Beyond the bleak and dismal shore: The wartime and postwar experiences of American four minute men, 1917-1927

The Four Minute Men, a group of volunteer speakers on wartime topics, exerted a tremendous influence on domestic mobilization in the USA from 1917 to 1918. The article assesses the experience of Four Minute Men, especially in postwar recollections. In particular, I argue that historians have misunderstood the authorship and significance of the 1927 article Memoirs of a Four Minute Man. This article misrepresents the writer's own experiences and overstates the sense of disillusionment experienced by wartime speakers in the 1920s and 1930s.