Teddy Roosevelt's Role in America Opting for Conscription to Fight the World War

John Whiteclay Chambers II, Rutgers University

Modern conscription, or the draft, came to America in World War I. In the nineteenth century, the nation raised its wartime armies primarily through the United States Volunteers: ad hoc units, locally raised and led, but armed, financed, and directed by national authorities. [The author does not discuss why he discounts conscription efforts in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars in this article. Perhaps it's simply a matter of scale or the trouble-filled character of those ventures. MH] 

In 1917, however, selective national conscription replaced the wartime tradition of the Volunteers. As the peacetime American army grew from 128,000 regulars and 80,000 National Guardsmen to a wartime force of 3.5 million soldiers, the draft supplied 72 percent of the World War I "Doughboys.". Once conscription began, authorities sharply contained the few attempts at organized resistance, jailed dissenters—Socialist party leader Eugene V. Debs, for example—subjected conscientious objectors to military discipline, and pursued some 338,000 draftees who failed to report or fled from training camps. Despite inequities, particularly in regard to race, the wartime selective draft was widely accepted by civilian and military elites. Having been proven effective, the Selective Service System would be used again to raise the bulk of America's wartime armies in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.

Wilson's decision to abandon the United States Volunteers in favor of wartime conscription is important historically because it changed America's traditional military format. For decades, however, the process by which he reached that decision was little understood. An exploration of this decision offers a useful exercise in historical analysis. Such an examination requires determining the chronological order of events, evaluating conflicting accounts, assessing cause and effect, and, in this case, weighing explanations of inevitability.

Traditionally, scholars assume the Wilson administration readily accepted conscription because it was the most equitable and efficient means for an industrial society to raise a mass army). Wilson used this explanation on 19 April to persuade a reluctant Congress to adopt the draft and on 18 May, when he signed the Selective Draft Act. Newton Baker, Wilson's Secretary of War, and Enoch Crowder, former Judge Advocate General of the United States Army, also used the explanation provided in their postwar recollections. In 1928, Crowder, who headed the Selective Service System during the war, recalled that Baker came to the Judge Advocate General's office on 4 February 1917, the day after the diplomatic break with Germany, and said the president had just visited the War Department and wanted a conscription bill ready the next day. Working through the night, as Crowder remembered it, his staff drew up what he said became the Selective Draft Act three months later.

Baker's own postwar account put the draft's origin around 20–24 March 1917, thus shortly after Wilson's decision to go to war on 20 March. Recalling a meeting with the President, the Secretary of War said he gave Wilson recommendations for conscription from the Army's Chief of Staff, General Hugh Scott, and former chief of staff, General Leonard Wood. According to Baker, Wilson readily agreed, declaring: "That is the fair way; it is the democratic way. The experience of England with the volunteer system is a warning to us". Baker's account suggests that once Wilson decided to enter the war and raise a wartime army, he immediately decided upon a selective draft because of its efficiency and equity.

These postwar public recollections are seriously flawed, however, distorting what actually occurred. More recently disclosed  contemporary sources, including private letters from Wilson, Baker, Crowder, Scott, and former president Theodore Roosevelt as well as declassified records from the General Staff, reveal a different story. Instead of a bold, direct decision for the draft as the obvious wartime choice, contemporary evidence documents a cautious and more circuitous route. Indeed, Wilson avoided making a decision for conscription and initially wanted to insist on the United States Volunteers. Ultimately, however, he chose to jettison the volunteers and adopt the draft, not because of the opinions of his military advisers, which he and Baker had repeatedly rejected in February and March, but rather because of an unexpected and extraordinary personal challenge from Theodore Roosevelt. This challenge, unknown to the public in March 1917, became the catalyst for historic change.

