CHAPTER TWO

Origins of a US Army Physical Culture, 1885–1916

Lt. Col. Charles Greenleaf, the Army’s assistant surgeon-general, made a shocking claim before a convocation of physical education’s early luminaries in the spring of 1891. Greenleaf first iterated the “popular belief” that soldiers exemplified the benefits of physical training. Surely the care taken in a soldier’s selection, his need to “endure the hardship of campaigns in every variety of climate” and still triumph in combat, and his discipline, habits, and diet made a soldier the “model of physical perfection.” Nonetheless, Greenleaf claimed, the soldier “cannot be regarded either as an athlete or even as a well trained man physically.”¹ Greenleaf attributed this failure chiefly to an absence of “systematic gymnastic training.”² Yet even as Greenleaf made these remarks, a movement was afoot within the US Army to rectify the problem. That movement’s nucleus resided at the US Military Academy, but its voices bubbled up from across the force in professional journals and popular periodicals. The movement crested with the publication of the Army’s first physical training manual twenty-three years after Greenleaf sounded his warning. In 1914, the US Army established an official physical culture for the first time, and it was based on systematic training.

A small clique of men was responsible for producing this physical culture. Analyzing their publications between 1885 and 1914 along with their relationships in light of their immediate professional contexts reveals four key features of the culture they fashioned. First, Army physical training advocates valued expert knowledge. They strove to ensure that actual training conformed to that expertise instead of happenstance and folk wisdom. Second, a soldier’s psychologic development was valued at least as much as his physical development within this new physical culture. Third, their culture prioritized unit fitness over individual soldier optimization. Finally, their culture worked from an assumption that the human material to be sculpted would be of relatively high quality because the small US Army could enlist men selectively. In most ways, this culture reflected contemporary assumptions, beliefs, and practices in the professionalizing field of physical education. However, the Army’s physical culture and American physical education had begun diverging by 1906 for institutional and cultural reasons. Ultimately, the physical culture represented by the Army’s manual of 1914 responded to the beliefs of its producers about the value of fitness in modern war—and that notion of fitness extended well beyond bigger biceps and stronger lungs. But why did members of the US Army become interested in physical training in the first place?

Much of that interest had European roots. In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, commentators advanced theories to explain the Prussian victory. One theory held that superior Prussian education accounted for the outcome. A representative example of this argument appeared in a letter written to the editors of the Army and Navy Journal in 1872. Its author, known to history as T. Gentz, argued that only one component of the superior Prussian education mattered—physical education, both in and out of the army. Integrating Prussia’s victory into a longer history of conquests by hale northern nations, Gentz insisted that even in modern warfare “muscular power and a hardy constitution” remained relevant. Human bodies put machines into action, and gymnastics imparted “firm nerves and a manly spirit” to its practitioners. The stronger arm could “take the steadier aim and deal the more forcible blow,” the “stout shoulder” bore more weight, the stronger legs leapt ditches and charged uphill better, and superior constitutions saw soldiers through the “brunt of the dusty battle.”³ Gentz went on to argue that the United States would also benefit from gymnastics, especially as a part of military training. With the frontier’s closing, Gentz argued, “it is time that gymnastics should raise us a new generation of men.”⁴ Positive impressions about the desirability and utility of gymnastics persisted in parts of the US Army through the following decades. Writing twenty years later, systematic training advocate Capt. James Pilcher made an argument similar to Gentz’s. “When the superior physical training of one of the parties to so great a contest as the Franco-Prussian War is known to have been the force that turned the tide of victory in its favor,” Pilcher wrote, “the United States cannot afford to reject it.”⁵

Even before 1871, US Army officers were aware that European militaries used gymnastic training to improve their soldiery. For instance, the Delafield Commission’s Capt. George McClellan, who traveled Europe as a military observer between 1855 and 1856 before gaining his “Young Napoleon” sobriquet, had praised the French army’s physical training manual from 1847 and its gymnastic school near Vincennes.⁶ Maj. Richard Delafield, the commission’s leader and subsequently the US Military Academy’s superintendent, acted on these findings. In 1858, he directed Lt. J. C. Kelton to develop a “systematic course” of training for West Point’s cadets based on systems in use at military schools in Paris and Vienna.⁷ Praise for systematic gymnastic training came to Army officers through civilian sources as well. For instance, physical education pioneer Edward Hartwell commended Prussian practices in his influential report on the state of physical education from 1886. “In the interval between Jena and Sedan,” Hartwell declared, Prussia had “demonstrated most clearly and strikingly the power and worth of comprehensive and scientific ‘training.’”⁸

Some American officers viewed systematic training as a way to prepare soldiers for the new empty battlefield’s demands that were created by the need for troop dispersal in the face of increased firepower. Assistant Surgeon-General Greenleaf insisted that soldiers themselves, lacking the “elbow touch” of linear warfare, had begun by 1891 to “feel the necessity for physical activity and endurance in attacking an enemy or in defending himself.”⁹ Pilcher, also a medical officer, similarly argued that the “soldier’s physique” had more than ever “become indispensable.”¹⁰ Fortunately, Pilcher insisted, modern knowledge and science made it more possible than ever to precisely and efficiently condition bodies for combat. This way of thinking fit perfectly with the contemporary turn in American high and popular culture toward activity, dynamism, and masculinity. Similarly, these ideas harmonized with a movement in American higher education toward physical education and sport. If colleges and universities took interest in fitness, should the US Army do so too?¹¹

However, not everyone in the Army agreed with the premise of systematic physical training or the means of implementation. Nor did most officers possess the expert knowledge needed to employ systematic training. Many senior Army officers had long acknowledged the connection between physical fitness and soldiering, but they rarely made methodical efforts to improve soldier fitness. Instead, they assumed that soldiers’ bodies best adapted to the rigors of soldiering by soldiering. Lt. John Kulp captured this idea of incidental training when he complained that the older generation of officers believed “the shovel to be the best gymnastic apparatus for soldiers.”¹² Some members of this older generation also considered systematic physical training to be a fad, possibly a dangerous one, and therefore not a necessity.¹³ Thus, dedicating precious training time to exercise outside of traditional drill made little sense.

Others saw utility in physical training but did not know how to structure programs or lead exercises. Such shortcomings typically inclined officers toward either extreme emphasis on popular sports and field days or dull repetition of the drill manual’s limited setting-up and rifle exercises. Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, the Army’s outgoing chief of staff in 1914, stressed the consequences of these conditions in his preface to the physical training manual of 1914. He wrote that despite the well-intentioned efforts of many commands, physical training’s benefits would “remain a negligible quantity” without a “well-defined authorized method of procedure” that imposed “system and uniformity.”¹⁴

Desire for system and uniformity in training informed by expert knowledge also existed at the Army’s lowest levels. For instance, Lt. Frank Besson warned just prior to the publication of the manual of 1914 that Army officers were aware of physical training, but that they needed more specific guidance. Besson counted five manuals in publication dedicated to military exercise, yet none resided in the headquarters library of the Hawaiian Department where he served, and he knew of no officers who owned copies. Besson had seen copies of then-Maj. Edmund Butts’s Manual of Physical Drill occasionally in company libraries. However, he believed that officers were only familiar with the fifteen pages that described rifle drill and contained accompanying sheet music. Even these exercises were rarely employed, Besson observed.¹⁵ According to Besson, units usually resorted to using the seven setting-up exercises in the drill regulations, but these tended to “do more harm than good” owing to a lack of knowledge and enthusiasm. Too often, Besson remarked, physical training amounted to little more than a squad of men, “blouses unbuttoned and hats jammed down on their heads, going through these, the same monotonous exercises day after day, each man with a funereal cadence all his own.”¹⁶

Wood and Besson both proposed similar solutions. First, the Army should compile the best of what had been written on military physical training since the 1880s into a single, comprehensive manual. Next, the Army should require all commanders to make that manual’s system a universal part of every soldier’s regular education. Publication of the Army’s physical training manual of 1914 was an attempt to do just this. Its pages, steeped in a rich broth of ideas and practices concocted by physical training advocates, crystallized and institutionalized a physical culture more than thirty years in the making. Taken together, the manual’s methods, guidelines, definition of fitness, and underlying assumptions compose a physical culture. This culture was the product of a long history and a particular moment. A small group of men, mostly associated with the infantry branch and the US Military Academy, produced that culture over three decades. Examining their backgrounds, relationships, ideas, and contributions to actual physical training practices in the Army yields insights into the nature of the culture that materialized in 1914.

