CHAPTER ONE
Images of soldiers running, sweating, squatting, pushing, and pulling their way toward physical readiness are ubiquitous in the media and popular imagination today, so it may be surprising to learn that such activities have only officially and regularly been part of the US soldier’s life since 1914.1 In that year, the US Army published its Manual of Physical Training. This manual laid out for the first time in the Army’s history a comprehensive, professionally developed, uniform system of exercise designed to occupy a permanent position in the training of America’s soldiers. Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, then Chief of Staff of the Army, penned an introduction to this seminal document in which he asserted that “There is nothing in the education of the soldier of more vital importance than [physical training].”2 Wood’s words were undoubtedly genuine. The Chief of Staff was a famously active man, known especially as a companion of Theodore Roosevelt’s in the “strenuous life.” Hagiographies published about Wood in the lead-up to his presidential campaign in 1920 invariably extolled his “magnificent health and robust physique” that resulted from making “part of the day’s work to keep the body in trim.”3 Yet this riding, rowing, and wrestling general officer was an abnormally avid physical culturist among his cohort of military leaders. Likewise, his ideas on physical training’s importance were not universally held, especially among older officers. Thus, Wood’s confident assertions in 1914 must also be read as an argument for a relatively new idea that still lacked total acceptance throughout the Army. Formal exercise systems were not native to US Army training practices, and the character of systematic training as we have come to know it was not preordained. As Wood observed in 1914, physical training had to that point been a “negligible quantity,” owing in large part to the “absence of any well-defined authorized method of procedure” and the total lack of “system and uniformity.”4
Movement toward system and uniformity manifested most clearly in the manual from 1914, but it began in the 1880s and 1890s. Understanding the system that emerged in 1914, and the patterns and dynamics in Army physical training philosophy and practice thereafter, requires an understanding of the broader context in which advocates devised that system. In the years between 1880 and 1914, social, intellectual, and cultural anxieties intersected with struggles to prepare for combat on new battlefields rendered more dangerous and demanding by technological developments. Physical training, which was experiencing a popularity explosion in American society, seemed to be a means by which to address all of these problems. Simultaneously, a professionalization movement among physical educators created new philosophies, knowledge, and practices that influenced the systematic training of soldiers in both direct and indirect ways.
Central to the broader context in which the US Army’s physical culture originated was a set of social, intellectual, and cultural concerns that gripped Americans in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. These interlocking concerns produced a broad anxiety about the nation’s human material. Speaking generally, this anxiety manifested in fears of degeneration and a loss of American virility and vitality. In a world often conceived of in terms of social Darwinism, the degeneration of a nation’s human material was a critical problem, and perhaps even an existential one. Of America’s declining human material, men’s bodies composed the most important portion. As historian Kristin Hoganson observes, many Americans believed that the health of the nation and its political system depended on the robustness of its men and their “manly character.”5 Degenerating male bodies therefore posed problems for the nation, but also for the US Army specifically. This anxiety over the nation’s human resources is especially interesting because it remains with us today, even if it manifests somewhat differently. Contemporary concerns about high obesity rates, the national security implications of those rates, and the billions of dollars Americans spend annually on diets and exercise all signal the enduring relevance of the body politics’ fitness.
American men, and Western men in general, struggled to navigate a gender geography in flux in the late nineteenth century. The crisis was especially acute in white middle-class America. The sources of this crisis were many, but class and economic issues were crucial. To a middle-class Victorian of the mid-nineteenth century, “manliness” had meant self-restraint, character, and a good work ethic. To these qualities, the American Civil War added military service and combat experience. This was the era of the “self-made man.”6 In many ways, industrialization, corporations, management systems, and depressions made the achievement of Victorian manliness very difficult for many men. Fewer men were self-employed, more were trapped in sedentary clerical jobs, opportunities to prove oneself in war grew rare, and hard work and restraint did not insulate men against the effects of market failures beyond their control. Industrialization also changed the nature of some jobs by mechanizing production, seemingly integrating workers as pieces of a larger machine with less need for male physicality. This transition, made especially visible in Frederick Taylor’s time-and-motion studies, eroded men’s ownership of their own time and labor. Meanwhile, urbanization packed Americans into less healthy environments. Men living in these conditions faced more competition for fewer prizes, along with less opportunity for self-mastery and independence in the workplace.7 Meanwhile, the western frontier’s closure, once a man-making space at the border between primitiveness and civilization, denied men their classic option for regeneration.8
Even as middle-class men struggled to make themselves in a changing economy, many perceived threats from women suggested a “feminization” of modern man and of America. Women, it seemed, encroached everywhere in the traditional male sphere. Women increasingly entered the once male-exclusive working world in the late nineteenth century, denying men many workplaces as all-male preserves.9 More and more, women workers provided new competition for men, and men in most workplaces had to modify standards of behavior to account for women. Woman suffrage movements and other forms of political involvement, contemporaries argued, also denied men exclusive claims in the realm of politics.10 Even as it seemed that men’s purview was shrinking, increasingly fewer men could claim political and social power on the grounds of military service in an era when men lacked a major war in which to “prove” themselves, unlike their Civil War–veteran fathers and grandfathers.11
Beyond politics and the workplace, changes in child-rearing and family life fanned fears of feminization. Economic changes relocated most men’s place of work from the home to a more distant office or factory, so men spent less time in their roles as fathers and male models. The bonds between mothers and their children grew at the same time.12 Moreover, fewer male role models were available to American boys because women increasingly dominated the teaching profession. Men feared that women’s growing control over the development of male children, and the consequent “regime of sugary benignity,” would produce a generation of spoiled, physically weak, and morally suspect men.13 The period’s rising consumer culture and its “ethos of pleasure and frivolity,” in the words of historian Gail Bederman, further amplified an obsession widely held by American men with “softening.”14
Fears shared by many white middle-class men about feminization manifested in another, related concern: “overcivilization.” Fast living, feminization, and fewer opportunities for self-making threatened to render men too soft and too refined. In response, white middle-class men in the late nineteenth century increasingly celebrated the primitive. This strategy served a social and cultural purpose by defining distinctly masculine virtues as crucial to the nation’s vitality.15 However, according to Bederman “civilization” also had a racial meaning at the time. In this formulation, civilization was a stage of development beyond savagery or “barbarism.” Anglo-Saxons had achieved their advanced status as a civilized people through a long Darwinian struggle.16 Overcivilization’s chief threat in this sense was that soft men made for a soft race, a race unworthy of the evolutionary ladder’s top position. Industrialization, urbanization, and the frontier’s closure denied men traditional sources of struggle and hardening, demanding that new spaces be found and new methods developed.
