The US government “selected” Ely J. Kahn for service in the US Army in 1941, relabeled him Private Kahn, and dispatched him to training. Before long, Kahn found himself sweating in a field in South Carolina, sharing in an early morning combat-preparation ritual common to the experiences of millions of American soldiers that began with a “brisk dose of calisthenics.” During those physical drill sessions, Kahn remembered his officers exclaiming that every exercise “would develop some especially useful muscle,” warning their charges “not to bend those knees as we strove earnestly to touch our toes,” and urging the troops on “by announcing that every uncomfortable position we got ourselves into was for our own good.” That was one of Kahn’s great lessons: “You don’t have to be in the Army long to learn, from some superior or other, that everything you do, or that is done to you, is for your own good.”1 What Kahn and his peers may not have realized is that their officers had more in mind than muscular strength and cardiovascular endurance when they spoke of exercises doing soldiers good. In truth, the workouts were part of an uplift project intended to produce better men in a holistic sense: more disciplined, more resilient in the face of adversity, and more morally upstanding. While some elements of that uplift project could claim a general heritage from warrior cultures stretching back through millennia, the particulars of Kahn’s exercise ritual were less than a century old.
Kahn’s enforced early morning routines were grounded in an eternal fact: war is physical. In combat, fortune favors the soldier in better condition. Superior conditioning enables troops to fight longer and harder, to move farther and faster, to carry heavier loads and endure greater hardship. These relative advantages can be the difference between life and death, victory and defeat. The Prussian philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz once observed that “War is the realm of physical exertion and suffering. These will destroy us unless we can make ourselves indifferent to them, and for this birth or training must provide us with a certain strength of body and soul.”2 So long as humans make war, this will be an enduring truth. Thus, physical training in some form has always been a part of the preparation for war. Western traditions locate the origins of martial physical training, and often the ideal male body type, in ancient Greece and Rome. Whether in the broader educational approach of the Athenians or the utilitarian version of the Spartans and Romans, physical training shaped bodies for war. The humanist impetus behind physical training faded in the medieval period, but warrior castes in feudal systems sustained utilitarian physical training. Militaries in the early modern period had little need of individual warriors, but elaborate drill regulations fitted soldiers’ bodies to a new sort of combat and battlefield. Later, nationalism brought with it more widespread demands on citizenries for military service. Whole populations needed to be made healthy and strong in the name of war.3
Kahn’s particular experience also reflected the heritage of a new political, cultural, military, and intellectual juncture that emerged in the twentieth century’s dawning years. Military leaders and thinkers in the United States at the time believed that war—as it always had—demanded bodily preparation. However, physical training assumed increased importance and new characteristics that reflected a modern confidence in man’s ability to manipulate nature and society.4 Progressive educators such as John Dewey, and members of the new physical education profession such as Thomas Wood, Luther Gulick, and Clark Hetherington, endorsed an organic unity of mind and body. They argued that learning a physical act was not just physical but also mental and social. Play and exercise could therefore develop the whole individual, even societies.5 Some military officers recognized the potential power of this new physical education philosophy and others like it in popular fitness movements. The rational application of modern, scientific training methods seemingly created opportunities to shape both physical and non-physical qualities. Militaries around the world developed and promoted gymnastics systems and sport to take advantage of these perceived opportunities. The US military followed suit, anxious about entering a competitive imperial world where embodied nations battled for survival in the framework of social Darwinism.6
What follows is an exploration of the specific heritage that informed Kahn’s exercise experience—those philosophies and practices that guided the US Army’s efforts to shape soldiers’ bodies between 1885 and 1957. Taken together, these philosophies and practices formed a physical culture, here defined as a constellation of ideas about the nature and value of fitness, and of the means by which one should achieve it. While multiple physical cultures could and did exist simultaneously, this study traces the official culture promulgated in policy and doctrine, the one top US Army leaders intended to be dominant. That culture’s foundation was systematic exercise. Its producers posited that physical training should be a distinct activity instead of an incidental byproduct of other activities, and that it should be rationally structured and applied to maximize its intended effects. Four key questions impel analysis of this culture. In whose interests were bodies shaped? To what ends were they shaped? How did the philosophy and practice of shaping those bodies change over time? How did the shaping of bodies contribute to projects of man-, soldier-, and citizen-making? Answers to these questions reveal more than just simple exercise preferences. Martial physical training advocates aspired to more than utilitarian benefits. The systems and practices they advocated therefore also opened windows onto how they conceived of the future battlefield, the ideal soldier, the relationship between man and machine, and the nature of American citizenship. In short, these exercise systems were cultural expressions. Exploring the official physical culture’s development over time yields insights into military culture in general, and into relationships and interactions between the US Army and wider society in the first half of the twentieth century.