None of these cultural producers exercised a greater or more enduring influence than Herman Koehler, who served as the US Military Academy’s Master of the Sword from 1885 to 1923. His impact on the Army’s systematic-training-based physical culture in its nascent years was both deep and wide. For instance, Koehler’s manuals and his articles in professional military and physical education journals largely determined official training practices and decisively shaped the thinking of most Army officers on the subject of exercise. Although he was not the first to claim that the Army needed systematic, standardized training, Koehler’s prominence in martial physical training discourse waxed over the years the Army edged closer to sanctioning an official physical culture. The Army’s seminal Manual of Physical Training of 1914, in which the Army formalized a physical culture, was essentially an amalgamation of his two earlier books from 1892 and 1904. Perhaps this was not surprising, given that Koehler was a member of the three-officer board that authored the document.¹⁷ Beyond his publications, Koehler’s influence also derived from his Academy position and the men he instructed. West Point was particularly significant to the early history of the Army’s physical culture because for decades it was the Army’s sole center of expertise in physical training. Also, its graduates greatly influenced the Army’s policies and day-to-day life in its various units from the bottom to the top of the institution. As Master of the Sword, a position responsible prior to 1885 only for teaching swordsmanship and other physical skills, Koehler became the school’s father of physical education and, in many ways, the Army’s as well.¹⁸ Koehler was the Army’s only dedicated expert in and practitioner of physical training, and he personally instructed more than thirty-five classes of West Point graduates, who went on to fill leadership roles ranging from platoon leader to chief of staff of the Army. Through his publications, institutional influence, and personal instruction, Koehler came to dominate the accreting body of philosophy and practices that was coalescing into a well-defined physical culture at the turn of the century.

Prior to Koehler’s arrival in 1885, West Point’s administration had taken tentative steps toward incorporating systematic physical training into its curriculum. These steps helped position West Point as the Army’s center of expertise on the subject, but they left ample room for improvement. Kelton’s European-inspired program of 1860 had cadets of all four classes performing calisthenics and gymnastics, though the Academy discontinued it in 1861 with the Civil War’s onset. After 1861, cadets did not follow a systematic program of training, but they were required to spend time in the gym pursuing whatever caught their interest. Gymnastics languished at West Point until 1877 when the superintendent, Gen. John Schofield, recommended its resumption.¹⁹ The recommendation idled until a Board of Visitors report in 1881 criticized gymnasium conditions at the Academy. “There was no exhibition of exercises in the gymnasium,” the board noted, and “the whole furnishing is unsatisfactory.” The board’s members declared that the “value of this class of exercise for whose profession requires good physical development cannot be doubted.” They then proposed the construction of a new gym and creation of a department that would make gymnastics training a “positive requirement” for every cadet.²⁰

The report jolted the Academy’s administration into action. The superintendent directed Lt. Edward Farrow, an instructor in the Department of Tactics, to draw up a training program. Farrow’s system, which included gymnastics and swimming, became a part of cadet development in 1882.²¹ Farrow directed training until he departed for a new assignment in 1884 and was replaced by Lt. Henry Kirby. Koehler later criticized Farrow’s program because there “was but little system” in the course and because it “lacked many of the fundamentals of a rational training system.” However, as Koehler also observed, Farrow and Kirby deserved credit for “breaking up the pernicious practice of permitting Cadets to use the gymnasium as they saw fit,” and for raising the Academy’s appreciation of physical training as a necessary component of cadet development.²²

In 1884, the death of Master of the Sword Antone Lorentz created an opportunity to put West Point on equal footing with other institutions of higher education, many of which were rapidly incorporating physical education into their curricula. Lorentz had done little to advance systematic training in his twenty-seven-year tenure and must have left much to be desired, seeing as how he was replaced in practice if not in title by Farrow in 1881.²³ The search for a professional educator to replace Lorentz led to George Brosius, the Milwaukee Normal School’s director and coach of the Milwaukee Turnverein’s award-winning 1880 team.²⁴ Brosius declined the offer, citing his work in Milwaukee, but recommended his nephew, protégé, normal school graduate, and “best man of the Frankfurt class”—Herman Koehler.²⁵ Academy officials offered Koehler the position. He accepted and began instructing in 1885.

Koehler, only twenty-five years old, was an impressive candidate by dint of his physical prowess alone (he boasted flexed biceps nineteen-and-a-half inches around), not to mention his education and credentials.²⁶ A talented gymnast, Koehler placed second overall at the 1880 international Turner Festival in Frankfurt. While observing another meet a year later, Koehler learned that the man who beat him in 1880 was competing. Despite not having trained, Koehler entered the competition and won first place in a field of more than three hundred contestants.²⁷ Koehler also bore an educational pedigree that qualified him as a professional physical educator, unlike any of his predecessors at West Point. Moreover, he possessed practical experience, having worked since 1882 as a school gymnastics director in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Koehler immediately set about constructing a system of physical training for West Point’s cadets. He expressed the philosophy behind this program and his broader concept of fitness in an article written for the Academy’s centennial in 1902. Koehler’s aim was to counteract the pressure placed on cadets by their program of study, which he deemed a “mental strain” that was “fraught with danger to the physical welfare of the cadet.” Koehler planned to do this by building up the weak so that they might “have an even chance with the naturally strong,” sculpting sound bodies that might yield sound minds, and nurturing energy and strength reserves upon which cadets could call in times of stress. The first objective of Koehler’s system was general health, though he sought simultaneous cultivation of “strength, agility, precision, self-reliance, courage and endurance.”²⁸ Because physical training had a fundamentally educative purpose at West Point, Koehler intended his system to raise the general standard among the Corps of Cadets. Endeavoring to “turn out record-breaking strong men, or skilled acrobats” was “wrong in every particular” in Koehler’s opinion because focus on elites did the majority harm through neglect. To this end, he laid down a principle that recurred through his later work as well: “The greatest good to the greatest number, and only at the expense of those who can afford it.”²⁹

Physical training’s share of the Academy’s curriculum grew throughout Koehler’s tenure. Beginning in 1885, fourth-class cadets received three weeks of daily drill upon arrival at the Academy, and then three drills of forty-five minutes a piece and three periods of fencing instruction per week from October through June. The upper three classes were not required to attend drill, but they were encouraged to do so in the winter months.³⁰ The benefits accruing to cadets were obvious. For instance, the 1889 Board of Visitors gushed in their report that it was “exceedingly difficult to believe that the gymnastic exercises performed by the fourth class could be the result of only one year of practice under instruction by Professor Koehler. The feats of agility were simply wonderful; they are valuable chiefly as evidence of sound, muscular, trained bodies.”³¹ Most of the exercise system under which cadets toiled appeared in Koehler’s Manual of Calisthenic Exercises, published in 1892, which later formed the basis for the Army’s manual of 1914.³² Koehler pushed continuously to make physical training mandatory for all classes so that gains made in the first year would not be lost in the latter three. He finally realized this objective in 1905 and simultaneously had boxing and wrestling added to the curriculum.³³ In recognition of his contributions and the value of his work, West Point’s superintendents and Board of Visitors requested repeatedly beginning in 1889 that Koehler be granted a commission. Congress agreed in 1899, commissioning Koehler as a first lieutenant. In 1901, Congress also made Koehler’s post permanent by law. Furthermore, the law required that the Master of the Sword to henceforth act as “instructor of military gymnastics and physical culture,” and that Koehler’s successors be officers of the line specially selected for the post. Koehler received subsequent promotions to captain, major, and lieutenant colonel in 1905, 1917, and 1920, respectively.³⁴

