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Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star: War-time Editorials

Chapter 24: A SQUARE DEAL FOR THE TRAINING CAMPS
By Theodore Roosevelt
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About This Book

The collected editorials present a series of forceful wartime commentaries urging vigorous national mobilization and uncompromising pursuit of victory. They call for honest information, increased military preparedness including universal training, efficient production and conservation of resources, vigorous support for liberty loans and relief organizations, and firm action against pro-enemy sentiment or obstruction. Alongside practical policy prescriptions, the pieces criticize political timidity, wrongheaded compromise, and inadequate leadership, while exhorting citizens to civic responsibility and sacrifice. Occasional reflections on individual episodes and public figures illustrate broader themes of duty, patriotism, and the relationship between democratic governance and effective wartime administration.

A SQUARE DEAL FOR THE TRAINING CAMPS

October 21, 1917

The Playgrounds and Recreation Association of America has undertaken a capital work in pushing the War Camp Community Committee, of which Mr. John N. Willys, of Toledo, is chairman. The War Camp Committee work for Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Colorado has made Mr. I. R. Kirkwood chairman, and has begun an active drive to get the three-quarter of a million dollars allotted to this district out of the total of four million to be raised in the country.

The movement should receive the heartiest backing. It represents much more even than the very important work of providing amusements for the hundreds of thousands of enlisted men in the various camps, for it also has to deal with the moral and sanitary surroundings, not only in camps, but in the neighboring towns and cities. In former wars the number of men incapacitated by diseases contracted in the camps often surpassed the number incapacitated by the sickness due to the hardships and exposure at the front. This was because of lax supervision of the neighborhood moral and sanitary conditions, and also from failure to instruct the soldiers that it is a shameful and unsoldierly thing to expose themselves to disease due to indulgence in vice.

The committee is working not only in the interests of national morality and decency. It is also working in the interest of military efficiency, for it will save scores of thousands of soldiers from being shamefully incapacitated before reaching the front, and the gain to the Nation from the economical as well as the moral standpoint, after the war, will be very great.

The work of the committee will be carried on outside the camps in the adjacent communities acting in coöperation with churches, clubs, and organizations of public-spirited men and women. It will be wholly different from the work inside the camps, which is done by the Y.M.C.A., the Knights of Columbus, the Y.M.H.A., and similar bodies. In many places the local authorities already have done much work along the lines sketched by the national committee, and wherever this is the case, the national committee will surely aid the local bodies.

All good and patriotic men and women should heartily back this work to keep Uncle Sam’s soldiers clean, decent, and self-respecting; to make them better citizens and more formidable fighting men.