Fear Itself (48 page)

VI.

R
AISING QUESTIONS
about consent and obligation at the most fundamental level of life, the issue of conscription
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was a good deal less abstract to most Americans than neutrality or Lend-Lease. How to organize an army in a manner appropriate to a liberal democracy and to citizens guaranteed the right to be free from arbitrary coercion by political authorities had been long-standing puzzles.
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In the early republic, the main solution had combined the development of a small professional military, recruited on a voluntary basis, and state militias that could be mobilized for national purposes in wartime. During the Civil War, the country established a draft not conducted through the militia system; it met with enormous resistance, much corruption, and opportunities for substitution, and World War I had witnessed the renewal of a draft.
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But these were exceptions at times of total warfare. When those wars ended, conscription ceased. Even interventionists like Walter Lippmann worried at the start of the 1940s that the creation of a large conscripted army with its troubled associations could be “a cancer which obstructs national unity.”
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Mandatory military service was closely identified with the dictatorships. In August 1930, the Soviet Union had adopted a sweeping compulsory military service law, which extended liability to women, who were accepted into the armed forces during peace and were made eligible for the draft during war. Italy had adopted a deep program of militarization, specifying that boys and girls at six should begin premilitary training; the draft was universal for men past the age of twenty-one. Germany had also made all citizens eligible and had entered teenagers into a rigorous training program. Japan, which first had adopted a national draft in 1873, owed much of its success in China in the 1930s, where it deployed more than 1.5 million soldiers, to its modernized conscript army. Britain, by contrast, opted for conscription only with the Emergency Powers Defense Bill of May 22, 1940.
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Not surprisingly, the Selective Service Act of 1940 was the subject of intense debate on Capitol Hill and beyond. Though the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, was to endorse the draft in mid-August and call for national unity even as he conceded the election, the party platform adopted in June rejected the idea of compulsory military service as unnecessary with the country at peace, and even the news headlines of the country’s largest Republican paper called it the “Dictator-Draft Bill.”
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Taking the same position, the CIO announced that it opposed peacetime conscription.
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On the other side of the question, at the start of hearings by the Senate Military Affairs Committee, Gen. John Pershing, who had led American Expeditionary Forces during World War I, wrote to argue that compulsory training in advance of war was essential to avoid repeating the experience he had faced when he had commanded only “partially trained boys.”
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Eleanor Roosevelt intervened to recognize that “this is a very unusual procedure for us, when we are not at war,” but an urgent one, nonetheless, because the country had to confront a self-styled “chosen race” that “cannot be fought in our traditional ways.”
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No one who spoke on either side of the question in Congress disagreed with the exaggerated claim made by Mississippi’s Wilmer Colmer that this was “the most important measure that has been before the American Congress in the last 50 years.”
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In March 1938, the Department of War had prepared plans to put some two million men under arms within four months of a declaration of war.
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A year later, the Joint Army and Navy Selection Service Committee published detailed plans to draft an military force of several million should the country find itself at war. But in 1940, there was no such declaration and no such situation. The United States was at peace, if precariously so, when a bill was introduced in the House on September 3, 1940, to require all male citizens between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five, unless exempted, to register as potential draftees. At issue was whether the country should train a reserve of military manpower for potential future deployment.

Even more than neutrality and Lend-Lease, conscription signaled to its opponents that the United States was gearing up for war. Its sponsors thought it no less than prudent to get ready to confront the militarized dictatorships, especially that of Nazi Germany, whose forces were storming through Europe and murdering civilians as they went. The first group thought a draft would make war more likely by providing the administration with the means to fight, and that, as North Dakota’s Republican representative Usher Burdick argued, “there will be time enough for that when we are threatened and war is inevitable.”
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The second group thought a draft would help keep the peace by deterring aggressors. “We can be certain,” Pennsylvania Democrat Herman Eberharter argued, “that if we remain in such a state that we can easily be overcome by force that there will be no hesitation on the part of the dictators to attempt to subjugate us.”
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Once again, southern members dominated the advocacy side in the House and Senate. Across the region, people had gathered at mass meetings, demanding that Congress act.
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Support for the draft, Gallup reported, was especially robust in the South.
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In addressing the House, Colmer spoke of “the object sought [as] the preparedness of this country. We all agree that we ought to be prepared.” Georgia’s Malcolm Tarver warned that “unless we are willing to sacrifice to build up our Army and our Navy, and our national defenses generally, there lies before us not only the possibility but the probability of our being subjected to aggression.” Luther Patrick of Alabama advanced the claim that “America is preparing against one thing, and one thing only—totalitarian spread.” Robert Thomason of Texas called the bill “a life insurance policy,” and Andrew Jackson May of Kentucky, who chaired the House Military Affairs Committee, cautioned that “if England is conquered we will have a job on our own hands that will be much more difficult than the one we have now.”
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Southern members also insisted that the draft was fairer than any other way to raise an army. They noticed that the rate of voluntary enlistment was highest in their region; approximately half of the seventy thousand young men who had enlisted from January to June of 1940 came from the South. Southern members clearly believed their constituents had been more than adequately satisfying their patriotic duty but that the rest of the country had been shirking. Alabama’s John Sparkman, then serving his second term in the House (later the 1952 running mate for vice president on the Democratic ticket headed by Adlai Stevenson), maintained that “this burden which equally belongs to every citizen of this Republic should be equally distributed, and these people from other areas ought to be required to do their share toward public defense.”
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Southern representatives composed the most cohesive and supportive bloc on the three key votes in the House—recommital (171–241), final passage (263–149), and agreeing to the conference report (233–124).
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The 1940 act was both revolutionary and limited. It was revolutionary because it broke with American traditions, especially a deep skepticism about having a large standing army, by promising to train millions of young Americans during its first half decade even if the country remained at peace. It was limited because it stipulated that no more than 900,000 men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six, of a cohort of 16,500,000, were to be drafted annually; each would be required to serve only a year in the armed forces (voluntary enlistment would be permitted for those over eighteen); and deployment was limited to the Western Hemisphere, where German subversion in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela caused major concerns.
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This, indeed, was to be a “selective” system. Fully 44 percent of the men called for induction were rejected by board physicians for physical or mental deficiencies, and fully twelve million secured deferments because of their occupations, when deemed critical, marital status, or lack of literacy.
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Further, the manner in which the Selective Service System would be administered differed from every other arrangement for conscription both in the world’s dictatorships and its democracies. The U.S. draft was decentralized. It was run by 6,442 local boards that were staffed not by paid government officials but by at least three civilian volunteers who were given wide discretion about which persons to enlist and which to defer. With the armed forces practicing racial segregation, and with draft boards overwhelmingly white (250 African-Americans served out of a total of at least 25,000 outside the South, and with the exception of a tiny number in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee, the South had none), the law provided the South with a buffer against racial challenge. Worried that “their” blacks, if drafted, would mix with nonsouthern African-Americans, and thus have their views about race contaminated by radical ideas, the members of southern boards simply did not conscript black civilians until American participation in the war later required more manpower. With the administrative and substantive assurances provided by military segregation and draft board decentralization, the white South could pursue its preferences about global affairs as if they had no consequences for their racial order.
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Later, of course, this proved to have been a profound miscalculation.

