Military service and American citizenship in historical perspective

Historically, Americans have had a fraught relationship with military service. From the Revolutionary War's ‘Minute Men’ to World War II's ‘Greatest Generation’, the myth of the citizen-soldier resonates deeply in American cultural memory. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of men have rushed to the colours voluntarily when the United States has faced threats to its security. Contrary to this civic-republican ideal, however, compulsory military service has been suspect throughout most of the nation's history. In reality, most citizens harboured a more liberal view of their citizenship, at least when it came to service under arms. They based their citizenship on rights owed by the state rather than their obligations to it, and they preferred a small, professional military to one in which citizen-soldiers performed military service in order to earn the right to political participation.

Citizenship in the United States, therefore, has never been predicated on military service. Even though the Militia Act of 1792 required every free, able-bodied white man to serve in a state-administered, local militia unit until its repeal in 1903, the law was rarely, if ever enforced. Moreover, states administered militia units rather than the federal government, creating a level of removal between militia service and any form of national citizenship. Additionally, women, the disabled, conscientious objectors, and other groups who have historically been excluded or excluded themselves from the armed forces have been able to achieve the rights of American citizenship. Finally, resistance to military service has existed since the very founding of the nation. Thomas Paine praised the men who remained at the Continental Army's 1776 encampment at Valley Forge because so many ‘summer soldier[s]’ and ‘sunshine patriot[s]’ had ‘shr[u]nk from the service of their country’. Perhaps most importantly, conscription during wartime has been necessary because most men are not particularly eager to put themselves into prolonged mortal danger, regardless of the cause.

Nevertheless, during the twentieth century, most eligible men who received draft notices served without public comment. Inductees may have grumbled and complained, but they served. Historians have documented the complexities of soldiers' reasons for wartime service, but these rationales tended to boil down to a combination of public pressure and feelings of personal responsibility. Men felt it their obligation as citizens to defend their homes, their communities, their comrades-at-arms, and their nation. Further, because military service, for the most part, was available only to men and only men could be drafted, serving as a member of the armed forces became uniquely associated with a particularly masculine form of citizenship. The feminising of conscientious objectors, who were branded as sissies, weaklings, cowards, and traitors during both world wars, underscores this point. Therefore, men also served to protect their masculinity. Most men may not have volunteered for military service, but if their country called them, they served. Those who sought methods to avoid induction tended to do so quietly and as individuals.

The Vietnam War was different. Once again, most men who were drafted served, but a much higher proportion of eligible men did not. What set this generation apart from its predecessors was the public way in which those who avoided military service did so. Some men fled the country to avoid the draft and some publicly burned their draft cards to protest the war. More commonly, however, men who actively sought ways to avoid military service applied for legal deferments, just as they had in earlier conflicts – but they did not hide this fact. They shared information with one another. They sought help from organisations. They consulted manuals published to help them. New Left organisations with nation-wide followings such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) along with hundreds of smaller, local anti-war groups and organisations, helped foment what historian John Whiteclay Chambers II, termed ‘a massive campaign of public disobedience’.

Scholars from a variety of fields have located the origins of this anti-military sentiment in the unique circumstances of America's war in Southeast Asia, but constructions of masculinity and citizenship perpetuated by the country's military manpower policies also fostered men's scepticism toward military service. Public perceptions of the war, including its perceived immorality, focused this already existent antagonism. By the time draft calls escalated in the mid-1960s, many American men already believed that military service was something that ‘other people’ did. They were not going to give up their deferments quietly, especially to participate in a war they did not support. The increasing selectivity of post-war military manpower policies had eroded the unusually strong relationship between masculine forms of citizenship and military service that had resulted from widespread participation in the armed forces during World War II. This unwittingly attenuated the connections between military service and masculine citizenship.

