"From Four Million Conscripts to Four Million Consumers: Rethinking the First World War and Military-Industrial Complex"

In the summer of 1917, the YMCA bought 14,000 baseball bats for wartime distribution, just a fraction of $1.5 million spent on “the greatest order in the history of athletic equipment.” Orders like this demonstrated the scale and scope of American soldiers’ demands for leisure, which led bureaucrats and officers to reshape the country’s economic output. Many historians have framed the “military-industrial complex” as a product of mid-twentieth-century scientific breakthroughs improving weaponry like the Manhattan Project. However, progressive officials’ concern about conscripts’ recreation during the First World War also spurred innovation across entertainment and consumer goods, illustrating a much longer, more nuanced relationship between corporate executives and War Department administrators than previously recognized. By examining the overlooked and misunderstood welfare programs of the First World War, this paper improves our understanding of American business history by recontextualizing the connections between manufacturers and the military. Utilizing memoirs, debriefing interviews, and meeting minutes from draftees, government agents, and YMCA workers, it frames soldiers’ aid programs as sites of change; officials recruited experts from Sears, Vacuum Oil, and other companies to modernize factories, improve shipping networks, and popularize spectator sports as entertainment. Following the war, Quartermaster Robert E. Wood was one of many veterans who applied lessons from their service to postwar careers; as an executive with Sears, Wood spoke of his mission to turn the company into the “commissary” of the nation, linking his role overseeing servicemen’s shops to civilian life. Throughout their service, “soldier-consumers” pressured administrators to restructure welfare work according to troops’ needs by improving business operations and management techniques, forcing historians to rethink our understanding of industry’s relationship with the armed forces.