At every stage of its development, the Army’s physical culture reflected unique contexts informed by perceived military demands, the state of exercise science and physical education, popular culture, and its own accumulating tradition. Modern war’s demands were particularly influential and largely justified systematic exercise. At the turn of the twentieth century, new technologies rendered battlefields simultaneously deadlier and emptier while mechanizing and industrializing the act of killing.7 Individuals paradoxically seemed to become more important on apparently empty battlefields—devoid of mass troop formations and the concomitant reassuring “elbow-touch”—even as the individual soldier’s relative significance ostensibly declined in inverse proportion to battle’s growing spatial and temporal scope.8 In the 1950s, another possible technology-driven battlefield revolution appeared to be afoot, this time driven by nuclear weapons. Tactics and organizational structures adapted to the imagined battlefield of the future, again seemingly reducing the individual’s relative significance. Yet in both these periods and all the years between, military theorists and leaders in Europe and in the United States emphasized moral forces as a key to the offensive and victory. Theorists and military leaders often conceived of war before World War I as a contest of wills that hinged on the human element’s performance, both en masse and individually. “The true strength of an army,” wrote Britain’s Col. Frederic Maude, an influential commentator on military tactics and affairs before World War I, “lies essentially in the power of each, or any, of its constituent fractions to stand up to punishment, even to the verge of annihilation when necessary.”9 Men required moral and muscle fiber to withstand the terrifying effects of devastating weapons while advancing in isolation from others, to bear increasingly heavy physical and psychic loads, and finally to close with and kill the enemy—sometimes by bayonet or bare hand.10 More than fifty years later, US Army leaders such as Gen. Maxwell Taylor likewise emphasized the human element in war. Scoffing at the idea of a “push-button war,” Taylor and others doubled down on the need for fit, resilient troops to prosecute war on a nuclear battlefield. Leaders in both eras and in the intervening years looked to systematic exercise as a way of sculpting the sort of soldier they needed.
Broader cultural, political, social, and intellectual contexts informed and constrained the imaginations of those seeking to improve the Army’s human material and the tools at their disposal. Early in the official physical culture’s development, for instance, Social Darwinism and neo-Lamarckianism fixed attention on bodies and stressed race. Under these theories, physical appearance revealed internal qualities, and physical struggle shaped character or even strengthened offspring.11 Concerns voiced mainly by white, male Americans about racial and masculine decline at the turn of the century fueled intense anxieties that translated into worry over national strength and vigor.12 Perhaps the modern world’s “overcivilized” men were not ready for the modern battlefield’s challenges.13 But the “crisis in masculinity” opened avenues for improving soldiers, too. If bodies could degenerate, they could also regenerate. A popular physical culture grew up in America around sport and bodybuilding. With the right diet and exercise, men could cultivate corporeal proportions like the world’s “perfect man,” Eugen Sandow. And if people could improve themselves, then the military might also engineer men’s bodies for martial purposes.14 Officers drew on the language and practices of popular physical cultures in developing solutions to battlefield problems, and they continued to do so throughout the twentieth century.
Martial physical training resonated with movements applying scientific knowledge and methods, and occasionally pseudoscience such as eugenics, to improve the human body and thereby improve society. Nutritional science, which arose in the first two decades of the twentieth century, is one example. Nutritionists revolutionized the way Americans approached eating by breaking food down into its component parts, such as calories and vitamins, and reimagining food as fuel. This approach theoretically enabled efficient and economic consumption, all while improving the health of individuals and the nation. Physical training advocates moralized exercise in much the same way as nutritionists moralized food consumption. Physical educators, belonging to a field that professionalized alongside the emergence and evolution of the Army’s physical culture, also sought to apply scientific knowledge and methods to improve bodies and society. Trends in physical education and in US Army physical training typically moved in similar directions, and in several cases educators decisively influenced developments in the Army’s physical culture.
