"See Him Through": Masculinity and the War Work of the Knights of Columbus, 1917–1918

In April of 1917, the Knights of Columbus leadership became alarmed. They noted that the War Department had commissioned the evangelical Protestant Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) to set up hundreds of recreation centers, known as "huts," in military training camps throughout the country. They decided to shift funds designated for fighting religious prejudice to support the U.S. war effort instead.⁴¹ Supreme Knight James K. Flaherty sent a demand to the War Department insisting that Catholics needed to have a presence at military camps too. The leadership and members of the Knights of Columbus saw their service at training camps, and later in France, as an opportunity to prove their own Americanism and challenge Protestant hegemony. To do this, they developed a strategy of questioning the manhood of the YMCA while bolstering their own, thereby revealing the shifting understandings of both Catholic and American manhood in the modernizing United States.

Historians of United States masculinity have long examined the ways the YMCA sought to define and represent Christian manhood.⁴² They have paid much less attention, however, to the ways Knights of Columbus, the largest and most well-known Catholic fraternal order, also used appeals to manly ideals as a way to define themselves, their mission, and their place in the nation. At their founding in 1882, the Knights embraced an ideal of knights who fought in the Crusades, men who stood strong against attacks against Christendom and defended the weak, but who also submitted to the authority of the church. As historian Amy Koehlinger writes, "knighthood marked the intersection of robust Catholic faith, the performance of duty, and the articulation of Catholic manhood."⁴³ This vision of manhood countered more dominant late-nineteenth century American ideals of manly independence by allowing for more of a sense of communal responsibility and deference to the hierarchy. Some of this emphasis continued early in the U.S. involvement in World War I when the Knights commissioned a poster that evoked this vision (figure 1). As the smoke of battle rises in the background, Catholic soldiers and sailors kneel, heads bowed, while holding their weapons. The focus of the image is the priest who raises the cross with his eyes looking heavenward. The American flags in the background remind the viewer that these soldiers are fighting for the United States, and thereby shows the congruence between their faith and national belonging.

Figure 1.

"The Knights of Columbus" by William Balfour Ker (1917).

Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Yet as the Knights made their case to partner with the War Department, they realized they needed new ways to express their wartime manhood, one less romantic and more pragmatic. The War Department operated under progressive, scientific principles, and had created the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA) as part of a larger effort to fight venereal disease. Raymond Fosdick, the head of the CTCA, sought civilian partners to help promote healthy exercise and entertainment as a way to steer men away from prostitutes.⁴⁴ He had worked with the YMCA on military social hygiene campaigns on the Mexican border, and when the commission was formed, he immediately asked John Mott, the YMCA's General Secretary, to serve on it. This compelled the Knights to insist that Catholics needed a presence in military training camps as well. A low-grade tension existed between the groups, and the Knights looked for opportunities to differentiate themselves favorably from the YMCA. They played into early-twentieth-century discourses that linked religiosity to femininity by casting YMCA workers as overly sentimental and too focused on morality to understand the realities soldiers faced while portraying themselves as having a connection with the common man.⁴⁵

The Knights leadership decided early on that they would minimize religion in their work. As they made plans to press their case to the War Department, one Knight, attorney Thomas Lawler, advised, "Make it a rule . . . that any soldier shall never be questioned in K.C. recreation centers as...