Body and Soul: The Selective Draft Law Cases and World War I

Body and Soul: The Selective Draft Law Cases and World War I CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZOLA By most accounts, the career of the Selective Service Act of 1917 before the Supreme Court of the United States was remarkably short. In January 1918, the Court dispensed with constitutional challenges to the recently adopted military conscription law in a brief, unanimous opinion following a session of oral argument in which the Justices were widely reported to be bored by the case and impatient to issue their ruling. But the Supreme Court’s engagement with conscription and its enforcement marked a contingent and transformative moment for the Constitution, the Court, and the United States. The legacies of the Court’s ruling in Arver v. United States include a surprising cast of characters: not only drafted soldiers and conscientious objectors, but a Hungarian refugee, a Canadian nurse, and an unwed teenage mother from rural Virginia. A cen­ tury later, as Americans continue to grapple with the obligations of citizenship, the limits of federal power, and the extent of personal privacy, we might pause to consider a crucial moment when war brought the federal gov­ ernment into direct contact with the body and soul of every American citizen.1 The Selective Service Act asserted the federal government’s power at its most ex­ treme. During the war, the basic premise that political obligations implied military ones was rarely challenged, and the general sense of compliance was not lost on a re­ porter for the New York Times who spent one registration day in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood around Peck Slip on the East River waterfront in Manhattan. There, 3,528 men—among them the longshoremen, dock workers, and drifters who filled the neighbor­ hood’s lodging houses—registered, without complaint, at the makeshift offices of New York Local Board No. 92. “There was no use complaining,” wrote the reporter: To ask the average registrant what he thought ofthe whole affair would be to receive a shrug ofthe shoulder and the acknowledgment that he really saw no use in having any thought on the subject at all, further 296 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY than that it was the law of the land, and that every loyal citizen owed it to himselfand to his country to obey that law.2 The New York newspaper reporter mar­ veled that this unprecedented registration for military service looked almost like “part of America’s second nature.” But, in fact, it wasn’t. Adopting, enforcing, and upholding America’s first universal military draft re­ quired a remarkable departure from the na­ tion’s political traditions of civic voluntarism and militia service. That was a point made by the law’s opponents, who were not so quick to shrug their shoulders. By the war’s end, conscription brought America courtroom bat­ tles, shootouts in the Ozark Mountains, and even a fistfight in the cloakroom ofthe United States Senate. There were torchlight parades and midnight raids; a Kaiser hanged in effigy, a man hanged in a noose. Through it all, the registration forms poured into Selective Service headquarters. And to those we ought to pay a bit of attention. “Accustomed to consider themselves more or less outside of the social organism of society,” the reporter noted, draft-age men “were suddenly compelled to locate them­ selves ... ask themselves many questions that had not concerned them before—who they were—what they were—where they were.” To the men, the forms were nuisances, be­ side the point. What the registrants of Peck Slip did not realize was that filling out the forms, “locating” themselves before the state, was the main fact—and their cards were symbols of the new terms of citizenship. Selective Service created new categories of citizens: conscripts, conscientious objectors, draft dodgers. As drafted men and their fam­ ilies interacted with military administrators, they reworked the meanings of American citizenship and its relation to our bodies and our souls. When the Supreme Court joined the debate, it left a remarkably long legacy for such a short opinion.3 Conscription and Coercion World War I represented a drastic trans­ formation in the power of the federal gov­ ernment. By almost any metric, from...

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