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To get the real flavor
of the CMTC, and how the idea began in 1913, or why it was so important -
probably to making the CCC the success it eventually became, you have to
read the book, "Forgotten Summers", by Donald M. Kington. It is the story
of the Citizen's Military Training Camps, from 1921 - 1940.
It was General Leonard Wood then Chief of Staff of the Army in the summer
of 1913 that fostered the idea of a Citizen's Military Camp and ran two
experimental camps for college men. The two initial camps were located at
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and Pacific Grove, California near the Presidio.
Those two camps were so successful that more were ordered opened at
Ludington, Michigan; Asheville, North Carolina; and Fort Ethan Allen,
Vermont. When Europe began to erupt in what would become WWI, it was
apparent more would be needed in 1915 and in New York the area of most
interest was news when even the mayor of New York City volunteered to
attend a camp at the Plattsburg barracks in up state New York. The
publicity and the CMTC alumni eventually gave rise to the Plattsburg
movement years later. Theodore Roosevelt said of the camps, "The military
tent where boys sleep side by side will rank next to public school among
the great agents of democracy." A young captain by the name of Douglass
MacArthur assisted General Leonard Wood in establishing the Plattsburg
movement.
It was the graduates of the 1915-16 camps that formed that MTCA or
Military Training Camps Association. By 1927 there were 53 camps and many
felt that if more funding would have been provided, many more camps would
have opened with many thousands more men attending. It was in 1933 that
the attendance began dropping as one CMTC attendee stated that Roosevelt's
CCC jobs paid $30 per month which then was more than an Army private made
at the time.
One Col. Harry Truman was a camp commander prior to becoming President.
Ordered to Camp Pike Arkansas in 1933. Ronald Reagan also has his own CMTC
experience at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. TR's son Col. Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
also was a camp commander at the Plattsburg camp. Many a poster was placed
in stores that shown Babe Ruth saying "If I had a son I'd want him to
attend a Citizen's Military Training Camp!" George Herman Ruth went on to
autograph a baseball and a bat to be awarded to the outstanding soldier
athelete at each camp for the year. This went on from 1927 when he hit 60
home runs until 1934.
"Prophecy was written in 1933 by a 17 year-old Kentuckian while attending
one of the new Citizen's Military Training Camps (CMTC) - this one at Camp
Knox, Kentucky, a half-day's train ride from the young man's hometown of
Guthrie. It was Robert P., Warren's first year at camp and the second year
for the CMTC. Later, using his full name, Robert Penn Warren, the young
man became one of America's most eminent men of letters, winning three
Pulitzer Prizes - one for fiction and two for poetry - as well as being
named America's first official poet laureate." It was the first poem he
had every written. There were over 50 camps across our great nation. There
should have been 500 more. Eventually the CCC would fill that gap for a
grateful nation.
You see no beauty in the parched parade,
The quivering, heat-glazed highways mile on mile,
The fields where beauty hold a debt unpaid,
The gray, drab barracks in monotonous, grim file.
You take no joy when the dust wraiths dimly curl
Above the winding column crawling on far hills.
You see but short beyond the present whirl
Of circumstance, your little wrongs and petty ills.
But when it all has passed and you have lost
the swinging rhythmic cadence of the marching feet,
Then you will reck as paltry small the cost,
And memory will purge the bitter from the sweet.
Prophecy, by Robert P. Warren 1922 Camp Knox Kentucky
Note; all of the content provided here was largely from "Forgotten
Summers".
There is also a DVD
titled, "Camp Forgotten" you should also watch. While it is about the
Michigan CCC, it is quite typical of all CCC camps in America. Michigan
maintains a CCC Museum at Higgins Lake, Michigan across from Higgin's Lake
State Park. |
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The CMTC began
much earlier in other parts of the country than it did at Fort Harrison.