A final contextual factor is that making soldiers and making citizens overlapped in an age of nationalism and conscription. All male citizens were potential soldiers. Military service seemed to some a way of inculcating discipline, health, and patriotism in the public. Soldiering could be a means of elevating humanity, and certainly of bettering manhood. Yet physically fit, patriotic, and courageous soldiers could not be made in a few weeks of training. Such soldiers were the products of a culture, a people, and a society. Consequently, politicians, educators, and Army leaders also deployed the ideals and tools of martial physical training in spaces outside the military: schools, preparedness camps, paramilitary programs, and more. Through these deployments, martial physical training abetted the efforts of elites seeking to define the nature of citizenship in terms of obligations, and to leverage military service as a positive good for society. In general, the Army’s physical culture supported an obligation-based model of citizenship that privileged certain bodies, namely, those of healthy, white, military-aged males. It also often framed the soldier and his body as interchangeable parts in a larger machine. These models did not always sit well with American society.
In addition to broader contextual factors, persistent tensions within the Army’s physical culture also shaped its development over time. The relative influence over the culture enjoyed by institutional outsiders and insiders at any given time was one such tension. Only when outsiders exercised decisive influence did the Army’s physical culture change significantly. This was the case at the very beginning, when West Point hired young Herman Koehler to take charge of its physical training program, and at major points of inflection during both World Wars, when massive and rapid end-strength growth brought civilian physical educators into positions of authority. Whereas institutional insiders tended to preserve the values, assumptions, and practices they inherited, outsiders tended to inject the latest trends from civilian physical education and popular culture. Ironically, these outsiders usually placed greater emphasis on practical combat preparation than did insiders, whose goals typically aligned more with visual sculpting and discipline. This observation points to another tension commonly found in studies of military culture: the paradoxical pulls of tradition and innovation. Only in times of major dislocation and upheaval did the Army’s physical culture bend toward innovation. Other, smaller tensions also played their parts. For instance, recreational athletics consistently competed against systematic exercise for time and attention. While producers of the Army’s physical culture emphasized the latter, soldiers and their immediate superiors often preferred the former. Of the tensions explored in this work, only one dissipated by 1957—debate among senior leaders about the value of and real need for physical training. At the end of the nineteenth century, many of the Army’s top officers questioned whether units should spend time exercising instead of training soldier skills through marching, digging, and drilling. By 1957, top officers assumed that systematic exercise was an inherently necessary activity, and that physical fitness was a trait to be valued over most others in their subordinates.
Three punctuated periods are apparent in the evolution of the Army’s physical culture between 1885 and 1957: Koehler’s disciplinary era, the combat-readiness interregnum of 1917–1919, and the scientific measurement school’s rise after 1942. Because understanding the particular context in which the Army’s physical culture originated is crucial to understanding its nature and subsequent development in these three periods, an analysis of military problems and proposed solutions at the turn of the twentieth century makes a good point of departure. Most solutions involved improving an army’s and nation’s human material. This concept drew on popular fitness cultures, evolutionary science, and racial pseudoscience while echoing impulses toward order, systems, control, and moralizing in Progressivism and industrial management. From the beginning, the Army’s physical culture was about much more than a soldier’s physical efficiency. It was also about cultivating desirable qualities, especially discipline; promoting an idealized warrior masculinity; and improving the moral fiber of individuals and units. The soldier’s body existed at the intersection between the battlefield, Progressive culture, physical education philosophy and pedagogy, transnational influences, and the period’s “crisis in masculinity.” Training philosophies and practices emerged from this context that coalesced into the Army’s official physical culture. Politicians, physical educators, Army officers, and other elites deployed this emergent physical culture to support arguments for improving American citizens’ bodies as a matter of national security in an age of American imperialism.
