Selective Service Research Articles

Draft deferments and higher education: New evidence from a totalitarian state

AbstractPrevious studies report mixed results regarding the relationship between military conscription and educational incentives. We provide new evidence from a distinct institutional environment—the Soviet Union, a totalitarian and centrally planned superpower. We examine the impact of abolishing student deferments on higher education (HE) enrollments. Competing hypotheses about the value of Soviet HE imply an uncertain relationship. For a sample of individuals from Latvia, then part of the Soviet Union, we find that this change significantly reduced the odds of male but not female enrollments. There is no evidence that this relationship varied by nationality. Additionally, we find that males who enrolled in HE just before the deferments were abolished were less likely to complete their education. Our results confirm that Soviet HE was used, in part, to avoid military service.

정신건강 사회

This paper deals with how the major issues of public health in the United States played a multifaceted role in enacting the National Health Act of 1946, which was the first enactment of overarching mental health act at the federal level. At the beginning of WWII, the state of mental health system in American society was barely known. However, at the early stage of the war, their Selective Service System (SSS) with the psychiatric screening process based on the lessons of WWI and psychiatric knowledge during the time had failed to sort precisely out unfit soldiers. Luckily, most soldiers suffering from acute symptoms such as extreme anxiety, depression, regression, exhaustion, even numbness or deafness in a short period were able to return to their duty after a few-day convalescence. However, concerns about America’s public mental health problems skyrocketed during and right after the war. As a consequence, the consensus that needed a federal level measure inevitably established. By examining the text of the legislature and the hearings of the House of Representative and the Senate, this study looks into what were the focused problems and concerns in the process of enactment. Around the issue of a federal level of mental health policy, there had been overarching considerations of related fields, including academic, administrative, and even civilian. Looking into the details of each field’s consideration within the Congressional discussion, this paper aims at grasping how the concept of mental illness and disease changed and how the prominent actors of legislatures responded to the changing concept of mental illness. Through detailed examination of the related materials, this study presents the interconnection between the consequences of the great war and the will to maintain American society sane.

Suboptimal Selective Service: An Analysis of the Obstacles to Selective Service Reform in American Political Institutions

Expanding mandatory selective service registration in the United States to include women would seem to be good public policy that increases national security and reduces gender bias. Despite the recent recommendation of a congressionally-mandated commission, recent efforts to implement this important reform have repeatedly stalled. Why? In this article, we explain the failure of selective service reform through the lens of American political institutions. Neither the composition of the Supreme Court, nor the institutional incentives facing legislators, are conducive to movement on this issue. Building on the legislative entrepreneurship literature, we argue that recent trends in congressional representation and the adoption of new issue framings are the most likely factors that will increase the probability of selective service reform. The absence of selective service reform in the United States reveals important facts about agenda-setting in defense policy and how political institutions shape the relationship between the public and the military.

How Transgender and Non-Binary People are Ignored in the Male-Only Military Draft Debate

The constitutionality of an all-male military draft is currently being litigated in National Coalition for Men v. Selective Service System. Unfortunately, the effect this issue will have on transgender and non-binary people is largely being ignored. This essay considers how current Selective Service standards are not only psychologically harmful to transgender and non-binary people but also how they negatively affect their ability to receive college financial aid, federal jobs, and job training.

Conscription and the Color Line: Rawls, Race and Vietnam

This article revisits one of John Rawls's rare forays into activist politics, his proposal presented to the Harvard faculty, calling for a denunciation of the “2-S” system of student deferments from conscription. In little-studied archival papers, Rawls argued that the draft both exposed “background” structural racial injustice and constituted a burdening of black Americans that violated the norms of fair cooperation. Rather than obscuring racial injustice and focusing exclusively on economic inequality, as Charles Mills has claimed, Rawls rejected the ascendant conservative views that naturalized black poverty or else attributed it to cultural pathologies in black families. Thus Rawls found nothing illicit in taking the position of a disadvantaged racial group as a relevant comparison when applying his ideal theory to nonideal circumstances. However, I contend in this article that Rawls's account of political philosophy as an attempt to find a consensus may be similarly ideological, leading him to displace the reality of conflict through begging descriptions, expressivist formulations, and historical romanticism.

