Pros And Cons Of Selective Service Act

As World War II raged in Europe and Asia, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, instituting the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the bill into law on Sept. 16, 1940, and all males age 21 to 36 were required to register with the Selective Service System. Some 45 million men registered and more than 10 million were inducted through the Selective Service System during World War II.
The Selective Training and Service Act expired in March 1947, but Pres. Harry S. Truman pushed for an extension of the draft. Congress obliged, and the Selective Service Act was reenacted in June 1948. A few years later the act was scheduled to expire in June 1950, but the outbreak of the Korean War that …show more content…
More than 1.5 million men were inducted into the armed services during the Korean War. As the U.S. role in the Vietnam War expanded, the Selective Service System fell under scrutiny. In 1966 Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson commissioned a study to improve the Selective Service System. The resulting legislation, the Military Selective Service Act of 1967, did little to get rid of public resistance to the draft. Increasingly, opponents of the war had taken to destroying their draft cards as statements of public protest. The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled in United States v. O’Brien that the destruction of a draft card reserved the furtherance of an important governmental objective that was unrelated to the stifling of unpopular speech. The decision severely reduced the burning of draft cards as a form of protest, but a part of the ruling actually created a precedent that protected other forms of symbolic speech, such as flag burning . In a following year Pres. Richard M. Nixon, signed an amendment to the Military Selective Service Act that returned selection by lottery to the draft process. While this was portrayed as more fair than the existing system of conscription by age, public opinion had already soured on