Drafting for domesticity: American deferment policy during the Cold War, 1948–1965

Abstract

This article uses military manpower policy to illustrate the pervasiveness and unintended consequences of militarisation in the United States between 1948 and 1965. Conscription fuelled America's Cold War military. Over time, however, the Selective Service widened its deferment criteria to include more students and family men, purposefully guiding them into civilian occupations and domestic arrangements it defined as in the national interest. This practice coalesced into ‘manpower channelling’ in the mid-1950s, a policy that militarised certain civilian activities, but that also highlighted the limits of military service in the United States. Ultimately, it helped separate military service from masculine citizenship obligations.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Robyn Muncy, Arne Hofmann, Laura McEnaney, Jeremy Best, Kimberly Welch, Christina Larocco, Helena Iles Papaioannou, and Julie Mancine for their comments on this article. I am also deeply grateful to the convenors of and participants in the 2012 LSE-GWU-USCB Graduate Conference on the Cold War for their insights, assistance, and encouragement.

Notes

81 Suchman, Williams, and Goldsen, ‘Student Reaction to Impending Military Service’, 303.

80 Studies conducted in the late 1950s indicated that approximately 70% of the cohort who turned 26 in 1958, or virtually all qualified, non-fathers fulfilled their obligation to military service in some way. The studies did not factor in the higher minimum intelligence test score requirements implemented by the Army in 1958. These higher standards would have led to fewer men being judged acceptable for service. Nor did the studies account for the differences between service in the Reserves and in the active-duty forces (See Gerhardt, The Draft and Public Policy, 244–245).

79 House Armed Services Committee, Extension of the Universal Military Training and Service Act, 90th Cong., 1st sess., May 1967, 2024, 2030.

78 Peter Henig, ‘On the Manpower Channelers’, New Left Notes, 20 January 1967: 1, 4–5; Michael S. Foley, Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 61.

77 Appendix 1, House Armed Services Committee, Review of the Administration and Operation of the Selective Service System: Hearings Before the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives, 89^th Cong., 2d sess., June 1966, 10014.

76 Kennedy signed Executive Order 11119 on 10 September 1963.

75 Memorandum for Director Selective Service, 19 August 1963, JFKPOF-087-008, President's Office Files, Presidential Papers, Papers of John F. Kennedy, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-087-008.aspx [accessed Feb. 15, 2012]; Enclosure, Lewis B. Hershey to the President, 30 August 1963, ibid.

74 The Selective Service's fiscal year ran from 1 July to 30 June, so fiscal 1957 ended on 30 June 1957, almost 17 months after the executive order. In absolute numbers, the number of I-A fathers increased from approximately 151,000 in FY 1956 to 369,712 in FY 1957 (Ibid., 1957, 26).

73 Annual Report, 1957, 3.

72 Only one article appeared in the New York Times, for example, and it ran without commentary. See ‘Younger Men Placed First in Revised Rules for Draft’, New York Times, 17 February 1956.

71 Annual Report, 1956, 28.

70 Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10659 on 15 February 1956.

69 15,586 men received II-A deferments in fiscal 1955 and 112,000 received II-A deferments in fiscal 1962 (See Annual Report, 1955, 22; ibid., 1963; 11); Dee Ingold to the Director and attachments, 13 February 1958, 105 Advisory Committee (Ala-Wyoming), 1963–48, box 34 and Memo, re: Amendments to Selective Service Regulations, November 16, 1962, 110 General, 1963–1955, box 35, both in Central Files, 1948–69, RG 147, NARA.

68 List of Essential Activities, Appendix 12, Annual Report, 1955, 87.

67 Flynn, The Draft, 209; Gerhardt, The Draft and Public Policy, 229.

66 Annual Report, 1960, 27.

65 Annual Report, 1960, 25–26, 29.

64 Selective Service System, ‘Channeling’, Orientation Kit, 1965. Quotes, pp. 1, 2, 6, 8.

63 See Annual Report, 1958, 51; ibid., 1960, 24–29.

62 ‘The Emergency Role of Selective Service’, n.d., attached to Joel D. Griffing to Col. Grahl, 16 December 1959, Orientation Course, box 71, Papers of the Planning Office, 1947–1963, RG 147 Records of the Selective Service System, NARA.

61 Gerhardt, The Draft and Public Policy, 240–241.

60 Selective Service: Present and Future, 5 January 1949, 032-GEN, 1963–1948, box 26, Central Files, 1948–69, RG 147, NARA; Annual Report, 1955, 17; ibid., 1957, 61–62.

59 Annual Report, 1957, 61.

58 Annual Report, 1956, 65.

57 Gerhardt, The Draft and Public Policy, 217.

56 Annual Report, 1953, 67; ibid., 1957, 74; ibid., 1961, 58.

55 Gerhardt, The Draft and Public Policy, 214.

54 Gerhardt, The Draft and Public Policy, 192.

53 George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 653.

52 Bulletin to the Advisory Committee on Specialized Personnel, No. 10, 15 November 1952, 105, Advisory Committee (Gen.), 1952–51, box 34, Central Files, 1948–69, RG 147, NARA.

51 ‘Planning Nation's Man Power for 10 Years Ahead’, U.S. News and World Report, 4 January 1952, 32.

50 Eisenhower's Executive Order allowed men already deferred for fatherhood to retain their III-A classification, but any man seeking a dependency deferment after 25 August 1953, would have to prove either that his wife's pregnancy occurred prior to the cut-off date or that his military service would cause undue hardship or privation for his family. See Flynn, The Draft, 138.

49 National Manpower Council, Student Deferment and National Manpower Policy, 3; Bulletin to the Advisory Committee on Specialized Personnel, No. 10, 15 November 1952, 105, Advisory Committee (Gen.), 1952–51, box 34, Central Files, 1948–69, RG 147, NARA.

48 Harold H. Martin, ‘Why Ike Had to Draft Fathers’, Saturday Evening Post, 29 August 1953, 27; Press Release, 3 August 1951, 002.40, 1963–48, box 26, Central Files, 1948–69, RG 147, NARA.

47 Annual Report, 1954, 20.

46 See, for example, ‘Wealthy Men Dodging Draft, Senators Told’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 February 1953; ‘Why Korea is Called “Poor Man's War”’, U.S. News and World Report, 20 February 1953: 18–20; ‘Board Quits; Claims Draft Favors Rich’, Washington Post, 10 July 1953; ‘Lawmaker's Son Deferred; Draft Board Resigns’, Los Angeles Times, 15 July 1953.

45 Fifty-nine per cent of respondents favoured allowing college students to graduate. George Gallup, ‘Draft Deferments for College Men, Fathers Favored’, Daily Boston Globe, 1 June 1952.

44 For more information on dependency deferments during World War II, see Flynn, The Draft, 68–75. Married men without children lost their deferred status as part of the Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1951.

43 For more, see May, Homeward Bound, 146–149; Weiss, To Have and To Hold, esp. ch. 3; James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. ch. 7.

42 O. Spurgeon English and Constance J. Foster, ‘How to Be a Good Father’, Parents Magazine, June 1950, 84. [emphasis in original]

41 See Jessica Weiss, To Have and To Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), especially ch. 4.

40 Selective Service Act of 1948, United States Statutes at Large, vol. 62, part 1, 1948, 612.

39 See Annual Report, 1953, 55–57.

38 George Q. Flynn, The Draft, 1940–1973, (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 143.

37 See ‘Deferment Plan Scored’, New York Times, 12 May 1951, and ‘Conant and Dodds Assail Deferment on Student Marks’, New York Times, 9 April 1951.

36 Annual Report, 1953, 18.

35 Edward A. Suchman, Robin M. Williams, and Rose K. Goldsen, ‘Student Reaction to Impending Military Service’, American Sociological Review 18, no. 3 (June 1953): 293–304.

34 There were an estimated 1,569,000 male college students in the U.S. in the fall of 1950, the majority of whom were not eligible for the draft, being either veterans, members of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), under age 18 or over age 26, or already classified as IV-F (deferred for physical, mental, or moral reasons), leaving only 450,000 eligible for the draft. A total of 413,392 students took the SSCQT between May 1951 and May 1952. Sixty-three per cent scored the requisite 70 or higher to obtain a deferment. See Trytten, Student Deferment in Selective Service, 68.

33 President Truman signed PL 51 – 82d Cong. on 19 June 1951.

32 Senate Preparedness Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1951: Hearings Before the Preparedness Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services. 82d Cong., 1st sess., Jan. 1951, 508.

31 Scientific Advisory Committees Minutes of Public Meeting, 18 December 1950, 14, box 71 Papers of the Planning Office, 1947–1963, RG 147, NARA.

30 ‘Reports of the Scientific Advisory Committees’, Dec. 1, 1950 in Trytten, Student Deferment in Selective Service, 43.

29 ‘Reports of the Scientific Advisory Committees’, Dec. 1, 1950 in Trytten, Student Deferment in Selective Service, 20.

28 ‘Reports of the Scientific Advisory Committees’, Dec. 1, 1950 in Trytten, Student Deferment in Selective Service, 92.

27 The Scientific Advisory Committees originally convened and issued a report in 1948. When the draft was suspended in 1949 the recommendations were shelved. The Committees were hastily recalled in 1950 to issue a second report, which became the basis of the student deferment plan.

26 See, for example, Leonard Carmichael and Leonard C. Mead, eds., The Selection of Military Manpower: A Symposium (National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, 1951); Robert A. Walker, ed., America's Manpower Crisis: The Report of the Institute on Manpower Utilization and Government Personnel, Stanford University, August 22,23, and 24, 1951 (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1952); M.H. Trytten, Student Deferment in Selective Service: A Vital Factor in National Security (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952); National Manpower Council, Student Deferment and National Manpower Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952); National Manpower Council, Proceedings of a Conference on the Utilization of Scientific and Professional Manpower, Held October 7–11, 1953 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954).

25 ‘Students and the Draft’, Citizens and Soldiers, Scientific American, September 1951, 48.

24 Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier (Washington, DC: GPO, 1945) http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm#summary [accessed 29 February 2012].

23 Gerhardt, The Draft and Public Policy, 148.

22 See Meeting of Advisory Committee on Specialized Personnel, Washington DC, 3 December 1951, 25–31, box 71, Papers of the Planning Office, 1947–1963, RG 147 Records of the Selective Service System, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland [hereafter RG 147, NARA].

21 Deferred or exempted men outnumbered available registrants by a margin of 4:1. On June 30, 1952, there were 8,563,000 classified registrants between the ages of 18.5 and 25. 4,570,000 were deferred, 2,935,000 were either in the military or reserves or veterans, and 1,118,000 were immediately available (United States Selective Service System, Annual Report of the Director of Selective Service for the Fiscal Year 1952 to the Congress of the United States pursuant to the Universal Military Training and Service Act as Amended (Washington, DC: GPO, 1953), 1951, 11.

20 Deferred or exempted men outnumbered available registrants by a margin of 4:1. On 30 June 1952, there were 8,563,000 classified registrants between the ages of 18.5 and 25. 4,570,000 were deferred, 2,935,000 were either in the military or reserves or veterans, and 1,118,000 were immediately available (United States Selective Service System, Annual Report of the Director of Selective Service for the Fiscal Year 1952 to the Congress of the United States pursuant to the Universal Military Training and Service Act as Amended (Washington, DC: GPO, 1953), 63 (hereafter Annual Report,[year]).

19 ‘A Report to the National Security Council - NSC-68.’ 12 April 1950, President's Secretary's File, Truman Papers, 7, 54. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/pdf/10–1.pdf [accessed 28 February 2012].

18 See Chambers, ‘Conscientious Objectors and the American State.’

17 The Universal Military Service and Training Act of 1951 added a clause that required alternate service from conscientious objectors as well.

16 Selective Service Act of 1948, United States Statutes at Large, vol. 62, part 1, public laws, 1948, (Washington, DC: GPO, 1949), 612–613.

15 Selective Service Act of 1948, United States Statutes at Large, vol. 62, part 1, public laws, 1948, (Washington, DC: GPO, 1949), 605.

14 See James M. Gerhardt, The Draft and Public Policy: Issues in Military Manpower Procurement, 1945–1970 (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1971), ch. 2. Quote p. 90.

13 Hanson W. Baldwin, The Price of Power (New York: Harper, 1947), 18, as quoted in Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State, 62.

12 The authoritative overview on militarisation in the United States is Sherry, In the Shadow of War. More specialised works include Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Aaron Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America's Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Andrew J. Huebner, The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

11 My work utilises Michael Sherry's definition of militarisation as ‘the process by which war and national security became consuming anxieties and provided the memories, models, and metaphors that shaped broad areas of national life’ after World War II. See Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1997), xi.

10 Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, The War, and the Vietnam Generation (New York: Random House, 1978); David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt (New York: Anchor Books, 1975) Bernard Rostker, I Want You! The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force (Arlington, Virginia: RAND Corporation, 2006); Beth Bailey, America's Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2009).

9 Chambers ‘Conscientious Objectors and the American State’, 40.

8 John Whiteclay Chambers, II, estimates that between 1964 and 1973, 27 million young men reached draft age, of whom 16 million, or 60%, of those eligible did not serve. Of these, 15 million received legal exemptions or deferments and approximately 570,000 evaded the draft illegally. See Chambers, ‘Conscientious Objectors and the American State’, in The New Conscientious Objection, 41.

7 For more on conscientious objectors, see Charles C. Moskos and John Whiteclay Chambers, II, The New Conscientious Objection: From Sacred to Secular Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Timothy Stewart-Winter, ‘Not a Soldier, Not a Slacker: Conscientious Objectors and Male Citizenship during the Second World War’, Gender and Society 19, no. 3 (2007): 519–542; Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. ch. 2.

6 Other reasons also included economic necessity, adventure, and eventually, survival. For example, see John Ellis, The Sharp End of War: The Fighting Man in World War II (London: Corgi, 1982); Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York: Penguin Books, 1997); Christopher H. Hamner, Enduring Battle: American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776–1945 (Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas Press, 2011).

5 For a larger discussion of exclusionary definitions of the citizen-soldier, see Cohen, Citizens and Soldiers, 123–125; for more on the gendering of the citizen-soldier ideal, see Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), ch. 5.

4 Thomas Paine, ‘The Crisis’, in Thomas Paine: Collected Writings, edited by Eric Foner (New York: Library of America, 1995), 91.

3 For more on the ideological differences between civic republican and liberal conceptions of citizenship, see Ruth H. Bloch, ‘The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America’, Signs 13 (Fall 1987): 37–58; Isaac Kramnick, ‘The “Great National Discussion”: The Discourse of Politics in 1787’, The William and Mary Quarterly 45, no. 1 (Jan. 1988): 3–32; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edition, (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1967, 1990), 62; For more on how these ideologies affected the ideal of the citizen-soldier in the United States, see Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1957); Eliot A. Cohen, Citizens and Soldiers: The Dilemmas of Military Service (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), ch. 5–6; R. Clare Snyder, Citizen-Soldiers and Manly Warriors: Military Service and Gender in the Civic Republican Tradition (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Michael S. Neiberg, Making Citizen Soldiers: ROTC and the Ideology of American Military Service (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Ronald R. Krebs, Fighting for Rights: Military Service and the Politics of Citizenship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

2 The Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1951 authorised funding for a universal military training programme but required a separate act of Congress to implement the program. The second law never passed. See below.

1 The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 is widely considered the United States' first peacetime draft by both scholars and the legislators who crafted it. It is clear, however, that the 1940 Act was passed with an eye toward America's entrance into World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt signed it into law on 16 September, 1940, close to two weeks after he had traded fifty retired destroyers to the British in exchange for land rights in the Caribbean and Canada and a year after easing the United States' Neutrality Acts to allow Great Britain to purchase war material on a cash and carry basis. Despite its professed neutrality, the US had already chosen sides in the conflict. In contrast, by the time Truman signed the Selective Service Act in June 1948, the US had defined the Soviet Union as its primary enemy and negotiated diplomatic crises like the communist coup in Czechoslovakia and would imminently face the Berlin blockade, but the law itself was aimed toward a non-specific war to take place sometime in the future. Thus, it created more of a peacetime draft than that of 1940. For more on the fuzzy edges of wartime in the United States, see Mary L. Dudziak, WarTime: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).