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Both Secretary of War Baker and Secretary of Navy Daniels devoted much time and effort to the problem of providing reasonably normal and wholesome activities in camp for the millions of men who had been removed from their home environment.

Their policy ran counter to the traditional idea that a good fighter was usually a libertine, and that in sex affairs `` God-given passion '' was a proof of manliness.

Baker moved first ; ;

six days after war was declared he appointed Raymond Fosdick chairman of the Commission on Training Camp Activities ( the CTCA ).

Fosdick, a brother of minister Harry Emerson Fosdick, was a graduate of Princeton, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the American Philosophical Association.

His assignment was not a new one because Baker had sent him to the Mexican border in 1916 to investigate lurid newspaper stories about lack of discipline, drunkenness, and venereal disease in American military camps.

Fosdick had found the installations surrounded by a battery of saloons and houses of prostitution, with filles de joie from all over the country flocking to San Antonio, Laredo, and El Paso to `` woman the cribs ''.

He also ascertained that many officers were indifferent to the problem, including Commanding General Frederick Funston who gave Fosdick the nickname of `` Reverend ''.

On the basis of the long chronicle of military history Funston and his brethren assumed that the issue was insoluble and that anyone interested in a mission like Fosdick's was an impractical idealist or a do-gooder.