Training Camp Activities Research Articles

Multiple racial futures: Spatio-temporalities of race during World War I

Using the example of the WWI-US Commission on Training Camp Activities, I argue that racialized biopolitical projects entail multiple, specific spatio-temporalities that seek to enact different racial futures within and between racial categories. What I call “victorious whiteness”, “infinite whiteness” and “static blackness” assembled by the Commission on Training Camp Activities, and an “advancing blackness” pursued by black elites in opposition, interacted in a complex topology of early 20th-century efforts to protect trainee soldiers from venereal disease, and efforts to prevent racial violence, both of which endangered the war effort and thus the future of the white nation. This counters a tendency in much current literature on racial biopolitics to assert a stark binary between and homogeneity within the facilitation of white futurity and black risk failure within individual biopolitical projects.

Warren Kimsey and Community Singing at Camp Gordon, 1917–1918

During the Great War, the Commission for Training Camp Activities (CTCA) pioneered a program in which civilian song leaders were assigned to camps throughout the United States. These men (and a few women) were instructed to organize regular community singing, train officers as song leaders, and cultivate musical talent among the soldiers. They also worked as song leaders in nearby towns and cities, an activity that was intended to improve military–civilian relations and promote patriotism. This article examines the career of Warren Kimsey, the first song leader assigned to Camp Gordon, an army training camp located near the city of Atlanta. Kimsey organized community singing both in the camp and in Atlanta, where he led enormous crowds in the newly constructed Auditorium–Armory. This study presents Kimsey’s work as a product of the nationwide community singing movement and its progressive political agenda, while at the same time contextualizing it in Atlanta’s identity as an emerging cultural center. It also identifies Kimsey’s contributions to music education in Georgia and discusses the broader influence of wartime song leaders on community music initiatives throughout the country.

The Jewish Welfare Board and Religious Pluralism in the American Military of World War I

The Jewish Welfare Board and Religious Pluralism in the American Military of World War I Jessica Cooperman (bio) Throughout World War I and during the period of demobilization, the Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) worked alongside the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), a Protestant organization, and The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization, as a civilian partner to the U.S. War Department’s Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA). In early 1919, just months after the end of the war, Raymond Fosdick, chairman of the CTCA, speaking at the annual meeting of the JWB, assessed the wartime achievements of the three partners by asserting, “The fences have disappeared; the sectarian lines have vanished” in work carried on not as “Jewish work or Protestant work or Catholic work,” but as “fundamentally an American work … for all the troops in the camps without regard to faith.”1 Audience members, men and women who had devoted their time, money, and energy to the welfare of soldiers, must have been pleased to hear Fosdick praise their efforts and the harmony achieved among these different religiously based organizations. For those involved in founding the Jewish Welfare Board, it must have been particularly gratifying to have a high-ranking government official like Fosdick describe its work as fundamentally American. Less than two years earlier, in April 1917, when the United States had entered the war, the JWB had met with a far more skeptical view of what a Jewish organization could contribute to the welfare of American soldiers. The U.S. War Department had entered World War I committed to building a nonsectarian program of welfare services for soldiers, but it had understood “nonsectarianism” in distinctly Protestant terms. Over the course of conflict, the JWB managed to change official conceptions of the place of Judaism within the American military, and to advocate for a more pluralistic notion of religion in America. American religious pluralism is most often thought of as a phenomenon of the post-World War II era, a triumph of postwar liberal ideology and a product of the social shifts caused by military service during that [End Page 237] war.2 Ideas about pluralism, however, originated earlier and flourished in the 1910s in places such as the pages of the Intercollegiate Menorah Association’s (IMA) Menorah Journal and the writing of one of the Harvard Menorah Society’s founding members, philosopher Horace Kallen.3 Kallen would go on to argue that ethnic “cultural pluralism” was one of the cornerstones of American democracy. Some of the IMA’s early supporters, however, men like Jacob Schiff, Cyrus Adler, Julian Mack, and Irving Lehman, were deeply involved in the establishment of the JWB. They saw the welfare work done on behalf of American soldiers as an opportunity to advance a vision of pluralism that was tied to religious belief and practice, and supported by government policy. During World War I, as a result of the interventions of the JWB, the U.S. government gave official sanction to a new vision of the types of moral guidance and religious observance young men needed in order to be good soldiers and responsible citizens. Judaism was recognized by the state, along with Protestantism and Catholicism, as a “fundamentally American” religion. While such recognition did not immediately transform the United States into a nation committed to broad conceptions of pluralism, it played a crucial role in advancing the idea that religious pluralism was central to American identity, and that the United States was a country of three faiths: Protestant, Catholic and Jewish.4 Welfare programs for World War I soldiers thus marked a critical moment of experimenting with ideas about pluralism and with the possibility of transforming pluralism from a philosophic idea into a state-mandated reality. The Welfare of Soldiers and the Commission on Training Camp Activities In 1917, progressive reformer Newton Baker headed the U.S. War Department. Baker had come to Washington after serving as mayor of Cleveland, where he attracted national attention with his campaign [End Page 238] to stamp out vice by providing citizens with wholesome, alcohol-free entertainment. He became Secretary of War in 1916 and immediately set out to reform and “improve” the...

