United States Military Academy Superintendent Colonel Albert L. Mills and four cadets presented a statement signed by all of the members of the Academy, pledging to abolish hazing to a Congressional Subcommittee investigating hazing.
The statement, appeared on the front pages of American newspapers the next day. It stated, in part:
[W]e... while maintaining that we have pursued our system from the best motives, yet realizing that the deliberate judgment of the people would, in a country like ours, be above all other considerations, do now reaffirm our former action abolishing the exercising of fourth class men, and do further agree to discontinue hazing, the requiring of fourth class men to eat anything against their desire, and the practice of 'calling out' fourth class men by class action; and that we will not devise other similar practices to replace those abandoned.
Hazing had come to national attention after the death of first-year cadet Oscar Lyle Booz on December 3, 1900. He had entered West Point in June 1898 in good physical health. Four months later, he resigned due to health problems. He died in December 1900 of tuberculosis, blaming the illness on hazing he received at West Point in 1898.
Hazing is monumental stupid, but it still continues on in various contexts. Just recently I learned that a young man I've known for many years changed career paths due to hazing.
It was a Saturday. Harpers looked back at the day, on its cover, when the Army enforced the law in Yellowstone National Park.
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