"Our country is bidding us minister to her with our all and society is crying loud for help in the slow work of pushing forward. Service! the whole world cries and our answer must be, I am ready… In what way shall we serve? For what shall one enlist?"
In 1917 and 1918, this was the crucial question around which the lives of young Quaker men all over the United States revolved. In the First World War, the United States raised and mobilized its first national army of citizen-soldiers. This period was characterized by a drastic change in the relationship between the individual and the state. Because of the draft, hundreds of thousands of Americans faced pressing questions about their relationship to their country and their conscience for the first time. The Society of Friends is a valuable lens through which to examine these questions and the
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Of those, studies that focus on Quaker relief efforts, like J. William Frost's "'Our Deeds Carry Our Message': The Early History of the American Friends Service Committee," are the most common. Allan Kohrman's evaluation of Quaker responses to WWI takes a wide-angle view of US Friends in the war that puts the breadth of their views front and center. Kohrman's study privileges the perspectives of prominent Quaker organizations, publications, and individuals such as Rufus Jones and Henry Cadbury. Influential Quakers on the home front wrote extensively on issues of conscience and conscription, yet many of them were women or men too old to be drafted themselves. In each of these scholarly works, the voices of the draftees themselves are seldom heard. What the scholarly conversation is missing is a nuanced examination of the choices made by draft-age men on the ground level- the individuals with the most at