By the turn of the century, many white men, especially those of the middle class, began centering definitions of manhood on bodies in response to this complex of anxieties. In this corporeal configuration, an unstable, performative masculinity steadily displaced the earlier, inward-focused self-made-man ideal.17 More and more, proving one’s masculinity demanded constant effort and visible proof. The earlier ideal of a self-made man acquired a physical element by the late 1870s as an outward manifestation of inner strength. However, by the turn-of-the-century, men tended to view physicality as an end to be pursued rather than as a natural byproduct of proper manhood. Men may have doubted the possibility of achieving their forefather’s manly virtues, but through gymnasium work they could at least produce the appearance of a virtuous inner life.18 In the best-case scenario, such work might even strengthen morals as it strengthened muscles.
An irony of the turn toward a more bodily-centered masculinity was that American men simultaneously grew more anxious about their bodies and physical capacities. Men viewed as increasingly effeminate, overcivilized, and living soft lives in mentally overstimulating modern society seemed prone to breaking. Americans quickly invented a medical diagnosis for this culturally based fear: neurasthenia. Though the idea of nervous disease had been discussed since at least the 1830s, it became well defined as an important problem, even a “near epidemic,” in the 1880s after the publication of George Beard’s book American Nervousness.19 Beard defined nervousness not as a mental illness or an excess of emotion, but simply as “nervelessness—a lack of nerve force.” Extreme nervousness led to neurasthenia, or “nervous exhaustion.”20 Beard employed bank account and battery metaphors to explain the condition. Some people were blessed with large accounts or batteries (reserves of nerve energy), and others made due with little. In either case, drawing too much on those accounts or batteries led to bankruptcy or depletion. Nervousness manifested in a wide range of symptoms ranging from dyspepsia and fatigue to premature baldness.21 Its appearance nearly everywhere in America, according to Beard, was not surprising.
Beard chiefly blamed modern civilization for American’s susceptibility to nervous exhaustion in the late nineteenth century.22 He argued that constant activity brought on by steam power, the telegraph, the periodical press, social institutions, and the “indulgence of appetites and passions” overstimulated men, especially “brain workers.”23 At the same time, men’s physical activity decreased due both to economic changes that required less manual labor and to increasing culture and refinement. Confronted with constant overstimulation, these weakening bodies possessed smaller reserves of nerve energy. Beard saw the signs of this pernicious problem everywhere, even in the American man’s reduced capacity to hold his liquor, as evidenced by his poor “bottle-power” in comparison to an English man.24 Neurasthenia was, however, also something of a badge of distinction because only the most civilized peoples (a concept freighted with cultural and racial meaning) were susceptible to its force. Neurasthenia did not seem to afflict more “primitive” peoples, those whose passionate and powerful manhood, according to Beard, both strengthened bodies and disqualified them for civilization.25 Beard’s solution was not to throw out civilization, but rather to leverage its tools to develop new technologies and social customs productive of “strength and vigor.”26
Embedded in the neurasthenia concept was a potential solution. If bodies could degenerate, then they could also regenerate. Methods designed to encourage regeneration varied widely and came from multiple sources. One of the more famous proposals came from G. Stanley Hall, an American educator and vocal expert on psychology and pedagogy. He argued beginning in the late 1880s that educators could utilize “recapitulation” to help American boys. Hall’s recapitulation theory presumed an evolutionary ladder up which human races could progress. Anglo-Saxons had supposedly reached the top rungs, but the modern world denied them the chance to experience the highly physical and passionate earlier stages. Therefore, Anglo-Saxons grew up intelligent, but lacking in passion and power, making them susceptible to neurasthenia. Hall proposed encouraging “primitivism” and “savagery” in young boys by allowing misbehavior, reading bloody stories, and even fighting in controlled environments. This process supposedly molded boys into men while inoculating them against the degenerative forces of modern civilization.27
More visible signs of regeneration efforts appeared in America’s late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century physical culture. This culture, in line with the period’s bodily focused masculinity, promoted sport, health remedies, body building, and more. With the right diet and exercise, men could cultivate proportions like Eugen Sandow, the world’s “perfect man.”28 Americans could harness science and hard work to engineer their bodies so as to appear strong and vital, and in the process cultivate those same qualities. The idea was not to turn back the clock to an idealized earlier time, but to leverage modernity’s tools to fashion new ways of fitting civilized men to a new time.