By the time the CMTC camps expanded from elsewhere on Fort Harrison
grounds to the Camp Glenn area it was already 1925. Those buildings are
long gone, but the brick buildings that replaced them in 1935 are still
there today. Read how the program began and how those who fought together
in the Spanish American War understood the need to have a well trained
Army (General Wood for example) and trained citizens to pitch in when the
going got tough! Many in the CMTC including the regular Army at the time,
transferred in the 1930's to the CCC or WPA when those programs began and
required supervision out of miliatry uniforms. Most of these enrollees
also served their country during WWII and later used the GI Bill
championed by the American Legion to better their lives. It was this
effort that created America's middle class. The CMTC began in 1921 and
ended the same time as the CCC because of WWII. You will see below there
were efforts to have it started much earlier, but it took WWI to convince
most that this was really needed.
The Plattsburg
Movement and its Legacy
by Donald M. Kington
The story is told of a French officer, just after the WW I Armistice,
complimenting an American officer on the United States having raised in
excess of three millions of men in ten months. "That's good," he said.
"but I am told that, although you had no officers' reserves to start with,
you somehow found 200,000 new officers, most of them competent." That, he
added, was astonishing and he wanted to know how it was done.
The American, who himself was a product of the system, was able to
describe the famous "90-day" Officer Training Camps in 1917. Had there
been time, and the French officer patient enough to listen, the American
probably could have described the genesis of that program.
1
It all began in the summer of 1913 with the idea of establishing a
training program for young civilians. That year the army conducted two
experimental camps for college men. General Leonard Wood
was chief of staff. It was Wood's political and
public-relations savvy that launched the fledgling attempt at military
preparedness. 2 [Note; Wood Road in Fort
Harrison is named for Leonard Wood, along with Shafter Road for General
Rufus Shafter, both were Teddy Roosevelt's superior officers during the
Spanish American War. Wood and Shafter were both Medal of Honor
recipients. TR would also eventually be awarded the Medal of Honor and the
Nobel Peace Prize.]
The idea of summer military training for civilians was not new. For years
the militia had conducted camps of instruction. A supplement to the 1912
War Department Annual Report had recommended summer camps along with a
proposed national reserve organization. 3
The inspiration for Wood's actions in 1913 came from a situation that is
unimaginable in modern-day Army protocol. During Cornell University's
spring break Lieutenant Henry T. Bull, the university's professor of
military science, took the train from Ithaca, New York, to Washington and
quickly obtained an appointment with the chief of staff.
4
Bull had learned of the navy's plan to offer college students a two-month
summer cruise aboard battleships and thought the idea could be adapted by
the army. He proposed to Wood that qualified students be attached to
regular army units for four or five weeks in the summer, but strictly as
volunteer civilians, with no enlistment involved.
Wood liked the idea but believed special camps should be established for
the training. He assigned Bull to a three officer committee to prepare a
detailed program. The other two officers were Captain Robert van Horn and
Captain Douglas A. MacArthur. More than 20 years later MacArthur would
again play important roles in the army's summer training program for young
civilians.
With the backing of Lindley M. Garrison, secretary of war in the new
Wilson administration, Wood sent the following circular to the presidents
of colleges and universities throughout the nation:
1. The secretary of war has decided to hold two experimental military
camps of instruction for students of educational institutions during the
coming summer vacation period. Should these camps prove a success, it is
intended to hold them annually, one in each of the four sections of the
country.
2. The object of these camps is, primarily, to increase the present
inadequate personnel of the trained military reserve of the United States
by a class of men from whom, in time of national emergency, a large
proportion of the commissioned officers will probably be drawn, and upon
whose military judgment at such time, the lives of many other men will in
a measure depend.5
Despite the short notice and limited time for preparation, two successful
camps were conducted that summer in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for the
eastern sector, and one for the west in Pacific Grove, California, near
the Presidio of Monterey.
There were no extra appropriations for the camps, nor did Wood attempt to
obtain any. In addition to transportation costs to and from camp, the
training cost for each young man was $27.50: $10 for uniforms and $17.50
for food. 6
The camps were so successful that the next year four camps were scheduled.
