Why Mistreat the Armed Forces?

by AGNES E. MEYER

1

DURING two years of almost constant travel throughout the country in the war years, I saw army camps, naval stations, and airfields, as well as factories of every description, whose orderliness, discipline, and efficiency made me proud of our country. But from those scenes of technological skill, perfect coordination, and expert leadership I walked out into a social chaos so appalling, inhuman, and disgraceful that I was ashamed of our country. Of course, there were exceptions. Some army installations and some of the new factories were not perfection. Occasionally I found communities, especially in the later period of the war, that were struggling heroically to provide the warworkers or the military personnel with the basic amenities of life. But as a rule I lived day in, day out, in war centers where whole populations were deteriorating physically and morally.

Belatedly government and voluntary agencies did what they could to improve the worst situations. But we never learned how to handle either the mobilization or the demobilization of the home front. When the war ended we were socially as unprepared for peace as we had been for war.

What was the basic reason for this disparity between the expert management, the conservation of human and material resources, that characterized our military installations and factories, and the disregard for human values, for individual dignity and common ordinary decency, that so often prevailed at the very doors of these institutions?

The contrast between our efficient camps and factories and the social chaos that surrounded them during the war was due to the fact that we are technologically the most expert nation in the world but we haven’t begun to learn how to apply that technological skill to the solution of our social problems. We are a confused people because we are split personalities. We have forgotten that democracy must live as it thinks, and think as it lives.

The split in our civilization between science and society, between the disciplined expert and the undisciplined civilian, between mechanical efficiency and social drift —in short, between authority and freedom — this is the gap that yawns wide between our military institutions and the people as a whole. The tensions, irritations, and open hostility which exist wherever the armed forces and civilian communities come to grips are just one manifestation of this split that runs through our whole culture. It will never disappear until both sides realize what creates the impasse. The military accuse the civilians of “apathy,” the civilians speak contemptuously of “brass hats.” Unless both groups realize why their mutual prejudices are so deep, it is futile to make a purely moral and patriotic appeal to them to cooperate with each other.

To reconcile the military and civilian mentality, our military leaders must accept their social responsibilities; and the civilian population, not only near the camps but throughout the nation, must develop more efficient methods of self-government. Both the military and the civilian leaders have the difficult task of bringing our technical and social sciences closer together. Since we shall be obliged to protect our country with armed might for years to come, long-term planning for intelligent, cooperative endeavor is essential to the safety of our country and of Western civilization.

How then are we to begin the process of successful military-civilian cooperation? How are we to overcome the mutual distrust that now exists between these two radically different attitudes and disciplines? How are we going to achieve mutual understanding as a basis for constructive action?

Let us begin our analysis with the social responsibilities of the military. The greatest cause of friction in the military zones has long been the problem of housing for married personnel.

Our war experiences, our urban slum areas, and the present lack of decent homes for military personnel in many of our communities have shown us again and again that there is no other single factor which can undermine family life and the whole social order more thoroughly than bad housing conditions. In several camp communities during the war, babies died like so many flies, children became ill or warped in character, families were broken up, delinquency and crime were encouraged merely because perfectly decent Americans were forced to live like cattle.

According to the reports on the present military housing situation gathered by the President’s Committee on Religion and Welfare in the Armed Forces, those same conditions and those same results can still be found in many of our camp communities. Unsanitary housing, shacks without toilet facilities and running water, and frightful trailer slums are in use: thousands of officers commute as much as 75 miles twice a day because there is no place to live near the military establishments. Here are some of the comments from army, navy, and air force commands: “Ten people lost their lives in army structures last year.”“Army personnel live in houses that are unsafe and unsanitary and pay exorbitant rents for them.” “The divorce rate is staggering.” “We send men out to fly complicated airplanes with troubled minds. ”

If during peacetime the armed forces are not going to provide adequate housing for their married career personnel, they might as well fold up and forget about national defense. For the married men are precisely those most important to the armed forces. Junior officers and key noncommissioned officers, the professional cadre upon whom the commanding officers must rely for the training of the recruits and for the whole discipline and morale of the ranks, are resigning in droves, and the reasons most frequently given are intolerable housing, the danger that the family might break up or the children suffer permanent harm of a physical or emotional nature. The navy receives hundreds of requests every month for such hardship discharges, and the air force estimates that 59 per cent of all married enlisted personnel are dissatisfied with their living arrangements.

We are spending huge sums to train new recruits to take the place of the married officers who resign. If the replacements have to face the appalling hardships of their predecessors, they too will resign as soon as their tour of duty terminates. This is sheer waste of energy, talent, and money.

