World War I Preparedness and the Militarization of the NYPD

By Matthew Guariglia

As the rest of the world continues to ruminate on the 100-year anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I, New Yorkers also must grapple with the lasting impact the “Great War” had on their city. In the years leading up to, during, and following the United States’ 1917 entrance into the war, “preparedness” became the watchword that signaled New York’s increasing awareness of its connection to the world and the conflicts happening beyond the harbor. From food rationing to drafting soldiers, preparedness and all it involved included a full-scale reorganization of American society, including the New York City Police Department.

Although for many New Yorkers, interactions with the police remained unchanged, the NYPD’s transition from the hulking 19th century bruisers of Gangs of New York to modern police officers was cemented by how preparedness and militarization effected the way NYPD officers acted, looked, and understood their jobs.

From 1915 through 1917, “preparedness” became a central tenet of Police Commissioner Arthur Woods’ department, whether it be for “fire, flood, cyclone, tidal wave, earthquake, or even foreign invasion.”[1] Of course, preparing a police force for a foreign invasion also meant remaking it as a military force to be reckoned with.

Postcard of mounted NYPD officers parading down Broadway. New York Public Library

Many New Yorkers looked on with anxiety as preparedness transformed the NYPD into what resembled a militarized occupation of the city. In one training exercise, police were sent to Staten Island in companies of 350 men, given military rifle and tactics training, and forced to defend a fort during a “sham battle.”[2] On October 17, 1916, the NYPD paraded down Fifth Avenue in a fashion they had never done before. Gone were the signature blue uniforms, or the batons hanging from their belt. Now, New Yorkers saw their neighborhood police officers clad in khaki military-style uniforms with rifles on their shoulders and mounted machine guns being pulled on tripods. “We ask Commissioner Woods—WHAT IS THE REASON FOR THIS ARMY EQUIPMENT,” read one letter in The Call. “New York’s police are becoming more militaristic all the time. They are becoming more like cossacks. With the mounted cops, the machine-gun cops, the cops with rifles, New York cops are getting to look more like an army than a police force. WHAT FOR?”[3]

One thing that had supposedly set the United States apart from their would-be tyrannical adversaries in Germany and Austria-Hungry was the alleged benevolence of its police force. Some units of the multi-faceted German police looked more like soldiers than beat cops and it was often their job to maintain order by use of violence, indefinite detention without a trail, and even torture. Despite the fact that the lived experience for many Black New Yorkers may not have been entirely different from the most brutally treated German citizens, law enforcement in the United States was still symbolically, if not legally, opposed to such extreme and militaristic tactics.[4]

As men and as consumers, police were forced to perform preparedness in ways that effected both their wallets and their waistlines. It was during the years leading up to the U.S. entrance into World War I that gymnasiums were built in stationhouses around the city and department administrators obsessively attempted to manage the physique of their officers. Requiring police to cultivate slimmer more disciplined bodies served the dual function of demonstrating a more soldierly appearance while simultaneously promoting food rationing as healthy and eventually, patriotic.

In the first days of January 1917, Woods’ NYPD announced its most outlandish experiment in conditioning men’s bodies to date: the NYPD Diet Squad. The Diet Squad consisted of twelve “husky” bachelors from the new recruitment class who would live off of 25 cents a day. In their daily newspapers, New Yorkers read about the public weigh-ins, meals, and exercise regimens of the men of the Diet Squad. Although the men ultimately gained rather than lost weight, the public attention heaped on the squad’s members still succeeded in promoting one message: rationing food doesn’t mean starving or even sacrificing.[5]

The NYPD Diet Squad, 1917. Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

A song, entitled “Soldiers all the time” was published in the Police Bulletin in November 1915 in light of the ramping up of “preparedness” in New York. The songs purpose, as evidenced by its emphasis on how “commissioners are changin’ fast,” was to show how militarization and modernization of the police force were entwined. Progress came in the form of new uniforms, fitter men, and larger equipment. The third refrain in particular tried to emphasize how far the police had come:

Time was when they was heavyweights and
Did their little stunt
In a sort of German Helmet and a big, bow window front.
They turned a corner like a truck; they
Couldn’t beat a dray,
But that was some before the flood—just
Look at ‘em to day.
A-foot, a-horse, a-wheel the force is turned
Out spick and span.
They’re prideful of their uniforms as any
Army man;
They’re drilled and quick and straight and
Slick—it’s good to put in rhyme
That they’re the city’s U.S.A. and soldiers
All the time!

Implicit in the song is the constant refrain that what made modern police modern was their martial physique. Gone were the days of “heavyweight” prize fighting bodies that “turned a corner like a truck.” The new police were “drilled” in clean military uniforms. “Soldiers all the time,” emphasized the newness of police militarization of and its entanglement with modernity. As more and more politicians and commissioners emphasized “modernizing” police departments, militarization became one of the defining characteristics of the NYPD for decades to come.[6]

Matthew Guariglia is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Connecticut. His dissertation, "Learning to Police: Knowledge, Power, and Policing in Multiracial New York," explores race and the impact of empire and immigration on policing in New York City.
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Notes
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[1]William Menkel, Police Preparedness in New York, The American Review of Reviews, August 1916, 203-205, in Scrapbook,Papers of Arthur Woods, Reel 2, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C

[2]William Menkel, Police Preparedness in New York, The American Review of Reviews, August 1916, 203-205, in Scrapbook,Papers of Arthur Woods, Reel 2, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C

[3]“3,000 Police-Soldiers Parade in Fifth Avenue, Winning Plaudits from Military Achievement,” New York Herald, October 18, 1916, in Scrapbook, Papers of Arthur Woods, Reel 2, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C; “New York Police Are Becoming More Militaristic,”The Call, October 18, 1916. in Scrapbook, Papers of Arthur Woods, Reel 2, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C

[4]Alf Lüdtke, Police and State in Prussia, 1815-1850, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 124; Elaine Glovka Spencer, Police and the Social Order in German Cities: The Düsseldorf District, 1848-1914, DeKalb: Nothern Illinois University Press, 1992, 102-103.

[5]“Police Start Diet Squad,” Sun, January 4, 1917, in Scrapbook, Papers of Arthur Woods, Reel 2, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C; “Police Diet Squad to Show How to Live on 25c. a Day,” American, January 5, 1917, in Scrapbook,Papers of Arthur Woods, Reel 2, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C

[6]“Soldiers all the time,” The Police Bulletin, Vol. 1. No. 11. November, 1915, 12.