What was preparedness movement

Adherents believed that the United States needed to immediately build up a strong military, with the assumption that the U. The most prominent advocate of the movement was ex-President Theodore Roosevelt, who gave a number of impassioned speeches and made early commercially available wire recordings supporting the build-up. The movement became a major theme of the Presidential election, pitting incumbent Democrat Woodrow Wilson against Republican Charles Evans Hughes.

Hughes criticized Wilson for not taking adequate preparations to face a conflict. A number of cities throughout the U. Postcard of Preparedness parade down Michigan Avenue, June, Advocates proposed a national service program. Young men, 18 years old, 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.

The UMT proposal failed, but it fostered the Plattsburg Movement, a series of summer training camps that in and hosted some 40, men, largely young businessmen and professionals. The camps were based in Plattsburg, New York. Postcard of the camp at Plattsburg, Company F, From a contemporary account of training in Plattsburg:. New York The Pullman delegation to the Plattsburg training camp is now settled down to hard work.

This is an ideal location for the purpose-two mountain ranges in sight, plenty of rough country for maneuvers and an army post alongside the camp. The thirty men sent to camp by the Pullman Company had a special sleeper on the Plattsburg special. Splendid meals were served enroute and everyone enjoyed the trip. Suggestions by labor unions that talented working class youth be invited to Plattsburg 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 is saw as politicized, localistic, poorly armed, ill trained, too inclined to idealistic crusading as against Spain in , 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 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.

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.

In fact neither the army nor navy was in shape for war. Despite the flood of new weapons systems unveiled in the war in Europe, the army paid scant attention. For example, it was making no studies of trench warfare, poison gas or tanks, and was unfamiliar with the rapid evolution of air tactics.

The Democrats in Congress tried to cut the military budget in The preparedness movement effectively exploited the surge of outrage over the Lusitania in May, , forcing the Democrats to promise some improvements to the military and naval forces. Wilson, less fearful of the navy, embraced a long-term building program designed to make the fleet the equal of the Royal Navy by the mids.

The facts of submarine warfare which necessitated destroyers, not battleships and the possibilities of imminent war with Germany or with Britain, for that matter , were simply ignored. Wilson's program the army touched off a firestorm. Garrison's proposals not only outraged the localistic politicians of both parties, they also offended a strongly held belief shared by the liberal wing of the progressive movement. They felt that warfare always had a hidden economic motivation.

Specifically, they warned the chief warmongers were New York bankers like J. Morgan with millions at risk, profiteering munition makers like Bethlehem Steel, which made armor, and DuPont, which made powder and unspecified industrialists searching for global markets to control.

Antiwar critics blasted them. These selfish special interests were too powerful, especially, Senator LaFollette noted, in the conservative wing of the Republican Party. The only road to peace was disarmament, reiterated Bryan.

Garrison's plan unleashed the fiercest battle in peacetime history over the relationship of military planning to national goals. In peacetime, War Department arsenals and navy yards manufactured nearly all munitions that lacked civilian uses, including warships, artillery, naval guns, and shells.

The large-scale encampments were referred to as the "female Plattsburg" movement. While both camps focused on military preparedness training for women, life was somewhat different between the two camps. The Washington Post noted that Hewitt's camp cultivated "the sincerity, the practicality, the real spirit of self-sacrifice which seemed…conspicuously lacking" at the Chevy Chase camp. While Hewitt may have created a more severe environment at her training camp, perhaps the most conspicuous difference between the two camps was the uniform.

While the vast majority of civilian and military uniforms for women at the time, including Army and Navy uniforms, consisted of ankle-length skirts, the motto at Hewitt's camp was "no skirts allowed. The women who joined the Emergency Services Corps and First National Service School carved out a place in the preparedness movement alongside the men at Plattsburg.

Yet in joining the "female Plattsburg" movement, they were being tested. The urgency for these women to use their newly cultivated skills and prove that women were capable of this kind of work is perhaps best captured in a Washington Times article published on July 26, "The eyes of the entire country are upon them to see if they are going to put the training they received into practical use, and they must not fail, lest the work of the school will be unjustly criticized.

Though Hewitt proclaimed that she felt women did not belong in the trenches, it was her hope that should the U. And serve they did. Hewitt worked for the Ordnance Department in Washington, D. Hewitt's younger sister, Lucy, worked overseas in France as a nurse with the American Committee for Devastated France. The campers, and hundreds of other American women, went on to serve at home and overseas , both as civilian volunteers and members of the military.

They were nurses, motor drivers, telephone operators, reconstruction aides, office workers, farmers, and countless other jobs that supported the war effort and redefined women's place in society. As Margaret Vining, Curator of Armed Forces History at the National Museum of American History, notes: "Of the many ways the Great War divided the past from the future, none was more significant than the reordered place of women in society. Skip to main content.

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