Selective Service Act of 1917

The Selective Service Act of 1917 or Selective Draft Act (Pub. L. 65–12, 40 Stat. 76, enacted May 18, 1917) authorized the United States federal government to raise a national army for service in World War I through conscription. It was envisioned in December 1916 and brought to President Woodrow Wilson's attention shortly after the break in relations with Germany in February 1917. The Act itself was drafted by then-Captain (later Brigadier General) Hugh S. Johnson after the United States entered World War I when it declared war on Germany. The Act was canceled with the end of the war on November 11, 1918. The United States Supreme Court upheld the Act as constitutional in 1918.

At the time of World War I, the United States Army was small compared with the mobilized armies of the European powers. As late as 1914, the Regular Army had under 100,000 men, while the National Guard (the organized militias of the states) numbered around 115,000. The National Defense Act of 1916 authorized the growth of the Army to 165,000 and the National Guard to 450,000 by 1921, but by 1917 the Army had only expanded to around 121,000, with the National Guard numbering 181,000.

By 1916, it had become clear that any participation by the United States in the conflict in Europe would require a far larger army. While President Wilson at first wished to use only volunteer troops, it soon became clear that this would be impossible. When war was declared, Wilson asked for the Army to increase to a force of one million. An astonishing 73,000 men had volunteered within the first day of the war's declaration, but by six weeks after the call, it was clear that waiting for more self-elected men would not be compatible with the intended plans of quickly mobilizing a fighting force to Europe. Wilson then accepted the recommendation of Secretary of War Newton D. Baker for a draft.

General Enoch H. Crowder, the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army, when first consulted, was opposed. But later, with the assistance of Captain Hugh Johnson and others, Crowder guided the bill through Congress and administered the draft as the Provost Marshal General.

A problem that came up in the writing of the bill and its negotiation through Congress was the desire of former President Theodore Roosevelt to assemble a volunteer force to go to Europe. President Wilson and others, including army officers, were reluctant to permit this for a variety of reasons. The final bill contained a compromise provision permitting the president to raise four volunteer divisions, a power Wilson did not exercise.

To persuade an uninterested populace to support the war and the draft, George Creel, a veteran of the newspaper industry, became the United States' official war propagandist. He set up the Committee on Public Information, which recruited 75,000 speakers, who made 750,000 four-minute speeches in 5,000 cities and towns across America. Creel later helped form the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy, with union leader Samuel Gompers as president, to win working-class support for the war and "unify sentiment in the nation". The AALD had branches in 164 cities, and many labor leaders went along although "rank-and-file working class support for the war remained lukewarm ...", and the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful. Many prominent Socialist leaders became pro-war, though the majority did not.

By the guidelines set down by the Selective Service Act, all males aged 21 to 30 were required to register to potentially be selected for military service. At the request of the War Department, Congress amended the law in August 1918 to expand the age range to include all men 18 to 45, and to bar further volunteering. By the end of World War I, some two million men volunteered for various branches of the armed services, and some 2.8 million had been drafted. This meant that more than half of the almost 4.8 million Americans who served in the armed forces were drafted. Due to the effort to incite a patriotic attitude, the World War I draft had a high success rate, with fewer than 350,000 men "dodging" the draft. Section 7 of the Act provided that men would be "as far as practicable...grouped into units by States and the political subdivisions of the same," the most prominent example being the "National Army" infantry divisions.^{[citation needed]}

The most important difference between the draft established by the Selective Service Act of 1917 and the Civil War draft was that substitutes were not allowed. During the Civil War, a drafted man could avoid service by hiring another man to serve in his place. A mostly inaccurate perception spread that substitutes were used primarily by wealthy men and was resented by those who could not afford them or considered them dishonorable.