ily conference with the department
chiefs to secure the newest developments.

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 transatlantic 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 President planned to bring the Y. M. C. A. into the service by
making it a war-work body, and Bok immediately made arrangements for a
page to appear each month under the editorship of John R. Mott, general
secretary of the International Y. M. C. A. Committee.

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 as food administrator to
the women of America was published in The Ladies' Home Journal. Bok now
pla