But even more important is the question of morale, for this turnover of officers is bound to undermine our whole military organization. I think it was Napoleon who said that an army cannot march on an empty stomach. It is becoming equally clear that a peacetime army cannot live without housing any more than it can march without food. If we try to build up a military force by breaking up family life, we shall soon have neither an army strong enough to defend this country nor a country that is worth defending.

And into this morally rotten situation we have the hypocrisy to send chaplains to preach the sanctity of marriage and the basic importance to society of family life. It would be far better, if we have to choose between the two, to save the chaplains’ salaries and use the money to build homes. For as one navy chaplain said: “The primary obstacle to normal, decent living in the navy is lack of adequate housing facilities.”

It is equally futile to preach about cooperative military-civilian relationship when the competitive scrambling for the small amount of available housing space only serves to strain relationships between the two. Cupidity and rent gouging inevitably become the order of the day. The military are enraged by civilian profiteering, and the civilians are indignant because the armed forces are throwing their whole community into disorder.

This horrible impasse cannot be blamed on either of the two groups. The local commandant and the local civilian officials are helpless however hard they may try to alleviate the human suffering that is now a commonplace in their environments. Help must come from the top echelons of the armed services and from Congressional legislation.

2

FOR the first time our military leaders are responsible for a large peacetime system of national defense. The fact that they have not thought through this totally new situation and the social responsibilities it entails can be demonstrated in many ways. The very form of the military budget reflects a lack of serious concentration upon the housing problem. For the fiscal year 1950 this budget carries an item of $430,000,000 for all construction needs, depots, airfields, administration buildings, and family quarters. That housing is not a separate item is in itself revealing, especially in the light of the fact that the total sum allotted to over-all construction represents only a small portion of the funds required to meet the present housing shortage.

But Congress will have no confidence in a request for adequate funds for military housing unless the estimates for the combined forces are made by people who know what they are talking about. The Army Engineers claimed that it would cost $20,500 to build a 1080-square-foot row-house until the Bureau of the Budget paired down their estimate. Why, then, could the Atomic Energy Commission build excellent family quarters for $10,000, just about half as much?

Moreover, each of the three services computes its estimates on a different basis, each service has a different program, and each has a multiplicity of agencies concerned with housing. Only a combined drive for housing funds, based upon careful estimates and sound principles of administrative procedure, can convince the Congress that housing is a basic need of military preparedness. Therefore, it is essential that a team of expert housing consultants be appointed to unify the housing policies of the three services and to draw up a long-range housing program for the military establishment. Obviously the number of housing units now needed cannot all be built at once. But it should be possible to determine the maximum appropriation that can be expected annually and then to formulate a fiveor ten-year construction plan.

Let us also call the attention of the National Military Establishment to the fact that since their total budget of $14,765,000,000 was voted by the House of Representatives, the costs for food and clothing, for steel and other construction materials, have decreased at least 10 per cent. Why can’t a building program for the combined services begin at once with the enormous sums that will be saved next year in the purchase of all supplies?

If the military began a bold and vigorous building program, it would speedily change the attitude of private capital in the adjacent communities. Local contractors and builders have been reluctant to finance construction projects for army posts that only too often proved to be temporary. A military building program would assure the local businessmen that the near-by installations were to be permanent. Then private capital would not only feel safe in entering the field, but probably would put in competitive bids to take over as much of the program as it could get.

For the rapacity which many communities have shown in their treatment of military personnel is due largely to the uncertainty of military plans and to the lack of a long-range policy by Congress on military defense. If a town gets the feeling that a camp may be moved, the desire to profit while the going is good seizes upon everybody. Therefore, stability in peacetime military installations is a prerequisite for stability in military-civilian relations. With adequate housing for married military personnel, constructed by public and private coöperation, the most fundamental cause of friction between the peacetime armed services and the civilian communities would be eliminated.

3

THE local communities also have a long way to go before they can handle with maximum efficiency the numerous problems that arise when vast numbers of young recruits are added to their normal population. With the exception of small towns or cities, most American communities have enough public and private education, health, and welfare agencies to meet any problems, provided these activities are skillfully coordinated with one an-

other, with the Federal and state agencies, and with the efforts of the numerous voluntary national organizations.

This reorganization cannot take place in a vacuum. There must be a visible hub where all people, including the soldiers and their families, can go for help, and where the wealth of local community services, whether public or private, can be put at the service of the individual without loss of time or energy. The big communities can save themselves much work and save the soldiers many a heartache if they will establish a Community Service Center similar to the Veterans Centers of the post-war period, where the soldier can go for information or advice and where the citizens or agencies that want to be of help to the soldier can find out how best to do it. At the head of this Community Service Center should be a skilled director to keep the competitive agencies and talents coöperating smoothly and harmoniously, a man who knows the city, its facilities, and their functions, and who can direct applicants to the proper agency.

