ng camp idea. This committee was formed and Presidents
Hibben of Princeton and Drinker of Lehigh were elected president and
secretary. The committee with these officers in charge gave assistance
to Wood in his organizing work so that out of the small beginnings in
the two camps an enormous organization arose which trained tens of
thousands of young men to be officers and made the immense expansion
of the little American army to 4,000,000 soldiers possible.

Pushing always quietly but unremittingly ahead Wood helped these
officers to increase the camps from two to four in the summer of
1914--in Vermont, Michigan, North Carolina and California--with a
total attendance of 667 students.

Then came the Great War and the beginning of the work on a large
scale. From college students, who reported on the interest and
pleasure which they got out of the summer camp, the life in the open
and the military instruction afforded by regular army men, the
movement extended to business men, lawyers, preachers and so on. Wood
{212} opened the Plattsburg camp on Lake Champlain to the latter and
started the first business man's camp. Each man paid his own railway
fares, his own living expenses while in camp and bought his uniform
and equipment, except arms, with his own money.

That year (1915) 3,406 men attended the five camps. In 1916 six camps
were opened and 16,139 men attended them. At the close of the first
Plattsburg camp the business men formed an organization for furthering
and extending this training just as the college men had done at
Gettysburg two years before. And in 1916 these two organizations
consolidated and organized the present Military Training Camps
Association of the United States.

All through this period, taking advantage of the European war, drawing
lessons from the tragic happenings just across the Atlantic, Wood went
about the country, as little "Bobs" of Kandahar had previously done in
England, speaking in halls, in camps, in churches, at clubs, at
festivals, on special and unspecial occasions of all kinds. He drove
home the subject which he knew so well and others knew hardly at all.
He met all comers of {213} every grade in arguments and debates--those
who were constitutional objectors, pacifists, people who thought
arbitration much more effective, people too proud to fight or too busy
to get ready--all comers of all kinds. And the Great War day by day
helped him. He spent his summers going from one camp t