American men have been consistent in their ambivalence to serving in the military. Through most of American history, men who chose peacetime service were viewed as the bottom of the social barrel. One soldier, stationed in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1942, observed that the popular perception of the American soldier was “still a National Guard jag staggering drunkenly down the street at 2 a.m.” The situation in wartime, of course, was supposed to be different. The ideology of civic republicanism defined military service as a masculine obligation. Male citizens had the duty to serve in an emergency. Most American men, however, from Thomas Paine’s “summer soldiers” who vanished from the winter encampment at Valley Forge up until the present, have tended to reject military service as a patriotic obligation. Conscription during wartime has been necessary because men have rarely been eager to put themselves into mortal danger, regardless of the cause.

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During World War II, government agencies and private corporations launched a massive propaganda campaign to promote the importance of soldiering. Organizations from the War Department to the American Red Cross to Coca-Cola used heroic imagery to equate military service with masculine strength. In 1942, Harold Gauer, who did public relations for the National Youth Administration in Washington, D.C., was reminded by a friend that soldiers had become “the personification of the cause,” giving “America a beautiful personal stake—emotional stake—in [the war’s] success.” The friend urged Gauer to leverage the symbol of the soldier. On a wider scale, such imagery was necessary because neither the federal government nor private interests could persuade Americans that they should fight out of political obligation.

Many men of military age internalized the messages that connected manhood with military service. Veterans who have given oral histories repeatedly return to the theme of joining up to become men. Although Robert McClure’s father obtained a deferment for him, as the oldest of nine children on a western Kentucky farm, he decided to join up anyway. “I was afraid that people would think that I was afraid to go … and I didn’t want people to think that,” he later told a Library of Congress interviewer. Ralph Chase of Connecticut worried that he would be “blackballed” as a coward if he did not join up. Such stories form the backbone of the “greatest generation” narrative.

Yet this narrative, no matter how ubiquitous during and since the war, did not capture the full range of men’s experiences. Many others either outright rejected the connection between manhood and military service or simply failed to let it dictate their decisions. Close to 18,000 conscientious objectors chose either alternative public service or federal prison rather than be drafted into the armed forces.