Vol. XXXIII, No. 3 WASHINGTON 



March, 1918 



THE 



MATDONAL 

 GEOGff§A« 

 AGAZD 



THE HEALTH AND MORALE OF AMERICA'S 



CITIZEN ARMY* 



Personal Observations of Conditions in Our Soldier Cities 



by a Former Commander-in-Chief of the 



United States Army and Navy 



By William Howard Taft 



EARLY last winter disquieting re- 

 ports gained circulation concern- 

 ing the conditions in our National 

 Army cantonments and with regard to 

 the morale of the drafted men. 



According to these reports, a large per- 

 centage of the men would be glad to 

 leave their camps and return to their 

 homes. It was said that they did not 

 understand the issues of the war; that 

 they did not think it necessary to send an 

 army to France. 



Dr. John R. Mott, the General Secre- 

 tary of the Young Men's Christian Asso- 

 ciation of the United States, and one of 

 the great men of this generation, sent 

 word to me of these reports, received 

 from agents of the Association detailed 

 for work among the drafted men. 



While there was neither sedition nor 

 mutiny among the men, Dr. Mott deemed 

 it of the highest importance that some 

 one should go to them to explain why we 

 were in the war, why an army should be 

 sent to France, and why it was necessary 

 to fight this war through as a battle for 

 Christian civilization. 



* Lecture delivered before the National Geo- 

 graphic Society, in Washington, D. C, March 

 15, 1918. 



He said there were sixteen canton- 

 ments, one of which, Camp Lewis, at 

 American Lake, on the Pacific coast, I 

 could not reach, but the other fifteen he 

 asked me to visit and to speak at length 

 on the subject, twice a day, to the soldiers 

 in each camp. Subsequently, Camp Dix, 

 at Wrightstown, N. J., was excluded 

 from my list because of a quarantine, and 

 there were substituted Camp Sheridan, a 

 National Guard camp, at Montgomery, 

 Ala., presumably because it was the Ohio 

 National Guard, and the naval canton- 

 ment at the Great Lakes, north of Chi- 

 cago, where 25,000 men were in the 

 course of preparation for the navy. 



I doubted my power to attract the at- 

 tention of the drafted men to the issues 

 and to convince them, but I felt it my 

 duty to go, if men like Dr. Mott and Mr. 

 William Sloane, the president of the 

 army branch of the Young Men's Chris- 

 tian Association, thought it would be 

 helpful, as they said they did. 



Accordingly, on New Year's Day I vis- 

 ited Camp Grant, at Rockford, 111., and 

 spoke four times there to audiences of 

 3,500 men each. Thence I went to Camp 

 Dodge, near Des Moines, Iowa, and spoke 

 there to similar audiences five times. 