Militarisation and the long post-war

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the Selective Service operated within the complex environment of Cold War militarisation, one of the defining forces of post-World War II America. Planners in the State and Defense Departments based American foreign and military policy on their belief in the existence of global struggle between American democracy and Soviet communism. Such a bipolar world required American preparedness, defined as both military strength and civilian readiness. In many ways, the domestic Cold War in the United States was defined by the process of militarisation. But Cold War militarisation was also a profoundly ambivalent process. Americans feared becoming the totalitarian enemy they loathed. Hanson Baldwin, the New York Times military affairs editor, was not alone in asking how the United States could protect itself ‘without becoming a “garrison state” and destroying the very qualities and virtues and principles [it] originally set out to save’.

The draft, like so many other elements of post-war society, reflected this ambivalence. On the one hand, the very existence of conscription during peacetime indicated the enhanced role of militarisation in post-war American society. In the emerging Cold War environment, national security simply was seen as a more critical issue than the threat of compulsion. Many conservatives, including former isolationists who had objected to the draft, found it ‘more important to be anti-Soviet than anti-military’, and withdrew their opposition to conscription in 1948, when President Harry Truman asked for a renewal of Selective Service amid rising tensions with the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, Congress responded to Truman's request with a limited bill. The president had spent the previous three years fighting for a programme of universal military training, which would have required all able-bodied, male citizens to receive some training upon reaching their eighteenth birthday, but the Selective Service Act of 1948 baldly stated that all men did not have an equal responsibility for military service. According to the legislation, ‘the obligations and privileges of serving in the armed forces … should be shared generally’, but only ‘in accordance with a system of selection which is fair and just, and which is consistent with the maintenance of an effective national economy’. In other words, while universal military service theoretically should be an obligation of citizenship, it was not a practical reality. The nascent Cold War demanded partial mobilisation. Men should expect to serve if called, but the Act would not call all men with equal vigour. It authorised the president to defer any individual engaged in work ‘found to be necessary to the maintenance of the national health, safety, or interest;’ whose status as the sole supporter of dependents rendered his ‘deferment advisable’; whose belief in a ‘“Supreme Being” caused his opposition to all wars’; or who was ‘found to be physically, mentally, or morally deficient or defective’. Except for those incapable of or religiously opposed to military service, the law mandated that deferments should be granted to those who would perform service to the country in some other manner, either through their jobs or through their family role as breadwinner.

These broad categories of deferments made rational sense. They assured equity of national service, if not equality; promised scientific research and development and a strong economy; and protected the interests of society's most vulnerable. The armed forces could not expect to draw their personnel haphazardly from the young male populace without ramifications in the civilian sector. Targeted short-term deferments and permanent exemptions from military service existed to protect the economy as a whole by ensuring enough potential employees remained available to keep it vibrant and healthy.

But deferments and exemptions could be used to defend social values deemed of national importance as well. For example, this act, like other twentieth-century American draft laws, protected the beliefs of certain men who could prove they were religious conscientious objectors. Although it was a contested issue, the majority of Americans agreed that compelling a man to compromise his sincerely-held religious ideals, even in the name of national defence, undermined the nation's foundational principle of religious freedom. Ministers and divinity students were exempted from military obligations for similar reasons. As escalating Cold War tensions brought the issue of conscription into the public eye and onto the Congressional floor, law- and policymakers had to ask which values deserved special protection and which did not.

The Korean War and the rise of deferments

Planners in the State and Defense Departments contextualised the June 1950 invasion of South Korea by North Korean troops within an environment of Cold War militarisation. They based American foreign and military policy on their belief in the existence of global struggle between American democracy and Soviet communism and did not envision the Korean War as an isolated emergency of limited duration. Therefore, the US would have to mobilise accordingly to defend its ally, but it would not be able to demobilise after the war. America's only viable response to the Soviet threat, whether in war or peace, was a massive build-up of conventional and thermonuclear arms in order to create a ‘military shield’ under which allies could develop political and economic systems friendly to the US. America needed the strength ‘to deter … Soviet expansion, and to defeat, if necessary, aggressive Soviet or Soviet-directed actions of a limited or total character’. Any peace of the 1950s would therefore be a militarised peace. To maintain a flexible force ready to meet any contingency, the army, it was believed, would have to rely on conscription to meet its manpower needs long into the future. Thus, when the Selective Service sprang into action to meet its quotas in June 1950 after having suspended all inductions the year before, the question of which men to safeguard through deferments quickly became a political issue.