Koehler’s system reflected its creator’s background in Friedrich Jahn’s Turnen, which was a German system of gymnastics that Jahn created in the early nineteenth century after witnessing the Prussian army’s disastrous defeat at Jena in 1806. Jahn subsequently participated in Prussian educational reforms as a leading physical trainer.³⁵ Major aims of those reforms included instilling national pride and preparing Prussian men for a future war to throw off French dominance. Thus, whole body improvement for a broad population, not the creation of elite athletes, was at Turnen’s core. Turnen also harnessed exercise as a means of promoting well-trained citizens that were faithful to the nation and prepared for war.³⁶ Two waves of German emigres fleeing government crackdowns in Prussia and elsewhere brought Turnen to the United States, first in the mid-1820s and later following the revolutions of 1848. In the United States, Turnen clubs became centers of ethnic German communities, but they also strove to Americanize their message. Turners earned national recognition for their service in the Union Army during the Civil War, helping propel their system of gymnastics to prominence.³⁷ Later, Turners attempted to integrate their system into American schools, placing them in the midst of a late-nineteenth-century nationwide debate about the best means of training American youth. This “Battle of the Systems” pitted Turnen against many other competitors, including Ling’s Swedish Gymnastics and a homegrown system of machine exercises developed by Dudley Sargent. Turnen ultimately lost this battle in the first decade of the twentieth century, owing in part to its ethnic associations but primarily to its strong emphasis on apparatus work, which was impractical for many schools.³⁸

Although the Turners eventually lost in the Battle of the Systems, Turnen was alive and well at the US Military Academy after 1885 and the US Army baked it into its official physical culture in 1914. Understanding the core elements of Turnen is therefore helpful for understanding the core elements of the Army’s physical culture. A typical Turnen syllabus for male students included six classes of exercises: marching; calisthenics; “heavy work” with dumbbells, rings, and other implements; apparatus work; gymnastic games; and some popular physical activities such as track-and-field competitions, swimming, fencing, boxing, and more.³⁹ This typical syllabus emphasized general body development and prescribed progressively more difficult, complex, and active exercises. Formality also characterized a Turnen session. One instructor normally led large groups through structured and rhythmical sequences, often using commands.⁴⁰ Turnen clearly inspired Koehler’s emphasis on general health and his principle of doing the greatest good to the greatest number. The material in the manual of 1914 could have also been pulled directly out of a Turnen syllabus, as it matched the six typical categories of exercise.⁴¹ Turnen’s high degree of formality, emphasis on discipline and broad populations, and overt military focus must have appealed to Academy officials and Army officers congenial to physical training alike.

In a time when most of the Regular Army’s officers earned their commissions from West Point, Koehler’s long tenure as Master of the Sword gave him a unique ability to promulgate his Turnen-derived system throughout the Army. Between 1885 and 1900, Koehler instructed every West Point cadet personally.⁴² As the Academy’s physical program expanded, especially after 1905, Koehler acquired several assistants, but he retained control over the program’s structure and continued delivering instruction personally. By 1919, only two hundred West Point graduates on active duty had not received personal instruction from Koehler, and all of those entered the Academy prior to Koehler’s arrival in 1885.⁴³ If officers were leading physical training or writing about it after 1889, then their only likely frame of reference was Koehler’s example and system. Dissemination through discipleship was an intentional strategy. In the absence of a secondary education program for physical instructors, Koehler believed that West Point graduates needed to enter the Army prepared to lead training as local experts.⁴⁴ The Army refused to establish an official physical culture from the top down before 1914, so Koehler tried to spread one from the bottom up.

Koehler’s disciples, joined by like-minded advocates of systematic training, propagated a consistent physical culture through praxis and print. A gymnasium construction boom on Army posts in the 1890s provided proponents of systematic training opportunities for practice. Initially funded by profits from post canteen sales, gymnasia enabled all-weather, year-round physical training.⁴⁵ With few exceptions, gymnasia built specifically for systematic training first appeared at the Army’s three recruiting depots: Columbus Barracks, Davids Island, and Jefferson Barracks.⁴⁶ These buildings came equipped with all the tools necessary for strengthening the bodies and minds of American soldiers at the turn of the century. Tools ranged from “light work” implements such as dumbbells, barbells, rowing machines, and Indian clubs (wooden bowling pin–shaped instruments of varying weight) to technical gymnastic apparatus such as parallel and horizontal bars. A lieutenant or captain at each post was detailed to direct training in these gyms, usually with the assistance of a few noncommissioned officers.⁴⁷

Koehler believed that such “splendidly equipped gymnasiums” removed the “chief obstacle” to systematic physical training. However, there remained the question of how to put these resources to best use.⁴⁸ Junior officers detailed as instructors enjoyed no training apart from what they received as cadets at West Point or as college students elsewhere. Several publications offered some guidance. Koehler’s manual from 1892 was popular, for instance, as was British author Archibald Maclaren’s book Physical Education. Koehler attempted to fill this gap in 1904 with his Manual of Gymnastic Exercises, but ultimately the Army did not mandate any specific practices or a consistent system before 1914. Young officers in control of gymnasium instruction thus enjoyed wide latitude in determining the nature of training at their posts. This was a major responsibility. Koehler charged these young officers with remembering the importance of their duty to lead critical training, on which the “success or failure is dependent entirely upon themselves.”⁴⁹ Many rose to the challenge. Gymnasia created spaces for officers to encounter, experiment with, and lead physical training. Several innovators, most with experience as gym directors, published their systems in print. By 1913, at least four of these were available as full manuals: Constantine Chase’s Physical Drill for Foot Troops (1897), Edmund Butts’s Manual of Physical Drill (1897), Enoch Garey’s Manual of Physical Drill (1911), and Merch Stewart’s The Physical Development of the Infantry Soldier (1913). Each system differed in some specifics, but the culture each manifested and promulgated was remarkably consistent with Koehler’s, including key elements such as the pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number using progressive, systematic, formal training.

The most influential of these gymnasium instructor-innovators was Edmund “Billy” Butts. An 1890 West Point graduate who had enjoyed Koehler’s tutelage, Butts was given charge of gymnastics training at the Columbus Barracks recruiting depot in 1893. He found that physical training occurred at the depot, but that there was no “systematic drill.” Instead, soldiers were “‘turned loose’ in the gymnasium” under the lax supervision of noncommissioned officers. Under these conditions, Butts felt that the “results could not but be more harmful than beneficial.”⁵⁰ Butts quickly set about constructing a regular training program. He also improved the gymnasium while filling it with new equipment purchased using funds from the Post Exchange and elsewhere. Soon, each of the depot’s four companies was sweating through thirty-five-minute drills five days a week under Butts’s direction. These drills included a variety of activities ranging from calisthenics to dumbbell exercises. In designing his drills, Butts sought to “avoid that constant repetition” that made work “mechanical and tiresome,” while also aiming to engage every soldier’s whole body to promote symmetrical development.⁵¹

Butts’s performance earned him recognition among peers and superiors alike. After he spent fifteen months at the Columbus Barracks, the Headquarters Department of the East, encouraged by its adjutant general, Col. Samuel Breck, detailed Butts in 1894 to travel to various posts and establish training programs. Butts spent a few months each at posts throughout the East, Southeast, and Middle West departments doing so.⁵² This experience challenged Butts to craft a standardized system that could be applied in a wide range of conditions. By 1895, Butts had also become something of an expert for his peers. Earlier that year, the Department of the East required each post to place an officer in charge of physical training. Several of these newly appointed officers wrote to Butts seeking advice and guidance.⁵³

Butts applied his knowledge and experience to respond to these requests in two ways. First, he published an article in 1895 in the Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States offering his peers some generic advice. Butts directed physical training instructors to secure and improve gym facilities initially, and then prepare themselves as athletes and disciplinarian drill instructors, develop a cadre of assistants, and read a good reference manual such as Koehler’s Manual of Calisthenic Exercises.⁵⁴ Butts also began work on a practical manual that would enable “any officer to give regular and beneficial instruction to his command.”⁵⁵

Just three years after being detailed to tour posts and establish training programs, Butts published the first edition of his Manual of Physical Drill. The manual was a practical guide designed by Butts to “systematize physical training in the army.”⁵⁶ The system’s foundation was a “simple and progressive” five-exercise-set arrangement without rest between exercises. Butts applied this structure to a wide variety of exercises, though the core drills consisted of calisthenic, rifle, dumbbell, and gymnastic apparatus work. Wall-scaling, rope-climbing, and other activities with obvious practical military value were also included as “essential to the athletic training.” While “athletic games and contests” occupied about 20 percent of the manual’s pages, they were relegated to the back of the book, confined to track-and-field events, and given only as “matters of general interest and information.”⁵⁷ As in Koehler’s scheme, officers led the drills in Butts’s system using commands. Butts recommended that officers drilled their units in thirty-minute sessions at least four times per week. Ideally, whole companies would go through the drill together, though Butts allowed for battalions or even regiments to exercise together if the lead instructor had several officer assistants.⁵⁸ Butts furnished two ten-day example programs, one for units without much gymnastic apparatus available and one for units with fully equipped gymnasia.⁵⁹ However, as in Koehler’s manuals and the later manual of 1914, Butts left the specific content of each “thirty minutes’ drill” up to instructors.

