Selecting President Wilson's Army: The Draft And Immigration In Six Massachusetts Communities

Abstract

In 2008, as I prepared for a travel-study trip led by Salem State University Professors Christopher E. Mauriello and Stephen Matchak to parts of France and Belgium where the Western Front of World War I had been, I found a list of the men from my hometown, Beverly, Massachusetts, who had died in military service during that war. I was struck by two things. First, the names on the list included many names that were on street corners, bridges, parks, and athletic fields that I had used and passed by nearly every day of my life, never knowing why those names were affixed. Second, judging by the surnames, the men represented a wide array of ethnic backgrounds. I knew that Beverly at the time of World War I had a diverse economic and ethnic composition. It was home to both a world-leading factory and to the residences of some of the wealthiest families in the United States. Old Yankee money shared the City with the immigrants and children of immigrants who mainly worked tended the great estates or in a gigantic factory. Those immigrants and children of immigrants were participants and descendants of the participants in the massive waves of immigration that the United States had received in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. For men of my generation, the heavy hand of the Vietnam War draft had not fallen equally on all, though I was among the lucky ones with a draft lottery number that guaranteed I would never be called. Like some of America’s earlier wars, Vietnam had seemed like a rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight. I wondered how the diverse group of Beverly men had come to be in the World War I army; had they served willingly, by a draft, or both. That curiosity set me on the course that produced this thesis, which is an attempt to answer two questions: 1) Why did the United States adopt a draft, despite long-standing tradition of using mainly volunteer war-time forces and adverse experience with the draft? and 2) Did anti-immigrant feeling very strong at the time affect who was sent to war?