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was under way.
    The historian George Q. Flynn writes, “The idea that all able-bodied men owe an obligation of military defense can be traced to the dark caves of prehistory.” But it wasn’t until the French Revolution that conscription was formally codified, the French National Assembly declaring, “Every citizen must be a soldier and every soldier a citizen or we shall never have a constitution.” AfterNapoléon I employed draftees to great effect, Britain and Germany adopted conscription as well.
    The United States, though, had always viewed conscription with suspicion. Not until the Civil War did Congress authorize a nationwide draft, compelling males aged 20 to 45 to serve in the Union Army. The results were less than spectacular. The law permitted draftees to pay for substitutes, enabling the wealthy simply to buy their way out of service. The draft was so unpopular that in 1863 it triggered riots in New York City that claimed at least 20 lives. (The Confederacy implemented a national draft that was nearly as unpopular, if only because it utterly disregarded the principle of states’ rights.) A draft put in place for World War I lasted less than two years and was abolished immediately after the armistice.
    But with another global conflict looming, Franklin Roosevelt urged a return to compulsory military service. Not only was the army too small—it comprised fewer than 188,000 soldiers when Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939—it was also woefully out of shape. After reviewing troops at Ogdensburg, New York, in August 1940, Roosevelt confided to a friend, “The men themselves were soft—fifteen miles a day was about all they could stand and many dropped out. Anybody who knows anything about the German methods of warfare would know that the army would have been licked by thoroughly trained and organized forces of a similar size within a day or two.” As envisaged by Roosevelt, a draft would not only make the army bigger; by instituting stringent physical requirements for draftees, it would also make it healthier.
    In the speech accepting his party’s nomination to run for an unprecedented third term in 1940, Roosevelt said most Americans “are agreed that some form of selection by draft is necessary and fair today as it was in 1917 and 1918.” However, many Americans were not agreed. Conscription was opposed by a diverse coalition, including organized labor, isolationists, pacifists, religious leaders, youth groups, African-American organizations,and, perhaps most poignantly, gold-star mothers who had lost their sons in the last war.
    Their arguments were equally varied: the draft was unconstitutional and unfair, it would encourage war, it would stymie economic growth. So fervent were the opponents that Senator James F. Byrnes, a Democrat from South Carolina, declared that a draft bill didn’t stand a “Chinaman’s chance” of passing. But after France surrendered to Germany on June 21, 1940, the opposition began to wane. It all but vanished after Wendell Willkie, FDR’s Republican opponent in the 1940 election, came out in favor of the draft on August 17.
    On September 16, 1940, the draft became law. All men between the ages of 21 and 35 were required to serve one year in the armed forces. The draft was administered by the Selective Service System, so named because the draft was discriminate: Not every draftee was automatically inducted. Deferments could be granted if a draftee had dependents, was “necessary in his civilian activity,” or was “physically, mentally, or morally unfit” to serve. The draft was discriminate in another way: African-Americans were banned from the Marine Corps and the Army Air Corps (later known as the Army Air Forces), while the Army and the Navy maintained segregated units.
    A hallmark of Selective Service was decentralization. More than 6,000 local draft boards were established across the