Draft registration is one of the ways that all young men (and possibly in the futre young women as well) have to interact with the military and think about their relationship to military “service”.
It should go without saying that the only reason young men are required to register with the Selective Service System is so that they can be conscripted into the military, if Congress and the President decide to reinstate a draft.
The only reason for the existence of the Selective Service System is to plan and prepare to carry out a draft that would force people into the military. The only reason for Selective Service registration, and the only use of the registration database, is to facilitate a draft. Registration is part of the process of implementing a draft, not something separate or different from a draft.
Although “Plan A” for Congress, the Pentagon, and probably the President is the poverty draft, “Plan B” for all of them remains conscription.
It’s unclear how long the military will be able to rely on “volunteers”. It’s one thing to sign up for the National Guard or the reserves as a “weekend soldier” in peacetime, and something very different to sign up for 2 years in combat.
Only outsourcing and privatizing war-making to mercenaries and contractors (partly by using private “security contractors” in combat roles, and partly by outsourcing non-combat support work to civilians, freeing a higher percentage of soldiers for combat) has enabled the military to continue the current wars so long, on such a scale, without a draft.
The Selective Service System maintains contingency plans for a general “cannon fodder” draft of young men (based on the current list of male registrants between 18 and 26) and/or a separate Health Care Personnel Delivery System, like the “doctor draft” during some previous U.S. wars, of men and women up to age 44 in 57 medical and related occupations (based on professional licensing lists). These plans could be activated at any time that Congress decides to reinstate either or both forms of a draft. Local draft boards have already been appointed and trained for every county in the U.S.
(For more about the Selective Service System and how a general draft based on the current Selective Service registration database would work, see our article, What Is the Selective Service System? and our FAQ about the Selective Service System and the military draft (required military service), also available in Spanish as Preguntas frecuentes sobre el Sistema de Servicio Selectivo y la conscripción (servicio militar obligatorio).
Knowing and willful refusal by young men to comply with the registration requirement is a crime, but compliance is low and nobody has been prosecuted since 1986.
“One who fails to register must “knowingly” do so before he is guilty of an offense,” as one appellate court noted. To convict anyone of wilful nonregistration, the government would have to prove that they knew they were required to register. This would be difficult unless someone has told the government, or said publicly, that they are deliberately refusing to register.
A July 9, 1982, communication to United States Attorneys from the Justice Department “requires that United States Attorneys notify non-registrants by registered mail that, unless they register within a specified time, prosecutions will be considered. In most instances we anticipate that Federal Bureau of Investigation agents will also interview alleged non-registrants prior to the initiation of prosecutions. Nevertheless, if a non-registrant registers prior to indictment, no further prosecutive action will be taken. The policy is designed to ensure that the refusal to register is willful.” (Memo from Dept. of Justice headquarters to all U.S. Attorneys, quoted in the U.S. District Court decision in U.S. v. Eklund, 551 F. Supp. 964, S.D. Iowa 1982.)
In May 2016, Selective Service officials finally admitted publicly, in interviews with U.S. News & World Report, what has long been obvious: The government abandoned enforcement of draft registration in 1988. Passive resistance has made registration unenforceable, and has made the registration list all but useless for a fair or inclusive draft.
Most men who register for the draft do so only if it is required for some other government program. Men who haven’t registered for the draft are ineligible for some Federal programs (although ineligibility for Federal student aid has been ended). In some states (although not in other states including California, Oregon, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania), the Selective Service System has successfully lobbied for state laws that require men of draft age to register in order to obtain a drivers’ license, or are automatically registered (sometimes without even realizing it) when they get a drivers’ license. Male immigrants of draft age must register before they can be naturalized as U.S. citizens.
Few young men comply fully with the draft registration law. In practice, there is no penalty for late registration, as long as you register before your 26th birthday. Men are supposed to notify the Selective Service System every time they change addresses until they turn 26, but almost nobody does. Most draft notices sent to the addresses in SSS records would be returned as undeliverable, or would be delivered to registrants’ parents’ homes (or former homes), rather than to the intended draftees.
It’s been clear for more than 40 years, and remains the case today, that draft registration has failed. The Resistance has won. Bernard Rostker, who was Director of the Selective Service System from 1979-1981 during the attempt to get every American man born in 1960-1962 to register, told a Washington Post interviewer in 2017, “The list that they have I doubt could pass the legal definition of a complete and objective list, because it is structurally flawed and Selective Service knows it. It’s a list that I’m sure the courts would throw out immediately because it’s not accurate.” In 2019, Rostker testified before the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service that the current draft registration system is “less than useless”, legally indefensible, and should be ended.
Draft registration was suspended by Executive Order (subject to resumption at any time in the same manner), the Selective Service System was put into “deep standby”, and draft boards were disbanded in 1975, but the system was never entirely abolished. A small cadre of contingency planners and a vestigial structure were maintained, and the system was rebuilt from that nucleus in 1980 with the resumption of draft registration and the appointment of new draft boards, both of which have remained active ever since as part of ongoing preparation and contingency planning for resumption of inductions.
The 43 years (and counting) since 1980 of draft registration in the USA, and of resistance to it, are a substantial fraction of the long history of the draft and draft resistance in the USA. Yet the history of the draft, draft registration, and draft resistance since 1980 is often omitted from what are misrepresented as “comprehensive” histories of conscription in the USA, either because this period is “too recent” or because “there is no draft”. But neither of these is a valid argument for historical blindness or amnesia.
As the South African philosopher of social organization and social change Rick Turner observed in his treatise on participatory democracy, The Eye of the Needle, “History is not something that has just come to an end and is certainly not something that came to an end fifty years ago.”
And the history of planning and preparation for a draft, and resistance to it, when induction orders are not being issued is as much a part of the history the draft as the history of planning and preparation for nuclear war, and of resistance to it, during times when orders to launch a nuclear attack have not been issued, are a part of the history of nuclear warfare and anti-nuclear activism.
[Pickets outside an event in Los Angeles during the 1980 Presidential campaign demonstrate the overlap between anti-draft and anti-nuclear activism: “No Nukes, No Draft”. Photo by Anne Knudsen from the Herald Examiner Collection, L.A. Public Library.]
There is as yet no full history of the draft and draft resistance in the USA since 1980. In its absence, there is and can be no “comprehensive” history of conscription throughout U.S. history. What follows is an introductory summary of this missing history.
Draft registration was reinstated and draft boards throughout the USA, which had been eliminated in 1975, were once again appointed and trained, beginning in 1980 under President Carter, supposedly as a response to Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and part of preparations for possible intervention preparations for intervention by the USA in Afghanistan on the side of the Islamic fundamentalist warlords and mujahideen who were then fighting against the Soviet Union. The U.S. government put me in prison for refusing to agree to fight on the side of the people who would later become the Taliban and Al Qaeda. It’s no wonder that people of my generation have no faith in the ability of the government of the USA to decide for us in which wars, or on which (if any) side, we should fight.
Draft registration was reinstated during the 1979-1981 “hostage crisis”, a period of national trauma, political panic, and demonization of Islam that foreshadowed, in many ways, the trauma and panic after 11 September 2001 during which legislation like the Patriot Act was approved. Most Americans — including both politicians and the public — had taken for granted their personal impunity to “blowback” from American meddling in foreign politics. The takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran following the Iranian Revolution and the grant by the U.S. of sanctuary to the ousted former Shah (chronicled by former draft resister David Harris in his book, The Crisis) changed all that, and led to calls to invade or “nuke Iran”.
