Conscription's Chances

Congress displayed a soggy lack of enthusiasm; the public was remarkably silent. So it seemed possible that the debate over peacetime conscription, touched off by President Truman's message to Congress (TIME, Oct. 29), might sputter out like a damp fuse in the fogs of the first postwar autumn.

For this pallid reaction the President was partly to blame. He had shown courage in delivering his message in person, braving the uneasy reception his advisers had urged him to avoid. Yet out of deference to Congressional sensibilities—or perhaps merely out of the traditional American preference for euphemism—he insisted that his plan for universal military training was not conscription at all.

Fleet Admiral Ernie King joined him in this bootless exercise in semantics, based on the technicality that trainees would not be in the armed forces. But details of the training plan (see below) made clear that the 18-year-olds, if not actually in the Army & Navy, at least would have a hard time staying out or getting out.

Using soft words for hard ones did not ease Congress' problem. The U.S. might be willing to buy a year of training just as a gigantic—and highly expensive—national health program. It was even more likely to buy a tough program of future military security, based on the discovery in World War II camps that the value of training depends on how closely it approximates the conditions of battle. But confusing the two products helped the sale not at all.

Whatever the label, Congress was faced with a hard choice. Few Congressmen relish the responsibility of leaving any stone unturned in the quest for U.S. security. Yet there are a few dissenters even in the high command of the Army, Air Forces and Navy (e.g., Admiral Nimitz) who question the effectiveness of a year's peacetime training, however arduous it may be.

The experience of other nations is ambiguous: peacetime conscription gave Germany and Russia good armies, but was not much help to France. Over the entire issue hangs the bigger question of the relative mobilization of the postwar world, and the still bigger question of how science will change the shape of future battles.

Looking to public opinion, Congress found little guidance. The nation was in no mood to think hard & straight on another burning issue, or even to hear about it. Although peacetime conscription might forever change the pattern of U.S. life and the size of its national budgets, few citizens jumped on soap boxes or raised angry voices at bars. Congress' mail came chiefly from those organized groups whose opposition had already been discounted: churchmen, educators, labor leaders.

While the war was still on, opponents feared that peacetime conscription might be rushed through Congress while the nation was in a mood to clutch at any military straw. Now a new possibility appeared: would the nation reject the idea by default, without ever agreeing that it was either good or bad? At week's end an Associated Press poll of Senators showed 25 in favor of the plan, 19 opposed, 40 undecided and in no hurry to make up their minds.