Dark Barn

Dark Barn Michael Dinkel (bio) Art and Irene Reinbold were generous people. I know this because the two of them took care of me when I needed a place to lay low after I quit college, when my hair was still long and I cared more. They let me stay with them on their small, rocky dairy farm in the hills east of our town, in one of the upstairs rooms left vacant by their grown children. I spent important time there, helping them around the place when I could, wandering that wild country, and learning where I fit with the people and place I came from. I had that advantage then, the backing of capable people. I'm writing about the two of them today because I have misplaced some of the things they gave me and I'm tired of looking for them in the sky. That October had been unseasonably warm. Most of Art's summer hay was in the barn and his corn was almost ready. There had been a few light frosts and the trees in the hills were changing color. The sweet smell of fall had seeped into the back porch where our heavy coats hung waiting but the sun-drenched days had persisted. Time was holding in that gentle extension of summer that sometimes comes to the country in late autumn. Everyone knew it couldn't last and, on that day, I felt the change in the air. Art was more direct, he said that evening the wind was going to shift and come from the east, and bring snow. [End Page 1] I had been staying with them for most of the fall. If I wasn't in school, I should have been working on my father's dairy farm but things in that part of my world had gotten off track. That summer I had been drafted for the war in Viet Nam and had missed my induction. A family friend at the courthouse had told my father that there was an arrest warrant out for me and I shouldn't make myself too obvious in town. It was bad timing in the already strained relationship I had with my father and it was entirely my fault. I hadn't told him I'd given up my student deferment and the local draft board had denied me conscientious objector status. I couldn't sign up and still appeal the draft board's decision. I should have tried harder to explain myself but my father wasn't much of a talker. Work and silence had let me know I was on my own. It was also the cattle, I needed a break. Their needs were incessant, every morning and night they had to be fed and milked. They were the reason for all of my childhood years of early morning chores and fieldwork. Their gentleness and obedience irritated me. If I was there, I would be milking those cows and harvesting his corn with no letup in either. Art and Irene were letting me stay with no questions asked and I was fortunate to have a place to be while waiting for my draft board to respond. So, this was to be the last day of good weather. By the time I got out of bed, Art had already started a fire in the cookstove. When I came into the kitchen he was sitting at the table looking out at the beginning of the day. The low snapping of the burning oak and the plucking of the coffee percolator were background to the quiet. I went to the cupboard and took out two cups and sat down to wait with him. When it was ready, I got up and poured our coffee and sat back down. As the day came up, we could see the hills and Dahn Lake across the gravel road that went past the farm. The cows had gathered and were standing patiently at the back of the barn waiting to be milked, quietly reminding me of all of the places I was supposed to be. When Art and Irene went down to do the milking, I went out...

The Summer of '46

The Summer of '46 Storey Clayton (bio) The meme about the origin of the Baby Boomers goes like this: all the men in America were off fighting bravely in World War II, keeping the world safe for democracy. In 1945, the Nazis surrendered and then Japan got nuked and surrendered and the world was saved and the boys came home. And since the war was won and the Axis was defeated and the world was safe, it was okay to make babies again. So there was a boom, a big boom, starting about nine months after the end of the war. VE Day was May 8, 1945, marking the end of the war against Hitler. VJ Day was a season later, August 14, 1945, though Japan didn't formally surrender for another two weeks. VJ Day is the day that produced that iconic photo you associate with the end of the war, where the navy sailor hears the news and grabs his main squeeze for a passionate, tilting kiss. Never mind that this kiss is actually a #MeToo story, that the woman being kissed didn't know the guy and never consented. "And then I was grabbed," Greta Zimmer told an interviewer decades later. "That man was very strong. I wasn't kissing him. He was kissing me." George Mendonsa, the guy in the photo, was home on shore leave. He didn't go home and make a Baby Boomer with Greta like so many of us were left to presume. He married Rita, the woman standing behind him, over his shoulder in the picture, with whom he'd been on a date when the movie was interrupted to announce Japan's surrender. They married in October 1946, but didn't have their first child until 1953. Had they conceived a child that night, the child would have been born in May 1946. But George was home on shore leave. It took a while to get the millions of men deployed in the Pacific back from the theater. So it's safe to say that the summer of 1946 is the real start of the Baby Boom as a cultural phenomenon. Donald Trump was born in June 1946. George W. Bush was born in July 1946. Bill Clinton was born in August 1946. For five of the last seven Presidential terms, spanning what will be, as of the forthcoming election, twenty of the last twenty-eight years, the US hasn't just been led by Baby Boomers. It's been led by tip-of-the-spear Baby Boomers whose birthdays embody the meme that gives the generation its name. ____ This level of clustering of Presidential birthdays is not only rare, it's unique. Four other pairs of Presidents share a birth year, but none of their birthdays are closer than three and a half months apart. George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter were both born in 1924, Richard Nixon and his pardoner Gerald Ford in 1913, U.S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes in 1822, and Andrew Jackson and the man who beat him while losing the popular vote, John Quincy Adams, in 1767. None of those pairs combined to serve more than twelve years as President and none shared their birth year with a third President. [End Page 166] Trump was born on June 14, W. Bush on July 6, and Clinton on August 19. The three Presidents were born in a span of 67 days. Both Clinton's and Bush's fathers fought in World War II, while the older Fred Trump, a real estate developer, built barracks and apartment buildings near stateside naval bases. And since you're probably wondering, none of the other candidates for President in 2020 were born in 1946. The closest is Elizabeth Warren, born in 1949. Hillary Clinton was born in 1947. Barack Obama was born in 1961, technically placing him in the Baby Boom generation, which most people close three years later in 1964. That year, our Summer of '46 trio reached the age of 18 just as the Gulf of Tonkin incident was opening the Vietnam War. All three enjoyed student deferments from the draft from 1964-68...