By mid-1941, global desolation was accelerating. The tyranny and bloodshed inside occupied Poland included the erection of the Warsaw Ghetto. The German occupying force and the Vichy government presided in France. Japan controlled roughly half of China, occupied the strategic ports of French Indochina, and closed the Burma Road. Massive air raids persisted in Britain. Italy invaded Greece. Yugoslavia had been bombed and occupied. North Africa and the Middle East were convulsed in bitter fighting. And on June 22, 1941, in the most momentous development of the war, Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

In light of these ongoing events, the impending truncation of service in mid-1941 by recently trained men unnerved the Department of War and frightened the White House. War was everywhere, and the fledgling U.S. Army was threatened with dissolution.
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With Japan increasingly astride East Asia and much of the Pacific, with almost all of Europe under Nazi domination, and with the Soviet Union reeling, and thus with Britain at ever more risk, this hardly seemed a good time to return to a pre-1940 military. Echoing the urgent recommendation of the Department of War that limitations on the length of military service be dispensed, a shaken FDR warned, on July 4, that Americans must pledge their lives as well as their allegiance if freedom was to live, and, on July 21, he sent a message that cautioned Congress not to make a “tragic error” by permitting “the disintegration” of its newly expanded army.”
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Congressional debate was fierce over what were technically the 1941 amendments to the Selective Training and Services Act of 1940, but in fact this was a great dispute about America’s stance in the world. The House and Senate had to decide whether to extend soldiers’ term of service by eighteen months, remove limits on the total number of conscripted troops, and take out the geographic restrictions that had been included to win over unsure votes in 1940. Following intensive hearings in both chambers, discussions in the House and the Senate were prolonged and tart. Senator Hill recalled how “those who opposed aid to England and China and other countries, in spite of their protestations that they believed in a strong America, an America well-armed and well-fortified, have opposed practically every measure . . . brought to this floor to the end that we might have a strong armed force and that we might have a strong America.”
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Full of tension, they proceeded, with the outcome truly not known. The administration and internationally assertive members of Congress argued, as the Senate Military Affairs Committee put the point, that the “national interest is imperiled.”
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Hill elaborated on the fear that the Axis countries of Germany and Japan threatened to put the United States “in the jaws of a gigantic pincers movement, with one jaw in Japan, the other Jaw in Germany, and South America being used as the handle through which the pressure will be applied to us.” In this context, he argued, the question was simple: “Shall we keep our Army? Shall we, if possible, make that Army stronger and better and more efficient for our safety and our protection? Or shall we do as 13 other nations did in Europe; disregard these rumblings and invite by default the destruction of all we cherish?”
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By contrast, those who opposed the extension of the draft beyond one year argued that there was little chance the army would disintegrate or that the national interest would be put in danger. America’s position had actually strengthened during the past year. War production was proceeding at great speed. Weapons were reaching the Allies. The Italians had suffered defeat in Africa. Nazi forces were busy in Russia. The Germans had failed to invade England. Surely there was no need to lift territorial restrictions on the army, or even extend the period of service for draftees.
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Alexander Wiley, a Wisconsin Republican senator, offered the most coherent argument along these lines, forcefully noting when the 1940 draft bill had been debated, Germany had “not lost a million men in the Russian campaign. . . . Singapore and the East Indies were almost defenseless. Now they are equipped and garrisoned . . . and before England got one American bomber she was able to bomb out practically all the ships and boats Hitler had assembled for an attempt on Britain. Hitler has not been able to cross the water with his troops.”
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