Biological thought helped translate these broad cultural anxieties spurred by economic, social, geographic, and political change into a national crisis. Although Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species, published in 1859, made no attempt to apply evolution to explain the behavior of people or groups, many Americans and Europeans did just that from the 1870s to the early twentieth century. Social sciences and politics informed by biological concepts framed global politics as a struggle for survival in a world ruled by the iron law of natural selection.29 National survival in such a world depended simply on strength, the definition of which contained racial and gender components. Therefore, American power depended upon the strength of white American men—the exact population whose masculinity the modern world seemed to threaten most.30 War thus held a paradoxical significance in late-nineteenth-century American thought. On one hand, war posed a threat to national survival if American manhood was indeed weakening. This was especially true given the likelihood of massive conscription in the imagined wars of the future because a broad swath of the male population needed to be fit to fight. On the other hand, war could also be a vehicle for toughening the latest generation of American men, who were denied both a frontier and their forefathers’ crucible of combat. In either case, biological thought heightened the national significance of strong male bodies.
Doubts about the strength, character, toughness, and vigor of American men were of particular concern to many young US Army officers because they coincided with military concerns over combat’s evolving character and changing battlefield geometry. These changes derived chiefly from new weapons technology such as smokeless powder, high explosive, rifling, small arms magazine loading systems, and quick-firing systems for artillery. Taken together, these advances increased the range and lethality of artillery pieces and made the ordinary infantryman a much deadlier combatant. Equipped with a small caliber, breech-loading, magazine-fed rifle, the infantryman of the late nineteenth century significantly outmatched his predecessor of just a few decades. The modern infantryman could carry more ammunition, achieve a higher rate of fire with greater accuracy, enhance his chances of survival by operating from the prone or within field fortifications, and remain essentially invisible when using smokeless powder and remaining stationary. The lethal zone in front of defensive positions grew along with the expanding effective ranges of weapons, which increased the time assaulting troops spent exposed to fire and the time over which morale deteriorated. In addition, smaller units on the defense using rapid-firing weaponry generated volumes of firepower superior to that generated by larger units in earlier eras. Because fewer soldiers were needed to generate effective fires and concentrated attacking formations invited heavy casualties, troop densities on typical battlefields plummeted, falling from one man per 257 square meters during the American Civil War to one per 2,457 in World War I.31 Survival on this ever-more-lethal battlefield depended on dispersion.32 But while spreading out and seeking cover may have preserved lives, it damaged morale by denying soldiers the support and mutual observation of their comrades. Dispersal also limited leaders’ ability to control units and sustain the momentum of an attack. With friend and foe alike invisible, individual soldiers found themselves isolated, vulnerable, and rooted in place. Modern small arms and artillery ushered the earlier age’s densely packed ranks of colorfully uniformed troops into a deadly obsolescence.33 Likewise, combat’s evolving character and the new battlefield geometry yielded increased physical, mental, and emotional trauma, placing ever greater demands on the human body.
Military leaders and theoreticians in the latter third of the nineteenth century were keenly aware of the challenges posed by these new weapons technologies and battlefield modifications. Indeed, the limitations on offensive maneuver at the tactical level became the “tactical problem of the day” in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871).34 Even before this, US officers, like their European contemporaries, recognized the need for adaptation. As early as the 1853, US Army-commissioned boards studied the problems posed by new technology and recommended tactical solutions. The American Civil War’s massive bloodletting reveals the inadequacy of those early solutions and their inability to resolve tensions between the need for dispersion on one hand and for command and control on the other.35 Later in the century, some theoreticians in the US and throughout Europe argued that the defense’s superiority was so great as to be insurmountable, at least in the near term. Jan Bloch is the best-known representative of this school. In his book Is War Now Impossible? and his earlier multivolume study, Bloch argued that the defensive superiority generated by new weapons technologies would yield a bloody stalemate on a vast battlefield. Victory in such a war hinged on exhausting the enemy’s economic resources and reserves of will. In Bloch’s formulation, the use of force had little utility in national policy.
The argument advanced by Bloch and other like-minded theoreticians never earned a place in the period’s mainstream of military thought. Military leaders simply could not accept such a hopeless future. Successful offensive strategies depended upon an army’s ability to succeed on the tactical offensive, at least sometimes. So instead of Bloch and company, Napoleonic and Prussian models guided the thoughts of most European and American theoreticians in the late nineteenth century. The Napoleonic and Prussian models demanded aggressive action to achieve conclusive results, with the former placing emphasis on élan and the latter on firepower and initiative.36 The alternative, theoreticians argued, was passivity and a return to the indecisive wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.37 The battlefield may have become deadlier, but to most military thinkers this was just another surmountable obstacle. No complete consensus emerged on the best solution to the new battlefield’s tactical problems, but a dominant intellectual position formed between 1870 and 1914. Some historians have labeled this position the “cult of the offensive,” though the term is misleading because it characterizes turn-of-the-century military leaders as irrational, self-defeating, and ignorant.38 Military leaders and theorists were not ignorant or irrational. Rather, they were trying to solve massive problems with the material, intellectual, and cultural resources at hand, and some were unfortunately slow learners.
