Citizens' Military Training Camp

Citizens' Military Training Camps (CMTC) were military training programs of the United States. Held annually each summer during the years 1921 to 1940, the CMTC camps differed from National Guard and Reserves training in that the program allowed male citizens to obtain basic military training without an obligation to call-up for active duty. The CMTC were authorized by the National Defense Act of 1920 as a compromise that rejected universal military training

Plattsburg Movement

The CMTC was a continuation of the "Plattsburg Movement," a volunteer non-enlistment training program organized by private citizens in Plattsburgh, New York, that had trained 20,000 potential Army officers during the summers of 1915 and 1916. The Movement was itself an expression of the Preparedness Movement, a group of influential Americans drawn primarily from upper-class lawyers, bankers, academics, and politicians of the Northeast, committed to a strand of Anglophile internationalism. Believing that the United States would be drawn into the European war then raging, they proposed a national service program under which the 600,000 men who turned 18 every year would be required to spend six months in military training, and afterwards be assigned to reserve units. The small regular army would primarily be a training agency. Underscoring its commitment, the Preparedness movement set up and funded its own summer training camps at Plattsburgh and other sites, where 40,000 college alumni became physically fit, learned to march and shoot, and ultimately provided the cadre of a wartime officer corps.^[1] Suggestions by labor unions that talented working-class youth be invited to Plattsburgh were ignored.

These camps were formalized under the Military Training Camps Association, which in 1917 launched a monthly magazine, National Service. ^[2] (In 1922, the magazine was acquired by and folded into the The American Army and Navy Journal, and Gazette of the Regular, National Guard and Reserve Forces.)

CMTC

CMTC camps were a month in length and held at about 50 Army bases nationally. At their peak in 1928 and 1929, about 40,000 men received training, but as a whole the camps were a disappointment at their multiplicity of stated goals, but particularly in the commissioning of Reserve officers. The program established that participants could receive a reserve commission as a second lieutenant by completing four successive summer courses (titled Basic, White, Red, and Blue), but only 5,000 such commissions were awarded over the 20-year history of the CMTC. Apparently, no records exist that document total participation, but it is estimated that 400,000 men had at least one summer of training.^[3]

Among known participants were Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan, Robert Penn Warren, Walter S. McIlhenny, Chuck Yeager, and William Guarnere.

References

1. ^ Very few young men from wealthy or prominent families considered a career in the Army or Navy then or at any time in American history. The highest social background of cadets, exemplified by George Patton, West Point 1909, and Lucius Clay, 1918, was oldest son of a locally prominent family.
2. ^ "Magazine to Push National Service". New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FA0E14F93C5E11738DDDAC0894DA405B878DF1D3. Retrieved September 10, 2011. 
3. ^ Kington, Donald M., Forgotten Summers: The Story of the Citizens' Military Training Camps, 1921-1940, Two Decades Publishing (1995), ISBN 0-9645789-0-5

External links

• The Plattsburg Movement and its Legacy, Relevance, Autumn 1997.
• Lost battalions: the Great War and the crisis of American nationality By Richard Slotkin
• Between the Wars: Citizens' Military Training Camp (CMTC) from the Fort George G. Meade Museum