The 1914 camps were located in Ludington, Michigan, near the shores of
Lake Michigan; Asheville, North Carolina, near the Pisgah Mountains; and
Fort Ethan Allen, Vermont, on Lake Champlain. The camp in the west
remained in the Monterey area. 7
By 1914 the European continent was engulfed in war, causing the idea of
military preparedness to take on a new urgency for Americans. This concern
was particularly strong in New York and other urban areas of the
northeast. Influential young eastern executives and politicians became so
anxious about the issue that they, almost spontaneously, helped create
what became known as the "Plattsburg Movement."
Hundreds of distinguished and not-so-distinguished public and private
leaders in their thirties and forties, including the 36-year-old mayor of
New York City, John Purroy Mitchel, volunteered for a summer camp at
Plattsburg Barracks in upstate New York. 8 Two Roosevelts also attended,
Quentin and Theodore Jr., as did Julius Ochs Adler, general manager of the
New York Times and nephew of Adolph Ochs, the newspaper's publisher.
Adler's pro-national defense attitude would favorably influence the Times
coverage of defense issues for years to come.
This Plattsburg camp was in addition to the camps for college men, which
continued in 1915. The four-week training at Plattsburg (despite what
today's atlases and ZIP Code books show, that is the way the city's name
was then spelled) was officially known as the Business Men's Camp but was
branded early and irrevocably by the press as the "Tired Businessmen's
Camp."
Although the camp's extensive publicity, particularly in the New York
newspapers, concentrated on the lighter side, it sharpened the nation's
new awareness of the preparedness movement. One of the nation's most vocal
and distinguished proponents of military readiness took to his "bully
pulpit" to express his enthusiastic support of summer military training
for young men. Theodore Roosevelt said: "The military tent, where boys
sleep side by side, will rank next to the public school among the great
agents of democracy." 9
As a captain in 1916 George C. Marshall was cadre for the West Coast's
version of Plattsburg's "Tired Businessmen's Camp" conducted at the plush
grounds of the Del Monte Hotel in Monterey, California. According to
Marshall's boss, General J. Franklin Bell, headquartered at the Presidio
of San Francisco, the volunteer trainees were "all the hot bloods of San
Francisco. I saw more Rolls-Royces and other fine cars around there than I
have ever seen collected." It was Captain Marshall's job to whip them into
shape, which he did with a firm effectiveness that earned him the respect
of the "hot bloods" and won him the nickname "Dynamite."
10
The graduates of the 1915 and 1916 camps gave the spark for the formation
of the Military Training Camps Association (MTCA), with the core of its
membership principally alumni of Plattsburg training. "
11
The MTCA soon gained sufficient political clout to influence congress's
approval of a full appropriation for the 1917 camps. In April, however,
the nation declared war against Germany, wiping out any possibility of
summer camps for volunteer civilians. The MTCA quickly suggested to the
secretary of war that the proposed civilian camps be converted into
officers' training camps. The association and the War Department carried
on a nationwide recruiting campaign, and by 27 August, 341 candidates had
been graduated from the first series of of fleer training camps. This,
wrote the secretary of war, was "a number sufficient to meet the immediate
needs of the Army." 12
The Officer Candidate Schools ran from May 1917 through November 1918 at
locations across the nation. Officer candidates, after careful screening,
were given three months of intensive training. By May and June of 1918,
57,307 graduates from the first three series of schools had been
commissioned and enrolled in the new national army. At the time of the
Armistice in November about 46,000 candidates were enrolled in the fourth
and last series of officers' schools. Because of the need for officers of
all grades, commissions were granted up to the rank of colonel in the
first two series. The secretary of war reported a total of 297 graduates
being commissioned as field grade officers, including two full colonels.
The camps also provided a sizable number of captains and first
lieutenants. 13 It appears that many of those
who had attended the earlier "Tired Businessmen's" camps reentered the
1917 officer training camps where they earned commissions. The tragic hero
of the legendary "Lost Battalion," Charles W. Whittlesey, and Captain
George McMurtry, Major Whittlesey's right hand in that operation, were
among the graduates.
An officer candidate camp for African-Americans also was opened in June
1918 at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. By October of that year the camp had
commissioned 639 black officers, all in the infantry.
