Sex and Motivation in the American Morale Campaigns of the First World War

During the First World War, the United States War Department assiduously regulated the sexuality of soldiers and many citizens residing in the vicinity of training camps—a task that it accomplished largely through an organization called the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA). Historians have generally focused on the repressive aspects of this agency’s sexual control programs, and argued that their primary goal was to instill sexual morality among the soldiers and wider society. In a departure from this interpretation, this dissertation shows that while sexual morality rhetoric was certainly an important part of the War Department’s strategy for combatting what they deemed to be wayward sexual activity, it was, for the agency’s top leaders, less decisive than motivating soldiers to fight, which involved remaking the overall sexual environment of training camps in such a way that drafted men would be compelled to lean into their wartime roles. Drawing on the relatively neglected archival records of the Military Morale Section and the Morale Branch of the army’s General Staff—which exercised control over the CTCA during the decisive final months of the war—as well as the publications of a number of morale strategists who formulated the CTCA’s motivational strategy, this dissertation demonstrates that the War Department did not just repress sexuality, but actively sought to arouse, control and channel the soldiers’ desire for it in order to build up their “vigor” and get them to fight and to endure. The dissertation traces the trajectory of the military’s morale apparatus from mobilization through demobilization, and demonstrates the enduring significance of the agency’s “parasexual” motivational strategy—from the centrality of sexual scarcity, frustration and manipulation, to the encouragement of women to be sexual gatekeepers, to the widespread advancement of racialized and classed sexual hierarchies and sexual racism more broadly.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Rogers, Eric

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Guarneri, Julia

• american history
• commission on training camp activities
• First World War
• Gender
• history of motivation
• morale
• morale branch
• sexuality
• World War I

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/c829d3ee-f80a-44d5-90db-4ace6f57a635/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.99062

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/352865