Bodies for Battle

US Army Physical Culture and Systematic Training, 1885-1957

Garrett Gatzemeyer

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780700632589
• eBook ISBN: 9780700632596
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Physical training in the US Army has a surprisingly short history. Bodies for Battle by Garrett Gatzemeyer is the first in-depth analysis of the US Army’s particular set of practices and values, known as its physical culture, that emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to tactical challenges and widespread anxieties over diminishing masculinity. The US Army’s physical culture assumed a unity of mind and body; learning a physical act was not just physical but also mental and social. Physical training and exercise could therefore develop the whole individual, even societies. Bodies for Battle is a study of how the US Army developed modern, scientific training methods in response to concerns about entering a competitive imperial world where embodied nations battled for survival in a Social Darwinist framework. This book connects social and cultural worries about American masculinity and manliness with military developments (strategic, tactical, technological) in the early twentieth century, and it links trends in the United States and the US Army with larger trans-Atlantic trends.

Bodies for Battle presents new perspectives on US civil-military relations, army officers’ unease with citizen armies, and the implications of compulsory military service. Gatzemeyer offers a deeply informed historical understanding of physical training practices in the US Army, the reasons why soldiers exercise the way they do, and the influence of physical culture’s evolution on present-day reform efforts. Between the 1880s and the 1950s, the Army’s set of practices and values matured through interactions between combat experience, developments in the field of physical education, institutional outsiders, application beyond the military, and popular culture. A persistent tension between discipline and group averages on one hand and maximizing the individual warrior’s abilities on the other manifested early and continues to this day. Bodies for Battle also builds on earlier studies on sport in the US military by highlighting historical divergences between athletics and disciplinary and combat readiness impulses. Additionally, Bodies for Battle analyzes applications of the Army’s physical culture to wider society in an effort to “prehabilitate” citizens for service.

chapter one

bodies and battlefields

contextualizing martial fitness for modern war

Images of soldiers running, sweating, squatting, pushing, and pulling their way toward physical readiness are ubiquitous in the media and popular imagination today, so it may be surprising to learn that such activities have only officially and regularly been part of the US soldier’s life since 1914.¹ In that year, the US Army published its Manual of Physical Training. This manual laid out for the first time in the Army’s history a comprehensive, professionally developed, uniform system of exercise designed to occupy a permanent position in the training of America’s soldiers. Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, then Chief of Staff of the Army, penned an introduction to this seminal document in which he asserted that “There is nothing in the education of the soldier of more vital importance than [physical training].”² Wood’s words were undoubtedly genuine. The Chief of Staff was a famously active man, known especially as a companion of Theodore Roosevelt’s in the “strenuous life.” Hagiographies published about Wood in the lead-up to his presidential campaign in 1920 invariably extolled his “magnificent health and robust physique” that resulted from making “part of the day’s work to keep the body in trim.”³ Yet this riding, rowing, and wrestling general officer was an abnormally avid physical culturist among his cohort of military leaders. Likewise, his ideas on physical training’s importance were not universally held, especially among older officers. Thus, Wood’s confident assertions in 1914 must also be read as an argument for a relatively new idea that still lacked total acceptance throughout the Army. Formal exercise systems were not native to US Army training practices, and the character of systematic training as we have come to know it was not preordained. As Wood observed in 1914, physical training had to that point been a “negligible quantity,” owing in large part to the “absence of any well-defined authorized method of procedure” and the total lack of “system and uniformity.”⁴

Movement toward system and uniformity manifested most clearly in the manual from 1914, but it began in the 1880s and 1890s. Understanding the system that emerged in 1914, and the patterns and dynamics in Army physical training philosophy and practice thereafter, requires an understanding of the broader context in which advocates devised that system. In the years between 1880 and 1914, social, intellectual, and cultural anxieties intersected with struggles to prepare for combat on new battlefields rendered more dangerous and demanding by technological developments. Physical training, which was experiencing a popularity explosion in American society, seemed to be a means by which to address all of these problems. Simultaneously, a professionalization movement among physical educators created new philosophies, knowledge, and practices that influenced the systematic training of soldiers in both direct and indirect ways.

Central to the broader context in which the US Army’s physical culture originated was a set of social, intellectual, and cultural concerns that gripped Americans in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. These interlocking concerns produced a broad anxiety about the nation’s human material. Speaking generally, this anxiety manifested in fears of degeneration and a loss of American virility and vitality. In a world often conceived of in terms of social Darwinism, the degeneration of a nation’s human material was a critical problem, and perhaps even an existential one. Of America’s declining human material, men’s bodies composed the most important portion. As historian Kristin Hoganson observes, many Americans believed that the health of the nation and its political system depended on the robustness of its men and their “manly character.”⁵ Degenerating male bodies therefore posed problems for the nation, but also for the US Army specifically. This anxiety over the nation’s human resources is especially interesting because it remains with us today, even if it manifests somewhat differently. Contemporary concerns about high obesity rates, the national security implications of those rates, and the billions of dollars Americans spend annually on diets and exercise all signal the enduring relevance of the body politics’ fitness.

