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Mobilizing Faith

JOSEPH ODELL’S career took many turns. He was a minister by training, an education reformer by conviction, and a writer by trade. In 1917, these roles merged. The former army chaplain traversed the United States to investigate War Department outposts, stopping by a number of camps and forts. By the time he reached Atlanta in November 1917, he was generally impressed by the activity he encountered. This was a surprise, because Odell expected to be disappointed in the South. Fort McPherson and Camp Gordon housed high percentages of foreign-born men, black men, and illiterate southern white men. The combination appeared combustible. Yet when Odell spoke with soldiers and attended the weekly meeting of the executive board of the local Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), he was taken aback.1
As he reported to readers of The Outlook, a liberal religious weekly that supported the war effort, and then to other papers that reprinted his column, in Atlanta he unexpectedly discovered “a unique spirit of cooperation.” Women mended soldiers’ clothing, the Transportation Committee furnished automobiles for the sick, and the Entertainment Committee arranged concerts. The Federated Women’s Club taught men how to sew and the Daughters of the American Revolution taught black women to knit. The Hebrew Association and the Knights of Columbus thanked the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) for lending them space for worship, dances, and lectures. As a booster for the moral, religious, and educational work of the War Department, Odell was far from objective. He appreciated the quotidian integration of religion into military procedures, remarking that “there is nothing remote or separate or esoteric about this religion; it fits into the order of the day as naturally as the meals in the mess-room.” His reportage indicated that supporting the religious and moral welfare of soldiers could be coercive and patronizing. But his wonder at the “common sense” efforts to deemphasize difference among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews was real.2
Early twentieth-century Atlanta was not the most obvious place to witness interreligious coordination and fledgling, if condescending, multiethnic and multiracial discussions. Eleven years before Odell’s visit, racial violence erupted in the southern boomtown as the gubernatorial candidates debated how to disenfranchise black men and newspaper headlines alleged black violence against white women. Four days of street violence destroyed black bodies and black businesses. The city remained heavily segregated, and overtly racist legislation entrenched Jim Crow policies. By late 1915, an opportunistic organizer revived the Ku Klux Klan with a march up a ridge outside Atlanta, and capacity crowds broke attendance records at the opening of the bigoted movie The Birth of a Nation. Religious minorities faced less hostility, but Atlanta did not welcome Jews and Catholics. The 1915 lynching of Leo Frank weighed heavily on the city’s Jewish population. Catholics, a small population in a largely Protestant city, also faced the Klan’s wrath. Despite the racial and religious tensions plaguing Atlanta, the war years provided an opportunity to gather together to meet the needs of conscripted soldiers.3
Listening to the reports of Atlantans’ service compelled Odell to volunteer a war story of his own. The setting was the June 1917 Battle of Messines Ridge, a British offensive that recaptured a strategic outlook from German hands at the cost of 25,000 Allied lives. About three miles from the French border, he told the Atlanta volunteers, “a Catholic soldier lay dying, blown almost to pieces by a bomb. No Catholic chaplain happened to be near, and no Protestant chaplain was available; but a Hebrew rabbi, acting as a chaplain to the Jewish troops, bent over the dying Catholic and held the crucifix to his lips while he breathed his last.” The committee members listened to Odell in captivated silence, then applauded in unison. They too valued “religious comity.” That only a trickle of Americans had arrived in Europe in June mattered little. The tale reflected American values and priorities. As Odell reassured his readers, “some of the by-products of this war may be worth all the sacrifices of men, money, and strength.”4
Odell joined a small but growing chorus of chaplains and military officers who viewed religious cooperation as an important and positive consequence of the United States’ participation in World War I. Chaplain Lee Levinger (Jewish) returned from Europe extolling the virtues of an ecumenical chaplain corps. “Religious unity,” he insisted, “is more than a far-off ideal.” In his final report on the war, General John Pershing agreed. “Chaplains, as never before, became the moral and spiritual leaders of their organizations, and established a high standard of active usefulness in religious work that made for patriotism, discipline, and unselfish devotion to duty.” Pershing’s casual intermingling of religious and moral work was typical, for the separation between them was blurry, in civilian and military realms alike. By war’s end, Pershing affirmed, religion had become a crucial weapon in the U.S. military’s arsenal. But at war’s beginning, this conclusion could not be anticipated. In spring 1917, the chaplaincy was small and consisted only of mainline Protestants and Catholics. To serve millions of newly conscripted men, the military intensified its efforts to expand the chaplaincy while continuing to regulate the appointments and activities of military clergy. Together, military needs, civilian agitation, and Congressional legislation irrevocably altered the institution of the chaplaincy, making it more religiously diverse and laying the foundation of tri-faith America.5
Over eighteen months of active American participation in the Great War, the state mobilized faith to sustain its martial goals. The state used religion to streamline its diverse and ethnically fragmented citizenry into more manageable groups. Regardless of birthplace, native tongue, or ethnicity, in the military, American soldiers were Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. This tri-faith architecture, expressed in tacit but significant ways during World War I, facilitated religious decision-making and set boundaries for inclusion. The military began cultivating an ethos of moral monotheism, an imprecise yet productive religious worldview that stressed belief in one God, respectable conduct, and belonging to the American nation.6 Building a religious institution suitable to the new American fighting forces demanded altering the contours of the chaplaincy itself—opening it to more faiths while holding fast to educational standards and enunciating the duty to serve all men. Yet even as the state attempted to distance itself from sectarianism, it could not remain isolated from religious schism and racial strife. Clergy volunteered to enlist as chaplains, and minority religious groups—Christian and Jewish, white and black—lobbied to participate in the chaplaincy. Through its responses to wartime exigencies and requests for religious accommodations, the military chaplaincy slowly constructed a new but unarticulated American religious ideal.
