CHAPTER X MOONLIGHT SCHOOLS IN WAR TIME

In the spring of 1917 the War came and the illiterates faced new problems. Illiterate boys were swept, along with others, into the army. Hitherto they had been barred from army service, but now the War Department removed this restriction and let them in.

The first registration for army service was for men from 21 to 31 years of age, and took place on June 5, 1917. The Kentucky Illiteracy Commission immediately turned its attention to illiterate soldiers and concentrated its energies on helping to win the War. In three weeks’ time the names and addresses had been secured of all those in the various counties who had registered by mark. The moonlight schools were not scheduled to open until late in August, but a special session was opened for these illiterate soldiers that they might learn to read and write before they were sent to camp. This call was sent out to the teachers through the press of the State:

TO THE TEACHERS OF KENTUCKY:

An unusual situation confronts those engaged in teaching in this State. It is one which will put to the test your patriotism and your devotion to education, as well.

30,000 young men in Kentucky signed their registration cards on June 5th by mark, being unable to sign their names. These are not confined to any locality, but are scattered throughout every county in the State. They are not colored, but mainly white.

These figures must stagger every thoughtful Kentuckian. They would shame us to the point of concealment, but for the need of these young men for immediate relief. Concealment works no cure. Only prompt and decisive action can do that.

These young men are not to blame for their misfortune. The enlightened citizens of Kentucky, who have tolerated lax compulsory attendance laws, and have submitted to the non-enforcement of such school attendance laws as are on our statute books, are mostly to blame. But there is no time to waste in crying “shame” or in fixing the blame. This is a time to atone in such measure as we may.

It is unfair that these young men should be torn from their homes and dear ones and sent across the water to fight your battles and mine without being able to read a letter or to write a line back home. Next to actual engagement in battle, the most momentous event in the life of a soldier is the arrival of a letter from home. To his anxious mother a letter from her soldier boy is a comfort above price. No third person, however willing, can convey the sentiments and secrets of these two to each other.

The Y. M. C. A. provides an abundance of reading and writing material, but these boys can only gaze upon it hungrily as a thing they crave to use, but cannot. Such printed reminders, posted about the Y. M. C. A. camp, as “Write home,” “Have you written to mother today?” are unintelligible to them.

A Committee hands to each boy a pocket testament as he passes through the port of New York to embark for the war zone. 30,000 Kentucky boys can get no comfort from the Bible, even when it is given to them.

These young men may be called into camp September 1st. Beginning July 23rd, we can give them a six weeks elementary course in the moonlight schools, such as will enable them to read and write their own letters, and to peruse elementary books and to read most items in the newspapers. Such as cannot attend the moonlight schools can be taught individually at home. Public school teachers, who are already in their schools have the best opportunity. Every one of these I am sure will gladly serve, but in counties where the schools are not in session and where the teacher is not on the ground, former teachers and educated citizens can start night classes in the public school-houses.

There may have been a time when these young men were sensitive about this affliction, or when they were indifferent, but that time is past. It is an hour of crisis with them, and they will be seeking teachers as earnestly as teachers could, possibly, seek them.

It is the duty of every public school teacher in Kentucky to volunteer. Some have already done so on the mere suggestion of such a call. Some even who are not teachers have volunteered. It is a high privilege to render to these unfortunate ones and to our State and Nation this service. We may have been unable to invest in Liberty Loan Bonds. It may not be ours to follow the boys to France to minister to them under the Red Cross, but we can add to their comfort, their self-respect and efficiency by giving them this training before they go.

SHALL KENTUCKY SEND THIRTY THOUSAND ILLITERATES TO FRANCE? God forbid! Why should she send any? Hasn’t she an Illiteracy Commission, 11,000 public school teachers and as patriotic people as ever the sun shone on? To the guns, yes, every man of them--even though with their affliction they might well be exempt from military duty, I believe--but to the books first, and then they’ll go to the guns more content and with less embarrassment and less handicap.

Let the lights burn for the soldier boys on the evening of July 23rd in every rural, village and city school-house in the State! Write or wire that you will volunteer and let us provide you with books and plans.

Yours sincerely, CORA WILSON STEWART, President Kentucky Illiteracy Commission. Frankfort, Ky.

Those who had attended the moonlight schools had always been provided with free books, both as an inducement and as a provision to insure success. Certainly the same generous treatment must be accorded the soldier students.

A campaign for funds was organized, and in keeping with the spirit of the times this was military in form. Eleven men of prominence from the eleven congressional districts in the state were summoned to Louisville to take the lead and the responsibility in the campaign to provide illiterate soldiers with books. Not one refused. Leaving their law offices, the courts, their banks and corporations they came. They became the eleven division commanders, and with their county captains, precinct lieutenants and numerous faithful privates, made the speediest finance campaign on record, and carried their part of the enterprise through with success.