The vast majority of American men between the ages of 18 and 26 could not be conscripted because they were physically disqualified; already held agricultural, occupational, dependency, or other types of deferments; were already in the military or reserves; or were veterans. Moreover, low birth rates during the Depression years had their greatest impact on the draft-age population during the late 1940s and early 1950s, when just over one million men turned 18 annually. The director of the Selective Service, Major General Lewis B. Hershey, feared that if the war continued, too few would qualify for induction to replenish active-duty soldiers who rotated out of service. Yet, by late 1950, the Truman administration had asked for a total military force of 3.5 million men. Hershey and the Defense Department worried that the available pool of manpower would not be deep enough to meet the need. Nevertheless, under pressure from a variety of sources, he instituted a large-scale programme of deferments for college students, primarily in order to protect scientific and engineering fields.

World War II had jumpstarted the militarisation of civilian science. The advent and military application of such inventions as radar, synthetic rubber, the jet engine, penicillin, and especially the atomic bomb brought scientists firmly into the realm of national defence. But at the same time, leaders in these fields agonised over what they saw as an impending shortage of trained personnel. Starting with Science: The Endless Frontier, a July 1945 report to President Franklin Roosevelt by Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, scientists in policy and lobbying positions regularly warned lawmakers and the public of the dire consequences that would result from not encouraging and educating enough young scientists and engineers. Bush prophesied a deficit of approximately 17,000 men with advanced degrees in these fields by 1955. By 1951, an industrial employers' report cited by Scientific American stated that an additional 60,000 engineers alone would be needed by 1954.

The heightened draft calls of the Korean War caused panic in the scientific community. Its members held a series of publicly- and privately-sponsored policy conferences between 1950 and 1952 to discuss the problem and issue recommendations. Of these, the meetings of the Scientific Advisory Committees, jointly convened by the Selective Service and National Security Resources Board, were the most influential. Members, representing public and private universities and professional organisations, formed into six subcommittees – agricultural and biological sciences, engineering sciences, the healing arts, humanities, physical sciences, and the social sciences – were asked to develop a workable plan for classifying and deferring students in the national interest. Their combined report became the core of the Selective Service's student deferment plan.

Members recommended a liberal deferment programme, citing the mercurial nature of scientific advancement. ‘It is quite possible’, their report noted, ‘that fifteen years ago nuclear physicists would have been dismissed as a scientific luxury – as a group of theoreticians not essential to the national defence’, Now, it implied, theoretical physicists were indispensable to national security. M.H. Trytten, the committee chair and director of the Office of Scientific Personnel of the National Research Council, went on to claim victory in World War II as ‘primarily the triumph of a virile technology based on the skills and knowledge of scientists, engineers, and other specialists’. Deferments for scientific training, therefore, were imperative if the United States was to continue its military and technological superiority. Equally important, college students contributed to ‘national preparedness just as certainly as … men in training in the armed services’. Charles E. Odegaard, the executive director of the American Council of Learned Societies, confirmed this notion at a conference to present the committee's findings to the public. He explained, ‘National defence is now more than a military affair. It requires as a correlative a concept of civilian defence that involves far more than putting out fires or directing traffic to bomb shelters’. Civilian work was not throwaway work. It was imperative. Men did not need to don a military uniform in order to perform service in the national interest.

Hershey did not entirely agree. While he supported the group's recommendations regarding the importance of student deferments, he adamantly believed that a deferment should be a postponement of military service, not an exemption. Not all national service was created equal, at least in his view. When the Selective Service Act of 1948 came up for renewal in 1951, he warned members of the Preparedness Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee that Congress must carefully frame the new legislation, ‘otherwise a deferment becomes simply a means of evading service by staying out until the program ends or the law expires’. To prevent such an occurrence, the new Universal Military Training and Service Act of 1951 expanded to age 35 the draft liability for any man who received a deferment before age 26.

