² Howard, Michael, The First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 146Google Scholar. This figure includes deaths from combat, accident, and illness but does not include those whose lives were likely dramatically shortened by physical and psychological injuries that occurred during the war.

³ For a catalogue of clerical excess, see Abrams, Ray H., Preachers Present Arms: The Role of the American Churches and Clergy in the World Wars I and II, with Some Observations on the War in Vietnam (Scottsdale, Pa.: Herald, 1969)Google Scholar. For a more measured, though also quite critical, discussion of clerical involvement in the march toward war, see Gamble, Richard M., The War for Righteousness: The Great War, Progressive Christianity, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, Del.: ISI, 2003)Google Scholar.

⁴ Right Reverend Thomas, Monsignor C. F., “Patriotism,” in Cherry, Conrad, ed., God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 278Google Scholar. He continued, “And it is incumbent upon every man and woman who glories in the name of American, and who lives under the protection of American freedom and enjoys the benefits of American liberty, to strengthen the arms of those champions.”

⁵ Seeger, Alan, Poems (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1919), 171Google Scholar. Seeger's poem is titled, “Ode in Memory of American Volunteers Fallen for France.” See Winn, James Anderson, The Poetry of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar for an incisive history of the change in conceptions of honor from booty and material gain to the absence thereof.

⁶ Historians Jim Cullen and Drew Gilpin Faust would agree that the sentiments voiced by DuBois and others with regard to the First World War echoed those voiced by Frederick Douglass and other African Americans with regard to the Civil War. See Cullen, Jim, “I's a Man Now: Gender and African American Men,” in Clinton, Catherine and Silber, Nina, ed., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Faust, Drew Gilpin, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008)Google Scholar.

⁷ Kennedy, David, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Slotkin, Richard, Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (New York: Henry Holt, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁸ Bederman, Gail, “‘Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough’: The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911–1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism,” American Quarterly 41:3 (September 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Putney, Clifford, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar. See also Blum, Edward, “‘Paul Has Been Forgotten’: Women, Gender, and Revivalism during the Gilded Age,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3:3 (July 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a different, though not contradictory, perspective on the gendered root of religious authority, see Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Noonday, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁹ Budd, Richard M., Serving Two Masters: The Development of American Military Chaplaincy, 1860–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 121–153Google Scholar. Piper, John F., American Churches in World War I (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, entire (esp. 119–122). Budd describes in great detail the disarray into which military chaplaincy fell in the post–Civil War era and the efforts to professionalize the chaplaincy in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Great War, in Budd's account, was a pivotal moment for the development of chaplaincy as a profession insofar as it led to the standardization of appointment practices and clarified such issues as rank and promotion. But Budd does not concern himself with soldiers' views of chaplains and other religious authorities, which complicate the picture significantly.

¹⁰ In this article, “religious authority” refers to the public recognition of an individual's ability to interpret Christian revelation for the purpose of guiding a community in matters of faith. I understand religious authority to be necessarily public, necessarily communal. I also understand authority in the Christian tradition to involve three basic elements: 1) revelation—in most cases the scriptures and traditions of Christianity, 2) an authority figure whose status is achieved either through institutional affiliation, charisma, or a combination thereof, and 3) a community that both recognizes that some measure of truth resides in revelation and is willing to accept and heed an authority figure. Within the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, and in most Protestant churches as well, the authority figure is a priest, minister, or pastor, either assigned by a hierarchy or called by a congregation. Whether educated according to accepted standards or considered to be inspired, the minister depends for authority on public recognition of special abilities that qualify her or him to guide a community according to revealed Christian truth. This conception of religious authority was shaped by Weber's, MaxThe Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 190Google Scholar; and Lincoln's, BruceHoly Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 51–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 79–81, 84–85. I was introduced to the triangular formation that I describe (community, authority, revelation) through coursework at the University of Chicago with Professor Bernard McGinn. His interest was in describing the more specific though related task of exegesis, but the formulation remains, to my mind, both elegant and useful.

¹¹ Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 98Google Scholar. For additional, generally supporting perspectives on Progressive Era American culture and religion, see May, Henry, The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Times, 1912–1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Slotkin, Richard, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

¹² Ebel, Jonathan, Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ The two most widely read such books, both classics in the field, are Hutchison, William, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; and Marsden, George M.Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. Dolan, Jay, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, briefly discusses American Catholics' responses to the war. Two more recent, excellent additions to the field—Grant Wacker, , Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Winston, Diane, Red Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar—continue the pattern of dealing intelligently and eloquently with the war, without attending to those who fought it.

