From the archives of The Memory Hole

Anti-war Propaganda: On the Group W Bench

The following essay by James J. Martin comes from a collection, titled, Revisionist Viewpoints: Essays in a Dissident Historical Tradition. The draconian device of compulsory military service in its various manifestations has been a tool for warmaking and foreign adventurism since time immemorial. Dr. Martin here explains the emergence and effects of the most enduring conscription law in American history.

A Look at Conscription, Then and Now

by James J. Martin


Not long after the national nominating conventions named President Lyndon Johnson and Senator Barry Goldwater as the contenders for the presidency in the election of 1964, both men astounded large elements in the country by pledging to work for the termination of conscription, if elected. These promises were headline news in several of the country's largest newspapers in the middle of the summer, and excited a goodly volume of discussion and comment.
One hesitates to suggest that either candidate or his entourage considered such a policy move a majority desire. But undoubtedly it was prompted by the feeling that enough people were of such persuasion as to represent a juicy parcel of votes. A Gallup poll released just before Christmas, 1964 corroborated this surmise. It revealed that 23 per cent of their national sample believed the draft should be abolished, while another 14 per cent were in doubt as to the wisdom of continuing this institution.1 These two combined constituted a rather tidy fraction of the national community, and indicated a significant deterioration in a state of mind which, over the last quarter of a century, seemed growingly committed, with few dissenters, to this totalitarian service for its young men as far ahead as anyone might care to peer.
The revival of conscription as an arguable issue has been an electrifying event, at a time when it seemed as though the paying of the Confederate debt was more likely to gain the agenda as a discussion topic, so many people having become adjusted to compulsory military service as one of the endurable pillars of the American way of life. Of course, these would not include the number acquainted with the eloquence of Daniel Webster during the War of 1812, denouncing suggestions that this country adopt such a program then, as little more than reliance on the artifices of distant tyrants.
The state everywhere owes a profound debt to this handiwork of the French Revolution, brought to a high polish later by Napoleon I. But it was not until the First World War that the modern industrial national states perfected it into the science which it has become. And it has been the complement to universal suffrage in the evolution of the ant-hill society; the common man has had proffered to him the ballot in one hand and the rifle in the other, the two have usually accompanied one another, even if at an irregular pace.2
As far as today's collegians are concerned, perhaps there is an aspect of confusion and mystery connected with this stage of the situation, since an overwhelming majority seems to believe that a period of compulsory military service has been a thing American males have always had to look forward to. And some of those fighting for its dissolution know so little history that they imagine they will be the first eligible youth free from its grasp since colonial times, if not from those of Genghis Khan. But there is a goodly fraction of their teachers whose whole college careers, graduate work and all, were spent entirely in an era when the cold breath of the draft did not blow on the nape of anyone's neck.
The writer belongs to the last college generation (four years, the usual time span necessary to attain the bachelor's degree, is considered a generation in this context) which were able to spend at least part of their undergraduate life unconfronted by compulsory military service in peace time. Possessors of one of the original draft cards, issued in mid-October, 1940, have become as elite a club' as those holding Social Security cards beginning with an 001 number.
The majority at that time trudged off to register with the morale of a steer being led into an abattoir. But at least there was the general atmosphere that something unusual was happening, and a widespread unhappy and depressed sentiment prevailed; the circumstances under which this revolutionary change in policy was taking place charmed very few of those involved.
"The Panic Is On" was the title of one of the swing-music hits of the time. And indeed it was, though the peace-time draft was a reflection of a somewhat different one. This panic was the one induced by the successes of the German military machine in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and France in April, May, and June of 1940, before which the vaunted forces of the French and British had folded like an oriental fan, despite enjoying vast material anti manpower superiority.
Bi-partisan supporters of the foreign policy of the Roosevelt administration, with its powerful favorable predisposition toward these latter countries' regimes, promptly contributed to the hysteria by helping to float scare stories of imminent invasion of this country. Before the end of the summer, eyes were already being raised skyward, in expectation of seeing Adolf Hitler's paratroopers descending on Des Moines, Keokuk, and points elsewhere. Life magazine, just over three years old at the time and ready to try anything, had a generous hand in this spate of palpitation, publishing on the heels of the Anglo-French debacle three pages of sketches, drawn as far back as March, 1939, and based on advice from "the best available military advisers in Washington," which described an easy aerial and naval invasion of the United States from both West and East simultaneously.3 It was obvious that there was no objection from high places to this incubation of morbid anxiety and consternation. and its contribution to popular panic which helped depress opposition to "defense" appropriation legislation was never estimated, let alone its part in diverting attention from the flurry of conscription proposals, which events of that moment also inspired.
A formidable team of journalists, aided by radio and newsreel commandos, and supported by a contingent of completely unhinged educators, shrieked of our utter inability to fend off the horrid "Narzies," to use the pronunciation of Britain's Winston Churchill. Though unable to cross the twenty-six miles of the English Channel, by some magic they were expected to drop unopposed upon mid-America, 4,000 miles away. (One route which they were expected to take was via the hump of South America, in which case the Germans would have been performing a stunt comparable to moving back to Istanbul for a running start. One must keep in mind, of course, the limitations of the propeller-driven aircraft of over twenty-five years ago.) It was of interest to those who resisted these efforts to dissipate their skeptical judgment to learn in 1945, when General George Marshall filed his final report as chief of staff, that no evidence could be found that the Germans even had a coherent plan for controlling Central Europe, let alone entertaining grandiose schemes for overpowering the United States.