Hawks who had never reconciled themselves to the end of the draft after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam seized on this “crisis” as an opportunity to push back against the “Vietnam syndrome” that (somewhat) inhibited U.S. military adventurism for a few years after the U.S. lost its war against Vietnam, put the U.S. back on more of a permanent war footing, and start the move back toward a draft.
Some otherwise dovish liberals acquiesced to reinstating draft registration as a relatively “harmless” gesture to appease the war fever. There was opposition to draft registration within the Democratic Party which was even raised on the floor of the 1980 Democratic Convention at which Carter was re-nominated for a second term as President. But Carter and his campaign advisors hoped (in vain, it tuned out) that bringing back draft registration might help Carter counter Ronald Reagan’s campaign criticism of the “weakness” of Carter and the Democratic Party, while stopping short of a nuclear attack or an all-out invasion of Iran.
Opposition to the draft during the U.S. war in Indochina had been part of, and in part a catalyst for, the wider youth liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The reinstatement of draft registration was part of an ageist backlash against the youth movement that coincided with a more widely recognized sexist and racist backlash against the against feminism, civil rights, and affirmative action. That ageist backlash against youth included both draft registration and the shift during and since the Reagan Administration to debt financing of higher education as a new means of channelling young people’s lives.
Even without a draft, the U.S. proxy war in Afghanistan would become, by most measures, the largest and deadliest U.S. shooting war of the 1980s, although not as costly as Reagan’s buildup for what many hawks hoped would be a nuclear first strike against the USSR, and never the focus of as much public attention and popular opposition as either Reagan-era nuclear sabre-rattling or the smaller U.S. wars in Central America. Had draft registration succeeded and a draft been available, and had the U.S. sent its own troops into Afghanistan in the 1980s rather than not until the 2000s, the carnage would have been even worse.
[Picket sign in Los Angeles on the first day of renewed draft registration, 21 July 1980: “Registration is the 1st step to war”. Photo by Dean Musgrove from the Herald Examiner Collection, L.A. Public Library.]
Registering young men and creating a list of potential draftees was a step towards a draft. Pressure for a draft increased during the Reagan Administration, which took office shortly after the resumption of draft registration. But the unexpected extent of noncompliance with Selective Service registration, and the abject failure of the government’s brief attempt to make examples of a few of the “most vocal” nonregistrants, prevented the government from taking the next step toward a draft.
To put it another way, the only reason it’s still “just registration”, and nobody has been drafted since 1973, is that so many people young people resisted registration in 1980, and have continued to do so (mostly unnoticed) ever since.
The result has been a stalemate for more than forty years in which resistance to draft registration has continued to prevent a draft, but registration has continued and the unenforced registration law has remained on the books. There has been neither a sufficiently organized anti-draft movement to force the government to repeal the Military Selective Service Act, nor any face-saving way for Congress to repeal the law without admitting failure and, more importantly, acknowledging the constraint placed on military planning and capacity by the unavailability of a draft, even as a fallback option.
Today, Congress is finally being forced to confront this issue and make a choice. The opening of all combat assignments to women called into renewed question the constitutionality of requiring men but not women to register for a draft, and prompted Congress to consider either to try to extend draft registration to young women as well as young men, or to end draft registration entirely. But Congress has yet to act.
The rest of this page describes how we got to this stalemate.
Be warned: I have a separate page about my own prosecution for draft resistance, but the article below is also, in part, a personal story. The “I” of this Web site is Edward Hasbrouck. Feel free to contact me directly if you want to talk to me about my personal motives, choices, and experiences, or the history of the prosecutions of draft resistance organizers in the 1980s.
Most people who weren’t involved in draft resistance organizing haven’t been paying much attention to draft registration. I’m able to tell this story because I was a participant in it, as an organizer with the National Resistance Commitee (in Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco), co-editor of Resistance News, and one of those few nonregistrants — even among the minority who publicized their resistance — who were singled out for prosecution. But I don’t want to claim more of the credit for our victory over draft registration than is due, or that my motives were “representative” of anyone else, then or now. I did no more than many others, many of whom — women especially — remained invisible, either by their own choice or as a result of the sexism of the media and our own movement. For some radical feminist women draft resisters’ perspectives on the sexism within the anti-draft movement and in its portrayal in the press, and why they were involved in the anti-draft movement in the 1980s in spite of that sexism and even when only men were required to register for the draft, see these articles by Liz Davidson and Ann Wrixon. And the actions of the millions who quietly sat out draft registration were, in the long run, more significant than those of the few thousand who openly defied the registration law.
When draft registration was reinstated for young men in 1980, following a five-year hiatus, Barack Obama — the only U.S. President to date to have been subject to the post-19080 draft registration law — was in one of the first cohorts required to register. Obama later wrote about the campus anti-draft organization at Columbia for the student newspaper, and may have attended a talk about nonregistration given by my friend and comrade in draft resistance organizing, Matt Meyer, at a meeting organized by the Columbia Students Against Militarism in November 1982, at one of the peaks of publicity about prosecutions of nonregistrants.
Those subject to draft registration in 1980 and after were part of a different, often overlooked, generation, “Generation Jones”, with different experiences and attitudes than the baby boom generation that was subject to the draft during the U.S. war in Indochina.
The end of the draft for the U.S. is often used as the delineator of the end of the baby boom. One could equally well use the resumption of draft registration as the delineator of the start of “Generation Jones”.
Men born from mid-1957 through the end of 1959 (on the cusp between the baby boom and Generation Jones) never had to register for the draft, and most of them paid little attention to draft registration. Draft registration was a major issue for men born in 1960-1962, who were supposed to register during mass registration weeks that were front-page news in in July-August 1980 and January 1981. Draft registration remained a significant issue for men born in 1963-1968, who had to register while prosecution for nonregistration seemed at least a possibility. By the time men born after 1968 reached the registration age of 18, it was already becoming clear that the threat of prosecution was minimal, and fewer and fewer people were paying attention to registration.
Barack Obama — who has described himself as part of Generation Jones rather than the baby boom — says he registered for the draft, but the response by his peers was dramatically different than the response by baby boomers to the previous Vietnam-era draft and registration system had been. The response to renewed draft registration showed how much young people’s attitudes had changed during the five-year hiatus in registration. The post-Vietnam, post-Watergate generation didn’t grant the government presumptive trust or sign up for the draft automatically or unthinkingly.
The most significant political developments between the end of the draft in 1973 and the resumption of draft registration in 1980 were the U.S. defeat in Vietnam (throughout which, as the Pentagon Papers showed, U.S. officials lied about the war) and Watergate. These were the political coming-of-age events for those required to register starting in 1980 (Generation Jones) and that distinguished them from those who were subject to the draft during the U.S. war in Indochina (the Baby Boom generation). Most Baby Boomers, even those who came to resist the draft, initially took for granted the honesty of the U.S. government and the legitimacy of its claimed rationale for the war in Indochina. As many draft resisters of that period, including David Harris in Our War, have described in their memoirs, they had to go through process of disillusionment — in most cases only after they had registered for the draft at age 18 — before the reasons for resistance could overcome the government’s presumed legitimacy.
By 1980, Generation Jones had already been disillusioned by Vietnam and Watergate. The burden of proof had shifted, and we expected the government to justify its demands on our lives. For many of us in Generation Jones, the question wasn’t, “Why resist?”, as it had been for the Baby Boomers, but “Why obey?” This change — unnoticed or unappreciated by our elders — was why the response to draft registration in the 1980s and after was so different from that in the earlier era, and why proponents of draft registration failed to anticipate or prepare for the prevalence of noncompliance. Nonregistration was a manifestation of a generational, attitudinal shift that had already happened, rather than a “decision” that could be attributed primarily to any events in 1980 or after.
