The Preparedness Movement was a campaign led by former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, Leonard Wood, and former President Theodore Roosevelt to strengthen the U.S. military after the outbreak of World War I. Wood advocated a summer training school for reserve officers to be held in Plattsburgh, New York.
The movement was at first opposed by President Woodrow Wilson, who believed the United States should be in a position of neutrality in order to broker a compromise peace in Europe. Several organizations were formed around the Preparedness Movement and held parades and organized opposition to Wilson's policies. After the Lusitania was sunk by German U-boats on May 7, 1915, and Pancho Villa launched his raid against Columbus, New Mexico, Wilson's attitude changed. The United States Congress passed the National Defense Act of 1916 in June 1916 to authorize an increase in the size of the U.S. Army from 100,000 men in 1916 to 200,000 on active duty and 400,000 in the U.S. National Guard, by 1921. It also padded a large long-term increase in the U.S. Navy.
The movement
In 1915, a strong "preparedness" movement emerged. It argued that the United States needed to immediately build up strong naval and land forces for defensive purposes; an unspoken assumption was that the United States would fight sooner or later. General Leonard Wood (still on active duty after serving a term as Chief of Staff of the Army), ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, and former secretaries of war Elihu Root and Henry Stimson were the driving forces behind the preparedness movement, along with many of the nation's most prominent bankers, industrialists, lawyers and scions of prominent families. There emerged an "Atlanticist" foreign policy establishment, a group of influential Americans drawn primarily from upper-class lawyers, bankers, academics, and politicians of the Northeastern US, committed to a strand of Anglophile internationalism.John P. Finnegan, Against the Specter of a Dragon: The Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917 (1975)
A representative leader was Paul D. Cravath, one of New York's foremost corporation lawyers. For Cravath, in his mid-fifties when the war began, the conflict served as an epiphany, sparking an interest in international affairs that dominated his remaining career. Fiercely Anglophile, he strongly supported US intervention in the war and hoped that close Anglo-American cooperation would be the guiding principle of post-war international organization.Priscilla Roberts, "Paul D. Cravath, the First World War, and the Anglophile Internationalist Tradition." Australian Journal of Politics and History 2005 51(2): 194–215. Fulltext in Ebsco
The preparedness movement had a "realistic" philosophy of world affairs—it believed that economic strength and military muscle were more decisive than idealistic crusades focused on causes like democracy and national self-determination. Emphasizing the weak state of national defenses, the movement showed that America's 100,000-man army, even augmented by the 112,000 National Guardsmen, was outnumbered 20 to one by the German Army, which was drawn from a smaller population. Reform to them meant UMT or "universal military training", i.e. conscription. Preparedness backers proposed a national service program under which the 600,000 men who turned 18 every year would be required to spend six months in military training, and afterwards be assigned to reserve units. The small regular army would primarily serve as a training agency.
This proposal ultimately failed, but it fostered the Plattsburg Movement, a series of summer training camps that in 1915 and 1916 hosted some 40,000 men largely of elite social classes, and the later Citizens' Military Training Camps that trained some 400,000 men from 1921 to 1940.
Opposition
The Socialist Party was a bulwark of opposition to the preparedness movement.Elizabeth McKillen, "Pacifist Brawn and Silk‐Stocking Militarism: Labor, Gender, and Antiwar Politics, 1914–1918." Peace & Change 33.3 (2008): 388–425. Antimilitarists and pacifists—strong in Protestant churches and women's groups—protested the plan would make the United States resemble Germany, which required two years' compulsory military service from every male citizen.Susan Zeiger, "The schoolhouse vs. the armory: US teachers and the campaign against militarism in the schools, 1914–1918." Journal of Women's History 15.2 (2003): 150–179.
Another source of criticism of the Preparedness Movement and particularly its demands for "100% Americanism" came, quite understandably, from those increasingly dubbed Hyphenated Americans; America's enormous number of White ethnic immigrants and their descendants. Criticism from White ethnic circles occasionally argued that "100% Americanism" really meant Anglophilia, as particularly demonstrated by escalating demands for both the "Special Relationship" and for tolerating only the English language in the United States. In a letter published on 16 July 1916 in the Minneapolis Journal, Edward Goldbeck, a member of Minnesota's traditionally very large German-American community, announced that his people would, "abandon the hyphen", as soon as English-Americans did so. Meanwhile, Goldbeck argued, "Let the exodus of Anglo-Americans start at once! Let all those people go who think that America is a new England!" Carl. H. Chrislock (1991), The Watchdog of Loyalty: The Minnesota Commission of Public Safety during World War I, Minnesota Historical Society Press. pp. 21, 337.