¹⁴ Tweedy, Henry Hallam, “The Ministry and the War,” in Sneath, E. Hershey, ed., Religion and the War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1918), 96–97Google Scholar, cited in Putney, Clifford, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 183Google Scholar.

¹⁵ The Stars and Stripes, still a fixture on American military bases, was first published for American servicemen and -women during the Great War. It was written and edited by American soldiers, many of whom had backgrounds in journalism, and was printed weekly from 8 February 1918 through 13 June 1919. At the height of its print run, the Stars and Stripes put 500,000 copies in circulation among deployed American soldiers and war workers, along with interested readers on the home front. For more on the Stars and Stripes, see Cornbeise, Alfred E., The Stars and Stripes: Doughboy Journalism in World War I (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Stars and Stripes, 10 May 1918, 2. Emphasis added.

¹⁷ Ibid. The Federal Council of Churches of Christ and the Catholic Church in America had worked from the moment war was declared to provide adequate numbers of chaplains to the Army. In this effort they encountered resistance from the War Department and from Congress, and grew increasingly frustrated—as Chief of Chaplains Charles Brent indicated—with their inability to provide “the boys” with pastors and sacraments. “We are dreadfully shorthanded here… . Last Sunday I was with our 1st Division on the eve of their going into the greatest battle of the war. Men in the ranks were asking for spiritual ministrations which we were unable to provide… . It is cruel beyond words to send our young men across the sea to live in conditions of unwonted hardship and temptation, to encourage them to be ready to die for the country, and then neglect to furnish them with those spiritual ministrations which are at the door of every citizen in home life.” At this point in the war, official numbers put the chaplain-to-soldier ratio at 1:3600; Brent estimated that it was closer to 1:5000. Pro-chaplain lobbying efforts in Washington finally bore fruit in the spring of 1918, when President Wilson signed a bill authorizing an increase from one to three chaplains per regiment. This should have reduced the ratio to 1:1200. A Stars and Stripes article, published 2 August 1918, greeted tepidly the news of this victory for home-front religious leaders. The Stars and Stripes reported this news three months later under the headline, “Three Chaplains To Each Regiment Watch Your Step.” Far from the relief one might expect from spiritually neglected soldiers, and still further from the automatic respect that Chaplain Brent and Yale's Professor Tweedy anticipated in print, the article expressed continuing skepticism, deploying old, unflattering images of religious leaders. “No chance for members of the A.E.F. to stumble off the Straight and Narrow now… . For the Thin Highway has a triple guard in place of the lone chaplain sentry who used to patrol the narrow beat, herding lost souls back into the proper fold.” The author explained that the increase had nothing to do with “wickedness or … any growing sin in the A.E.F.” but was instead meant to provide assistance to “an overworked organization, where the spiritual odds of 1 to 3600 had become a trifle lopsided.” In addition to depicting chaplains as one-dimensional moral policemen, the writer recalled the problems outlined in the editorial “Dominies and Doughboys” in his description of the recently established school for new chaplains. “Its main purpose is to offer a course in human nature where chaplains who have served up with the men and know their needs and ways can instruct the new chaplains in the right ways to get to the men … All creeds gather at one school. The work is far beyond any one sect. It is no longer a matter of narrow religious belief, but of the greater gospel of care, fellowship, and friendly aid” (Stars and Stripes, 2 August 1918, 1). Without this “course in human nature,” the writer believed, pastors would not know the “needs and ways” of the men, and would struggle to rise above sectarianism and other “matter[s] of narrow religious belief.” But all was not lost. Men at war had shown some chaplains the light; those chaplains could now evangelize among their unconverted professional kin.

¹⁸ See Budd, Serving Two Masters, and Piper, American Churches in World War I. These two studies of the chaplaincy, one focused on the Great War, the other a survey of the “rise” of the modern chaplaincy, leave the doughboy out of the narrative. They thus create an impression of widespread acceptance of chaplains on the chaplains' terms. Soldiers are an essential part of the narrative and were not passive receptacles for chaplains' messages. Another recent study describes negative aspects of relations between soldiers and religious workers (YMCA men in particular) stemming from the religious jingoism of the latter. Relations between soldiers and chaplains were sometimes hostile, sometimes amiable. The most common cause of discontent among soldiers was not, however, chaplains' efforts to “position Christ in the trenches” (Putney, Muscular Christianity, 192). Rather, soldiers' discontents with religious workers arose from concerns about their masculinity.