Participants [in a sociology research study] were asked, “Generally speaking, how much do you think we can trust the government in Washington to do what is right?” Only 17% of the exemplars [who engaged in acts of resistance], but half of the rest of the sample, gave a high trust response on this item. Perhaps such general skepticism about authority systems makes it easier to break the bonds when the unjust variety [of authority] is encountered.[William A. Gamson, Bruce Fireman, and Steven Rytina, Encounters With Unjust Authority, The Dorsey Press, 1982, p. 121; see also pp. 134, 155.]
The profile of Ben Sasway by David Harris in the New York Times Magazine in 1982 picked up on this generational shift and its significance:
I had known I could be drafted for years before I even considered that I had the option to refuse. He learned about both possibilities at the same time. It took intense personal disillusionment for me to distrust the Government. He does so almost as a matter of course. My generation had to be in the middle of a third-world jungle before we even asked why we were there. He seems to have strolled into a perspective we had to struggle mightily to reach….Sasway has done what he thinks is right without having to change his mind first.
That difference between us is also a central link. Though still a sensitive subject in many circles, the 60’s are at the root of much of what America has become since, and the diversity and skepticism that seem to have nurtured Ben Sasway are just two of its byproducts. The framework of his decision would have been significantly narrower without the precedents we set.
“I believe there’s a cultural memory of sorts,” he says, “and that Vietnam affected me and my peer group profoundly even if we can’t remember it.
“A lot of older people don’t understand where I’m coming from when I say you can’t have blind faith in a government. It just doesn’t get to them. I say, ‘Well look at what happened in Vietnam,’ and they say, ‘Vietnam was an isolated incident. We’ve got to put that behind us and get behind our Government for a change.’ We can’t put it behind us. I think a fundamental part of the way I see the world is Vietnam.”
[David Harris, Draft Resistance, 80’s Style, New York Timnes Magazine, 22 August 1982]
There were already stirrings of opposition in response to unsuccessful proposals in Congress in 1979 to resume draft registration.
There was some talk of reinstating the draft in 1979, and some small anti-draft marches and rallies including one on Boston Common in September 1979. But most people didn’t think it conceivable that, so soon after the draft had proven a lightning-rod for opposition to the U.S. war in Indochina, even hawks would be so foolish as to try to bring back the draft, or would have the votes in Congress to do so.
President Carter surprised almost everyone — including his own Selective Service Director, Dr. Bernard Rostker who wrote in his memoir that he was told only hours before — by including a proposal to reinstate draft registration in his State of the Union Address on 23 January 1980.
Soviet troops are attempting to subjugate the fiercely independent and deeply religious people of Afghanistan…. The implications of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan could pose the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War…. The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil…. I have determined that the Selective Service System must now be revitalized. I will send legislation and budget proposals to the Congress next month so that we can begin registration and then meet future mobilization needs rapidly if they arise.[President Jimmy Carter, State of the Union Address, 23 January 1980.]
Rostker’s memoir also makes clear that draft registration was not seen as an “alternative” to the draft but as the first step in reinstating a draft. The push to reinstate draft registration within the Carter and later Reagan administrations came from opponents of the “All-Volunteer Force” (AVF) who saw bringing back draft registration as a step toward their real goal of bringing back the draft.
Opposition to President Carter’s call for draft registration was immediate. There were marches, rallies, and other demonstrations in cities and towns and on campuses throughout the U.S. within days.
[March against the draft by students at West Virginia University, Morgantown, 29 January 1980. Photo from the WVU Committee Against Registration and the Draft, collection of the West Virginia Regional History Center.]
[Picket line outside Jimmy Carter for President re-election campaign headquarters, Atlanta, GA, 15 March 1980. “No War! No Draft! No Way!” “ERA Yes! Draft No!”. Photo by Joe Benton from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives, Georgia State University Library.]
[Banner of the newly-formed U-Mass Boston Anti-War Coalition at rally against draft registration, Government Center, Boston, 2 February 1980. Joe Allen at left. Photo by Michael Letwin, who was one of the speakers (see also his speaking notes) from that rally.]
Opposition to draft registration was not limited to centers of radicalism. This photo, for example, shows a typical local college-town march against the draft in March 1980 in Morgantown, WV, with marchers led by a banner for the West Virginia University chapter of CARD and carrying signs including “Resist the Draft” and “Resist Registration”.
The photo below of a teach-in at West Virginia University on 7 March 2022, as part of the mobiliation for the march on Washington later that month (note the poster for the march displayed behind the speakers), shows some of typical diversity of organizations and ideologies that came together to oppose the reinstatement of draft registration, with a Vietnam veteran, a Trotskyist, a pacifist, and a libertartian sharing the rostrum:
[Anti-Draft teach-in in the “Mountainlair” student union, West Virginia University, Morgantown, 3 March 1980. Photo from the WVU Committee Against Registration and the Draft, collection of the West Virginia Regional History Center.]
From left to right, the speakers shown above are:
Pre-existing organizations may have had an advantage in organizing demonstrations on short notice. They owned bullhorns, knew how to apply for march permits, had organizational banners already made, and had membership lists and phone trees. But many of the first demonstrations in response to Carter’s announcement were entirely spontaneous, with no permits or formalized leadership. Most of those who took part, even when events were nominally sponsored by some organization or other, were newly mobilized, part of no organization, and motivated by no ideology but simply by opposition to the draft. Most of the participants and organizers in these initial protests were of draft age, and at least as many of were women as men. “I would not register. I feel I can’t. I would not serve the war effort. If that meant going to jail, as much as it scares me, I would still do it,” Tufts University senior Nancy Brink told the Boston Globe on 17 February 1980. Protesters outside Carter’s reelection campaign headquarters carried picket signs including, “ERA YES! DRAFT NO!”
Students were most visible only because they were the most concentrated groups of young people, but non-student youth, parents, and other older allies were also galvanized into action by Carter’s proposal. Anti-war military veterans, veterans of draft resistance and conscientious objection, and other veterans of the movement against the U.S. war in Indochina — many of whom thought they had ended the draft in the USA for good — were also a prominent presence. Many of those who had supported resistance to the draft during the U.S. war in Indochina renewed their call to resist the draft in 1980.
[“No Draft of Women or Men!” Ron Kovic, Vietnam veteran against the war and author of Born on the Fourth of July, burns a draft registration while seated in his wheelchair in front of the Federal Building in Los Angeles, 22 July 1980. “Kovic said he did not want his 19 year old brother to become a victim of the draft as he did in the Vietnam War.” Photo by Mike Sergieff from the Herald Examiner Collection, L.A. Public Library.]
Nonregistration was not a new idea. While many of those who resisted the draft during the U.S. war in Indochina came to their position of resistance or their willingness to act on it only after having registered with the Selective Service System at age 18, some high school students, especially those exposed to older resisters who regretted having registered, had openly or covertly refused to register when then turned 18, and encouraged their peers to do likewise. Some of these older nonregistrants were role models and mentors to nonregistrants in the 1980s.
President Carter presented his proposal for draft registration as a way to “send a message” to the Soviet Union about U.S. readiness to intervene militarily in response to the Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan (where the U.S. went on to arm and fund the fighters who would later come to call themselves the Taliban and Al Qaeda). But most anti-draft groups saw it primarily as a step toward war with Iran in response to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that overthrew the tyrannical U.S. backed Shah, the so-called “Hostage Crisis”, and criticism of Carter as insufficiently bellicose by 1980 Republican Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. “No war for oil!” and We won’t die for [insert name of major oil company]! were among the most common slogans of the new anti-draft movement.
