Kilmer House

A Johnson & Johnson Employee During WWI, “Somewhere in France”

There’s a fascinating blog that’s been in the news recently.  It reproduces the letters of a World War I soldier, in chronological order, 90 years after he wrote them.  The letters have an immediacy that has thousands of readers following the writer’s story from letter to letter.  Many Johnson & Johnson employees fought in World War I and, aside from writing to their families, they wrote letters to their co-workers and occasionally sent photographs, which are preserved in our archives.

Two Employees Who Served in World War I

The Spanish American War in the 1890s had seen the Company increase its production of sterile surgical dressings, gauze, bandages, and other supplies to help treat wounded soldiers.  During World War I, the Company ran shifts around the clock to keep up with the demand, which included all of the Allied forces, as well as military and civilian hospitals in the U.S. and many in Europe.  This led in 1916 to the acquisition of the Chicopee Manufacturing Company of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, whose entire spinning and weaving output was soon on its way to New Brunswick to be made into surgical dressings and other medical supplies.

Excerpt from an Employee Letter to Fred Kilmer 

Fred Kilmer, whose son was also serving in the army, encouraged the Company’s employee-soldiers to write and send photographs back to New Brunswick, which he saved in a scrapbook.  This correspondence helped give these employees a lifeline back to their civilian lives.  Their co-workers also sent care packages with joke books, newspapers (The Home News, the local New Brunswick paper, was a frequent request), magazines, items of clothing and personal necessities, like razor blades for their shaving kits.  They kept their soldier-colleagues informed about what was happening back in New Brunswick, and the employees who wrote from training camps and then from France wrote what they could about what it was like in the trenches and field hospitals.

 Back of postcard showing Camp Dix in Wrightstown, NJ.  Many employees who enlisted were trained there.

An employee from the box room, who became a cannoner with a Field Artillery battery in France, wrote: 

Over There, May 16, 1916 — “…I am in my dug–out about 10 feet under the ground, so they will have to hit right square on top of the dug-out to do any damage to us.  You can feel the jar when the shells land a little ways off and they blow out the candle by the force of the shock.”  [Employee Letter, May 16, 1916]

“It is funny how you will get used to all the noise, and when you hear the shells going over your head you don’t mind it at all, for that is all I hear all day long; we get gassed nearly every day…” [Employee Letter, May 2, 1918]

Another employee from the main office, who served in an Ambulance Corps, illustrated some of the confusion and constant back-and-forth movement experienced by those at the front. 

November 23, 1918:  “We left Fraundes on September 19th., in trucks for a place called Villers Dauconet, a French American evacuation hospital and we stayed here until October 9th., when we joined the division for the first time, and went to a place called Mt. Blauville…We left here the next day and hiked about four miles to a place called Apprenouvite.  Here we laid in holes made by the dough boys eight days previous.  These holes were just long enough to stretch out in and were one foot deep…the next night fifty of us hiked back to Apprenouvit [sic] and ran a Field Hospital while twenty others went to the front and did litter bearing work…”  [Employee Letter, November 23, 1918]

 Postcard from employee-soldier written to Fred Kilmer

In another letter, dated July 1, 1918, the box room employee wrote to his supervisor and mentioned with a sense of pride the fact that Johnson & Johnson medical supplies played such a major part in treating the wounded. 

“…as I walk over the battle field and see some places where our boys fell and were dressed before they were taken away, I often find a J&J bandage wrapper laying around…”  [Employee letter, July 1, 1918]

The box room employee turned cannoneer and the main office employee came home safely, while others were not so fortunate.  The box room employee reported back to his friends at Johnson & Johnson about what it was like at the exact moment the armistice ended the war:

“I was up at the front the morning that the war was called off just before eleven o’clock on the morning of November 11th.  Every gun around me was sending them over as fast as they could and just at eleven o’clock, they all stopped.  It sure did feel queer that afternoon when everything was so quiet and you could walk around where you pleased; everyone started celebrating that night and I took a hand in it myself; it sure was a great sight.”  [Employee Letter, December 5, 1918]

In my last post I mentioned that Robert Wood Johnson (son of Company founder Robert Wood Johnson the first) had an idea about how to increase the Johnson & Johnson business.  And his idea was…to take an almost year-long trip around the world.  It’s not as farfetched as it sounds, because that trip led to Johnson & Johnson becoming a decentralized global company. 