The solutions these theorists proposed derived generally from two propositions. First, weapons technology benefited the attacker as much as the defender. Colonel G. F. R. Henderson, an influential British military theorist at the turn of the century, advanced ideas typical of this position: “Neither smokeless powder nor the magazine rifle will necessitate any radical change. If the defence has gained, as has been asserted, by these innovations, the plunging fire of rifled howitzers will add a more than proportional strength to the attack.”39 Simply put, the advantages accruing to the offense and defense through technological innovation canceled each other out. The second proposition was that man remained both the constant in war and the dominant factor in combat. Henderson made this argument too. Magazine rifles and other innovations “introduced a new and formidable element into battle,” he wrote, but “the moral element still remains the same. Weapons improve, but human nature remains the same.”40
Moral forces run as the key thread in turn-of-the-century military literature.41 Depending upon context, the concept held two closely related meanings. Moral forces referred to a wide range of intangibles, including morale, the feeling of confidence present in a force, skill, training, resilience, judgment, and the “inherent strength of [an army’s] national character.”42 Moral forces were not a new idea in military literature. Clausewitz emphasized them in his writing, for instance, and many authors before him paid moral force close attention, too. Still, these forces assumed a marked prominence in the late nineteenth century following from the technology-imposed tactical stalemate that Bloch predicted and many feared. Victory in battle inclines to the side capable of generating greater combat power at the decisive point. Combat power derives from troop numbers, force capabilities such as firepower and mobility, and intangible moral factors. If theoreticians were correct in asserting that technological innovations offset one another, then moral forces could provide the crucial relative advantage that victory demanded.
The French colonel Charles Ardant du Picq’s writings epitomized the turn-of-the-century military thought that awarded moral forces the key role in battlefield victory. Ardant du Picq, whose service as an infantry officer began in 1844, recognized the changes new weapons technology wrought on the battlefield. However, Ardant du Picq rejected technology as the crucial determinant in battle. Instead, he emphasized man. Based upon his study of ancient battle and his modern experience, Ardant du Picq argued that “in battle, two moral forces, even more than two material forces, are in conflict. The stronger conquers.”43 Ardant du Picq did not believe that those moral forces came from destructive power. Instead, moral forces derived from confidence, resolution, and “threatening power” in the form of fresh reserves or forces on the enemy’s flank or in his rear.44 Men needed to be made strong in order to project moral force against the enemy, and to resist the terror and fear inherent in combat. Ardant du Picq advanced several methods to improve an army’s moral force, but discipline was his central theme. Ardant du Picq defined discipline as a “state of mind” and a “social institution” built over time that “made men fight in spite of themselves.”45 Nations and armies needed to find new means by which to instill discipline, and thereby attain superior moral force.
A Prussian artillery shell fired near Metz in August 1870 cut short Ardant du Picq’s career as a military theorist. His book, Battle Studies, was published posthumously and achieved wide readership and influence in the French military with its second edition in 1903.46 Ardant du Picq’s writing resonated with the pre-1914 generation of military officers who were preoccupied with similar tactical problems. Battle Studies did not decisively impact military thought before 1903, but Ardant du Picq’s work was representative of a broader, transnational trend in military thought at the dawn of the twentieth century. Just as in France, most military theorists in Britain, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere promoted moral forces as essential to victory on the modern battlefield.47
Military thinkers drew on more than abstract theory to support their conclusions about tactics and moral forces. Wars fought by European powers between 1870 and 1914 furnished practical experience open to interpretation. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 that claimed Ardant du Picq’s life provided the first major data point. French and Prussian forces employed similar weapons technology and tactics, though the extended order’s value remained open to question. Maj. Wilhelm von Sherff, a Prussian officer writing from experience in the Franco-Prussian War, highlighted the debate between “new” and “old” tactics. Sherff and like-minded military men argued that rifling required forces on the offensive to adopt an extended or “individual” order or else suffer catastrophic losses, but that new weapons also enabled loose formations to achieve a sufficiently high rate and volume of fire at a given point to triumph over a more tightly packed opponent. For Sherff and others like him, the offensive was still alive and preferable.48 Armies needed new tactics to make the offensive work, and those tactics hinged on improving individual soldiers through training in order to offset the psychological penalties of the empty battlefield.49
Not everyone agreed with the conclusions Sherff and others drew from the Franco-Prussian War. Advocates of what Sherff termed “old” tactics defended the continued relevance of close order on the basis of moral forces. Only in close order and under the control of leaders, advocates argued, could men face the terror of battle and still advance. However, close order did not mean quite the same thing by the late nineteenth century as it did in the Napoleonic wars or in the American Civil War. Where the old basic unit had been the battalion or even regiment, the basic unit in later close-order systems was the platoon or company. These smaller formations allowed for greater flexibility in employment and would be spaced more widely on the battlefield. In such a system, close order did not mean marching toward the enemy shoulder-to-shoulder, but advancing in longer, thinner lines at a quick walk or run while making use of available cover.50
The British experience in the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) challenged the close-order orthodoxy, even in its updated form. On the veldt, hidden Boer defenders decimated British formations that advanced in tight formations and relied on cold steel. The British colonel G. F. R. Henderson, who observed part of the campaign and had earlier argued that new technologies benefited the offense and defense equally, responded to continental criticism of the British army by pointing out that “the flat trajectory of the small-bore rifle, together with the invisibility of the man who uses it, has wrought a complete revolution in the art of fighting battles.”51 Henderson insisted that infantry now had to attack in successive lines of skirmishers in an extended order. Henderson observed that troops in close order might achieve a local numerical superiority, but he argued that those formations would take enormous losses that would likely undermine the close-order formation’s moral power.52 As a result of the British experience in South Africa, contemporary military thought swung toward open-order formations as the solution to the old problem of crossing the deadly zone, a zone that continued expanding due to progressive improvements in weapons technology.
