World War I Army Training by San Francisco Bay: The Story of Camp Fremont

By Barbara Wilcox

In 1917, Stanford University leased a portion of its land to allow the creation of Camp Fremont, headquartered in present-day Menlo Park. That brought the war into the Bay Area's backyard. Soldiers received a welcome reception, and locals embraced the potential economic opportunities. However, the military presence also revealed the conflict Americans felt over the war. Residents threatened conscientious objectors within their community, while the government mollified fears of the vice that often followed troops in training. Armistice came earlier than expected, and many soldiers trained for combat they never saw. But all contributed to the growth and change that arrived with the modern era. Author Barbara Wilcox tells Camp Fremont's story of adaptability, bravery and extraordinary accomplishment during the Great War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jan 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781625856333

Barbara Wilcox

Barbara Wilcox is a longtime journalist and writer in news, public affairs and American culture. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. This book grew out of her Stanford thesis research, which was awarded the Stanford Historical Society Prize for Excellence in Historical Writing. She lives in Menlo Park on the site of Camp Fremont's school for bakers and cooks.

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INTRODUCTION

Not many homes in the Palo Alto hills have swimming pools. The foothills, especially in winter, are cooler than one might expect, with breeze from the Golden Gate reaching the region by afternoon and sending its tempering breath over the rolling grasslands and venerable oak trees. People in Silicon Valley think of themselves as doers, in any event, not as loungers by pools. For an invigorating swim, which is more in tune with how locals live, the Palo Alto Hills Golf and Country Club is down the street. But the client wanted a house with a pool, and so the contractor brought in equipment one morning in November 2010 and started, cautiously, to dig.

Pretty soon, the blade began unearthing hunks of long, rusty shells, deeply corroded, dozens of them, many with marble-sized shrapnel balls still nestled inside. A ringing ping of metal on metal heralded each new find. The contractor had heard this might happen and slowed the work pace even further. Then a blade connected with an object that made a distinctly thicker, robust thunk, and a bomb squad was called in.

This crew had encountered some of the few remaining physical traces of Camp Fremont, a World War I U.S. Army training camp that claimed roughly sixty-eight thousand acres of the San Francisco Peninsula, from San Carlos to Los Altos, at its peak in summer 1918. The camp’s nucleus was seven thousand acres leased from Stanford University and from private, mostly absentee, owners in what is now the small city of Menlo Park, where the camp was headquartered. It was one of thirty-two camps designated to train an army vastly enlarged after America’s April 1917 war declaration. Sixteen of these camps, including Fremont, had to be hurriedly built from the ground up. At Camp Fremont’s peak, more than twenty-eight thousand men of the army’s newly formed Eighth Division trained there for combat on the Western Front. They practiced trench warfare on a maneuver ground, complete with dugouts and underground galleries, on the site of today’s Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) National Laboratory south of Sand Hill Road. They used an artillery range, where the crew digging a swimming pool found the unexploded shell in November 2010, stretching coastward from the Stanford property now called Dish Hill into the forested slopes between Los Trancos and Madera Creeks. There, on what now largely remains open space, men of Camp Fremont’s Eighth Field Artillery Brigade spent a few intense weeks firing seventy-five-millimeter field guns from Dish Hill into the type of reverse slopes they hoped soon to conquer on the Western Front. It is ammunition from such a French 75—quick and accurate, the famed workhorse of the Allies—that excavators still occasionally find in the Palo Alto foothills today. Likewise, trenches and dugouts of Camp Fremont emerge after heavy rains as sinkholes among today’s research installations and venture-capital firms. They are palimpsests from an earlier era of growth, innovation and change.