Theodore Roosevelt, Former Commander-in-Chief
and Rough Rider

Crowder's recollection that Wilson ordered a conscription bill on 4 February, turns out to have been false. The visit to which Crowder refers was probably the one on Thursday, 22 February. But Wilson did not ask for conscription. He wanted an emergency measure giving him authority, in case Germany committed an overt act after Congress adjourned on 4 March, to raise and train an army of one million men. Baker continued to insist on trying the volunteer system before resorting to the draft, as he had since his instructions to the General Staff on 3 February. A request from Senate conscriptionists for the General Staff to submit a plan for permanent universal military training and service also concerned the president. Consequently, Baker asked Crowder to rewrite the General Staff's response to the Senate, reducing it to selective rather than universal military training, and then Baker forwarded it without the administration's endorsement, so that it failed to come to vote in Congress. On 7 March, General Scott complained to an editor of the conscriptionist New York Times that the administration would not allow a draft until volunteering had been exhausted.

Baker's postwar account is deceptive because it omits the administration's initial insistence on voluntarism and simply portraying Wilson as recognizing the efficacy and equity of the draft after deciding to enter the war on 20 March. In fact, however, the president still remained firmly committed to the traditional volunteer system when he met with the General Staff on 24 March, despite their  recommendation for conscription. In a confidential letter to former Secretary of War Henry Stimson on 26 March, Crowder, who had been at the meeting, reported that "the President stated his mind on the question of raising an army" and the Judge Advocate General then described the force of 1.5 million men. Crowder concluded his recapitulation of the meeting: "Under the scheme as it stands to-day, we will resort to the draft only after the failure of the volunteer system." Then added in a handwritten postscript, "The President's reasons for this are interesting but confidential".

Frustratingly, Crowder did not give the President's reasons, but they can be inferred from other evidence. Wilson knew that there was widespread opposition to conscription among rural isolationists and among ethnic groups opposed to joining the Allies as well as from agrarians and industrial workers who feared an attempt by corporate America to "militarize" the country through a permanent policy of universal military training and service. Although Theodore Roosevelt was the main spokesman for the conscriptionist wing of the "preparedness" movement, it had been financed over the past two years primarily by eastern business and financial interests. Given anti-militarists' fears, Baker explained to former President William Howard Taft on 6 February, as he rejected Taft's suggestion for conscription, "there would undoubtedly be great suspicion aroused if compulsory service were suggested at the outset and before any opportunity to volunteer had been given".

But the President suddenly reversed himself. He had insisted on the volunteer system on 24 March and presumably continued that policy through at least 26 March when Crowder wrote to Stimson about it. He may have changed his mind by 27 March, but he certainly had by 29 March. On 27 March, General Scott implied that a major change might be coming when he advised his son, a civilian mining engineer and reserve officer: "You better get yourself a field uniform and have it ready. We do not know what is coming out of the box".  On 29 March, Crowder confirmed the policy shift to Stimson: "Confidentially, I have been engaged for two or three days in writing and re-writing a bill which the President will stand for when he communicates with Congress. You will be a little surprised when he has spoken-In drafting the bill we have practically thrown out of consideration the Volunteer Act, and the new force to be raised in addition to the Regular Army and National Guard will not be called volunteers at all". On 29 March, Baker took to the president a two-page summary of a "Bill to Increase Temporarily the Military Establishment of the United States." Although the Regular Army and National Guard would be expanded to wartime strength by voluntary enlistment, the "additional forces" were "to be raised and maintained exclusively by selective draft." The United States Volunteers were consigned to history.

What caused Wilson to switch from the United States Volunteer system to conscription between 24 and 29 March (probably between 26 and 27 March)? A reconstruction of events indicates a particularly pertinent development on 26 March: Wilson learned of an extraordinary challenge from his main political rival, the irrepressible, Republican ex-president Theodore Roosevelt.

After having chastised Wilson since 1915 for a timid foreign policy and a failure to expand the armed forces, the bellicose Roosevelt feared in early 1917 that Wilson and the Democratic Congress would limit the United States' response to U-boat warfare to material support for the Allies and not send American troops to help crush Imperial Germany. Personally, the old Rough Rider also yearned to re-experience the thrill of victory on the battlefield, as he and his 1st Volunteer Cavalry Regiment had on San Juan Heights in 1898.

