First Reactions

A brand-new fact faced the U. S. people last week--peacetime conscription. On Registration Day, set for Oct. 16, more than 16,000,000 young Americans will register for the draft that is to swell the ranks of the U. S. Army to the unprecedented peacetime figure of nearly 1,000,000 men by January 1941. If there was grumbling or kidding among the young men most concerned (aged 21 to 36), there was not enough of it to get into the papers. A few "youth leaders" denounced the draft, but youth itself appeared prepared to take things as they came.

Many a young man told his girl that there wasn't really more than one chance in 100 that he would be drafted.* Many a young man submitted good-naturedly to corner-store gibes at his certain fate. The jokes that were cracked were, more often than not, 1917 jokes, even such transmigratory Liberty Bond characters as Ed Wynn's "Weatherstrip" (so called because he kept his father out of the draft). The U. S. moved uncomplainingly on toward Registration Day.

An exception to this vast, good-natured conformity was the tiny minority of religiously-minded conscientious objectors. Alert to the implications of the Selective Training and Service Act, as a result of their own experiences in World War I, and of British brethren in World War II, one small group has been meeting weekly in Manhattan since mid-July, to coach their fellows. This week the War Resisters League (over 17,000 strong), headed by hulking, 6 ft. 4 Evan W. Thomas, New York University professor of medicine and brother of the Socialist candidate for President (like his brother, jailed as a C. O. in World War I), conducted its first New York public test tribunal for youthful dissenters. Questions put included such traditional pacifist posers as "Did not Jesus whip the money-changers out of the temple?" As the nation went, so went Eleanor Roosevelt. Turning on her old friends, the American Youth Congress and the American Newspaper Guild, for their "claptrap" talk decrying the draft, she offered up her four strapping sons, should the country need them--like Cornelia, who had no jewels to give for Rome but her sons, the Gracchi. From Washington came word that Son Elliott, who has a wife and three small children, had obtained a captain's commission in the Army Air Corps Specialists reserve, would probably be on duty in a week--well before Registration Day.

* Actually, it was more like one in 16.

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