposing that business had run along for a hundred years and somebody would come in and say to the head of the business, “How much money are you spending on this particular activity?”

“Well, so much, one-fourth of all we spend.”

“Have you ever had a meeting of the heads of the agencies for the expenditure?”

“No.”

“Well, how do you know you are not duplicating facilities? How do you know there is any coordination between the establishments you are building in the securing of supplies, in the hiring of men?”

“We don’t know. We never have had, in this business organization, even a meeting to discuss the question of proper expenditure of money upon the standpoint of one corporation as distinguished from five separate departments of a corporation.”

Now what a ridiculous situation that is and yet that is what has pertained from the beginning of Government. We have forty-one independent governmental departments and establishments and each of them has been going on its own way and the result has been chaos in business, absolute chaos. It is a remarkable thing that here for the first time in the history of the Government you have got together the elements to determine the proper administration of this most important matter of the care of the sick and the disabled among the veterans of the war. For the first time it is possible, by this juxtaposition, to properly consider policies to prevent duplication, to devise ways and means and it is a comment upon the terrible conditions under which the business of this Government has been transacted, and that is the first instance where you could get them all together to discuss a coordinated policy. That has been so with everything. The meeting never would have gotten together, you never could have gotten together physically in connection with this thing unless you had been ordered together by the use of the Executive power of the President of the United States. Now don’t get that out of your head,—that underneath this reorganization of government, which is not to be effected, but which has been effected in this routine business, there is the idea of force, and if the idea of force was not there we would not have gotten anywhere in connection with the securing of these results, which small as they are, represent an immense advance upon the old situation. I speak now from the standpoint of the accomplishment of these coordinating boards,—not as predicting something that is going to be done, but of the result of that which has been done during the last six months through coordinating agencies such as your Federal Board, established by the President of the United States through the use of his authority and running the routine business of the Government for the first time upon a business basis.

I make this distinction (for Mr. Burke, for instance) as some misapprehension may be had in connection with this matter of policy. The Budget Bureau, is not concerned with policy save that of economy and efficiency. We are concerned with the routine expenditure of money, of proper conduct of routine business. It is our business to see that when money is appropriated by Congress along a certain line or policy with which we have nothing to do, that that money is spent as economically and as judiciously and carefully as possible in order to secure the greatest results along the line of the policy imposed by Congress.

If Congress as a matter of policy should pass a law to put garbage on the White House steps, it becomes our duty, regrettable as it might be, to advise Congress and the Executive as to how the largest amount of garbage may be most expeditiously and economically spread on the White House steps. And that is why we are safe in demanding what is absolutely necessary, in every business, in routine matters,—a centralized authority. There is no democracy in a properly organized business so far as routine business is concerned. It is a monarchy, and if the sense of responsibility on the part of the agent to the man at the head of the corporation, who is responsible for the policy, is lost, the business goes to pieces, and, if a private business, you go into the hands of the sheriff.

The trouble is that in the past the Presidents of the United States have not done their full duty and assumed the control of the routine business organization of Government. The result is, as is always the case, with a private or public organization, that when the money is spent by parties interested alone in spending the money, the plan of the unit over which the spending head presides takes precedence over the plan of the organization as a whole.

Now that has been exactly the situation in the United States up to this time, and in dollars and cents, to say nothing of the matter of the use of facilities, there has been a waste that is incalculable in the past.

Now, for instance, take this. All this is preliminary but it is very important. Let me talk about human nature in connection with this matter of taking order,—this matter of jealousy of prerogative. I sometimes think we ought all to take a course of study in human nature. I sometimes think that while in the A. E. F. charged by the Commander-in-Chief with this same job of coordinating separated services, the independent services of the Army in connection with the unified business plan of the A. E. F., and afterwards in trying to couple up the allies in the same line of endeavor, I had a better chance than most people to see in its full majesty,—if you choose to look at it that way—that desire for absolute independence,—that willingness to subordinate practically everything on earth to hold power which is characteristic of human nature.

When you have to approach independent power, to induce voluntary surrender, I have found you might as well give it up in advance. There is nothing a man holds to like this right to exercise power, and the best illustration of that is shown by the fact that the greatest war of all ages was fought for four years without a central command. Napoleon’s 44th maxim in war was that nothing is more important in war than a unified command, under one chief. Everybody knew it, but it was not until the unnecessary loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars worth of material that Great Britain bent its pride and accepted that plain, common-sense provision of unified command of the allies under Foch. Not until the fourth year of the war when the allied cause faced annihilation was such a plain, common-sense provision as that for central command possible to be made for the allies, and the certainty of annihilation alone made it possible.