Teachers volunteered faster than we could assign and equip them. Some were out of the state, it being their vacation time, and from their retreats up in the mountains, on the lakes and even from Canada they came hurrying home.

New text-books were written to meet the need and to partake of the spirit of the times. The peaceful lessons on building roads, spraying fruit trees, rotating crops and conserving soil were not for men like these who were putting such things behind them. Theirs must be lessons martial in tone, so some were prepared centering around “men and guns, flags, camps, tents, kaisers and kings.” To make their training as much an inspiration as possible their books and school supplies were given the appearance of war. Their covers were gay in patriotic colors, even the pencils being in red, white and blue. A soldier with his gun was the cover design, and he appeared in all his glory, wreathed about with a border of flags. _The Soldier’s First Book_ and _Soldier’s Tablet_ were the names given to their readers and writing books.

Brave though our countrymen are, there is no question but that many an American boy was hesitant in the early days of the War about going to fight on foreign soil. The first lesson in the _Soldier’s First Book_ had in it a trace of psychology, as well as a content through which men were supposed to master timely words and sentences:

I go. I go to war. Do you go? Do you go to war? Yes, I go to war. Yes, we go to war.

There was considerable debate at first as to the part which the United States should play in the War, some believing that her remoteness from the theatre of action would practically prohibit her sending anything but money, munitions and food. “The man with the hoe” was acclaimed a patriot, so a lesson that delicately suggested a preference for the gun was produced:

The war is on. Some will fight with gun. Some will fight with hoe. All will fight with gun or hoe. I will fight with gun. You may fight with hoe.

To inspire something of enthusiasm for the approaching life in camp, about which there were many rumors, some distressing and some vague, this lesson was prepared:

Is this the camp? Yes, this is the camp. See the flag! See the tents! See the men! See the guns! This is fine!

The wisdom and justice of our nation’s course was being disputed in those early days before sentiment for the War had crystallized, and the first reasons ever given some of the fighting men for our being at war with Germany were learned in a simple lesson like this in the moonlight schools:

Why are we at war? To keep our country free. To keep other peoples free. To make the world safe to live in. To stop the rule of kings. To put an end to war.

The purpose of the next lesson is obvious:

See the flag! It is our flag! Our flag never knew defeat! Why did our flag never know defeat? Because our flag has always stood for right.

Camp life with its crowds and complexities would need some introduction to them, especially the features which would immediately affect them. Each man would have an early interest in the orders of the day, posted up around the camp on bulletin boards, so this lesson referring to their duties was thought applicable.

Let us read this. What is it? It is the bulletin board. What is it about? It tells when one is on detail. What is that? It is one’s duty for the day. Am I on duty today? Yes, you are on guard duty. Are you on? Yes, I am on kitchen police.

Undoubtedly, there would be situations in camp requiring a sense of humor. A lesson which prepared them somewhat for the blunders and jests of their rookie days was this:

Let us play a joke on a rookie. All right, what shall it be? Send him after a key. A key to what? A key to the parade ground. Would that be a joke? Can’t you see it? No, I cannot. Did you ever see a key to a field? No, I see. The joke is on me.

On the hot summer evenings of July and August, 1917, Kentucky boys, subject to army service, wended their way to the moonlight schools. These men had a new and powerful incentive. Many of them had never known a week’s absence from home, and some had journeyed no farther away than the county seat, to return to their own roof-trees at night. They now faced separation from all who were dear, separation by a distance of three thousand miles, and in a situation of constant danger which would stir every emotion of the heart and demand some connection with the ones at home. Their extremity was great, and they realized it. This was evident by the numbers that came, the grim determination with which they attacked their books and their unconcealed joy over a simple lesson learned. Their teachers had a feeling of tenderness toward them and a desire to help them that amounted to exaltation equal to that, no doubt, felt by any who served and sacrificed during the War. Knowledge was never so glorified as it was those nights in the moonlight schools, when the soldiers clutched at it as hungry men for bread and the teachers bestowed it as manna with heavenly grace.

New speed records were made in the time required to learn to read and write. The men in the first draft who had missed the moonlight schools were met by teachers at the station where they entrained and rendered “first aid” in reading and writing for a day or an hour as the time would permit. It was in one of these first-aid classes that the champion record was made. A bridegroom, torn from the arms of his bride whom he had married but the day before, sought to learn in one day’s time that he might write a love letter back to her. Not the next week nor on the morrow did he desire to write her, but it must be done that very day. According to the poet,

Heaven first taught letters for some wretch’s aid, Some banished lover or some captive maid,

so surely it would not fail him now. From early morning until his train left that night he strove to master script, and not in vain. Before his train left, he wrote the letter, beginning it “Dear Darling,” and his exultant joy must have been equalled by her happiness and surprise when the letter arrived.