Demonstrations and other nonviolent actions against the reinstatement of draft registration included marches and rallies in Washington, DC, and San Francisco, CA by several tens of thousands of people on each coast on 22 March 1980. In the pre-Internet, pre-social-media era, this was a remarkably large and rapid mobilization.
“Refuse to Register” and “I will not register” picket signs screen-printed by Fred Moore for the NRC were prominent at the San Francisco march (see this list of endorsers of the San Francisco march), where Fred Moore was one of the speakers.
[Front ranks of the West Coast mobilization against the draft and draft registration on Market St. in San Francisco, 22 March 1980. Photo by Chris Booth for Resistance News.]
[West Coast mobilization against the draft and draft registration passing the main Post Office and draft registration site (today the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals courthouse) on 7th St. at Mission St. in San Francisco, 22 March 1980. Photo from “It’s About Times” newspaper, via Foundsf.org.]
[Crowd at the West Coast mobilization against the draft and draft registration listens to speakers including Fred Moore of the National Resistance Committee. Civic Center Plaza in front of City Hall, San Francisco, 22 March 1980. Photos by Chris Booth for Resistance News.]
[Lesbian Anti-Draft Action contingent in the West Coast mobilization against the draft and draft registration, 22 March 1980. Photo by Chris Booth for Resistance News. The next banner, partially visible, is from the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center. President Carter had proposed requiring both women and men to register for the draft, and straight feminists and many other women were also among the organizers and marchers in San Francisco and Washington.]
[East Coast mobilization against the draft and draft registration, Washington, DC, 22 March 1980. Photo by permission of Craig Glassner, previously published in Fifth Estate. Left to right: Edward Hasbrouck, Mike Lawrence, unknown, Bill Steyert.]
I was in Washington that day with Mike Lawrence and Vietnam Veteran for Peace Bill Steyert, who I worked with as fundraising canvassers for Citizens for a Better Environment (CBE) in Chicago, holding this fluorescent piss-yellow on black “Piss on the Pentagon” banner on the steps of the Treasury Department headquarters to the enthusiastic cheers of passing marchers. Our employers at CBE didn’t know about or approve of the banner, and docked our pay but didn’t fire us for missing a day of work without permission to go to Washington for the march.
[David Harris speaks to the crowd in front of the U.S. Capital.]
Draft resister, prison veteran, and Resistance organizer David Harris spoke at the rally in Washington and took part in an East Coast organizing meeting for the National Resistance Committee the following day.
Other speakers at the Washington, DC, march and rally included the former SNCC chair Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael); Alan Canforaone of the students shot and wounded by the National Guard at Kent State University in 1970; and the feminist poet Denise Levertov, whose “A Speech: For Antidraft Rally, D.C., March 22, 1980” was reprinted as a prose poem in Candles in Babylon, New Directions Press, 1982, and other anthologies and collections. (See also Levertov’s earlier speech at an earlier anti-draft rally on Boston Common, 15 September 1979, reprinted in Light Up the Cave, New Directions Press, 1981.) Some elected politicians spoke, but were not well received. (This article includes quotes from these and others of the speakers at the D.C rally. I’ve been unable to find a recording, transcript, or any of the speakers’ notes from either the D.C. or S.F. rallies. I would welcome any leads.)
[Marchers on their way to the U.S. Capitol, 22 March 1980. Photo from the WVU Committee Against Registration and the Draft, collection of the West Virginia Regional History Center.]
Both the House and Senate appropriations committees held hearings in February and March, 1980, on the Carter Administration’s request for authorization and funding for registration of both women and men. Many members of Congress were critical of the proposal and skeptical about the rationale for registration. (This letter to a constituent from Sen. Alan Cranston (D-CA) is typical of mainstream Congressional arguments against draft registration. Both members of Congress and witnesses from the anti-draft movement (including the National Resistance Committee) questioned how the registration requirement would be enforced and how addresses would or could be kept up to date. They predicted — correctly, as it turned out — that noncompliance would render registration unenforceable.
The House Judiciary Committee held a separate hearing in Madison, WI, on 14 April 1980 on the Judiciary Implications of Draft Registration, which heard more testimony about the National Resistance Committee and plans for draft registration resistance. Witnesses summoned from the Department of Justice declined to discuss their enforcement plans — which, it turned out, didn’t exist. Dr. Curtis W. Tarr, who had been Director of the Selective Service System in 1970-1972, was the first witness called to testify. Dr. Tarr’s plane was delayed by a blizzard and he didn’t make it to Madison that day, but his prescient “written testimony”:/draft/Tarr-1980.pdf against trying to reinstate registration was entered into the record:
My judgment is that in this national climate, offenders would constitute a significant portion of the total pool.
If a person were apprehended for failure to obey the law, the next problem would be prosecution…. I doubt whether U.S. Attorneys or Federal Judges would attempt to convict young people in numbers that would ensure reasonable compliance with the law. Reacting to that laxity, counselors would soon advise young people not to register since the penalty would be inconsequential in the unlikely event that the offender were caught.
Once registration has taken place, then records must be maintained. Enforcing a requirement to notify Selective Service of a changed address would be even more difficult than enforcing the duty to register. Again, courts would not wish to treat this failure as a serious transgression, a further encouragement to non-compliance.
Thus I foresee the possibility of evasion by large numbers that would overwhelm the agencies for law enforcement and the judiciary.
[Written testimony of Dr. Curtis W. Tarr, Judiciary Implications of Draft Registration, Hearings before the the Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives, Madison, WI, 14 April 1980.]
Eventually, despite these warnings about likely enforcement problems, Congress voted to appropriate money for registration of men — but not to authorize registration of women.
The mass registration start-up weeks in July-August 1980 (for men born in 1960-1961) and January 1981 (for men born in 1962) provided an ideal focus for anti-draft organizing and action. There were informational pickets and on-site draft counseling at Post Offices throughout the country.
[Scene outside the Berkeley, CA, Post Office, Monday, 5 January 1981, the first day of the week during which all men born in 1962 were supposed to register. Photo by Andrew Mazer for Resistance News.]
Hundreds of people were arrested in sit-ins and other direct actions against draft registration during the mass registration weeks. See this page on the “Boston 18” for more about one of the best-documented such cases, which provides a snapshot of who took part in mass anti-draft actions, their backgrounds, and their motives.
[Sit-in blocks draft registration inside Main Post Office in Portland, OR, 5 January 1981. Photo by Michael Lloyd, The Oregonian.]
Different groups led the organizing of anti-draft activities in different communities, but draft resisters had a much wider range of reasons to resist than was typically reflected in any organizational manifesto. During the U.S. war in Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s, anti-draft activism including draft resistance was generally framed as a subset of the movement against that specific war. There was much less unity in the 1980s and after, when there was no consensus even amongst anti-war activists on which wars to prioritize in their activism.
In the 1980s, some draft resisters and anti-draft and anti-war activists and organizations focused first and foremost on the existential threat of a nuclear World War 3 between the USA and the USSR, some on the proxy war in Afghanistan between those nuclear superpowers (arguably the largest U.S. war of the 1980s and the “hottest” war of that period of the “Cold War”), others on U.S. war-making closer to home in Central America. Still others focused on the ageism, sexism, racism, homophobia, and/or class bias of the draft and the military. Libertarians, including some “Reagan revolutionaries”, weren’t necessarily anti-war (although some were isolationist or opposed to foreign military interventions) but instead focused on the authoritarianism of the draft and the slippery slope from a purely military draft to compulsory national service with both military and civilian components.