14
Marked indelibly with the sarcastic sobriquet of "90 Day Wonders," a
nickname later inherited by the graduates of Officers' Candidate Schools
during World War 11, graduates of this quickly improvised World War I
training program provided the army with a cadre of combat leaders
unsurpassed in any of the nation's previous wars.
As essential as this military-preparedness training was to the army's
success -- actually its very survival in Europe -the concept would always
have its detractors. In The Top Kick, Leonard H. Nason's gritty and often
darkly humorous novel set on the battlefields of France, two of the
Regular Army doughboys, both of whom apparently had been cadre at
Plattsburg Barracks, have the following conversation:
" I aim to get a commission out of this scrap and it's time I was after
it."
"Well, you would a got
one at Plattsburg if you hadn't gone givin' your opinion on them sheep-herdin'
jaspers they called reserve officers. You wouldn't expect to get a
commission after tellin' a bunch o' millionaires they wouldn't make a
pimple on a good soldier's nose, would yuh?" 15
How many millionaires attended Plattsburg or were members of the MTCA is
problematic and beside the point. The MTCA was an organization made up of
individuals from all over the nation who were sincerely dedicated to the
idea of military preparedness, some of whom were in high enough positions
to influence the army and the Congress.
Shortly after the Armistice, in his annual report for 1918, Secretary of
War Baker lauded the army's of officer training program. "Thousands of our
young men," he wrote, "left positions of responsibility and profit,
dropped their personal affairs and devoted themselves wholeheartedly to
the new business of war." 16
After being mustered out, many of those citizen soldiers who survived the
war remained active with the MTCA, or joined it for the first time.
Dedicated MTCA members who were either too old or physically unfit to join
the army had served the country well as recruiters. At the war's end the
organization again took on its principal mission of convincing the country
and Congress of the need for universal compulsory military training.
Even with the considerable influence the MTCA had by 1920, it was unable
to overcome the political realities brought on by the tide of isolationist
and pacifist sympathies engulfing the nation two years after the "War to
End All Wars." The MTCA's vigorous campaign for universal military
training was doomed. 17 Although the Senate passed a bill establishing
such a program it was rejected by the House and failed to survive in
conference. The compromise bill did, at least, provide for a summer
training program for American youth, the volunteer, no-further-obligation
Citizens' Military Training Camps (CMTC).
Although CMTC wasn't precisely the program the MTCA had fought for, the
association acknowledged its parental obligation. For the next 20 years
the association would promote, protect, and fight for CMTC, accepting it
as something of definite value, if not quite the creation of its dreams.
Although some World War veterans attended CMTC perhaps for the purpose of
pursuing a reserve commission the history of the 20-year program is beyond
the scope of this article and not relevant to Relevance. For those readers
interested in pursuing that history, the author immodestly refers them to
his book, Forgotten Summers: The Story of the Citizens' Military Training
Camps, 1921-1940.
Notes
1. John Cary Clifford, The Citizen Soldiers: The Plattsburg Training Camp
Movement, 1913-1920 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1972),
p.228.
2. Jack C. Lane, Armed Progressive, General Leonard Wood (San Rafael:
Presidio Press, 1978).
3. War Department Annual Report (Washington, D.C., War Department, 1912),
p.l21.
4. Major General Preston Brown, "The Genesis of the Military Training
Camp," Infantry Journal, December, 1930), p.609.
5. Clifford, op.cit., p. 12.
6. Ibid., p. 16.
7. Ibid, pp. 25-26.
8. Ibid, pp. 72-73.
9. Military Training Camps Association, The Mess Kit (Camp Knox, Kentucky,
Military Training Camps Association, 1923), p.13.
10. Leonard Mosley, Marshall, Hero for Our Times (New York: Hearst Books,
1982), pp.45-46.
11. Clifford, op. cit., p. 92.
12. War Department Annual Report (Washington: War Department, I 917),
p.121.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid, pp. 189.
15. Leonard H. Nason, The Top Kick (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Doran
and Company, 1928).
16. War Department Annual Report op.cit., p.l9.
17. Clifford, op. cit. p. 193 |