¹⁹ Stars and Stripes, 10 May 1918, 2.

²⁰ Stars and Stripes, 5 April 1918, 4. See also Putney, Muscular Christianity, 125. This was not the first time that ministers and the young men with whom they walked were placed in this inverted relationship. As Clifford Putney writes, in 1911 Alan Hoben wondered whether ministers leading boys' groups were converting the boys or vice versa. The truth was, Hoben concluded, that boys “saved” the minister more often than he saved them. After all, he reasoned, by associating with boys the minister not only regained those qualities of youthfulness he had lost, he also “retains the sense of fun, fights on in good humor, detects and saves himself on the verge of pious caricature and solemn pathos … Life cannot grow stale; and by letting the boys lead him forth by the streams of living water and into the whispering woods he catches again the wild charm of that all-possible past: the smell of the campfire, the joyous freedom and good health of God's great out-of-doors.”

²¹ Stars and Stripes, 5 April 1918, 4.

²² Ibid. See Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)Google Scholar, and Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” in Divided Houses, eds. Clinton and Silber, for useful discussions of wartime gender roles.

²³ See Lears, No Place of Grace, ch. 3; and Putney, Muscular Christianity, entire. A roster of the men involved in wartime religious councils, responsible for the approval of men for the chaplaincy, and the assessment of their work, reads like a “Who's Who” of muscular Christianity. Charles Brent served as chief of chaplains. Members of the Committee on the War and the Religious Outlook included Harry Emerson Fosdick, Charles W. Gilkey, Henry Churchill King, John R. Mott, Robert Speer, and James I. Vance.

²⁴ Putney, Muscular Christianity, 116–126.

²⁵ Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, entire; Putney, Muscular Christianity, entire; Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic, 1993), 233Google Scholar. The ideal man was tough, stalwart, determined, and independent; he was the author of his own future and bore the future of the nation on his broad shoulders. He was also, much to the dismay of cultural custodians of all types, a vanishing breed. In early twentieth-century America, the professional and geographical spaces in which he could exist were vanishing if not already gone, and the rugged physicality that defined him was, more and more, the possession of “inferior races” newly arrived from Europe or on the move from the rural South to the urban North and willing to do the physical labor that built muscles and invigorated spirits. “We need the iron qualities that must go with true manhood,” intoned Teddy Roosevelt. “We need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shirking the rough work that must always be done, and to persevere through the long days of slow progress or seeming failure which always come before any final triumph.” Indeed, consciousness of the decline of white manhood and white masculinity and the perceived decline of white American civilization led to a simultaneous re-articulation of the myth of the rugged (white, male) individual and an institutionalization of mechanisms to propagate it, thus molding a new generation of heroes. The popularity of such male-oriented, generally Christian groups as the Boy Scouts and the YMCA, among others, and the blossoming of college athletics can all be attributed to an effort, led by white American men, to revive and develop white masculinity.

²⁶ Ely, Dinsmore, Dinsmore Ely, One Who Served (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1919)Google Scholar, vii. Ely's letters and diary were edited for publication by his father, Dr. James O. Ely.

²⁷ Chapman, Victor, Victor Chapman's Letters from France, with Memoir by John Jay Chapman (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 8Google Scholar.

²⁸ Winn, The Poetry of War, 143. Winn's discussion of poetry and the myth of chivalry in war is as penetrating as it is concise. To wit: “The myth of chivalry celebrates a time that never was. It falsifies the past to evade the present.”

²⁹ Putney, Muscular Christianity, 32. “But while such ‘delicate’ types might appeal to women, argued Oberlin president Henry C. King, men found them ‘especially repulsive.’ Men preferred ministers ‘of blood earnest spirit,’ he averred. Or, as the Reverend James Vance wrote in reference to the sentimental clergyman, ‘Where in all the sweep of freaks and failures, of mawkish sentiments and senseless blathery, can there be found an object of deeper disgust than one of these thin, vapid, affected, driveling little doodles dressed up in men's clothes, but without a thimbleful of brains in his pate or an ounce of manhood in his anatomy? He is worse than weak—he is a weaklet.’”

