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A West Virginia Town Applied For Soviet Foreign Aid, and Other Lesser Known American History Facts

Khalid Elhassan February 21, 2020 33 min

Vulcan - McDowell County — Vulcan miners in 1919. The Sangha Kommune

20. Kids of the Privileged vs Everybody Else’s Kids

Draft lottery during the Vietnam War. Wall Street Journal

The way the draft system was set up back then, college students got deferments. Ending student deferments would furnish enough bodies to meet the military’s manpower shortage, but college students were predominately the kids of the middle and upper classes. That is, the people whose opinion counted the most with Congress and the media. Without their support, or at least acquiescence, American involvement in Vietnam could not continue.

Such support or acquiescence would not last long if their kids’ student deferments were canceled, and they were drafted and sent to fight and die in a far-off country most Americans could not place on a map. Mobilizing reservists could also furnish enough bodies, but it posed a similar dilemma: the reserves and National Guard were overwhelmingly filled with the children of the well-off and connected, and sending them to Vietnam would produce a fierce backlash.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.