Word: drafting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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While Congress' new draft law awaited the President's signature, thousands of young men had stormed the nation's armories. To them, a three-year hitch in the National Guard or Organized Reserves (with regular drill periods near home) looked much better than a 21-month hitch as a draftee. By the time the President signed the law, the reserves were chockablock with new recruits, and the Guard was almost over its national goal of 341,000 enlistments...
Then the escape hatch closed. In a droning Pentagon press conference last week, Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall announced that registration for the draft would begin the third week of August, the first inductions probably in October. By November the induction rate will be stepped up to 30,000 a month, will pull in an estimated 250,000 draftees before next July. Including 18-year-old volunteers and regular enlistments, the Army hopes to be up to 790,000 men by then, the bulk of them organized into a striking force of twelve Regular Army divisions and six National...
Everybody was caught napping. With a view to helping small businessmen get a fair share of defense orders, the House Small Business Committee's Chairman Walter C. Ploeser had slipped in an amendment to the draft bill. Neither the committee's colleagues in the House & Senate, nor the White House, noted the real meaning of the amendment. Only after President Truman signed the draft bill last week did the fact come fully clear: Congress had unwittingly provided for the broadest draft of U.S. industry in peacetime history...
...Administration, which had repeatedly asked for much milder stand-by powers only to be ignored by the Republican Congress, was wholly unprepared for the sweeping powers concealed in the draft act. So far there is no need for them. Except in the aircraft industry, defense orders are generally small. For the first half of this year, military needs in steel totaled only 670.000 tons, about 1% of total U.S. production...
...Universal military training and a new draft...