CHAPTER 1

“Conduct of a Nature to Bring Discredit upon the Military Service”

Fort Riley, Kansas, 1898–1940

Any officer or cadet who is convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman shall be dismissed from the service.
—Ninety-Fifth Article of War, effective February 4, 1921
All disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and military discipline, all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the military service, and all crimes or offenses not capital, of which persons subject to military law may be guilty, shall be … punished at the discretion of such court.
—Ninety-Sixth Article of War, effective February 4, 1921
The U.S. Army experienced tremendous change in the early decades of the twentieth century.1 We see all of those changes playing out at Fort Riley in Kansas in this era: growth and transformation in the size, scope, and demographics of the army and the men who served in it; professionalization and institutional transformation in response to the massive changes wrought by World War I ; and heated domestic debates surrounding morality and health, and how the army would revolutionize its legal system to accommodate these conceptual changes. Because Fort Riley was an old, established U.S. Army post in the Midwest by the late nineteenth century, it serves as a useful venue for exploring how the U.S. Army thought about issues related to sexuality—family life and marriage, sexual propriety, venereal disease, homosexuality, and sexual violence—in domestic settings. Fort Riley also housed both white and black soldiers, which offers a further opportunity to examine to what extent the race of individual soldiers mattered in how the army considered these issues. While most of those serving at Fort Riley were members of the Regular Army—that is, active-duty, professional soldiers who were considered by many civilians to be outside the mainstream of American society, especially before World War I—World War I also brought an influx of new men into the army who intended only to perform their military duty for the duration of the war. With these men, many of them draftees, came increased attention and interest by civilian reformers in army life. After the war, the army’s justice system was significantly revised for the first time in more than a century. Examining how the army treated what it considered criminal violations of a sexual nature in its court-martial process provides insight into what behaviors the army considered transgressive, how it publicly discussed such transgressions, and how it dealt with offenders.
At Fort Riley we see how entangled the army’s notions of marriage, the family, and sexual propriety were with social class and gender relations in its methods of policing contact between enlisted men and civilian women of various social classes. In many ways the army sought to maintain and reinforce the existing class, racial, and gender relations present in broader American society; as a profoundly hierarchical institution, it could do so starkly in ways that might be more obscured in a nominally egalitarian civilian society. We can also observe the perceived linkages between homosexuality and moral perversion present in how the army dealt with alleged cases of sexual contact between men, which only grew over time, as well as the discomfort that some middle-class observers had with the sometimes sexually charged banter and roughhousing of working-class men.
Fort Riley was initially established in Northeast Kansas in 1853 to protect the flow of settlers and goods over the Oregon, California, and Santa Fe Trails.2 During the Civil War, it housed a prisoner-of-war camp, and after the war it served to protect key rail lines against Indian attacks. From the fort, the U.S. Army launched several campaigns against Native American tribes in western Kansas and eastern Colorado during the Indian Wars, though with the lessening of hostilities by the 1880s, Fort Riley faced closure, along with many of the army’s other frontier outposts. In his annual report to Congress in 1884, Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan, commanding general of the U.S. Army, recommended that Fort Riley be retained as the army’s primary cavalry post and site of the army’s cavalry school. Sheridan’s recommendation was accepted and the cavalry school was established at Fort Riley in 1887. Fort Riley later hosted many major training exercises in the early twentieth century (1902–1904, 1906–1908, and 1911), which lent added importance to the fort as a major training center for the army.
Fort Riley was also home to a variety of army units, including the famed Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments, two units of the so-called buffalo soldiers, though official army histories of Fort Riley rarely even mention that black soldiers once served at the fort.3 Staffed by black cavalry troopers serving under white officers, these regiments rose to prominence and national attention during the Indian Wars. By the turn of the century, they were considered elite units and were sources of racial pride for many African Americans. Nevertheless, African Americans continued to be forced to serve in segregated units, and except for a handful of black chaplains and Lieutenant Charles Young (one of the few African American graduates of West Point), black soldiers were commanded by white commissioned officers. Black units were also stationed exclusively at garrisons west of the Mississippi.4
