The
military mobilization to meet the challenge ofindeed made the federal government far more
powerful than it had ever been before. In many ways, the war created an opportunity for many
reforms advocated by Progressives to be implemented, not to foster equality or to achieve
lasting reform, but to meet the exigencies of war.
World War I was in many
ways the first modern war, and it required industrial production at levels never before seen.
The War Industries Board was a federal organization with some coercive power, assembled with the
aim of organizing the economy and managing production to meet quotas that it set. Businesses
were awarded government contracts to produce certain items, an unprecedented step for the US
government. The federal government never had to implement a rationing program like it did in
World War II, but the Food Administration, headed by future president Herbert Hoover, did
institute price-fixing along with a steady campaign that urged Americans to...
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