Few men who trained at Camp Fremont actually saw action in the Great War. Stationed on the West Coast, days by rail from the Atlantic ports of embarkation, the Eighth was the last of the American Expeditionary Force’s (AEF) divisions to be put on trains before the November 11, 1918 Armistice. Some Camp Fremont units reached Europe in time to help with the occupation of defeated Germany or to build facilities for the AEF’s return to the United States. Most got no farther than the Atlantic docks when peace broke out. That August, five thousand Camp Fremont men had been stripped from the Eighth Division and shipped across the Pacific Ocean to Vladivostok, Siberia, where they were kept until early 1920 as part of President Woodrow Wilson’s failed Russian intervention to check Bolshevism there. Training draftees to fill their ranks probably contributed to the delay in Camp Fremont’s deployment.

The strange tale of America’s Siberian intervention has been told elsewhere and is largely outside the scope of this book. Camps like Fremont, however, remain largely unexplored, both as physical places and as historical phenomena. Because Camp Fremont was evanescent, fading like most of its sister training camps into America’s postwar landscape, it is easy to dismiss as a curiosity. The tunnels of the trench maneuver ground are remembered fondly but with little sense of context by many locals, now elderly, who played in them as boys before Stanford sealed them in the 1940s. Yet the tunnels have a story to tell.

Camp Fremont and its sister camps across the nation uniquely reveal how America mobilized to win a war in which most citizens had little personally at stake and further reveal how the scope and totality of that mobilization changed many Americans’ lives. Support for the war was not unanimous or selfless, despite wartime images of patriotic parades and families happily eating unfamiliar foods to save wheat and meat for the fighting men. In fact, World War I America was a tense place. The war was controversial and often widened existing rifts. A close look at Camp Fremont shows us this.

Federal power soared in the seventeen months the United States was at war—power to tax, power to spend, power to control corporate and individual behavior in ways large and small. Yet the U.S. war relied at least as much on Americans’ voluntary efforts. It relied on mobilizing the will of the people to accept controversial measures such as the military draft. It relied on voluntarism to fulfill the war effort in ways Congress would not or could not compel, such as getting localities to provide the large tracts of land required for camps like Fremont. At the same time, the government had to soothe locals’ well-founded concerns about the vice that in past wars had followed soldiers wherever they went.

Troops kept pets in camp and smuggled them overseas when they could. Bob Swanson collection.

The government appealed where it could to blatant self-interest, the line of least resistance. It also appealed to the implied self-interest of altruism, of the benefit through affiliation to the greater good that was a keystone of the age’s progressive thinking. Next, and again using the progressive toolkit, government worked the levers of public opinion and mass psychology to shape Americans’ behavior in support of war aims. Finally, government enhanced its own power to police, to evict and to detain. The scope and consequence of the U.S. war effort, as well as the mindset that made it possible, are clearest where the mobilization was physically concentrated, including the army training camps like Fremont that sprung up across the nation in late 1917. When the people of the San Francisco Peninsula welcomed Camp Fremont into their oak-studded foothills, they invited government into their lives in a new and pervasive way. Whether the experience made them happy rested largely on whether they thought they had reaped the rewards that the government had promised, whether they believed the propaganda and how well they negotiated new roles in this changing world.

It seems odd now that a university, let alone a coeducational university in a more genteel era, would welcome an army division of lusty young soldiers onto precincts roughly a quarter of a mile from its women’s dormitory. It seems preposterous—decades after Vietnam-era protest severed links between defense contracting and academia at many universities, including Stanford—that a university would allow field guns onto its precincts for the purpose of shelling neighboring properties, however sparsely settled the ground. Just as oddly, Camp Fremont was brought to rural San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties by a group led by the mayor of the city and county of San Francisco, someone whose legal authority ended thirty miles north of camp and whose attempts to similarly dictate land use outside his jurisdiction would today be strenuously fought if not instantly shut down.

In fact, none of these moves found unanimous favor in 1917–18. Problems of interrelations among soldiers and local women, in a Stanford official’s words, caused strife both in the university and in town. Federal and local officials shadowed and investigated women they found consorting with troops at Camp Fremont and elsewhere. Many Stanford women resented the university’s harsh—and, as it turned out, futile—new rules imposed to keep them away from the soldiers whom public opinion praised so much. As for the artillery bombardments, one downrange landowner’s opposition may have figured into the army’s decision to move Camp Fremont’s gunners to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, after only a few weeks. But it is important to realize that the camp and its guns and its rules found favor with the majority. They offered proof that their formerly sleepy area was progressive and patriotic and was doing its part to win America’s first global war.

