104 e lusive v ictories
and have a suffi cient impact in battle to assure that the president could
set the agenda at any postwar peace conference. Confi dent that the
general understood this, Wilson found no reason to inquire into just
how Pershing would accomplish the task.
With Pershing dispatched to France, the administration set about
raising, training, and equipping the AEF that would follow. Securing
manpower was the easy part: hundreds of thousands of young men
were inducted beginning in early summer 1917 to begin their basic
training. Producing soldiers was one thing; creating an army in the age
of industrial warfare quite another. As warfare became more complex,
the need for specialized troops also increased, and they required longer
training than did the soldier with a rifle. Much of the equipment
needed for the AEF could not be produced quickly in the United States
and would have to be acquired from the Allies. Even to supply Amer-
ican troops with uniforms, vehicles, ammunition, fuel, and the vast
range of goods the force would need required what was for the United
States an unprecedented level of economic coordination.
Th e initial economic mobilization eff orts went poorly, with Wilson
exercising ineff ective control. In August 1916, Congress had formed
an advisory Council of National Defense (CND), staff ed on a volun-
teer basis by prominent citizens. Following the declaration of war in
April 1917, CND members established committees to supervise
various aspects of mobilization, and these in turn spawned more com-
mittees until the total approached 150 separate bodies. Wilson could
only intervene selectively in the mobilization eff ort, and where he did
so the results were unimpressive. At times he let political consider-
ations override military needs. Th us, despite an urgent need for gun
powder, the administration (with his active involvement) canceled a
large contract to Du Pont for fear of how the public would react to
rewarding a major corporation that had already earned huge profi ts
from producing powder for the Allies. Critics initially focused their
ire on the War Department, which struggled to rouse itself from its
peacetime slumbers. But in early 1918, a coal shortage, brought on by
Wilson’s decision to set prices too low to assure steady production,
forced factories to close and provoked broad attacks on the adminis-
tration’s mismanagement and calls for a bipartisan coalition war
cabinet. Rather than seize on this as an opportunity to broaden his