Cotton Mill Workers with Cotton Products

In the aftermath of World War I, both Johnson & Johnson and the United States were recovering from the dislocation caused by the conflict.  The reaction to the casualties and devastation caused by the brutal trench warfare caused growing feelings of isolationism across the U.S.  The Company’s production levels stayed high while supplies of hospital and consumer products were refilled, but it was clear that this would not last, and new opportunities for growth would quickly need to be found.  Robert Wood Johnson had moved from manufacturing and was now in sales and marketing, areas in which he had a natural ability.  Johnson, who was still in his 20s, had joined the Company instead of going to college.  Though he had done well as general superintendent in charge of manufacturing, a position he had held starting in April of 1918, he still remained unproven to some members of management. 

Robert Wood Johnson

Robert Wood Johnson very perceptively felt that the United States was being forced into a policy of isolation that would destroy the Company’s vigorous export business.  He determined that the way to prevent that was to form international operations instead of relying on third parties to sell the products across the world…and at the time, he was virtually alone in believing that.   Others, including Robert’s uncle James Wood Johnson (who was President of the Company), felt that they should concentrate instead on expanding their existing network of sales agents and distributors.  The topic was debated for more than a year.  In the fall of 1922, Robert and his brother Seward asked the Board of Control to approve a study to get first hand information on the practicality of opening operations around the world.   The study would involve both young men traveling the world for almost a year.

Seward Johnson (L) and Robert Wood Johnson (R) in Egypt

The Board reluctantly agreed to the trip.  Robert and Seward spend a year preparing.  They collected letters of introduction, and researched business conditions in parts of the then British Empire (chosen because it had a developed economy) as well as other areas of the world.  Robert Wood Johnson and his brother boarded the S.S. Olympia to start their journey on October 1, 1923.  Johnson’s goals for the trip were to figure out the Company’s course of action in international business, to see if it was possible to open international affiliates, and also to investigate the supply of cotton from overseas, since cotton was a key element in many of the Company’s surgical and first aid products.

Interior of World War I-Era First Aid Kit

Robert Wood Johnson and his brother Seward visited twelve countries: England, France, Belgium, China, Japan, Australia, South Africa, India, Sri Lanka (called Ceylon in those days), Egypt, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Philippines.  They spoke with officials, visited pharmacies and hospitals, learned how medical products were distributed in each country, and researched the state of health education…since educating people about health was one of the ways in which Johnson & Johnson had built its business since 1886.  Johnson, ever-forward looking, wrote that he saw a market in Egypt for absorbent cotton (a process that had not yet been introduced there) and a market for medicated plasters, if the Company could launch an Arabic-language advertising campaign.  (Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel, by Lawrence G. Foster, p. 158)  Their journey, over land and by ship, took seven months, and they sent 36 reports back to New Brunswick.

Robert Wood Johnson in Egypt

Back in New Brunswick, Robert immediately pushed to form a British affiliate company.  When the board approved his plan, he went to England to look for a suitable manufacturing facility.  The British sales agents from John Timson & Company, Selby and Butterfield, would join the Company and help run the new business in England. After much haggling with Mr. Selby and Mr. Butterfield over the location (neither man wanted it to be too far from where he lived), they settled on Slough in Buckinghamshire, which would inconvenience both managers equally.  The Slough Observer, quoted in Robert Wood Johnson: The Gentleman Rebel, noted that the new operation was “ ‘…an all-British firm…employing only British labour.’ ”  (RWJ: Gentleman Rebel, p. 161) This practice of having locally-run decentralized operating companies employing local citizens insured that the new organizations were flexible and closely tied to the needs of local consumers.  It would become the main principle behind the expansion of Johnson & Johnson.

Johnson & Johnson operating company in Slough, England, 1968

The U.K. operating company opened in 1924.  It was followed in 1930 by affiliates in South Africa and Mexico, Australia in 1931, Belgium and France in 1934, Ireland in 1935, Argentina and Brazil in 1937, India in 1957, and more, continuing a steady worldwide growth. Today, there are more than 250 operating companies in 57 countries.

Decentralized international expansion was one of many ideas that Robert Wood Johnson would bring to the company his father and uncles founded.