Congress passes conscription

On 28 April 1917 both houses of Congress passed bills authorising the president to increase the army temporarily and introducing conscription in the United States. Late in the evening the House of Representatives passed its bill by 397 votes to 24 (398 to 24 according to present-day tallies), and just before midnight the Senate adopted its own version by 81 votes to 8. Among those voting against was Senator Robert La Follette. The United States was resorting to conscription for the first time since the Civil War, in which it was remembered above all as a source of riots and injustice, because the well-off could buy their way out of service.

The bill carried out the announcement of President Woodrow Wilson, who on 2 April, asking Congress to declare war, had called for the army to be increased by at least 500,000 men, chosen “upon the principle of universal liability to service”, and if necessary by further increments of the same size. Too few volunteers were coming forward. According to War Department figures from mid-April, an average of about 1,400 men a day were enlisting in the regular army, while hundreds of thousands of soldiers were needed. The bill drafted by the General Staff provided for selective conscription: only some of the men of a given age range were to be called up, and those indispensable to the economy or supporting families were to be exempted. Neither substitutes nor buying out of service were allowed.

The dispute over volunteers

In the House of Representatives the bill met strong opposition, and from within the president’s own party. The chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, the Democrat Hubert Dent of Alabama, was an opponent of conscription. On 18 April the committee voted 13 to 8 to amend the bill so that the president would first try to raise 500,000 volunteers and resort to conscription only if that failed. The defence of the administration’s version was led by the committee’s ranking Republican, the German-born Californian congressman Julius Kahn. Even the Speaker of the House, Champ Clark, spoke out against conscription. On 25 April he said that in the eyes of the people of his state of Missouri “there is precious little difference between a conscript and a convict”.

The decision came on 28 April. The House, sitting as the Committee of the Whole, adopted by 279 votes to 98 Kahn’s amendment removing the priority for volunteers from the bill. It also rejected an amendment by the Republican Frank Mondell of Wyoming, who wanted to allow the raising of volunteer regiments like the Rough Riders of 1898. In the evening a motion not to conduct the draft in places where alcohol was sold was also defeated. In the final vote only 24 members were against.

Roosevelt’s division

In the Senate the fiercest dispute was over the former president Theodore Roosevelt. Since the beginning of the year he had been seeking permission to raise a volunteer division, which he wanted to lead to France himself. According to his supporters, more than 100,000 volunteers had come forward for it. The Republican senator Warren Harding of Ohio proposed an amendment allowing the president to raise up to four divisions of volunteers. He argued that the swift arrival of even one American division would lift Allied morale more than promises of supplies. Opponents replied that a modern war should be conducted by professional officers and that the Senate should not single out one man at the expense of the commander-in-chief, who was the president. Wilson and the War Department were against, but the Senate adopted the amendment by 56 votes to 31. News of this was brought to the House of Representatives while it was still in session.

Because the two houses had passed different texts, the matter went to a conference committee. The final Selective Service Act was signed on 18 May. It covered men aged 21 to 30, and registration day was set for 5 June. It also kept a loophole for volunteer divisions, but Wilson did not use it and Roosevelt did not go to the front. By the end of the war about 2.8 million Americans had been called up in this way, more than half of all those who served in the armed forces.