Well, to be honest? I just gave up.

By 1920, even without Mumma’s otherworldly disapproval of my shabbiness, I knew I needed clothes. The trouble was, I dreaded becoming the object of a dressmaker’s pitiless assessment but I had also forbidden myself the alternative. The new fashions sold in department stores had thrown skilled American seamstresses out of work, you see. They’d been displaced by immigrant girls doing piecework for a pittance in terrible sweatshops. I refused to patronize a garment industry that exploited its desperately poor workers so heartlessly.

And if that wasn’t enough to keep me out of stores, there was this as well: I was determined to resist that shameless sister of war propaganda—the advertising industry.

President Wilson had been reelected on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” but it wasn’t long before he’d organized the Committee on Public Information. Its brief was to provide citizens with facts that would persuade them that entering the war was a good idea after all. To the administration’s dismay, its facts did not convince; rather than reconsider his own conclusions, Mr. Wilson decided that what our country really needed was a new slogan. Thus, the C.P.I. launched its memorable motto: “Make the world safe for democracy!”

Soon Americans were surrounded by posters with childish, frightening images like giant spiders wearing German helmets and crouching over Cleveland. Street boys were paid to hand out flyers with maps that had UNITED STATED crossed out and NEW PRUSSIA scrawled across the nation. Newspapers printed bogus pro-war letters to their editors, planting them next to articles that vilified anti-war dissenters in the crudest terms possible. In theaters, paid “spokesmen” gave four-minute patriotic speeches during intermission. Even at school, we teachers sat through pro-war slide shows with the children, who were sent home to shame their parents into supporting what the facts had not.