Some individuals and groups got involved in anti-draft activism in the early 1980s not primarily because of the issue itself but because it provided a tactical opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of nonviolent direct action (rather than “protest” or other ways to try to influence government actions), just as some of the same people and groups had gotten involved in activism against nuclear power in the late 1970s as an opportunistic choice to target a component of the nuclear-industrial complex that seemed more vulnerable than nuclear weapons to popular and political action (and to direct action rather than “protest”). Other groups seized on the issue of the draft, also opportunistically, because it was attracting attention and publicity that they hoped to piggyback on to publicize their own prior agendas and/or recruit for their own organizations. Attempts, especially by people too old to be required to register for the draft, to speak for the entirety of “the anti-draft movement” or to represent the motives of draft resisters were common, but should not be taken as accurately reflecting the motives of draft resisters, or their diversity.
The anti-draft movement of the 1980s was its own movement, overlapping like a Venn diagram with many other movements and motives. It wasn’t simply a subset of “the anti-war movement” (which was itself fragmented in this period, as just noted) or of any other single movement. It can’t be understood solely by reference to issues of peace and war. Some anti-draft activists supported “wars of liberation”. Some supported armed individual and/or collective “self-defense”. Some supported neither, or defined them differently.
There was then, and has been since, almost no systematic inquiry into the political or organizational sources of anti-draft activism in the 1980s. A notable exception, although not focused solely on draft resisters, is Sharon Presley’s Ph.D. dissertation, Values and attitudes of political resisters to authority (City University of New York, 1982). Presley was a prominent libertarian feminist scholar-activist and co-founder of Laissez Faire Books, which functioned as a “clubhouse” and hub of libertarian activism in New York City. Her research sample, recruited though contacts including the National Resistance Committee and the War Resisters league, included draft registration resisters (I was one of those surveyed), war tax resisters, and participants in anti-nuclear direct actions. Presley was well known as a libertarian feminist scholar and activist. Her thesis committee chair was Stanley Milgram, whose research focused on obedience to authority. Presley focused on disobedience to authority and what distinguishes the minority who resist authority.
Anti-draft coalitions brought together leftists and libertarians, socialists and anarchists, liberals and radicals, pacifists and non-pacifists, sectarians and individualists, religious and secular, idealogues and those with no adherence to any “-ism”.
In addition to single-issue anti-draft activities, draft registration was an issue raised by many multi-issue coalitions and events in the early 1980s, from the 1980 Chicano Moratorium to the 1980-1981 Women’s Pentagon Action to nuclear disarmament and Central America solidarity rallies, marches, civil disobedience, and direct actions.
The possibility of a new draft was already raised in 1979 in a preliminary list of demands for the 1980 Chicano Moratorium, which included, “We must oppose the draft since the working class minority youth will be the ones to most in case of another war as they did in the last war.” The issue of the draft moved to the forefront of the Chicano Moratorium immediately after Carter’s call for restatement of draft registration: The Chicano Moratorium is a great event in our history. At our first Moratorium in 1970 over 20,000 Chicanos and other nationalities took a stand against the Viet Nam War and our oppression here in the U.S. Ten years later, we confront many of the same issues we did at the time of the original Moratorium. AGAIN, we face the threat of being drafted and sent to fight a war for our oppressors…. Carter is gearing up to reestablish the military draft. During the Viet Nam War Chicanos had the highest percentage of casualties. We made up 20% of the dead, while we were only 5% of the total U.S. population. THIS IS GENOCIDE! Our stand today should be what it was in 1970: Our war is here, for our rights! Chicano students should organize an active resistance to draft registration, especially among our younger brothers and sisters in the high schools. A nonregistrant who was later one of those prosecuted, Rusty Martin, student body president at the University of Northern Iowa,
was one of the speakers at the march and rally for nuclear disarmament in New York City
on 12 June 1982 by more than a million people — the largest single political gathering in one place in U.S. history. “My crime is not that I did not register, but that I publicly opposed the registration process,” he told a UPI reporter when he was indicted.
“We drove out from Iowa and I went straight to the UN rally….
I was looking at an amazing mass of people,” Rusty remembers.
The one sound bite from Rusty’s speech that made the newspapers was characteristic
of anti-draft arguments that addressed both nuclear war and U.S. imperialism:
“Saying no to the draft is saying no to the crazy idea of winning a nuclear war
and no to future Vietnams.”
(Rusty Martin has no photo or record of what he said that day. Most if not
all of the speeches were recorded by Pacifica Radio, but not all were broadcast —
the live broadcast often cut away from the stage to interviews with people in the crowd.
If anyone has a recording, notes, or photo of Rusty’s speech that day, please me know.)
[“No Draft” was the first of the demands on this poster by Carlos Callejo for the 1980 Chicano Moratorium,
held on the 10th anniversary of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium at which “Chale Con El Draft!” had been one of the most common slogans.]
[Nonregistrants (left to right) Rusty Martin, Jerry Mehalovich, Jeff Patch, and Gary Eklund burn draft registration forms outside the main post office in Des Moines, IA, on 21 July 1980, the first day of the registration week for men born in 1960. Men born in 1961 were supposed to register the following week. Unlike burning draft cards prior to 1975, burning registration forms is legal, and was a common expression of protest of draft registration. At many post offices, protesters removed all the registration forms from counter display racks, often replacing them with anti-draft literature printed to resemble the official forms. At least several hundred young men who were required to register, and perhaps as many as several thousand, actively publicized their resistance or informed the government of their refusal to comply with the law, but only 20, including Rusty Martin and Gary Eklund, were ever prosecuted.]
[Nonregistrants Edward Hasbrouck, Rusty Martin, and Matt Meyer, Des Moines, IA, September 2023. Photo by Kay Meyer. Matt Meyer was a member of the steering committee that selected the speakers for the march and rally on 12 June 2023, and later chair of the War Resisters League.]
Nonregistrants for the draft played prominent roles in many other movements of that period. Leo Schiff, one of thousands of nonregistransts who were never prosecuted despite publicly declaring their refusal to register, was part of one of the Plowshares actions of symbolic direct disarmament at the nuclear submarine missile tube plan in Quonset Point, RI, in 1984.
The draft was also an issue for antiwar feminists, even after Congress narrowed President Carter’s proposal and voted to require only men to register. As illustrated by the “Stop the Drfat” picket sign in the center of poster above by Yolanda V. Fundora, the draft was one of the major issues raised by 2,000+ participants in the Women’s Pentagon Actions in November 1980 and November 1981, well after draft registration had been limited to men. According to their Unity Statement:
We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid. At the same time our cities are in ruins, bankrupt; they suffer the devastation of war. Hospitals are closed, our schools are deprived of books and teachers. Our young Black and Latino youth are without decent work. They will be forced, drafted to become the cannon fodder for the very power that oppresses them… We do not want to be drafted into the army. We do not want our young brothers to be drafted. We want them equal with us.
Click here for more feminist statements against the draft and draft registration
Pop culture references to the opposition to draft registration weren’t limited to punk rock. Anti-draft songs ranged from Frank Zappa’s 1980 single “I Don’t Wanna Get Drafted” (written early in 1980 while the possibility of requiring women to register for the draft along with men was still under consideration, and with lyrics including, “My sister don’t wanna get drafted, she don’t wanna go”; Frank Zappa’s two sons were both approaching draft age at the time) to the Dead Kennedys’ “When Ya Get Drafted” and Prince’s 1980 Partyup (“You gonna have to fight your own damn war… ‘Cause we don’t wanna fight no more”).
