336 Chapter Nine
tives and spokesmen.^53 The alliance among government bureaucrats,
labor bureaucrats, and business bureaucrats to extend their collective
jurisdiction and effective control over ordinary human lives was less
apparent in France, the United States, and Russia, where unions re
mained weak or, coming late to the scene, espoused revolutionary or
quasi-revolutionary ideologies.^54 Businessmen, whether masquerad
ing as “dollar a year” men in government service or acting privately to
capture government contracts, had correspondingly freer scope in di
recting the French, American, and Russian (to 1917) war economies.
Health, too, became subject to official management. In army ranks,
inoculation and other systematic precautions against infectious dis
eases, which in all earlier wars killed far more soldiers than enemy
action, made the long stalemate of the trenches possible. In eastern
Europe, public health administration broke down after 1915, so that
typhus and other diseases played their usual roles in killing soldiers
and civilians alike; but until 1918, when a serious influenza epidemic
swept around the entire globe, killing far more persons than died in
battle during World War I, army doctors and public health officials
managed to keep lethal infections in check on the Western Front,
despite miserable conditions in the trenches.^55 On the other hand,
little was done to extend preventive medicine to civilians. That had to
wait for World War II.
Rationing of food and other consumables had begun to alter accus
tomed inequalities of consumption within civilian society by 1916,
and in the ensuing years increasingly stringent rationing deprived
money incomes of much of their peacetime meaning. Taxation and
inflation combined in varying proportions in each country to do the
same. Ownership of property became less important; ascribed status,
deriving from an individual’s place in a hierarchy of command—
military or civil as the case might be—tended to eclipse inherited rank,
although to be sure the two often coincided. Despite carryovers from
- This is a major theme of Gerald Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in Germany,
1914 – 1918 (Princeton, 1966).
- Cf. Hatry, Renault; Usines de guerre, pp. 119-45, for Renault’s difficulties with
unions beginning in 1917. For the United States, David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The
First World War and American Society (New York, 1980), pp. 70–73, 258-64 and passim,
has interesting things to say about the wartime roles of rival AF of L and IWW labor
leaders. For Russia, Isaac Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions (London, 1950), pp. 1–17.
- Estimates of deaths from influenza in 1918–19 start at 21 million and rise indefi
nitely higher. This was more than twice battle deaths in World War I. Cf. Alfred W.
Crosby, Jr., Epidemic and Peace (Westport, Conn., 1976), p. 207. Venereal disease also
attained epidemic proportions in the British army, partly because it was treated as a
moral rather than as a medical problem.
