Commission on Training Camp Activities

On April 17, 1918, just 11 days after the formal U.S. declaration of war in World War I, the War Department created a new federal agency, the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), and charged it with protecting the men in uniform from the twin scourges of moral corruption and venereal disease. Americans had long associated military camps with disease and immorality; during the conflicts on the Mexican border, Pres. Woodrow Wilson had sent the well-known Progressive reformer, Raymond Blaine Fosdick, to assess conditions among the troops. With the outbreak of World War I, the president promised a new kind of camp and a new kind of soldier. In forming the CTCA, the president hoped to combat a real manpower issue by attacking a disease that reduced the number of combat-ready soldiers in each unit. At the same time, the president also envisaged a larger role for the commission, hoping to create soldiers physically fit and morally pure—worthy of the nation and of the families that sent them to war. Philosophically, the CTCA embraced a form of cultural nationalism, hoping to reshape the men in uniform to match these Progressive reformers' own white, urban, middle-class values.

Reflecting its Progressive roots, the commission initially employed positive methods in its program to remake the American fighting man. Social hygiene education for both soldiers and civilians emphasized sexual purity, associating irresponsible sexual behavior with slackers and traitors. Applying the modern methods of advertising, the CTCA used placards, pamphlets, lectures, and films to spread the message of a single standard of sexual abstinence to soldier and civilian alike. Recreation programs, in turn, worked to cultivate chaste behaviors and upstanding values in both soldiers and women through carefully orchestrated leisure activities. From athletics programs to group sings, from camp libraries to soldier clubs, leisure activities inside the camp filled the men's time while also attempting to inculcate middle-class values and habits. A companion program for local women and girls complemented these efforts, promoting a feminine ideal that combined the traditional notion of women's moral and domestic responsibilities with a more modern, public role in the war effort. Recognizing the inevitability of contact between soldiers and the civilian female population, CTCA reformers established broad-based community recreation programs as well, hoping to replace promiscuous activity with carefully controlled meetings. The CTCA's counterpart in the local communities, the War Camp Community Service, stepped up to provide healthful recreation, and sponsored dances and parades, picnics and pageants, and commandeered local organizations to do their part for the appropriate care of the men in uniform.

Though the reformers in the CTCA hoped these positive programs would prove sufficient to control the men in uniform and their female civilian counterparts, the commission left nothing to chance, simultaneously embracing the more repressive side of Progressivism in its development of programs of chemical prophylaxis and law enforcement. Conceding the reality that some soldiers would engage in sexual activity despite the commission's best efforts, reformers [Page 177]established a regimen of chemical prophylaxis, surprisingly effective if applied immediately following sexual contact, to which men were required to submit; failure to undergo the chemical treatment constituted a court-martial offense. Civilian women faced a much broader repression. Relying on a provision of the Draft Act, reformers established “moral zones” around the camps and sought their rigid enforcement. Beginning their efforts with the closure of red-light districts, reformers soon recognized the more complex problems of prostitution outside the districts, “charity” sex, and simple promiscuity. Seeking to control female sexual behavior, the CTCA developed a program that included both protective work aimed at deterrence and more severe efforts focused on the arrest, quarantine, detention, and reformation of sexually active women and girls. State and local governments and law enforcement agencies cooperated with the commission, passing laws, closing red-light districts, and building detention houses and reformatories.

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