From its organization and purpose to its recommendations on dress and hygiene, Butts’s manual reflected Koehler’s unmistakable influence. Not only did Koehler instruct Butts during the latter’s cadet years, Butts also sought Koehler’s advice when detailed to Columbus Barracks in 1893 and praised Koehler as “one of the best authorities on physical culture in this country and certainly one of the most successful instructors.”⁶⁰ Butts’s system differed from Koehler’s in only a few regards. For instance, Butts placed more emphasis on rifle drill than did Koehler, and he was more open to athletic contests held during field days. However, Butts’s definition and valuation of fitness, along with the means he thought best to achieve it, generally matched Koehler’s. The differences were more a matter of nuance than substance. Prior to 1914, Butts’s Manual of Physical Drill achieved a level of influence in the Army equal to or greater than any of Koehler’s manuals, but the physical culture it advanced was chiefly Koehler’s creation.

Koehler, Butts, and others developed and spread a coherent physical culture that yielded similar systems of exercise, but these cultural producers struggled to get the Army to put that culture into practice. Wholly systematized training throughout the Army proved difficult to realize. Gyms may have appeared on posts and recruiting depots may have instituted physical training in the 1890s, but articles in professional journals at the time indicate that commanders often resisted incorporating systematic and formal physical training, or simply knew too little about it to do much besides permit competitive sports. For instance, Lt. Robert Smart, an assistant surgeon, complained about this situation in 1901 when he bemoaned the lack of a “compulsory system of physical exercise” in the Army. Speaking about the drill required at recruiting depots by that time, Smart remarked that what physical drill did exist was “wrong because [it was] unsystematic.”⁶¹ Exercise was encouraged, but it was left up to local commanders and was neither structured nor ordered. Smart recommended that authorities superior to post commanders make daily exercise compulsory, and then turn that training over to men “instructed specially in this branch of military science” at proposed training centers run by military medical officers.⁶²

Three years later, Koehler issued similar complaints in the Infantry Journal’s inaugural issue, writing that the “proper physical training of the enlisted man” had been “written about, discussed and talked over for a long time, but as yet, except in a few instances, little of lasting value has been accomplished.”⁶³ Koehler rejected reliance on competitive athletics, and advocated instead using the “splendidly equipped gymnasiums” at most posts to execute systematic, supervised physical training.⁶⁴ In 1905, Fort Snelling’s superintendent of athletics, Maj. Robert L. Bullard, observed that there was excitement over sport in the Army, but few commanders arranged training to rationally build better bodies. “The present state of athletics or physical training in the army,” Bullard alleged, was “unsystematic, irregular, and uncertain in the extreme.”⁶⁵ By 1907, little had changed. Koehler again wrote to the Infantry Journal complaining that commanders did not treat physical training with the “degree of seriousness commensurate with its importance.”⁶⁶ According to Koehler, company commanders did not integrate physical training into daily schedules and did not compel most of their men to participate in what little training commanders did schedule. Furthermore, senior commanders “considered their duty ended with the issuance of orders pertaining to the subject.”⁶⁷

The challenge confronting the Army was not one of resources, but one of will and organization. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the Army had well-equipped gymnasiums on most posts and was building more. Several manuals were in print that laid out exercise systems specifically for Army use. The Army also had a body of officers able to put those systems into practice, whether they were medical officers or West Point graduates with rudimentary training as instructors. Yet the Army lacked a central authority to control and direct training. Koehler and others pointed to contemporary European practices as a possible model. One example was British Army’s Gymnastic Staff at Aldershot, which was established in 1860 as a central school with a permanent staff to train instructors for every regiment in the British Army.⁶⁸ Establishing such a center for the US Army was problematic, so much so that Lieutenant Colonel Greenleaf argued in 1891 that the creation of a permanent organization required an act of Congress. Without a legal basis, he predicted, a permanent organization’s future would be forever in jeopardy, subject to the whims of each new senior Army authority.⁶⁹

Assuming that such a law could be passed, Greenleaf suggested the US Military Academy (USMA) as a prospective location for such a center. This argument made sense in 1891 purely from an organizational and bureaucratic perspective. An Academy chair would require few new resources to stand up, and the organization would be well positioned to transmit training practices into the Army through each year’s graduating class. Pointing to the US Naval Academy as an example, Greenleaf argued that the leader of such an organization should be a medical officer well versed in anatomy, and capable of precisely, efficiently, and safely honing the human body.⁷⁰ Yet West Point did not have a department of physiology and hygiene like Annapolis. Instead, it had a Master of the Sword. Despite this, the argument for West Point as the seat of a permanent physical training center made more sense every year. As Koehler’s reputation and influence grew, and as his tenure lengthened into seeming permanency, there seemed no better choice. Additionally, Koehler enjoyed the patronage of West Point’s superintendents, who advocated for Koehler in the Army’s highest echelons. Koehler’s manual from 1892 was the product of such lobbying, as was the USMA-dominated board that produced the manual of 1914.⁷¹ Still, congressional action or, more realistically, firm commitment and orders from a senior Army leader was necessary to make systematic training a fixture across the Army.

Movement toward such a top-down directive began in the mid-1890s thanks to a trio of senior leader sponsors: Gens. Nelson Miles and Franklin Bell, and President Theodore Roosevelt. The directives these three leaders issued did not resolve all existing problems, but they moved the organization toward a standardized training model. Miles took the initial steps, first as the commander of the Department of the East between 1894 and 1895, and later as commanding general of the United States Army from 1895 to 1903. In the former position, Miles had a hand in assigning Butts to his educative tour of army posts, requiring athletics officers at each post, directing units within his department to conduct regular physical training, and publishing several pamphlets and circulars on training.⁷² As commanding general, Miles continued promoting the benefits of physical training as something of a celebrity fitness role model and enthusiast. Perhaps his most notable stunt in this role was his surprise eight-hour, ninety-mile horseback ride in July 1903, just a month before his mandatory retirement at age sixty-four. Miles supposedly rode the first thirty-five miles in record time in temperatures as high as one hundred degrees. He arrived in Fort Reno “fresh as the 34-year-old officer who had been his companion,” having definitively proven his fitness by doubling President Theodore Roosevelt’s recent forty-five-mile Laramie-to-Cheyenne ride, which had been considered “quite a physical feat.”⁷³

More meaningful orders came down from one of Miles’s successors as Army chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Franklin Bell. An 1878 West Point graduate, Bell is notable for being perhaps the most educated of senior officers in the early twentieth century on physical education. Although he graduated from West Point before Koehler arrived, Bell experimented with the use of gymnastics apparatus to train his troops as a cavalry lieutenant in the 1880s. He later spent a summer studying physical culture and training under Harvard’s Dr. Dudley Sargent, one of the fathers of American physical education.⁷⁴ Bell’s experiences in the Indian Wars and Spanish-American War motivated his continued interest in physical training.⁷⁵

