June 5, 1917: The draft commenced for conscription into the U.S. army for World War I. Americans had debated conscription for the previous two years. Many pacifists, socialists, feminists, and southern rural white people opposed the policy. This latter group resented that the Selective Draft Act exempted many industrial laborers. Additionally, as historian Jeanette Keith writes, “The federal government’s system of allocating draft quotas combined with southern whites’ racial prejudices to magnify the impact of conscription upon the region. The federal government set quotas based on a state’s population of draft-age men and on the number of volunteers a state had already sent to service. States with many men already in the National Guard and the regular services received low quotas. Southern white men had not rushed to volunteer, and southern black men had not been allowed to: Most southern states had no black National Guard units, and the federal government stopped accepting recruits to the black regiments in the regular army in the spring of 1917. Therefore state draft quotas were higher in proportion to population in the South than in other parts of the nation.”
Citations: Jeanette Keith, “The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917-1918: Class, Race, and Conscription in the Rural South,” The Journal of American History 87, no. 4 (March 2001): 1342, 1346, 1352, 1356, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2674731; “Registration Day,” political cartoon, 1917, https://www.loc.gov/item/2016683931/.
Kommentarer