When a group of isolationists led by Representative Hamilton Fish Jr.,* a Republican of New York and FDR’s old Dutchess County antagonist, attempted to delay the implementation of the draft by 60 days in the final version of the bill, Willkie urged that the provision be eliminated. Fish and other Republicans, including Joseph W. Martin Jr. of Massachusetts, chairman of the Republican National Committee, hoped to delay the draft until after the election when, they hoped, Roosevelt would have been defeated and the chance to stop the draft would again present itself.44
It was a hot summer, rendered hotter by the ongoing sideshow on Capitol Hill. A group of black-veiled women dressed in mourning clothes and calling themselves the Congress of American Mothers staged a death march against FDR’s plan for conscription in peacetime. They constructed a papier-mâché dummy with a coconut for a head of proconscription senator Claude Pepper of Florida, which they strung from a tree on the Capitol grounds. “We’re hanging Claude Pepper to a sour apple tree,” the women chanted, “so our sons and husbands can live on and be free.” Pepper, well known for his good sense of humor, took time to admire the mock lynching and declared it a splendid demonstration of free speech and the American way. The Capitol Police demanded that the women cut the effigy down, and it was delivered to Pepper’s office by police escort.45
The protests then moved inside, as the women in black entered the Senate gallery and later shifted to the House when the debate over the draft bill moved there. On September 3, one of a 600-member delegation from a Communist group called the Peace Mobilization Society, which was vehemently opposed to the U.S. entry into the war, stood up in the House gallery and shouted, “American conscription is American fascism.” As the protester was being ejected by Capitol Police, Representative Edward E. Cox of Georgia poked back by calling the protesters “lousy bums and bohunks” for trying to break in and influence Congress. Bohunk was a slur directed against eastern Europeans, especially Czechs, and was one more example that any hint of civility was melting in the late summer heat.46
The Peace Mobilization Society was a clear and immediate result of the German–Soviet Union non-aggression pact made earlier in the year, at which time the Communist Party USA became officially opposed to war with Germany. Its protest underscored the point that two factions—at opposing ends of the political spectrum and for different reasons—wanted to keep the nation out of the war and the draft.*
Late on September 4, the debate boiled over as House majority leader Sam Rayburn urged representatives to reject the Fish amendment, saying: “It is bad psychology, it is bad business. To wait means more war.” Tensions escalated during the night’s debate, in which Representative Beverly M. Vincent (Democrat of Kentucky) called Representative Martin L. Sweeney (Democrat of Ohio) a traitor for opposing the selective service bill. The exchange culminated in what the Associated Press called “a free-swinging, hard-hitting fist fight on the House floor,” in which several “vigorous blows landed on the face of each man.” The doorkeeper of the House noted that he had not seen anything like it in his 50 years in the House.47
Not only did Willkie demand that the Fish amendment be eliminated, but he also insisted that the draft was not a party issue separating Republicans and Democrats. On hearing Willkie’s statement, Fish accused him of having fallen for the propaganda of the interventionists and the eastern press and columnists.48
When the Senate and House held a conference committee to reconcile their versions of the bill, the Fish amendment was excluded, while the bill the Clark group originally submitted remained largely intact. Marshall had informed legislators that it would take two years for the draft to bear measurable results and that the Army would not be prepared to fight a war until then. He pushed lawmakers to conscript men for an 18-month tour of duty, but in his eagerness to get the bill passed, he settled for a year’s service, unless a national emergency was declared by Congress after the 12-month term. In such a situation, the draftees could be retained. The compromise would come back to haunt Marshall the following year.
Since the Louisiana Maneuvers in May, other maneuvers had taken place in five locales—Upstate New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the state of Washington, and Louisiana again—in August. Almost 300,000 Regular, National Guard, and Reserve troops had been involved, from units representing all 48 states.
The largest of these August exercises involved 105,000 men in Plattsburg between August 5 and 25, once again under the command of General Hugh Drum. Because they were billed as an attempt to mimic the stress of a real national emergency, the 1940 Plattsburg exercises seemed important enough for President Roosevelt, Secretary of War Stimson, and Army Secretary Patterson to show up in the presidential railroad car and tour the maneuver area before the finale to the mock war got underway.49
But these maneuvers quickly proved to be an exercise in futility rather than a show of preparedness as the paucity of real weapons and the most basic equipment seemed to highlight all reports and observations. “The soldier trudging through the dust with a length of gutter pipe on his shoulder in lieu of a trench mortar got precious little training except for his legs,” commented Marshall Andrews, who was covering the exercises for the Washington Post. But this was just the beginning, as Andrews noted that men lacked blankets, tents, mess gear, and even proper uniforms. Some men who had made the trip to Plattsburg were not allowed to participate because they did not have uniforms or as Andrews phrased it: “guns stayed silent . . . because their crews could not be uniformed.”50
Unlike the spring maneuvers in Louisiana, Plattsburg and the other August exercises received little newspaper coverage while they were taking place but a great deal when the results from these exercises were evaluated in early September. The conclusion was reached that no single division of the National Guard was ready for combat. The most critical summary appeared on the front page of the New York Times on September 9: “Inadequate equipment, a high percentage of ‘green’ officers, and raw recruits in all units of the Regular Army and National Guard and serious deficiencies in staff and command work even in the elementary fundamentals of ‘soldiering’ were revealed by the unprecedented series of army maneuvers which were held last month.” The article ended with all observers agreeing that the draft was needed to build up the Army’s strength.51
The final official reports from these exercises were even worse. One of the most damning recounted the alarming frequency with which men, ill prepared for marching and living in the outdoors, collapsed in the field. Units wandered aimlessly, communications failed, and supply lines failed, often leaving Guardsmen without food. Few of these deficiencies were the fault of the National Guard; the blame for most, rather, lay with the War Department, which had neglected the service for years and had outfitted it with little more than materiel left over from the previous war. Ancient Springfield rifles were labeled “50 CALIBRE,” and stovepipes standing in for guns were mounted on trucks masquerading as tanks.
“The 1940 summer encampments demonstrated beyond dispute, that in terms of ground forces the nation was virtually defenseless,” Army historian Christopher R. Gabel later concluded. “The National Guard’s make-believe guns spoke louder in Congress than they did on the maneuver field.”52
While Clark and his band of civilians had taken charge of the draft movement, Marshall was allowed to distance himself from that battle. He was free to adopt a new strategy, based on his fear that the Regular Army lacked the manpower to train conscripted men while keeping intact for emergency duty on this side of the Atlantic—such as putting down a Nazi-backed revolution in Brazil. He concluded that the solution to this problem would be to activate the whole National Guard, which could absorb thousands of draftees and give them basic training. Roosevelt agreed and encouraged Marshall to go to Congress and testify in favor of the draft and calling up the National Guard. Marshall made these points and on August 27 was given congressional authority to bring men of the National Guard into the Regular Army for one year. On August 31, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8530, calling up 60,000 men in units of the National Guard in 27 states to report on September 16. This first call amounted to about one-quarter of the National Guard.