isolationists and the Republican interventionists in the days before the Republican National Convention. Choosing these two men was, as one historian would later describe it, “a masterful political move on the part of a masterful politician.”32
When congressional hearings began on July 3, Perley Boone was on hand to distribute a letter to members of both houses from General John Pershing asserting that enforced military training was not un-American but rather would promote democracy by throwing different classes of people into close contact with the goal of preserving the American way of life. Pershing also pointed out that if the United States had adopted compulsory military training in 1914, it would not have been necessary in 1917 “to send partially trained boys into battle against the veteran troops of our adversary.” Pershing then concluded: “Certainly we could have ended the conflict much sooner, with the saving of many thousands of lives and billions of treasure.”33
The effect of the letter, widely distributed to the press, was felt the next day in many Fourth of July editorials across the country. Under the headline CONSCRIPTION IS AMERICAN, Washington, D.C.’s Evening Star used Pershing’s letter to support peacetime military conscription as a way of ultimately avoiding war rather than fostering it. But the press was split along isolationist/interventionist lines and reacted to the Pershing letter accordingly.34
After its introduction, the Burke-Wadsworth bill made little headway in Congress, as many still worried about the public reaction to a peacetime draft. It clearly needed a push from the outside, which prompted Clark, Boone, and the others supporting the legislation to redouble their efforts and seek new allies. Corporations were solicited for support. Allen L. Lindley, vice president of the New York Stock Exchange and a member of Clark’s committee, wrote to every member company listed on the exchange, asking for endorsements to help enact the bill. Clark himself set up temporary headquarters in the Carlton Hotel in Washington, where he managed the lobbying effort.35
The debate was carried out publicly in letters to the editors of newspapers, which at their most extreme had an apocalyptic tone. When one writer to the Sacramento Bee insisted the draft was in God’s plan, another responded: “I do not think God wants any nation to toss its offspring onto the fiery altars of Moloch,” referring to a Canaanite deity associated with child sacrifice.36
A leading Republican and likely presidential candidate, Senator Robert A. Taft, led the opposition and argued that a compulsory draft was more typical of totalitarian nations than of democracies. “The theory behind it leads directly to totalitarianism,” Taft argued. “It is absolutely opposed to the principles of individual liberty which have always been considered a part of American democracy.”
The loudest opponent of Clark, his committee, and the legislation under consideration was Senator Rush Dew Holt, a fiercely antiwar firebrand Democrat from West Virginia, who attacked those who backed the bill as “Wall Street lawyers, international bankers and directors in munitions enterprises,” the very forces he claimed led America into the First World War. Holt stated that Clark and his allies had treasonous intent as they plotted to lead the nation into war to preserve its and their overseas investments. His attack on the floor of the Senate on August 6 made it seem as if the meetings in the Harvard Club were shady affairs held in secret. He termed the money that had been raised to promote conscription a “slush fund,” which then as now referred to monies set aside for illicit purposes. New York Times General Manager Julius Ochs Adler, “a man who holds stock in corporations in countries now at war, was there.” Holt then added: “Mr. Adler wants the American boy to protect his investments.”
But as Holt was winding up his attack, he was openly challenged by Senator Sherman Minton of Indiana, the majority whip and a strong ally of the administration, who alleged that during World War I, Holt’s father had opposed the war effort to the extent that he had advocated not raising food to be sent to the American troops in France, a group that had included Minton.
“A malicious lie,” was Holt’s response. “If the administration wants filth and gutter mud to be thrown they get the Senator from Indiana to throw it.” Minton responded: “And when Hitler wants it thrown you throw it.” Then Minton added that Holt’s father had sent his eldest son to South America to hide from the draft. Minton then added: “I get a little impatient at being lectured to from a slacker family.” Holt came back asserting that Minton’s claims were untrue and these lies “like lice, continued to be carried by rats”—a line that occasioned what the Chicago Tribune reported as “uproarious laughter” from the Senate gallery packed with foes of the draft.37
The back-and-forth continued into the following day, when after a further round of insults and accusations the “debate” lost its steam with Minton getting the last word by stating that the rules of the Senate would not allow him to express the contempt he held for the senator from West Virginia.38
It was what the Chicago Tribune characterized as “one of the most vitriolic exchanges in recent history” and what the San Francisco Chronicle called a “barroom brawl.” Although the isolationists and the newspapers that supported them saw justification in the attack, it was quickly rebutted. Adler, for example, pointed out that the only companies he held stock in were the New York Times itself and its printing company.39
As the draft bill was debated and discussed, the growing fear in the United States in the early summer of 1940 was that Great Britain would fall to Nazi Germany just as France, Holland, Belgium, Poland, Denmark, and Norway had fallen already. Beginning in July 1940, the fear intensified as Hitler’s Luftwaffe relentlessly bombed England, and the German navy blockaded it in preparation for a planned Nazi invasion.
Fear was also growing that Imperial Japan was on its own path of conquest. During the summer of 1940, Japan’s war in China was entering its fourth year with no end in sight. Some Americans feared Japan might actually attack North America by way of Hawaii or the Aleutians. Senator Rufus Holman of Oregon went a step further and claimed that he had learned from “authoritative military sources of imminent peril of an invasion” threatening the entire Pacific coast including Alaska.40
Finally, Roosevelt saw his opportunity to support the Clark plan when the Republicans nominated former Democrat Wendell Willkie as their candidate on June 28, whose support for the draft was expressed a month later and amplified in his formal acceptance speech. In a press conference on August 2, FDR felt he could now unequivocally endorse draft legislation and declare it essential to national defense, during which he also declared that the effort to create a new army with volunteers had failed.41
On August 7, in a letter to Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, former secretary of war Harry Hines Woodring argued, “I cannot see the need of compulsory military training at this time, and I should like to see the bill amended so that it does not become effective until, and after, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army has first advised the Senate in writing that the voluntary system has completely broken down.” Woodring believed that voluntary service had not been given a chance by the Roosevelt administration, which had earlier refused his plan to raise Army pay to $30 a month for volunteers. Woodring also criticized conscription as smacking of “totalitarianism.”42
Roosevelt stuck to his guns, insisting that the volunteer system had indeed failed just as Willkie’s position became firmer. On August 17, in a campaign speech in front of a crowd of 20,000 in Indiana, Willkie said, “I cannot ask the American people to put their faith in me without recording my conviction that some form of selective service is the only democratic way to secure the trained and competent manpower we need for defense.” Some isolationists claimed that Willkie was simply in favor of a future, not immediate, conscription—an interpretation Willkie scotched on August 26, when he told reporters that he was “unequivocally in favor of immediate conscription.”43
When
