First Peacetime Draft: U.S. Prepares for War

Congress authorized the first peacetime military draft in American history on September 16, 1940, requiring all men between twenty-one and thirty-five to register for potential military service. The Selective Training and Service Act passed by a single vote in the House of Representatives, reflecting a nation deeply divided between interventionists who saw war with Germany as inevitable and isolationists who believed America could and should stay out of the European conflict. The legislation emerged from a growing recognition that the United States military was woefully unprepared for a major war. The Army had fewer than 270,000 soldiers in mid-1940, ranked nineteenth in the world behind Portugal and just ahead of Bulgaria. France had fallen to Nazi Germany in six weeks that June, Britain stood alone across the English Channel, and Japan was expanding aggressively in East Asia. President Roosevelt, seeking an unprecedented third term, tread carefully between the public desire for peace and the strategic necessity of building a fighting force. Senator Edward Burke and Representative James Wadsworth introduced the bill, which required twelve months of military training for draftees, limited their service to the Western Hemisphere, and capped the standing army at 900,000 men. The draft lottery took place on October 29, 1940, when Secretary of War Henry Stimson, blindfolded, drew capsule number 158 from a glass bowl, selecting the first men for service. Roughly 16 million Americans would eventually serve in World War II, the vast majority through the Selective Service system. The peacetime draft of 1940 gave the military a year of training and organizational buildup before Pearl Harbor, an advantage that proved critical when the country entered the war in December 1941. Without it, the United States would have faced the Axis powers with a skeletal, undertrained force. The draft remained in effect continuously from 1940 until 1973, shaping American society, politics, and the Vietnam-era antiwar movement that ultimately ended conscription.