This was part of the emotional climate prevailing when Congress undertook debate on bills to provide vast "defense" spending.
An idea of the effect of this invasion-scare program can be gained from observing the behavior of the representatives of the people, who argued long and cantankerously over an appropriation bill of $363 million for building warships in 1933, but passed an appropriation bill of some $8 billion with scarcely a murmur in the summer of 1940. Of course, an immense conscript armed force to use the martial hardware which would presumably result from this "defense effort" was also on the legislative agenda; the thesis that if the country was really in danger, such manpower would have been readily forthcoming via the volunteer system, was never allowed a test. The fact that majorities of 80 per cent and over stubbornly refused to support entry into the war by the administration right to the day of the Japanese attack on Hawaii on December 7, 1941, indicates the degree to which the scare propaganda of imminent invasion of continental United States (Hawaii was an island possession 2,000 miles away, not a state, in those days) was discounted.4
In any event, by the end of the summer of 1940 the representatives of the people had passed and Roosevelt had signed the Selective Training and Service Act, often referred to as the Burke-Wadsworth Act, from the names of the bi-partisan pair who introduced the bill, Senator Edward R. Burke and Representative James W. Wadsworth. This was the first compulsory peace-time military service bill ever passed in United States history, and with a number of modifications in the more than a quarter century since, it remains our basic conscription law. The Burke-Wadsworth bill was not the only measure proposed, but it ended up being the one adopted. With Roosevelt's signature September 16, it provided for the registration of all men between the ages of 21 and 36, and for the training for a calendar year of 1,200,000 troops and 800,000 reserves. On October 16 was begun the job of registering 16,400,000 men. Those selected were drawn in a lottery, beginning October 29, and the first draft notices began to be received in November. (This writer remembers being one of the first to receive the famous "greetings" but recent recuperation from a near-fatal illness, involving pneumonia and various complications, did not make for ready acceptance.)
A fantastic amount of undercover work was represented in this conscription act; many persons of diverse political persuasions contributed their labors in its behalf. The work of a powerful and wealthy Anglophile "conservative" element drew much attention in the four months before the work ended in law. An influential "liberal" sector of opinion makers, after first backing a universal training suggestion, also found their way to this side of this draft proposal.5 Undoubtedly, the former element, in addition to their ardent sensitivity toward the cause of certain British Tory leaders at grips with the Germans at that moment, also thought of conscription as some kind of political therapeutic. As Lawrence Dennis analyzed them in his acerbic critique, "Many, for example most of the members and supporters of the Civilian Military Training Camps Association, favor conscription because they believe it will be a force for conservatism and an antidote for the subversive isms and for revolution. In this belief they are 100 per cent wrong."6 Dennis, of course, was proven absolutely right. But probably the most concise analysis had occurred forty years earlier. "Universal, conscript military service with its twin brother universal suffrage has mastered all continental Europe, with what promises of massacre and bankruptcy for the Twentieth Century!" exclaimed the celebrated French historian Hippolyte Taine, in 1891, in his Origines de la France contemporaine. One could only remark in extension that the slaughter of 1914-1918 had proven insufficient illumination of M. Taine's vision, apparently, as everyone began to get ready for another round of murder, robbery, and destruction.
The new conscription act promised to be somewhat more grimly and stringently enforced, if its stipulations were to be believed. Though Roosevelt on registration day spoke expansively about this being a reviving of "the 300-year-old American custom of the muster," this must have caused his speech writers as much heartburn as Robert E. Sherwood confessed to have suffered every time he heard the part of Roosevelt's 1940 Navy Day speech in which the promise was made "again and again and again" that no Americans would be sent off to "foreign wars," Sherwood having written this succulent tidbit. In the case of this conscription procedure, there really was no one kidding anyone; this was compulsory, and utterly unrelated to the colonial muster. A violator was guilty of a felony, not a misdemeanor, as had been the case in the First World War; the law provided for a penalty of five years in prison or a fine of $10,000 or both.
There is little material on the subject of evasion during World War I, and little more on the subject of conscientious objectors. There had been about 1,300 of the latter in the First World War, and something was known about their treatment during the war years. What remained an obscure subject was the degree of evasion of the law by those who "lined the forces of General Green," as evasion and desertion had been so picturesquely described in the Civil War. Apparently it had been substantial in 1917-1918 as well, since even textbooks in the 1940's declared that evasion had been the major handicap to proper enforcement in that time. But far better police methods and improved transportation and communication in 1940-1941 were expected to make both evasion and desertion much more difficult and their incidence much less, though we have little to work with on these subjects for the Second World War as well as the First. Looking for material on such subjects is in a class with trying to prepare a faithful account of the extent of violations of wartime rationing and price control and the operation of the "black market." The successful in such enterprises are most unlikely to become sources of documentation.
