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's 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, and concerned that this
war, like others before it, would encourage moral vice and
corruption, 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. Fortified by
temperance, abstinence, self-control, and a healthy athleticism,
marginal Americans were to be transformed into truly masculine
crusaders. What began as a federal program designed to eliminate
venereal disease soon mushroomed into a powerful social force
intent on replacing America's many cultures witha single
homogeneous 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 this vision
often faced exclusion from the reformers' idealized society, or
sometimes even imprisonment. "Unrestrained" cultural expressiveness
was stifled. Social engineering ruled the day. Combining social,
cultural, and military history and illustrating the deep divisions
among reformers themselves, Nancy 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.
General
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