³⁰ Keene, Jennifer D., Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 24Google Scholar. “Rather than concentrating on the immorality of the war's catastrophic violence, Americans focused on monitoring the aspects of army life over which they could exercise some control. Progressive reformers, who had avidly campaigned to eliminate drinking and prostitution from civilian society before the war, now undertook a crusade against vice in the wartime army.”

³¹ Stars and Stripes, 28 June 1918, 4. Emphasis added. See also Stars and Stripes, 8 February 1918, 4. The author of an editorial “To The Folks Back Home” focused on the “alarming stories about us of the A.E.F. and our conduct here in France” that had been circulating in America. The stories had to do with the bad behavior of soldiers and, he wrote, “if they weren't so far from the truth, we might be inclined to get really mad.” In describing the source of these stories the editorialist named no professions, but appeared to finger clergymen and religiously affiliated reform groups. “It's no laughing matter to be talked about behind our backs in such a reckless and irresponsible way by reckless and irresponsible people, though no doubt some of them have the best intentions in the world and think that they, and they alone, can save us. (They probably told you that and asked you to contribute money to their worthy cause, haven't they?)” This damning “letter” was certainly read by many more soldiers in France than “Folks Back Home,” and its message was clear. The A.E.F. is a morally solid and upright community. Those who characterize it differently—and likely ask for money to help “save” it—are cowardly, reckless, and irresponsible regardless of the nature of their position or the benevolence of their intentions.

³² Stars and Stripes, 26 July 1918, 4.

³³ Wood, Lambert, His Job: Letters Written by a 22-year-old Lieutenant in the World War to His Parents and Others in Oregon (Portland, Ore.: Metropolitan, 1932), 51Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

³⁴ Boylston, Helen Dore, “Sister”: The Diary of a War Nurse (New York: Ives Washburn, 1927), 156Google Scholar.

³⁵ Keene, Doughboys, 24.

³⁶ Keene, Doughboys, 24; Kennedy, Over Here, 186–187. This was the backdrop for Secretary of War Newton Baker's rejection of French Premier Clemenceau's offer to provide licensed houses of prostitution for American servicemen. The offer made its way via Pershing and Raymond Fosdick, head of the Commission on Training Camp Activities, to the Secretary's desk. Baker reportedly exclaimed, “For God's sake, Raymond, don't show this to the President or he'll stop the war.”

³⁷ Rossano, Geoffrey I., ed., The Price of Honor: The World War One Letters of Naval Aviator Kenneth MacLeish (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1991), 54Google Scholar. Rossano wrote a full and concise biography of MacLeish as an introduction to his edition of MacLeish's correspondence with Priscilla Murdock. See also Britton, Emmett, As It Looked to Him: Intimate Letters on the War (San Francisco: privately printed, 1919), 26–27Google Scholar. Britton wrote in a letter dated 17 July 1918: “Thank God I am married, for this is no place for a single man… . If I ever had any illusions about fighting for La Belle France they are gone; I am fighting for the sanctity of womanhood and the protection of my home, my wife and my kiddies.”

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ MacLeish, Kenneth, Kenneth: A Collection of Letters Written By Lieutenant Kenneth MacLeish, U.S.N.R.F.C., Dating from His Enlistment and During His Services in the Aviation Corps of the United States Navy, Edited and Arranged by His Mother (Chicago: privately printed, 1919), 92–94Google Scholar. Though vehemently resentful of negative characterizations of their morality back home, America's fighting men were not of one suspicious voice on the topic of home-front religious leadership. Shailer Mathews, Billy Sunday, and William B. Riley had sons in the war, and family affections endured. Two other soldiers' voices indicate that all was not lost in relationships between fighting men and home-front religious leaders not related by blood. Kenneth MacLeish corresponded with his pastor, Dr. Stifler, on the topic of whether Stifler ought to become an Army chaplain or a “Y” man. The correspondence was cordial, thoughtful, and poignant. After sharing his thoughts on the YMCA and military chaplains, MacLeish asked Stifler if praying during a recent combat mission marked him as a coward. Harry Butters, an American volunteer in the English Army and a lapsed Catholic, wrote to his sister Lucille that he had found a book given him by “Father George” to be “the greatest inspiration in the world” and asked her to tell the father so: see Butters, Harry, Harry Butters, R.F.A. “An American Citizen,” Life and War Letters … The Brief Record of a California Boy who Gave his Life for England (New York: John Lane, 1918), 101Google Scholar; 29 March 1915. But he also wrote, “To go back to your letter to him, which he did not read to me, but of which he told me the contents, it was your idea that I might possibly at this time be leaning back towards the Church, in which case, as Father Tim [Carey] said, now was certainly the time of all times to return to the Sacraments… . And for me, dearest heart, the Church is far more impossible to return to to-day than it was the day I first left it, when I felt that I was no longer of its faith in articles of doctrine. It is no good, dear—you must continue to have faith in my spiritual progress alone as I stand… . I am happy and hopeful in my own faith … and have no fear of the future.” In spite of warm feelings for Father George and for the Catholic Church, Harry Butters thought himself the best keeper of his spiritual welfare.