The two main objectives must be to help local civilians and military families work out a satisfactory program of living and to make them feel that they are not alone in this struggle. These objectives can be greatly facilitated and community initiative reinvigorated by an efficient clearinghouse or Service Center, situated not in some courthouse basement but in attractive quarters on Main Street where everybody can readily find it.

Unless the communities make such efforts to create an orderly government, all the endeavors of the U.S.O., the Red Cross, the Y.M.C.A., the Y.W.C.A., and other national voluntary organizations are just so much froth on a seething cauldron.

Another major focal point for improving the coördination of community welfare services is the public school. When thousands of young married officers and privates invade the local community, it means that the school population is rapidly multiplied. We still have 395 school districts where the children of warworkers and military personnel are exposed to fire and health hazards in overcrowded temporary shacks, some of which Senator Neely recently described as “too poor to be used for any animal.”Now more families are pouring into these distressed school districts. “It is only reasonable,”said Senator Magnuson, “to require that maximum attention be given by the Federal government to school districts where the Federal government itself has the greatest responsibility.”

The bipartisan bill before the Congress, sponsored by ten Senators, authorizing a first year’s appropriation of $150,000,000 for school construction in these areas, should be passed at once. We are now reaping a harvest of crime and delinquency because the schools were shamefully neglected during the last war. But buildings alone will not solve the problem of education in the hurly-burly of these military zones. Their moral atmosphere can only be fortified if all the religious, recreation, health, and educational resources are combined to make the school a community center with a varied program that will help not only the children but their parents to lead happy, useful, socially integrated lives. The prime objective—a decent standard of living for the whole community — will not have enough driving force behind it unless we Americans recognize that a stable, orderly society is the sine qua non of any practical and cultural achievement.

An efficiently organized community is the only protection against the greatest menace with which camp communities are eternally faced. A big military establishment brings a sudden influx of wealth to the adjacent cities, towns, and villages. And wherever big sums of money are at stake, there the forces of evil collect like vultures over carrion. These evils are three in number and they always go together—prostitution, gambling, and liquor. The power and reach of these underground forces are appalling. An illustration of their long arms is the fact that the Nevada legislature not long ago voted to legalize prostitution. Fortunately the governor had the courage to veto the bill.

Don’t let anybody tell you that since prostitution cannot be eliminated it is best to segregate it in certain areas. During the war the Public Health Service, coöperating with state and local authorities, closed houses of prostitution near all the big encampments, and after a short period the venereal disease rate dropped markedly. If you condone the existence of organized prostitution, the gambling and liquor rackets also spring up right and left. The whole community then becomes infected with vice, greed, and moral corruption.

During the war, I saw such communities in which the city officials, the army public relations officials, even the churches, were dominated by vice rings. The only time my veracity and good will were openly attacked was when seven clergymen whose town I attempted to clean up by a detailed description of this hell-hole were inveigled — and the local Congressman was inveigled — into publishing a letter in the Congressional Record stating that I was a liar whose poisonous pen had bespattered the fair name of their beautiful city. Such an attack could not be ignored. Fortunately I had as usual understated the conditions. So I wrote a real description of what went on in that city, ending with its V.D. rate, which was four times our American average per thousand, and put the article into the Congressional Record. I never heard from the seven clergymen again.

One of the many statements given me during the war by experts on the subject of organized prostitution was that of Mayor William F. Devlin of Seattle, Washington, a former police court judge, who fought and won a tough battle to clean up his city: “It is my contention that houses of prostitution should be closed. It is the only solution of the problem. I am mindful of the fact that many people, even some in authority in military and civilian life, are not of the same opinion, but I have yet to find the experienced man in the medical or military field who has studied this problem who takes a contrary view.

“ Because of the money involved, every apparently feasible argument will be used by the profiteers to prove why houses of prostitution cannot be closed, all of which are based not upon the merits or demerits of the case but upon their interest in the continuation of the practice. That leads us to a very difficult problem, namely, that good, lawabiding people are often deceived by these arguments. Such people even pass on these specious arguments to others in the belief that they are true.

“I hope that in this battle to control venereal disease by closing the houses of prostitution we shall be making a permanent contribution to the Nation’s program, for in my opinion what is good for the soldier is good for the civilian too. While this problem is vitally important now, the attack on it should be a permanent program carried on to make a better civilization after the war.”

You cannot achieve a solution of this problem without enforcement by an honest police force that has the power to control prostitution in taverns, dance halls, and on the streets. Nor can you rely on the military V.D. rate as a sign that the situation is under control. That rate, thanks to penicillin, has been lowered everywhere except in the military installations near the Mexican border. The only defense is a well-organized community that is eternally vigilant and ready at all times to defeat the scavengers that profit from vice.