The Army’s official physical culture underwent its first major change between 1917 and 1920. West Point’s Master of the Sword, Herman Koehler, and his disciplinary gymnastics largely defined US Army physical training before World War I. In 1917, mobilization summoned hundreds of civilian educators to serve. Civilian physical training directors, most notably Dr. Joseph Raycroft, replaced Koehler as dominant cultural producers until 1920. These civilians changed the character of Army physical training, redefined fitness along the lines of functional combat efficiency, and introduced now-familiar concepts such as measurable fitness standards. Tradition waxed and innovation waned after the war. Cultural inertia and the earlier system’s bureaucratic entrenchment produced a wholesale reversion to Koehler’s original formulation of the Army’s physical culture in the interwar years. Debates about masculinized national health and the deployment of martial physical culture, both in practice and in rhetoric, to improve the body politic grew in volume and intensity during this period. New martial “prehabilitation” programs arose, fueled by surprisingly high draftee rejection rates during World War I and the Depression’s devastating physical, psychic, and moral toll on US citizens. Two of the most prominent were the Civilian Military Training Camps (CMTC) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The CMTC linked physical fitness explicitly with citizenship. The CCC sculpted men’s bodies and helped remasculinize men’s public and self-images, often under the direction of Army leaders.
As in World War I, the Army’s physical culture changed significantly during World War II. Because the Army failed to retain lessons learned during its earlier experience, officers and civilians responsible for physical training had to rapidly relearn how to prepare a mass conscript force for war. Primary emphasis in the Army’s physical culture returned to functional, combat-oriented training and its producers rediscovered standardized testing. Again, professional physical fitness educators and athletic coaches, such as Theodore Bank and Charles McCloy, pushed changes based on state-of-the-art thought in the physical education community. Their empirical, data-driven approach to crafting a physical training system with performance standards came to be hailed as the “new physical training concept” by later cultural producers. The Army’s senior leaders meanwhile developed policies that increasingly recognized different body types and degrees of ability, but they also opted to exclude women from the Army’s official physical culture when the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC, later WAC) formed in 1942. Women exercised instead within a wholly different set of values, assumptions, and practices, revealing the Army’s official physical culture to be a fundamentally gendered construct.
The real and imagined battlefield implications of technological advances converged with cultural anxieties over American masculinity and physical fitness after World War II as they had in the late nineteenth century. On one hand, nuclear weapons and other technologies suggested to some the rise of “push-button” war in which the soldier’s physical capacity barely factored. On the other, Korean War experiences and deep-rooted convictions in the Army about the centrality of man in war suggested that physical training remained relevant, and that it might even be more necessary than ever. In 1957, the physical culture’s chief producers came down firmly in support of the latter camp and reaffirmed basic tenets of the Army’s World War II–era physical culture. This moment represented the maturation of the Army’s physical culture, the core of which is not much different from the culture’s core today.
Yet fitness was not just a soldier’s concern in the 1950s. Mass mobilization in World War II and the Cold War’s intense ideological struggle kept attention on civilian bodies and their training. However, the acceptable means by which the state could pursue the prehabilitation of its citizenry had changed considerably since the 1930s. Examining several federal efforts to enhance American fitness between the 1930s and 1950s, including the Victory Corps, proposals for Universal Military Training, and the President’s Council on Youth Fitness, highlights many of these changes. Over time, the appeal of martial prehabilitation diminished owing to a combination of American social, cultural, and political posturing against militarism and totalitarianism, and a popular understanding of citizenship in which obligations factored less and less. This combination also increased federal reliance on “advisory state” approaches. Examining the character of implemented programs, along with arguments for and against them, helps illuminate relationships between the Army’s physical culture and wider American society.
When Private Kahn took his daily dose of calisthenics in 1941, he was performing a ritual rich with meaning, even if he did not realize it. Two generations earlier, his predecessors began participating in calisthenics, contests of strength and balance, and rifle drill. These activities were supposed to sculpt troops into better men, to chisel body, mind, and spirit into something more upstanding, more resilient, and more capable of meeting modern war’s demands. A generation later, Kahn’s predecessors took their own doses of calisthenics and mixed them with sports, obstacle courses, and hand-to-hand combat training to become American crusaders suited for victory on World War I’s Western Front. Kahn’s generation and those that followed participated in similar activities, though they were increasingly informed by empirical research and a more scientific approach to programming. Between 1885 and 1957, US Army soldiers and those potentially liable for service took part in projects of man-, soldier-, and citizen-making that continued elevating physical fitness from being a personal interest to a general, societal interest. Individual bodies became constituent elements of the state’s health and military power, and the US Army’s approach to physical training became a cultural icon. What follows is an exploration of the people and ideas behind that movement and of the unique physical culture they created.