Convinced of the need for improving the American soldier’s physical fitness, Bell, as the incoming chief of staff, was the driving force behind General Order 44’s issuance in March 1906.⁷⁶ This order required cavalry, infantry, and field artillery units in the Regular Army to conduct physical training in garrison and in the field. Gymnastics, athletics, bayonet, and “kindred exercises” were required in garrison, while practice marches were required in the field. Furthermore, all company-level units had to conduct one practice march per week at a minimum of at least twelve miles, plus a monthly march of three consecutive days when in an active field training period.⁷⁷

Bell also partnered with President Roosevelt, himself a famed proponent of the strenuous life, in performing fitness “stunts” to promote the value of exercise. For instance, the two competed in the fifteen-mile “Muldoon Challenge” in February 1908, which Bell won.⁷⁸ In November of that year, Roosevelt and Bell appeared together at the War College. Both men delivered messages about the “desirability of officers keeping in fit condition at all times,” and then Roosevelt invited the General Staff officers and War College students present to join him on a “stroll” that afternoon. Unable to refuse, the fifty-eight officers present followed the president on a “bully tramp” through thick woods, up and down rocky cliffs, and across a chin-deep stream.⁷⁹ A month later, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 989, which required an annual physical exam for Marine officers that consisted of a fifty-mile march.⁸⁰ One year earlier, Roosevelt had also directed Army officers to take physical fitness tests. This was partly in response to a report from the Philippine Department’s inspector general that found only two of nine colonels fully fit for duty. The War Department’s answer was to require all field-grade officers annually to ride thirty miles a day for three consecutive days, though coastal artillery officers and some staff officers were permitted to walk fifty miles over three days instead. The riding requirement remained on the books until 1917.⁸¹

Miles, Bell, and Roosevelt made physical training more visible in the Army, and they also made it mandatory in limited ways. But what they did not do was specify how commanders should conduct physical training. Thus, Koehler and others continued complaining even after General Order 44’s issuance that commanders did not take physical training seriously, and that the Army needed to systematize its practices. Pressure mounted, as did interest among senior leaders. Bell’s successor as chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, took the next step by directing the publication in 1914 of the Army’s Manual of Physical Training. Seeking authors for this manual, the Army turned to its internal expert at the US Military Academy, just as Lieutenant Colonel Greenleaf had recommended in 1891.

The resulting manual, officially authored by a small board but chiefly Koehler’s product, equipped officers responsible for training in philosophical and practical ways. Philosophically, the manual described fitness and ascribed it value. Practically, the manual posed advice on hygiene issues, gave guidance on structuring training programs, and dictated exercise methods. Several manuals may have come before, but none equaled the manual of 1914 in breadth, depth, specificity, distribution, and official endorsement. Appropriately for an expression of and foundation for a physical culture, the manual of 1914 began with a definition of fitness. The authors conceptualized the elements of this definition as a pyramid capped by the supreme component of discipline. The pyramid’s foundational layers were fourfold: general health and bodily vigor; muscular strength and endurance; self-reliance; and “smartness, activity, and precision.” The latter qualities were described as “physical expressions of mental activity.”⁸² The first two elements, both hygienic and physical, formed a base for the second set of elements, which were psychological. Once the soldier obtained “robust health” and an awareness of his increased strength and endurance, then he needed to be “taught how to value the former and how to use the latter to best advantage.”⁸³ This knowledge translated into self-reliance and self-consciousness. The manual’s authors intended for soldiers to exercise not just their muscles but their minds as well. Instructors exercised minds chiefly by insisting on “precision and exactitude.” Doing so supposedly cultivated “essential soldierly qualities” such as self-respect, neatness, and grace, which “combined spell discipline.”⁸⁴ Fit soldiers were mentally and physically healthy, strong, and resilient. Fit soldiers were confident in their abilities, in complete control of their bodies and minds, and willing to submit themselves to a unit’s needs.

The manual provided instructors with more practical advice regarding hygiene and programming, which was typical of training guidance found in period professional physical education and the popular press.⁸⁵ For example, the manual counseled that exercise should occur in open air, preferably “pure, dry air,” whenever possible.⁸⁶ Other advice equipped instructors to teach their charges proper breathing techniques and to recognize the onset of exhaustion. In the interest of completeness, the manual’s authors recommended the best time of day to exercise (never after a meal), the best clothing to wear while exercising (flannel), and the healthiest way to recover after drill (sponging the body with tepid water) too.⁸⁷ In terms of programming, the manual’s authors offered general direction but stopped short of dictating a schedule beyond providing a sample five-day program. Instead, they gave those responsible for training leeway to build programs that took into account their soldiers’ aptitude and condition, and the facilities and time available. This was an enormous responsibility. Officers needed to take their work seriously and “not for an instant lose sight of the fact that to them has been intrusted [sic] a part of the soldier’s training which is of great importance.”⁸⁸ The manual did include some guidance to help structure programs. For instance, instructors should work extensor and flexor muscles in paired exercises, seek harmonious and symmetrical total-body development, and ensure that every day’s work “dovetail into the next and be progressive.”⁸⁹ The “setting-up exercises,” a series of calisthenic drills, formed the core of every session. Instructors could add various types of apparatus and skill work to this core. Grouping and sequencing exercises fell to the instructor’s discretion. This latitude might seem odd for a document that purported to standardize physical training practices across the Army. However, the manual’s authors wanted to account for the variety of conditions in which units might train.⁹⁰ Too prescriptive a program might allow officers to make excuses for not doing physical training at all if local conditions did not match those assumed in prescription. Flexibility in programming therefore enabled standardization of physical training itself across the force.

In contrast with the hygienic and programming sections, which were essentially compilations of suggestions, the manual dictated how to perform exercises and drills. Of the manual’s 335 pages, 319 contained exercise instructions, guidance on issuing commands, and photos and drawings illustrating movements and positions. The instructions were comprehensive. For instance, the broad jump alone required four pages and three images to explain.⁹¹ Specificity enabled focus on precision and exactitude—supposedly vital to building discipline—and allowed amateurs to employ expert-developed movements properly. According to the manual’s authors, every exercise had a “function peculiarly its own” that had a “certain effect upon a certain part of the body.”⁹² While officers could arrange those exercises according to general guidelines, they lacked the expert knowledge to design movements capable of producing such precise results. Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood, writing in the manual’s preface, therefore discouraged any “departures” from the manual that were “at variance with its methods generally.”⁹³

The resulting institutionalized physical culture embodied in the manual of 1914 expressed a body of ideas that had accreted over nearly three decades, and that were chiefly birthed and shepherded by Herman Koehler. Four salient elements characterized that culture. First, the culture valued psychological qualities at least as much as physical qualities in defining fitness. Second, the culture prioritized a unit’s average capabilities over optimizing any individual’s physical capacity. Third, the culture built on an assumption that experts possessing specialized knowledge and training were essential to fitness. Finally, the culture’s producers assumed that the Army’s recruits were of generally high quality, though in need of refinement. These characteristics mostly reflected the culture’s heritage from the second generation of American physical education. This second generation had emerged after the American Civil War, but transition to a third generation that embraced sport and play to a greater degree was underway by 1906. As a result, a divide emerged between physical training practices prevalent in the Army and those in higher education and wider American society.

