“The Military Is Incidental to What I Have in Mind”: The Compton Commission, the New Deal, and the Fight for Universal Military Training

Five days before Christmas in 1946, the members of the President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training gathered in Washington, DC, to begin several months of conversations with the ultimate goal of producing an official recommendation on US President Harry Truman’s proposal to implement a national program of universal military training (UMT) in the United States. The push for UMT began with a War Department proposal developed chiefly by General George Marshall when he served as Chief of Staff during World War II.1 Marshall’s plan called for providing a year of training to all able-bodied men upon graduation from high school, not unlike what is done in dozens of countries around the world today.2 At that time, UMT was just one of several initiatives designed, as the historian Michael Sherry once put it, to prepare the United States for the next war.3 However, in the year and a quarter since the end of the war, the issue had become deeply contested. Amidst the political furor, Truman appeared before the commission and gave a provocative address explaining his personal commitment to the issue. “I don’t like to speak of it as universal military training,” he began. “I want it to be a universal training program … to take care of the temple God almighty gave us.” To ensure that there was no confusion about his intentions, the president pointed out that he had deliberately left the word “military” out of the commission’s official title, the President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training. In fact, he added in an astonishingly blunt line toward the end of the speech, “the military is incidental to what I have in mind.”4