Conscription, Conscientious Objection, and Draft Resistance in American History By JerryElmer.Leiden/Boston: Brill,2023. 390 pages. $136.00 (hardback). ISBN: 978‐90‐04‐51528‐4

Conscription, Conscientious Objection, and Draft Resistance in American History is a comprehensive history of the military draft in the United States and the public reaction to it, from June 1784, when the Continental Congress disbanded the Continental Army (having twice rejected George Washington's request for a small peacetime army), through the Vietnam War. In an introductory chapter, Jerry Elmer, a Vietnam War–era peace activist and retired environmental attorney, explains that the Framers of the Constitution did not intend for military service to happen through conscription. (The Second Amendment was intended to keep arms in the hands of citizen-soldiers to help defend the country.) Accordingly, the military in the pre–Civil War era was comprised largely of state militias, while the US Army remained static in size at 15,000 for 80 years—even as the US population increased eightfold and territory more than tripled. The War of 1812 was fought with that military force, during which the statesman Daniel Webster echoed the sentiments of many in subsequent wars by asking, “Where is it written in the Constitution … that you may take children from their parents, & parents from their children, & compel them to fight the battles of any war, in which the folly or the wickedness of Government may engage it?” (16–17). Volunteers fought the 1846–1848 War with Mexico, as well. In each of the subsequent chapters (covering the Civil War in both the Union and Confederacy, World Wars I and II, the Cold War and Korean War, and the Vietnam War), Elmer discusses the applicable conscription statutes and major court cases arising from them. Legal historians will appreciate Elmer's assertion that “statutory language is important, and to understand any law, one must refer to the actual language of the statute and the regulations implementing the statute” (3). Arguably, the heart of the book is Elmer's examination of opposition to the statutes, whether it be public or underground, legal or illegal, religious or secular, violent or nonviolent. Seeing “[t]he depths of American hostility to conscription” from before the Civil War through the Vietnam War as being “significantly underrecognized and underappreciated” (329), Elmer's strength is historiographical analysis, addressing errors and lacunae in both primary and secondary sources. While the book is encyclopedic, a few sections stand out. For example, the Militia Act of 1795 allowed Abraham Lincoln, decades later, to “second,” or federalize, an unlimited number of state militiamen into service early in the Civil War. This manpower was insufficient, leading to the first US conscription statute in March 1863. Opposition to that statute was widespread, resulting in the worst urban riots in the nation's history, in New York City in July 1863. Ultimately, Elmer demonstrates how 53 percent of eligible men in the North were draft refusers, by either not enrolling or not entering service when called up. In the Union in the Civil War, the federal or state governments sometimes paid bounties to men to encourage enlistment. In other cases, men could avoid military service by finding a substitute or paying a $300 commutation fee. This came more easily to men of more privileged socioeconomic status, but the states of New Hampshire and Delaware, and the cities of New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee, sometimes paid the commutation fee for men of lesser means. The Civil War created a unique opportunity to compare conscription systems arising from the United States but simultaneously implemented by two different governments. Conscription in the Confederacy predated that of the Union by a year and was particularly problematic when the secessionist states had massive military manpower needs at the same time that they were trying to manufacture war materiel and police a home front with millions of enslaved people. In March 1865, the utterly desperate Confederacy resorted to permitting the arming of enslaved people to fight in its army. Elmer points to the hypocrisy of white southerners who complained that conscription constituted involuntary servitude, even when the Confederacy was based on chattel slavery. He notes that there was widespread draft evasion—and support of that evasion—by communities in both north and south, seeing it as a sign that “whatever jingoism may be present in the American character—antiwar and antidraft sentiment … runs deep in the American psyche” (94). Elmer finds the conscription of World War I pivotal. It saw the creation of the Selective Service System (SSS) classification of men for military service and channeling them for military-supporting manpower needs. The Espionage Act, passed in 1917, is still on the books as a deterrent against dissent. The National Civil Liberties Bureau, which was created in 1917 to counsel conscientious objectors and defend other opponents of World War I, became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which remains a driving social force in the United States today. Many forms of draft resistance, especially refusal to register for, and to be inducted into, military service, as well as techniques of draft counseling, originated in this era. During World War II, peace churches—primarily Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren—and pacifist organizations negotiated for alternative civilian service. The resulting Civilian Public Service saw pacifists not only running a portion of the US draft system but also paying for it in an effort to prevent some of the carceral abuse conscientious objectors faced during World War I. Approximately 12,000 men from peace churches and various Protestant denominations, along with Catholics and Jews, found themselves in over 150 work camps “to demonstrate a better way to approach conflict than war” (186). Elmer allows that while