4. Saving Our Boys from Alcohol and Vice

One of organized womanhood’s major contributions to the war effort was to collaborate in an attempt to save American soldiers from vice and Demon Rum. In addition to establishing rigorous dry zones around every military camp in the United States, the Selective Service Act of May 1917 also outlawed prostitution in wide zones around the military camps. To enforce these provisions, the War Department had ready at hand a Commission on Training Camp Activities, an agency soon imitated by the Department of the Navy. Both commissions were headed by a man tailor-made for the job, the progressive New York settlement-house worker, municipal political reformer, and former student and disciple of Woodrow Wilson, Raymond Blaine Fosdick.

Fosdick’s background, life, and career were paradigmatic for progressive intellectuals and activists of that era. Fosdick’s ancestors were Yankees from Massachusetts and Connecticut, and his great-grandfather pioneered westward in a covered wagon to become a frontier farmer in the heart of the Burned-Over District of transplanted Yankees, Buffalo, New York. Fosdick’s grandfather, a pietist lay preacher born again in a Baptist revival, was a prohibitionist who married a preacher’s daughter and became a lifelong public school teacher in Buffalo. Grandfather Fosdick rose to become Superintendent of Education in Buffalo and a battler for an expanded and strengthened public school system.

Fosdick’s immediate ancestry continued in the same vein. His father was a public school teacher in Buffalo who rose to become principal of a high school. His mother was deeply pietist and a staunch advocate of prohibition and women’s suffrage. Fosdick’s father was a devout pietist Protestant and a “fanatical” Republican who gave his son Raymond the middle name of his hero, the veteran Maine Republican James G. Blaine. The three Fosdick children, elder brother Harry Emerson, Raymond, and Raymond’s twin sister, Edith, on emerging from this atmosphere, all forged lifetime careers of pietism and social service.

While active in New York reform administration, Fosdick made a fateful friendship. In 1910, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., like his father a pietist Baptist, was chairman of a special grand jury to investigate and to try to stamp out prostitution in New York City. For Rockefeller, the elimination of prostitution was to become an ardent and lifelong crusade. He believed that sin, such as prostitution, must be criminated, quarantined, and driven underground through rigorous suppression. In 1911, Rockefeller began his crusade by setting up the Bureau of Social Hygiene, into which he poured $5 million in the next quarter century. Two years later he enlisted Fosdick, already a speaker at the annual dinner of Rockefeller’s Baptist Bible class, to study police systems in Europe in conjunction with activities to end the great “social vice.” Surveying American police after his stint in Europe at Rockefeller’s behest, Fosdick was appalled that police work in the United States was not considered a “science” and that it was subject to “sordid” political influences.[33]

At that point, the new Secretary of War, the progressive former mayor of Cleveland Newton D. Baker, became disturbed at reports that areas near the army camps in Texas on the Mexican border, where troops were mobilized to combat the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, were honeycombed with saloons and prostitution. Sent by Baker on a fact-finding tour in the summer of 1916, scoffed at by tough army officers as the “Reverend,” Fosdick was horrified to find saloons and brothels seemingly everywhere in the vicinity of the military camps. He reported his consternation to Baker, and, at Fosdick’s suggestion, Baker cracked down on the army commanders and their lax attitude toward alcohol and vice. But Fosdick was beginning to get the glimmer of another idea. Couldn’t the suppression of the bad be accompanied by a positive encouragement of the good, of wholesome recreational alternatives to sin and liquor that our boys could enjoy? When war was declared, Baker quickly appointed Fosdick to be chairman of the Commission on Training Camp Activities.

Armed with the coercive resources of the federal government and rapidly building his bureaucratic empire from merely one secretary to a staff of thousands, Raymond Fosdick set out with determination on his twofold task: stamping out alcohol and sin in and around every military camp, and filling the void for American soldiers and sailors by providing them with wholesome recreation. As head of the Law Enforcement Division of the Training Camp Commission, Fosdick selected Bascom Johnson, attorney for the American Social Hygiene Association.[34] Johnson was commissioned a major, and his staff of 40 aggressive attorneys became second lieutenants.

Employing the argument of health and military necessity, Fosdick set up a Social Hygiene Division of his commission, which promulgated the slogan “Fit to Fight.” Using a mixture of force and threats to remove federal troops from the bases if recalcitrant cities did not comply, Fosdick managed to bludgeon his way into suppressing, if not prostitution in general, then at least every major red light district in the country. In doing so, Fosdick and Baker, employing local police and the federal Military Police, far exceeded their legal authority. The law authorized the president to shut down every red light district in a five-mile zone around each military camp or base. Of the 110 red light districts shut down by military force, however, only 35 were included in the prohibited zone. Suppression of the other 75 was an illegal extension of the law. Nevertheless, Fosdick was triumphant: “Through the efforts of this Commission [on Training Camp Activities] the red light district has practically ceased to be a feature of American city life.”[35] The result of this permanent destruction of the red light district, of course, was to drive prostitution onto the streets, where consumers would be deprived of the protection of either an open market or of regulation.

