National Service

"When people talk about compulsory national service," says Milton J. Friedman, the bantam cock of conservative economics, "it brings to mind Hitler's Jugend. It's so much warmed-over collectivism packaged to look like draft reform."

The rhetoric on the other side has the epic calm of sociological jargon. Partisans of compulsory national service look at their plan as a chance to sort, patch and mold human stock. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, puts it this way: "Universal national service would make it possible to assay the defects and potentialities of every young American on the threshold of adulthood."

The assumption behind compulsory national service is that the battery of institutions which currently educates and indoctrinates young Americans turns out defective products. A way must be found to produce better systems, and that way, in typically American style, is to tack yet another institution atop the old ones.

How millions of teenagers are to be housed, fed, clothed, and set to gainful employment is nowhere discussed. Who is to teach them, in Miss Mead's words, to be "citizens alert to the problems and responsibilities of nationhood in a rapidly changing world," no one knows. That it is right to teach them this euphemism for plain old Americanism is assumed.

A second faction in the national service camp admits that a draft is necessary to supply the military, but contends that other forms of service should be voluntary. They would offer young men (and women, in some versions) a chance to volunteer for military or non-military service. A term in some Peace-Corps-like agency would not exempt a man from the draft, but it would put his name at the bottom of what Selective Service cheerfully names the order or call. In anything but a general mobilization he would not be touched.

Non-volunteers would go into the draft pool, but only for two years. Anyone not called between 18 and 20 would then be free. Details, like how to choose within the pool -- whether to defer students or have a lottery -- could be settled by whoever wanted to settle them.

The benefits of this more modest scheme for national service are the benefits of participatory education: an exciting bankroll of experience, a few years of insulation from the work-a-day world. Psychologists and ex-Peace Corpsmen are generally the most insistent supporters of such plans.

The first step in establishing alternative service, according to its advocates, is to set up a board to approve projects proposed by agencies requesting national service volunteers. Peace Corps work would undoubtedly make the grade, as would work in hospitals and schools. But is a member of SNCC working in the national interest? Does a small community-organizing project which constantly irritates the local political machine have a place in the catalogue of alternative services?

Donald J. Eberly, architect of the most detailed prospectus for the volunteer program, proposes construction of a network of National Service Summer Camps. At 17 or 18, immediately following high school, men and women would collect at these camps for several months of service work and counselling on the possibilities of college or continued volunteer service.

Further counselling would be available from National Service Placement Centers. There young men wanting to enter non-military service, but unsure about which particular activity they prefer, could take mental and physical tests, train in a given skill, and learn about openings in the volunteer world.

Opposition to alternative service comes from those who fear that enlistment in the army would plummet if men were given a respectable way out. The army, they say, would be left with those who failed to meet the physical or mental requirements of the volunteer agencies. In a middle-sized war, with the de facto exemptions of volunteer workers unaffected, alternative service couldn't compare with frontline duty.

Yet without the exemption, alternative service would lose its drawing power. A man might spend two years in the Peace Corps and find, as sometimes happens now, that his draft board had classified him 1-A. There are in fact some 60 cases where a local board has tried to draft a man right out of the Peace Corps. Most of these cases have been appealed to state and federal branches of the Selective Service System.

The Politics of the Draft

All the reports and statistical analysis, all the grand designing that has gone into the draft debate seems less grand when it is remembered that Rep. L. Mendel Rivers (D-S.C.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is a very close friend of Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, the director of Selective Service.