racial segregation in the military in World War II was “both legally and morally deplorable,” the SSS “merely reflected the Jim Crow norms of the country at large” (225). He finds the treatment of Nisei particularly reprehensible, since the SSS classified American citizens of Japanese descent as “aliens,” i.e., noncitizens, yet later drafted Nisei into the US military from “concentration camps to make cannon fodder of them” (225). While the end of World War II brought the rise of the peace-promoting United Nations, the United States suffered, as Elmer characterizes it, from “strong, sometimes pathological, anti-Communist sentiment” (229) and the palpable threat of nuclear attack in the Cold War era. Despite public skepticism, the United States maintained a standing army in what was technically peacetime and, harkening back to the citizen-soldiers of colonial-era militia, debated whether it should have universal military training, in which every young person would undergo basic training, serve in the reserves for a time, and potentially be called into service in case of war or national emergency. Even though the 1950s could be described as an era of complacency, Elmer observes that many grassroots organizations of various sizes and from throughout the nation nonetheless mounted opposition to a peacetime draft. The result was that the SSS was reinvented in 1948 with registration for all men (women were ultimately excluded) 18 to 26 years old and the possibility of conscription for men 19 to 26 years old. Throughout the book Elmer examines channeling by the US military. Especially in the Cold War era, the SSS not only inducted men into the military, but also, through deferments and exemptions, channeled them into activities in the national interest. Lewis B. Hershey, director of Selective Service from 1941 to 1970, defended this practice, arguing in a 1965 memorandum that it motivated young men by “engender[ing] a sense of fear, uncertainty, and dissatisfaction” in them (307). A public outcry ensued about the totalitarianism of this, but Elmer demonstrates that this concern had been on the minds of officials during World Wars I and II, noting that in the latter war, men were unable to change jobs, even within in the defense industry, without permission of the SSS. During the Vietnam War, the membership of the 4000 local draft boards that determined which men in a particular location should be conscripted into service was 95 percent over age 40, two-thirds veterans (one-fifth of them from World War I), only 1.3 percent Black, and bereft of women. Elmer implies that the narrowmindedness of these boards, each “a fief unto itself” (284) and not acting in harmony with other boards, contributed to the lack of success of the Vietnam War–era draft. While he noted the beneficial “cooperation and cross-fertilization between the peace and civil rights movements” (280) in his Cold War chapter, he does not directly note the generation gap between draft boards and draftees, nor does he develop the role of the student/youth and civil rights movements much in the Vietnam War chapter. Rather, he devotes more attention to the millions of men who took “small, separate actions … to evade service without openly confronting the Selective Service” (325). Further, he describes the draftees, their friends and families, grassroots groups, and the large number of Catholic priests and nuns and other religiously motivated protesters who turned in, poured blood on, and destroyed draft records and committed other more egregious acts of civil disobedience. Elmer tracks cases in which courts ruled in favor of men whose conscription status had been changed or whose induction was accelerated as punishment for turning in their draft card. Ultimately, he sees that “the government's stupid and/or illegal actions … created a system more fragile and more susceptible to successful court challenges than it needed to be” (325). (Elmer had reflected on his personal experiences in this era in his first book, Felon for Peace: The Memoir of a Vietnam-Era Draft Resister [2005].) While conscription ended in 1975, some discussion of the deployment of US combat forces after Vietnam—in the Gulf War of 1990–1991 and in the early twenty-first century in Afghanistan and Iraq—would have been a welcome bookend to the colonial and state militias in the first chapter of the book. The text is supplemented by tables that track statistics such as draft calls, registrations, inductions, and refusers thereof. Fifteen photographs show draft resisters and flyers (some in color) that encouraged their resistance. Sources included over 150 state and federal court cases; over 200 books, journal articles, and US government publications, over 40 newspapers, and some archival collections. Elmer documents his writing well, with nearly 1100 footnotes. An excellent index contributes to the utility of the book. This book, the first volume in the Studies in Peace History series from Brill, has well-organized chapters and numerous subheads to guide readers and to facilitate comparison between wars. Elmer's narrative is clear and readable and could well serve as the basis for a university course on US conscription history and challenges to it. While it is not a military history per se, the book could serve as a supplement to such a course, while individual chapters could contribute to courses on specific wars. It well deserves a place in the canon of American peace history. [Editor's Note: Jerry Elmer ([email protected]) offers to speak (in person or via Zoom) without honorarium in any class where all or part of this book has been assigned by the professor.] Donald W. Maxwell is assistant professor of history at Indiana State University, where he teaches courses on twentieth-century US history and immigration history. He earned a Ph.D. in US history from Indiana University Bloomington and is the author of Unguarded Border: American Émigrés in Canada during the Vietnam War (2023).

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