Making Men Moral

Social Engineering During the Great War

Nancy K. Bristow

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1997
• Print ISBN: 9780814713082
• eBook ISBN: 9780814786239
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

On May 29, 1917, Mrs. E. M. Craise, citizen of Denver, Colorado, penned a letter to President Woodrow Wilson, which concluded, We have surrendered to your absolute control our hearts' dearest treasures--our sons. If their precious bodies that have cost us so dear should be torn to shreds by German shot and shells we will try to live on in the hope of meeting them again in the blessed Country of happy reunions. But, Mr. President, if the hell-holes that infest their training camps should trip up their unwary feet and they be returned to us besotted degenerate wrecks of their former selves cursed with that hell-born craving for alcohol, we can have no such hope.
Anxious about the United States' pending entry into the Great War, fearful that their sons would be polluted by the scourges of prostitution, venereal disease, illicit sex, and drink that ran rampant in the training camps, countless Americans sent such missives to their government officials. In response to this deluge, President Wilson created the Commission on Training Camp Activities to ensure the purity of the camp environment. Training camps would henceforth mold not only soldiers, but model citizens who, after the war, would return to their communities, spreading white, urban, middle-class values throughout the country.
What began as a federal program designed to eliminate sexually transmitted diseases soon mushroomed into a powerful social force intent on replacing America's many cultures with a single, homogenous one. Though committed to the positive methods of education and recreation, the reformers did not hesitate to employ repression when necessary. Those not conforming to the prescribed vision of masculinity often faced exclusion from the reformers' idealized society, or sometimes even imprisonment. Social engineering ruled the day.
Combining social, cultural, and military history and illustrating the deep divisions among reformers themselves, Nancy K. Bristow, with the aid of dozens of evocative photographs, here brings to life a pivotal era in the history of the U.S., revealing the complex relationship between the nation's competing cultures, progressive reform efforts, and the Great War.

Notes

PREFACE

1. The CTCA work also included the navy, and military personnel overseas. This book will explore the CTCA inside the United States and will emphasize the commission’s work with the army.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

1. Galen W. Morton, of Beardstown, Illinois, to President Wilson, 29 August 1917, doc. 4198, file M, box 5, entry 394, RG 165, National Archives.

2. Marcia Louis Bradley to Secretary Baker, 10 May 1917, doc. 275, file Oregon, box 10, entry 395, RG 165, National Archives.

3. Petition from the Ministerial Association and Christian Endeavor Convention in joint session in Fowler, Illinois, sent by the Presiding Elder of Rock River Conference, U.B. Church, to President Wilson, 29 June 1917, doc. 2937, file A, box 1, entry 394, RG 165, National Archives.

4. Mrs. E. M. Craise, Superintendent of Francis Willard Settlement, Denver, Colorado, to Woodrow Wilson, received by the Commission on Training Camp Activities 29 May 1917, doc. 633, file C, box 1, entry 394, RG 165, National Archives.

5. Rosa Patrick, of Parsons, Kansas, to Secretary Baker, 17 July 1917, doc. 3071, file P, box 6, entry 394, RG 165, National Archives.

6. Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 70.

7. Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, 69–77.

8. Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 36.

9. For details on the prevalence of vice, drinking, theft, and gambling among Confederate troops, see Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb, 36–58. For information on similar behavior in the Union Army, see Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 247–274. On vice during the war, see Thomas P. Lowry, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1994).

10. Undated letter of J. M. Guess, quoted in The Life of Johnny Reb, by Wiley, 58.

11. Anne M. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery—Prostitutes in the American West, 1865–1890 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 145, 146.

12. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery, 146.

13. Mrs. Sara D. Hyde to Woodrow Wilson on 8 June 1917, doc. 1298, file A, box 1, entry 394, RG 165, National Archives.

14. Mrs. Elizabeth Heim, of Ross county, Ohio, to Hon. Harry [sic] Baker, 28 June 1917, letter file A, box 1, entry 394, RG 165, National Archives.