In spite of the vigorous campaign waged, some were missed, and it was no uncommon thing during the late summer of 1917 for men to be arrested for their failure to register and brought before Federal officials. It was then disclosed that they were illiterate and did not know of the registration or the draft, and some of them did not even know that the country was at war. This added to the expense of the Government and to the burdens and annoyance of officials, but these were nothing in comparison with the humiliation and the anguish suffered by the innocent victims and their families at home.

The exemption boards found difficulty in testing the eyes of illiterate soldiers. No provision having been made they invented devices of their own. Some boards substituted pictures for the lettered cards customarily used by oculists. Stalwart, finely developed men stood up before draft boards and answered questions like these: “Do you see this little dog or can you see best the larger dog above?” “Do you see the cat in this line best or the one below?”

A second and third session of the moonlight schools for illiterate soldiers followed the first. Nowhere else in America were illiterate registrants being taught. The camps were in process of construction. The time between the registration of soldiers and their encampment--some three months or more--could profitably have been employed by illiterates of draft age in every State in learning to read and write. The records revealed that there were 700,000 men between the ages of 21 and 31 in the United States who registered by mark.

Kentucky men entered Camp Taylor at Louisville with books in their hands and determination to learn burning in their hearts. Many of them had had a taste, at least, of knowledge, and even when they had learned no more at the first aid stations than to write their names, had been provided with school supplies, pledged to continue their lessons, and placed under the instruction of some educated member of their group who promised to continue the teaching when they reached camp. In many cases they were accompanied by their moonlight school teachers, who had, themselves, been drafted out of their schools.

Some, in spite of all precautions, escaped the moonlight schools and entered camp illiterate. Soldiers from Indiana and Illinois were quartered at Camp Taylor, also, many of whom were unable to read and write. The experiences of illiterate soldiers at Camp Taylor were identical, no doubt, with those in all the other training camps. It was a story of humiliation, handicap and discouragement and in many cases black and bitter despair. Their utter bewilderment added to the difficulties of an already complex situation, and so reduced the efficiency of the company or the squad that their presence was resented by some officers, who at every opportunity and upon the slightest pretext shifted the illiterates from their own to another company.

The tables in the Y. M. C. A. hut spread with sheets upon sheets of white paper and envelopes were to the illiterate soldiers as a feast to which they had not been bidden. One soldier approached another timidly at a Y. M. C. A. writing table and said, “Will you back a dozen envelopes for me to my mother, please?”

“Certainly,” replied the other, “but why a dozen? Are you planning to write her every day? You must be a dutiful son.”

“No, these are to last me a year,” the soldier confessed. “I promised my mother that I’d get some envelopes backed and that once a month I’d slip a dollar bill in one and mail it to her and by that she’d know that I was still alive.”

Some were too proud to confess their illiteracy or to ask for help, and their difficulties were multiplied. Some carried letters in their pockets for days before they could overcome their pride sufficiently to ask someone to read them. One soldier was sent to the guard house for disobeying orders, and after he had served his sentence, it was disclosed that he had disobeyed his orders only because he could not read them.

Meanwhile, the moonlight schools and first aid classes were “leavening the whole,” and an illiteracy campaign was finally in progress at Camp Taylor under government auspices, with the Kentucky Illiteracy Commission as the base of supplies. The war against illiteracy in this camp was the inspiration for others which soon followed its example. Camp Shelby at Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where Kentucky troops were being shifted from time to time, was the next to organize, and though no preparation had been made by the Government in the beginning for this educational emergency, the most pressing of the War, the need was being realized in every camp, and soon illiterate negroes were being taught at Camp Lee in Virginia, illiterate foreigners at Camp Dix, New Jersey, and illiterates of every race and class in the other camps throughout the nation, and even overseas.

A Bible was presented to each American soldier by certain organizations as they embarked for France, and as the first troops began to move overseas, the President sent them this message:

TO THE SOLDIERS OF THE NATIONAL ARMY:

You are undertaking a great duty. The heart of the whole country is with you. Everything that you do will be watched with the deepest interest and with the deepest solicitude not only by those near and dear to you, but by the whole nation besides. For this great war draws us all together, makes us all comrades and brothers, as all true Americans felt themselves to be when we first made good our national independence. The eyes of all the world will be upon you, because you are in some special sense the soldiers of freedom.