Hershey had already started designing the new programme. In the summer of 1951, the Selective Service added the II-S category for deferred students to its classification system. College or graduate students could obtain this classification either through their class rank or through their score on the Selective Service College Qualification Test (SSCQT), a standardised test of verbal and quantitative reasoning the Selective Service commissioned from the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey. Approximately 80% of the estimated 450,000 draft-eligible men on American college campuses took the SSCQT during its first four administrations in 1951.

These numbers were significant enough to catch scholars' attention. In May 1952, three Cornell University sociologists initiated a study of male college students' attitudes towards military service, the draft, and deferments. Close to 3000 students from 11 college campuses across the nation responded to their questionnaire, and of these, 83% harboured negative opinions toward service in the military. College men did not want to be drafted, especially to fight in Korea, a conflict that only 46% of respondents supported. Moreover, they embraced their newly won deferments. Only one in ten of the students surveyed believed the law granted special privileges, while a full 96% claimed they rarely or never felt guilty about not being in uniform, even with their country at war. Nevertheless, as much as they did not wish to be called up, students, by a margin of four to one, acknowledged that military service was a responsibility of citizenship and viewed their deferments as a temporary reprieve. Ninety-one per cent believed they would be inducted within three years of graduation, but they hoped the war, at least, would be over by then. They may have understood military service as their duty, but they did not extend their responsibility to fighting in an unpopular war.

In the meantime, the student deferment programme proved a great success. In fiscal 1952, 204,446 men were classified as II-S. Although some labour unions, most notably the United Auto Workers, and a few educators, such as Harvard University President James Conant and Princeton University President Harold Dodds, publicly labelled the programme ‘undemocratic’ because it granted special privileges, the majority of Americans supported it. In one 1952 Gallup opinion poll, 69% of respondents favoured inducting students only after they had completed their studies. Hershey reluctantly accepted the programme as a necessary element of modern manpower planning, even as he lamented his own agency's liberal deferment policies.

Although the expectation from both the Selective Service and among the students themselves was for eventual military service, the addition of the II-S deferment set an ambivalent precedent. It created a situation in which the military establishment purposely kept a particular category of men out of the armed services in the name of national security, not because of what those men actively contributed to the defence of the nation but because of their potential to contribute in the future. The Selective Service, with the collusion of the president, Congress, the Department of Defense, and professional and educational organisations, found them more valuable to the country as civilians than as soldiers. Additionally, because the student deferment programme hoped to encourage science education in particular, it helped militarise the scientific fields by tying them to the nation's defence efforts. It privileged civilian forms of masculine citizenship at the same time that it militarised them.

Dependency deferments similarly offered advantages to men who opted to pursue domestic responsibilities as husbands and fathers by allowing them to avoid the uncertainty of conscription. The decision to defer men based on their family status reflected a judgment based more heavily on national values than any other draft classification, except arguably those relating to conscientious objectors. In part, it indicated the assumption that the father was the main source of income within the family. Since the base pay of the enlisted grades was particularly low in the immediate post-war years and military allowances for dependents of soldiers and sailors were not automatic until the Korean War, many families would, in fact, face hardship if the male head-of-household were conscripted. But the application of the III-A (dependency) deferment went far beyond cases of individual hardship.