Privately excoriating Wilson as insincere, shifty, and an abject coward, Roosevelt began plans in February to raise and lead a division of United States volunteers to Europe after war was declared in order to ensure that the fight was fought to the finish. He wrote to the Secretary of War requesting a commission to raise the division. Baker had initially ignored his requests, but on Wednesday, 20 March, after the president decided to enter the war, Baker wired Roosevelt rejecting his latest appeal to head a division of United States volunteers. "A plan for a very much larger army than the force suggested in your telegram [of 19 March] has been prepared for action of Congress whenever required," Baker wrote. "Militia officers of high rank will naturally be incorporated with their commands, but the general officers for all volunteer forces are to be drawn from the regular army." 

Undeterred, Roosevelt retorted on Friday 23 March: "I understood, Sir, that there would be a far larger force than a division called out; I merely wished to be permitted to get ready a division for immediate use in the first expeditionary force sent over. In reference to your concluding sentence, I wish respectfully to point out that I am a retired Commander in Chief of the United States Army, and eligible to any position of command over American troops to which I may be appointed."

On Monday 26 March, Baker sent Roosevelt's telegram to Wilson without comment. The president returned it the next day, 27 March. On the margin, he scrawled angrily: "This is one of the most extraordinary documents I have ever read! Thank you for letting me undergo the discipline of temper involved in reading it in silence".

It was indeed an extraordinary document, for it suggested that the popular and unpredictable former president was prepared to challenge the administration's attempt to deny him the right to raise and command United States volunteers. Roosevelt's threat changed the equation of political costs and military and industrial benefits by seeking to rely upon a selective draft rather than the volunteer system from the beginning. Wilson had long understood that a.selective draft could obtain soldiers in sustained and predictable numbers without disrupting vital industrial and agricultural production. Evidently, political cost of further antagonizing isolationists and anti-conscriptionists as he led a divided country and Congress into war troubled him. Now that concern was outweighed by the potential problem of having an uncontrollable ex-president as the most prominent American general in Europe, where he would join with the Allies and their American supporters to challenge Wilson's goal of preventing a vengeful peace by the Allies, rather than a just and lasting peace, a "peace without victory."

It seems highly probable that Roosevelt's extraordinary challenge led the President to reverse his policy. By 29 March (within two days after Wilson returned Roosevelt's telegram to Baker, and if General Scott's letter of 27 March is indicative, then the day he returned it), the President had abandoned the United States Volunteers and decided to rely upon the draft from the outset. Now he was receptive to recommendations from professional soldiers for conscription that he had repeatedly rejected, most recently and directly on 24 March. Wilson probably indicated his change of mind to Baker on Tuesday,27 March, most likely after the afternoon cabinet meeting. Baker then summoned Crowder, Scott and two other generals to a meeting on Wednesday, 28 March, to begin to prepare legislation for the new policy.

Only after Congress adopted the war resolution on 6 April 1917, did the administration announce the new military policy publicly. There was considerable opposition to it, and it took a month for Wilson to force conscription through a bitterly divided Congress. (Roosevelt lobbied to require the president to authorize him to command a separate unit of United States volunteers, but Congress only recommended it, and Wilson, naturally, ignored it.) 

Given the major military role the United States ultimately came to play in the war, it could be argued that some form of conscription was probably inevitable, but that role was not evident when Wilson made the decision for conscription in March 1917. Before the Allied military missions arrived in Washington in late April 1917 and explained that they needed significant numbers of American troops on the Western Front, Wilson had believed that the United States' role would continue to be primarily supplying credit, food, and military supplies to the Allies, now convoyed by the United States Navy. He envisioned a wartime army of perhaps 1.5 million men, that would, as it was trained in the United States over the next 18 months, impress the Allies as they moved toward victory. Together with the supplies and with a token force sent to Europe, this American army would help guarantee the United States a place at the peace table. It was not until the summer of 1917 that the administration abandoned its original plan of sending only a small token military force to France and having the U.S. Army provide the draftees with extensive training in the United States, and agreed instead to Allied requests for one million American troops in France. That number increased in 1918, and by the end of the war, the American army numbered 3.7 million, with the 2 million soldiers of the American Expeditionary Forces responsible for a major sector of the Western Front. This was a force and a mission far beyond what Wilson had envisioned when he decided for conscription in late March 1917. That was not why Wilson decided to institute the draft, but that decision made granting those requests possible.

