onduct in the
history of the world has been the development of our Army during the
past two years. Under the provisions of the Selective Service Law, this
Army has represented a cross section of American male humanity--even
more representative indeed than was intended; for in the efforts of the
Local Boards to send men who could best be spared, many found their way
into the ranks who were handicapped from the start by low mentality or
disease. What were the guiding forces which operated upon this body of
nearly four million men?

In the first place, our country entered the war with a great moral
purpose, untinged by any trace of national or individual selfishness.
We really have to go back to the Crusades to find the like. And, as
then, each man supplemented this great basal impulse with whatever was
to him the strongest incentive--religion, patriotism, pride of family or
state or regiment, the desire to excel in what all were attempting.

In the second place, thanks primarily to the vision and determination of
one man, the individual appeal to each soldier as to his personal share
in the great enterprise was upon the highest plane. We were fortunate in
having at the head of the War Department a man peculiarly sensitive to
community problems and with no small experience in their solution.
Through the centuries men had come to the belief that if their soldiers
were only valiant and disciplined in arms, it would not do to inquire
too curiously into their personal standards of conduct in other
matters--that a considerable wastage in military strength from
drunkenness and disease was inevitable. And as we all know, this wastage
has in the past sapped, not only the strength of the Army, but
afterwards the very life of the nation to which the soldier must sooner
or later return.

The Secretary of War and his lieutenants, chief among whom in this field
should be placed the Chairman of the Committee on Training Camp
Activities, Raymond B. Fosdick, approached this problem neither in the
fatalistic spirit that what has always been must continue to be, nor in
a spirit of what, for want of a better term, I may call doctrinaire
idealism. They faced the fact that among the hundreds of thousands of
young men who were to be called to the colors, there would be many whose
ears would be deaf to any abstract appeal, and many others to whom such
an appeal might be made under normal conditions, but who in fatigue or
the let-down followin