The language of the 1948 Selective Service Act was purposely vague, authorising the president, and thus the Selective Service, to defer men whose ‘status with respect to persons dependent upon them … renders their deferment advisable’. While it is unlikely that Truman or Hershey considered popular parenting advice books when formulating military manpower policy, the message from such sources was clear. Social stability depended on happy families, which in turn required present and involved male figures, a phenomenon historian Jessica Weiss, borrowing from McCall's magazine, termed ‘togetherness’. Fathers were of the utmost importance. The June 1950 issue of Parents Magazine, for example, warned that children would fail to ‘find emotional fulfilment’ or ‘be good parents … to their children’ unless ‘Dad’ offered them the opportunity to develop ‘a warm regard for some of the best qualities of masculinity – tenderness, protection, strength’. Fathers could counterbalance the negative effects of overbearing mothers and prevent sons from becoming ‘sissies’. According to advice manuals, the very future of American society depended on the firm hand and tender heart of a loving, engaged dad. A man in uniform, stationed half-way around the world simply could not fulfil the role.

In wartime, however, rising manpower needs directly conflicted with the national desire to keep families intact. During World War II, the Selective Service and Congress had contorted themselves administratively in their efforts to avoid conscripting fathers, but the dearth of available manpower during the Korean War required conscripting married men without children. Strong resistance to drafting fathers remained. A June 1952 Gallup poll found that only 43% of Americans favoured keeping the armed forces at their current fighting strength through the induction of men with children. By way of contrast, 60% supported conscripting men working in vital defence industries. Only the student deferment received more support than that for fatherhood.

Even so, both classifications faced criticism, especially from those who felt unfairly targeted by the Selective Service System. Foreshadowing the Vietnam War, the Korean War acquired a reputation for being a poor man's fight. Those who could afford higher education soon learned to pyramid their deferments, moving seamlessly from II-S (student) to III-A (dependency) or II-A (occupational) deferments. A student who graduated from college and went on to graduate school, had a child, or found a job in the national interest could transform a temporary deferment into a de facto exemption. Even though Hershey downplayed the phenomenon, claiming that no more than 3% of II-S registrants took this path, negative publicity caused the Selective Service embarrassment. Magazines worried about privileged young men shirking their patriotic duty as they ‘babied out’ of military service, a trend seemingly supported by an August 1951 Public Health Service report specifically linking the war to a significant upswing in the number of first births in the first five months of the year. In mid-1953, local draft boards complained that 13,000 men per month were applying to change from student to dependency categories. In response, the National Manpower Council and the Department of Defense recommended ending dependency deferments for anyone who had used a student deferment, but the Selective Service rejected this recommendation as too difficult to administrate. On 11 July 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10469 ending the III-A deferment for all men except those for whom military service would cause extreme hardship.

Eisenhower's revocation of the fatherhood deferment was significant for several reasons. First, it took effect several weeks after the Korean armistice was signed. Even though fighting had ended, defence planners did not expect to demobilise. Arthur Flemming, director of the Office of Defense Mobilization, claimed that the military build-up would not reach its peak until 1954 and that the United States would be ‘involved in some kind of defence-mobilisation programme for the next 10, 15, or 20 years’. High manpower requirements would be part of the militarised peace that characterised the Cold War. The United States could no longer afford to protect fatherhood in the name of national security. Rather, the country needed fathers to protect their families by defending their nation. Second, the change in regulation occurred amongst a flurry of bad publicity. It seemed to be the only way the public could relinquish its desire to keep fathers on the home front. Fatherhood ceased being a protected category only amidst explanations that the change corrected an injustice. As Hershey put it, he had to ‘trade students for fathers’. Under the new regulation, students would no longer be able to shirk their duty as citizens by pyramiding deferments. Rescinding the privilege was a way to avoid elitism, solve the manpower crisis, and continue training the next generation of defence professionals. But the need for such justification turned out to be short-lived.

