AS LONG AS THEY WEREN'T TEACHING CRT...:

James called for the formation of a new kind of national service. He wanted to replace military conscription with a draft of young men, especially the wealthy, who he believed could benefit from it the most, to do the hard labor of society. (Given that this was 1910, it's not surprising that James didn't include women in his calculation.) 

"To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them," James wrote, "and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas." 

He saw such projects as society's best hope, because "war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way." 

But societal change seldom comes quickly; James was a thinker, and thinkers rarely change the world without help. Before his idea was taken up seriously, the world's nations had slaughtered an estimated 16 million during World War I, or the ill-named "War to End All Wars." 

'American life is barren'

German scholar Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy sought to realize James' dream by helping create voluntary youth service work camps during the 1920s in Germany. When the Nazis rose to power, however, they took over the camps for their purposes and Rosenstock-Huessy fled to the United States, where he accepted a teaching position at Harvard. 

After an academic dispute, Rosenstock-Huessy moved in 1935 to Norwich, Vermont, and taught at nearby Dartmouth College. 

The United States was just then starting its own youth service work camps, the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed jobless, unmarried young men. Rosenstock-Huessy faulted the CCC for admitting only disadvantaged youths, which he said created another barrier between social classes. He wanted to bring college-educated, mostly urban, young men back to rural areas. "American life is barren because the city and the farm have become separate," he said. 

Rosenstock-Huessy's passionate support for James' ideal of the "moral equivalent of war" rubbed off on his students, who sought to help him put those ideals into action. Shortly after graduating from Dartmouth in 1940, one of those students, Robert O'Brien, met a farmer in Tunbridge who needed a farmhand. O'Brien took the job and soon persuaded five other recent Dartmouth graduates to join him. 

O'Brien found numerous local jobs that needed doing just down the road from a CCC camp that had recently closed for lack of projects. 

At the same time, a group of Harvard graduates contacted Rosenstock-Huessy about starting a work camp in the Tunbridge area. Together with the Dartmouth men, they hatched the idea for Camp William James to be located at the CCC's former Camp Sharon in the Downer State Forest. 

Working with Rosenstock-Huessy, they found three influential women to promote their cause. Two were Vermonters: writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher and newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson (whom the Nazis had expelled from Germany in 1934 for her criticism of Hitler). The third was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who managed to get her husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, on board. 

Idealists vs. realists

In December 1940, an initial group of 40 young men, a mix of recent college graduates and others on economic relief, started rehabilitating the abandoned Camp Sharon. The men planned to tackle forestry, soil conservation, land resettlement and community revitalization projects. 

The enrollees' first order of business was learning to live and work together. "There was remarkably little friction over the past fortnight," reported one. But some complaints arose over the quality of the food and the lack of hot water. "Also some hot words about policies and tactics, but no black eyes. ... Everyone in the group came to know the others as people. There was no brooding. Any conflicts came out quickly, which was much healthier. We assumed shape, confidence and above all, a concrete unity." 

While enrollees prepared to put James' vision to the test, officials in Washington battled over how the camp would operate. One faction, sometimes dubbed the idealists, wanted the camp to be based on more democratic principles, with enrollees choosing their leader, who would supervise work. They also wanted enrollees to work closely with local residents on projects. 

The other faction, called the realists, argued for a top-down approach. They wanted the camp run along the lines of the CCC, with Washington appointing a military commander and dictating what work would be done and by whom. 

President Roosevelt's opponents attacked the camp as they had attacked most of his New Deal projects. Republican Rep. Albert Engels of Michigan demanded an investigation of Camp William James. He called it a camp for the "overprivileged" that ran counter to the CCC's mission to help the underprivileged. He also ignited rumors that the camp was secretly preparing the way for labor camps, like those in Nazi Germany. 

Some opponents pointed out that Rosenstock-Huessy was not yet an American citizen and that he had organized youth camps in Germany.  

The Bennington Banner defended Rosenstock-Huessy and the camp from Engels' attacks. "Although we do not think Americans can be too careful in scrutinizing the records of Axis dupes in this country," the paper editorialized, "it does seem that in the case of Rosenstock-Huessey (sic) the congressman has erred and been too cautious." The paper said that, yes, Rosenstock-Huessy was German, but he had applied for American citizenship and had been "forced out of Germany for being anti-Hitler." Furthermore, Rosenstock-Huessy "had been checked and passed as OK" by the FBI.

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