The United States waited as the world went to war in 1914. The army numbered soldiers in the hundreds of thousands and attended only to matters close to home. The Colorado National Guard massacred striking coal miners, U.S. Marines occupied Haiti, and General John J. Pershing led a failed pursuit of Pancho Villa in Mexico. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was reelected on the campaign slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” and Americans settled into encountering bloody battles in newsprint. The nation remained neutral while German submarines trolled the Atlantic; British intelligence cracked the Zimmerman Telegram, which planned for unrestricted submarine warfare against commercial vessels and proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico; and the Russian Revolution toppled the czar. Finally, with public outrage against Germany mounting, President Wilson asked Congress to declare war in order to “make the world safe for democracy.” Within days, Congress complied, and in a matter of weeks, the federal government became responsible for the millions of young men it conscripted to fight and die for the nation.
The unprecedented scale of the Great War and the mass mobilization required to fulfill American commitments to allies raised daunting questions. How would the army and navy manage the adolescents who would swell their ranks, swarm domestic posts, spill out of ships onto European shores, march into combat, lie in trenches, and possibly die for Uncle Sam? How would the military command masses of American immigrants who could barely croak a few phrases in English and recruits who had never read words on a page? And how would the state unify men whose only shared experience was the draft notice that arrived in their mailboxes?
President Woodrow Wilson capitulated to mandatory military service mere days before entering the United States into war, and on June 5, 1917, 10 million young men arrived at city halls, post offices, high schools, and public libraries to register for the draft. Passed barely a month earlier, the Selective Service Act of 1917 required men between twenty-one and thirty-one to present themselves to local draft boards. This new ritual meant ticking boxes on Form 1001 to provide the government with the data used to sort men into categories that separated the conscript from the exempt. In addition to names and addresses, the state collected vital statistics and background information about schooling, employment, military experience, language abilities, criminal history, physical fitness, and citizenship. This information distinguished those who would be called to serve and those who would stay home. Clergy earned automatic exemptions, husbands and fathers acquired temporary deferrals, and single men without dependents garnered trips to newly created army camps and naval stations, and, in 2 million cases, overseas. Men employed in essential war work could keep their jobs, and conscientious objectors could—with the right convictions and religious ties—abstain from combat. Immigrants and resident aliens, technically eligible for military service only if they intended to make the United States their permanent home, endured further scrutiny about their loyalty. “Few programs,” John Chambers has written, “could coincide better with the progressive era’s emphasis upon social efficiency than this idea of classifying much of the nation’s manpower.” This categorization of more than 24 million young men determined who, where, and how Americans served their nation in war. A small but significant number resisted, but most reluctantly accepted this new relationship between state and society, between Washington and local communities, between coercion and obligation.7
The men who donned army khakis or navy blues for a war “over there” were a varied lot. They were white and black. They hailed from Alabama and New York, California and Illinois. They were born in Cleveland and Kielce, Salt Lake City and Salerno. Some had graduated from high school; others could barely write their names. Some spoke only in English while others conversed in Polish, Italian, Russian, Yiddish, German, Czech, Norwegian, Spanish, or Japanese. Some felt at home on farms; others forged their way in cities. They were rowdy and quiet, skilled with rifles and scared of shotguns. They were restless and excited, worried about death and determined to return as heroes.8
But most of all, they were young—sheltered and inexperienced, unaccustomed to discipline and susceptible to vice. Or so the military assumed. As Secretary of War Newton Baker asked, “What are those soldiers going to do in the towns, and what are the towns going to do to the soldiers?” His question encapsulated the torrent of letters received from concerned citizens troubled by the immoral temptations—alcohol, prostitution, gambling—and the scourge of impure behavior reputed to fester in military camps. The lure of worldly desires was not exclusive to the military, but the net of the American armed forces was large, geographically expansive, and tied to the federal government. Neither a local ordinance nor a city vice court would suffice to harness the energies of virile young soldiers.9
The federal government addressed these concerns through two programs: the CTCA, which directed men’s eyes away from liquor, ladies of the night, and card games by organizing recreation and clean entertainment, and the military chaplaincy, which offered religious programs and promoted moral behavior. Chaplains often shared the moral commitments of Progressive Era reformers dedicated to eradicating vice, stimulating health, educating youth, promoting temperance, and Americanizing immigrants through a blend of civic leadership and government regulation. If schools, factories, courts, hospitals, and libraries could merge state authority and civil society to better social welfare, surely chaplains could foster the public good through moral uplift and religious succor. And as state-sponsored clergy, they could eschew pernicious sectarianism in favor of religious unity—a war goal unto itself.