“Have You Bought Enough Vietnam?”: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement at West Virginia University, 1967–1970

“Have You Bought Enough Vietnam?”: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement at West Virginia University, 1967–1970 Nora Sutton From May 5 to May 7, 1970, between one and two thousand students crowded Grumbein’s Island, a pedestrian path in the heart of the downtown campus of West Virginia University (WVU). Students were either protesting President Richard Nixon’s announcement of military operations in Cambodia and the recent killings of four students at Kent State University, or demonstrating their support for the president’s policies and publicly opposing antiwar demonstrators. What began as a vigil for the Kent State victims and antiwar march downtown devolved into a tense gathering of protestors, counterprotestors, and the National Guard. A few demonstrators broke into Woodburn Hall, the home of the university’s ROTC program, and caused a small amount of property damage. Students who wanted university president James Harlow to publicly denounce military action in Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State marched to the administration building, demanding the president hear them. Perhaps fearing an outbreak of violence, President James Harlow and West Virginia governor Arch Moore took drastic measures to quell the protests and authorized the West Virginia National Guard to break up the crowd. The May 1970 protests at WVU were tame compared to other campuses across the country, but this level of militancy surprised the university administration and the surrounding community. It was the largest and most disruptive antiwar action at WVU, but its occurrence was not an aberration—a subset of WVU students had been actively and publicly opposing the war since at least 1967. Antiwar activities at WVU before the Cambodia/Kent State protests reflect nationwide trends. West Virginia students were less militant than those at Michigan State, for example, but the absence of militancy does not equal isolation from the larger student power and peace movements. This [End Page 27] article explores the student-led antiwar activities both on and off campus and situates these activities in a national context. I focus on events occurring from 1967 up to the Cambodia/Kent State protests because resistance was the most active in Morgantown during this time. These three years were filled with cultural, social, and political strife for the United States and WVU students did not live in a vacuum. Despite Dean of Students Joseph Gluck’s characterization of WVU students as believing in “the old slogan of ‘love it or leave it,’” many felt the social and political upheaval taking shape across the country, either as bystanders or as participants.1 Early scholarly studies of the student movement focused on elite universities like Columbia and Berkeley, ignoring sleepy campuses like WVU, but more recent community-centered studies have explored how the movement played out in localities across the country.2 In Campus Wars, Kenneth J. Heineman helps reshape our understanding of the antiwar movement by focusing on land-grant campuses in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. Students at these schools were primarily from working- and middle-class backgrounds, and according to contemporary stereotypes, inclined to be supportive of US military action in Vietnam. Heineman posits a formula for understanding antiwar sentiment on these campuses that connects student demographics and increased university involvement in the military-industrial complex.3 He argues that antiwar protest primarily stemmed from the unfairness of the Selective Service System and the increase in military-related research contracts at universities. Indeed, while the working- and middle-class were statistically more likely to support the war, their sons were also more likely to be drafted through the Selective Service System.4 Heineman’s framework is applicable to the study of WVU students, who Joseph Gluck described as, “first generation [college students], out of the hills and hollows.”5 There is cause for suspicion of the hawkish working-class stereotype. In Peace Now!, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones points out that “it was one thing to detest middle-class students who enjoyed draft deferments, quite another to support the war that killed one’s own sons.”6 Public opinion polls in Dearborn, Michigan, and San Francisco, California, from 1966 to 1968 demonstrated higher antiwar inclinations among the working class.7 Although economic issues were important, labor’s...

