Willem van de Velde the Younger, Dutch ships in a calm. Public domain.
Britain and France bought American steel, grain, and munitions, and borrowed in New York to pay, so factory towns boomed while the country was still officially neutral.
A household near a mill or a yard could get hours it had not had, and it also met higher food prices as the orders competed for the same goods.
A household with a steady job outside the war trades paid the higher prices and did not get the overtime.
A firm with an Allied contract, or a bank that helped float the borrowing, took on a larger book tied to ships the war could sink and to governments that might not pay.
The Allies placed huge orders because their own farms and factories could not feed a continental war, and in 1915 they raised a five-hundred-million-dollar loan in the American market.
Plants hired to fill the contracts.
The paycheck depended on deliveries across an ocean the fighting had already made dangerous.
David M. Kennedy, Over Here (1980)