Infantry actions in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) stalled and then reversed the Boer War–induced swing toward skirmishing. Western military theorists and leaders could dismiss the Anglo-Boer War as abnormal, or as a brawl between an army geared for colonial warfare and an irregular opponent. In contrast, the Russo-Japanese War pitted two modern militaries equipped with modern weaponry against each other. Even if the Japanese were considered racial inferiors, their German-provided training and largely Westernized military practices made them near-peer competitors in the eyes of most European military thinkers. The ensuing combat closely approximated the future of battle many theorists had earlier envisioned.53 Military leaders seeking the offense’s continued viability found much on Manchuria’s and Korea’s battlefields to support their theories. For instance, US officers admired the infantry’s aggressiveness, the use of the bayonet, the growing impact of field artillery and machine guns on battle, and both armies’ tactical adaptability under changing conditions.54 In particular, the Japanese army furnished examples of successful infantry assaults on entrenched positions. Artillery fire did not eject Russian defenders from their trenches, but close infantry combat did. Commonly, infantrymen sapped their way forward toward enemy defenses over several nights under the cover of darkness. Once in position and receiving supporting fire, Japanese infantry charged forward in mass to overwhelm their opponents at close quarters. In some ways, this experience upset part of Ardant du Picq’s theory. Ardant du Picq argued that little actual close combat occurred because one side or the other would break purely on the basis of moral force. However, the modern battlefield created an environment in which close combat occurred often because lethal fires kept troops fixed in their entrenchments and rendered them unable or unwilling to flee in the face of an assault.55 Close combat in entrenchments thus added a new layer to existing theories about the criticality of moral forces. Now soldiers needed not only superior moral force to engage the enemy, but also superior physical force to defeat him in individual combat and eject him from defensive works.
Archibald Becke, a former British Army officer and an author of several histories, captured the most widespread and persuasive pre–World War I interpretation of Russo-Japanese War tactics in his book An Introduction to the History of Tactics, 1740–1905, published in 1909.56 Like many military theorists of his time, Becke concluded that the attack was much preferable to the defense, and that offensive action was still possible on the modern battlefield. Becke argued that artillery and supporting infantry fires were necessary in an attack, but that Japanese success hinged on the Japanese soldier’s superior “fighting power,” which derived from his high levels of “training, courage, intelligence, self-reliance, and patriotism.”57 Positions and weapons were not decisive in war, he argued, but rather the men who occupied those positions and used those weapons. This exhortation had echoed throughout military theory since at least 1870.
The Japanese army suffered heavy casualties even with superior fighting power. Becke and many of his contemporaries accepted these high casualty rates as the price of victory on the modern battlefield. For instance, Col. Frederic Maude, one of Becke’s contemporaries, argued that successful assaults depended on soldiers being trained to “know how to die” and not “how to avoid dying.”58 Becke and others extended this need for bloody-mindedness beyond soldiers and their superiors to the whole people of a state. If people wanted victory, and a decisive one especially, then they had to be willing to pay the price.59 Predictions about a major future war’s character reinforced the need to steel not only soldiers but also the whole citizenry. Bloch and others forecast a protracted, attritional struggle. In such a war, conscription would fill the military ranks. Widespread conscription brought the human cost of war home to a society. Conscription also meant that most soldiers would have little time to prepare before finding themselves on a very lethal battlefield.
On the eve of World War I, a half-century of military thought grounded in experiences on the battlefields of Europe, Asia, and Africa suggested a few key lessons. Of these, the most significant was that the offense remained possible and desirable. Despite rifling, smokeless powder, small arms magazines, and other technological developments, even frontal assaults made by infantry against entrenchments could succeed if certain conditions were met. For instance, soldiers might follow the Japanese example and patiently sap their way toward enemy trenches while properly timed and coordinated offensive artillery fires suppressed defenders. However important these preparations were, though, the key determinant of success was man, and specifically the concentration of moral forces at a critical point. Superior moral forces derived from the discipline, resilience, and psychology of individuals and units. The new battlefield posed a serious challenge to this formula, though. How could militaries sustain or improve their moral forces, and those of a whole nation, in the face of higher casualty rates and more challenging battlefield conditions without traditional means such as close-order formations and tactics?
