We Do Ron Ron Ron, We Do Ron Ron 

James Meek

In 1917, a pair of teenagers who had lied about their ages to join an ambulance unit destined for the Western Front found themselves in the same training camp in Sound Beach, Connecticut. One of them was Walt Disney. The other, only 15 years old, was Ray Kroc, the man who later made McDonald’s an empire. When Kroc and his comrades went off to the nearest town on furlough to look for girls, Disney stayed in camp, drawing. Disney served in France and Germany, but the First World War ended before Kroc was sent to Europe. Had he gone, it might have changed the history of fast food. The mode of operation in the trenches fascinated both Kroc and Disney: the assembly line. Everyone – the ammunition worker, the machine-gunner, the infantryman – played their small, repetitive, unskilled role with as much speed and efficiency as they could muster. The Front was, as Richard Rhodes put it in The Making of the Atom Bomb, an industrial operation for the manufacture of corpses.

Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.

From the archive

After George W. Bush, the Deluge
Murray Sayle on climate change

You can’t build a new society with a Stanley knife
Malcolm Bull on Hardt and Negri’s Empire

The Prodigal Century
David Blackbourn on Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century by John McNeill

On Thinning Ice
Michael Byers: When the Ice Melts

Bottlenecks
Partha Dasgupta: What Environmentalism Overlooks