World War I brought enormous changes to Fort Riley, which was expanded by thirty-two thousand acres to accommodate cavalry training of new army units before their deployment to Europe. As part of this effort, Camp Funston was created as one of the thirty-two new training camps for World War I doughboys on the extensive grounds of Fort Riley. Originally intended as a temporary training cantonment, Camp Funston is still in use in the twenty-first century. Construction of Camp Funston began in the summer of 1917; by September, when the camp opened, it housed just over ten thousand soldiers. Funston grew rapidly to accommodate over fifty thousand men by October 1918.5 It was commanded by Major General Leonard Wood, of Spanish-American War and Rough Rider fame, and produced three divisions of soldiers deployed to France for the war. Camp Funston also has the distinction of being the site of the first diagnosed victims of the misnamed Spanish Flu, which likely originated in Haskell County, Kansas, before becoming a global pandemic that infected five hundred million people and killed fifty million to one hundred million.6
Fort Riley and Camp Funston are located between two small towns. The nearest, Junction City, is four miles away. Its turn-of-the-century population of about five thousand had increased to over eight thousand by the outbreak of World War II. The only other nearby town, Manhattan, Kansas, eight miles from Riley and Funston, began the century with just over three thousand civilians but had increased to nearly twelve thousand by World War II. The army population at Fort Riley varied tremendously in the early twentieth century as units were deployed from Fort Riley to the Philippines, the Mexican border, and elsewhere. The fort’s population rarely fell below one thousand men, since the army’s cavalry school was always manned, generally ranging around two thousand men, though it swelled to more than four thousand during and immediately following World War I.7
While Camp Funston trained two divisions of white soldiers during the war—the Tenth and Eighty-Ninth Divisions—it also trained elements of a black division, the Ninety-Second. As soon as the presence of twelve thousand African American soldiers at Camp Funston was announced in fall 1917, local civilians began to complain. Their resistance to the presence of additional black soldiers at Camp Funston was somewhat unusual because while the local black civilian population was very small (there were only 110 black families in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1920, for example), there had been black Regular Army soldiers periodically stationed at Fort Riley (which was called, after all, “home of the buffalo soldiers”) for decades with no known negative reactions to their presence by local whites. The War Department dispatched a representative of the federal Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), tasked with overseeing the training and recreation of wartime recruits, to Camp Funston to investigate the matter. The CTCA official, F. B. Barnes, wrote to Raymond B. Fosdick, chairman of the CTCA, to urge Fosdick to employ his “influence and strongest efforts to have the order” to send the additional black soldiers to Funston rescinded. Ostensibly, the rationale was that, while local civilian entertainment facilities were not segregated as they were in the South, the small number of local blacks meant that black soldiers would have few other blacks with whom to associate, creating what Barnes called “moral and recreational problems exceedingly difficult to solve.”8 Local white civilians echoed these concerns, stating that the “influx of large number of colored troops into parks, streets, and places of amusement … near Camp Funston would inevitably result in race conflicts which the local civilian authorities would be unable to control.”9 There is no indication that Fosdick ever attempted to use his influence to prevent blacks from being trained at Funston, and in January 1918, the first group of 2,700 black soldiers arrived at Funston. The CTCA set aside one camp theater for their exclusive use.10 When a black sergeant was refused entry to a civilian theater in March 1918, the white commander of the Ninety-Second Division, Major General Charles C. Ballou, issued what became his infamous Bulletin No. 35. This order cautioned the black soldiers under his command against going where they were not wanted, urging them to give up their legal rights if pursuance of those rights would “provoke race animosity.”11 After this incident, there are no other recorded racially motivated disagreements between Funston’s black soldiers and local whites, nor were there any disciplinary infractions by blacks accused of sexual crimes in Kansas during World War I. All told, Fort Riley represents a domestic army community that enjoyed relatively placid relations with the local civilian community throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century, though it did experience demographic and legal changes during this period that affected how local army officials would attempt to regulate sexuality.

