The First World War at Home

Total war meant the government could no longer leave the economy or public opinion alone. The War Industries Board, led by Bernard Baruch, coordinated private companies directly: setting production priorities, standardizing goods, and fixing prices so factories made shells and uniforms instead of whatever sold best. This was an unprecedented level of federal direction over private industry, justified entirely as a temporary wartime necessity, not a permanent plan to manage capitalism.

Controlling opinion mattered just as much as controlling output. The Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918 criminalized interfering with recruitment or sharply criticizing the government, the military, or the war. In Schenck v. United States, 1919, the Supreme Court upheld a conviction for distributing anti-draft pamphlets, ruling that speech could be restricted when it posed a clear and present danger, a real and lasting limit on First Amendment protection. Alongside legal coercion came persuasion: the Committee on Public Information produced posters and films that used stark imagery, simple slogans, and appeals to duty or fear to push enlistment, bond sales, and conformity.

Mobilization also reorganized who worked and where. Labor unions grew during the war as the government needed uninterrupted production and tolerated higher wages and shorter hours to get it, while women and Black Southern migrants filled industrial jobs left by soldiers. When the war ended abruptly in November 1918, war contracts vanished, returning veterans wanted their jobs back, and inflation squeezed wages, producing a wave of strikes in 1919 and pushing many women and Black workers out of the positions they had just gained. This sets up the backlash and Red Scare that open the 1920s.