UNITED STATES IMPOSES PEACETIME DRAFT

Washington, D.C. • September 16, 1940

On this date U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the nation’s first peace­time draft law—the Selec­tive Training and Ser­vice Act, also known as the Burke-Wads­worth Act. Created to con­script troops quickly in the event the U.S. was drawn into a second global war, the new law was in response to looming geo­politi­cal ten­sions around the world. In the 1930s Italy invaded and annexed Ethi­o­pia, incor­pora­ting the African king­dom into its colony of Italian East Africa; Spain lay pros­trate on account of a nasty con­flict between repub­li­cans and fascists and their out­side enablers; and Germany invaded its eas­tern neigh­bor Poland at the end of the third decade and, as a con­se­quence, was at war with Poland’s mili­tary allies, Great Britain and France. On the other side of the globe the entire Asia Pacific region stood on the brink of a wider war, the result of Impe­rial Japan embarking on new con­quests on the Chi­nese main­land, in Indo­china (present-day Viet­nam, Laos, and Cam­bodia), and soon it was feared in South­east Asia/­Oceania (Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia).

Similar to America’s World War I draft of 1917, Roosevelt’s 1940 regis­tra­tion and con­scrip­tion act pro­vided a “selec­tive” draft that ranked liable Amer­i­can males and some resi­dent aliens by class and sub­class. Under the 1940 act able-bodied men, though not women, were drafted ini­tially into the army and later into the navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard by class and indi­vid­ual case. Draft-age men could poten­tially avoid mili­tary ser­vice if they were employed in agri­cul­ture, mining, busi­ness, com­merce, ship­building and defense-related indus­tries, and other essen­tial occu­pa­tions that supported the efforts of the U.S. military and the civilian economy.

All males between the ages of 21 and 35 inclusive were required to regis­ter for selec­tive ser­vice at their local or district draft boards. A national lottery was used to draft service­men. The first draftees entered ser­vice on Novem­ber 18, 1940. Volun­tary enlist­ments were handled by the same civil­ian draft boards. Defer­ments or exemp­tions from con­script­ion require­ments were given to liable males on an indi­vid­ual basis. Exemp­tions were pro­vided for con­scien­tious objec­tors (noncom­batant mili­tary ser­vice or alter­na­tive ser­vice of nation­al impor­tance for no com­pen­sa­tion), for most Nisei (second-gener­a­tion Japa­nese Amer­i­cans) between Decem­ber 1941 and Janu­ary 1944, for black Amer­i­cans for most of the war years because of racist assump­tions about their fighting abil­i­ties, and for Amer­i­cans with a wide range of acquired and con­gen­i­tal con­di­tions (see photo essay below). States and terri­tories were given con­scrip­tion quotas based on the num­ber of regis­trants in their juris­dic­tions who were iden­ti­fied by their draft boards as avail­able for mili­tary ser­vice and were found accept­able by one of the military branches.

In late December 1941 the age bracket expanded to 18 through 64 years of age. How­ever, imme­di­ate induc­tion typ­i­cally focused on younger age groups, pri­marily 18 to 45; men aged 45 to 64 were con­scripted mainly for man­power and skills inven­tory, not direct combat. The restric­tion that draftees could not serve out­side the Western Hemi­sphere or the nation’s pos­ses­sions or terri­tories was dropped 6 days after Japan’s bold sur­prise move against U.S. naval and air instal­la­tions on the Hawaiian Islands on Decem­ber 7, 1941. Some 16.5 mil­lion men were regis­tered during the first regis­trat­ion effort ending on Octo­ber 16, 1940, the first of 7 mass regis­tra­tions. Between Novem­ber 1940 and Octo­ber 1946 over 45 mil­lion men were regis­tered, of which 15 mil­lion served in the armed forces. Over 10 mil­lion men, or roughly 66 per­cent who served in uni­form, were inducted through the Selec­tive Ser­vice Sys­tem out of about 19 mil­lion men drafted. (Altogether 16.4 Amer­i­can men and women served in World War II.) Roose­velt’s 1940 draft law was allowed to expire on March 31, 1947, to be replaced by a new Selective Service regime a year later.

Selective Service: Civic Obligations in World War II

Left: President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Selec­tive Training and Ser­vices Act of 1940 in the Oval Office on Septem­ber 16. The law estab­lished a nation­ally uni­form con­scrip­tion process predicated on a nation­wide lot­tery (later by birth date) and a series of classes (I–IV) and sub­classes (A–H) applied to men between the ages of 21 and 35 (later 18 to 64) consid­ered eli­gible for “combat­ant training and ser­vice in the land or naval forces of the United States.” Local and district draft boards were given orig­i­nal juris­dict­ion over all classi­fi­cat­ions, and appeals to con­scrip­tion were permitted. Selec­tion and defer­ment on an indi­vidual basis were designed to minimize disturbances to the nation’s economy.

Right: On October 29, 1940, Secretary of War Henry Stimson drew the first num­ber in the nation’s first peace­time draft lottery from the same 10-gallon glass fish­bowl that had been used in the nation’s 1917 war­time draft. Stim­son handed the num­ber, 158, to Presi­dent Frank­lin Roose­velt to read over the radio. The nation’s first peace­time draft had begun. Across the coun­try, 6,175 young men held draft regis­tra­tion No. 158. The second number drawn, 192, was drawn by a different cabinet member, and so on. The men holding the first 10 per­cent of the lottery num­bers drawn (there were close to 8,000 numbers in the fishbowl!) each received an “order to report for induc­tion” from their draft boards based on their assigned number. After 3 national lotteries, call-up numbers were based on birth dates.

Left: Physical exams for fighting-age inductees and voluntary enlistees were multi­stage, starting with local or district draft board screenings for height, weight, vision, number of teeth, pulse rate, blood pres­sure, and over­all health to deter­mine ini­tial eligi­bility. The men progres­sed to more demanding mili­tary medi­cal boards at induc­tion and recep­tion centers that required chest X–rays, blood tests for vene­real dis­ease, and speci­fic func­tional tests (pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, runs, bur­pees) and psycho­logi­cal screenings to gauge fit­ness for com­bat, gene­ral duty, or called for out­right rejec­tion due to signif­i­cant dental, ear, throat issues, poor eye­sight, flat feet, dis­ease, or on moral grounds. Most physi­cals took place unclothed, men bearing num­bers written on their chests as shown in this photo, the backs of their hands, or on pla­cards hung around their necks. Men were placed into cate­gories or classes, from Class I (best quali­fied; hence, first chosen to fill con­scrip­tion quota), Class II and Class III (deferred because of occu­pa­tion and/or depen­dency; hence, ranked second and third choices to fill con­scrip­tion quota) to Class IV (limited ser­vice due to vari­ous physi­cal or even edu­ca­tional factors [a half-million men had less than a fourth-grade edu­ca­tion] or deemed “unfit for service” due to age, mental dis­abil­ity, race prejudice, illiteracy, or moral reasons; e.g., being homosexual or bisexual).

Right: This Associated Press wire photo shows 26-year-old heavy­weight boxer Joe Louis regis­tering at a segre­gated regis­tration center in Chicago’s Hyde Park neigh­bor­hood for the mili­tary draft on Octo­ber 16, 1940. The photo, cap­tioned “He’s a fighter for you, Uncle Sam,” was circu­lated in prac­tically every news­paper in the nation. Nick­named the “Brown Bomber,” Louis enrolled under his given name, Joseph Louis Barrow. He was among almost a half mil­lion men who regis­tered in Chicago on “R‑Day.” On Janu­ary 10, 1941, Louis volun­tarily enlisted in the Army as a pri­vate, even­tually serving with the Spe­cial Ser­vices Divi­sion and assigned to an “enter­tain­ment and inter­racial rela­tions morale mis­sion.” He toured Army camps in the U.S., Europe, and North Africa, enter­taining 2 mil­lion sol­diers with boxing exhi­bi­tions. Louis’s income went from $100,000 for a few brief minutes of work to $21 a month. Other volun­tary enlistees included Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, and Glenn Miller (U.S. Army Air Forces); John Basi­lone (U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps), Ira Hayes (U.S. Marine Corps); Ronald Reagan and Yogi Berra (U.S. Army); Paul New­man, Kirk Douglas, Gene Kelly, Tony Curtis, Henry Fonda, and John F. Kennedy (U.S. Navy); and Buddy Ebsen and César Romero (U.S. Coast Guard).

“Introduction to the Army,” U.S. War Department Official Training Film