This committee proceeded via New Jersey up the Hudson to the great Curtiss plant, on to Detroit and down to Dayton. At Elizabeth, New Jersey, they reported that the speed and anxiety of the workmen to get parts of planes into cars and on their way to Hoboken was “little short of phenomenal.” The officer in charge was courteous to the senators but begged them to keep out of the way, saying that the boys in Europe needed planes and there must be no delay--all of which impressed the senators so much that they thanked him and left. Then they proceeded north to the Curtiss plant at Buffalo--a plant having 14,000 men on the payroll and producing only ten to twelve planes a day. (In Toronto a factory employing 2,800 people was producing twelve fighting planes and twenty-four training planes a day.) There was present the same kind of apparently furious activity which the senators had witnessed at Elizabeth. The committee then went on to Dayton Field, where, after watching a schooling of the officers and a workout of the young men, they turned to leave. As they were walking away, the officer of the day approached Senator Reed and said, “Aren’t we going to be heard?” Without waiting for a reply he said, “I’m through. You can strip my buttons off, but I’ll have no more damned humbug. I am killing two boys a day. We dig two graves every morning before breakfast, just to be ready for their deaths. You may do what you like with me. I am through.” As a result, so the senator himself told me, the committee determined to return secretly to the factories they had just visited. There the men who had brusquely pushed the committee aside in their anxiety to ship planes to Europe were disgorging the airplane parts they had so carefully boxed. Thomas, who had been very rude to me, wrote the report and presented it to a Senate that had less than a dozen members in their seats. He complained feelingly of the lack of interest, the lack of patriotism in a matter which had impugned the honor and the integrity of our War Department. To one of his committee he said afterward, “I wish there were some way I could apologize to Mr. Borglum and tell him how mistaken I have been.”