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Saturday, September 4, 2021

Fort Sheridan Photos


Today we look at some more of the Fort Sheridan induction photos from World War II.  The Army photographed dozens, if not hundreds, of recruits from three sides, ostensibly to record body types.  Today, I'm posting a range of these along with some comparative remarks of various types.  We start with No. 9401, a fellow I would describe as very close to typical of these men and someone with about as blank a facial expression as you are likely to see anywhere.

 

13 comments:

  1. I can understand his blank expression. You could hardly say "Smile! You're on Candid Camera!" to these men. Was it compulsory for ALL inductees, do you know, to be photographed?

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    1. I don't think this was done everywhere, or more mention of it would have been made in the historical record. I wish someone with firsthand knowledge had written an account of the process and the rationale behind it.

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  2. I believe I have mentioned this before, but I did read an article - some considerable time ago - that stated the initiative was started, before DNA was discovered, to attempt to establish if there was a correlation between body type and character/personality/IQ. It appears that both recruits and students also underwent a psychiatric assessment. Some of the photographs were shot against a grid. Our military and universities in Britain did not participate in this project, but when I attended the sports clinic, we were all photographed - and filmed - in front of such a grid background. The doctor was ex-Royal Navy and I can only wonder if, perhaps, there had been some Nato sharing of information.

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    1. Any idea if the British material still exists?

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    2. Well, Britain didn't participate in this project and the sports clinic was specifically to analyse and enhance athletic potential. Some of the research may be gathering dust in some archive somewhere, but I was really meaning that information gathering techniques were perhaps exchanged within the military medical fraternity.

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  3. There used to be medical/social science theory (long since disproved) that body type had a lot of influence on personality. Remember the supposedly basic endomorph, ectomorph, and mesomorph body types? Calorman is right about the basic research protocols of large number random sampling with various types of mental/personality assessments. Lots of it wasn't voluntary or explained.

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    1. One would think that theory could be debunked by casual observation, but somebody had to prove and do a study I suppose.

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  4. All of these men have been white. Do you have any Asian, African American, or indigenous men in your collection? Do you know of any military photography of this nature that has included them? (Of course, NOT thinking of making other kinds of comparisons...)

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    1. You raise an interesting question, Jim. There are nothing but Caucasian men in my collection which further attests to the narrow scope of the practice. The three known sources of this type of material are the Fort Sheridan induction center outside Chicago, the St. Mary's College Navy pre-flight training school in California, and the Ivy League universities. The flight training system and Ivy League were known for being virtually all white, the Tuskeegee Airmen and the rare African-American Ivy Leaguer notwithstanding. One would expect, however, that a number of black Army inductees from Chicago would have gone through Fort Sheridan, but the Army was segregated at that time, and that might have meant separate training and induction centers.

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  5. I guess I had not considered how almost totally segregated the military really was during WWII. We've become accustomed to current levels of integration.

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    1. Since I replied to your previous comment, Jim, a generous viewer sent me some more photos of this type. One of them was a man named DeGomez, indicating he was Latino, a minority that was not segregated in the service. He looks thoroughly Caucasian, though, but I will post him at some point to see if others agree with that opinion.

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  6. It seems that a majority, if not all the pics have intact penis. Is that the case for most of the induction photos you have seen?

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    1. It's mixed. At that time circumcision was not nearly universal.

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