Bok learned that the country’s first act would be to recruit for the navy, so as to get this branch of the service into a state of preparedness.  He therefore secured Franklin D. Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy, to write an article explaining to mothers why they should let their boys volunteer for the Navy and what it would mean to them.

He made arrangements at the American Red Cross Headquarters for an official department to begin at once in the magazine, telling women the first steps that would be taken by the Red Cross and how they could help.  He secured former President William Howard Taft, as chairman of the Central Committee of the Red Cross, for the editor of this department.

He cabled to Viscount Northcliffe and Ian Hay for articles showing what the English women had done at the outbreak of the war, the mistakes they had made, what errors the American women should avoid, the right lines along which English women had worked and how their American sisters could adapt these methods to trans-atlantic conditions.

And so it happened that when the first war issue of The Journal appeared on April 20th, only three weeks after the President’s declaration, it was the only monthly that recognized the existence of war, and its pages had already begun to indicate practical lines along which women could help.

The editor had been told that the question of food would come to be of paramount importance; he knew that Herbert Hoover had been asked to return to America as soon as he could close his work abroad, and he cabled over to his English representative to arrange that the proposed Food Administrator should know, at first hand, of the magazine and its possibilities for the furtherance of the proposed Food Administration work.

The Food Administration was no sooner organized than Bok made arrangements for an authoritative department to be conducted in his magazine, reflecting the plans and desires of the Food Administration, and Herbert Hoover’s first public declaration to the women of America as food administrator was published in The Ladies’ Home Journal.  Bok now placed all the resources of his four-color press-work at Mr. Hoover’s disposal; and the Food Administration’s domestic experts, in conjunction with the full culinary staff of the magazine, prepared the new war dishes and presented them appetizingly in full colors under the personal endorsement of Mr. Hoover and the Food Administration.  From six to sixteen articles per month were now coming from Mr. Hoover’s department alone.

Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo interpreted the first Liberty Loan “drive” to the women; the President of the United States, in a special message to women, wrote in behalf of the subsequent Loan; Bernard Baruch, as chairman of the War Industries Board, made clear the need for war-time thrift; the recalled ambassador to Germany, James W. Gerard, told of the ingenious plans resorted to by German women which American women