Legends of Artificial Lift (2018)

The 2018 SPE Artificial Lift Conference and Exhibition will be held 28–30 August 2018 in The Woodlands, Texas. The event will feature a special Legends of Artificial Lift Luncheon honoring five people who have made outstanding contributions to the field of artificial lift technology. The 2018 SPE Legends of Artificial Lift Award recipients are Ken Decker, Cleon Dunham, Bill Lane, Tony Podio, and Lyle Wilson. Ken Decker Ken Decker has practiced gas lift for more than 30 years and is considered an expert in the use of gas lift valve performance, design, and troubleshooting. He has served on numerous API and ISO committees writing standards for gas lift equipment design and testing, and he has written numerous SPE papers on gas lift valve performance. After earning his BS degree in 1971 from Michigan State University, he worked on gas lift projects around the world, first with Teledyne Merla, then Otis Engineering. Upon his retirement from Otis in 1993, Decker formed his consulting business, Decker Technology. William C. “Bill” Lane Bill Lane has worked in the oil and gas industry for 40 years, first for Otis Engineering (now Halliburton Energy Services), and more recently for Weatherford International, where he held vice president positions over artificial lift research and development, elastomer systems, PCP systems, artificial lift emerging technologies, and artificial lift training. He was a founding member of the Artificial Lift Research and Development Council (ALRDC) and served as chairperson of the R&D committee. He holds a BS in mechanical engineering and an MS in mechanical engineering design, both from the University of Texas at Arlington. Augusto L. (Tony) Podio Tony Podio is a petroleum engineering consultant in Austin, Texas, specializing in artificial lift. Formerly he was a professor in the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught and directed research in the areas of drilling and production. He was a visiting professor at the Norwegian Institute of Technology and at the Australian School of Petroleum at the University of Adelaide. He holds BS, MS, and PhD degrees in petroleum engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BS in mining and petroleum engineering from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. Cleon Dunham Cleon Dunham graduated from Cornell University in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering. He worked for Shell Oil Company for 36 years, the last few as coordinator of oilfield automation and artificial lift for Shell’s worldwide producing operations in the Netherlands. Shell was one of the earliest pioneers of artificial lift automation, and Dunham was the technology’s biggest cheerleader. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Shell developed automation technologies for rod pumps, ESPs, and gas lift. He was instrumental in the development of these technologies and was an ardent champion of their use. The technology evolved from vans that drove from pumping unit to pumping unit collecting dynamometer cards, to real-time surveillance systems that delivered the data directly from the well to the engineer’s desktop. In SPE paper 3967, “Bridging the Information Gap Between Operations and Engineering,” He describes that early work and the significance of automation technology in production and operations. Although the paper was written in 1973, the ideas presented are still relevant today. B. Lyle Wilson “In 1964 my college funding at the University of Tulsa dried up, and I entered the field of artificial lift on the night shift with Centrilift,” ESP expert Lyle Wilson recalls. “My [lack of] collegiate progress was noticed by the Selective Service system, and I was given an opportunity for training, travel, and adventure. Returning from Vietnam, I finished my BS mechanical engineering degree at University of Tulsa in 1972 and officially started my career. I worked in directional drilling, fracking, and completions before I returned to ESP artificial lift.” Wilson spent 20 years working for Oil Dynamics (ODI), eventually reaching the position of chief engineer. He ended up back at Centrilift when ODI was purchased by Baker Hughes and merged with the Centrilift division, and he finally retired as a senior research advisor, though he continues to work with Baker Hughes as a third-party contractor.

