Straight America, a call to national service

by Frances Kellor

The American factory and the American city have failed as a melting pot.—The dog tent may succeed. It may become the best school of practical civics there is—a place where all Americans can meet together for the common good of America.

It may restore the balance to our triumvirate of the Declaration of Independence—Liberty, opportunity, and obligation. We have demanded and used the first two—we have neglected the third.

The civilian training-camp movement, which started at Plattsburg and is now continued at Fort Oglethorpe, is the biggest civic movement in America, and when crystallized along the lines of the Swiss system, will become the dynamo for national progress in America. There can be no question but that America is desperately in need of some national civic movement which is in its interest alone and which represents nothing but itself.

America is full of undisciplined, native-born young men and has besides a large transfusion of still raw foreigners. It could not bestow any greater favor upon its young men than to give all of them the benefits of military methods of drilling and education. It would “set them up” physically; they would acquire a knowledge of hygiene, sanitation, prevention of disease, etc., and they would also learn, to their great advantage, obedience, promptness, precision, regularity of habits, abstinence, economy, avoidance of waste, and respect for authority, all of which would make them more competent for their daily tasks—whatever they may be. Germany perhaps furnishes the best example of a well-governed people, but what the world needs is to govern itself, just as the best men are the men who exercise self-control.

Many of our young men, in their desire to remain “independent,” are inefficient, unreliable, and irresponsible; they are disobedient, headstrong, or rebellious under authority; they are discourteous, careless of obligations, and indifferent to broken promises. The average boy is prompt with excuses and self-justification under discipline—and this has been seen most conspicuously in our nation’s attitude in the present war.

Inevitably all of this leads to slovenly work; to indifferent citizenship; to play in which entertainment, not participation, is the rule; and to a shifting of responsibility in all walks of life. In the supplementing of individual by social ideals; in the transition from individual to social conscience; in the great change from personal to social control of many individual affairs, we have somehow lost the finer traits of character and those ancient Christian virtues which make for strong nations as well as for strong men.

I believe the training camp is unparalleled in its power to develop social consciousness and social control, and to show men the means by which they can work together for a common end. America needs sportsmanship in the best sense of the word, and the training camp can give it. America needs the abolition of its foolish class lines, now drawn in industry and in society; emphasized among races and by creeds, and nowhere worse than in the army itself. There is no place for it in the training camp. American industry has failed to Americanize the foreign-born citizens through its pay envelope; the training camp may succeed through the dog tent.

In our idea of universal service we should not stop with the training camp. There are hundreds of thousands of men and women, with a desire to serve, that cannot go to the training camp. We have throughout the country to-day a splendid expression of the desire to serve.

I believe that every citizen of this republic, male or female, and of any age after childhood, should have a regular scheme of duties, a regular enlistment for service of a definite nature suited to his or her status of capacity, which he must be prepared to render upon demand, and which he or she must keep in training to deliver. To work out the plans for such service for men and women alike, whether in motor corps, red cross camps, health service, or in many other ways, may well be the charge of citizens’ defense organizations, but they should be related to the civilian training camp to maintain standards and methods and unity.

The defense organizations, some fifty of national name and scope, are missing their great opportunity. They are getting people to sign pledge cards focusing attention, as it should be focused, on legislation and party programs. But they are not lining up the citizenship of the country in definite citizenship service. And by their lack of coöperation and lack of actual information about one another’s activities, they are further splitting up and sectionalizing sentiment where the real necessity is to collect and focus it. All over the country, in this place or that, groups of citizens are trying in a promising way to form definite, practical, little associations for training and defense. Aside from the training-camp movement now so hopefully developed, business men are joining together to try to settle upon uniform ways of coöperating with training camps and the national guard by making it possible for their employees to profit by these and to render national service in this way. People that own motors or own or control motor trucks are getting together to see how they could work out the transportation service which experts agree would be an absolute necessity in case of war in this country. Rifle clubs are being formed, business men are training one night a week in armories, women are forming red cross branches with definite courses of instruction in many cities, schoolboys are being sent to camps, suburbanites are organizing to breed police and army dogs, city tradesmen are organizing parades.