Conyers, btw, is a "red-diaper baby".
Robert Thompson, a leader in the American Youth for Democracy, a WWII era CPUSA "front", quoted from pg. 67 of work by neo-con historian, Aileen Kraditor, "Jimmy Higgins: Inside the Mental World of the Rank and File American Communist, 1930-1958." "We differ with the pacifists in that we do not 'tolerate' the military training which is enabling young Americans to help save this world from becoming a fascist hell. We glory in that military training...Universal conscription for youth for a minimum of military training as a permanent feature of American life was publically proposed by George Washington as early as 1783...Jefferson championed obligatory military training...President Lincoln fought for and applied a system of universal conscription for the Civil War...The brightest chapter in our tradition of universal conscription is the thoroughly democratic Selective Service Act now in operation...[American youth] are going to see that this war stays won...May God help those who think and plan otherwise." This was a reply to a letter from a pacifist to the AYD's publication, "Spotlight." Thompson immediately before this extract, said the letter writer's argument, "Serves fascism whether it is consciously intended to do so or not." Vietnam War Bibliography: The Draft, and Personnel Issues Christian G. Appy, Working Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam. Chapel Hill: University North Carolina Press, 1993.
Arnold Barnett, Timothy Stanley, and Michael Shore, "America's Vietnam Casualties: Victims of a Class War?" Operations Research, 40:5 (September-October 1992), pp. 856-66. Argues, using dubious statistical procedures but perhaps still correctly, that poor and working-class men were not seriously overrepresented among the Americans who died in Vietnam.
Lawrence M. Baskir & William A. Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation (New York: Vintage, 1978).
Martin Binkin and Mark J. Eitelberg, Blacks and the Military. Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1982.
Richard V.L. Cooper, Military Manpower and the All-Volunteer Force. R-1450-ARPA. Santa Monica: Rand, September 1977. Discussion (pp. 204-13) of how representative the military was of American society, comparing the Vietnam War years of the draft with the post-war years of the all-volunteer force, includes detailed data on the characteristics of those who joined
the military during the war.
George Q. Flynn, The Draft, 1940-1973. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993. Michael Stewart Foley, "Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War." Ph.D. dissertation, History, University of New Hampshire, 1999. 608 pp. AAT 9926017. Draft resistance in Boston.
Janice H. Laurence and Peter F. Ramsberger, Low-Aptitude Men in the Military: Who Profits, Who Pays? New York: Praeger, 1991. Deals with two cases, one of which was "Project 100,000".
Gerald Leinwand, The Draft. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970. 190 pp.
Jean Anne Mansavage, "'A Sincere and Meaningful Belief': Legal Conscientious Objection during the Vietnam War." Ph.D. dissertation, History, Texas A&M University, 2000. 303 pp. AAT 9968962.
Matthew Wade Markel, "The Organization Man at War: Promotion Policies and Military Leadership, 1929-1992." Ph.D. dissertation, History, Harvard, 2000. 405 pp. AAT 9972370. Looks at officer promotion policies, and behavior of commanders at the battalion and brigade or regiment level, in the U.S. Army and Marines.
Charles C. Moskos and John S. Butler, All that We can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way. New York: Basic Books, 1996 (pb 1997). I am not sure how much of this deals with the Vietnam era.
Patricia Mary Shields, "The Determinants of Service in the Armed Forces During the Vietnam Era." Ph.D. dissertation, Economics, Ohio State, 1977. 173 pp. DA 78-06201. Looks a lot at black-white differences.
David Suttler, IV-F: A Guide to Draft Exemption. New York: Grove Press, 1970. 171 pp.
Curtis W. Tarr, By the Numbers: The Reform of the Selective Service System, 1970-1972. Washington: National Defense University Press, 1981. xii, 177 pp. Tarr was Director of the Selective Service System from April 1970 to April 1972.
John M. Willis, "Who Died in Vietnam? An Analysis of the Social Background of Vietnam War Casualties." Ph.D. dissertation, Sociology, Purdue, 1975. 129 pp. 76-7155. Willis estimated the socioeconomic status of a large sample of men who had died in Vietnam on the basis of the census tracts in which their home addresses lay. He concluded that poor neighborhoods were over-represented among the dead; prosperous neighborhoods had been over-represented among the dead of World War II.
Gaillard T. Hunt, an attorney, practiced Selective Service Law (representing young men in legal disputes with the Selective Service System) in the Maryland-DC-Virginia area from 1969 to 1972. He has informed me that he has recently donated to the Swarthmore College Peace Collection several boxes of his legal papers from this period. These papers might be of considerable value to anyone doing serious, detailed research on the legal aspects of the Selective Service System, the range of behavior of judges, etc. The Swarthmore College Peace Collection also has many other papers on related subjects, especially conscientious objectors. For further information see http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/
Publications of the Selective Service System
Congressional Committee Documentation on the Draft
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Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, Edwin E. Moïse. This document may be reproduced only if this copyright notice is reproduced with it. Revised August 15, 2001.
Michael Pugliese