⁴¹ MacLeish, Kenneth, 54.

⁴² Biddle, Charles J., The Way of the Eagle (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1919), 170Google Scholar.

⁴³ Fosdick, Harry Emerson, The Challenge of the Present Crisis (New York: George H. Doran, 1917), 54–55Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Biddle, 170–171.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 206.

⁴⁶ Stars and Stripes, 8 March 1918, 3. Original emphasis.

⁴⁷ Cornbeise, The Stars and Stripes, 12.

⁴⁸ Stars and Stripes, 26 April 1918, 5. See also Tippet, Edwin J., Who Won the War: Letters and Notes of an M.P. In Dixie, England, France and Flanders (Toledo, Ohio: Toledo Type-Setting and Printing Co., ca. 1920), 21–22Google Scholar. Tippet, who served as a corporal in Company “A,” 112th Military Police, Thirty-seventh Division, recorded one example of religious entrapment in a 23 September 1917 letter to his parents. He wrote, “They are trying to force us to go down to the mess hall for ‘divine services,’—i.e., to hear a Jewish rabbi talk. If I don't go Ill have to work. I won't go. In order to insure attendance, no one is allowed to leave the confines of our battalion camp, tho there is a ‘Brotherhood’ meeting at the Y.M.C.A. I would like to attend. Army life is a reversion to the Dark Ages—a man is allowed no freedom of mind or will, let alone body.” Then continued, “One hour later” “Just as I thought—because I refused to hear the rabbi, I had to help ‘police’ the camp—pick up bits of paper, cigarette butts, tobacco quids, etc. Oh, it's great!”; Lee, Roger I., Letters from Roger I. Lee (Brookline, Mass.: privately printed, 1962), 228Google Scholar. Roger Lee, who served in the medical corps, also wrote in a 7 May 1918 letter of a more general perception of chaplains held by one grizzled lieutenant in his company. “Hep [Lt. Hepburn, 53, veteran of army life] told us of his philosophy of life which is most amusing. It seems that he is a Mason. He says that he is a Catholic, although his father is a Presbyterian. But he isn't a church-going Catholic, and when he puts his religion down on any army form, he always puts down ‘non-sectarian.’ ‘Never,’ says he, ‘should any priest or parson get a hold of you, because if you admit that you are this or that, the particular this or that chaplain gets you to round up all the patients of this or that sect and then you are done for and you have to go to church.”

⁴⁹ Stars and Stripes, 26 April 1918, 5.

⁵⁰ Kellog, Doris, Canteening Under Two Flags: Letters of Doris Kellogg (East Aurora, N.Y.: Roycrofters, 1919), 153Google Scholar. “For goodness’ sake, please don't anyone I love come over with the YMCA… . As an organization, it has certainly made an awful fiasco of its work here”; Stimson, Julia Catherine, Finding Themselves: The Letters of an American Army Chief Nurse in a British Hospital in France (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 10Google Scholar. Stimson, the eventual head of Red Cross nurses in France, wrote, “Our [chaplain] Dean Davis is a real man. We got a choir together and last evening had some fancy singing.”

⁵¹ Campbell, Peyton R., Diary-Letters of Peyton Randolph Campbell (Buffalo, N.Y.: Pratt and Lambert, 1919), 96Google Scholar.

⁵² Kean, Robert W., Dear Marraine (1917–1919) (Livingston, N.J.: n.p., 1969), 174–175Google Scholar.

