Although press interest in the Princeton organization eventually dissipated, the generation that came of age in the late 1930s expressed true misgivings about fighting another overseas war. The fact that the movement’s strongest outward manifestation took the form of parody did not diminish its message. Those who wrote it off as a joke or a prank were missing the point.
By the time of Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, the government increasingly feared that members of the Veterans of Future Wars would balk at voluntary or conscripted service in what the group’s founders had called the “folly of war.” Reinforcing the Veterans of Future Wars position, in October 1939 a new organization was formed at Princeton called the American Independence League, whose purpose was to keep the United States out of the European war. This new group caught on in the same manner as the Veterans of Future Wars: within a month, some 50 eastern colleges had or were in the process of establishing chapters.
In early November, America, a well-known Jesuit weekly magazine, completed a nationwide poll of 54,000 Roman Catholic college students at 182 educational institutions on the subject of the war. The results were stunning and consistent with the June Gallup poll: more than one-third of the students said they would become conscientious objectors in the event the United States government elected to send an army to fight in Europe, and an astonishing 97 percent of the students opposed U.S. involvement in the European war. These and other findings pointed the magazine to its conclusion: “The collegians are against war and most of them choose not to fight.”15
Some people felt that the invasion of Poland had made educated young people even more likely to choose pacifism, arguing that this generation of collegians had been unduly influenced by writers who generally detested war and felt that it could be avoided by negotiation. This view was given its loudest voice by the poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, who felt that post–World War I writers “had done more to weaken democracy in the face of fascism than any other group.” MacLeish named several writers, including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Erich Maria Remarque.*
As a man of letters, MacLeish had nothing but praise for these writers, but as an anti-fascist, he saw them corrupting a generation unable to see the moral issue at hand. This moral blindness afflicting the young and well-read was, in his opinion, more concerning than even the lack of planes and antiaircraft guns, “for if the young generation is distrustful of all words and distrustful of all moral judgments of better and worse, then it is incapable of using the only weapon with which fascism can be fought—the moral conviction that fascism is evil and that a free society of free men is good and worth fighting for.”
Stated forcefully in a speech on May 23, 1940, to an educational group at a convention in New York City, MacLeish’s remarks were carried over network radio. The headlines reporting on the event went right to the point: MACLEISH ASSAILS THE CYNICS (Baltimore Sun); M’LEISH FINDS U.S. MORALLY UNREADY (New York Times).16
As if to underscore MacLeish’s point, a petition signed by 1,486 Yale University students was sent to President Roosevelt, asserting that the United States should stay out of the European war and should give no credit, supplies, or manpower to Britain or any other nation fighting Hitler. Members of the group said that the idea for the petition was spontaneous and that with a little more time they could have gathered 2,000 signatures.17 Increasingly, American observers and editorialists questioned whether an effective opposition to the peace-at-any-price mentality of American youth could be mounted. Millicent Taylor, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, in an editorial in early June 1940 suggested that older Americans needed to work hard to convince their sons and daughters that the danger ahead was real and not subject to a negotiated settlement. Taylor agreed with MacLeish that the writers of the Lost Generation were to blame. Others—including public intellectual Mortimer J. Adler of the University of Chicago—suggested the fault lay with a generation of young, cynical professors: “Whether they go to war or not, irreparable harm has been done to the young men of this generation.”
Those in 1940 who understood that an army had to be raised realized the initiative had to come from outside the White House and Congress. New York attorney Grenville Clark, age 58, a wealthy and dynamic patriotic gadfly and advocate of a strong America, seized that initiative.
Before and during World War I, Clark had established a program to train business and professional men to be Army officers. Already successful in his own right and heir to banking and railroad fortunes, Clark had joined other businessmen to pay for these Civilian Military Training Camps, which produced some 40,000 officers for the American Expeditionary Force. Because the first and most famous camp was located near the town of Plattsburg, in Upstate New York, the effort became known as the Plattsburg Plan.
Clark, who never sought office himself, was interested in change through influence. To this end, he maintained strong friendships with both Republicans and Democrats, and his wealth and a powerful circle of friends made his bipartisan appeal all the stronger.
Like many others, Clark was convinced that the United States was ill prepared to fight a war in which its involvement was becoming increasingly likely. A former classmate of Roosevelt’s at Harvard and a lieutenant colonel in the Army in World War I, Clark was a Republican, an interventionist, and a civil libertarian, who believed that fascism was the greatest single threat to America’s freedoms.
On May 8, 1940, 24 hours before Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, several members of the Civilian Military Training Camps Association met at a dinner in New York to plan a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the first Plattsburg camp. A pedestrian discussion soon gave way to a momentous recommendation from Clark, who urged that the “best observance of the anniversary” would be a powerful civilian-led campaign of preparedness in 1940, against “an emergency already as threatening as the one in 1915.” He advocated for “a peacetime conscription act so that the U.S. could do its share promptly when inevitably drawn into the big war.”18
This initial meeting led to an even larger dinner on May 22, to which leaders of the training camp initiative from all over the country were invited. In advance of the meeting, Clark wrote to Roosevelt to let him know what he was planning and asked for the president’s comments. Roosevelt encouraged Clark’s group to meet, noting: “I am inclined to think there is very strong public opinion for universal service so that every able-bodied man and woman would fit into his or her place. The difficulty of proposing a concrete set of measures ‘short of war’ is largely a political one—what one can get from Congress.”19
The second dinner included several presidents of Ivy League universities, two Congressional Medal of Honor recipients, and Julius Ochs Adler, general manager of the New York Times. The group drew up a selective service plan that outlined who would control the draft, the size and scope of the new army to be created, and the need for specific deferments. The plan gave power to local draft boards staffed by volunteers, recognizing from the outset that the more decentralized the draft, the more easily Americans would accept it.20
Clark and colleagues argued that the nation would be the next one Germany attacked after France and Britain fell and that given America’s military weakness, Nazi troopships could sail up the Potomac River, take Washington, D.C., and then move north into Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.21
Still lacking the public backing of Marshall or Roosevelt, Clark and other advocates for conscription met in Julius Adler’s office on June 3 to formally create an organization and plan a campaign. By the end of the day, the National Emergency Committee, with Clark as its chairman, had 200 members; by the end of the week it had more than 1,000 across the country.
Using $250,000 raised from Clark and other wealthy members, the committee promoted the need for the draft, taking its message directly to newspapers, radio stations,