From "porous" to "ruthless" conscription, 1776-1917.

AuthorHenderson, David R.
PositionReport

What caused the United States to abandon its long tradition of a volunteer military, with some conscription by local and state governments, and to impose a harsh, federally run draft for almost forty years of the twentieth century? There were three major causes: (1) the existence of a much stronger central government, (2) a change in the political philosophy held by the elite, and (3) the Civil War draft. In this article, I document how each of these causes helped to bring about a harsh, ruthless draft in 1917, during the first year of U.S. participation in World War I.

The Shift

Many people believe that the United States moved from manning its armed forces solely with volunteers in 1776 to using primarily conscription in 1917. Martin Anderson (1982), for example, draws a time line showing that the United States had no draft during the American Revolution, but the truth is that the thirteen newly independent colonies did not rely purely on volunteer militias. State governments used the draft during the War of Independence not only to man local militias, but also to fill their required quotas in George Washington's Continental army (Chambers 1987; Hummel 2001). In short, no shift occurred from complete volunteerism to conscription. Instead, a shift occurred from conscription run by state governments to a much harsher conscription run by the federal government.

When the thirteen colonies fought the War of Independence, they did so with professionals, nonprofessional volunteers, (1) draftees, and men who were hired as substitutes by draftees. But the draft of that time, though onerous, was in two main ways less harsh than future drafts. First, draftees were allowed to hire substitutes. Second, they were not drafted for years at a time. Moreover, state governments conducted all of the drafts; the national government (supposing that one even existed under the prevailing arrangements) had no power to draft men. Even the national government's main army, the Continental army, reached a peak strength of only 16,800 in 1778; most of the 200,000 Americans who served as soldiers during the war served in the local militia (Chambers 1987, 20-23). (2)

Conscription for the state militias that fought in the War of 1812 also relied on state drafts, not on a national draft. Indeed, although Secretary of War James Monroe tried to implement national conscription, he failed utterly. It was in response to this proposed draft that Daniel Webster made his famous speech denouncing conscription as "a horrible lottery" based on the throw of the "dice of blood" (qtd. in Chambers 1987, 33-34). One might argue that the United States was moving away from conscription at that time. The Mexican War of 184648 was the first declared U.S. war fought exclusively with volunteers.

During World War I, however, the U.S. government never gave volunteerism or the state militias a chance, even though army officers estimated that 1.5 million men could easily have been recruited in 1917 alone. Shortly after the United States entered the war, the government initiated a massive draft for which 24 million men registered. Of the 3.5 million soldiers who served during the war, 72 percent were conscripts (Chambers 1987, 171,211, 73).

What happened to shift the United States so radically from reliance on volunteers and porous state drafts during the late 1770s through the mid-1800s to reliance on coercion by the federal government?

A Strong Central Government

Imposition of a federal draft requires, obviously, a federal government. During the War of Independence, virtually no such government existed. The thirteen former colonies, with the support of their citizens, held on to their powers jealously. They did not cede to a central government the power to tax, much less the power to conscript. Even after the war had ended and the Constitution was being written, advocates of conscription "understood that an attempt to give the new central government such authority would have been unprecedented and might well have led to popular rejection of the Constitution" (Chambers 1987, 26). By 1917, however, the central government was much stronger. It had successfully asserted its power during the Civil War, and in the postbellum years it had regulated competition using the Sherman Act (1890) and the Clayton Act (1914), regulated railroad rates with the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and subsequent laws (1903, 1906, and 1910), imposed an income tax (1913), intervened deeply in the banking system with the Federal Reserve Act (1913), and restricted cocaine, heroin, and other drugs with the Harrison Narcotics Act (1914). Although still tiny by modern standards, the federal government had become much larger and more powerful by an order of magnitude than it was in 1776.

The National Defense Act of 1916 gave the president the power to compel factory owners, by threat of criminal sanctions, to produce munitions for the government at whatever prices the government might choose to pay. Nationalizing men's bodies was the next logical step (Higgs 1987, 128-29).

The Change in Political Philosophy

As Robert Higgs insists, beliefs matter in social affairs (1987, 38). Although this idea should go without saying, a wide swath of economists unfortunately seems to believe that people pursue only their own narrowly defined interest and that the only "belief" they act on is that they should pursue this interest. In criticizing this view, Amartya Sen asserts strongly: "The purely economic man is close to being a social moron" (1977, qtd. in Higgs 1987, 41). Even a little introspection should persuade us that we often act on the basis of ideas, especially in the political realm.

Until almost the end of the nineteenth century, the dominant political philosophy in the United States was individualism. James Bryce, the keen British observer of U.S. society in the late nineteenth century, pointed to "certain dogmas or maxims" the Americans held, including the belief that individual rights such as the "right to the enjoyment of what he has earned ... are primordial and sacred." Also important were the beliefs that government authorities "ought to be strictly limited" and that "the less of government the better.... The functions of government must be kept at their minimum" (1895, qtd. in Higgs 1987, 83).

Nor were these the kinds of beliefs people held only when convenient. In 1887, President Grover Cleveland, who believed strongly in limited government, was presented with the Texas Seed Bill, which would have distributed seed grain to drought-devastated farmers in Texas. The amount appropriated in the bill was only $10,000, the equivalent of about $230,000 in 2009. Cleveland vetoed this bill. He could, he said, "find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution" (qtd...

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