A literature does exist on the fate of those who challenged conscription, on various grounds; after the United States became a belligerent, their treatment was anything but gentle. Should anyone think that the vaunted liberal Roosevelt regime treated intellectual or religious objectors with kind and gentle hand, a rude surprise is in store.7 Far more Americans spent the decade of the 1940's in jails and work camps on account of their resistance to compulsory militarization than is generally assumed, and still another contingent spelled out the era in assigned labor tasks of one sort or another which did not differ in principle from the forced-labor programs of Hitlerite Germany or Stalinist Russia. The fate of such as the Jehovah's Witnesses is another aspect of the story. The mauling, maiming, and even lynching of members of this inoffensive sect by outraged "patriots" for their attitude toward conscription and other outward trappings of the state was later matched by their imprisonment by federal authorities, with federal judges refusing to grant them hearings even on writs of habeas corpus. The experience of the Jehovah's Witnesses alone shreds the tiresome liberal bromide that the excesses of the First World War did not make their appearance during the Second. (To be sure, there were no repetitions of such lunacies as the uprooting of German as a school subject and the changing of the name of sauerkraut to "liberty cabbage," but there was a special venom and covert totalitarian viciousness to the World War II social in-fighting when compared to the ignorant exuberance of the war enthusiasts of 1917-1918.) But strangely enough, there has been only very modest circulation of the writings of the CO's of the Second World War, as compared, for example, to the reception of Harold Studley Gray's "Character Bad."8 At the start of registration, only a few religiously-motivated residents dared to refuse to "cooperate," principally a group of students at Union Theological Seminary. It was instructive to note the position of the two major voices of liberalism in America in those times, the Nation and New Republic, once the leaders of anti-militarism and all related sentiments, now enlisted emotionally in the European war and straining every nerve to spread belligerent feelings in the intellectual community. Both rejoiced over the situation in October, 1940, while reserving harsh words for the handful which refused to register, hinting that stern measures were likely to be taken against them.9 It seemed a bit grim that such a position should be taken, for the country was not in the war, and most of the proponents of conscription, including the President, were hailing a peacetime draft as just another of the steps "short of war" necessary to keep the country out of it. Not everyone was taken in by this soothing explanation, however; as Senator Henry F. Ashurst of Arizona remarked, "Men do not jump half-way down Niagara Falls.''10
The high emotion and hysterical climate which prevailed during the time the peacetime draft became national policy, steadily deteriorated in the twelve months that followed. For one thing, the war in Europe developed into a stalemate, and it apparently took some effort to keep it alive. As the spirited liberal academic warrior Hans Kohn declared late in 1942, "If Britain had wished to make peace with Germany, she could have done it easily in 1939, in the summer of 1940, and again in the spring of 1941.''11
While many opinion-makers in the country began to work themselves into cheering squads for or against Stalin in the summer of 1941, after Hitler's Germany went to war with the Soviet Union, the state of mind prevailing among the drafted in the makeshift army camps of the day began to darken, and this first contingent of draftees began to get restless. The one-year period of service was drawing to an end, and the law needed supplementation in order to keep the process going. Threats of mass departure were heard, anal the sepulchral acronym OHIO (Over the Hill in October) began to appear on barracks walls and elsewhere as the Congress began to debate a bill extending the original period of service. And it was accompanied by a new variety of invasion hysteria. It was advanced with a straight face that now that the Germans were invading Russia, they would soon sweep across Siberia and then be poised for an invasion of Alaska from Vladivostok, thus making it even more imperative that a big conscript army and extended military construction take place to forestall this portending foray. There was prompt seconding of this variant on Mr. Roosevelt's widely advertised German air-drop on Iowa by the profoundly pro-war weekly Time, which announced in trembling tones, "With Russia's Siberian bases in German hands, Alaska could become another Norway," presumably fully equipped in advance with "quislings," undoubtedly.12 It was reported that the President relished the revival of invasion threats as an aid to pass supplementary conscription legislation, spending a large amount of time drafting his address to Congress pleading for their action, while insisting that the country was in "infinitely greater danger" in the summer of 1941 than it was in the summer of 1940.13
There was substantially more difference of opinion on this question now than there had been a year before, however. A widespread attitude of skepticism prevailed, pro-war propaganda was selling very badly (a Gallup audience survey at the moment the President was active with the second annual invasion scare revealed that there was no audience outside of New York City for anti-Hitler and anti-German moving pictures, and that almost all propaganda movies into July, 1941, had "fizzled at the box office''),14 while a redoubtable contingent in the Congress was fighting extension of the period of service of the draftees with dogged determination part of their attitude was that such an extension would constitute a violation of contract, in that the full period of service had been spelled out in the original law. But the extension of the period of service for another eighteen months squeaked through by the astounding margin of a single vote, 203-202, in the House of Representatives, and Roosevelt promptly signed the bill on August 18, 1941.