15. The historian Thomas C. Leonard offers another explanation for the popular condemnation of the training camps, suggesting that the critics of war in the era preceding World War One worked to connect immorality with military service in the public mind. Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle—War-Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 35.

16. Daniel R. Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, 1917–1919 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 4–5.

17. Paul S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 220–221, 224; Edward M. Coffman, The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 21; Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, 5.

18. Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, 1.

19. Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 53.

20. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 53.

21. Raymond B. Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation: An Autobiography (New York: Harper, 1958), 122–136.

22. Raymond Fosdick to Honorable Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War, Report on Conditions on the Mexican Border, 10 August 1916, folder 1, box 23, Raymond Blaine Fosdick Papers, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. Published with permission of Princeton University Libraries.

23. Ibid.; Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 53–54. Fosdick’s findings were confirmed by a second investigator, Dr. M. J. Exner, employed by the Young Men’s Christian Association to carry out a similar project.

24. Fosdick to Baker, Report on Conditions on Mexican Border, 10 August 1916, Fosdick Papers; Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 55–56.

25. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 56.

26. For an excellent discussion of the conflicts within progressivism and within individual progressives over the issue of American entry into the war, see David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980X49–53.

27. Otis Graham, The Great Campaigns: Reform and War in America, 1900–1928 (Huntington, N.Y.: R. E. Krieger, 1980), 92.

28. Woodrow Wilson, “Speech for Declaration of War against Germany,” delivered at joint session of the two houses of Congress, 2 April 1917, reprinted in Documents of American History, Henry Steele Commager, ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), 131.

29. Kennedy, Over Here, 50–51.

30. John Dewey, “The Social Possibilities of War,” in Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, Joseph Ratner, éd., vol. 2 (New York: H. H. Holt, 1929), 551–560.

31. Kennedy, Over Here, 39.

32. Allen F. Davis, “The Flowering of Progressivism,” in The Impact of World War I, Arthur S. Link, ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 55.

33. Charles Hirschfeld, “Nationalist Progressivism and World War I,” Mid-America 45 (July 1963): 141, 145–146.

34. Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, 220.

35. Woodrow Wilson, “Special Statement,” in Keeping Our Fighters Fit for War and After, by Edward Frank Allen with the cooperation of Raymond B. Fosdick (New York: Century, 1918), opening page, no page number.

36. Baker to Fosdick, 18 April 1917, folder 6, box 21, Fosdick Papers.

37. Raymond Fosdick, quoted in The New Spirit of the New Army: A Message to ‘‘Service Flag Homes,” by Joseph H. Odell (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1918), 53–56.

38. For decades progressivism confounded historians with its complexity and provoked contentious debates over the nature of progressivism and the existence of a progressive movement. Important landmark works in the historiography of progressivism include Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R (New York: Vintage Books, 1955); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963); Arthur S. Link, “What Happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920’s?” American Historical Review 64 (1959): 833–851; Peter G. Filene, “An Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement,’ “American Quarterly 22 (1970): 20–34; John D. Buenker, John C. Burnham, and Robert Crunden, Progressivism (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1977). For excellent discussions of trends in the historiography of progressivism, see David M. Kennedy, “Overview: The Progressive Era,” The Historian 37 (1975): 453–458; Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 113–132; Alan Brinkley, “Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform: A Reconsideration,” Reviews in American History 13 (September 1985): 462–480.

39. Credit for the term “shifting coalitions” goes to John D. Buenker. In a persuasive interpretation of progressivism, Buenker wrote in 1977, “Viewing the [progressive] era as the work of shifting coalitions rather than of a single movement has the potential for reconciling most of the currently conflicting interpretations and of encompassing nearly all of the groups, values and p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• One: “An Invisible Armor”: The Progressive Social Vision and World War One
• Two: Full-Orbed Moral Manhood”: Cultural Nationalism and the Creation of New Men and Women
• Three: Reformers between Two Worlds: The Battle against Tradition and Working-Class Modernism
• Four: Building a National Community: The Complexities of Gender
• Five: Repression and Resistance: African Americans and the Progressives’ National Community
• Six: The End of the Crusade: Demobilization and the Legacy of the CTCA
• Epilogue
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Index