Punk rock was the embodiment of anti-authoritarianism, youth rebellion, and an often-explicit anarchism, and one of the most explicit draft resistance anthems of that era was the Clash’s “It’s Up To You Not To Heed The Call Up”, recorded in New York in the summer of 1980, released as a single that fall, and also included on the 1981 blockbuster triple album set, “Sandinista!”:
It’s up to you not to heed the call-up
You must not act the way you were brought up
Who knows the reasons why you have grown up?
Who knows the plans or why they were drawn up?
It’s up to you not to heed the call-up
I don’t want to die!
It’s up to you not to hear the call-up
I don’t want to kill!
For he who will die
Is he who will kill
Songs about the draft from within “the movement” included Dave Lippman’s “Stick Into the Gear”, recorded in September 1980 and released as a single later that year:
If there’s a draft, if there’s a war
Then I wanta know what for
I ain’t gonna go, I ain’t gonna fight
To defend dictators, it ain’t right…
(chorus)
No draft, no war, no aggression no more
No nations made poor by the oppressor next door
Colonizing criminals don;t just disappear
You’ve got to stop their war machine
Jam a stick into the gear…
Stick into the gear.
In addition to poetry and prose by draft-age men and women published in Resistance News and elsewhere, literary opposition to draft registration in the 1980s included poems by Allen Ginsberg (“Verses Written for Student Antidraft Registration Rally 1980”, in Plutonium Ode and Other Poems 1977-1980, and “Industrial Waves”, in White Shroud, Poems 1980-1985); Carolyn Forché (“Selective Service”, in “The Country Between Us”, 1981), and Denise Levertov (“A Speech: For Antidraft Rally, D.C., March 22, 1980”, in Candles in Babylon).
More than a million potential draftees born in 1960-1962 opted out by boycotting the initial mass registration periods in July-August 1980 (for men born in 1960 and 1961) and January 1981 (for men born in 1962). The rate of compliance with draft registration declined after that, even when the government mounted well-publicized show trials of a few of the “most vocal” registration resisters, who it was able to single out and convict on the basis of their public statements (and after personally serving them with notice of another “final” chance to register without penalty).
The low level of compliance with draft registration in 1980 and after, especially compared with the much higher rate of compliance with registration during the U.S. war in Indochina, surprised many people, but should have surprised nobody. Not only were there no local draft boards to monitor and enforce compliance with registration (draft boards were reconstituted after 1980, but have no local offices or staff and no role in registration or enforcement) but, more significantly, the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam generation had grown up with, and internalized, lessons about the government and the war that their elders had failed to learn. Draft registration was (and still is) a government-operated survey of young people’s attitudes that has ex[posed latent anti-war and anti-authoritarian sentiments as well as changes in attitudes and assumptions that occurred during the five-year hiatus in draft registration from 1975 to 1980.
Warmongers and revisionist historians may have deluded themselves into believing their bogus line that the public had repudiated and turned away from its revulsion at the U.S. role in the war in Indochina and at the draft that enabled the scope of that role, but young people knew better. The only reason overt anti-draft and anti-war activism had faded to invisibility was because the draft had been ended and the U.S. had withdrawn from Vietnam. The reinstatement of draft registration, combined with Reagan’s sabre-rattling, revived those sentiments. Revisionist histories have re-cast President Reagan as backed by a popular consensus. But like President Trump, he was strikingly polarizing and inspired both hatred and fear on the part of centrists and liberals as well as those on the left who were afraid of his attacks on civil rights and civil liberties, his imperialist aggression abroad, and his threats of a nuclear first strike.
Early in Reagan administration, the Department of Justice considered several enforcement options, including the possibility of prosecutions for conspiracy, aid, abetment, or counseling of resistance, partly on the ageist theory that older allies of draft resistance were “old enough to know better” and more culpable than the presumably gullible draft-age men they had “led astray”.
As discussed in my 1984 article, National Resistance “Conspiracy”?, based on internal government documents released on discovery in some of the trials of nonregistrants, policy-makers at DOJ headquarters didn’t rule out conspiracy or counseling prosecutions of organizations like the National Resistance Committee. But for tactical reasons, the DOJ decided to focus first on a few prosecutions of nonregistrants. That strategy backfired, and eventually the DOJ gave up entirely on prosecutions for violations of the Military Selective Service Act, without trying to prosecute resistance advocates, allies, or conspirators.
The enforcement strategy the government decided to pursue was spelled out in a memo drafted by David J. Kline, Senior Legal Advisor in the Department of Justice, and sent over the signature of his boss, Lawrence Lippe, Chief of the General Litigation and Legal Advice Section of the Criminal Division of the DOJ, to Assistant Attorney General D. Lowell Jensen on 11 January 1982:
The total number of nonregistrants will doubtless remain very high when measured against the Department’s prosecutive resources. However, an initial round of well-publicized, successful prosecutions should have a dramatic effect in further reducing the number of non-registrants….We first would have to accept the simple fact that, although some persons will be prosecuted, there will be others who are neither registered nor prosecuted. Nevertheless, such a policy, geared to present funding levels, might well yield sufficient general deterrence so that the Selective Service system receives sufficient registrations to maintain the credibility of the system.
Some of the “Reagan Revolutionaries” and other Reagan Administration officials were libertarians who had opposed the draft during the U.S. war in Indochina, and argued within the Reagan administration for an end to draft registration. Others had been, and still were, firm supporters of the draft.
Cracking down on draft resisters and student and youth activism was in Reagan’s political DNA. Reagan had been elected Governor of California in part on the strength of a campaign promise to crack down on uppity students and associated activist hangers-on at the University of California at Berkeley, and had brought many veterans of that campaign with him to Washington.
The Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice in the early 1980’s, D. Lowell Jensen, had worked together in the Alameda County [CA] District Attorney’s office in Oakland the 1960s with Ed Meese, later a key aide to Ronald Reagan first as Governor of California and later as President. Jensen led the prosecution in the 1969 conspiracy trial of the Oakland Seven for organizing Stop the Draft Week, an attempt to shut down the Oakland military induction center. At the Department of Justice in the early 1980s, Jensen oversaw the development of the policy for attempted enforcement of Selective Service registration through prosecutions of a few selected nonregistrants. During Reagan’s second term, he sent Jensen back to Oakland with an appointment as a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
At least hundreds, and perhaps as many of a couple of thousand, names of nonregistrants were referred to the Department of Justice after they failed to come forward and register after being sent certified letters by the Selective Service System threatening them with prosecution if they didn’t register. The overwhelming majority of Federal prosecutors to whom these case were assigned chose not to seek indictments, even if the subjects persisted in nonregistration, for reasons that have been largely unexamined. The tiny percentage of cases in which indictments were sought appear, so far as I can tell, to have been those referred to Federal prosecutors with an exceptionally strong personal, political, or ideological animus against draft resisters. These were basically open-and-shut cases, in which the potential defendants had made incriminating public statements or sent what amounted to written confessions to the government. But it’s clear from their (in)action on these referrals that all but a handful of Federal prosecutors didn’t think that even flagrant nonregistration warranted [prosecution as a Federal felony.
I was one of only 20 people prosecuted under the policy that evolved as described above. See this page for more about my own story and the case of the United States vs. Edward Hasbrouck including the role of Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Mueller.
