Lars Olsson’s insightful book on the intersections of labor, capital, and the First World War in a midwestern American city supports newer scholarship on the blurred lines between the Great War’s presumed home fronts and battle fronts. In the early twentieth century the most horrifyingly bloody war in world history neatly lined the pockets of Minneapolis’s industrial capitalists, who directed their employees to sew underwear worn by US soldiers heading to France. The Northwestern Knitting Company, renamed Munsingwear in 1919, used paternalistic and patriotic strategies to ensure the concern’s success during wartime. In a nutshell, this book reinforces the notion that World War I was good for the American economy.
Part of this success, at least for this particular company, lay in keeping labor activism at bay. In his logically arranged chapters Olsson explains the political and social setting of Minneapolis’s economy from the 1880s to 1920, then offers a...