⁵³ Blodgett, Richard A., Life and Letters of Richard Ashley Blodgett, First Lieutenant, United States Air Service (Boston: Macdonald and Evans, 1920), 131–132Google Scholar. See also Morse, Kathleen Duncan, The Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 16Google Scholar. Canteen worker Kathleen Morse described one encounter with a “visiting clergyman … a meek and long-suffering little man” who, though he did not “preach” per se, alienated himself nonetheless. When asked to say grace at breakfast, the man offered a “long and earnest exhortation” during which he proclaimed “Oh Lord, Thou knowest we are apt to grow lean and starve in Thy service!” Morse recalled that she nearly laughed out loud at the clergyman's unintentionally accurate summary of the moment his lengthy prayer had created.

⁵⁴ Ford, Torrey, Cheer-up Letters from a Private with Pershing (New York: E. J. Clode, 1918), 172Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ The anonymous author of One Woman's War wrote a critique of the YMCA in July of 1918 that beat at the same drum but with greater fervor. She chastised religious leaders for “trying to preach platitudes to these poor Yanks, while the Yanks want to drink a little cognac and sleep with a few girls and then go back to the Front to be bumped off perhaps.” Insufficiently attentive to the strains of war, this ministry, she concluded, should “either be washed out or done properly”: Anonymous, One Woman's War (New York: Macaulay, 1930), 265.

⁵⁶ Lears, 102, 112. As Lears wrote of the militarist reaction to a false and degenerate American culture in the years preceding the war, men sought something of the military in their lives less out of a thirst for blood and more out of a hunger for authenticity in life, experience, self, and emotion.

⁵⁷ Stars and Stripes, 13 September 1918, 2, emphasis added. See also Stars and Stripes, 15 March 1918. Father Osias Boucher, “sent over by the Knights of Columbus,” was among sixteen men of a “New England Outfit” to win the Croix de Guerre, according to a front-page story on 15 March 1918. “As battalions have gone into the front line, a chaplain has always gone, too. And it happened that Father Boucher's battalion got in on a party or two. His coolness, his steady work under fire among the men won its reward.” The Croix de Guerre signified a great deal to the military community that a clerical collar or even a thick neck and broad shoulders could not. Father Boucher had faced the battle and been proven true. In March of 1918 he could speak of war from experience, as few other Americans could.

⁵⁸ Ibid.

⁵⁹ Hamilton, Craig and Corbin, Louise, Echoes from Over There (New York: The Soldiers' Publishing Company, 1919), 235, 243Google Scholar. Donaldson praised the unit's other chaplain, Father Hanley, similarly: “He was a real fighting man and the army missed a great captain when Hanley went into the priesthood, but he certainly made it up as he cheered us through those bloody days.” See also Theodore Roosevelt III, Average Americans (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1919), 92–93. The authority that could be demonstrated or accrued in battle extended as well to whole organizations, most notably the Salvation Army. Theodore Roosevelt III wrote in his memoir of the transformation wrought in his attitudes toward Salvationists by their conduct in the war. “Before the war I felt that the Salvation Army was composed of a well-meaning lot of cranks. Now what help I can give them is theirs”: Ettinger, Albert, A Doughboy with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth: A Remembrance of World War I (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane, 1992), 73Google Scholar. Private Albert Ettinger, who had his share of run-ins with Father Duffy, recalled Duffy's presence in combat as almost god-like. “On the open battlefield, he was everywhere. He would appear like a gigantic apparition, emerging from a haze of smoke, undaunted by shell fire or machine gun bullets.”

⁶⁰ Lindner, Clarence, Private Lindner's Letters, Censored and Uncensored (San Francisco: n.p., 1939), 76–77Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Morse, , The Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), 16Google Scholar.

⁶² Barber, Thomas, Along the Road (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1924), 90–91Google Scholar.

⁶³ Laderman, Gary, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), xv–xviiGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁴ Morrow, John H. Jr., and Rogers, Earl, ed., A Yankee Ace in the R.A.F.: The World War I Letters of Captain Bogart Rogers (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), 182.Google Scholar As clear as Rogers's affections are the reasons for them. The “padres” of whom he wrote were not moralists; they were “regular guys” who had encountered and understood war and had the decorations to prove it. And those deeming their authority legitimate were not military hierarchs or the church leaders, Catholic and Protestant, who so eagerly and with such dedication fought to make adequate ministers and ministrations available to the men. Those authorizing the chaplains were the men themselves.