Historian David Kennedy identified the real Great War waged in the United States as a war for the American mind. Kennedy’s 1980 book Over Here traces how the Wilson administration harnessed the progressive ideology so popular at the time to win support for a less popular war effort. In its broadest terms, progressivism sought the use of government and institutions for the common good. It arose to correct a perceived excess of individualism that shaded into selfishness, whether among industrial trusts abusing corporate power or among a populace lacking common and binding purpose. The problem was that an ideology that exalted the common good also yielded motive and means to coerce the individual. This happened by law, the draft itself being the most notable example. It also happened via public opinion that was heavily shaped by government propaganda, law being considered more autocratic and therefore less desirable than consensus in the progressive mindset. While the government did not intend to incite hysteria, an effort driven by popular opinion gave outliers little legal remedy or standing to say no. Carried to extremes by the need for total mobilization, the result was a paradox, as California progressive leader Senator Hiram Johnson warned: [I]n our tenderness for democracy abroad, we forgot democracy at home. War doubters had to self-censor or face arrest. Neighbors browbeat one another to buy Liberty bonds or to do more on behalf of the soldiers. Conscientious objectors were threatened with baths of excrement. All these seedy doings emerged in and around Camp Fremont.¹

Progressives reasoned that camps like Fremont introduced troops to many features of America’s twentieth-century urbanization. The camps gave many soldiers their first taste of life in large, complex groups, of dental care and vaccination, of competitive team sports, of household electricity and, if their units were among the few linked to Camp Fremont’s hard-won sewer line, of modern plumbing. Progressives drove the War Department’s often-coercive efforts to guard soldiers’ sexual health and to prevent camps like Fremont from becoming hotbeds of vice. They drove public health efforts to stem the 1918 flu epidemic, which swept through Camp Fremont during the global mobilization and ultimately claimed millions of lives. Progressivism even influenced army training itself and helped to paper over that training’s shortcomings. Finally, progressive ideas of civic improvement help explain why Camp Fremont ended up where it did and how it affected people both on base and nearby.

The War Department appealed to self-interest where it could. The San Francisco civic and business leaders who lobbied Washington for a camp did so to further a Greater San Francisco, a regional entity in fact if not by statute, one that assured progress and stability in an area far beyond their jurisdiction but whose resources, such as water and electricity, they largely controlled. Like the Hetch Hetchy water system then being planned and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Camp Fremont involved many of the same prominent players. It meant to maintain the regional economic dominance of the city that historian Judd Kahn and geographer Gray Brechin dubbed Imperial San Francisco. The civic bigwigs, in turn, marketed the project to smaller-scale Peninsula real estate interests who welcomed the infrastructure, especially sewers, that they thought an army camp would bring.

The war ended before most Camp Fremont men sailed. This cartoonist from Fremont’s Twelfth Infantry was not alone in his disappointment. From The Twelfth U.S. Infantry—Its Story by Its Men.

The motives of Stanford University, then young, land-poor and struggling for identity, are more oblique. Trustees hoped leasing six thousand acres for an army camp would prove Stanford’s patriotism against the activities of its pacifist ex-president, David Starr Jordan, whose barnstorming against war was raining negative publicity on the university. Wartime university president Ray Lyman Wilbur, unlike his predecessors, was among those who thought national service would improve America’s youth. Insights that Wilbur gained from friend and Stanford trustee Herbert Hoover—who was fast gaining world prominence through his relief efforts for civilians caught in the conflict—lent immediacy in Wilbur’s eyes to the faraway war and grounded a conviction he expressed hotly to War Secretary Newton D. Baker in May 1917 "that unless something is done, and done very promptly, we