American men, and Western men in general, struggled to navigate a gender geography in flux in the late nineteenth century. The crisis was especially acute in white middle-class America. The sources of this crisis were many, but class and economic issues were crucial. To a middle-class Victorian of the mid-nineteenth century, “manliness” had meant self-restraint, character, and a good work ethic. To these qualities, the American Civil War added military service and combat experience. This was the era of the “self-made man.”⁶ In many ways, industrialization, corporations, management systems, and depressions made the achievement of Victorian manliness very difficult for many men. Fewer men were self-employed, more were trapped in sedentary clerical jobs, opportunities to prove oneself in war grew rare, and hard work and restraint did not insulate men against the effects of market failures beyond their control. Industrialization also changed the nature of some jobs by mechanizing production, seemingly integrating workers as pieces of a larger machine with less need for male physicality. This transition, made especially visible in Frederick Taylor’s time-and-motion studies, eroded men’s ownership of their own time and labor. Meanwhile, urbanization packed Americans into less healthy environments. Men living in these conditions faced more competition for fewer prizes, along with less opportunity for self-mastery and independence in the workplace.⁷ Meanwhile, the western frontier’s closure, once a man-making space at the border between primitiveness and civilization, denied men their classic option for regeneration.⁸

Even as middle-class men struggled to make themselves in a changing economy, many perceived threats from women suggested a “feminization” of modern man and of America. Women, it seemed, encroached everywhere in the traditional male sphere. Women increasingly entered the once male-exclusive working world in the late nineteenth century, denying men many workplaces as all-male preserves.⁹ More and more, women workers provided new competition for men, and men in most workplaces had to modify standards of behavior to account for women. Woman suffrage movements and other forms of political involvement, contemporaries argued, also denied men exclusive claims in the realm of politics.¹⁰ Even as it seemed that men’s purview was shrinking, increasingly fewer men could claim political and social power on the grounds of military service in an era when men lacked a major war in which to “prove” themselves, unlike their Civil War–veteran fathers and grandfathers.¹¹

Beyond politics and the workplace, changes in child-rearing and family life fanned fears of feminization. Economic changes relocated most men’s place of work from the home to a more distant office or factory, so men spent less time in their roles as fathers and male models. The bonds between mothers and their children grew at the same time.¹² Moreover, fewer male role models were available to American boys because women increasingly dominated the teaching profession. Men feared that women’s growing control over the development of male children, and the consequent “regime of sugary benignity,” would produce a generation of spoiled, physically weak, and morally suspect men.¹³ The period’s rising consumer culture and its “ethos of pleasure and frivolity,” in the words of historian Gail Bederman, further amplified an obsession widely held by American men with “softening.”¹⁴

Fears shared by many white middle-class men about feminization manifested in another, related concern: “overcivilization.” Fast living, feminization, and fewer opportunities for self-making threatened to render men too soft and too refined. In response, white middle-class men in the late nineteenth century increasingly celebrated the primitive. This strategy served a social and cultural purpose by defining distinctly masculine virtues as crucial to the nation’s vitality.¹⁵ However, according to Bederman “civilization” also had a racial meaning at the time. In this formulation, civilization was a stage of development beyond savagery or “barbarism.” Anglo-Saxons had achieved their advanced status as a civilized people through a long Darwinian struggle.¹⁶ Overcivilization’s chief threat in this sense was that soft men made for a soft race, a race unworthy of the evolutionary ladder’s top position. Industrialization, urbanization, and the frontier’s closure denied men traditional sources of struggle and hardening, demanding that new spaces be found and new methods developed.

By the turn of the century, many white men, especially those of the middle class, began centering definitions of manhood on bodies in response to this complex of anxieties. In this corporeal configuration, an unstable, performative masculinity steadily displaced the earlier, inward-focused self-made-man ideal.¹⁷ More and more, proving one’s masculinity demanded constant effort and visible proof. The earlier ideal of a self-made man acquired a physical element by the late 1870s as an outward manifestation of inner strength. However, by the turn-of-the-century, men tended to view physicality as an end to be pursued rather than as a natural byproduct of proper manhood. Men may have doubted the possibility of achieving their forefather’s manly virtues, but through gymnasium work they could at least produce the appearance of a virtuous inner life.¹⁸ In the best-case scenario, such work might even strengthen morals as it strengthened muscles.

