World War I Participation and The Nobel Peace Prize
Dawes helped support the first Anglo-French Loan to the Entente of $500,000,000. Dawes support was important because the House of Morgan needed public support from a non-Morgan banker. The Morgan banker Lamont said that Dawes' support would "make a position for him in the banking world such as he otherwise could never hope to make." (Loans were seen as possibly violating neutrality, and Wilson was still resisting permitting loans.)
During the First World War, Dawes was commissioned Major, Lieutenant Colonel, and Brigadier General of the Seventeenth Engineers. He served with the American Expeditionary Force as chief of supply procurement and was a member of the Liquidation Commission, United States War Department.
After the war, the U.S. Senate held hearings on overcharges by military suppliers. During heated testimony, Dawes burst out, "Hell and Maria, we weren't trying to keep a set of books over there, we were trying to win a war!" He was later known as "Hell and Maria Dawes" (although he always insisted the expression was "Helen Maria").
Dawes resigned from the Army in 1919. When the Bureau of the Budget was created, he was appointed in 1921 by President Warren G. Harding as its first Director. Hoover appointed him to the Allied Reparations Commission in 1923. For his work on the Dawes Plan, a program to enable Germany to restore and stabilize its economy, Dawes shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925. The plan was deemed unworkable and replaced with the Young Plan, which had harsher provisions against Germany.
Read more about this topic: Charles G. Dawes
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