The first peacetime draft in the United States

On 16 September 1940 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act, known after its sponsors as the Burke–Wadsworth Act. The United States, still formally neutral, introduced conscription in peacetime for the first time in its history. Until then Americans had known compulsory service only in wartime: in the Civil War, when both sides introduced a draft, and in 1917–1918, when, after the country entered the First World War, nearly three million men were called up in this way. On the same day the President issued a proclamation fixing 16 October as the registration day for all men aged 21 to 35.

The Plattsburg men

The initiative came neither from the White House nor from the army, but from a group of private citizens. At its heart was the New York lawyer Grenville Clark, a partner in one of the most influential firms on Wall Street. In 1915, while the United States was keeping out of the war in Europe, Clark had been one of the founders of the so-called Plattsburg movement: on the initiative of the former Army Chief of Staff, General Leonard Wood, thousands of volunteers, mostly college graduates and businessmen, underwent summer military training at their own expense at a camp near Plattsburgh, New York, and elsewhere. These camps gave rise to the Military Training Camps Association, which kept the idea of universal service alive between the wars.

In the spring of 1940, as Germany was crushing France, Clark and his old Plattsburg comrades concluded that an army of about a quarter of a million regulars could not defend the country, and that volunteers would not be enough to expand it quickly. In May and June they drafted a bill providing for universal registration and selective service, that is, the calling up of some of those registered by lot. Together with his friend Felix Frankfurter, a Justice of the Supreme Court, Clark also put forward to Roosevelt the name of Henry Stimson for Secretary of War. Stimson, a declared supporter of conscription, took office in July, and Clark later became his confidential adviser.

On 20 June 1940 the bill was introduced in the Senate by the Democrat Edward R. Burke of Nebraska, and in the House of Representatives by the Republican James Wadsworth of New York, a former senator and long-standing advocate of strong defence. The choice of sponsors from both parties was deliberate. Burke, who had already lost the primary in his state and opposed a third term for Roosevelt, could afford to back a bill that was politically risky in an election year.

The battle in Congress

At first the administration was cautious. The Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, feared that premature support for conscription would harm the army in Congress, and Roosevelt, who was seeking a third term, did not want to hand his opponents the argument that he was leading the country into war. But when the July hearings revealed public support – polls gave the advocates of conscription about two-thirds – and Stimson and Marshall argued that without a draft even the existing units could not be filled, the President came out in favour of the bill, first in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination and then openly at the beginning of August. The billions of dollars the President had asked Congress for rearmament were buying ships, aircraft and guns, but an army of more than a million men could not be built quickly from volunteers alone.

The opponents were many and vocal. Isolationists of both parties – senators such as the Democrat David I. Walsh of Massachusetts and the Republican Robert A. Taft – pacifist organisations, some churches and some trade unions warned that peacetime conscription was an institution alien to America, a step towards the militarisation of the country and the first stage in sending American boys to war in Europe. There were proposals to try voluntary enlistment first, to postpone conscription until a formal declaration of war, or to “conscript” the wealth and profits of industry along with men. The Senate debate dragged on from 8 August for almost three weeks, with supporters accusing opponents of filibustering. Walsh’s amendment postponing conscription until a declaration of war was rejected, and on 28 August the Senate passed the bill by 58 votes to 31.

Support for the bill was strengthened by the stance of the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie. In his speech accepting the nomination, delivered on 17 August in his home town of Elwood, Indiana, Willkie declared himself in favour of selective service. The issue ceased to divide the parties, although many Republicans in Congress went on voting against.

In the House of Representatives feelings reached fever pitch at the beginning of September. Women opposed to conscription sat in the galleries wearing mourning veils, and during the debate the Democrat Martin Sweeney of Ohio, a follower of the isolationist “radio priest” Charles Coughlin, called the bill a negation of democracy, for which another Democrat, Beverly Vincent of Kentucky, called him a traitor. The two congressmen exchanged several blows on the floor before colleagues pulled them apart. The House adopted an amendment by the Republican Hamilton Fish postponing conscription for 60 days so that the President could first call for 400,000 volunteers; on a roll call it passed by the narrowest of margins, 207 to 200. On 7 September the House passed the whole bill by 263 votes to 149 (some tallies give 265 to 151).