Furthermore, in June 1917, anti-war essayist Randolph Bourne also raised the possibility that the Preparedness Movement may have been one of the multiple covert operations used by both French and British Intelligence propagandists in order to bring America into the war against the Central Powers, "The nerve of the war feeling centered ... In the richer and older classes of the Atlantic seaboard, and was keenest where there were French or English business and particularly social connections. The sentiment then spread out across the country as a class-phenonemon, touching everywhere those upper-class elements in each section who identified themselves with this Eastern ruling group... In every community, it was the least liberal and least democratic elements among whom the Preparedness and later the war sentiment was found." Carl. H. Chrislock (1991), The Watchdog of Loyalty: The Minnesota Commission of Public Safety during World War I, Minnesota Historical Society Press. p. 22.
While defenders of the Movement retorted that military "service" was an essential duty of citizenship, and that without the commonality provided by such service the nation would splinter into antagonistic ethnic groups. One spokesman promised that UMT would become "a real melting pot, under which the fire is hot enough to fuse the elements into one common mass of Americanism."Chambers, To Raise an Army pp. 92–93. Furthermore, they promised, the discipline and training would make for a better-paid work force. The hostility to military service was so strong at the time it is difficult to imagine such a program winning approval; indeed, even in World War II, when Stimson as Secretary of War proposed a similar program of universal peacetime service, he was defeated.John Whiteclay Chambers, To raise an army: The draft comes to modern America (1987). pp. 96–98 Underscoring its commitment, the preparedness movement set up and funded its own summer training camps (at Plattsburgh, New York, and other sites) where 40,000 college alumni became physically fit, learned to march and shoot, and ultimately provided the cadre of a wartime officer corps.John Garry Clifford, The Citizen Soldiers: The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1913–1920 (2015).Very few young men from wealthy or prominent families considered a career in the army or navy then or at any time in American history. The highest social background of cadets, exemplified by George Patton, West Point 1909, and Lucius Clay, West Point 1918, was oldest son of a locally prominent family.
Suggestions by labor unions that talented working-class youth be invited to Plattsburgh were ignored. The preparedness movement was distant not only from the working classes but also from the middle class leadership of most of small town America. It had had little use for the National Guard, which it saw as politicized, localistic, poorly armed, ill trained, too inclined to idealistic crusading (as against Spain in 1898), and too lacking in understanding of world affairs. The National Guard on the other hand was securely rooted in state and local politics, with representation from a very broad cross section of American society. The National Guard was one of the nation's few institutions that (at least in some northern states) accepted African-Americans on an equal footing with whites.
Democrats
The Democratic Party saw the preparedness movement as a threat. Roosevelt, Root and Wood were prospective Republican presidential candidates. More subtly, the Democrats were rooted in localism that appreciated the National Guard, and the voters were hostile to the rich and powerful in the first place. Working with the Democrats who controlled Congress, Wilson was able to sidetrack the preparedness forces. Army and Navy leaders were forced to testify before Congress to the effect that the nation's military was in excellent shape. Wilson had to resist the demands for preparedness because there was a powerful anti-preparedness element of the party, led by William Jennings Bryan, women,Frances H. Early, A World without War: How U.S. Feminists and Pacifists Resisted World War I. (1997). Protestant churches,Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (2012), pp. 240–245. the American Federation of Labor,Simeon Larson, "The American Federation of Labor and the Preparedness Controversy." Historian 37.1 (1974): 67–81. and Southern Democrats such as Claude Kitchin, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. John Morton Blum, a biographer of Wilson, wrote: "Wilson's long silence about preparedness had permitted such a spread and such a hardening of antipreparedness attitudes within his party and across the nation that when he came in at late last to his task, neither Congress nor the country was amenable to much persuasion."John Morton Blum, Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality (1956) p. 121.
In July 1915, Wilson instructed the Army and Navy to formulate plans for expansion. In November, he asked for far less than the experts said was needed, seeking an army of 400,000 volunteers at a time when European armies were 10 times as large. Congress ignored the proposal and the Army remained at 100,000 soldiers. Wilson was severely handicapped by the weaknesses of his cabinet. According to Blum, his Secretaries of the Navy and War displayed a "confusion, inattention to industrial preparation, and excessive deference to peacetime mores [that] dangerously retarded the development of the armed services."John Morton Blum, The Republican Roosevelt (2nd ed. 1977), p. 153. Even more, Wilson was constrained by the traditional American non-interventionism. Wilson believed that a massive military mobilization could only take place after a declaration of war, even though that meant a long delay in sending troops to Europe. Many Democrats felt that no American soldiers would be needed, only American money and munitions.David Esposito, David. "Political and Institutional Constraints on Wilson's Defense Policy." Presidential Studies Quarterly 26.4 (1996): 1114–1125. Wilson had more success in his request for a dramatic expansion of the Navy. Congress passed the Naval Act of 1916, which encapsulated the planning by the Navy's professional officers to build a fleet of top-rank status, but it would take several years to become operational.Arthur Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (1954) p. 179.