Newt’ Gingrich interestingly proposes that we imitate the 1940 Selective Service Act in leaving who would be granted amnesty—or some form of legalized status—to local citizen boards, as the Selective Service Act left it to the discretion of local draft boards who would be required to serve and who would be granted deferments. Gingrich doesn’t answer the complaints of those opponents of “amnesty” who say that immigration boards in heavily liberal areas like Los Angeles County would grant amnesty to everybody who applied. In contrast, one suspects that local boards in Alabama, say, would grant legalized status to pretty much no one, except perhaps people with personal connections to people they knew.
That disparate treatment of similarly situated people in different geographical locations will strike a lot of people wrong, and not just liberals but also moderates and conservatives. And it’s worthwhile going back in history and learn just why. Gingrich is fascinated with, and implicitly if not explicitly compares himself with, Franklin Roosevelt, who was by just about anyone’s reckoning a transformative politician and national leader. But in the case of the Selective Service Boards, I think he is taking a policy adopted by Roosevelt in 1940 (the military draft went into effect in October 1940, a breathtakingly short time before the 1940 general election in which Roosevelt sought and obtained an unprecedented third term from the American people) but which was pretty much repudiated by Americans a generation later.
Roosevelt was the president of a country which was split regionally, racially, ethnically and religiously in ways we are unfamiliar with today, and he was seeking to enroll into military service what turned out to be 16 million men (and some few women) in a nation which had 131 million people in 1940. (Proportionately, in our nation of 310 million people today, that would be a military of 38 million men and women. Think about that. Can you imagine our current America with not 2 million but 38 million people in the military?) National standards as to who should serve and who should be excused would have been very hard to come up with and live with in 1940. Blacks in the South? Second class citizens then, barred from voting and restricted by all manner of restrictions which we can’t imagine really existing today. What about people in defense industries in the North? Better to let locals decide these things than try to set national standards. How can locals understand what’s going on when most people live in metro areas of 2 million plus people? Well, that’s a description of America today. But in 1940 most Americans lived out in the countryside of farms (one-quarter of the population) or small towns and county seats. There were a few monster cities—New York, in whose five boroughs 7% of the popular vote for president, one out of 14 votes, were cast in 1944, and Chicago, in the hands of a Democratic machine more closely linked to Roosevelt than New York’s Tammany Hall, and Philadelphia, still ruled by Republican mayors—but affairs in those places were run by well-connected locals who could be counted on to reflect local sensibilities disciplined by the incentive to maintain support from diverse ethnic and cultural groups.
Roosevelt was smart to realize that delegation of life-and-death draft decisions to local notables would be far more acceptable to the Americans of the 1940s than the creation and imposition of national standards to be applied uniformly in every corner of the nation. He probably also had canvassed opinion in the Congress which he persuaded to authorize the draft in August 1940, when Britain was barely hanging on against Nazi Germany and when Hitler with his allies Stalin and Mussolini were in control of or threatening to win control of most of the landmass of Eurasia.
Things in the late 1960s and early 1970s—from Lyndon Johnson’s massive escalation of the Vietnam war in spring 1965 until Richard Nixon essentially ended the draft in fall 1971—were very different. America was a culturally, regionally, racially and ethnically less diverse a nation, certain in theory and to a considerable extent in practice, than it was in 1940. The idea that locals could make life-and-death decisions about who would serve—and remember that more than 50,000 Americans died in Vietnam, orders of magnitude larger than the 4,000-plus who have died in Iraq—seemed preposterously unfair to many Americans, not just liberals but also moderate and conservatives. Hadn’t we just insisted that the South should dismantle and repudicate its systems of legally enforced and informally enforced racial segregation? And hadn’t white Southerners actually done so? How could it make sense, the Americans of the late 1960s asked, for someone in Texas to be denied a graduate school deferment while such deferments were routinely granted to people in Massachusetts? Local control, local discretion, differential treatment in different parts of the nation or even different parts of the same metropolitan area (for by the late 1960s a much larger percentage of Americans lived in part of a million-plus metro area) had come to seem illegitimate, even tyrannical. Ironically, it was the experience of World War II—and the mobilization of 16 million Americans into the military—that made us much more of a culturally unified and culturally conformist people, who could no longer abide local discretion on important issues but sought national standards to be imposed on all.
As such a proposal does today. Gingrich’s proposal for what some would call local amnesty boards invoked a precedent that America left behind some two generations ago. Too clever by half, as some Brits might say. Gingrich has written interesting counterfactual histories, including one which purports to recount Franklin Roosevelt’s different-from-history response to Pearl Harbor. It’s interesting and amusing (I didn’t get through the whole book) and his musings on Roosevelt are thoughtful and worthy of contemplation. But his proposal for local legalization (or amnesty) boards is, I think, too clever to one-and-a-half. Conservatives as well as liberals today believe that we should have national standards on these things (they disagree on the standards, but not on whether they should be national), and those concerned that the well-positioned will manipulate systems to their benefit (a category not limited to conservatives by any means) must think that Gingrich’s local immigration boards will be sources of favoritism. As the saying goes, nice try but no cigar.