Film, Cultural Policy, and World War I Training Camps: Send Your Soldier to the Show with Smileage

Smileage was a funding scheme designed to support the Commission on Training Camp Activities’ theater project during World War I. The public purchased coupon books that soldiers redeemed at the government Liberty Theatres, which purported to provide “morally uplifting” and “wholesome” live entertainment primarily, but later included Hollywood motion pictures. This article situates the Smileage campaign in the larger historical context during which the film industry negotiated its inclusion in war mobilization and its value to cultural policy. The theater project and camp recreation program illustrate the Wilson administration’s ambiguous and uneven stance toward the commercial film industry.

Raymond B. Fosdick (1883–1972):Ardent Advocate of Internationalism

RAYMOND B. FOSDICK, WHO would serve as the President of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1936 to 1948, was a lifetime disciple of Woodrow Wilson. His family was not wealthy but managed to scrape up enough money to send him to Princeton University. There he met Wilson, at that time president of the university, later to become the president of the United States (1913–1921). Fosdick described Wilson as an outstanding teacher, intellectually brilliant, who held his students spellbound.1 Fosdick graduated from Princeton in 1905, and then studied law at New York Law School. In 1912, during the presidential campaign, Wilson appointed Fosdick the secretary and auditor of the finance committee of the National Democratic Committee. Once elected President, Wilson made several other job offers which Fosdick declined, perhaps because by this time, he had met John D. Rockefeller Sr and his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr, possessors of an enormous fortune. By January 1913, the elder Rockefeller had asked him to prepare a report on the police systems of Europe, and then appointed him a trustee of two Rockefeller philanthropies: the General Education Board and the International Education Board. When the United States entered World War I, Fosdick was appointed chairman of the Commission on Training Camp Activities of the War Department. The goal of this commission was to promote athletics and other healthy activities and to distract the men from prostitutes, gambling, and excessive drinking.2 As the war was ending, Fosdick served as Special Representative of the War Department in France and as civilian aide to General Pershing during the Paris Peace Conference. On the journey, Woodrow Wilson discussed his vision of a League of Nations, an organization to be dedicated to the prevention of war, the maintenance of peaceful cooperation among nations, and free trade. On his return to the United States, Wilson asked Fosdick to become Under-Secretary of the League of Nations, then in formation. Fosdick accepted, although he was concerned about his own qualifications for so momentous an undertaking. From that time on, he would be dedicated to the goal of realizing Wilson’s ideal.3 Problems, however, arose in the United States Senate. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge led a group of senators strongly opposed to the League; the Senate was locked in months of contentious debate which Fosdick called an “unrelieved nightmare.”1(p200) Increasingly upset and angry with American opposition to the League, Fosdick decided to resign his position. Instead, he became a strong public advocate for the League of Nations, a stance he maintained for the remainder of his life. Fosdick soon became a leading trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 1936, became president, working in this position until his retirement in 1948. While Fosdick was trustee, the Rockefeller Foundation made significant contributions to the Health Organization of the League. In addition, Fosdick was directly responsible for persuading John D. Rockefeller Jr to become an active supporter of the League of Nations and to fund the splendid League Library.3 Fosdick maintained his strong international commitments throughout the 1930s and during World War II, as is evident in his 1944 speech to the American Public Health Association, excerpted here. In 1946, John D. Rockefeller Jr donated $8.5 million worth of prime Manhattan real estate to become the Headquarters of the United Nations. Using his influence with his friends, the wealthy Rockefeller philanthropists, Fosdick had achieved much to realize Woodrow Wilson’s vision; in 1972, at the age of 89, he died in Newton, Connecticut.

Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War

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.

Recreation, Welfare, and Morale of the American Soldier

money was spent in the Army posts in the United States by the Commission on Training Camp Activities, which built recreation halls, theaters, and field houses, and which supplied the operating personnel, hostesses, athletic directors, song leaders, dramatic coaches, and professional talent. Another large part was spent outside the military posts in the communities adjacent to the large camps, and in France by a loose organization of Y.M.C.A., Jewish Welfare Board, Y.W.C.A., Salvation Army, American Library Association, National Catholic War Council, and Knights of Columbus, who by the fall of 1918 had provided recreation personnel numbering over six thousand with the A.E.F. in France. In all this effort in the last war there was some little confusion, some considerable duplication of effort, some added burden to the military in handling civilians and adjusting disputes between civilian organizations. But the fact remains that a very fine job was done. Athletics, amateur and professional dramatics, singing, and a whole program of recreation had a recognized part in army life. Perhaps most important of all, women in great numbers took part in running canteens and recreation centers. The three thousand American women of the various organizations who accompanied our troops abroad had an incalculable effect on the spirits of the American soldier, and brought a new and immensely valuable element into the life of the Army. Under the fine leadership of Raymond B. Fosdick and Howard Braucher and the heads of the civilian agencies, a new and successful step was taken in the care of the soldier, c mparable only to the advance made with the introduction of women nurses in military hospitals.

The War and Navy Departments Commissions On Training Camp Activities

The War and Navy Departments Commissions On Training Camp Activities

III. Training Camp Activities

III. Training Camp Activities

The Commission on Training Camp Activities

The Commission on Training Camp Activities