How Boomers Screwed it up, continued: Student Deferrments

War, huh, yeah. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. . . .

War has caused unrest within the younger generation--

Induction then destruction.

Who wants to die, ah, war-huh, good god, why'all? 

What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

  Lyrics, "War (What's it Good For)", 1970

Selective Service Channeling 

Opening rounds of the "meritocracy" divide.

There was a time when military service was near universal for men who met minimum standards of fitness. During the Vietnam War era, service was not universal.

Some of us escaped.

In the 1960's the Selective Service system had a policy both of filling the manpower needs of the military and "developing more human beings in the national interest," as General Lewis Hershey put it in a memo that became known as the "channeling" memo. During the Vietnam War era the military drafted 11 million men out of a pool of nearly 27 million. 

There was a conscious decision by military and civilian authorities to exempt people they thought might better serve the country in civilian roles--doctors, dentists, people in professions. Some of the motivation no doubt was protecting the children of the privileged, but there was another idea in the zeitgeist. We survived WW2 in part because our scientists built an atomic bomb before Germany or Japan did. The Soviets had just beat us to put up Sputnik. We were losing the science war. Our colleges were part of the war effort. The resultant policy was to feed the presumed best and brightest into the colleges and not waste them on battlefields. 

This meant some young men got "deferments" from service, which likely would mean exemption from service if the war ended soon, as promised.

It split the generation. College students avoided the draft, made progress toward a financially rewarding degree, enjoyed the free spirit of the 1960's counterculture, and waited out the war. Poorer kids went to war, viewed on television as a combination of misery and wanton destruction. It was not an era of "thank you for your service." The war of search and destroy missions by "grunts"--rifle-carrying men on the ground--was horrific and traumatic. Homecoming veterans were widely perceived as damaged in some way. 

Draftees were the unfortunate ones, who had failed the "channeling" test. People lost student deferments by being unable to afford tuition or by dropping or failing a class. Judges would offer men in legal trouble the opportunity to volunteer for the army in lieu of jail.

A divide emerged.  

Colleges became hotbeds of anti-war activity. People at colleges were aware of their relative privilege, but internalized it as their just reward; they were safe because they worked, studied, stayed in school. Deferment was an earned privilege. They were safe by merit.

Working class communities saw it differently. They saw privilege and a raw deal. It was a working-class war, fought by poor boys and people of color.  

Members of the white working class, in North and South both, were receptive to George Wallace's populist 1968 and 1972 campaign rhetoric that condemned students as privileged elitists. I was in the crowd of 20,000 on the Boston Common in October, 1968. The Harvard Crimson quotes his taunts: 

     "I bet this is the first speech like this you Harvard boys have every heard. You just wait till November. You make lots of noise now, and you've had more influence on national policy than the good people of Massachusetts have had, but the day is coming when they're going to have their say."

The Vietnam draft was an inflection point. The Democratic party became "channelled." The spoken message was "end the war, save the country," and end the war for everybody, but the body language was unmistakable. There wasn't solidarity and unity. Young men in college accepted their privilege and felt lucky. They protested the war from the outside. Save yourself, so you can save the world, sure, but stay out of it.

That same ethic and sensibility persists. This blog has noted that the Democratic solution to the problem of low working class incomes was to tell people to go to college and escape the working class.  

Bernie Sanders's progressive message is the opposite. Don't just escape and join the economic oppressors  You save the entire generation by making being a productive worker a good living. We are in this together, as working class people.

That is a fundamental divide in the Democratic Party, one that most pointedly divides the Party of Bernie Sanders from the Party of Pete Buttigieg, and it helps explain why Sanders's supporters are so adamant in opposing Buttigieg. Buttigieg represents--through the body language of biography--the Democratic party of escape into prosperity through merit. Play by the rules, become a Rhodes Scholar, and you, too will avoid the common misery. That isn't what Buttigieg says aloud, but it is what he represents. 

The Vietnam War is not over, not by a long shot.


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Boomers lived this era, and may well remember it. For younger readers, it is history. But it is far from past. The wounds still fester.

Lisa Marie Bailey, Harvard Extension Masters Thesis:
An excellent, very readable history of Selective Service

NY Times Moral Case for Draft Resistance
A short history of the Vietnam draft