4

THE best answer to destructive social influences is wholesome recreation that will keep down the number of street-corner soldiers — the boys who just hang around because there isn’t a single thing for them to do. The first requirement is plenty of attractive, clean eating places where sanitary conditions are under constant inspection and the food is decent without being exorbitant in price. Don’t let the men get disgruntled because they spend most of their leisure time standing in line for a meal.

The management of the local U.S.O. facilities is the next most important item. During the war the efficiency of this organization was very uneven. I have been in big U.S.O. buildings that felt like morgues. The troops hated and avoided them. Unless the people in charge of the U.S.O. recreation quarters like their work, know how to win local cooperation, and put their whole souls into the job, the investment is a dead loss. There must be gaiety, life, music, dancing, cheerful sitting and sports rooms in these buildings, and particularly a friendly welcome, if they are to be what they should be: the favorite and the most respectable meeting place for the soldier on leave and the young girls of the community.

Above all, the U.S.O. must categorically forbid the breaking up of its recreation halls into Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Centers. To introduce this divisive influence is deception of the public which supplies the funds for a United Service. In one community where this dishonesty was permitted, the GT’s showed more sense than the weakkneed authorities who wanted to separate the religious groups. The Protestant U.S.O. happened to be the biggest and the most cheerful. So the three groups all congregated there and also admitted the Negro recruits although the city was below the Mason and Dixon line.

The U.S.O. and possibly also the Red Cross should face the fact that the many small Southern towns near big military installations cannot create an adequate, varied, and successful recreation program for huge numbers of soldiers. They just can’t afford it. Therefore, these communities should get the highest priority and the finest, most varied equipment furnished by the U.S.O. or any other organization. Otherwise the boys are sure to take to drink in these impoverished communities. And bad liquor at high prices leads to endless trouble.

I also recommend an idea of great value which was carried out during the war by the Y.W.C.A., an organization that deserves the highest commendation for its practical social pioneering. When the soldier’s wife and baby come to see him or to join him, they arrive with no accommodations and little money. Sometimes it takes several days before they can find the head of the family. With crowded hotels and exorbitant room rents, these poor women are stranded unless somebody holds out a helping hand. To take care of these helpless mothers with small children, the Y.W.C.A. set up hostels where they could spend one or two or three nights. The children could be left there under supervision while the mothers were looking up the soldier husband or rushing about to find permanent quarters. I know nothing that was a more humane contribution to those first awful days of getting adjusted to a new, strange, and overcrowded community and to good relations between the town and the post.

In all of these problems of adjustment to new social conditions, special consideration must be given to Negro recruits and their families, especially in the South. I have seen Negro troops, nurses, and other personnel spend their whole three days’ leave trying in vain to get transportation.

And don’t forget that in towns where segregation of our Negro fellow citizens is unavoidable, they also want to eat and to have a good time. The armed services are now meeting the problem of segregation in an honest manner within the military establishments. The treatment of our Negro troops outside the post is just as important to the bettering of race relations. If, for example, the local communities are unwilling or unable to establish adequate transportation for Negro soldiers, then the camp commander should supply extra buses for them.

In other words, in this as in all other civilian efforts to make the enlisted personnel feel at home, the local community must have the constant cooperation of the local military commander. I found during the war that a few of our post commanders understood how to work with the local community leadership. Most of them did not.

All three military services should be given systematic training in the social aspects of campcommunity relationships. West Point, Annapolis, and the air force commands should establish educational programs, conducted by our most practical sociologists, in the importance of the social environment to peacetime military operations. Had this been done at the close of the war, our military leaders might have learned more quickly that you cannot dump several thousand families on an already overcrowded community and expect a happy ending to the story. It only makes the armed forces look silly when local camp commanders get the townspeople together, as they sometimes do, and call them a lot of grafters. Rapacity, greed, and profiteering are inevitable when houses are few and applicants are many.

Military leaders should remember, and our country and the Congress should remember, that neither the military personnel nor the local communities are responsible for the fact that they have been forced upon each other, nor for the unsanitary housing to which both the native population and the invaders are now condemned. During the war unhealthful, inhuman, and indecent living conditions could be excused. They can’t be excused in times of peace. The armed forces might just as well make up their minds right now that they will never achieve good relations with the civilian population until housing is accepted as the social responsibility of the top military commands and the Congress. The fact that this vital question is being thought through and that a program of construction is being carefully planned will immediately bring more efficient local cooperation into play and transform the atmosphere in every military area throughout the land.