Selective Service Act comes into force

On 18 May 1917 President Woodrow Wilson signed the act “to authorize the President to increase temporarily the Military Establishment of the United States”, known as the Selective Service Act or the Selective Draft Act. Three weeks earlier both houses of Congress had passed differing bills, and a conference committee had worked out a joint text. The House of Representatives approved it on 16 May and the Senate a day later. On the very day he signed it, Wilson issued a proclamation calling on men to register. For the first time since the Civil War the United States resorted to conscription.

What the act provided

The act allowed the president to bring the regular army and the National Guard up to full war strength, announced at the time as 287,000 and 625,000 men, first with volunteers and if necessary by the draft. In addition, the president could at once call up 500,000 men into a new army raised by the draft, and later a further 500,000. The obligation applied to men aged 21 to 30, a compromise between the versions of the two houses. The act prohibited substitutes, the purchase of exemption from service and the payment of enlistment bounties, everything that had made the draft unjust and hated during the Civil War. It exempted officials, clergymen and divinity students, and allowed members of pacifist denominations such as the Quakers to serve without arms. Men supporting families and workers essential to industry and agriculture could count on deferment.

Officers were not to decide who would go into the army. The act created draft boards in every county, and in cities for every 30,000 inhabitants, made up of at least three local civilians, and their decisions could be appealed to district boards. Anyone who evaded registration or helped others to do so could be sent to prison for a year. The pay of privates was raised from 15 to 30 dollars a month. The act also prohibited the sale of alcohol to soldiers in uniform and allowed brothels to be removed from the vicinity of military camps. The organisation of the draft was entrusted to General Enoch Crowder, the Judge Advocate General of the Army, who as Provost Marshal General directed it until the end of the war.

The proclamation

In the proclamation Wilson set the day of registration for 5 June. Between seven in the morning and seven in the evening all men who by that day had reached the age of 21 but not yet 31 were to report to the registration places in their precincts. The exception was soldiers and sailors already in service, and the sick and absent could register by post. Wilson argued that in this war it was no longer armies that fought, but whole nations in arms: “It is not an army that we must shape and train for war; it is a nation.” The draft, he wrote, was “in no sense a conscription of the unwilling; it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass”. Some were to take up arms, others to stay in the factories and on the land, and registration day was to be “a great day of patriotic devotion”. At the same time the president ordered the whole National Guard drafted into federal service.

Refusal for Roosevelt

On the same day the former president Theodore Roosevelt telegraphed Wilson asking for permission to raise two volunteer divisions at once, and if necessary as many as four. The act allowed this, because Congress had left a loophole in it for volunteers in the spirit of the Rough Riders of 1898. In the evening the White House issued a statement, which the newspapers printed the next morning. In it Wilson wrote that, at least at this stage of the war, he would not use this power. He explained that the first troops sent to France must come from the regular army and be commanded only by trained soldiers, because the task facing the country was “undramatic, practical, and of scientific definiteness and precision”. In the same statement he announced the dispatch to France of a division of regular troops under the command of General John Pershing. On 21 May Roosevelt disbanded his organisation and released from their pledges the volunteers who had signed up for his divisions.

On 5 June nearly 10 million men registered. The order of call-up was then drawn by lot from this pool.