The millions of men who made their way to army camps and naval installations in 1917 and 1918 arrived with their own moral and religious standards. They may have liked a nightcap or a dance with the ladies, but more often than not, they also knew the hard edge of a church pew and the rhythm of a Sabbath hymn. The Selective Service never asked their religious affiliation except as it pertained to conscientious objection. But the military knew its ranks consisted of men with diverse religious identities—far more diverse than in previous wars due to immigration, new American religions, and the splintering of various Protestant denominations.10
Chaplains therefore conducted a very particular type of religious work. As clergy vetted and approved by the state, they would transcend religious differences to buoy the spirits, discipline the bodies, and yoke together the hearts of doughboys. The government assigned them three specific duties: to lead worship “for the benefit of the commands,” to bury the dead according to appropriate religious rites, and to teach. While Congress had not specifically delegated moral instruction to chaplains, it permeated much of their work. To be successful, Chaplain Clinton Wunder (Northern Baptist) argued, the modern chaplain “must be a social worker, lawyer, doctor, teacher, business man, officer, preacher—all combined into one. He baptizes, marries, and buries people.” As members of the Senate’s Committee on Military Affairs heard in September 1917, the size of the wartime military demanded more chaplains to support “the character—the moral character, as well as the religious sentiment—of the men.” In particular, chaplains advocated “clean living” and stood as a bulwark against the sexual depravity and venereal disease the military feared would infect its corps. Chaplain John Frazier (Southern Methodist), who became the navy’s first chief of chaplains, advised his fellow clergy that men from rural areas and small towns “have not been exposed to the pitfalls of seaport cities and consequently are unaware of the dangers, physical and moral, that attend association with lewd women.” Being a chaplain entailed more than saving souls or blessing the dead; it required teaching as well as preaching, inspiring as well as inhibiting.11
Yet in April 1917, the chaplaincy mustered fewer than 200 clergy and was ill prepared to serve the millions of Americans on the brink of service. Over the course of the war, the army’s total population increased from a little over 200,000 soldiers to more than 3.5 million, while the navy expanded from about 95,000 sailors to 533,000. Chaplains multiplied as well, with the army growing from 146 to 2,230 military ministers and the navy quintupling from 40 to 201. More than numerical proliferation, these changes indicated the state’s commitment to providing soldiers with regular, effortless access to religion. To ensure that the men dispatched as chaplains were capable of serving men across religious faiths and instilling moral principles, Congress set qualifications for chaplains. An applicant had to be (1) a “regularly ordained minister of some religious denomination,” (2) a minister “in good standing” endorsed by an “authorized ecclesiastical body,” and (3) under forty-five years old. In sum, to be commissioned as chaplains, clergy had to be young professionals approved by denominational authorities.12
These standards represented more than bureaucratic measuring sticks. They epitomized the Progressive Era push toward professionalization, which in turn signified the development of the American military as a modern institution and heralded the government’s effort to enlist religion as an instrument of statecraft. The clamor for a well-trained military chaplaincy began in the early twentieth century when navy chaplains sought to improve their status by establishing clear standards for the military’s religious officers. Army chaplains quickly followed suit, advocating stiff credentials as well.13 This impet...