An irony of the turn toward a more bodily-centered masculinity was that American men simultaneously grew more anxious about their bodies and physical capacities. Men viewed as increasingly effeminate, overcivilized, and living soft lives in mentally overstimulating modern society seemed prone to breaking. Americans quickly invented a medical diagnosis for this culturally based fear: neurasthenia. Though the idea of nervous disease had been discussed since at least the 1830s, it became well defined as an important problem, even a “near epidemic,” in the 1880s after the publication of George Beard’s book American Nervousness.¹⁹ Beard defined nervousness not as a mental illness or an excess of emotion, but simply as “nervelessness—a lack of nerve force.” Extreme nervousness led to neurasthenia, or “nervous exhaustion.”²⁰ Beard employed bank account and battery metaphors to explain the condition. Some people were blessed with large accounts or batteries (reserves of nerve energy), and others made due with little. In either case, drawing too much on those accounts or batteries led to bankruptcy or depletion. Nervousness manifested in a wide range of symptoms ranging from dyspepsia and fatigue to premature baldness.²¹ Its appearance nearly everywhere in America, according to Beard, was not surprising.

Beard chiefly blamed modern civilization for American’s susceptibility to nervous exhaustion in the late nineteenth century.²² He argued that constant activity brought on by steam power, the telegraph, the periodical press, social institutions, and the “indulgence of appetites and passions” overstimulated men, especially “brain workers.”²³ At the same time, men’s physical activity decreased due both to economic changes that required less manual labor and to increasing culture and refinement. Confronted with constant overstimulation, these weakening bodies possessed smaller reserves of nerve energy. Beard saw the signs of this pernicious problem everywhere, even in the American man’s reduced capacity to hold his liquor, as evidenced by his poor “bottle-power” in comparison to an English man.²⁴ Neurasthenia was, however, also something of a badge of distinction because only the most civilized peoples (a concept freighted with cultural and racial meaning) were susceptible to its force. Neurasthenia did not seem to afflict more “primitive” peoples, those whose passionate and powerful manhood, according to Beard, both strengthened bodies and disqualified them for civilization.²⁵ Beard’s solution was not to throw out civilization, but rather to leverage its tools to develop new technologies and social customs productive of “strength and vigor.”²⁶

Embedded in the neurasthenia concept was a potential solution. If bodies could degenerate, then they could also regenerate. Methods designed to encourage regeneration varied widely and came from multiple sources. One of the more famous proposals came from G. Stanley Hall, an American educator and vocal expert on psychology and pedagogy. He argued beginning in the late 1880s that educators could utilize “recapitulation” to help American boys. Hall’s recapitulation theory presumed an evolutionary ladder up which human races could progress. Anglo-Saxons had supposedly reached the top rungs, but the modern world denied them the chance to experience the highly physical and passionate earlier stages. Therefore, Anglo-Saxons grew up intelligent, but lacking in passion and power, making them susceptible to neurasthenia. Hall proposed encouraging “primitivism” and “savagery” in young boys by allowing misbehavior, reading bloody stories, and even fighting in controlled environments. This process supposedly molded boys into men while inoculating them against the degenerative forces of modern civilization.²⁷

More visible signs of regeneration efforts appeared in America’s late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century physical culture. This culture, in line with the period’s bodily focused masculinity, promoted sport, health remedies, body building, and more. With the right diet and exercise, men could cultivate proportions like Eugen Sandow, the world’s “perfect man.”²⁸ Americans could harness science and hard work to engineer their bodies so as to appear strong and vital, and in the process cultivate those same qualities. The idea was not to turn back the clock to an idealized earlier time, but to leverage modernity’s tools to fashion new ways of fitting civilized men to a new time.

Biological thought helped translate these broad cultural anxieties spurred by economic, social, geographic, and political change into a national crisis. Although Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species, published in 1859, made no attempt to apply evolution to explain the behavior of people or groups, many Americans and Europeans did just that from the 1870s to the early twentieth century. Social sciences and politics informed by biological concepts framed global politics as a struggle for survival in a world ruled by the iron law of natural selection.²⁹ National survival in such a world depended simply on strength, the definition of which contained racial and gender components. Therefore, American power depended upon the strength of white American men—the exact population whose masculinity the modern world seemed to threaten most.³⁰ War th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Modern War, Modern Fitness
• 1 Bodies and Battlefields: Contextualizing Martial Fitness for Modern War
• 2 Origins of a US Army Physical Culture, 1885–1916
• 3 The US Army’s Battle of the Systems, 1914–1920
• 4 Reversion, Disaggregation, and “Prehabilitation,” 1919–1940
• 5 Physical Cultures for Total War, 1936–1946
• 6 Hard Bodies for a Cold War: Conditioning and Prehabilitation, 1945–1957
• Conclusion: Fashioning That “Certain Strength of Body and Soul,” 1885–1957
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover