On June 2, 1940, exactly a week after the end of the maneuvers and the schoolhouse meeting, George Gallup released the results of a national poll, which were widely reported in newspapers across the country. Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion, which he had founded in 1935, commanded a high level of attention and respect in 1940, its reputation launched in 1936 when Gallup successfully predicted that Franklin Roosevelt would defeat Republican candidate Alf Landon and win re-election in a landslide.
The new poll concluded that Americans were well aware of what was going on in Western Europe. It also discovered that more than four voters in every five had concluded that the present Army and Navy were inadequate to protect the United States from foreign attack.
As had been shown in earlier surveys, two out of three Americans believed that if Germany should defeat England and France, she would sooner or later attack the United States. The survey also revealed that the greatest apprehension of Germany’s intentions was among southerners, of whom 82 percent feared a German attack. By contrast, the Upper Midwest, where isolationism was strongest, showed less apprehension, though 61 percent expressed concern.
Gallup also discovered that one-half of the American people now believed the United States should follow the path of various European nations and “institute compulsory military training for all able-bodied young men of military age for a period of one year.” By an overwhelming margin (85 percent to 15 percent), Gallup found that the public believed military training should be introduced into the hundreds of Civilian Conservation Corps camps.60
On June 24, General Chaffee was ordered to return to Washington, where he was made the first chief of the armored force. On June 30, the War Department announced the creation of an American tank force, headquartered at Fort Knox, Kentucky. It quickly attracted the nickname of the “American Panzer force,” underscoring the belief that it would soon equal the German tank force. Command of the Second Armored Brigade, part of the Second Armored Division at Fort Benning, Georgia, was assigned to Patton, who arrived at his new post on July 29, 1940. In taking the assignment, Patton relinquished command of the Third Cavalry Regiment and Fort Myer.61
With the American tank force established, the need for more tanks was urgent. When Patton took his new assignment, the Army had only about 500 tanks, and some of these were not sufficiently armored for use in the kind of battle operations the Nazis were engaging in. More were being produced, but they were at first slow in coming, and only a few hundred were built in 1940. However, in 1941 production went into high gear, along with a search to find the men to operate them. Those in charge assumed volunteers and men eager to transfer from other units would step up but that ultimately, the force of proud, brave tankers would have to be recruited from the civilian population.62
The country not only had to manufacture tanks, aircraft, and other up-to-date tools of war, but it also had to create well-trained, well-equipped, highly mobile, motivated, and disciplined armed forces numbering in the millions. And at some point, these men had to be field-tested under battlefield conditions.
Many felt it was not feasible to simply attract a massive group of able volunteers and that the only way to create this force was through conscription. However, Marshall himself at least initially believed that an intensive recruiting program could attract the number of volunteers needed to populate a new army and was not convinced that conscription was necessary.
Roosevelt was up for re-election in November, and isolationist factions continued to stifle any talk of intervention in Europe. Roosevelt and his inner circle feared the Republicans would nominate a candidate who would campaign against any military expansion, including a peacetime military draft. The president had a second reason to be reluctant about a draft: Americans were historically resistant to compulsory military service of any type, let alone the peacetime variety.
Opposition to the idea that all able-bodied young men should be required to perform military service dated back to the early days of the republic, residing in the words of then vice president Elbridge Gerry in 1784: “Standing armies in time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican governments, dangerous to the liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism.” Instead, Gerry thought reliance should be placed on each state’s “well regulated and disciplined militia.”63
For this reason, the United States disbanded the Continental Army of 1783, after the Treaty of Paris brought an end to the Revolutionary War and the final British forces had departed New York City. The federal government then called up four state militias to provide some 700 men to confront any new threats from native tribes and the British. A newly organized version of his First American Regiment was all that President George Washington had under his command as commander in chief upon taking office in April 1789.
Later that year, Secretary of War Henry Knox proposed a plan for a system of defense that called for all free American men to perform military service as a means of countering the powerful standing armies of Europe. However, suspicions about a creating an American standing army, especially in view of the recent war and the despised British Quartering Act, which had required Americans to provide shelter for British military forces, prevented the enactment of the plan.
The first real test of the militia system came with the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, which began when farmers in Western Pennsylvania, outraged by a federal excise tax on distilled spirits imposed to relieve the federal deficit, attacked and burned the home of a tax collector. With their ranks enlarged to 6,000, the men camped outside Pittsburgh and threatened to march on the city. One rebel, inspired by the French Revolution, pressed for the use of guillotines to dispatch tax collectors.
In response, President Washington, at the urging of Alexander Hamilton, under the provisions of the Militia Act of 1792, assembled 15,000 militiamen from eastern Pennsylvania and the surrounding states as a federal unit, commanded by Virginia’s Henry Lee, and prepared them to march upon the Pittsburgh camp. Washington himself took command of the federal force as it reached Bedford, Pennsylvania.* “The soldiers even set up a dazzling light display in town to honor the president,” wrote historian William Hogeland. “The blazing display read: ‘Woe to anarchy.’”64
When it arrived, the federal militia found the rebels unwilling to fight. The mere threat of the federal force had stifled the rebellion and established once and for all the sovereignty of the federal government. The army configured for the Whiskey Rebellion was quickly disbanded, and the rebels who had been sentenced to be hanged were pardoned by Washington.
During the War of 1812, Congress repeated the experience of the Revolutionary War by encouraging voluntary enlistment, coupled with requests to the states for militia units. Thousands of militia units existed, but most had little military value; they met carrying guns only once a year, on an obligatory muster day, events that often turned into little more than drinking sprees. A paltry 20,000 men enlisted, and as the United States seemed headed for defeat, the secretary of war, James Monroe, proposed the nation’s first serious attempt at national conscription by proposing a universal draft. A modified version of Monroe’s plan was approved by Congress, but it came too late to have an effect on the outcome of the war. Reacting to this legislation, Congressman Daniel Webster declared that the United States was “not yet in a temper to submit to conscription. The people have too fresh and strong a feeling of the blessings of civil liberty to be willing thus to surrender it.”65,*
The war with Mexico in 1846–48 did not require forces in sufficient numbers to raise the