’A Violent Desire for the Amusements’: Boxing, Libraries, and the Distribution and Management of Welfare During the First World War

During the First World War, American War Department officials and their welfare affiliates (including the YMCA, Knights of Columbus, and American Library Association) provided servicemen with an unprecedented scale and scope of leisure activities by embracing new distribution and management approaches. Historians examining troops’ leisure have focused on bureaucrats’ coercive actions restricting access to vice districts, but progressive authorities also hired staffers who could identify individual soldiers’ preferences and construct complex distribution networks on both sides of the Atlantic. By examining the military’s role in blurring public–private boundaries in welfare work, administrators’ postwar careers, and veterans’ expectations, this article illustrates wartime recreation programs’ impact on the development of mass culture.