Most of those of us who continued to refuse to register after being indicted were convicted, solely on the basis of our public statements such as this letter I wrote to the government in 1981. Nonregistrants who kept quiet faced almost no real risk of prosecution, even then.
I spent a month in the custody of the Attorney General in 1982 for an act of solidarity with other nonregistrants, and another 4 1/2 months in 1983-1984 for my own refusal to register. A long article about these experiences, written while I was in prison, was published as the lead article in Resistance News #14, March 1984, under the headline, Edward Hasbrouck is in Lewisburg Federal Prison Camp.
Those who had spoken out publicly and/or written to the government were generally easy for the government to find, and all but one of the 20 indicted nonregistrants presented ourselves in court as ordered. Paul Jacob failed to appear for arraignment, and was often described as having “gone underground. He actually lived quite openly under his own name, and did almost nothing to actively “evade” arrest. But as with many fugitives, the government did almost nothing to actively track him down. He was arrested a little more than two years after his indictment. No additional charges were brought against him for failure to appear or flight from prosecution.
Despite convictions and in many cases prison sentences, the show trials backfired.
Opponents of the draft were far from unified, ideologically or organizationally, and support for those who were prosecuted was often conditional and equivocal. Not all opponents of the draft supported resistance as a strategy. Anti-draft organizing was plagued by ageism and sectarian in-fighting. There was little respect from anti-draft activists and organizations for the autonomy of individual draft resisters — even, ironically, from those who claimed to value “conscience” as paramount. In my own case, one anti-draft group actually filed a legal brief in my case as a “friend of the court” asking the judge to rule on motions and arguments I had not raised. (See also this open letter I wrote from prison to share some of my experiences with others others who might later be singled out for prosecution.)
Fortunately, these internal divisions were largely invisible to the general public. There was little reporting, either in mainstream or “movement” press (outside of explicitly anarchist and/or resistance publications) of my objections to registration or to court-ordered “service”. Instead, headlines focused on the facts that (1) prosecutions of nonregistrants were “selective” and targeted only those who were, in the government’s eyes, the “most vocal”, and (2) many people were “protesting” registration and the draft.
Prosecutions thus served mainly to publicize and encourage the resistance. Nonregistrants learned that only those who spoke out would be, or could be, prosecuted, and that the government was powerless to round up the millions of people who were violating the law. Mass nonviolent direct action provided, and continues to provide, safety in numbers for draft registration resisters.
(See more here about my prosecution for refusing to register and about the other prosecutions of nonregistrants in the 1980s.)
[Outside the Federal courthouse in Boston before my sentencing for refusal to register for the draft, 14 January 1983. I’m holding a copy of the statement from the anonymous Abolitionists who had locked the courthouse doors the night before. Photo by Tom Landers, Boston Globe, via Getty Images]
Even Federal appellate judges reviewing convictions from the show trials of the “most vocal” nonregistrants recognized the message they communicated:
“Apparently the moral of the government’s policy is: if you want to evade the draft registration law, do nothing, say nothing, and you will not be prosecuted. Only those with the courage and candor to write the government refusing to register will be punished.” (U.S. v. Eklund, 733 F.2d 1287, 8th Circuit 1984, en banc, Lay, Chief Judge, dissenting)
I was part of organizing and networking for demonstrations in response to any indictment of a nonregistrant beginning in 1981. There were protests, rallies, marches, or vigils in more than 100 cities and towns throughout the U.S. in June 1982 in response to the first indictment of a nonregistrant, that of Ben Sasway in San Diego on 30 June 1981.
[Sean Herlihy (left) and Russ Ford (right) under arrest at blockade of Selective Service headquarters, Washington, DC, 18 October 1982. Photo by Grace Hedemann Hane, War Resisters League.]
In some places there was organized lobbying of Federal prosecutors to make them aware of the local support for draft registration resisters and the likely anti-draft response to any prosecutions. In Chicago, after a meeting with allies of draft registration resisters, the U.S. Attorney decided not to seek indictments in any of the 75 cases of suspected nonregistrants that had been referred to him.
There were shows of support and solidarity with draft resistance everywhere that nonregistrants were prosecuted, even in locations Federal prosecutors had chosen as likely to be "sympathetic" to the prosecution of draft resisters. In Des Moines, IA, for example, 200 people surrounded the Federal courthouse and 21 people were arrested on Federal charges of "interfering with the administration of justice" for blockading the courthouse to prevent the "political trial" of Gary Eklund.
[Posters for events at the trial of Andy Mager in Syracuse, NY; the trial of Russ Ford in Hartford, CT; and the trial and sentencing of Edward Hasbrouck in Boston, MA. More posters and graphics from anti-draft events in the 1980s.]
While only 20 nonregistrants were prosecuted, several thousand registration-age men had taken the same risk by publicizing their refusal to register and/or informing the government about their refusal to comply with the law. But these visible and confrontational forms of resistance were just the tip of the iceberg of widespread but quiet defiance of the call to register for the draft.
Any thought of further prosecutions was abandoned for good in 1988 when the Department of Justice refused to waste time investigating any more nonregistrants. Since then, the resistance has been almost completely spontaneous. As a grassroots movement of individual direct action, without leaders or organizations, it has also been almost entirely invisible. As a result, most recent reporting on the prospect of a draft has overlooked the significance of the ongoing resistance.
Click here for more about the prosecutions of draft registration resisters, 1982-1986
The organizational history of the visible anti-draft movement of the 1980s has yet to be written, and is beyond the scope of this article. But a few key but obvious ideas may help inform and guide that historical work:
Most of those who violated the Military Selective Service Act in the 1980s or after were neither part of, nor motivated by, any organization or ideology. The organized "anti-draft movement" was the very small visible portion of a very large iceberg, which made it both potentially powerful and highly vulnerable (and attractive) to potential cooptation or takeover by other organizations that wanted to use its "hot button" status to promote their ideologies or recruit support for their organizations and issues.
These underlying dynamics produced a constant tension between efforts to build intersectional solidarity between anti-draft activism and other movements, and efforts by other existing organizations and movements to capture the anti-draft movement (or at least its organized and public face) and impose their definitions and interpretations on the public image of its meaning, motives, and significance.
This tension played out within anti-draft organizing, both nationally and in many localities. Resisters were often used as "poster children" and props for others' messaging, and often had to struggle (not least against ageism within the anti-draft movement) to speak for ourselves.
[Ten-year-old John Delany protests draft registration outside the main downtown post office, Sacramento, CA, 1985. Rather thahn saying anything about John himself, the caption mentione only that John is the son of Dan and Chris Delany, founders of the Loaves and Fishes Catholic Worker homeless shaleter and soup kitchen. Photographer unknown, from the Suttertown News collection, Center for Sacramento History.]
Rather than celebrating the diversity of motives and forms of opposition and resistance to the draft and draft registration, many activists tried to impose their own ideas as to which motives, and which forms of anti-draft action, they believed to be the politically correct ones. Some believed -- or claimed publicly, even if they knew it wasn't true -- that most draft resisters identified as "conscientious objectors". Others wanted to portray us all as motivated primarily by anti-imperialism. Many of the most motivated and committed anti-draft activists were also those who brought their own preexisting agendas, and were least interested in listening to, much less amplifying, what resisters actually said about our own motivations and agendas.
The disunity and rapid disappearance of anti-draft organizing and the visible anti-draft "movement" in the 1980s tended to obscure the continued, and ultimately more significant, quiet noncompliance, and lent credibility to the false perception that noncompliance with Selective service registration is a thing of the past (just as that active resistance to the draft was a thing only of the 1960s and 1970s, not the 1980s).