Manpower channelling

Several factors contributed to a reversal of the critical manpower shortage faced by the armed forces during the Korean War. The first was a shift in national security policy. When Eisenhower took office in 1953, his discomfort with an $85 billion defence budget constituting 60% of federal expenditures and 12% of the gross national product led him to reassess military strategy. What became known as his New Look stressed deterrence of communism through the use or threatened use of strategic – and eventually tactical – nuclear weapons. Under this policy, the armed forces enhanced their nuclear stockpiles, their support and delivery systems, and their transportation and communication capabilities rather than their conventional ground forces. Emphasis on infantry lessened considerably. Between 1953 and 1961, overall active force strength dropped from over 3.5 million men to under 2.4 million, most notably in the army, which contracted by 675,000 soldiers during Eisenhower's presidency. Second, Congress passed the Career Incentive Act in 1955, offering a significant pay increase to men who stayed in the military after their initial term of service. The reenlistment rate rose from 27% in fiscal 1955 to 44% the following year. Finally, the downward population pressures that had been such a problem during the Korean War lessened and then reversed themselves. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, more and more men turned 18 each month, vastly expanding the available manpower pool. Where there were 9.1 million men of draft age registered with the Selective Service in 1953, there were 10.9 million in 1957, and 13.9 million in 1961.

Together, these circumstances meant that the military needed fewer men but that more men were available to it. Thus, an increasingly smaller proportion of the available manpower pool faced conscription each year. Inductions dropped from 33% of total military procurement in fiscal 1954 to 22% in 1957 to just 9% in 1961. Hershey recognised that small draft calls created difficulties for his agency. He had always insisted that deferments were merely postponements of military service, not exemptions from it. But by mid-decade, the numbers worked against him, forcing a ‘reassessment of how the System c[ould] adjust universality as a principle to high selectivity as a reality’.

With so many more men available and the threat of war with Soviet Union always imminent, the Selective Service under Hershey's leadership began to redefine its mission. He started to label his agency as ‘the storekeeper’ of the nation's manpower, touting it as the only federal agency capable of cataloguing America's human resources, a function that would be invaluable in the event of thermonuclear war. He instructed his staff to study the best ways to select men ‘for the task where they might give the greatest service to the Nation’, including as civilians. He made no mention of the nation's womanpower.

Hershey further altered his public attitude toward the agency's role. Where earlier he had prophesied disaster if Congress allowed too many deferments, writing, ‘If we make [a man] too secure [in his job], it will take about three Selective Service Systems to bomb him loose when we finally want him to go out and use the weapon’, he now started to advocate a ‘freer deferment trend’ so that men could be released to ‘make contributions to civil life’. He even altered the basis on which he defended the regulations that extended the age of draft liability from 26 to 35 for men who received deferments. Where he had argued earlier that the extended age limit would ensure their military service, he now claimed that the threat of loss of deferment would detain them in essential occupations until an age when other family pressures would probably keep them there. As one planning memo put it,

The Selective Service's congressional mandate was to secure military personnel, but by the late 1950s Hershey had expanded its purpose to guide the choices of private citizens, thus eliding the difference between military and civilian procurement in the name of national security. The Selective Service had entered the business of social engineering.

By 1960, this subtle shift in reasoning had coalesced into the policy of manpower channelling, which Hershey first publicly and explicitly articulated in his Annual Report to Congress that year, although he had mentioned it by name as early as 1958. He referred to the practice as ‘the counterpart of procuring manpower for civilian activities’. Channelling, according to one Selective Service memo, could ‘enhance the national well being by inducing more registrants to participate in fields [that related] directly to the national interest’. The policy encouraged local draft boards to help certain young men avoid military service by offering them deferments if they entered occupations believed to be of value to the nation. Men who ‘acquired [a] skill and either d[id] not use it or use[d] it in a nonessential activity’ could be enticed to return to more valuable pursuits if threatened with losing their deferred status. Even though the Selective Service denied compelling people ‘by edict … to enter pursuits having to do with essentiality and progress’, it acknowledged that it used ‘pressure’ as the ‘indirect way of achieving what [was] done by direction in foreign countries’. Channelling, therefore, was the agency's way of encouraging men to choose occupations it defined as beneficial to the nation by offering them draft deferments.