Additional cultural analysis turns on investigating the qualities valued in the culture and each quality’s relative value. To begin with, the Army’s first institutionalized physical culture valued a soldier’s psychological qualities at least as much as his physical qualities, and it assumed that physical training could address both. As reflected in the manual of 1914, Koehler and others presented the benefits of physical training as a pyramid. Physical qualities formed the pyramid’s foundation. None of these qualities was surprising or new: strength, endurance, improved posture and appearance, agility, gracefulness, general health, resilience to disease and injury, and muscular efficiency. However, advocates of systematic training claimed to be able to produce bigger gains faster by leveraging the latest advances in the professionalizing fields of physical education and training for the sole purpose of improving bodies. The application of new methods also addressed the pyramid’s second level: confidence, courage, self-reliance, and willpower. Koehler labeled these “psychologic” qualities. For him, intentional development of specific psychologic qualities was the “essential difference” between military and civilian physical training, and a key goal for military training.⁹⁴ The Army’s manual of 1914 summarized these qualities using one of Koehler’s well-worn sayings: they induced “men to dare because of the consciousness to do.”⁹⁵

At the top of the pyramid perched the culture’s ultimate psychologic quality: discipline. The definition of discipline in this physical culture reflected an understanding of what the future battlefield might demand of the soldier, and of how physical training could prepare soldiers for that battlefield. Contemporary theorists of warfare worried over the corrosive effects on command and control created by the need to disperse due to the deadliness of modern weapons. If not in close order, how could units sustain the momentum of an attack? How could soldiers overcome the psychological trauma of combat? Systematic physical training advocates responded with a type of discipline that combined individualist and corporate aspects. Reading Butts’s and Koehler’s definitions together sheds light on how this combination worked. Butts stressed individuality. “With all the discipline that is instilled [in military training],” Butts cautioned in 1904, “we do not want the American soldier to lose his individuality—that individuality which makes him the greatest soldier in the world.”⁹⁶ In contrast, Koehler stressed subordination, as evident in his description of a disciplined soldier as an “interdependent and dependable effective unit, with a direct and definite responsibility to the state.”⁹⁷

With its veneer of drill, systematic physical training seemed to foster Koehler’s subordination more than Butts’s individuality. The ideal training sessions imagined and depicted in these works always had men in ranks responding in unison to commands issued by forceful, disciplinarian paragons of physical fitness. Yet Koehler’s and Butt’s positions were closer than they at first appear. Koehler did not seek blind or unthinking obedience, but the “intelligent, voluntary subordination of the individual in an equal degree with every other individual.”⁹⁸ Subordination was an individual decision, compatible with American ideals of individuality. Physical training taught men to control their bodies and to respond to commands. Self-control helped men willingly submit themselves to authority and the unit’s needs while retaining their individuality, and thus the confidence to act on their own initiative if necessary. Physical training conditioned bodies and minds alike, the combination of which was supposed to enable a bottom-up discipline productive of aggressive team-based action on the battlefield.

The logic behind promises of improving psychologic qualities also underwrote promises about making soldiers more moral. Period beliefs closely linked strong bodies and strong minds. Much as training muscles to submit to the will was thought to develop discipline, exercise was thought to strengthen both muscular and moral fibers. Noted psychologist G. Stanley Hall expressed the muscles-morals connection clearly in a paper he delivered in 1894: “You cannot have a firm will without firm muscles; and there is nothing so dangerous for morals as to have the gap between knowing what is right and proper and health and the doing of it, yawn; and it always yawns if the muscles get weak.”⁹⁹ Koehler made similar comments in a draft of the manual of 1914, writing that “it is the physical that determines the destiny of the intellectual.”¹⁰⁰ Thus, physical trainers also saw themselves as cultivators of vigorous, moral, and active masculinity.

Moral development helped commend the idea of systematic exercise to otherwise skeptical senior officers. Not only did exercise improve discipline and behavior, but it provided a healthy alternative to vice.¹⁰¹ Many of the authors urging the Army’s adoption of systematic physical training made this argument, though sometimes in overly simplistic ways. For example, Lt. A. B. Donworth, one of the young officers assigned as a gym superintendent, related his own college experiences in an article from 1897. Donworth wrote that maintenance fees for damaged school property had been on the rise at his college, but the opening of a “fine gymnasium” on campus curtailed vandalism. The reason, according to Donworth, was that the students were so tired by evening from exercise that the “property remained unmolested.”¹⁰² Most advocates, like their counterparts in civilian education, made more sophisticated arguments that linked muscle fiber and moral fiber. One of their most commonly invoked analogies was the “blacksmith’s arm.” This analogy drew on the observation that the more a blacksmith used his arm muscles, the stronger they became. Physical education advocates reasoned that exercising man’s will by the disciplined and mutual action of mind and matter could similarly strengthen that will.¹⁰³ Connections between exercise and moral behavior would only grow more influential as a justification for physical training in the years to come.

A second key feature of the new culture’s definition of fitness was an emphasis on organizations over individuals. In an article published in 1904, Koehler asserted that other armies had adopted physical training in the interest of improving whole-army efficiency. Koehler argued that the US Army, like others, was “most invariably dependent upon the average man,” so the “standard of physical excellence which may be attained is dependent directly upon the efforts made to develop the average man and the man who is below average.”¹⁰⁴ The point of physical training was to raise the average level of fitness across an organization, not to maximize individual physical performance. As Capt. L. S. Upton observed a year later in reflecting on his Spanish-American War experiences, systematic training could ensure “that each man will be developed and made an efficient physical unit in the army machine.” The whole idea of physical training, Upton argued, was to “give all soldiers a proper physical development and sufficient stamina to make them equal to a required military task with the least number of ineffectives.”¹⁰⁵ To make his point, Upton compared two theoretical battalions, one containing the Army’s best sprinters, and the other focused on training its average men. If both ran a mile, the battalion focused on its specialist sprinters would lose a larger percentage as fall-outs than the other, making it militarily inferior. Even Butts’s bragging about his trainees’ muscle growth revealed his stress on organizations—his statistics only highlighted average gains across units.¹⁰⁶

Valuation of an organization’s average level of fitness above the individual’s capacity also manifested in an injury- and exhaustion-avoidance mindset. “Underdoing is rectifiable; overdoing is often not,” cautioned the authors of the Army’s manual of 1914, echoing one of Koehler’s maxims.¹⁰⁷ Systematic training advocates viewed injury and exhaustion as a double threat. First, because improved unit efficiency was the ultimate goal of training, injuries were counterproductive. Injuries kept men from training and degraded a unit’s combat effectiveness. Second, injuries and exhaustion could make soldiers dread physical training. Monotony posed a similar threat. Training advocates regarded enthusiasm and focus as key to developing psychologic qualities. If soldiers dreaded training, then they would not participate enthusiastically or focus their efforts.¹⁰⁸ Moreover, dread and dissatisfaction worked against the creation of a team mentality conducive to discipline.

A third key feature of the Army’s first official physical culture concerned physical trainers’ qualifications. Systematic physical training was premised on claims of scientific, expert knowledge. Only by precisely applying specified methods could trainers help soldiers achieve promised psychologic, physical, and organizational benefits. Such precision was beyond the reach of people unversed in the nuances of a human body’s composition, arrangement, and operations. Some training advocates, almost exclusively medical officers, argued before 1914 that only physicians possessed such knowledge. Pilcher, one of the medical officers who first promoted systematized training, made this case in his seminal article of 1892 by noting that many of the day’s “best teachers of physical training” held medical degrees, and that regulations in the British Army and elsewhere required medical officer supervision of gymnastics. Pilcher argued that medical officers were uniquely equipped to obviate the “danger of injury from the abuse of exercise” and to diagnose “defective parts” of soldiers’ bodies.¹⁰⁹ However, while many of the period’s famed physical educators held medical degrees, not all did. Similarly, not all medical officers had mastered the latest methods of physical training. Finally, given the imbalance between the number of men to be trained and the number of medical officers available, a requirement for all training to be led by medical officers was impractical. Other experts needed to be found or made.

The most efficient and effective system most advocates proposed resembled European establishments, especially the British Army’s program at Aldershot. This program, created and directed by experts assigned to the British Gymnastic Staff, certified trainers who then returned to their regiments and served as physical training specialists. As noted earlier, ideas for a similar program in the US Army invariably identified West Point as the obvious proponent and Koehler as its director. Though not a physician, Koehler could claim the necessary expert knowledge thanks to the professionalization of physical education. Yet hopes for a similar “postgraduate” course in the US Army had died out by late 1904.¹¹⁰ Instead, Koehler and his compatriots settled for relying on West Point graduates as local specialists. Educated by Koehler and his staff as cadets, Academy graduates were theoretically equipped to apply a centrally constructed system of training.¹¹¹ This stopgap solution to the expertise problem worked so long as cadets and commanders alike took physical training seriously, and so long as commanders only assigned those men most interested in the work as training officers. However, this solution also had drawbacks. For example, it produced a limited pool of potential trainers that was not easily expansible. Also, potential instructors equipped with the latest knowledge were invariably the youngest officers in a unit, and thus they lacked influence over unit training.