The closeness of the vote and the division which it represented nationwide was a sobering experience for FDR and many of his most closely adhering supporters in high places. The drive to make the U.S. a formal belligerent had sputtered badly as well, though in the eyes of some legal figures, the country had become one technically for sure, as a consequence of its vast military and other aid to England beginning about the time of the first draft law with the dispatch of some fifty so-called "over-age" destroyers to help augment the British navy. By the time of the supplementary conscription act, the economies of the U.S. and Great Britain had drawn quite close together; probably something between two-thirds and three-fourths of America's export trade were going to this destination at this moment. And the academic and intellectual world was stepping up its calls for war as a compensatory step for the decreasing zealousness of the general populace. The first outright declaration by an organized group of American educators for full participation in the war came from the Progressive Education Association in the form of a manifesto signed by twelve of the fourteen editors of its journal, Frontiers of Democracy, about a month before the supplementary draft act was passed.15 The growing bellicosity of the senior faculties in many colleges was a revelation in its own right.16
By this time, also, the economic effect of the "defense" activity was being felt everywhere, and the spreading stake in a "defense" job was having a noticeable and in some cases profound effect on political behavior. Between-the-wars liberal spokesmen had taken upon themselves the task of covering themselves with shame for the "egregious profits"17 made by American businesses out of various World War One enterprises, and the "merchants of death" theme had been enlarged upon with great effectiveness and eclat. But liberalism having split to its core on the issue of this new vicar, only the anti-war sector was paying attention to the profits being amassed out of "defense," on which subject there was now barely an occasional squeal from the interventionist (and majority) faction, many of whom were moving toward the assumption of important jobs in the future war administration, of which a few had already been taken by such as Archibald MacLeish.18
However, there is a counter-lesson to the doctrine of economic determinism in observing the sectional vote on the subject of the extension of the draft. The congressmen from the South outdid all other sections in their enthusiasm for more conscription and voted for it almost to a man. Yet they came from a section which was enjoying little of the new income flowing from "defense." For instance the state of New Jersey alone at one time in 1941 had more "defense" contracts than the entire fourteen states of the South combined.19 (It is ironic also to note that the South was more incensed at Hitler Germany and its racial policies and more anxious to fight than any other section of the country, again illustrating another American tendency, the penchant for becoming furious at sin— some place elsewhere.)
Far from accepting the situation, indeed a healthy segment of American industry, commerce, and finance was vastly troubled by the rapid transformation of America. David Lawrence, in his famous July 4, 1941, editorial in the United States News called loudly, "The United States is on the threshold of national socialism," adding, "The inroads of national socialism are unchecked by either Republicans or Democrats who have hitherto defended our system of private initiative." For sure, the discipline and planning of industry was geared more then, as always, to the success of the national state in warfare, as is also increased state regulation of the economic system, than to gain any other alleged objectives related to the "welfare" of the citizenry. And, a short time later, Lawrence, coaching businessmen to be alert and cash in on the vast reconversion of industry to war, admitted this in his issue of August 22, 1941: Government isn't a respecter of individual interests, isn't too much concerned about individual hardships, so long as its own purpose is served." Shortly after, Lawrence himself smoothly and effortlessly joined the forces which obliterated the distinction between war and peace; "defense" was the key word in this successful assault, and the resulting state of affairs continues to the present day. Conscription was simply its other face. The eventual entry of the U.S. into the war via the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941, ended all talk about the wisdom or necessity of compulsory military service, while just the first six months of intensive military production and conscription in 1942 did more to take the "bends" out of the already much-socialized U.S. economy than the eight years of peace-time New Deal tinkering, combined and compounded.
For a long time, the Second World War and the leaders of the victorious side have been as sacred a herd of cows as has ever been known to graze in the meadow of history. A handful of novels have dared to discuss its dark and seamy side, while a few recent television shows have undertaken to tell the viewers that it was funny, but an almost solid lock-step exists in the scholarly world on this immense and complex subject, faithfully clinging to as many of the fables and propaganda yarns and emotional smotherouts as possible, in an effort to keep from getting tarnished by revisionist revelations and having their dearly-cherished fairy tales controverted. This makes it extremely difficult to examine the conscripted army under fire in the manner that might be described as sociological analysis. Picture and print still deal only with the heroic and the semi-celestial.
But a Harper's magazine story of nearly twenty years ago is a faint inkling as to the scope of the story which still remains to be told. It is obvious that evasion of conscription by failure to register was no doubt the course chosen by a small minority, while the tiny band which defied it undoubtedly were steeled by a deep faith in some principled ethic or strong religious conviction. For the vast majority, registration and superficial cooperation was the route taken, with the objective in a staggering number of instances being that of gaining a discharge from the armed services or seeking a status of incapacity. In an extended comment on this side of the picture, John McPartland, in the article in the above, 20 related that at one time the Army decided that bedwetting was sufficient reason for a discharge, and that shortly after that the incidence of bedwetting went up twelve hundred per cent in one Texas training camp. A "wave of psychoneurotic discharges" followed, and it was only stemmed when the War Department issued a circular which removed bedwetting as a justification for discharge. But there were a number of other avenues open to unenthusiastic conscriptees "MR 1-9, the army manual for spotting malingering, was never better than a lap or two behind the ten to twenty per cent of our troops who hit the sick book in high hopes of home." "There were more AWOL's than civilian strikers during the war, more hours lost owing to desertion," declared McPartland, "than were lost because of strikes." "This was not a generation of heroes," he summed it up glumly, concluding with an analysis of the country and the times which is in a class all by itself:


By the end of the war it was plain that the only people we were really angry at were ourselves. We knew that we had gone into a war without any great Cause we believed in, we had avoided military service when we could, and we were neither ashamed nor criticized for it.... We were unregenerate, unashamed, and uninterested. We weren't even surprised or too angry when all the vaunted postwar planning that had been paraded through our periodicals—had achieved spectacular failure.... Nobody thought that this war was going to make the world safe for democracy, that this was the war to end war, or that we were going to succeed in our postwar plans.... We receive the courtesy of the extravagant lie, and we return the courtesy by buying the merchandise. But we don't expect very much. This strange relationship of the lie, the lie known and discounted, and the incredulous public that doesn't believe and hasn't believed for a long time but goes along anyway, pervades our politics and our religion as well as our commerce....

But what of the performance of that part of the conscript army which managed to get to the fighting fronts? Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall and a group of 350 co-workers, investigating the European Theatre of Operations in World War Two, interrogated hundreds of "outfits" fresh out of battle, and, on the basis of what they heard, "fixed the percentage of men who actually fired their rifles against the enemy at 12 to 25 per cent." In other words, Brig Gen. Marshall's report to the Operations Research Office concluded that anywhere between one man in eight and one man in four did all the shooting which resulted in "victory" in 1944-1945. This is confined entirely to combat soldiers who were armed and in a position to fire their weapons at their enemy. But even this is a very generous estimate, when one examines some of the case studies mentioned by Brig. Gen. Marshall in his book Men Against Fire;21 of a reinforced battalion of over a thousand men ambushed by Japanese on Makin Island, only thirty-seven fired their weapons, and in a later engagement on Chance Island in the Marshalls, where a crack unit of over 100 men engaged in a fight with Japanese forces, only fourteen did all the firing against them. Even elite forces had little better records; Brig. Gen. Marshall declared that no more than 25 per cent of the best air-borne troops actually fired their weapons at the Germans in Europe.
In the early stages of the Korean War, the record was even worse; Brig. Gen. Marshall reported one instance of remnants of an infantry division trapped by the Chinese in North Korea, during which engagement the division commander reported seeing only one soldier returning Chinese fire. A platoon of another infantry regiment which broke and ran, allowing a serious break-through, arrived in the rear with nearly all of its ammunition unfired. By the end of this latter war, it was claimed that the percentage of those engaging in fire fights had risen to one out of two combat soldiers, but the figures submitted by Brig. Gen. Marshall to the Operations Research Office after five months of observations in Korea in 1952 were not very convincing.
Particularly interesting as techniques used to increase involvement in battle were suggestions from psychiatrists. "The most efficient method is to prompt them to lose their individual identities by promoting a mob psychology," wrote one journalist who summarized the program of breaking down inhibitions against killing, though he admitted the "remolding" via "emphasis on mob-psychology techniques" carried "disturbing implications.''22 Seeking advice from clergymen he was reassured by all he consulted that there was nothing to fear, while one was quoted as saying:

In a life-and-death struggle, it sometimes is necessary to lift the curtain of morality and civilization from men's souls to expose the brute beneath. But when the crisis is over, if the curtain is old and solidly designed and substantially built, it will easily drop back into place again—to mask the brute forever.

Undoubtedly, this is the same kind of spiritual advisor who is endlessly heard intoning in dread despair concerning "the moral crisis of our age," and indulging in similar mind-wrenching agitation. If the "life-and-death struggle" is long enough, or if there is a succession of them, there usually is not enough left of "the curtain of morality and civilization" to bother to talk about.
Throughout the emergencies which have prevailed from the late 1940's to the two-thirds mark of the 1960's, conscription has maintained its Svengali-like grip on the American imagination. By far the most important reason for this has been the Cold War. Beginning with the efforts at "containment" of Soviet expansionism in 1947 and continuing through to the present day's similar efforts to stem that of Red China, a state of endemic semi-war, breaking out now and then (especially 1950-1953 in Korea) into full-scale hot war has persisted. The failure of peace to break out in the more than twenty years since the end of World War Two and the existence of one emergency after another since that time have had much to do with the fact that the draft has never sagged as policy, at least until recent times. A high level of sustained military activity the development of a prodigious complex devoted to preparation for waging atomic war and defending the country from a similar enterprise, and the vastly increased importance of military personalities in politics and business (we have long been familiar with the general or admiral-turned-politician become chairman of the board), have all helped to contribute to a favorable climate of opinion supporting one of the main props of this system, conscription. We have even seen a spell of politicking by the spokesmen of the armed forces for the great totalitarian dream of Universal Military Service, a structure which goes well beyond the draft.23
For a time in 1940 there was a rash of talk about such a system and FDR was reported in favor of this rather than a conscription act modeled on that of 1917, which is what the country eventually got. It would have involved the policy of two years of compulsory service for all, young women and young men alike, most of it devoted to home-front labor services not unlike what was being done then by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and which has been extended in recent years to foreign countries via the Peace Corps. In other words, military training was definitely subordinated to this other objective.24 It did not succeed in gaining the necessary sup port in 1940, nor have variations on the theme of universal service suggested from those times to the present. The only serious move in this direction during World War Two was Roosevelt's suggestion in his message to Congress in January, 1944, that a "national service" law be passed. Apparently this was under study for some time because the Army and Navy Journal for January 8, 1944, leaked out that such a proposal would be made by the President. However, it lost support rapidly under the charge by "liberals" that it was really a front for a strike breaking agency; their zeal for such schemes had abated markedly in four years. After the Korean War in General Dwight D. Eisenhower's first term as president, the proposal of universal military training again went the rounds, especially after Eisenhower's message to Congress in support of such a policy in January, 1955. This did not get off the ground, either.
But the idea is anything but new, despite its revival in still another form by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Montreal on May 17, 1966. "It seems to me that we could move toward remedying the present inequity in the military draft system," McNamara said on this occasion, "by asking every young person in the United States to give two years of service to his country—whether in one of the military services, in the Peace Corps, or in some other volunteer development work at home or abroad."25
The far more pronounced favorable psychical atmosphere toward sophisticated totalitarian collectivist proposals today than a quarter of a century ago rules out any jaunty confidence that we shall never see universal service of this sort. The same Gallup poll referred to above on the subject of conscription revealed that "large majorities were in favor of funneling those physically or mentally incapable of meeting current armed forces standards into a "Domestic Peace Corps," and heavy popular support has also been noted for a revival of the CCC youth work camps of the 1933-1943 period, which in turn were really little more than a version of the para-military youth institutions functioning contemporaneously in Stalin Russia, Hitler Germany, and Mussolini Italy, but molded in harmony with American rather than Russian, German, or Italian traditions.26 "A free society is inevitably one in which government is big enough to do its job properly," declared Professor Julian V. Langmead Casserly, of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary (Evanston, Illinois) before the University of Denver International Colloquium on Logic, Physical Reality, and History the same day Secretary McNamara's plea for universal service made headline news all over North America, an assertion which was warmly received.27 It would seem that in a political environment in which Prof. Casserly's dictum can be looked upon as high wisdom, the introduction of universal service ought to be little more than moderate technical problem, at worst.
To be sure, such a scheme would be far milder than the total mobilization order of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia upon the outbreak of hostilities with Italy late in 1935, which, strangely enough, has been going the rounds among Pentagon officials for the last year, and a framed copy of which hangs in the office of General Lewis Hershey, United States director of Selective Service from 1940 to this day. It reads:28
Everyone will now be mobilized and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa.

Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband. Women with small babies need not go.

The blind, those who cannot walk, or for any reason cannot carry a spear are exempted.

Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.


In part, the circulation of such a primitive and ferociously barbarian document, authored by an African politician who has been extolled for over a generation by "scholars" as the very distillation of "democracy," is perhaps a reflection of exasperation and a feeling of harassment growing out of the sharply stepped-up tempo of conscription as a result of the amplification of the undeclared war in Viet Nam and the remarkable amount of resistance to it, in a wide variety of ways, which surely has not made the conduct of the Viet Nam campaign weigh any easier upon those responsible for carrying it out. Whether Goldwater or Johnson got the votes of the people opposed to or cool toward conscription will probably never be known. But one thing is definite: there was no more talk by the latter about winding up conscription once the election was in the bag. In fact, the election had barely cooled off before it was discovered that the draft would have to be reinvigorated, not terminated, and a loud wrangle has prevailed ever since over many aspects of the institution. Though the casual talk of 1964 which referred to it as expendable is a thing of the past, the President continues to show his indecision, as in the incident in July, 1966, while talking to a group of young people, during which he spoke of the draft as "a crazy-quilt" and remarked, "We are not wedded to it."
There have been high and low points in the history of conscription in the United States. In many ways the nadir of the institution was somewhere between 1929 and 1935, during which years profoundly depressing anti-war pictures29 such as "Journey's End," "All Quiet on the Western Front," and "What Price Glory" exerted such dramatic influence on a multitude of viewers, while books such as Squad, Company K, The Horror of It, and Lawrence Stallings' The First World War and Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, plus a scattering of realistic revisionist works from the academic world, all helped to reduce the prestige and attraction of war and the warrior to a twentieth-century low.30
Late in 1931 Albert Einstein in a celebrated nationally circulated article expressed the conviction that the moral decline of the white race began with the adoption of conscription.31 But he and most others of like views in that time made the trip to Canossa in the subsequent decade, and eventually became competitors in the production of belligerent manuals. It was especially ironic to see Einstein, the eloquent detractor of conscription, eagerly lend his assistance in the production of the atomic bomb, a device for the carrying of barbarian warfare against non-combatants on a scale which made the efforts of conscripted armies seem quite selective and restrained, by comparison. At any rate, it has been some thirty years since the last sustained critique of conscription as a moral catastrophe. Of the major world powers, today only Japan, painted by a trainload of Western journalists and propagandists between 1920 and 1945 as a people with a bloodstream filled with martial truculence, is barred by law from employing conscription.32
Undoubtedly, no moral case will be revived as an accompaniment to any drive which might derail conscription in the time to come. The new rationale likely will be strictly "practical," built around the horrendous new weapons with their mass-killing powers, rendering the Armed Horde quite unnecessary. And there is a possible concomitant, that the new technical weapons are so complex and expensive that it is unwise to trust them to any but persons of superior intelligence, thus bringing to the fore again the idea of a relatively small well-paid group of professionals handling the business of "defense."
Meanwhile, "brush-type" guerrilla warfare has again become the vogue, with its propensity for enrolling the energies of ununiformed irregulars and many related amateur tactics. Though armed with more wondrous devices, it appears that these behind-rock-and-tree, hit and run activities are making the present-day conduct and problems of a line company in Asian jungle warfare not much different from what they were in colonial American Indian wars. In view of this development, it will be interesting to see how this contradiction, of warfare conducted in the neo-primitive manner, in an age of gigantic weapons capable of impersonal obliteration of millions in an instant, is reconciled. A serious conflict appears to be arising.
One should not be so fascinated or bemused by the spectacle of conscription and its vast social and other consequences and implications so as to neglect to glance at the politico-economic system of which it is a part. It has been suggested many times that conscription has a function in serving as a blotter for unemployment among the youthful uneducated and/or untrained. Granting this for the moment, while posting a reservation to the effect that surely there are more constructive activities for the young than two or more years of compulsory military service, itself one of the best forms of training for existence in a socialist order, one must take a long, hard look at the industrial and other sectors of the community which have become adjusted to an economy in which there is always a generous cut of the melon for the producers of the goods consumed in what seems to be an endless series of "defensive" adventures beyond the country's shores.
It is plausible that the populace, in a Gadarene gesture, might endorse such a plan as Universal Service, military or otherwise. But the suspicion lingers that conscription may not be as deeply rooted in American ways as the galloping military socialism that has evolved out of "defense," and which "conservatives" are supposed to be so enamored of, as opposed to the "creeping" socialism of nonmartial sorts, allegedly the preserve of "liberals." In actuality, it appears that there is a powerful combination of both to be found in the former, and this is a predictable upshot of "bi-partisanship" in foreign policy, now nearly a quarter century old. The National Observer on June 13, 1966, revealed that the production lines of some 5,000 firms in this country were devoted exclusively or almost entirely to war production as a consequence of the expansion of the armed forces' needs in the Viet Nam conflict.33 A political analysis of this formidable group of enterprises would indubitably reveal that the affiliations involved were quite well dispersed, from the point of view of either ideology or party. The modified warfare state is steadily homogenizing them all. If there is a single dramatic thesis in Donald I. Rogers' recent book, The End of Free Enterprise,34 it is that, as of this moment, business is barely more than a handmaiden to big government. Many highly placed individuals and influential institutions are cheering this process on.
Martin R. Gainsbrugh, senior vice president of the National Industrial Conference Board, in attendance at a Washington symposium in April under the sponsorship of the American Bankers' Association, released figures fully as ominous as that cited above:
  1. One-fifth of the gross national product is bought by governmental bodies.