Since 1980, noncompliance with Selective Service registration and address update requirements has been sustained -- almost entirely by spontaneous individual action, and in the absence of any ongoing draft resistance organizing or propaganda -- at rates many times higher than the resistance at the peak of the U.S. war in Indochina or any earlier U.S. war or draft. Mass direct action (noncompliance with registration) has prevented, and continues to prevent, reinstatement of the draft, and has rendered registration completely unenforceable.
Unable to get young people to register voluntarily, the Selective Service System has tried to shift to a system of economic coercion and incentives, turning the draft registration program into a form of "poverty draft".. At the urging of lobbyists for the Selective Service System, some states require young men to agree to be registered with the Selective Service System if they want to obtain a state's license. Most of those who register in other states do so in order to qualify for student loans, government jobs, or job training, or in order to protect their immigration status and eligibility for U.S. citizenship. (Almost all male U.S. residents are required to register for the draft, including non-U.S. citizens).
The shift from predominantly grant-based funding for higher education and vocational training in the 1960's and 1970's to predominantly loan-based funding in the 1980's and after roughly coincided with the reinstatement of draft registration, with which it has since been linked. It has served to channel> loan recipients into needing higher-paying jobs to pay off their debts, and to make it more difficult for them to choose unpaid or underpaid public service work. This is a major reason why, despite the continued interest of young people in activism, it is harder for them to choose lower-income careers today than it was for those in the 1960’s who typically graduated from college with minimal, if any, debt. In today’s circumstances, few people who want to further their education feel they have much choice about whether to register for the draft (although they do have a choice, and we urge them to exercise that choice), and their registration is no indication of their willingness to be drafted. Many more people would resist if they were drafted than are willing to risk negative consequences (including forgoing Federal student loans) for resistance at the time of registration.
Almost no one complies with the legal requirement to notify the Selective Service System of address changes until a man reaches age 26. We presume that, like almost all his peers, Barack Obama violated this law, although he may have done so unknowingly, couldn’t have been prosecuted without proof of knowledge of the law, and could no longer be prosecuted or penalized, even if he now admitted knowingly breaking the law, since the statute of limitations for either nonregistration or failure to report address changes expires on one’s 31st birthday.
Most registrants have effectively “unregistered” by moving without telling the Selective Service System where they have gone, and most induction notices would end up in the dead letter office. That will make it even harder for the government to try to crack down on those who haven’t registered, or who refuse to report for induction, since the government must prove to a jury that anyone accused of a draft law violation actually got a notice of what they were supposed to do (register, report address changes, or report for induction).
As did the National Resistance Committee, I support all those who resist conscription of the labor (through the draft) or their money (through war taxes), regardless of whether they do so through quiet evasion or open defiance.
The Selective Service System assumes that all registrants are willing to report whenever and wherever they are called up, to fight and kill whomever they are told to kill. In reality, many registrants will resist if drafted. Others registered in the hope or expectation that they will qualify as conscientious objectors.
Many people registered only out of fear, and will report only if compelled to do so — which will prove as impossible as compelling young men to register has proved. Others were registered involuntarily and essentially “passively”, under state laws (passed in response to lobbying by Selective Service) that require draft-age applicants for state driver’s licenses to consent to having their drivers-license information used to register them with the SSS. (California is the largest state without such a state law, although proposals for such a California law have been made repeatedly.) These people’s registration status indicates nothing about their willingness to be drafted or the likelihood that they would resist a draft.
Still others have registered in order to qualify for Federal student loans (a requirement that ended in 2021), job training, government jobs, and other programs. But people who register solely in order to be able to afford to go to college, or to get or keep a job, can’t be presumed to be willing to be drafted.
Some people dismiss the actions of millions of young people who have quietly ignored the requirement to register for the draft, and to tell the Selective Service Service whenever they move, as presumably apolitical, insignificant, or “cowardly”, or as draft “evasion” rather than draft “resistance”. But such an analysis ignores the reality of political life and the risks of overt resistance for the poor people, people of color, and undocumented immigrants who make up the bulk of this ongoing but quiet resistance to draft registration.
The most detailed and explicit rebuttal to these erroneous assumptions about the significance of quiet resistance, the “hidden transcripts” of subaltern political thought and action, and their relationship with the “public transcripts” of overt resistance has been made by James C. Scott:
Much of the active political life of subordinate groups has been ignored because it takes place at a level we rarely recognize as political. To emphasize the enormity of what has been, by and large, disregarded, I want to distinguish between the open, declared forms of resistance, which attract most attention, and the disguised, low-profile undeclared resistance….For many of the least privileged minorities and marginalized poor, open political action will hardly capture the bulk of political action…. The luxury of relatively safe, open political opposition is rare… So long as we confine our conception of the political to activity that is openly declared we are driven to conclude that subordinate groups essentially lack a political life…. To do so is to miss the immense terrain that lies between quiescence and [open] revolt and that, for better or worse, is the political environment of subject classes….
Each of the forms of disguised resistance… is the silent partner of a loud form of public resistance.
[Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Yale University Press, 1990, Chapter 7]
Desertion is quite different from an open mutiny that directly challenges military commanders. It makes no public claims, it issues no manifestos, it is exit rather than voice. And yet, once the extent of desertion becomes known, it constrains the ambitions of commanders, who know they may not be able to count on their conscripts…. Quiet, anonymous,… lawbreaking and disobedience may well be the historically preferred mode of political action for… subaltern classes, for whom open defiance is too dangerous.[Two Cheers for Anarchism, Princeton University Press, 2012, Chapter 1]
The draft resistance movement has always been defined by act of resistance — whether those are active or passive, public or closeted — rather than by adherence to an ideology or membership in an organization. The resistance consists, by definition, of all those who resist. It’s important not to conflate “the resistance”, as a movement, with any organization; not to presume that draft resisters all share a political analysis or agenda beyond opposition to the draft; and not to dismiss the significance of passive and/or unorganized noncompliance:
Prevailing definitions, by stressing articulated social change goals as the defining feature of social movements, have had the effect of denying political meaning to many forms of protest…. Collective defiance [is] the key and distinguishing feature of a protest movement, but defiance tends to be omitted or understated in standard definitions simply because defiance does not usually characterize the activities of formal organizations that arise on the crest of protest movements…. The effect of equating movements with movement organizations — and thus requiring that protests have a leader, a constitution, a legislative program, or at least a banner before they are recognized — is to divert attention from many forms of political unrest and to consign them by definition to the more shadowy realms of social problems and deviant behavior…. Having decided by definitional fiat that nothing “political” has occurred, nothing has to be explained, at least not in the terms of political protest.[Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, Pantheon Books, 1977, pp. 4-5]
Draft registration has failed, by any measure. Congress should repeal draft registration and abolish the Selective Service System. If it doesn’t, the President could and should proclaim an end to draft registration. In the meantime, people potentially subject to the draft should continue to resist.
The real question is not, “Will Congress enact a draft?”, but, “Will would-be draftees submit to a draft?” The clear evidence is that they will not comply voluntarily, and that the government has no way to enforce the draft law in the face of such widespread noncompliance. As was the case during the first USA-Iraq war in 1990-1991, we still won’t go (PDF). Draft resisters are often accused of naiveté, but those who believe that they have the power to impose a draft are deluding themselves and refusing to face the facts.
This page published or republished here 5 June 2016; most recently modified 24 March 2024. This site is maintained by Edward Hasbrouck. Corrections, contributions (articles, graphics, photos, videos, links, etc.), and feedback are welcomed.