Finally, producers of the Army’s first official physical culture assumed that the Army’s recruits were of a generally high quality, even if they harbored doubts about wider American society. The period’s cultural producers tended not to explicitly reinforce the popular perception of the enlisted ranks being peopled by society’s dregs. However, the culture’s nearly complete focus on improving the rank-and-file’s physical fitness and the absence of disciplinary training for officers imply some paternalist assumptions about the qualitative differences between the two populations. As an example, Butts, ever the American fighting man’s promoter, observed in 1895 that the Army’s human material was “of the highest order.” New recruits entered with sufficient foundations of strength and endurance, each “well developed in his uncouth way.” Butts therefore charged physical trainers with making the most of this raw material, sculpting each soldier into a “magnificent specimen of physical manhood.”¹¹² A decade later, Capt. Guy Palmer delivered a similar assessment of the American soldier. New recruits possessed solid foundations, though they lacked “grace, agility, and a knowledge of how to use their strength” and displayed unevenly developed bodies. “Latent qualities exist in these men,” Palmer observed, but they needed a “course of systematic and wise instruction to bring them out.”¹¹³ Systematic training advocates generally converged on the idea that to be ready for modern war, the American fighting man, but not his officers, needed honing and to be made more efficient.

For all their confidence about the quality of the average recruit, systematic training advocates regularly hinted at their doubts about the quality of men in wider American society. Sometimes these doubts reflected anxieties springing from the period’s dominant Darwinian racial theories. Maj. Henry Kilbourne, an army surgeon, sounded such an alarm in a paper for a panel on military physical training during the 1897 Association of Military Surgeons conference. Alongside presenters proposing systems of training and debating the place of athletics in the Army, Kilbourne warned that the average quality of the American population was decreasing due to racial mixing. The “swarthy, low-browed and stunted people now swarming to our shores” were problematic, he cautioned, because physical training could only enhance what was already naturally available. Perhaps Butts’s superior American recruit would become a thing of the past.¹¹⁴ Other anxieties sprang from the neurasthenia crisis seemingly gripping American and Western European societies. Koehler himself gave voice to these concerns in a draft of the Army’s manual of 1914, writing that the “primitive and simple methods of life” that had cultivated a “physical and moral hardihood” in American men were under threat from modern conveniences on one hand, and urbanization on the other. Koehler estimated that as a result, less than 50 percent of men aged eighteen to forty-five were physically healthy enough to serve.¹¹⁵

Those men most responsible for constructing a physical culture around systematic training assumed they would sculpt generally high-quality raw material, even as they echoed the era’s concerns about the suitability of most men for modern war. Rarely did these cultural producers give any written consideration to mass mobilization’s implications for their physical training systems. The closest most came was a vague hope that men introduced to physical training in the service would take their fitness knowledge, skills, and enthusiasm out into American society, thereby “preconditioning” the next generation of soldiers for service. One of the clearest expressions of this hope is found in then-Capt. Merch Stewart’s Physical Development of the Infantry Soldier (1913). A prolific author, veteran of the Spanish-American War, and future West Point superintendent, Stewart argued that all able-bodied male citizens between the ages of eighteen and forty-five were liable for military service, so all were obligated to improve their fitness.¹¹⁶ Yet exhortation could not replace planning for an influx of lower-quality recruits, especially given that the Army included few expert trainers and had only a limited, fixed pipeline for producing new trainers. Thus, differing perceptions of human material in and out of uniform suggest that this physical culture was geared chiefly toward a small standing army’s needs.

Apart from training manuals, nothing more clearly illuminated the outlines and elements of the Army’s first official physical culture than did debate over sport’s place in the military at the turn of the twentieth century. This debate’s influence on the Army’s physical culture and physical training practices also persisted through subsequent decades, as later chapters demonstrate. Enthusiasm for sport and systematic physical training grew up together in the decades following the American Civil War. The sporting movement in the US Army chiefly resulted from grassroots interest and organization. Soldiers’ interest in athletics coincided with a sporting craze in late-nineteenth-century America. Soldiers’ interest also coincided with military reform movements, especially after the Spanish-American War, and with social reform movements that painted sport as an alternative to vice.¹¹⁷ More specifically, the military’s sporting germ arguably originated at the academies before spreading throughout the larger force, a key inflection point being the inaugural Army-Navy football game in 1890. In the 1890s, officer attitudes toward sport shifted from toleration to a willingness to experiment and athletics became part of the duty day for some soldiers. By the 1900s, sport enjoyed “unqualified acceptance” as one of the “essential elements of soldier training,” according to historian Steven Pope.¹¹⁸

Linked by one historian as synergistic trends, sport and systematic physical training also represented two different, though related, physical cultures.¹¹⁹ Systematic physical training sought to organize and rationalize training practices from the top down, and it emphasized average unit performance. Sports arose from a bottom-up popular movement and typically celebrated the elite individual athlete’s performance. Systematic physical training activists such as Koehler and Butts saw both opportunity and peril in sports. On one hand, field days and athletic competitions built esprit de corps, celebrated physical activity, and encouraged interest in training among many soldiers. On the other, competition inclined leaders to focus on their star athletes and pushed soldiers to specialize instead of seeking harmonious, balanced development. A few critics went further, arguing that sports were “mere play” as opposed to the “serious nature” of a soldier’s calling, so the “kindergarten methods” of sport could not advance training.¹²⁰ Ultimately, negotiation of the sports issue by producers of the Army’s physical culture clarifies many outlines and contours of their own physical culture.

Paired articles under the title “Athletics in the Army” in a 1905 edition of the Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States captured the potential and problems nearly all systematic training advocates perceived in sports. In one article, Capt. H. Hawkins expressed deep concern about the proliferation of field days and their pernicious effects on soldiers’ bodies and command climates alike. Field days, common features of Army life by 1905, set aside a day or more from regular training so that entire units could participate in and observe athletic competitions. Hawkins described this application of athletics as submission to a sporting craze or fad, and he argued that commanders were wrong to think of these days as physical training. Only men who could already run well or play a sport participated, while the rest of the unit’s men “merely clap their hands at the performances of their representatives.”¹²¹ The elite competitors benefited little from participation in terms of exercise, though they risked injury, and the rest did not benefit at all. In the other article, Maj. Robert Bullard claimed that enthusiasm for sport reflected a deeper concern about physical training and development present in American society at the time. On the whole, Bullard found athletics to be a potentially positive tool for shaping fit bodies appropriate for soldiering. However, Bullard took issue with the Army’s unsystematic use of athletics, which was neither entirely recreational nor entirely for training. Athletics, he argued, must be “subordinated—better—completely swallowed up in the idea of training” and turned from “sport, play and trifling, to training and the serious business of preparation for war.”¹²² Both Hawkins and Bullard recognized the need for physical training and the potential role athletics could play in it. Yet both also expressed concern about how enthusiasm for sports could derail more serious and constructive means to build better bodies.

Bullard’s and Hawkins’s efforts to find appropriate ways to apply sport were typical of systematic training advocates at the turn of the century. For instance, Koehler and Butts also wrestled with the role of athletics in physical training. Their thoughts on the subject are worth exploring, given the influence both men wielded in the production of the Army’s physical culture. Over more than a decade of writing, Butts consistently argued in favor of athletic competitions. While inaugurating physical training at Columbus Barracks in 1893, Butts also inaugurated regular post field days. As late as 1905, Butts still hoped for a time when these post field days might culminate in department or all-Army championships equal in import to the annual Army Rifle Competition.¹²³ Butts valued all kinds of field day competitions. However, he advised that the bulk of the events be military in nature, such as wall-scaling or tent-pitching, and involve as many members of a unit as possible.¹²⁴ Every officer, and especially young graduates of West Point, had a duty to encourage all kinds of athletic activities, according to Butts.

