Reforming the Country’s Morals
Dr. Jerry Sanson
Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum
November 2025
Louisiana residents generally maintained a good relationship with Army planners and the thousands of troops sent to the Pelican State for training during World War II. One of the reasons the Army chose Central Louisiana as the site of the Louisiana Maneuvers and the training camps built in the region was the history of good relationships between the local population and troops who trained there during World War I. Louisianians again opened their homes for troops during World War II, helped host dances and parties for them, volunteered at USO centers, and provided help in other ways. Civic groups provided paper and writing implements for them to write letters home. People in Central Louisiana generally welcomed the newcomers into their communities as they had about two decades earlier.
Some people and organizations in the state, however, worried that the influx of new people with morals that did not fit with their concept of traditional southern beliefs and codes of social conduct could be a corrupting influence on their communities and the young men sent to the region for training. The answer to those concerns, some people thought, was to reform the Army’s, and the nation’s, moral foundations.
Gambling continued to be a popular vice throughout the war despite periodic and ineffective police raids. The New Orleans Ministerial Union and the East Baton Rouge Police Jury both urged enforcement of anti-gambling laws in 1944. Both groups recognized that “open and widespread gambling” continued in their parts of the state. Their efforts did not lead to suppression of the vice. Dr. Michael Kurtz, Professor Emeritus of History at Southeastern Louisiana University, remembered in the documentary Louisiana during World War II, that his father worked during the war at a New Orleans police station that had a well-used connecting door to the gambling establishment located next to the station. Reformers could not hope for much help from law enforcement agencies with arrangements such as that one.
Consumption of alcoholic drinks haunted other Louisianians. The East Louisiana Baptist Association complained in October 1941 that beer was available to troops participating in the massive Louisiana Maneuvers that year even in “dry” parishes and wards and that the Army abetted the consumption by sending its trucks and men in uniform to deliver the beverage. “[T]he protest [against this activity] by citizens was met with rough retort” according to the Association’s report of the incident. (One can only imagine the meaning of the phrase “rough retort” referring to anyone trying to separate large groups of soldiers from their beer.) The Association asserted that Army officials were “delivering our soldiers over to the tender mercies of the brewers, whose sole purpose is to exploit them for their pitiful army wages.”
Opponents of alcohol consumption used wartime shortages and rationing as reasons to prohibit liquor production. The First Baptist Church of Ashland located in Natchitoches Parish protested the use of scarce sugar to produce intoxicating liquors. The Louisiana Moral and Civic Foundation petitioned President Franklin Roosevelt in 1942 to close night clubs and gambling establishments throughout the country for the duration of the war because they were “nonessential to the war effort, caused absenteeism, used supplies of gasoline and rubber, absorbed money in profit that people could otherwise use to buy war bonds, and contributed to juvenile delinquency and the overall crime rate.”
Other groups apparently agreed with the Louisiana Moral and Civic Foundation’s call for closure of places of dubious moral distinction. The Women’s Missionary Union of Zion Hill Baptist Church of Winnfield called for prohibition of liquor sales and suppression of vice within specified zones around army camps and industrial or other strategic areas.
The Winn Parish Baptist Association created the most stringent plan in Louisiana for reforming American morals and supposedly supporting the war effort in November 1942. The Association called on Congress to close all businesses in the country engaged in the manufacture, sale, or storage of all alcoholic beverages. Winn Parish Baptists also wanted all “diseased” prostitutes placed in “concentration camps” where they would be treated as saboteurs while “healthy” prostitutes would be forced to work in war-related factories. All men with venereal diseases and all male criminals would be drafted into a “foreign legion.” Representative A. Leonard Allen, whose Fifth Congressional District included Winn Parish, dutifully received the request and introduced it in the House of Representatives where it was referred to the Military Affairs Committee and promptly disappeared.
The portable communion kit used by Lutheran pastor and World War II chaplain Rev. Luther M. Schulze who met the spiritual needs of both guard personnel and prisoners of war at Camp Livingston now on display in the Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum is a reminder that spirituality played a role in the lives of many American soldiers during the war years. (“There are no atheists in foxholes.”) Some Louisianians on the home front felt that same spirituality, and it inspired them to try to overhaul the country’s morals to their satisfaction despite “rough retort.”
