Word: draft
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...Franklin Roosevelt, as usual, made headlines too-some as President, some as candidate. As candidate he made a fighting speech before a Labor audience (see below). As President, he received from Congress the capstones of his defense program : 1) conscription of man power, along with unprecedented peacetime powers to draft industry as well; 2) a $5,000,000,000 supplemental Defense Bill, to equip the new Army and launch a world-beating two-ocean Navy...
...Roosevelt gracefully accepted both, signed both. Said he, calling upon 16,500,000 male citizens to register for the draft Oct. 16: "We have set forth the underlying . . . duties, obligations and responsibilities of equal service. . . . We have not carved a new and uncharted trail in the history of our democratic institutions. On the contrary, we have merely reasserted an old and accepted principle of democratic government...
...Nobody can pay a forfeit to escape the draft, pay a substitute to serve for him, or buy his way out once he is in service. Nor can the U. S. offer special bounties to any conscript or volunteer. Reason: the Army's doleful experiences with bounties, substitutes, and attendant corruption in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars...
...Known members of 1) the Communist Party, 2) the Nazi Bund, cannot be hired to replace draftees in civil jobs. Aliens can be so hired. They are subject to the draft only if they have filed their first papers and made application for citizenship...
...System owes much of its precision and detail to onetime (World War I) Draft Administrator Hugh S. Johnson (who is not bashful about taking due credit in his daily column). Its present spark plug is tawny-haired, blue-eyed Lieut. Colonel Lewis Elaine Hershey. A descendant of antimilitarist Mennonites who migrated to Pennsylvania in 1709, Lieut. Colonel Hershey has specialized on Army conscription plans since 1926. His technical superior on the Joint Army and Navy Selective Service Committee is the Navy's Lieut. Commander Benjamin Stacey Killmaster. But the Navy has little need of conscripts, will leave...