The Wilmington morning star., 1940-08-18
Editorial Comments
From Other Angles
JEFFERSON ON THE DRAFT
New York Herald Tribune

The opponents to the draft in the Senate
have been making a great effort to show what
universal compulsory military training is
somehow inconsistent with American democ-
racy and the nations early traditions. When
Senator Burke remarked for example, that
Gen. Washington had made a proposal for
compulsory training in 1888, Senator Wheel
er retorted that II George Washington
couldn't put it across, it was because the
people wouldn't stand for it," thereby dis
missing the subject in a way that gives a
wholly erroneous impression of the infant ma
tons attitude toward military service.
When the Revolutionary War came to an
end the American people were prepared to
fight two military institutions tooth and nail,
these being a standing army of professional
soldiers and a military aristocracy. They
looked upon both as menaces to their liberties,
the first as an instrument OF %despotism with
which they had had painful experience under
British rule, the second as a caste that might
win control of their general government and,
through it, impose a hereditary aristocracy
on the nation. Every suggestion for a volun-
teer army, enlisted in peace time for long
periods of service, was viewed with sharp
suspicion, and these suspicious were warmly
oppressed by Jefferson and all the liberals
of his persuasion but what they all did want
instead was a well equipped and intensively
trained militia, in which every able-bodied
1o3 WOol0 NC SO111pClCo w law u u1lOGISO
periodic training, and against such compul-
sorry training there was no popular prejudice
at all.
None but an armed nation can dispense
with a standing army" wrote Jefferson in
1903. TO keep ours armed and disciplined is
therefore at all times important" Ten years
later he wrote: 1--WE must train and classify
the whole of our male citizens, and make mill
tary instruction a regular part of collegiate
education. We can never be safe till this is
done" The next year he wrote: 1--WE annot
be defended but by making every citizen a
soldier, as the Greeks and Romans who had
no standing armies" When writing of the
militia it must not be supposed that Jefferson
and his contemporaries had in mind a home
guard force, at the disposition of local au-
thorities only, for Jefferson again and again
deplored suggestions that militia service
should be limited geographically and h a t
militia units should not be sent out of the
country, for the specific reason that such
limitations on the national use of the militia
would be an argument for a standing profess
sional army.
AS early as 1777, when measures were
adopted for conscripting men into the army
through the militia, the purpose of them
was: For making provision against invasions
and Instructions, and laying the burden equal
ly upon all" This was conceived to be the
only form of training consistent with denoc-
racy, while the recruiting of volunteers into
the standing European armies of the time
was ~contemptuously described as the use of
hirelings who had been pauperized by oppres-
sion. Universal training in peace time was the
democratic alternative to militarism in early.
America, and it continues to be that at this
moment.