Why America Should Restore the Draft

While agreeing with Professor Liebert and Colonel Golby that the All-Volunteer Force—which in 1973 replaced the Selective Service System (the draft) enacted by Congress at the onset of World War II—has worsened the estrangement of America’s military from the larger society and that this estrangement constitutes a hazard to our nation’s democracy, Colonel Hauser disputes their notion that nothing much can be done to remediate that hazard other than encouraging a return to historical/traditional nonpartisanship on the part of active and retired military officers, presumably encouraged by civilian political leadership. Instead, he suggests, a return to the draft, within a program of national service, would not only ameliorate military-societal separation but also provide a multitude of strategic, social, political, and economic benefits to the entire nation.

Selective Service, the Gender-Ordered Family, and the Rational Informality of the American State

How do gender relations regulate the American state? To answer this question the author examines archival material on the formation and operation of the Selective Service System during World War I, the understudied federal American draft system. She shows how the federal government vested local draft board members with the authority to determine on a subjective, case-by-case basis whether potential draftees were genuine breadwinners in determining whom to draft and who would receive dependency-based deferments. Informal rules of thumb about the gender-ordered family structured the First World War draft. By analyzing the Selective Service System and by placing feminist political sociology, scholarship in the American political development tradition, and Weberian scholarship on the modern state in critical dialogue with one another, the author identifies how the American state’s locally applied substantive rationality relied on the family’s gender hierarchy in ordering its rational informality. Gender relations thereby rationalized the state’s local informality.

Dependency as a Keyword of the American Draft System and Persistence of Male-only Registration

How has male-only draft registration been ideologically justified in the United States? Feminist International Relations and Security Studies scholars would, correctly, point to the strong association between masculinity and militarism in explaining the preservation of male-only registration. I argue, however, that feminist political-sociological scholarship on the centrality of the male breadwinner/female caregiver distinction to numerous federal programs sheds light on ideological justification for women’s exclusion from draft registration. Much like other federal programs, concerns with women’s dependency and men’s economic independence shaped the Selective Service System in 1917. Fear of unraveling the family’s sexual division of labor persisted when Congress renewed all-male draft registration in 1980, a position to which the Supreme Court deferred in 1981. I conclude by arguing that the draft’s problematic nature would endure if women were required to register with Selective Service and that the new arrangement would likely reproduce multiple inequalities.

A career's twisting road.

I wanted to be a physicist. When I was in elementary school, I corrected a teacher about the orbits of the planets. In high school, I told a teacher that we could directly image single atoms; she didn't believe me even after I showed her the journal article I saw it in. My parents were of two minds: proud of my scientific aptitude but, being of modest means and Jewish descent, hopeful their only son would become a “real” doctor someday, the medical kind. ¶ I enrolled in the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park, in 1969 and obtained two bachelor's degrees, in physics and astronomy, in 3 years. Michael A'Hearn, my astronomy adviser, told me he was content to add a tiny bit of knowledge to the world—prophetic words from the future team leader of Deep Impact, the space probe that blasted a hole in comet Tempel 1 35 years later. I decided that I, too, wanted to make a small contribution, in experimental physics. In 1970, the Selective Service System held a lottery to determine the order in which men born in 1951—my birth year—would be called up for service in the Vietnam War. I won. My birthdate came up first. My physics adviser got a low number, too; he went abroad to medical school. With pressure and support from my father, I entered medical school at UMD. It kept me out of Vietnam. There were five other physics majors in my class. ![Figure][1] “Now I'm a real doctor, the kind my father so wanted me to be.” ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER Research was still my goal, so I worked in a neurobiology lab. After graduating, I went to Duke University Hospital for a combined residency and postdoc in neurology. For the next 30 years I was an academic neurologist, seeing patients, teaching, and doing basic research—the academic triad. I kept up with developments in physics (to which I yearned to return) by reading, especially Science . I learned that my physics adviser had gone into medical practice. Retrospectively, I can see how good those decades were for medical research and researchers. Good ideas and valid protocols were rewarded with grant money, despite the high level of competition. Many hard-core scientists who had entered medicine to avoid the draft did important work. I garnered an international reputation in my specialty, but my father never considered me a real doctor like the practitioners he saw in the cardiology and internal medicine clinics he frequented. Yet, before he passed away with a stroke in 2008, he made it clear he thought I'd had a good career. I agreed. Three years later, I retired. My retirement didn't last long. My wife said I should get a job—she said I had too much energy—so I started filling in for absent neurologists in the field of stroke management. For 3 years, I have worked at hospitals in small towns across the United States, learning a new approach to medicine. Medicine, it is said, is an art. The academic medicine I had practiced, though, is science. Everything you do for and to your patients is based on the best evidence, calculated for maximum efficacy, and reviewed and criticized by yourself and colleagues. It took me 3 years to stop looking at every problem as a possible publication, to stop answering every question with a PowerPoint presentation. Now that I'm a real doctor, the kind my father so wanted me to be, I am practicing the art of medicine, although I still occasionally ask whether patients know the square root of two during mental-status exams; once I even found a patient who knew Ohm's law. My bedside manner has sharpened. I detect gratitude from my patients—a new type of satisfaction. It's an experience my father knew as a patient and wanted me to have on the other end. It took me 40 years, but here I am. I haven't tried being a physicist yet, but careers are long, and only at the end can they be fully measured. [1]: pending:yes

