World Wars of the Twentieth Century 317
large-scale human effort. I therefore propose to treat the managerial
metamorphosis wrought by these two wars at rather greater length, in
the belief that this aspect may prove to be their principal and most
lasting result for human history.
Managerial Metamorphosis in World War I:
First Phase, 1914–16
The unexpected duration of World War I compelled each of the pro
tagonists to organize and reorganize the home front to improve the
efficiency and enlarge the scale of the country’s war effort. Far-
reaching changes in older patterns of management resulted. In par
ticular, innumerable bureaucratic structures that had previously acted
more or less independently of one another in a context of market
relationships coalesced into what amounted to a single national firm
for waging war. Business corporations were the most important of
these structures, perhaps, but labor unions, government ministries,
and army and navy administrators also played leading roles in defining
the new ways of managing national affairs.
Time-tested customs and institutions became soft and malleable in
the hands of rival technocratic elites who made millions into soldiers
and other millions into war workers. Family life, property rights, ac
cess to consumables, locality and class relationships—all altered dras
tically. Taken together, changes in daily routines and encounters
added up to a social metamorphosis as remarkable (and perhaps also as
natural) as the metamorphosis of insects.
How did it happen?
At first, everyone assumed that the war would last only a few weeks.
On the Continent, the very perfection of rival mobilization plans
meant that normal life halted abruptly with the outbreak of hostilities.
Only in England did “business as usual” persist.^23 France almost
emptied its factories and farms of able-bodied men. The shock was
lessened in other countries by the fact that not all eligible males had
been trained as soldiers. Political controversy, too, stopped “for the
duration” in every belligerent land. Except for a small band of doc
trinaires, socialists everywhere betrayed their revolutionary rhetoric
and suspended the class struggle in order to repel the national foe.
For thirty-six days it looked as though the expectation of a short war
- The phrase was invented by Winston Churchill, according to Samuel J. Hurwitz,
State Intervention in Great Britain: A Study of Economic Control and Social Response,
1914–1919 (New York, 1949), p. 63.
