Fort George G. Meade: The First 100 Years

Camp Meade: The Little Melting Pot
WORLD WAR I YEARS
19
Camp Meade is well remembered as a WWI training
ground, but it served another, unintended purpose: It was
one of the places where America first confronted its new
identity.
Between 1880 and 1914 more than 20 million immigrants
arrived in the United States, mostly from Eastern and
Southern Europe, many of them settling near their ports
of entry. Of the white population of Baltimore in 1910,
for example, almost 37 percent were either foreignborn
or had two foreign-born parents. (The roughly 16
percent of the population who were black were excluded
from most of the Census tabulations.) The Army was
happy to take advantage of this immense new pool of
potential recruits, but the leaders understood that it would
take special effort to instill in the immigrants American
attitudes toward work, organization, and patriotism.
At first, as with everything in that war, all was chaos.
Sgt. Ed Davies of the 315th described the men he was
assigned to train as they assembled at the station in
Philadelphia:
What a motley looking crew they are, Italians, Jews, Poles
and what not. Of the 22 of them one other boy and myself are
the only English speaking Americans in the bunch. A fight
started just before we reached Baltimore, but the MPs who
boarded the train there put an end to it before any damage
was done.
The 310th Artillery Regiment counted 15 nationalities
and four religions–Catholic, Protestant, Greek Catholic,
and Jewish. Never before had so many nationalities served
at the same time, and all mixed together in the same units.
Gradually order emerged. Religious organizations
catered to the social, ritual, and cultural needs of their
adherents–Knights of Columbus for Catholics, the Jewish
Welfare Board for Jews, the Red Cross for everyone but
especially the native-born. Lessons in English, American
history, and patriotism attracted many students. The
Baltimore press loved to write about the exotic origins
of the men of the 79th, stressing their recollections of
oppression in their native lands and their loyalty to their
new home, where they were free. A turning point came
when the officers instituted a system first tried at Camp
By Gene Fax
Gordon in Georgia. Non-English-speaking trainees
were organized into three groups: a labor battalion for
soldiers suspected of disloyalty and for enemy aliens, a
noncombatant battalion for those who had a useful trade
but were not physically fit for combat, and a development
battalion for the rest. This last group was organized
by native language and led by officers who were native
speakers. The effect on morale and performance was
dramatic.
It was at Camp Meade and other training camps that
old-line Americans and new immigrants first met, then
trained and served together. Their experience of each
other was cemented in combat and carried over into
civilian life after the war. While there were still large
social differences, even antagonisms, between the groups,
neither was quite as strange to the other once they had
returned from France. This showed in the attitude of
John W. Kress, a lieutenant in the machine gun company
of the 314th:
Looking at the numerous Italians, Russians, Poles,
Hungarians, Greeks, Serbs, Slavs, Romanians, and even
Austrians and Germans in this vast Army, one at first
wondered where the real American was keeping himself.
Slowly the realization came that this conglomeration of
nationalities was the real body of American people–they were
the real Americans.
***
(Left) In a rough and cold wooden barracks building, soldiers
gather, despite their ethnic differences, to celebrate Christmas
in a room filled with pine boughs. The Baltimore Press loved to
write about the exotic origins of the men of the 79th, stressing
their recollections of oppression in their native lands and their
loyalty to their new home where they were free.