On Jan. 20, 1958, when a 23-year-old ex-truck driver from Tupelo, Miss., was ordered to report to the draft board in Memphis, it made front page news around the world.
The draftee, of course, was Elvis Presley, already a cultural icon. Ironically, he was also a precursor of the rock ‘n’ roll, draft card-burning youth rebellion that would shake society a decade later.
When Elvis was drafted, it was peacetime. There was no war or major threat to the nation’s security. But the Selective Service System called on Elvis to drop his astonishing $100,000-a-month career to serve his country as a $78-a-month Army recruit. And he put down his guitar and put on the uniform with no complaint.
Such was the power of the military draft in the 1950s. And such was the pull then of the young men’s sense of patriotic duty to serve their country. No matter how rich or poor you were, or what race or creed, if your nation called on you to serve, in those days you went.
The idea that the rectitude of the draft and universal military service could be challenged seemed almost preposterous then. But last week, the U.S. House of Representatives may have put the first nails into the coffin of the Selective Service System and the draft as a socially leveling institution.
The House Appropriations Committee earlier this year stripped Selective Service of its $29 million annual budget, giving it, instead, $5 million to cease operations and provide its 267 employees with severance pay. Rep. Gerald Solomon (R-N.Y.) tried to save the agency by restoring $20 milliion to its budget, but the House last Monday voted “no” to his proposal by a vote of 207-202.
The Selective Service is the agency that maintains the master lists of 14 million young men eligible for military service. American males are required by law to register their names with the service on their 18th birthdays.
The list is kept up to date by 100 agency employees at its Great Lakes offices north of Chicago. The agency also oversees the training of 11,000 volunteers serving on the nation’s 2,000 draft boards.
While no American has been drafted in the last 20 years, the agency claims if it were called on in a national emergency, it could supply 100,000 or more men from its lists and have them in uniform within 13 days.
Surprisingly little national attention has been paid or emotion spent in the debate on the future of the agency. Some veterans groups such as the American Legion are protesting the moves to shut down the Selective Service, but not very loudly or with much vigor.
“The American Legion has always been in support of the (Selective Service System),” Lew Wood, a Legion spokesman, said last week. Wood said the Legion will make its feelings known when the Senate takes up debate on the fate of selective service, possibly later this month.
“Defense of the nation requires a system of military manpower procurement,” Wood said. “The Selective Service System is an inexpensive way of being prudent and prepared.”
Charles Moskos, Northwestern University’s influential military sociologist, also thinks it might be a mistake to discard the system.
“I’m pro-draft just on principle,” Moskos said. “I think it’s good symbolically that the youth of the nation, no matter what circumstances they come from, know that they may be called on for national service.”
On the other side, since the Vietnam War era, many religious and peace groups have continued to oppose the draft on moral and ideological grounds.
But the arguments that seem to be swaying Congress to ditch selective service are fueled more by the idea that the draft makes as much sense today as fighting a high-tech war with bolt-action rifles.
Those sentiments are based in large part on studies done by Elliot Feldman, a Harvard political scientist who spent a year studying manpower procurement in the Pentagon in 1984.
“Nine years ago,” said Feldman, now an attorney practicing international law in Washington, “we knew this (selective service) operation made no sense, but politically it was untouchable at the time.”
Feldman’s study never questioned that Selective Service System lists could produce hundreds of thousands of potential draftees on short notice. Instead, it questioned the ability of the armed forces to absorb so many draftees on short notice.
“Twelve or 13 bases were supposed to absorb (the draftees),” Feldman said, “and I visited seven of the bases. It was apparent that, with any sudden influx of inductees, there would be impossible shortages of barracks spaces, hospital beds and everything else.
“They would have been training with brooms instead of rifles, and they would have been in tents, but the tents wouldn’t have been manufactured yet. The SSS could process the names, but the military couldn’t process them into recruits in less than 12 months.”
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With the sort of technology-driven warfare faced by America now, whether nuclear attack or smaller-scale brushfire wars on the scale of the Persian Gulf war, the draft would make little sense, Feldman said.
“By the time a year passed for new recruits to come on line, the war is most likely over,” he said.
Though the Pentagon originally rejected Feldman’s findings, in the years since they have gained credence in military circles. The Army-Navy Times newspapers, which cover military issues, earlier this year published a leaked story that the Department of Defense had decided to recommend doing away with draft registration.
Small as the $29 million annual budget might be for the Selective Service System, it is a tempting target for a Congress hungrily looking for ways to slash billions.
Many are guessing that the Senate, which must act one way or another by September on the proposal to kill the agency, will follow the House’s lead and deny it further funding.
It will be a startling end to an institution that has loomed so large in the lives of most American males since it was organized under President Franklin Roosevelt in anticipation of World War II.
Ten million men were drafted, making up two-thirds of the manpower serving in the U.S. military in that war. The draft continued after the war and through the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
During Vietnam, however, the draft came under increasing attack. The agency, local draft boards and draft cards themselves became symbols of the hated war reviled by anti-war protesters.
Inequities built into the system drafted a disproportionate number of working class and poor youths into the war while the sons of wealthy and middle-class families avoided service through college deferments.
The system tried to rectify the inequities by gradually repealing most deferments. The most celebrated reform came in the form of a draft lottery, introduced in December 1969.
Under the lottery system, birth dates were selected at random each year and assigned a draft priority. Those whose birthdays were among the first 195 selected could be almost certain of being drafted.
The first lottery pulled birth dates for all men born between 1944 and 1950. The first date pulled was Sept. 14, and men born on that date in those years were drafted almost immediately, with little chance of deferment other than certified medical disability.
The lottery is perhaps only vaguely remembered now by most Americans. But it was a highly charged moment in history for men whose birth years were subject to the lottery, most of whom probably still remember their draft priorities.
President Clinton, for one, has never been able to forget the first lottery. He was 23 years old in 1969 and against the war. He was in England as a Rhodes scholar and was agonizing over whether he would quit his scholarship and return home to accept an appointment he had engineered into the ROTC to avoid being drafted.
The lottery, conducted Dec. 1, 1969, settled it for him. His birth date, Aug. 19, was the 311th pulled, making it almost impossible for him ever to be called up by the draft. He resigned from his pending ROTC appointment and finished out his year in England.
Clinton was and has continued to be attacked for his stand on Vietnam and the draft. But, now that Clinton is president, his administration has sought the $29 million to continue funding the draft agency.
It is perhaps a bit astonishing now that Congress-many of whose members are proud of their service in various American wars-finds itself poised to lay the military draft to rest.