The second draft registration in the United States

On Tuesday 1 July 1941, at more than 6,400 local draft boards across the United States, the second registration of men took place under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, which had introduced America’s first peacetime draft. Some chronologies of the war state that on this day the obligation to register covered “all American men over 21”. That was not the case. Men aged 21 to 35 had already registered on 16 October 1940, and older men were not covered by the act at all at the time. The July registration applied only to those who had turned 21 in the meantime, that is, those born between 17 October 1919 and 1 July 1920. The Selective Service administration estimated their number at about 750,000. In the same month, on 31 July, the office of Director of Selective Service, formally vacant since April, was taken over by Brigadier General Lewis B. Hershey, who was to head it for nearly thirty years.

A new class

From the outset the Burke–Wadsworth Act of September 1940 assumed that registration would not be a one-off. It required every man who, “on the day or days fixed for the first or any subsequent registration”, was between 21 and 35 years of age to present himself, and left the dates of subsequent registrations to the President. The first registration had given the army a list of more than 16 million men, but with every month more young Americans turned 21 and remained outside the system. On 26 May 1941, the day before Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed an unlimited national emergency, the President issued a proclamation setting the second registration for 1 July.

This time there was no great mobilisation of volunteers. In October 1940 registration had been carried out by thousands of teachers, officials and election officers in schools, churches and polling places. In July 1941 it was handled by the members of the local draft boards themselves and their clerks, mostly in their own offices; national headquarters stated explicitly that organisations outside the Selective Service System were to have no part in it. The procedure changed little. Each registrant gave his personal details, address, place of employment and the name of a person who would always know his address, and received a registration card. The new class filled in melon-coloured cards, so that they could easily be separated from the white cards of October, and the serial numbers of the new registrants were prefixed with the letter “S”.

Before the registration Roosevelt sent a letter to the members of all the local boards, which the Selective Service bulletin published on the front page of its 1 July issue. The President thanked them for having worked long hours, “without compensation other than patriotic pride”, at the “difficult task of selecting men for the armed forces”, while leaving at home those whom industry and agriculture needed. Now, he wrote, they were being asked to take on another task: registering those who had come of age since October. The whole Selective Service System, with its local boards, appeal boards, doctors and advisers, then numbered some 150,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them unpaid volunteers.

The July class was more than twenty times smaller than the October one, and in the space of nine months the draft had become part of everyday life: by 1 July 1941, 693,948 men had been inducted under it, and the army, which in mid-1940 had numbered fewer than 270,000 soldiers, was approaching a million and a half together with the National Guard, which had been called into federal service.

Whom to call up and whom to leave in the factory

The July registration coincided with the first serious dispute over how to reconcile the draft with arms production. Factories working on orders for the US Army and, from March 1941, on deliveries to Britain under Lend-Lease, complained that the boards were taking away their skilled workers. In the first days of July Selective Service headquarters sent out Circular No. 3, which instructed the boards to “comb the lists” of registrants and not to call up men needed in defence industry. Attached to it was a list, drawn up by the Office of Production Management, of some 350 occupations in which labour was short. Hershey, while still deputy director, also announced with the President’s approval that a worker deferred because of employment in the arms industry would lose his deferment if he left that job.

The second issue concerned age. In the summer of 1941 the view prevailed in Congress and in the War Department that training was of most benefit to young men, and that older draftees more often had families and jobs in which they were hard to replace. On 3 July headquarters ordered the boards to defer for 30 days the induction of registrants aged 28 or over, pending an amendment of the act. Congress soon passed it. According to Selective Service estimates, the new provisions exempted some 8 million men from induction, roughly half of those registered in October 1940; about 120,000 of them were already in the army by then and could apply for release. The burden of the draft was thus shifting markedly onto the youngest age groups, and the 21-year-olds of July were becoming its main pool.

