Scholars in business communication often focus on organizations as research sites. One example is JoAnne Yates (1993) who uses, among others, the well-known business of DuPont as a model. Her central argument, from a historical point of view, is focused on how small, family owned companies grew exponentially in the early twentieth century and how this caused business communication to become more controlled and impersonal (xv). But there is a lack of further significant research on how the organizational changes that affected early twentieth century business communication also influenced the communication in other organizations. My dissertation will argue that the communication in one such organization, the U.S. Army, was affected by the changes of the early twentieth century, as shown through examples of government-released records from the army's famous First Division in World War I.