Camp William James was opened in 1940 by Dartmouth College professor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, as a center for training youth for leadership in the Civilian Conservation Corps, which had been inaugurated in 1933 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
[1] The camp's namesake and inspiration was the pragmatic philosopher, William James, who delivered an influential address at Stanford University in 1906 with the title, "The Moral Equivalent of War".
"A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy", James argued, "Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built."
This service must implement the global organization as the young must experience what the old are planning before the old can have any authority.Among those who had joined the short-lived work at Camp William James was a Dartmouth student, Page Smith, who later became an important American historian at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
While on the faculty at UCLA, in 1962, Smith wrote a letter to Hubert Humphrey proposing an international version of the Camp William James experiment in the "moral equivalent of war".