The agency's director credited the policy for the number of scientists, engineers, doctors, dentists, teachers, students, and men then in ‘every field requiring advanced study’. He believed it had become particularly important after the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 had forced the United States ‘to inventory or reappraise critically its educational, scientific, and technological activities’. According to Hershey, ‘any such analysis having a connection with manpower and its relation to the Nation's survival vitally involve[d] the Selective Service’, the only federal agency capable of maintaining an inventory of the country's ‘human resources’.

More importantly, in delineating the purpose of channelling, Hershey redefined his meaning of service. In 1950, he had disagreed vehemently that a male citizen's obligation to defend his nation could be fulfilled in any way other than through the military. By 1960, however, he realised that ‘the concept that “duty” is best exemplified by service in the Armed Forces’ might ‘be interpreted somewhat more broadly’. Channelling encouraged men to enter civilian fields in the national health, safety, or interest. In that capacity, it was an admission on the part of the director of the Selective Service, an agency directly tied to the military, that the responsibilities of masculine citizenship in the United States did not have to include military service.

George Q. Flynn, Hershey's biographer, suggests that the general developed the practice of manpower channelling as a rationalisation to keep his agency alive during a period of reduced need, but as policy historian James M. Gerhardt makes clear, virtually no one in Congress, the Department of Defense, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff seriously considered eliminating the draft during the Eisenhower or Kennedy years. Defence planners believed that the threat of conscription motivated men to volunteer, and they pointed to the low enlistment rates of 1947, when the draft had been suspended, as their proof. Moreover, since the public appeared comfortable with Selective Service, there was no impetus to overhaul or terminate the system through the 1950s and early 1960s. Instead, they expanded the existing deferment structure to accommodate the growing draft-age population and the nation's manpower needs. The Selective Service began formulating the regulations that would coalesce into manpower channelling before Hershey articulated a unified policy. Channelling became the justification for excluding so many men from military service once the framework for multiple deferments was already in place.

To that end, the Selective Service drastically expanded the availability of occupational deferments, based on the Departments of Commerce and Labor's 1955 revised lists of essential activities and critical occupations. The new lists were shorter than the 1951 originals, but they were also more generalised, adding such categories as ‘health and welfare services’, ‘research and development services’, and ‘educational services’. Using these guidelines and those set forth by state Science Advisory Committees established by the Selective Service beginning in 1956, local boards and individual men could more easily define their jobs as service in the national interest. The number of men deferred for occupational reasons increased almost 650% between 1955 and 1963 and Hershey continually sought administrative methods to defer more.

The Selective Service overtly admitted it channelled men into particular occupational fields, but its policies had implicit effects on men's domestic arrangements as well. Whether explicitly stated or not, deferments encouraged early marriage and fatherhood, further privileging civilian pursuits. In 1956, President Eisenhower issued an executive order changing the sequence of induction so that all eligible non-fathers between the ages of 19 and 26 would be called before any otherwise eligible fathers. In essence, the president created a de facto exemption for all men with children. From a military standpoint, the new regulation provided the military with ‘somewhat younger inductees’, since removing fathers from the draft pool tended to push the average age of available men downward and the Selective Service called the oldest available men first. But Hershey also claimed that the order was ‘designed to strengthen the Nation's civilian economy’. Whether because fathers were more likely to remain in stable jobs than non-fathers, enhance the purchasing power of their family units, or strengthen the economy in some other way, he did not elaborate.

The measure garnered very little press attention. Wartime fears over the pyramiding of deferments had abated, allowing the federal government to once again define the maintenance of the nuclear family as more important to the containment of communism than widespread military service. ‘Family life’ was added to industry and agriculture as sectors to which the Selective Service owed ‘essential support … as related to the country's defence posture’. It is impossible to draw a clear causal relationship between Eisenhower's order and the American birth rate, but according to the 1957 Annual Report of the Director of Selective Service, the number of fathers in the I-A category (available for service) more than doubled between fiscal 1956 and 1957, increasing at an average rate of 18,200 per month. Whether intended or not, it is more than likely that this policy channelled men into fatherhood.

