	APPLY REQUEST INFORMATION CONTACT US DIRECTORY HOME SEARCH

Section I: The Development of the ROTC program in America, 1862-1916

Section II: The Golden Age of ROTC at Ripon College, The 1920s and 1930s

Section III: Ripon College and its ROTC Unit during World War II

Section IV: Postwar Reconstruction: The Ripon ROTC Unit, 1945-1950

Section V: An Era of New Challenges: The Ripon ROTC Unit in the 1950s and 1960s

Section VI: The Ripon Battalion in Crisis: The Ripon ROTC Unit, 1967-1970

Section VII: The Ripon Battalion as a Volunteer Organization: The Ripon ROTC Unit 1970-1991

Concluding Observations

Appendix: ROTC Personnel, Ripon College, 1919-1995

CONTACT INFORMATION

Phone

ACADEMICS:ROTC

Home > Academics > Majors > ROTC > ROTC History at Ripon

{ ROTC History at Ripon : Faith and Courage }

Section I

The Development of the ROTC Program in America, 1862-1916

lthough the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) was established by Congress in the 20th century, the basic concept on which it was founded was established by the Morrill Land Grant College Act in 1862. Long a supporter of the concept of the citizen soldier and aware that the current Civil War was being fought primarily by just such citizen soldiers, Senator Justin Morrill provided in his legislation that the agricultural and mechanical colleges he planned to support would be institutions where:

the leading object shall be, without excluding scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and mechanical arts, ... in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. [authors' italics]

The four words which provided for military training in the context of the educational vision that shaped this legislation had enormous ramifications for Ripon College and the nation in the subsequent century. They established, first, the idea that although the United States would maintain a professional regular army for its major wars, the country would rely on an army made up of citizen soldiers.

Second, by providing for military education aimed at officers, the legislation indicated a growing recognition of the fact that the backbone of such a citizen army had to be college-educated officers with some prior military training. Third, the task of carrying out such training was delegated specifically to the larger, more efficient, and more egalitarian state universities committed to technical education rather than to the smaller, more expensive, and more elitist private colleges dedicated to the liberal arts.

The military education program provided for in the Morrill Act tended to languish during the rest of the nineteenth century as few could see a need for a citizen army. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, two major developments focussed new attention on the training of officers for citizen-soldier forces. The first of these was concern over the military and political developments in Europe and Japan that made it seem that the United States was becoming increasingly vulnerable to attack by modern mass armies. Many political and military leaders began to advocate that the United States be "prepared" for such a contingency by creating some kind of mass organized reserve force of trained citizen soldiers.

At the same time many social leaders, and especially college and university presidents, were becoming increasingly alarmed about what they saw as a deterioration in the physical and moral character of American youth. Actually believing in the mythical vision of the husky, virile, and deeply moral teen-age male who supposedly ripened to maturity in the rural society of the nineteenth-century frontier, these leaders anguished over the scrawny, indolent, and undisciplined generation they saw being produced by the newly urbanized society in America. In a desperate effort to recover this vanishing virility, many of these leaders accepted the idea of introducing military training into secondary and post-secondary education as an alternative means to provide the guided physical and moral development seemingly lost with the passing of the frontier.

With the outbreak of World War I in Europe these two movements coalesced to produce a demand for a new military policy that included universal military training (UMT) and a program for training reserve officers. While UMT remained unpopular in many parts of American society, the idea of providing military training at colleges and secondary schools for prospective reserve officers found almost no critics and was easily incorporated as the ROTC program in the National Defense Act of 1916.

The ROTC program outlined in the 1916 legislation allowed the government to provide support in the form of money, equipment, and instructors to all qualifying high schools and colleges which volunteered to participate. At participating colleges, this program called for two levels of military training. The first was a two-year program called the Basic Course that was to be mandatory for all male students. As a remnant of the campaign for UMT, the Basic Course was to provide the physical and moral training still seen as necessary for all young men in American society as well as sufficient military knowledge to enable the student to serve as a well-trained private or non-commissioned officer in a citizen-soldier army in times of national emergency.

The second level was a two-year program called the Advanced Course which was open only to students who volunteered for it and who were then selected by the president of the college and the resident military instructors. The objective of the Advanced Course, which included a mandatory six-week summer camp, was to train students to serve after graduation as lieutenants in the citizen-soldier reserve forces. It was then hoped that some of these graduates of the Advanced Course would continue their military studies in their adult life to qualify for promotion to higher grades. The National Defense Act of 1920 even provided for the formation of actual divisions made up of citizen-soldier reservists with officer personnel up to colonel to be drawn from those ROTC graduates who had voluntarily continued their studies. It was this four-year program made up of the mandatory and universal two-year Basic Course and the voluntary and selective two-year Advanced Course that Ripon College accepted when it applied to the War Department in 1918 for an ROTC program on its campus.