In some cases, the federal anti-vice crusade met considerable resistance. Secretary of Navy Josephus Daniels, a progressive from North Carolina, had to call out the marines to patrol the streets of resistant Philadelphia, and naval troops, over the strenuous objections of the mayor, were used to crush the fabled red light district of Storyville, in New Orleans, in November 1917.[36]

In its hubris, the U.S. Army decided to extend its anti-vice crusade to foreign shores. General John J. Pershing issued an official bulletin to members of the American Expeditionary Force in France urging that “sexual continence is the plain duty of members of the A.E.F., both for the vigorous conduct of the war, and for the clean health of the American people after the war.” Pershing and the American military tried to close all the French brothels in areas where American troops were located, but the move was unsuccessful because the French objected bitterly. Premier Georges Clemenceau pointed out that the result of the “total prohibition of regulated prostitution in the vicinity of American troops” was only to increase “venereal diseases among the civilian population of the neighborhood.” Finally, the United States had to rest content with declaring French civilian areas off limits to the troops.[37]

The more positive part of Raymond Fosdick’s task during the war was supplying the soldiers and sailors with a constructive substitute for sin and alcohol, “healthful amusements and wholesome company.” As might be expected, the Woman’s Committee and organized womanhood collaborated enthusiastically. They followed the injunction of Secretary of War Baker that the government “cannot allow these ... young men to be surrounded by a vicious and demoralizing environment, nor can we leave anything undone which will protect them from unhealthy influences and crude forms of temptation.” The Woman’s Committee found, however, that in the great undertaking of safeguarding the health and morals of our boys, their most challenging problem proved to be guarding the morals of their mobilized young girls. For unfortunately, “where soldiers are stationed ... the problem of preventing girls from being misled by the glamour and romance of war and beguiling uniforms looms large.” Fortunately, perhaps, the Maryland Committee proposed the establishment of a “Patriotic League of Honor which will inspire girls to adopt the highest standards of womanliness and loyalty to their country.”[38]

No group was more delighted with the achievements of Fosdick and his Military Training Camp Commission than the burgeoning profession of social work. Surrounded by handpicked aides from the Playground and Recreation Association and the Russell Sage Foundation, Fosdick and the others “in effect tried to create a massive settlement house around each camp. No army had ever seen anything like it before, but it was an outgrowth of the recreation and community organization movement, and a victory for those who had been arguing for the creative use of leisure time.”[39] The social work profession pronounced the program an enormous success. The influential Survey magazine summed up the result as “the most stupendous piece of social work in modern times.”[40]

Social workers were also exultant about prohibition. In 1917, the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (which changed its name around the same time to the National Conference of Social Work) was emboldened to drop whatever value-free pose it might have had and come out squarely for prohibition. On returning from Russia in 1917, Edward T. Devine of the Charity Organization Society of New York exclaimed that “the social revolution which followed the prohibition of vodka was more profoundly important ... than the political revolution which abolished autocracy.” And Robert A. Woods of Boston, the Grand Old Man of the settlement house movement and a veteran advocate of prohibition, predicted in 1919 that the 18th Amendment, “one of the greatest and best events in history,” would reduce poverty, wipe out prostitution and crime, and liberate “vast suppressed human potentialities.”[41]

Woods, president of the National Conference of Social Work during 1917–18, had long denounced alcohol as “an abominable evil.” A postmillennial pietist, he believed in “Christian statesmanship” that would, in a “propaganda of the deed,” Christianize the social order in a corporate, communal route to the glorification of God. Like many pietists, Woods cared not for creeds or dogmas but only for advancing Christianity in a communal way; though an active Episcopalian, his “parish” was the community at large. In his settlement work, Woods had long favored the isolation or segregation of the “unfit,” in particular “the tramp, the drunkard, the pauper, the imbecile,” with the settlement house as the nucleus of this reform. Woods was particularly eager to isolate and punish the drunkard and the tramp. “Inveterate drunkards” were to receive increasing levels of “punishment,” with ever-lengthier jail terms. The “tramp evil” was to be gotten rid of by rounding up and jailing vagrants, who would be placed in tramp workhouses and put to forced labor.

For Woods the world war was a momentous event. It had advanced the process of “Americanization,” a “great humanizing process through which all loyalties, all beliefs must be wrought together in a better order.”[42] The war had wonderfully released the energies of the American people. Now, however, it was important to carry the wartime momentum into the postwar world. Lauding the war collectivist society during the spring of 1918, Robert Woods asked the crucial question, “Why should it not always be so? Why not continue in the years of peace this close, vast, wholesome organism of service, of fellowship, of constructive creative power?”[43]