The conference committee of the two houses struck out the Fish amendment and fixed the draft age at 21–35; the House had earlier wanted to register men up to the age of 45, while the Senate had proposed a narrower range. The Senate sent the agreed text back to conference once more, demanding a tougher provision on the government’s seizure of industrial plants that refused to accept defence orders. This so-called Russell–Overton amendment, named after the Democratic senators from Georgia and Louisiana, entered the act as its Section 9. On 14 September both final votes passed easily: 47 to 25 in the Senate and 233 to 124 in the House. Two days later, the day after the decisive battles over London, Roosevelt signed the act.

What the act provided

The obligation to register covered all men between their 21st and 36th birthdays, both citizens and aliens permanently resident in the United States. From among those registered, local draft boards made up of civilians from the area were to select men for twelve months of training and service, in the order drawn in a national lottery. After completing it, a draftee remained in the reserve for ten years, or until the age of 45 at the latest. In peacetime no more than 900,000 draftees could be in training at any one time, and they could be employed only in the Western Hemisphere and in the possessions of the United States, including the Philippines. The act guaranteed those called up their old jobs back after service, provided for deferments on account of occupations important to defence and of supporting a family, and allowed conscientious objectors who opposed all war on religious grounds to perform non-combatant service or work “of national importance” under civilian direction. Compared with 1917 this was a broader arrangement, since it was not confined to members of the traditional peace churches.

On the same day, 16 September, the first units of the National Guard, among them the 30th and 45th Infantry Divisions, were called into active federal service for a year. Congress had authorised this by a joint resolution of 27 August. Together with the regular army, the Guardsmen and the draftees were to form a force of nearly one and a half million men in 1941.

Registration and the lottery

On 16 October 1940 more than 16 million men registered at polling stations, schools and offices across the country. Each was given a serial number by his board, from 1 to just over 7,800. On 29 October the first lottery was held in the Departmental Auditorium in Washington and broadcast on the radio. Stimson, blindfolded with a strip of cloth cut from the covering of a chair from Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence had been signed, drew the first capsule from the same glass bowl that had been used in 1917. Roosevelt read out the number: 158. In each of the roughly 6,500 boards the man holding that number became the first in line to be called up; across the country there were more than six thousand such men. In a radio address the President stressed that it was “a most solemn ceremony”, accompanied by no bugles or drums. The first draftees put on uniform on 18 November 1940. The new Selective Service administration was headed by the president of the University of Wisconsin, Clarence Dykstra, and his deputy – from July 1941 his successor – was Lieutenant Colonel, soon General, Lewis B. Hershey, who ran it until 1970.

The draft in the election campaign

The act came into force in the middle of a presidential campaign in which Roosevelt was the first president in history to seek a third term. Willkie did not attack conscription itself, but in October, as his ratings slipped, he accused the President ever more sharply of dragging the country into war, and he also criticised the way the destroyers-for-bases agreement had been concluded, bypassing Congress. Roosevelt answered with assurances of peace. On 30 October, the day after the lottery, he told mothers and fathers in Boston: “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” On 5 November he won the election by a clear margin.

Significance

The act of 16 September was one of the most important steps the neutral United States took towards war in 1940, even though its authors spoke only of defence. It made it possible to train hundreds of thousands of men within a year and gave the army a system that could be expanded at once. By the summer of 1941, however, the twelve-month service of the first draftees was nearing its end, and the letters “OHIO” began to appear in the barracks – short for Over the hill in October, meaning “we desert in October”. Roosevelt and Marshall asked Congress to extend the term of service. On 12 August 1941 the House of Representatives approved the extension by a single vote, 203 to 202, and the Speaker, Sam Rayburn, swiftly closed the vote before anyone could change his mind. Had the result gone the other way, the American army would have fallen apart on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

After the United States entered the war in December 1941, Congress extended the obligation to serve to men aged 20 to 44, and from November 1942 to 18- and 19-year-olds as well, and lengthened service to the duration of the war plus six months. By March 1947, when the act expired, more than 10 million men had been inducted under it – the majority of the roughly 16 million Americans who served in the armed forces during the Second World War. The Burke–Wadsworth Act thus laid the foundations of the army that fought in North Africa, Italy, France, Germany and the Pacific in 1942–1945. The registration system it introduced also outlived the war: with interruptions, America relied on the draft until 1973.