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.The geographical distribution of scores indicated thatWestern and Northern states held more intelligent people than the Southern states, an arearife with children working in the fields at the expense of their education.Because familiarity with mainstream American culture, a secondary school educa-tion, and a middle-class economic background were not necessarily the prerequisites fora successful military career, intelligence test results had limited usefulness for the army.After the war, however, public schools throughout the nation embraced intelligence test-ing as a useful way to measure the potential of their students.Measuring student aptitudehas been a staple of the American school system ever since.The army could dismiss the importance of intelligence test scores, but by reveal-ing the limited educational background of many soldiers, intelligence tests uncoveredan important deficiency that the army had to address.Literacy was essential to functionin the modern army.Nearly 20 percent of the men tested took the Beta exam for illit-erates.The majority of native-born white men had completed only seven years ofschool, while foreign-born and Southern black men averaged 4.7 years and 2.6 years ofschooling respectively.Civilian reformers had long been aware of the relationship 48 WORLD WAR Ibetween child-labor and poor school attendance, and as the war was underway theProgressive-era campaign for mandatory schooling ended when Mississippi became thefinal state in the nation to pass a compulsory school attendance law.Absorbing a highconcentration of semi-literate or illiterate men who could not read basic orders, under-stand signs in the trenches, or send letters home presented a thorny dilemma for the mil-itary.Army officials expected to teach men how to drill and handle firearms; they weresurprised to discover that in many camps men also required instruction in reading andwriting English.Some camp commanders established base schools for men to attend intheir off-duty hours, while others turned to the Young Men s Christian Association(YMCA) to instruct soldiers or help them write letters home.Selecting and Training OfficersSelecting and inducting enlisted men into the military was pointless if there wereno officers there to lead them once they arrived in the training camps.During the war,there were several ways to become an officer.Men who had held commissions in theRegular and National Guard before the war provided the wartime army with a nucleusof trained leadership.They were not plentiful enough, however, to officer the entirewartime army.Consequently, the army had no choice but to quickly train the officers itneeded to lead troops into battle.There was a limited precedent to follow in turningcivilians into officers.In 1915, the War Department had supported General LeonardWood when he ran a series of semi-official volunteer summer boot camps for 1,300college students, bankers, and businessmen in the wake of the Lusitania sinking.Othershad enthusiastically attended summer training camps organized by private groups suchas the Military Training Camps Association.These pre-war camps held in Plattsburgh,New York, identified a contingent of upper and upper middle-class men eager to leadmen into battle if the nation went to war.Before a single enlisted man stepped foot ina training camp, these men were among the 30,000 civilians and 7,957 Reserve Corpsofficers who headed off to attend one of sixteen Officers Training Camps opened bythe War Department in the spring of 1917.By the end of the war, the army had trained182,000 officers, nearly half in three-month officer training camps.In addition, thearmy promoted 16,000 qualified enlisted men and the Medical Department and otherspecialized branches commissioned nearly 70,000 civilians, including doctors andengineers who possessed much needed expertise.Most of the men attending officer training camps were college graduates oruniversity students who abandoned their studies to volunteer for military service [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]