Discrimination by the Selective Service System in the Vietnam Era

Discrimination by the Selective Service System in the Vietnam Era is an analysis of how the conscription system was structured in such a way that ethnic minorities, people with limited education and/or the economically disadvantaged were statistically more likely to be ordered into combat. Created by an Act of Congress in 1917, the Selective Service was implemented in response to the lack of American volunteers to join the military during WWI. As military needs for conscripted soldiers varied over the years, so too did the laws governing conscription. These reenacted draft laws produced a myriad of different exemption and deferment statuses. 1951 was a pivotal year regarding draft law because for the first time, able-bodied college students under the age of 24 would be deferred so long as they remained in school full-time (classification 2-S). Their non-student counterparts were classified 1-A (immediately draft eligible). This designation identified the men 18 years of age and older who would most likely be involuntarily conscripted into the military (and most likely be killed or maimed in combat). As the Vietnam War ramped up dramatically during the 1960s, the need for American soldiers outstripped the supply of volunteers (as it did during WWI when there was no deferment for college students). Anti-war protests on college campuses ramped up as well. By focusing exclusively on the comparison of the “1-A” and “2-S” draft classifications during the most intensive Vietnam combat of the 1960’s, I will argue that, beginning in 1965 with the organization called Students for a Democratic Society, draft-deferred students formed and maintained the grassroots anti-war movement that finally brought the Vietnam War to an end in 1973. In researching this topic, several books on the subject were located, each of which contained references to other relevant publications.

Contingencies

Contingencies Ann D. Gordon (bio) When I retired in 2012, I also brought to its conclusion the historical edition that occupied thirty years of my life, the Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. I feel reasonably safe in saying that no one knows these two women as well as I do at this moment. That is not to claim that I have the best ideas about them. After reading every surviving diary entry, incoming and outgoing letter, speech, broadside, and essay at least twice, I know the evidence they left behind and what about them cannot be known. This is simply a by-product of the task I took on, to craft works that allow everyone else to learn about Stanton and Anthony. I retired in the midst of a presidential campaign in which women’s rights and voting rights were again contested. Improbably, the history of the woman suffrage movement was back at the center of politics. As I watched creative young feminists mobilize to protect our rights, I was struck by their ability to tap into that history and its imagery. They knew that their peers would get historical jokes as well as understand political stakes. Napoleon Sarony’s 1871 portrait of Stanton and Anthony seated together became an internet meme about voting. Conversely, when I was in my twenties, what activists did was unthinkable: Stanton and Anthony were invisible and uninvited to national political conversations. The purpose of editing their papers is in no small part to make sure that does not happen again. I retired from the Department of History at Rutgers, where I had the rank of Research Professor. That title signals multiple truths: though a rank equivalent to Professor and full-time employment, it marked me as ineligible for tenure, grant-funded, and hired on a string of one-year contracts. I belonged to the fastest-growing sector of the academic labor force, a group variously called non-tenure track faculty, non-tenure eligible faculty, contingent faculty, and—in a more evocative term—“the precariat.” No one plans to practice the historical craft for decades without job security. No one pursues a contingent career. I landed in that uncertainty while looking for variety in the work a historian might do. By the time I discovered historical editing, precarious employment was the rule. I deposited my first grant-funded paycheck in July [End Page 188] 1975. By the time I directed a project, historical editors dubbed my cohort the “Soft Money Generation,” distinguished from forebears like Arthur S. Link, who turned to editing after they made their reputations and secured tenure in normative ways.1 Getting Started I entered Smith College in the fall of 1962 and declared myself a history major at the proper time. To my recollection, no one in the department talked about why or what came next. Years later, in an essay about the girls who graduated from the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia in the 1790s, I wrote that Benjamin Rush and his colleagues modeled the girls’ curriculum after that for boys at the College of Philadelphia, even to the extent of instructing them in public speaking. Then the young ladies graduated—right off a cliff. Their graduation speeches are songs of farewell to experiences that would not recur.2 Shadows of that predicament lingered in my education. Our training was first rate. When I graduated in 1966, I had studied historiography, pursued historical research under expert guidance, and suffered my writing to be improved by a lot of people who made time to do that. At cross-purposes to the good intentions of the history faculty, however, there existed a student culture of husband-hunting, set to the cadence of the college president’s mantra that a liberal arts education would make us better mothers. The ferment of the early Sixties agitated life at Smith and across what were then the Four Colleges of the Connecticut River Valley. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had a presence at Smith and Amherst, and together we organized Northampton’s first march against the war in Vietnam and protested the collaboration of colleges with the Selective Service System when...