Still, “national sports” such as baseball and football also found favor with Butts. The benefits he perceived in “national sports” were many: building esprit de corps, inspiring emulation of fit athletes, and providing alternatives to vice, among others. Butts also saw sport as a way to simultaneously build discipline and individuality. Comparing ball players and skirmishers, Butts contended that both must be “subservient to and united with” the team’s efforts, and yet able to take “quick and prompt individual action” on which success often depends. “An able player on the ball field will not forget his tactics on a field of battle,” Butts wrote, “and an able captain of a ball team will make an abler captain in the deadlier game of war.”¹²⁵ Given his cadet reputation as a remarkable athlete, his enthusiasm is not surprising. Yet for all of the eloquence Butts invested in celebrating sport, it never figured as more than a complement to the core of his system—methodical, disciplinary gymnastic training. For instance, consider the composition of his manual. Track-and-field training information earned a chapter, and intercollegiate and amateur track-and-field records earned a page, but both were appended to the end of the manual and added simply “as matters of general interest and information.”¹²⁶

Tension also existed in Koehler’s opinion of sport. Intercollegiate athletics blossomed at West Point during his tenure as the Academy’s Master of the Sword, led by an interest in football, as was the case in so many other institutions of higher education at the time. In fact, Koehler served as head coach of the Army football team from 1897 to 1900 and remained involved with the team in later years.¹²⁷ Koehler also oversaw the institution of mandatory intramural athletics for all cadets in 1920, a practice that continues to the present day. Yet Koehler also argued against athletics in the wider army. For instance, in an article published in 1904 Koehler urged the Army to adopt a system of training that would raise the physical standard of all its members, but remarked that “it is needless to add that competitive athletics do not and can not do this.”¹²⁸ Though a fan of the sort of field days Butts advocated, which Koehler labeled “organization competition,” Koehler also argued against the proliferation of field days on units’ training calendars.¹²⁹ Similarly, Koehler worked to advance sport at West Point, but ignored the topic in his manuals of 1892 and 1904, and only briefly covered track-and-field events in the Army’s manual of 1914.

How does one explain the disapproval of sport in the Army voiced by one of the most influential figures in the history of West Point athletics? Features of the systematic physical training culture Koehler fathered are key to solving this puzzle. Physical training in the Army was supposed to improve a unit’s average fitness and symmetrically develop all soldiers, while simultaneously promoting discipline and other psychologic qualities. Koehler believed that competitive athletics, in contrast, targeted small populations of men for specialized development who were usually already fit. Competition also inclined participants to focus on victory over training, which posed increased risks of injury. Competition’s seductiveness also threatened to take time and attention away from the serious business of physical training.

West Point was uniquely capable of avoiding these hazards of sport according to a manifesto Koehler wrote in 1909 on the “theory and practice of athletics” at the Academy for its nascent Athletic Council. In this paper, Koehler argued that West Point’s physical training goal had always been to develop the “very highest possible standard of general excellence of the mass of its students.”¹³⁰ Competitive athletics could support that objective, he asserted, because West Point already had a mandatory systematic training program for all cadets and the Academy’s supervisory organizations were dedicated to keeping sport aligned with the developmental mission. In short, all cadets developed a foundation of fitness in systematic training, and then those that desired additional challenges could try out for competitive sports teams. This aligned with his consistent position that competitive athletics, while potentially valuable, should “never be more than an incident in the system of training of soldiers.”¹³¹

Conditions in the Army did not match conditions at West Point, so Koehler doubted that competitive athletics could remain incidental. If all commanders were not dedicated first and foremost to systematic training, and the Army’s highest authorities did not make such training mandatory, then competitive athletics would spin out of control. Koehler’s experiences at the Academy likely reinforced his beliefs. After all, his manifesto of 1909 responded directly to competitive athletics having spun out of control at the Academy a few years prior. While the Academy’s superintendent, Col. Hugh Scott, had been away on an extended absence in 1908, members of the Army Athletic Association had threatened to cancel the annual Army-Navy football game over a player eligibility dispute with the Naval Academy. For Scott, this was the last straw. The Army Athletic Association, founded in 1892 as a private booster organization that funded competitive athletics and scheduled competitions, had grown too independent and lacked a stake in the Academy’s core educational and developmental mission.¹³² Scott responded by establishing his own Athletic Council comprising the commandant, the Master of the Sword, and various officers from the superintendent’s staff.¹³³ This council directed the activities of the newly rechartered Army Athletic Association, bringing competitive athletics under the tight supervisory control Koehler extolled as one of two key reasons why competitive sport could be part of a cadet’s daily life, but not necessarily a soldier’s.

Producers of the Army’s first official physical culture reflected American physical education’s second generation in their views on sport, emphasis on psychological qualities and group fitness, and logical linkages between mental, physical, and moral qualities. Capitalizing on the American public’s fascination with health, strength, and fitness in the decades following the Civil War, this generation claimed expert knowledge based on physiology, evolutionary theories, and traditional practices associated with ethnic groups. Scientific training and knowledge set this generation apart from its forebears, though much of the earlier millenarianism of antebellum health reformers endured. The leading thinkers of physical education’s second generation included physicians as well as self-styled physical educators or trainers, much like the population of principals behind the Army’s physical culture. Historian Roberta Park has shown that second-generation physical education claimed two functions: a hygienic function and an educative function. Physical education goals were broad and comprehensive, including physical, mental, and moral development. These ideas match language Koehler and his peers consistently used. Second-generation physical educators also stressed the need to direct exercise toward specific goals, and to confine exercise within tight limits set by experts who prioritized physical, mental, and moral development over victory in competition.¹³⁴ Like Koehler, Butts, and other Army training advocates, second-generation physical educators endorsed sport, but only as a complement to gymnastics and other types of disciplinary training.¹³⁵ Similarly, physical educators also struggled against the constant threat of sport’s popularity overwhelming their serious goals in physical training.

Identifying these common roots is important in light of the eventual divergence between the Army’s physical culture and American physical education. Where the Army’s institutionalized physical culture remained stable, American physical education moved into a third generation around 1906 that embraced sport to a much greater degree. Many factors propelled this move, such as the increasing influence of social science and psychology over physiology, the pressure of popular culture, the growth of professional and college sports, and the rise of the play movement and child development theory.¹³⁶ The Army’s official physical culture proved more resistant to change. Resistance stemmed partly from the decisive influence Koehler and his disciples exercised on policy, and partly from the overlap between military values and practices and the gymnastics and psychologic outcomes touted by second-generation physical education. More and more, fitness in American physical education and wider American society meant “normal” social development and a healthy body. In the Army, antebellum and even earlier values endured. Fitness in the Army meant health, strength, resilience, confidence, and discipline. Psychologic qualities were just as important as physical qualities in this model. Fitness also continued to include logic that transcended the individual: fitness was an obligation owed to the unit and nation; improving the unit’s weakest link remained the top priority; and a fit body was in part one placed in willing submission to the group’s needs.

Ultimately, the physical training manual of 1914 makes clear that the Army had come a long way in addressing Greenleaf’s warning in 1891 that the American soldier was something less than a model of physical perfection. Though Koehler and his compatriots still complained about the implementation of systematic physical training and the dangers of the field day, the Army as an institution had decisively embraced their mode of physical training. Such training seemed well suited to the perceived demands of the modern battlefield. There, mass mattered more than quality by 1914, but a higher-quality mass trumped a lower-quality mass. While the scale of war grew, loss of the “elbow touch” in combat demanded more of the individual soldier. Discipline seemed critical, given the corrosive effects of battle’s enhanced physical and psychological challenges. Yet discipline taken too far and made too strict could also squelch the individual initiative that also seemed necessary when every soldier had essentially become a skirmisher.

Producers of the Army’s physical culture promised to give American soldiers a competitive edge in this environment. By using expert knowledge of the body and mind to construct systems of training, these cultural producers planned to sculpt stronger bodies and minds than had been possible using older, incidental modes of physical training. Though not intended to make individual supermen, the new physical training augured an improved average level of fitness for whole units. Men accustomed to subordinating their bodies to their will, and their will to the unit’s needs, could enter modern battle confident of success, if not survival. Disciplined and enhanced bodies, minds, and morals—such were the assurances of this physical culture. But given the limited capacity to produce certified trainers, the growing divergence from thought and practice in American physical education, and the assumption of building from relatively high-quality human material, how truly ready was this culture for the demands of mass mobilization and modern war?