Doughboys

The Suitability of the First One Million Draftees
(Current Opinion, 1919)

Additional data regarding the 1917 Draft and how the first one million inductees measured-up physically:

The first adequate physical survey in half a century was made possible when the Selective Service system brought before medical examiners some ten million men. Of the 2,510,000 men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one 730,000 (29 percent) were rejected on physical grounds.

We found it interesting to learn two facts from this article; the first being that the highest number of acceptable draftees were from the countryside and the second involved the malady of flat feet -which effected one out of every five American men at that time.

The 1917 Draft
(U.S. Gov. 1931)

Attached is a small piece that explains how the draft of 1917 was conducted. Illustrated with three charts, this article provides the number of males in the U.S. at that time (54,000,000), how many had registered under the Selective Service Act (26,000,000), the percentage of the whole number who had never registered and how the onslaught of the influenza epidemic had effected the W.W. I draft.

In the fall of 1917 the first half million came rapidly. During the winter the accessions were relatively few, and those that did come in were largely used as replacements and for special services.

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