By the latter portion of John F. Kennedy's presidency, the Selective Service had so many qualified men that it actively sought methods to justify their removal from the pool of eligibles. In response to an August 1963 inquiry from Kennedy, Hershey reported that the number of men available for induction could be reduced by one-fifth if the president modified the order of call so that all qualified single men would be drafted before any married men without children. In September, Kennedy complied with Hershey's request. Once more, the stated rationale was to lower the average age of induction, since married men tended to be older than single men, but its subtext was that married men were more important to the nation as civilians than single ones; single men were more easily expendable. Young men got the message. A 1966 Department of Defence study found that marriage rates jumped considerably among young men in the age brackets most vulnerable to the draft in the months following the change in regulation. Marriage rates were 7.5 and 10.9% higher for 20- and 21-year-olds, respectively, between October 1963 and June 1964 than they had been during the previous two years. Marriage rates for all other age groups remained static. Again, the Selective Service's own policies undoubtedly channelled at least some of these men into early marriages, thus privileging domestic masculinity in the name of national defence.

Conclusion

The Selective Service made no secret of its social and civil defence goals through the late 1950s and 1960s. Channelling was designed to encourage men to fill particular civilian roles the agency believed would be of benefit to the country in the event of war or nuclear attack. Hershey spoke and wrote openly of the social engineering function of manpower channelling in meetings, articles, letters, and testimony before Congress for close to a decade before the heightened draft calls of the Vietnam War made the practice controversial. By then, the inequities of the agency's liberal deferment policies had once again started to create a public outcry, as the burden of the draft seemed to fall disproportionately on poor and minority men.

In January 1967, Peter Henig of the Ann Arbor, Michigan chapter of Students for a Democratic Society wrote a scathing article on manpower channelling in the organisation's newsletter, New Left Notes. His ‘discovery’ of the practice sparked outrage among anti-war activists from the political left, who used them as an example of state-sponsored elitism and military imperialism. But many from the political right were horrified as well. To conservatives, the practice sounded too much like communist interventionism. In hearings before the House Armed Services Committee in May 1967, Pennsylvania Republican Richard Schweiker and Wisconsin Democrat Robert Kastenmeier both used channelling and the inequities it exemplified to argue for a complete overhaul of the law governing Selective Service. Once criteria for deferments were tightened, however, protest against military service increased. Hershey's prediction that it would ‘take about three Selective Service Systems to bomb [a man] loose’ if he was made too comfortable in his deferment proved prescient.

The Selective Service was the vehicle by which millions of men entered the armed services between 1948 and 1973, but its regulations also offered deferments and exemptions to millions more. The Defense Department's estimates of the proportion of eligible men who served in the military as a result of the draft are questionable, though it is clear that the percentage lessened over time. This is due, in part, to changing defence strategy and shifting population pressures, but it is also because of the Selective Service's own policies. Instead of targeting deferments to protect the economy during wartime, the agency modified its priorities to privilege men's potential for future contributions to the national interest, be they scientific research, technical inventions, or children. This policy simultaneously militarised civilian pursuits and privileged domestic masculinity at the expense of military service.

Men who received deferments had little trouble rationalising them. As the Cornell University sociologists concluded in 1952, if a law allows for ‘differential sacrifice’, individuals will seek out legally-sanctioned opportunities to lessen their own participation and have ‘little difficulty in justifying such a course of action and in defending [their] relatively favoured status’. As the Selective Service began to redefine its mission through the 1950s with the institution of manpower channelling, deferments became easier to obtain and to excuse. They became normalised, as did the inequalities inherent in a system that demanded military service from some male citizens but not from others. When draft calls rose at the outset of the Vietnam War, the Selective Service found that it could not easily dismantle the system it had constructed. Many American men no longer saw it as their obligation to serve in the military, especially under the questionable circumstances presented by the war in Southeast Asia. Military service separated from the responsibilities of masculine citizenship in the United States. Channelling had worked too well.