Let it be your pride, therefore, to show all men everywhere not only what good soldiers you are, but also what good men you are, keeping yourselves fit and straight in everything, and pure and clean through and through. Let us set for ourselves a standard so high that it will be a glory to live up to it, and then let us live up to it and add a new laurel to the crown of America. My affectionate confidence goes with you in every battle and every test. God keep and guide you!

The White House, Washington. WOODROW WILSON.

But, alas, there were many among them who could not read the Word of God or the President’s benediction.

By the spring of 1918, America had many men overseas, and homesickness was reported to be acute, and in some cases even fatal among them. General Pershing, Commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, realized that there was something more essential in keeping up the morale of these boys than the socks, sweaters, candy and tobacco with which the American people showered them and so he issued this order to the women at home:

The women of America must regard themselves as thoroughly militarized. They must consider themselves as real soldiers and take orders from their officers here and obey them without question. Any woman who has a husband, brother, sweetheart, or relative in foreign service should write, write, write long, cheerful letters telling everything that happens in the old home town. The men are hungry for news and the things which seem like trivial happenings at home will be of the greatest interest to the men.

The order which I would send to the women of America is to work and write.

All who returned from the War Zone, lecturers, propagandists and others, brought the same message--“The boys need letters, letters; write, write, write.” The sad news came of boys dying of homesickness in the army overseas. It was not indifference or negligence on the part of the soldiers’ families that caused them to withhold letters, but in many cases it was the inability to write.

Here was a work for the moonlight schools scarcely less urgent than that of teaching the boys themselves, so sessions were begun for the wives, mothers, sisters and sweethearts of soldiers, and for the men over thirty-one who were subject to the next draft. The main purpose of these sessions was to teach those who enrolled to write to the boys in France, so they came with that expectation and all the training was to that end. Not only were they taught as quickly as possible to write letters, but they were instructed as to the kind to write and the sort to withhold. Letters such as “Mrs. Wiggs” and “Pollyanna” would write--radiating enthusiasm and cheer, were placed, for comparison, on the blackboard beside one of exaggerated woes, which rendered the latter so absurd that none would care to even faintly imitate it.

Boys in France wrote joyfully on receipt of these letters. The fact that they were written by those who were illiterate when they left home gave them a happy surprise. One boy wrote, and his was a typical letter.

You couldn’t imagine how pleased I was to get a letter from my dear mother. Ma I wouldn’t take the world for that letter. You certainly did well. I could read your letter a whole lot better than I could Pa’s.

A war course of study was prepared and issued for use in these sessions. The drills of peace time gave way to the more pressing ones of food conservation, the Red Cross, Liberty Loans and lessons on the history of the War and the geography of the warring countries, all of which were designed to bring isolated people into co-operation with the agencies that were striving to win the War.

The _Soldier’s First Book_ was revised and elaborated and contributed to the Y. M. C. A., the educational arm of the Government, for publication by their press and for use in the camps. It was turned over to them on the one condition that it be provided to every illiterate soldier free, as had been done in Kentucky, in the early days of the War.

By the fall of 1918 an elaborate educational program had been mapped out by the Government and was being applied in places, but the signing of the Armistice called for a complete reversal of these plans, and for a program that would quickly turn the minds of the men to the things of peace and reconstruction. The plans were immediately shifted, and the Government sent 50,000 _Country Life Readers_ overseas for illiterate soldiers detained on foreign soil. The lessons on the clean ballot, just taxation, soil conservation and cultivation, good roads and the prevention of disease were all part of the reconstruction program, which would require no less courage, energy and patriotism than even the War itself.

It is a far cry from the school-houses of Kentucky to the army occupation camps in Germany, but the moonlight schools had trailed the illiterate soldier through the camps, across the seas, through England and France to the army of occupation on the Rhine. Letters came from many soldiers. This one from a lieutenant in the army--a Kentucky boy--was the last received and made a fitting close to the part the moonlight schools had played in the War:

DEAR MRS. STEWART:

I suppose it will come somewhat as a surprise to learn that we are conducting moonlight schools according to your plans in far-off Germany. I’m now on outpost duty, and your book is in use in the point furthermost from Coblenz in the American area. Six months ago I don’t suppose many people expected the moonlight school movement to reach beyond the Rhine.

I have a fine class, mostly Italians. They’re all anxious to learn, and I get as much pleasure from teaching as I did when I opened the first moonlight school in Camp Shelby. I wrote you about that.

The teaching of illiterates is being carried on throughout our division, and I suppose in other units also. We keep records of their work and submit reports from time to time in the same manner that other work is being done in the army.

Good luck to the moonlight schools and I hope that every American boy when he returns from overseas will be able to read and write.