“We Were a Soft People”

Abstract

When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, food supplies seemed vitally important to winning what had become a contest of endurance on and off the battlefield. Woodrow Wilson created the United States Food Administration, a powerful wartime agency charged with exporting as much American food as possible to western European allies and neutrals. While official food administration policy urged Americans to eat plenty, as long as they ate wartime substitutes rather than exportable commodities, individuals within and without the administration saw the wartime food conservation campaign as an opportunity to champion the moral value of austerity, drawing parallels between righteous physical self-control and the virtues of strong, even autocratic, government. This paper examines the relationships in First World War America between self-discipline, a distrust of the pleasures of food, and views of the war as a morally and politically purifying experience.