Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 87, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 April 1916 — TO TRAIN FOR WAR [ARTICLE]

TO TRAIN FOR WAR

Thirty Thousand Citizens to Take Military Instructions. “Plattsburg Idea" to Be Carried Out In Seven or More Camps at Important Points This Summer. Washington. Thirty thousand young Americans will undergo military training under regular army officers this summer. This is the advice the house and senate military affairs committees have received from the Military Training Camps association of the United States, at 31 Nassau street, New York city. This association has charge of the enrollment of men in the seven or more camps of instruction, at important points, iq. the United States in the period from April to October, this year.

These men will represent students, business- and professional men and other vigorous Americans from all walks of life who will be thrown together into the melting pot of military training in the interest of better American citizenship. The camps founded on the “Plattsburg idea” —so called because the first camps of that kind were held at Plattsburg, N. Y., on the banks of Lake Champlain, last summer—were uniformly so successful that demands for more, camps of the kind have come from all parts of the country.

Since, under present conditions the men at the camps are obliged to pay their, own expenses, the training imposes no obligation whatsoever for subsequent military service. The members have to subscribe to nothing that might bind them to join any ‘military organization. They simply put in four or five weeks of healthful out-door life in tents, under the very best-known sanitary conditions, and under the training of some of the best equipped and experienced officers in the regular army. The men who enroll can for the most part be divided into four classes’, (a) men whose occupations or home ties do not permit them to enter the national guard with its fixed night drills, (b) men of the laboring classes who have a prejudice against the militia because of the liability to strike duty, (c) men who, as a matter of principle, will never support a'force subject to even partial state control and (d) men living in the country too far a way from a militia organization to make service in It possible. The men trained in these camps can be formed into regiments, subject tb a prescribed course of field training and thtfsform a reserve force, under an. exclusive federal control,, side by side with the national guardWhile the instruction camp training

tends to equip properly qualified members for service as officers of the troop bodies, officers of the association say it has a far broader scope. The big idea behind it, they say, is that the movement lays the basis for a “federal reserve citizen army.” The training camps, thus far, are conducted under a system by watch each member pays his own way, under a comparatively small charge for food and uniform ($22.50 to S3O for the entire camp for beginners or former members of camps, respectively), besides whatever the cost of railroad transportation may be. Camp equipment and everything else is supplied free of charge.