In October 1918, Alfred Carlton Gilbert (1884–1961) stood before the Council of National Defense (CDN). On April 6, 1917, America entered World War I, and the country’s manufacturers began building products primarily for the war effort. The Council soon set its sights on toy manufacturers, suggesting that building and selling toys took away from the effort. Gilbert, who was chairman of the Toy Association’s War Service Committee, strongly disagreed. He brought in numerous toys to prove his argument.
“A boy wants fun, not education. Yet through the kind of toys American toy manufacturers are turning out, he gets both,” Gilbert stated, according to the Boston Post. “The American boy is a genuine boy, and he wants genuine toys. He wants guns that really shoot, and that is why we have given him air rifles from the time he was big enough to hold them. It is because of toys they had in childhood that the American soldiers are the best marksmen on the battlefields of France.”