Historians have since proposed several ways by which modern militaries sought to improve their human material. For example, some argue that a mystical (and irrational) reverence for the offensive seized military leaders, civilian elites, and publics in the decades leading up to World War I. This reverence allegedly produced a “cult of the offensive” in which European military and civilian elites blindly promoted the offensive on the basis of myth. The cult simultaneously generated security dilemmas while predisposing elites to logics that preferred war in order to address those dilemmas.60 In this formulation, the self-deception underwriting the cult of the offensive was a means by which militaries and states improved their human material psychologically by teaching soldiers and citizens to accept the offensive’s horrors in hopes of securing victory. Other historians, such as Michael Howard and Antulio Echevarria, argue that military leaders followed a “compelling rationale” in emphasizing the offensive spirit.61 After all, armies needed to attack at the tactical level in order to achieve positive objectives at the operational and strategic levels, and attacking meant crossing the deadly zone. Instead of an irrational cult, Howard found that militaries used doctrine rationally to predispose officers and men toward attacking and to instill the confidence necessary to succeed in spite of heavy losses. Thus, statements such as French Colonel Louis de Grandmaison’s in 1911—that the offensive depended upon “cultivating with passion everything that bears the stamp of the offensive spirit. We must take it to excess: perhaps even that will not go far enough”—may have reflected intentional action based on a realistic assessment of probable battlefield conditions.62 Echevarria points to a more concrete, though narrow, method of improving human material: weapons drills. He argues that fire discipline training, especially for machinegun crews, developed confidence and a union of man and machine that kept soldiers focused on definite tasks under stressful battlefield conditions.63
However, Howard, Echevarria, and others have overlooked another tool nearly every modern military force leveraged at the turn of the twentieth century—physical training. This tool was more concrete than doctrine and more widely applicable than weapons drills, but its particular character was not eternal, universal, or predetermined because military theorists and leaders sought solutions within their cultural environments. Those men seeking ways to improve an army’s human materiel called upon period ideas about the nature of masculinity and about relationships between the body, mind, and spirit. As US Army leaders in the latter half of the nineteenth century scoured their cultural terrain in search of answers to the “tactical problem of the day,” they encountered programs designed to sculpt bodies in specific ways that were growing in popularity. Many of these programs already bore a martial edge. Physical training promised to strengthen the individual soldier’s body, discipline individuals and units, and bolster any organization’s moral force. Physical training also held wide appeal outside the military, unlike weapons drills. This appeal was important because it implied ways to make whole populations stronger and more resilient, thus preparing them for the demands of a future war in which success probably depended on heavy conscription. Given these points, embedding US Army leaders in their wider cultural milieu must precede the story of how the US Army in particular came to value and practice physical training.
Much of that cultural milieu congregated around another problem akin to the “tactical problem of the day”: widespread anxiety about modern man not being as strong, motivated, resilient, or self-sacrificial as his forebears. German military officer and author Wilhelm Balck addressed this issue directly in his treatise on tactics from 1908, in which he argued that units appeared to be growing more brittle. Where units in the Franco-Prussian War could sustain 25 to 33 percent casualties and function, similar-sized units in the Boer War seemed unable to sustain casualties above about 7 percent.64 Balck explained that the “nerve-racking impressions of the battlefield” had grown over the recent decades owing to extended lines, the suddenness of entering combat, and the decreasing ability of officers to control dispersed formations. However, individual soldiers were also growing more susceptible to the battlefield’s impressions. “Steadily improving standards of living,” Balck observed, “tend to increase the instinct of self-preservation and to diminish the spirit of self-sacrifice.” Also, the simple “physical powers of the human species” were “partly diminishing.”65 Balck’s observation lays bare an interaction between the period’s “tactical problem of the day” and one of its major cultural phenomena—a crisis of masculinity. The concern Balck elucidated was a trans-Atlantic phenomenon. In the decade preceding World War I, US officers similarly voiced concerns about men’s “progressive deterioration,” the “over or under indulgence in work or play,” the destruction of man’s “calmness and deliberation under fire,” and the erosion of military virtues such as “courage, mutual confidence, and self-sacrifice.”66
As did their European contemporaries, US Army officers seeking to improve the military’s human material, and perhaps the nation’s as well, accessed tools extant in society and culture. There, fears of degeneration had spurred the development of regenerative practices, many of which involved bodily improvement and contained obvious martial potential. Thus, early advocates of “scientific” physical training for the US Army were not thinking, speaking, and writing in a vacuum. Instead, they belonged to and were surrounded by a booming American physical culture consisting of popular and professional elements.
The people and organizations shaping popular physical culture were many and varied. Most were secular, but some key producers of physical culture were religiously motivated. For example, the “Muscular Christianity” movement encouraged bodily improvement as a means of developing character, manliness, and the vigor necessary to work in arduous mission fields at home and abroad. The movement’s millennial message held that man was responsible for his own salvation and that he could approach perfection through training of body and soul.67 For the secularly inclined, the period’s plethora of health and fitness magazines made the contours of popular physical culture visible. Featuring increasingly risqué cover art and photos, these magazines promoted a wide variety of exercise programs, diets, daily practices, and more for both men and women that ranged from pure quackery to cutting-edge science. Magazines also provided an advertising vehicle for makers of tonics, “parlor gymnasium” equipment, and books on exercise.68 Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture epitomized the genre, though several predecessors predated its rise in the 1890s.69 Exercise crazes such as bicycling, Indian clubs, wall-climbing, and more regularly gripped the American public in this period. Gymnastic and calisthenic exercise systems also competed for the American public’s favor. Most of these systems originated in Europe, two of the most popular being Swedish gymnastics and German Turner gymnastics. Dudley Sargent’s American individual strength training machine system entered the competition near the turn of the century as well, though it assumed a distant third place.70 A construction boom accompanied the boom of interest in physical health. Public gyms, many ornate and elaborate, appeared in American cities and towns alongside ethnically aligned Turnenhallen and Sokol facilities.71 Ultimately, turn-of-the-twentieth-century Americans found themselves surrounded more and more by messages about and the trappings of physical fitness. Popular culture’s vectors were various, ranging from the religious to the purely commercial, but they shared a promise of regeneration and a premise of man’s perfectibility.
