Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance. Amy J. Rutenberg. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.

In Rough Draft, Amy J. Rutenberg, associate professor of history at Iowa State University, provides a comprehensive and compelling account of the shifting context and profound implications of military manpower policy during the Cold War. This innovative book is an exceptionally important addition to the broad literature on the draft, joining earlier works that have proven mainstays for anyone examining the draft.[1] Readers interested in the acute ways that the draft melded service, gender, militarization, socioeconomics, and race during the Cold War will find much to ponder.

Rutenberg seeks to provide perspective into Vietnam-era draft resistance by deeply delving into the manpower policies that developed beforehand throughout the Cold War, especially manpower channeling. As she explains, “Rough Draft, therefore, uses the lens of military manpower policy to shed light on the contested relationships between choice and compulsion, rights and responsibilities in a democracy.”[2] Her purpose is to explore how and why the draft influenced American society, largely through active choices that privileged certain individuals and marginalized others. Rutenberg shows the extent to which such critical decisions arose from the shifting cultural mores of the Cold War, wherein national security increasingly held both international and domestic connotations.

The author employs a valuable war and society approach that interrogates military manpower policies and their broader meanings and wider reverberations throughout American society. Rutenberg supports her analysis with meticulous research. The endnotes—50 full pages—are a remarkable testament to many years of detailed evaluation and provide a most commendable model for scholars and students alike. The author leverages archival material from numerous repositories located across the country and situates them within a plethora of relevant secondary sources in a manner that provides both depth and breadth.

Rutenberg demonstrates that the Selective Service System was not a benign actor, simply delivering personnel necessary for national security, but rather deliberately crafted policies that privileged certain young men with deferments and pursued others for induction.

Rutenberg organizes her work into six chapters, bookended by an introduction and conclusion. The chapters proceed generally chronologically, although they understandably overlap somewhat at the transitions. Throughout this incisive study, Rutenberg demonstrates that the Selective Service System was not a benign actor, simply delivering personnel necessary for national security, but rather deliberately crafted policies that privileged certain young men with deferments and pursued others for induction. The former tended to be middle-class white men with means, while the latter were often working-class and minority men. Such prioritization revealed much about American culture during the Cold War and ultimately fractured the draft’s public legitimacy. In the end, Rutenberg concludes that military manpower policy during the Cold War “ironically succeeded in undermining the already tenuous connections between military service and masculine ideals of citizenship.”[3]

Rutenberg admirably achieves her stated goals and much more, providing both a robust exploration of the draft and far-reaching insights on American society during the Cold War.

Rough Draft is the best work on this topic to appear in quite some time. It should be required reading for anyone with an interest in the draft and will likely become the standard work for the foreseeable future. It is lucidly written, tightly argued, and prodigiously researched. Most importantly, it provides an original interpretation of the inner workings of manpower policies during the Cold War and their tremendous—and often unintended—consequences. Rutenberg admirably achieves her stated goals and much more, providing both a robust exploration of the draft and far-reaching insights on American society during the Cold War. This fine book joins a host of other highly successful works that shed beneficial light on the military and the myriad intersections between it and gender, militarization, and American culture writ large.[4] Readers interested in the draft, military service, gender, militarization, and American society during the Cold War will find much value in this outstanding book.

William A. Taylor is the Lee Drain Endowed University Professor of Global Security Studies at Angelo State University and editor for two book series, Studies in Civil-Military Relations, with the University Press of Kansas, and Studies in Marine Corps History and Amphibious Warfare, with the Naval Institute Press.

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Header Image: Young Soldiers Who Have Just Been Drafted, Fort Jackson, South Carolina May 1967 (Warren K. Leffler).

Notes:

[1] See George Q. Flynn, The Draft, 1940–1973 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993); John W. Chambers, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York: Free Press, 1987); J. Garry Clifford and Samuel R. Spencer, The First Peacetime Draft (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986); and James M. Gerhardt, The Draft and Public Policy: Issues in Military Manpower Procurement, 1945–1970 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971).

[2] Amy J. Rutenberg, Rough Draft: Cold War Military Manpower Policy and the Origins of Vietnam-Era Draft Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 8.

[3] Rutenberg, Rough Draft, 195.

[4] See Tanya L. Roth, Her Cold War: Women in the U.S. Military, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Kara Dixon Vuic, The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Jennifer Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Heather M. Stur, Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Beth Bailey, America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).