For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front

1. Food Will Win the War: Domestic Science and the Royal Society

Two of the primary relationships Tönnies describes in his theory of Gemeinschaft depend on the involvement of women, in one case as wives and in the other as mothers. Since the two are irrevocably interconnected in Western society, much war propaganda focuses on the responsibilities of women to civilize their men and to feed and educate their children. From the days of the Temperance and Suffrage movements, women upheld the idea of their moral superiority, and the advent of the First World War allowed that idealization to continue. In some cases, of course, that moral superiority played out in pacifism. But by and large, women assumed a pivotal role in maintaining the morale of the home front. New methods of food preparation and new products designed to make life in the kitchen easier formed the basis of the propaganda campaign to enlist the housewife in the moral role she was born to play. Wives and Mothers: Salvation in the Mixing Bowl Herbert Hoover assumed the duties of director of the United States Food Administration at its inception in August of 1917 and immediately set about mobilizing the food industry, restaurants , and the home kitchen to adopt his new plans for food conservation. Hoover adamantly rejected pleas from European Allies to institute food rationing. As he recalls in his introduction to William Clinton Mullendore’s History of the United States Food Will Win the War Domestic Science and the Royal Society ONE 28 | Food Will Win the War Food Administration, “voluntary action has the great value of depriving those who can afford it and not those who have no margin for sacrifice.”1 Hoover’s rationale appears to have its foundation in the knowledge that the poor, those with no margins for sacrifice, could not afford many of the food items that rationing would have controlled in the first place. Those who could not eat cake were not a part of Hoover’s grand scheme. But middle-class women were very much a part of it. Hoover tells us that “the women of the country were called upon for this service and, under the leadership of the very able women who headed the Conservation Division in Washington, directors were appointed to collaborate with the state and county administrations and a network of committees was established engaging several hundred thousand women. A campaign secured from 14,000,000 families . . . signed pledges to carry out the conservation programs suggested by the Food Administration from time to time.”2 Beyond controlling the press, as we shall see shortly, Hoover established a system of hands-on coercion that was impossible for the patriotic woman to resist, and a system of voluntary compliance that enlisted food distributors and manufacturers—that is, the corporate end of food production. Products such as Crisco, Calumet Baking Powder, and Campbell ’s Soup and the propaganda campaign to enlist women are directly linked to the U.S. Food Administration and its efforts to manipulate the sale and distribution of food as well as its consumption. Albert N. Merritt, a member of the Food Administration staff, in his 1920 book War Time Control of Distribution of Foods, details in great length the pressures applied to manufacturers and distributors of food as well as food retailers. In a chapter called “Voluntary Propaganda,” Merritt alludes to a potato surplus that occurred in the summer of 1918. According Food Will Win the War | 29 to Merritt, “potatoes could not be exported, and as there was such an acute shortage of wheat a most energetic campaign was conducted through the wholesale and retail dealers to push the sale of potatoes, and to urge their use by the consumer in the place of wheat.”3 Many of the wartime bread recipes call for the use of potatoes, and according to Merritt, the “campaign resulted in the avoidance of the complete loss of millions of bushels of this important food commodity, with a corresponding saving in wheat for export.”4 In other words, housewives bought potatoes. Other works also confirm the efficacy of propaganda. In his History of the United States Food Administration Mullendore substantiates on a national scale the effects of the Food Administration ’s campaign. While the first pledge card drive failed because it lacked the appropriate methods of distribution, a detail Hoover omits from his introduction, the second drive, according to Mullendore, “actively enlisted between thirteen and...