A sports and athletics craze, for both participating and spectating, accompanied the growing American fascination with physical training. Much of the sports craze originated in colleges and universities, and thus among America’s middle and upper classes, but deepening obsessions with football, rowing, baseball, and more extended beyond student bodies to seize whole communities. By 1890, it had become fashionable to speak of colleges “as if they were schools for forming ball-players, oarsmen, and athletes,” according to Edward Hartwell, a forefather of American physical education.72 Organizational and business structures soon grew up around athletics that accelerated a transition from pure amateurism to professionalism in sports, though Americans generally clung to an amateur ideal in rhetoric at least.
The sporting craze had many sources, and sport itself served many purposes both outside and inside the US military. For instance, one scholar posited in 1917 that sport provided a safety valve for the American energy and pioneer spirit pent up after the frontier’s closure.73 Turn-of-the-century political and cultural elites certainly promoted sport as a vehicle for renewing society, preparing future leaders, and socializing American youth.74 Other historians have argued that sports acted like a “social glue” that bonded a diverse nation and helped build a unified national American myth.75 Whatever its origins and appeal, the athletic side of American physical culture permeated the US military and powerfully influenced the thinking of many US Army leaders.76 However, sports came heavily laden with cultural assumptions that were occasionally at odds with the values and assumptions motivating advocates of “scientific” physical training in the US Army.
Advocacy of “scientific” physical training in the Army must be understood within the context of a concurrent push for professionalization in the physical education field. Physical educators, many of whom were physicians and physiologists, wanted to separate themselves in the last two decades of the nineteenth century from popular physical culture, antebellum health reform movements, and the competitive athletics craze. The paths toward expert status blazed by physical training advocates in the Army and physical educators in American society were closely related, and they often intersected. Within the Army, physical training began gaining traction after 1885, following the US Military Academy’s appointment of Herman Koehler as its Master of the Sword.77 Physical educators also took a major step toward professional status in 1885 with the founding of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education (AAAPE). Pioneers such as William Anderson, Edward Hitchcock, Tait McKenzie, James McCurdy, Dudley Sargent, and others instituted the organization to discuss the “underlying principles of the new profession.” The AAAPE’s founders believed that most teachers were “individualists” and “missionaries” interested in pressing their own special theories of health and fitness.78 Such a chaotic discourse needed discipline, especially because no licensing measures existed. The AAAPE’s protoprofessionals sought to establish this discipline, earn society’s trust and confidence, and distance themselves from a long-associated history of health reform movements. To do so, they asserted an expertise rooted in scientific knowledge that promised benefits to the whole of American society.
The social benefit physical educators touted in the late nineteenth century had two components, which historian Roberta Park labels hygienic and educative.79 Presenters at a landmark physical training conference held in Boston in 1899 described both succinctly. Speaking before the assembled body of the region’s educators and the nation’s physical education authorities, the US commissioner of education, William Harris, defined hygiene as the pursuit of making “the most of the body for human purposes.” Harris argued that physical training, which he defined as the “conscious or voluntary training of the muscular side of our system,” played a crucial role in hygiene by improving students’ wills. Improvement of will occurred through voluntary processes, such as muscle-strengthening exercise, that also “call[ed] into action the higher nervous motor-centres of the body and brain.”80 Improvement and development warrants, referring vaguely to how bodies grew and character formed, undergirded educative arguments for physical training.
Harris’s claims reflected the positions of the field’s protoprofessionals, who combined antebellum ideas about the nature of the will with new developments in biological science and evolutionary theories.81 The presentation following Harris’s at the conference of 1899, given by the widely respected physical training pioneer Edward Hartwell, reveals both the composite basis of the educative functions and the expansive mission conceived of by early physical educators for their profession. Hartwell, a medical doctor with an interest in history who served as the director of physical training in Boston schools and as Johns Hopkins University’s gymnasium director, was a leading authority on the effects of exercise on the human body and mind. Research trips throughout America and Europe, and the influential series of reports that followed beginning in 1885, also gave Hartwell cachet as an expert on pedagogical practices.82
Hartwell began his address in 1889 by asserting that physical training deserved stature at least equal to mental and moral training as “an integral and indispensable factor” in education. “Muscular exercise is at once a means and an end of mental, and moral, as well as of physical training,” he asserted, because “without bodily actions we have no means of giving expression to mental power, artistic feeling, or spiritual insight. Without muscular tissue we cannot live or move.”83 Hartwell supported his argument with a detailed explanation of the appearance and function of muscle fibers. By 1889, research in biology seemed to have validated the older “blacksmith’s arm” analogy, which found that exercise enlarged, hardened, and strengthened muscle fibers while making them more responsive to the nervous system. Conversely, disuse led to “wasting” or atrophy. In his remarks, Hartwell paid particular attention to the connection between muscle fibers and the “nerves and centres” that transmit stimuli, and then continued by way of analogy in asserting that the cells and centers of the nervous system and brain similarly strengthened or atrophied depending upon use. Hartwell reasoned that in order to strengthen the brain, physical trainers needed to identify the muscular activation sequences that triggered actions in particular brain regions.84 The new scientific findings and theories Hartwell discussed seemed to provide a definitive and direct link between the body and the mind, which had long been regarded as the seat of will. Exercise strengthened muscles as well as the nerves and cells that made the mind work. Muscular training was therefore fundamental to human mental and moral development, and it was up to physical training professionals to unlock the most efficient and effective means of training all three domains at once.