Secretary of War Newton Baker Draws the First Draft Number on 20 July 1917

Analysis of that decision-making process reveals that Wilson had initially insisted on the use of the United States Volunteers and indicates that he changed his mind because of Roosevelt's challenge to his leadership. This influence of what otherwise might have been a comparatively minor incident suggests that important historical developments, or at least their timing and configuration, can sometimes hinge upon personal animosities and unforeseen circumstances. In Roosevelt's indomitable desire to repeat the glory and influence that he had on San Juan Hill in 1898 on the Western Front in 1917, the old Rough Rider paradoxically dragged down the entire United States Volunteer system with him. The ex-president, a longtime champion of universal military training and service, played a major role in achieving conscription, although not in the manner he wished. The true story of how the modern draft came to the United States is one of the ironies of American history. 

For information on the nitty-gritty operation of the Selective Service Act, see our 2019 article HERE.

Source:  Magazine of History, Oct., 2002

Trench Warfare Did Not End with World War I: The Orwell Trenches of the Spanish Civil War

Showing Solidarity with the Boys in Spain's Trenches

By Tony Langley

British writer George Orwell (pseudonym of Eric Blair 1903–1950) is justly renowned for his books 1984 and Animal Farm. Prior to publishing those works, he described his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War in Homage to Catalonia (1938).

After arriving in Spain in December 1936, he joined the anarchist POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista—Workers Party for Marxist Unification) militia more by happenstance than for any specific ideological reason and after a short and laughable training in Barcelona was stationed on the Aragon/Huesca front, in the semi-arid and remote Monegros (Black Hills) region. This was one of the few regions where static warfare prevailed for a long period of time during the Spanish Civil War, and, as a result, more or less permanent trench systems and fortified positions were built. Owing to their remoteness and the semi-arid climate prevailing in the Monegros, many of these are still visible and in relatively good condition today and worth visiting.

"Over the Top" Look

Spain is an archeologist's playground, even without restoration of Civil War sites. With the Orwell trenches, the same high standards were applied regarding authenticity in use of materials: natural stone, weather-worn tree trunks and branches, dried shrub and thorn, scavenged old doorways. The sandbags used in the restored trenches are even made of actual burlap and sand, not the usual concrete with burlap relief as used in most sites in France and Belgium. This little touch may be somewhat optimistic regarding the longevity of these sandbags, even in a virtually rain-free climate, but it does confer that extra touch of authenticity.

Informational Kiosk Discussing Orwell's Service

Due to the rigorously hilly terrain, the front in the Monegros sector was not formed into a continuous line of trenches, but rather into a series of distinct strong-points and fortified positions that were mutually supportive. Trenches would run for several hundred meters around the forward slopes of hills before petering out into inaccessible terrain. Use was made of barbed-wire and Spanish riders, to protect the trenches from infiltration and enemy raids, but barriers made of thorn/shrubwood and branches were often just as effective and abundantly available.

There are similarities with Western Front trench systems of course, trenches being essentially but ditches in the earth. The abundance of natural stone in Spain, however, gives the Orwell trenches a look that is often similar to those on the Italian Front in the lower Alps. Sniper or machine-gun positions are made of natural stone walls, usually curved and often sheltered with wooden beams again covered with natural stone, earth or sandbags. Sleeping, cooking or weather shelters were constructed of natural stone, much like a rural goatherd-shelter, while blankets or scavenged doors were used to keep out the wind and cold, which Orwell described as being penetrating and debilitating in this part of Spain in winter.

In Spain's Fields the Poppies Also Blow

A general consciousness of the Spanish Civil War is slow in coming to the new post-Franco Spain. However, during these last years it is evolving, and the restoration of the aptly and poetically named Orwell Trenches in Alcubierre is a sign that things are changing. A further section of these trenches is earmarked for restoration in the coming years, and some 15 km behind the former Republican lines, concrete bunkers constructed by Republican agrarian collectives have also been restored.

