Americans All!: Foreign-born Soldiers in World War I

CHAPTER 3. The Camp Gordon Plan: Organizing and Training Foreign-born Troops

The Camp Gordon Plan 67 C H A P T E R 3 The Camp Gordon Plan Organizing and Training Foreign-born Troops When freshly recruited soldiers reported to army camps, the military was shocked to learn the extent of illiteracy among its new troops, including those with long American ancestries. The General Staff estimated that almost  percent of the drafted men tested “were unable to read the Constitution of the United States or an American newspaper, or to write a letter in English to the folks at home.”1 Many more soldiers were merely “technically literate,” since they had mastered only the basics of reading at the elementary school level. Communication difficulties were complicated by thousands of immigrant soldiers from forty-six different nationalities who could not speak, read, write, or clearly understand the English language. Thefirstdraftalonebroughtin,immigrants.Capt.EdwardR.Padgett of the General Staff reported, “not more than one in a hundred [foreignborn soldiers] knew the English language well enough to understand the There are thousands and thousands of foreign-speaking soldiers in our army camps, and thousands more will arrive with the coming draft.We know what to do with them now, how to weed out the tares from the wheat, how to reach the best in the heart of the alien soldier and develop it, how to loosen his tongue and to teach him the principles of American citizenship. And we know, too, that he will respond to such treatment. We know that this so-called “Camp Gordon Plan” is the one which will add thousands and thousands of virile, efficient soldiers to our armies on the battle lines. —Capt. Edward R. Padgett, October,  68 AMERICANS ALL! instructions necessary to make them first-class fighting men.”2 Some army training camps claimed much higher numbers of non-English speaking soldiers. Camp Gordon, Georgia, an infantry replacement camp, reported that “ percent [of new recruits] had neither learned English nor obtained even the most elementary knowledge of the art of war.” Camp Gordon’s nd “All-American” Division, drafted from many different areas of the nation, included a significant of foreign-born troops. In fact, almost half of its approximately , soldiers “were fairly fresh from Ellis Island, New York.”3 To exacerbate the situation, the military discovered that the morale of foreign-born soldiers had been badly shaken by the difficulty in communication and through the neglect and ignorance of some of the trainingcamp commanders.The military newspaper Trench and Camp reported that some of the ethnic groups “quarrel and bicker with one another: old scores from the pages of history were reopened . . . based on politics or region [and] began to spring up and disrupt the scant harmony that did exist.”4 The War Department took great pains to evaluate and determine the best way to deal with the diverse cultures and languages found within their ranks. Much like the civilians who applied scientific-management techniques to reorder urban-industrial America, the military reformers used bureaucratic organizational skills that recognized environmental and situational factors as the roots of the immigrant soldiers’ difficulties. Similar to civilian scientific-management reformers who utilized professional experts, set standards, streamlined systems, and conducted timesaving studies in order to reorganize the urban-industrial nation, the War Department assigned experts to study the difficulties of the foreign-born men. This group interviewedimmigrantsoldiers,compiledstatisticaldata,implementednew management techniques, and developed rational, pragmatic solutions to the problems faced by immigrant soldiers. Their goal was to create an efficient fighting force and make “non-English-speaking soldiers . . . a permanent part of the camp machinery.” Military leaders afterward set out to educate camp commanders and officers about the benefits found through the newly developed policies and assured them that “men of foreign races” generallywere“readypupils,capableof concentrationandquickprogress.”5 In January, , the War Department created of the Foreign-speaking Soldier Subsection (FSS) to assist in the training of immigrant soldiers. For the first five months thereafter, the FSS reported to the Military Intelligence SectionunderMaj.RalphVanDeman.VanDemangraduatedfromHarvard in  and received a medical degree from the Miami Medical School in Cincinnati, Ohio, in . His career in the military began as an army sur- The Camp Gordon Plan 69 geon, and in  he attended Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth ,Kansas.VanDemanbecameanintelligenceofficerinandserved in the Spanish-American War and the Philippine War. After attending the Army War College in , he went on a secret mission to China and supplied Pres. Theodore...