The means available were many and diverse, ranging from sports and dance to free play, but Hartwell and most of his fellow protoprofessionals advocated gymnastics. Trainers struggling to define themselves as experts on the basis of scientific knowledge and unique skills found gymnastics appealing because they were, in Hartwell’s words, more “comprehensive in their aims, more formal, elaborate, and systematic in their methods,” and more productive of “solid and considerable gains” than any other alternative.85 Gymnastics systems came in many different forms based on ethnic origins and the use of apparatus, among other factors. Indeed, debate raged in the latter half of the nineteenth century over which of the many possible systems was best, and what in fact constituted an “exercise.” Yet these diverse systems shared a few characteristics in common. First, most attended to the needs of a broad population, male or female, and of the whole person. Gymnastics were not generally designed to create elite athletes or train the select few. Second, gymnastics systems were geared to produce symmetrical development of participants along the lines of fixed standards of physical perfection. Finally, all gymnastics systems were formal and subject to strict control by instructors. Experts were supposed to be able to prescribe exercises to correct specific bodily deficiencies, strengthen particular muscle groups, and, in some cases, even cultivate certain mental and moral characteristics. Americans especially embraced the idea of collecting precise bodily measurements and prescribing targeted exercises to generate desired outcomes.86 This idea manifested in many American systems, including Dudley Sargent’s and, in the US Army, Herman Koehler’s. The supposed precision in gymnastics gave physical education protoprofessionals a strong claim to unique scientific knowledge and methods.
In contrast, sports and their popularity posed problems for physical educators in the late nineteenth century, both inside and outside of the Army. Many physical educators recognized the potential value of sports, especially their assumed provision of social training in skills such as teamwork. However, school athletic programs and the intercollegiate competition model seemed poised to overshadow physical education in the 1880s and 1890s. Athletic coaches, a body also staking out claims to professional status, competed directly with physical educators for institutional resources, prestige, and power. Intercollegiate competition imperiled faculty control of athletics, thereby putting the educative premise of physical education in jeopardy.87 Sports also posed some philosophical challenges. For example, sports were inherently spontaneous, and thus a challenge to science-based claims to expert status made using gymnastics’ native characteristics of control and precision. Also, competition’s dynamics tended to focus attention on the development of the elite few over the ordinary many. Still, trends in physical education thought moved gradually toward an embrace of sport in the early twentieth century, partly in response to growing Progressive-era social and societal concerns, and partly out of recognition of sports’ much greater popularity relative to gymnastics.
The Army’s first efforts to introduce formal, systematic physical training must be understood within the intellectual and cultural environment to which physical education belonged. Many environmental influences can be understood as indirect. Army physical training advocates wrote and thought in the context of the period’s popular physical culture and of physical educators’ push for professional status. Other influences were direct. For instance, the US Military Academy’s Herman Koehler, a product of a Turner normal school, contributed to constructing the physical education profession through articles, conference participation, and organizational service. Many military advocates and system designers also received formal training at institutions such as Sargent’s Springfield College. Additionally, comparable trends in thought on physical training manifested in both the Army and the wider physical education world. Like physical educators, Army physical training advocates combined new scientific findings with older ideas about will, character, regeneration, and mind-body mutualism by way of reasoning through analogy. From the beginning, Army preferences for scientific prescription and highly formal exercise systems also faced challenges from popular pressure for sport. Much like their contemporaries in physical education, Army physical training advocates gradually accommodated athletics to a greater degree over time. Still, differences also existed. For instance, preferences for formal, highly controlled systems of exercise persisted much longer in the Army than outside it.
In summary, the US Army’s physical culture rooted in systematic physical training emerged within a larger social, cultural, and intellectual context. Nineteenth-century anxieties over America’s health, understood chiefly in terms of the nation’s perceived masculine quotient, prompted fears of degeneration. By the turn of the century, Progressive-era social and societal concerns added new anxieties while amplifying and modifying the old. All of these anxieties seemed to jeopardize the nation’s survival, or at least its vitality. Could America survive and thrive in a highly competitive world? Were its men capable of enduring the demands of modern war? But where problems existed, so did solutions. Among these was bodily improvement. In a world fixated on social degeneration and efficiency, gymnastics and sport promised regeneration, renewal, discipline, order, character, morality, and more. Faith in modernity suggested a way forward for Americans—not returning to an idealized past, but leveraging science and technology to develop men in new ways for a new world.
Army officers were particularly attuned to the dangers and opportunities in this wider context. Like physical educators and many national leaders, some of these officers turned to physical training and drew on popular physical culture and the professionalizing field of physical education. The direct benefits of physical training seemed obvious. Soldiers could march farther, carry more, and fight harder if in better physical condition. Physical training’s less direct benefits were just as desirable, if not more so. Physical training’s potential for moral and mental development, and for cultivating discipline, appeared to be a pathway toward improving the Army’s human material, which seemed necessary for success on the future battlefield. The Army’s central position in the overlapping fields of man-, soldier-, and citizen-making amplified the potential value of human improvement through exercise. The Army depended upon a fit and resilient male population to fight a war using conscription, and the Army could be an agent to help create a more fit and resilient population. Creation of appropriate exercise systems for the Army, which established the basis of the Army’s durable physical culture, resulted from the labors of a small set of physical training advocates whose identities and ideas are the subject of the next chapter. However, it is crucial to remember that those advocates worked within and drew on a specific cultural and military context unique to the turn of the twentieth century.