With Liberty and Justice for All: Why the Federal Government Should Elect to End the Selective Service System

With Liberty and Justice for All: Why the Federal Government Should Elect to End the Selective Service System

Conversation with Robert Voas

Conversation with <scp>R</scp>obert <scp>V</scp>oas

Defending America in Mixed Company: Gender in the U.S. Armed Forces

Women have voluntarily served to defend America since the birth of our nation, often driven by necessity or the fight for equal opportunity, but always limited by law or policy grounded in accepted gender roles and norms. Today, women compose 1 4 percent of the total active-duty military, and more than 255,000 have deployed to combat operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. Despite their exemplary service and performance in combat, women are still restricted from serving in more than 220, 000 military positions solely because of their sex. Women also continue to be exempt from the Selective Service System, for which their male counterparts are required by law to register. Are these continued inconsistencies between the sexes in the area of national defense incongruent with democratic tenets ? Have we gone too far or not far enough in allowing or compelling women to defend the nation if required ?

Manning &amp; Financing the Twenty-First-Century All-Volunteer Force

(*See endnotes for complete contributor biographies.) In 1973, in the wake of the Vietnam War, the United States transitioned from a conscription-based military to an all-volunteer force (avf).1 Faced with new challenges of cost and recruitment, the military substantially reduced the size of its active forces, particularly the Army. Previously, the Selective Service System had made accessing the required number of entry-level military personnel relatively easy. The system drafted young men who frequently served simply to comply with the law and motivated others to volunteer for service to avoid being drafted. Once the draft ended, attracting the requisite number of quali1⁄2ed recruits each year became much more dif1⁄2cult. Now subject to the dynamics of the labor market, the military confronted competition from other employers, especially in times of low unemployment, and from institutions of higher education, as increasing numbers of young men and women attended college. Thus, the force had to be downsized. Except for brief periods during the twenty-1⁄2ve years of Cold War conscription, the Army was the

Harry Truman and Health Care Reform: The Debate Started Here

The signing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in March 2010 has not quelled the bitter debate over the issue of health care reform. National health insurance (NHI) plans have been considered by many presidential administrations since the beginning of the 20th century. Harry Truman (Fig 1) was the first US president to propose a system of NHI, however, when he addressed Congress on November 19, 1945.1 He had already included “the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health” in his proposed Economic Bill of Rights. For Truman, the words did not go far enough. As a Jackson County, Missouri, judge, he had seen firsthand the disastrous effects that illness could have on a working family through his responsibility for the county poorhouse.2 He later learned that one-third of Selective Service registrants were rejected during World War II. In addition, many soldiers were discharged for health problems unrelated to combat, and still more were treated for conditions that predated their military induction. In his speech, Truman enumerated basic problems with health care delivery, including high costs and loss of earnings during illness. In response, he proposed compulsory NHI for all Americans and expanded social insurance systems to include replacement of lost earnings. FIGURE 1 President Harry S. Truman with March of Dimes children, 1950. Copyright unknown, courtesy of the Truman Library. NHI was not a new concept. Otto von Bismark initiated a compulsory health insurance program in Germany in 1883; its success led to the expansion of the concept of social insurance across Europe and the … Address correspondence to Robert D. Schremmer, MD, Division of Emergency Medical Services, Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics, 2401 Gillham Rd, Kansas City, MO 64108. E-mail: rschremmer{at}cmh.edu