The second lottery

The order in which the new class would be called up was set by a second national lottery, held on the evening of 17 July in the Departmental Auditorium in Washington, the same hall in which the first had taken place in October. It was open to the public, and by seven in the evening every seat was taken. Hershey opened the ceremony and then invited the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, to draw the first capsule from the same glass bowl that had been used in 1917 and in October 1940. Knox, to the applause of the hall, passed the honour to Staff Sergeant Robert W. Shackleton of Fort Dix, a draftee from New York. Shackleton drew number 196. The following numbers were drawn by Knox himself, the Assistant Secretary of War, Robert P. Patterson, the Chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Navigation, Rear Admiral Chester Nimitz, the chairmen of the military affairs committees of both houses of Congress, the African American activist Channing Tobias and representatives of veterans’ organisations. The rest of the 800 capsules were drawn by more than sixty non-commissioned officers who had themselves entered the army through the draft. The drawing ended at 9.27 p.m.

The mechanism differed from October’s. The order drawn did not form a separate list to be exhausted after the 1940 lists. The local boards interleaved the new registrants with the earlier ones not yet called up, in proportion to the size of the two groups, so that the new class did not go as a whole to the back of the queue. The Selective Service bulletin spoke of “the newest class of 752,000 potential trainees”. New registrants who refused armed service on religious grounds could apply for conscientious objector status and for assignment to the Civilian Public Service camps, open since May.

Hershey instead of Dykstra

Since the spring of 1941 the Selective Service System had had no formal head. Its first director, the political scientist and president of the University of Wisconsin, Clarence A. Dykstra, whom Roosevelt had appointed in October 1940 so that the face of the draft would be a civilian rather than a soldier, headed it for only six months. In March 1941 the President made him chairman of the new National Defense Mediation Board, which was to settle labour disputes in the arms industry, and on 1 April Dykstra left the Selective Service administration. He remained at the head of the mediation board only until early July, after which he returned to running the university.

From April the office was in practice run by his deputy, Brigadier General Lewis Blaine Hershey. Born in 1893 in Steuben County, Indiana, a teacher by training, he had served in the Indiana National Guard from 1911, had been in France with the American Expeditionary Forces in the First World War, and in 1920 had transferred to the regular army. From 1936 he was executive officer of the Joint Army and Navy Selective Service Committee, which spent four years preparing plans for a future draft. After the act was passed in 1940 he was promoted to brigadier general and made executive officer of the new agency, and on 19 December 1940 its deputy director. It was he who drew up the regulations, trained the state directors and defended the principle that the fate of draftees was decided by their neighbours on the local board, not by officers.

On 31 July 1941 Roosevelt sent Hershey’s nomination as Director of Selective Service to the Senate, which confirmed it immediately. A post that ten months earlier had been deliberately given to a civilian thus went to a career officer – but also to the man who had been the real architect of the system from the start and knew it better than anyone else.

Its place in the war

The second registration took place nine days after Germany attacked the Soviet Union, in a month in which US Marines landed in Iceland and Washington was putting ever sharper pressure on Japan. The United States formally remained neutral, but the army it had been building for a year was approaching a threshold that could only be crossed by a political decision. The 1940 act limited draftees’ service to twelve months and to the Western Hemisphere, and the first of them were due to go home in the autumn. In his biennial report, published at the beginning of July, the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, warned that releasing them would break up newly trained units, and on 21 July Roosevelt asked Congress to extend their service. At that time the letters “OHIO” began to appear in the barracks: Over the hill in October. The Senate passed the extension on 7 August, and on 12 August the House of Representatives approved it by a single vote, 203 to 202, when the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, swiftly closed the vote. On 18 August the President signed the act, which lengthened service by 18 months. Had the vote gone the other way, the US Army would have begun to fall apart a few weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

More registrations followed the July one. After the United States entered the war, Congress in December 1941 made men aged 20 to 44 liable for service and required all men aged 18 to 64 to register; further registrations were held in 1942, and from November of that year 18- and 19-year-olds were also inducted. By 1947 more than 10 million Americans had entered the armed forces through the draft. Lewis B. Hershey headed the Selective Service System throughout the war and then through the Korean and Vietnam Wars, until February 1970, when, amid protests against the draft, President Richard Nixon removed him from office. He was the longest-serving director in the agency’s history. The system he had helped to build from 1936, and which in July 1941 passed its first test of routine, became a permanent feature of American life for three decades.