Other Civil War sites worth visiting in the region are the totally destroyed and preserved towns of Belchite and Roden. These are haunted places, the ruins looking as if fighting had ended but a year or so ago. No attempts have been made at clearing rubble or lining off dangerous areas. Visitors can walk among the ruins of houses and buildings and imagine they are making their way among any of the destroyed villages and towns on the Western Front. The scent of rosemary and wild mountain thyme, crushed underfoot while walking the parched earth, hints to the difference in location and conflict. But here in Spain, too, poppies grow abundantly amongst the ruins and old trenches, indicating at least some type of communality between these two 20th-century wars, separated so little in time, but so much in ideology.

An American Nurse in Paris: Novels of the Great War

Nursing Staff, American Red Cross Hospital #1, Paris

John F. Andrews

46 North Publications, 2025

Reviewed by David F. Beer

They don’t need to paint a target on me. I wear a skirt. The only one in the American press corps in France.

Imagine you’re a young American woman who has graduated as a registered nurse and finds herself in Paris as the Great War is painfully drawing to a close with its terrible human cost. Moreover, you’re not at all interested in a nursing career because your heart has always been in the written word, and especially journalism. Your one goal now is to work as a war correspondent—specifically as a medical journalist. This woman is Alice Simmons, whose experiences from 24 May through July 1918 reveal a myriad of situations and intrigues involving not only Alice but also the world of war journalists, AEF officials, wounded soldiers and marines, and the fighting in and around Belleau Wood.

An American Nurse in Paris is a rewarding historical novel. In some 300 pages the author (himself a career physician) takes the reader through the challenges and setbacks of a young woman who is seen by the American Press Corps and military as presumptuously vying for recognition she shouldn’t be awarded—because she is female.

The barriers Alice must overcome (including discrimination and an attempted rape by two U.S. officers) are numerous, but she persists. Fortunately, she has a few supporters among the AEF officer ranks and she does manage to get a nursing position in an American Red Cross military hospital. Her demanding work and trying experiences in the hospital among badly wounded and dying American troops comprise over half of the book and make for captivating reading.

Some of the characters are based on real people, as the author points out in an afterword. Thus we meet General Ireland, Brigadier General Nolan, Brigadier General Harbord and others who, as actual persons, played important roles in the AEF in World War One. Their attitudes, conversations and actions in the book’s plot are of course fictionalized. An actual journalist who was quite popular in his time is Floyd Gibbons, a flamboyant writer who was wounded in the war and who wrote a short memoir of the conflict. In the novel he is also unhappy about Alice’s final acceptance as a nurse and journalist.

Order HERE

Ultimately, the narrative of the book centers on Alice and how she meets the numerous challenges that face her in these few months. She not only determinedly overcomes social and professional discrimination but also comes to terms with her own self-doubts and aspirations. And she becomes both a valued nurse and an effective war correspondent who shows us the terrible aftermath of battle when writing about her hospital work and patients:

The physical wounds are obvious and the topic of much conversation. The unseen, unspoken wounds lurk in the shadows. Will they ever heal? Many are sad about the loss of comrades, gone in ways too horrific to imagine. Tasting air filled with the blood mist of their best friends and the chemicals of an industrial death creates indelible memories that a lifetime of nightmares cannot reconcile (p. 198).

If you enjoy historical novels of the Great War, you will enjoy this book.

David F. Beer

Eyewitness: I Was Buried Alive at Verdun

Bernard Potrykus, a German soldier of Polish ancestry, while serving with the German infantry at Verdun,  barely managed to escape being buried fatally in a collapsed dugout while helping dig out men entombed by an earlier explosion. He described the experience in his 1939 war memoir Wspomnienia Kaszuba spod Verdun (Memories of a Kashubian from Verdun).

