FDR - Jean Edward Smith [292]
Privately he encouraged Grenville Clark and his allies to press forward but suggested they downplay the compulsory aspect. With FDR’s blessing, Stimson and Marshall testified repeatedly on Capitol Hill in favor of the Burke-Wadsworth bill. “Selective service was the only fair, efficient, and democratic way to raise an army,” Stimson told the House Military Affairs Committee.41 Marshall said there was “no conceivable way” to secure the men necessary for the nation’s defense “except by the draft.”42 Public opinion lurched forward. At the time of France’s surrender, slightly more than half of Americans polled favored selective service. On July 20, less than a month later, the figure stood at 69 percent, and by late August it was 86 percent.43
The combination of Clark’s public relations effort, the testimony of Stimson and Marshall, plus the intrepid stand Britain was making against the Luftwaffe’s assault paid dividends. On July 24, 1940, the Senate Military Affairs Committee reported the Burke-Wadsworth bill favorably. Five days later Roosevelt asked Congress for authority to call the National Guard and the Reserve Officers Corps to active duty.44 On August 2 FDR fired his first public shot in favor of the draft. Meeting the press for the 666th time since assuming office, Roosevelt said he was distinctly in favor of a selective training bill and considered it essential for national defense.45 Willkie added his endorsement on August 17. Echoing Stimson’s remarks, Willkie said that selective service “is the only democratic way in which to assure the trained and competent manpower we need in our national defense.” When a reporter told Willkie that if he wanted to win the election he would come out against the draft, Willkie shot back, “I would rather not win the election than do that.”46
Willkie’s support for the draft “broke the back” of the opposition, said California’s isolationist senator Hiram Johnson.47 The democratic aspect of selective service carried the day. On August 28 the Senate passed the Burke-Wadsworth bill 69–16, a majority of Republicans voting in favor. In the House, New York’s Hamilton Fish, the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced a crippling amendment to delay selective service registration until after the election and limit the size of the draft to 400,000 men. Fish’s amendment carried narrowly; Stimson, FDR, and Willkie protested vigorously; and the provision was stripped from the final conference report that reconciled the House and Senate versions. On September 14 the bill, essentially as the Clark group had prepared it originally, passed the Senate 47–25 and the House 232–124. Roosevelt signed it into law two days later, and on October 16, 1940, more than 16 million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five registered for the country’s first peacetime draft.
Thirteen days later a blindfolded Secretary Stimson dipped a ladle carved from a beam taken from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall into a huge fishbowl filled to the brim with bright blue celluloid capsules, each of which contained a number that would determine the order in which men would be called up. Stimson gave the first capsule to FDR, who opened it and announced, “One hundred fifty-eight.”48 At the end of October, the first 16,000 inductees reported for duty. Over the next year, at the rate of 50,000 a month, 600,000 men would be called to active duty. The draftees, together with 500,000 regular Army troops and 270,000 from the National Guard, would form eleven full-strength divisions, an air force of 5,000 planes, and all the support personnel a force of that size required. The Army, which numbered 189,839 men at the end of 1939, would top 1.4 million by mid-1941.49
Britain’s need for destroyers grew ever more pressing. Three times in June, Churchill repeated his request.50 Britain was down to its last sixty-eight vessels, with which it had to defend