Military Justice at Fort Riley

The American court-martial system used at Fort Riley (and elsewhere) drew on centuries of British military justice tradition that was gradually modified for use by the U.S. Army.12 In 1775, the Provisional Congress of Massachusetts Bay adopted a virtually unchanged version of the 1774 British Articles of War as the Massachusetts Articles of War, which contained detailed guidance for conducting courts-martial and maintaining military discipline. Two years later, the Massachusetts Articles of War were revised slightly and adopted for use throughout the United States. The Articles of War thus represent a kind of legal framework older than the U.S. Constitution, predating all civilian courts authorized or instituted by the Constitution. Military courts-martial also differed in significant ways from civilian courts, including the use of a single judge advocate who acted as both prosecutor and defense counsel. The Articles of War were amended again in 1789 but otherwise remained in effect until 1806, when they were substantially revised for the first time by the U.S. Congress. These revisions prohibited double jeopardy, established a two-year statute of limitations, and granted the accused the right to challenge members of the court. The Articles of War were amended again in 1874, largely to reflect a growing consensus within civilian legal circles on due process considerations.
In 1890, Congress established the summary court-martial, which was designed to replace the regimental and garrison courts-martial for enlisted men charged with minor offenses during peacetime.13 In a summary court-martial, the accused was to be brought before a single-officer court within twenty-four hours of arrest. This officer was the sole determiner of the accused’s guilt or innocence and meted out any punishments. The accused was offered the choice of a summary court-martial or a higher-level court-martial; these higher-level courts-martial offered increased protection of due process but were more elaborate and involved many commissioned officers in court proceedings. It was only in 1895 that an executive order established a set of maximum punishments for each punitive Article of War or individual offense; this executive order also provided guidance on how courts-martial were to consider the accused’s prior convictions and other factors in determining punishments.
For the first time in more than a century, Congress undertook a major revision of the Articles of War in 1916. The new legal guidelines established the three types of courts-martial that would exist within the U.S. military throughout the rest of the twentieth century: the general court-martial, the special court-martial (which replaced the regimental and garrison courts-martial), and the summary court-martial.14 This 1916 revision included a number of important features, such as the requirement that a judge advocate be appointed to general and special courts-martial; the accused’s right to receive legal representation at general and special courts-martial; a prohibition on the requirement of the accused to incriminate himself; and the requirement that the accused be tried within ten days of arrest, among others.
In the wake of numerous complaints about military justice during World War I, Congress enacted a new set of 121 Articles of War in 1920, which went into effect in 1921.15 The new Articles of War adopted in 1920 were not revised again until 1948. The important changes to military justice proceedings in 1920 included requirements that general courts-martial consist of at least five commissioned officers; that separate trial judge advocates and defense counsels be appointed for each general and special courts-martial (defense counsels could be civilian or military); that thorough pretrial investigations be conducted in all cases; that the accused be given full opportunity to cross-examine witnesses and present evidence; and that a board of review, consisting of three officers from the Office of the Judge Advocate General, review all courts-martial. Concerns about undue (and unlawful) command influence under this system lingered until well after World War II, as a single commissioned officer could prefer charges against the accused, convene the court-martial, select the members of the court (including the defense counsel), and review the case.
Pre–World War I records of general courts-martial from Fort Riley are fragmentary and incomplete, making it difficult to reach comprehensive judgments about the ways in which the army used military legal instruments to regulate soldier sexuality. However, soldiers at Fort Riley seem to have been given relatively free rein to indulge in sexual activity, even with prostitutes and even when soldiers’ sexual activities led to infection with venereal diseases, though the army appeared to draw the line at sexual activity or vulgar displays while in public, either at the fort or in nearby civilian areas. There seems to have been a general tacit acknowledgment by many in the army that—mostly save for concerns about venereal disease—sexual activity on the part of male enlisted personnel was a normal expression of their rough-and-tumble, working-class masculinity. Venereal infections certainly occurred throughout the period at Fort Riley, as the Annual Reports of the Surgeon-General of the Army and the existence of a venereal ward at the post hospital attested. However, soldiers received neither summary nor general courts-martial when they contracted venereal diseases, regardless of whether they received the required venereal prophylaxis. Several houses of prostitution existed in Junction City, Kansas, and soldiers patronized the women employed there. It appears that the soldiers were disciplined only if they attempted to bring these women onto the grounds of the fort or if they caused a public disturbance, either at one of the brothels or in another public space. While pre–World War I records of general courts-martial from Fort Riley are incomplete, army legal records for the two decades following the war are much more readily available, offering a more complete look at how the U.S. Army used military justice to regulate soldier sexuality after World War I. The relevant cases provide insight into a broad array of sexual transgressions by both white and black enlisted men, as well as noncommissioned and commissioned officers, across the two decades following World War I.

Lesser Criminal Offenses

While serious criminal offenses committed by enlisted men and officers were tried in general courts-martial, summary courts-martial provided a simple legal mechanism for trying relatively minor offenses. Unlike general courts-martial, which had elaborate judicial requirements and procedures, summary courts-marti...