  2. Twenty-six out of every 100 employed in the country today are directly or indirectly working for one or more governmental bodies.

  3. Twenty-eight per cent of the national income is collected in taxes alone by various governments: federal tax collections now exceed the total of the country's entire output of goods and services as recently as 1941. The combined spending of all levels of government today is close to $185 billion, about seven times what such spending was at the outbreak of World War Two.

  4. Government of one sort or another is responsible for supplying seven per cent of all personal incomes "free" to individuals each year, by way of Social Security, disability and military pensions and benefits, unemployment compensation, and a number of other programs.35


The question that comes to mind is this: are we so far along the road in the evolution of this sophisticated form of socialism that outside imbroglios, which rest squarely on conscripted manpower for "solution," are necessary to keep up the level of intervention already achieved and possibly provide excuses for additional intervention? It is impossible to examine the issue of conscription apart from economic realities. It has become an explosive subject off and on for fifty years in this country, and it has been inextricably intertwined with vast foreign wars and an economy more or less geared to these struggles. The magic word has always been "defense." Probably the big government called for by Prof. Casserly, that it may do its job properly, still is not big enough. In which case, it is little more than speculative diversion to talk about the pros and cons of conscription at all. A ray of hope does exist, growing out of the discovery of the bottomless pit of outer space, and the ensuing space race This has provided for vast socialist expenditure; there are no privately-sponsored space shots or explorations anywhere yet. But neither has it required any conscripted personnel yet, though this might occur if it were discovered that evil forces in the galaxy require the extension of "defense" into the extra-terrestrial reaches.
An apathetic majority of about two-thirds still entertains the notion, even if somewhat vaguely and confusedly, that there is something faintly heroic and noble about conscripted service, indulging in reservation primarily on such occasions as when they are informed by the military authorities of a dead son somewhere in a distant land. The interrelation of business, the military, and the state seems to be beyond comprehension. Should there occur, however, a concentration of yet imperceptible circumstances which result in the dismantling of conscription,36 a train of consequences and concomitant adjustments are in store which may produce all most as many tensions, even though much different ones, as the present state of affairs is responsible for. A socialist omelet exists which will not be resolved into its constituent elements with any degree of ease.

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