policy - The Black Vault

m.
THE BDM CORPORATION
successfully that it seemed to exonerate the ad hoc military system. Yet
even before the Americans entered the First World War the need for conscription
had been recognized and a new relationship between the military
and the Republic had started to form.51/
When war was actually declared, a
draft act was easily passed and enforced, and the war was fought primarily
with conscripts unlike any previous war in American history.
However, World War I was followed by widespread disillusionment,
bitterness and a pacifist backlash of unusual intensity.
been a pacifist strain in American
There had long
society; it went hand in hand with
isolationism and dated back to the period following the War of 1812.
had resurfaced even before the Mexican American War was over, and the long,
bloody trauma of the Civil War had left many Americans with no taste for
war at all. But the pacifism of the 1920s and 1930s is noteworthy for its
intensity, the breadth of its appeal, and its expression in official as
well as popular actions. Furthermore, although pacifism in the United
States is closely associated wit;, isolationism, the pacifism following the
First World War was international and gained credibility through such
instruments as the League of Nations, which the US did not join, the
Washington Naval Conference and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. These international
efforts had the unfortunate effect of encouraging the "false but
comforting assumption that peace and security could be easily obtained
without costs or obligations on the part of anyone."52/
The domestic corollary of these international sentiments was
revulsion against not just war but the military also.
It
In the years
directly following the war it was politically impossible to pass a peacetime
conscription act, and West Point experienced 50% vacancies.
Meanwhile,
the Army shrank to a level of just 150,000 in 1920 and 119,000 in
1927 - nearly as small as the 100,000-man Reichwehr which Germany considered
an unbearable national insult despite its much
smaller population.53/
American military men, furthermore, remained outside the mainstream
of American so,:iety.54/
' As the international situation worsened, the United States
f
responded with increasingly adamant expressions of "neutrality" of which
A
2p. 'I. --
2 32-32