⁶⁵ Stars and Stripes, 7 March 1919, 5.

⁶⁶ Stars and Stripes, 23 May 1919, 4. A 23 May 1919 letter to the editor of the Stars and Stripes indicates that these sentiments were shared beyond the paper's editorial desk. By May of 1919 the American Legion had absorbed the Comrades in Arms and was front and center among veterans' organizations. J. H. Gaston and eighteen unnamed members expressed their hopes for the Legion and for the composition of its membership. Gaston began by proclaiming in vaguely socialist tones, “Our battle over here is not finished until we apply the 14 points of President Wilson to the United States and make the country a better place to live in, with laws that will provide a surer and better share of the profits to the workers.” He called not for the root-and-branch change being fought for in Russia, but for reforms that would at least put an end to “the ring that makes for favoritism and graft.” Purporting to speak for a body larger than his eighteen comrades, he continued, “If this is what the American Legion stands for, then you will find that the men who joined the colors will be for it, one and all.” For Gaston as for many American soldiers, the Great War did not end with the Armistice. Soldiers would shed their uniforms and return to their homes, he conceded, but “the work that the boys fought for, or were ready to fight for, but had to take jobs back of the lines instead, will be carried on when we are in civilian garb.”

Interestingly, Gaston and his cohort ended their letter not with a call to action, but with a call to exclusion. They offered that the American Legion ought to be composed “of men who served under the colors.” They had heard rumors “that an effort is to be made to include in its membership men who served with welfare organizations,” such as the YMCA, the Knights of Columbus, and the Red Cross. “There are a few of them who did a good job,” Gaston wrote, “but they are not soldiers, and there is no more reason why they should belong than there is why the women who drove automobiles around in the States and wore fancy uniforms should be included in a veteran corps.” In his eyes, the chasm that separated the doughboy from the “Y” man, both of whom had served in France, was wider than the ocean that separated the battle-tested veteran from the green draftee. The latter made for suitable post-war company; the former belonged among fancily dressed women.

⁶⁷ Duffy, Francis P., Father Duffy's Story: A Tale of Humor and Heroism, Of Life and Death with The Fighting Sixty-Ninth (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1919), 25–29Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 66–67.

⁶⁹ McCarthy, George T., “The Greater Love” (Chicago: Extension, 1920), 21Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 92.

⁷¹ Ibid., 81. Original emphasis.

⁷² Methodist William Leach's concerns for masculinity preceded his war experiences. Prior to the war he authored and published a poem, “To Be A Man,” which began with the prayer, “Save me, my Father, from the creeping/And insidious weakness/Which has robbed so many of their manhood.” Yet Leach recorded a wartime incident in which his usefulness and position in the community, and therefore his religious authority, were explicitly called into question. During the “Soissons drive,” launched on 18 July 1918, he and others had been carrying and caring for wounded soldiers in withering heat when Leach encountered a senior army officer. “As I lugged one end of a stretcher up to the open place under the trees where the wounded were being almost corded up, a lieutenant-colonel came up, saw that I was a Y man and began to sputter. ‘Why in the name of—don't you Y.M.C.A. people do something? Here are dying men, and not even a drink of hot coffee for them. You are a hell of a bunch.’” Leach had run out of coffee, sent for more, and taken up the work of carrying wounded until the coffee arrived. He was doing more than was required of him and was clearly unjustly accused, “But you can't say all that to a lieutenant-colonel … So I walked away into the brush and bawled all to myself just like a kid.” The emotions of the moment were complex, their intensity likely heightened by the danger and the death. Was Leach only reacting to the officer's unfair diatribe? Was he upset by the stereotype that was clearly at work? Was he disappointed that, in spite of important contributions, he remained at the margins of the military community?

⁷³ Stars and Stripes, 7 February 1919, 6.

⁷⁴ Ibid.

⁷⁵ Ibid.

⁷⁶ Stars and Stripes, 1 November 1918, 4–5.

⁷⁷ Stars and Stripes, 15 March 1918, 6.

⁷⁸ Much to the disappointment of the paper's staff and, though for different reasons, to Blackman and Rexrode, the AEF “put a K.O. instead of an O.K.” on the fight before the opening bell.

⁷⁹ American Legion Weekly, September 1920.

⁸⁰ Bacevich, Andrew, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chapters 3–5Google Scholar.