Selective Service System

World War I

Congress passed the Selective Service Act on May 18, 1917, in order to raise a massive American army to win the war in Europe. The system was designed to facilitate the rational apportionment of manpower to the multiple tasks required of an industrialized state at war: while the primary goal was to build up the strength of the armed forces, the architects of the American system learned from mistakes of the earlier entrants into the war (both France and Germany found themselves compelled to “draft” men from the front lines back to the fields and factories) and made provisions for the deferment of laborers in agriculture, arms production, shipbuilding, and other industries deemed crucial to the war effort.

Another key feature of the Selective Service System was its localism. While the national Selective Service agency exercised central authority, the system was designed expressly to push decisions on draft classifications and deferments down to some 4,000 local draft boards staffed by volunteers throughout the country. This move was intended to build trust in the system.

The task was a daunting one, but the newly formed Selective Service agency proved up to the job. The magnitude of the system's accomplishment is revealed by the numbers: the total strength of the armed forces in 1916 was 179,376 men; during the 18 months of the war, the military ranks expanded to 3,685,000 soldiers, sailors, and marines. Of these, 2,810,296 were conscripts supplied by the Selective Service System from the more than 24 million men aged 18 to 45 who had registered. While resistance to the draft developed in some communities, Selective Service was overall a major success.

World War II

With the war won, the system was deactivated in 1918. During the interwar years, a variety of alternative conscription measures were considered, notably including a proposal for universal military training. These were ultimately rejected as too controversial; consequently, the draft as instituted in World War II closely resembled its predecessor. In 1940, after the fall of France, growing concern that the United States would be drawn into the wars raging in Europe and Asia led to the reactivation of the system through the Selective Service Act of 1940. Men ages 21 to 35 were required to register; inductions resulted in the expansion of the armed forces from 458,000 in 1940 to 1.8 million in 1941. In a last-ditch effort to maintain American neutrality, Congress restricted draftees to service in the United States and its territories and limited their term of service to one year; the act was extremely unpopular among draftees and was renewed in the summer of 1941 by only a single vote in the Senate.

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