German Trench at Verdun

Suddenly, the ground beneath our feet shifted. We heard a bang as loud as a hundred thunderbolts. It got dark because of the dust. Everybody ran toward the other edge [of the dugout], while those in bed started to call for help. The enemy did his job: he penetrated our cover. All those sleeping were buried. 

“Boys!” The deputy officer Winkler yelled in uproar, “help our companions!” He himself was there, and he started to dig up the ground with a small shovel that he found. Around ten people, who were more courageous and were not afraid of dying, came to help the buried. Our Winter… did not search for a shovel but started to dig with his own hands, he ripped his nails, he tossed the boards with his teeth. The efforts of those who tried to rescue the buried soldiers were superhuman.

At first, the layer of ground that covered them was apparently not so thick, cause we could hear their cries and we could even understand individual words that they used to call for help. However, more and more ground started to fall, much more than dozens of hands could handle. A second explosive must have hit a spot near the entry, because a new avalanche of ground and stones fell on those unfortunate ones, and the third hit the same spot, Winkler yelled, “Move back!” As if he sensed something. They jumped to the side, and a great part of our dugout was buried.

Those who had tried to rescue the other soldiers were also almost buried…  Our situation was horrible… A shell hit half of the stairs at the exit. Although they were thick, the boards did not endure it: we heard a creak; when we turned our eyes to this spot, we could not see daylight anymore. The entire staircase was buried down to  them bottom. There was an overwhelming darkness, like in a grave. We were also silent because everyone got scared so much that we could not speak. Only when someone lit a match did everybody start moving. There was an undescribable tumult. 

German Soldiers at Damaged Trench and Dugout

Some kept saying on and on, “We are lost now!” Others ran from one wall of the trench to the other, like wild animals in a cage, and they wanted to break them down with their chests to get outside; besides, they screamed loudly and stridently for the help of God and the saints…. Our commander ordered us to search through our pockets, [because maybe] we will find matches or a candle. We found a little of that. Half of a matchbox, a lighter, and, what was most important, a piece of candle, although it was small. Winkler took it all, light up the candle, and said: “Now, boys, let’s get down to work. We have to dig ourselves out of here. There are too many of us to just die here, and we still have healthy hands and legs. Get down to work with everything you got and we will soon escape from this unfortunate place.” 

First, he ordered us to gather all the rifles and masks in one place, so that they do not get buried. Then, he formed us in a chain: he stood at the head by the stairs and transfered the ground to the nearest soldier. He gave it to another one, and so on, until it was in the very corner of the trench. Winkler emphasized the fact that we have to place it high and tight, so that it does not take much space…  We worked in silence. We only grunted heavily since the work was extremely burdensome since we lacked big shovels; we had only the small ones that we carried on our belts. We alternately worked in standing positions and on our knees, and it was even worse when Winkler blew out the candle, because he was afraid that we would run out of the candle at the end.  Then it often happened that one would hit his companion’s side with a shovel in the dark… 

The air was thick with dust, less and less oxygen, and it was so hot that we thought we were in a bakery oven. Sweat flew down our bodies and hurt our eyes with the dus. A crust grew on our faces, which was so big that – when Winkler lighted a match to have a look – we could barely see anything at all.  The trench slowly started to fill with soil. Winkler did reach the point where the shell hit, but the more ground we tossed, the more ground fell down, as if from the horn of plenty! … Space quickly diminished.We moved closer to each other, eventually working back to back. Breathing became increasingly difficult with each passing second.

Eventually, one of us fainted…  Soon, a second soldier fell down, thena a third right after him, almost when our candle faded away. “It is bad,” a dry throat gasped.  It was a cry that would begin general panic, which would be the end of us, had our Winkler not exclaimed with his shrilly but dry voice: “Boys, I see sky!” Indeed, it was true.  We dug ourselves out from the ground…  Then, we came out, one after another. God, what a joy! It was night, the half moon above, so many stars in the sky! What a great difference: this sky and the black abyss. It was still much better to die here, on the surface. 

Source: "Poles in Kaiser’s Army on the Front  of the First World War",  Ryszard Kaczmarek, STUDIES IN HISTORY, MEMORY AND POLITICS, Vol. 33