On September 16, a week after the New York Times critique was published, the Burke-Wadsworth bill establishing a military draft passed the Senate 47–25 and was subsequently approved in the House by a vote of 232–124 on the same morning.54,55 Clark and his band of unpaid lobbyists “practically wore out shoe leather tracking down and buttonholing Senators and Representatives,” recalled General Lewis Hershey, who became the director of the Selective Service System after the bill was passed.
Thus ended what was later termed the most tumultuous summer in Congress in living memory. Under the final version of the act, all American males between 21 and 45 years of age were required to register for the draft. The government would select men through a lottery system under which “all drafted soldiers had to remain in the Western Hemisphere or in United States possessions or territories located in other parts of the world.”
A group of about 1,000 opponents of the draft who had camped outside the Capitol during the final debates now moved to a position in front of the White House. Their anthem, “Down by the Riverside,” contained the line: “Ain’t gonna study war no more.”
The same day the bill passed, the first 60,000 of 270,000 National Guardsmen who would be called between that moment and June 30, 1941, when the Army would be authorized to grow to 1.4 million, reported for active duty. The first divisions to arrive—the 30th from the South, the 41st from the West, the 44th from the Northeast, and the 45th from the Southwest—were distributed geographically to create minimal industrial disturbance to any one region of the country since the vast majority of Guardsmen held jobs.56
That evening, George Marshall delivered a special address on CBS Radio: “The next six months include the possibility of being the most critical period in the history of the nation . . . We must be prepared to stand alone,” he warned. Marshall also went out of his way to express his faith in the American citizen-soldier:
I fear that we expect too much of machines. We fail to realize two things: First, that the finest plane or tank or gun in the world is literally worthless without technicians trained as soldiers—hardened, seasoned, and highly disciplined to maintain and operate it; and second, that success in combat depends primarily upon the development of the trained combat team composed of all arms. This battle team is the most difficult, the most complicated of all teams to create, because it must operate on unknown ground, in darkness, as well as in daylight, amid incredible confusion, danger, hardship, and discouragements. It is a team of many parts, the decisive element of which remains the same little-advertised, hard-bitten foot soldier with his artillery support.57
Marshall could celebrate, but the timing of this victory was far from ideal for Roosevelt. Samuel Rosenman, one of FDR’s closest advisers, told the president: “From a political point of view, there couldn’t have been a worse time for them to have passed this bill. The actual drawing of numbers will probably take place right smack in the middle of the campaign, and of course you are going to be blamed for it in a great many homes.”58
However, a shift in attitude among young Americans of draft age strongly suggested that the draft would not bring the resistance many had predicted. The Gallup Poll had never done opinion sampling among those under 21, but when the draft issue surfaced in 1940, the editors of the Reader’s Digest, then the most popular magazine in the world, commissioned a poll of Americans between the ages of 16 and 24. Some questions were directed at both sexes and others were asked only of males. The results, published in the October 1940 issue, were a pleasant surprise to those who worried about the state of American youth, which the magazine termed “tough-fibered, loyal and hopeful.” It added: “They have faith in the future. They are not radical—in fact they are surprisingly conservative in their views.”
The pollsters asked young men whether they objected personally to a year of military service, and 76 percent said they did not. Many of them requested proper training: “If I’m likely to fight, I’d rather know how.” The fundamental acceptance of compulsory military service by this “slice” of the nation’s manhood (some 10 million men) closely approximated acceptance by the general population, which Gallup polled several times on the issue.
In the commentary accompanying the poll results, Gallup pointed out that commentators and editors who had been telling America that its young were a flabby, pacifistic, yellow, cynical, and discouraged lot had now been handed a stinging rebuke from the very young people they were criticizing. Gallup named Walter Lippmann of the New York Times, Dorothy Thompson of the New York Tribune, and the president himself for advancing this negative point of view. Thompson was a woman of great influence; in 1939 she had been named the second-most influential woman in the country after Eleanor Roosevelt. Gallup suspected that many of those pushing the negative portrayal of American youth had been swayed by the “fulminations of such noisy groups as the American Youth Congress,” a Far Left group with strong ties to the Communist Party that had demonstrated against the Burke-Wadsworth bill.59
As if to underscore the Gallup conclusion, on October 10, a poll taken at the University of Maryland by the student newspaper found that Maryland students favored compulsory military training by a 5–1 ratio. News like this was welcome, as the draft system was about to face its first test less than a week later.60
Section 4(a) of the new law stated that no discrimination be shown against any person on account of race or color. However, section 3(a) of the same act gave Army and Navy authorities unlimited discretion in deciding whom to accept into their ranks and how to employ those they accepted. In other words, discrimination was banned, but segregation was not. Jim Crow still ruled.
Because the military was segregated, race-specific draft calls more often than not limited the number of black recruits. In 1940, there were six black units in the Army. African American draftees could be assigned only to these units or to new ones being planned. Attempts to send African American draftees to the Army were rejected before segregated barracks and mess facilities could be put in place. In 1940 it was unthinkable that blacks and whites could eat or sleep under the same roof.61
With draft registration in mind, civil rights leaders went to the White House on September 27, 1940. A. Philip Randolph, head of the black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was accompanied by Walter White, the head of the NAACP, and T. Arnold Hill, an administrator for the Urban League. They demanded the racial integration of the Armed Forces as well as changes in the hiring practices of the burgeoning defense industry. The president told the men that progress was actually being made: African Americans were going to be assigned to combat services in numbers proportional to their percentage of the overall population, “which is something,” he added. The black leaders then pushed on the issue of integration. According to White’s account of what happened next, Roosevelt at first thought about the formation of integrated divisions in the Army but after some additional thought seemed to accept the idea that the Army could place black combat units alongside white ones and over time “back into” desegregated units. Roosevelt made it clear that this idea would have to begin in the North. Progress it seemed had been made—that is, only if and when these first steps were taken.62
When the group of civil rights leaders then raised the question of desegregating the Navy, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox quickly responded that such a move would be all but impossible. He explained: “We can’t do a thing about it because men live in such intimacy aboard ship that we simply can’t enlist Negroes above the rank of messman.” Roosevelt jumped in at this point to say that the Navy “was organizing musical entertainments and new bands for ships” and putting “Negro bands” on ships could allow white sailors to come to accept sharing space with black sailors. As the meeting ended, FDR thanked the black leaders for their time and promised that he would talk with his cabinet and other top officials about the issue of racial integration in both military services.63
But the nation’s military leaders—including Stimson, Marshall, and Knox, and almost all of FDR’s cabinet—were totally opposed to any of the changes proposed by the president, especially as so many other pressing military issues were up for discussion. Marshall made the key argument: “There is no time for critical experiments which could