Abstract
Research on class bias in military service has focused on service and death among the economically disadvantaged during the Vietnam War. This study uses the war records of elite colleges to examine elite participation in five major wars. Significant differences in elite participation across wars are found, with lower rates during the Civil, Korean, and Vietnam Wars and higher rates during the World Wars. The similarities between Korea and Vietnam indicate that political unrest related to the Vietnam War was not the sole cause of low levels of elite participation. Changes in the size and structure of the post–World War II military are hypothesized as alternative causal factors.
The Confederate soldiers’ lament that his was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” expressed a claim of inequality that has frequently accompanied U.S. wars. 1 Several studies have examined whether the underprivileged disproportionately served, fought, and died in Vietnam. Findings are mixed; some find inequality 2 while others do not. 3 This article refocuses the analysis, asking, To what extent have the privileged have borne the burdens of war?
Limitations of Previous Research
The existing research on class bias in military service has several limitations. First, it is almost exclusively concerned with the Vietnam War. 4 In consequence, this research cannot determine whether inequalities in Vietnam were typical, exceptional, or part of a preexisting trend. This article examines elite participation across one hundred years and five wars.
Second, a reliance on large-sample surveys effectively removes economic, social, political, and other elites from the analysis because they are too few to affect significantly the results of studies using these methods. Thus, the results are potentially inconsistent with any level of service by elites.
Third, these studies typically use parents’ or community characteristics as proxies for respondents’ own class or status characteristics. Though reasonable given the transience of occupations and class positions of most recent high school and college graduates, these proxies are limiting. Young men have their own status and prospects for class positions that can differ from those of their parents. While in most cases these embryonic statuses are difficult to recognize, young elites’ status is revealed (to themselves and others) through honors, awards, and selection to prestigious groups. These independent status positions and class expectations may affect young men’s decisions regarding military service.
This study examines individual rather than parents’ status by utilizing the war records of students at Ivy League colleges. Ivy League educations are not merely vehicles to elite status but makers of elite status in themselves. Thus, Ivy League students are elites within their generation. They are probably also aware of this status, which may affect their actions with regard to military service.
The Data
In principle, the study uses four simple pieces of data: (1) the number of students attending a college before and during each war, (2) the number of students from each college dying in each war, 5 (3) the total number of males 6 in the U.S. population in age ranges comparable to the student population, and (4) total war deaths.
In practice, the data are far from simple because definitions of “student” and “war death” vary across time and institution. War dead are defined by the U.S. government though the definition varies across wars. 7 Unfortunately, schools do not always follow these definitions, nor are their own definitions consistent over time. 8 This study balances validity with comparability across colleges and consistency across time by applying the government’s definition of war dead to the colleges’ lists of war dead. 9
The data come from college war memorials, college archives, published volumes, and official government statistics. The appendix provides a fuller description of the data sources.
Results
The bottom panel of Table 1 provides baseline data on the number of soldiers serving and dying in each war, the mobilization rate (calculated as the number serving in the military divided by the total number of men aged twenty to thirty-nine), and the size of the population cohorts most likely to experience military service.
War Dead at Six Elite Colleges
Note: See appendix for sources.
aUnion casualties and population only.
bCollege war deaths dead per one hundred thousand total war deaths.
cTotal in military as a percentage of men aged twenty to thirty-nine.
The top portion of the table gives the numbers of students dying in each war from each college. The raw numbers are on the right of each column in parentheses. The numbers on the left control for the varying size of each war and express the number of students from each college dying for every 100,000 dying in each war. For example, for every 100,000 men dying in World War II, 39 had studied at Brown and 112 at Harvard. The data show that, in these terms, for five of the six colleges, the greatest contribution to war dead came during World War I and the smallest contribution came during the Civil War.
Unfortunately, Table 1 does not control for changing college enrollments or for population growth. The relatively small Civil War numbers in Table 1, in part, reflect low nineteenth-century enrollments. In addition, the increasing U.S. population increases the pool of eligible soldiers and affects the probability of service or death by anyone including students at elite colleges.
Table 2 controls for these factors by comparing the proportion of a school’s recent graduates who died in a given war to an estimate of the proportion of all men in the population of similar ages who died in that war. To calculate these numbers, the number of graduates from each college during the ten- and twenty-year periods prior to the end of each war were counted. 10 These graduates, because of their age, are most likely to have served in the military. The table then shows, for each war, the number of students who died from each of these periods as a percentage of the total number of graduates from each of these periods. 11 Estimated death rates for population cohorts aged twenty to twenty-nine and twenty to thirty-nine 12 at the bottom of each panel are included for comparison. 13 Finally, the percentage of all service personnel who died provides a measure of overall lethality of each war. These data allow comparisons of the proportion of college graduates who died to the proportions of all men and all service personnel who died.
War Dead as a Percentage of Ten- and Twenty-Year Cohorts at Elite Universities
Note: See appendix for sources.
The table shows that the Civil War and World War I were the deadliest wars for elite college students, while Korea and Vietnam had the lightest casualties by a very large margin. However, these results do not control for the size of the war. To understand inequality in service, college rates must be compared to population rates.
Table 2 shows that while the Civil War college death rates were high relative to other wars, they were low relative to the death rate in the military and the population as a whole. The death rate for the six colleges combined was 4.9 percent in the ten-year cohort as compared to 17.8 percent for men aged twenty to twenty-nine and 10.0 percent for men aged twenty to thirty-nine and 16.5 percent of those in military service. This indicates that the Civil War was far less deadly for elite college students than others in for the population.
In World War I, the ten-year college cohort death rate of 2.54 percent is approximately the same as the death rate for the military as a whole and almost twice the death rate for the twenty- to twenty-nine-year-olds in the population. Given that the population estimates are overestimates (see note 13), we can be confident that this indicates a greater than proportional contribution to the war on the part of elite college students during World War I.
In World War II, the ten-year college percentage is slightly higher than the percentage for all twenty- to twenty-nine-year-olds and much higher than the percentage for the military as a whole. Because the World War II mobilization extended well beyond this age range, the twenty-year cohorts probably provide the most accurate comparisons for this war. The death rate in the twenty-year college cohort was 2.31 percent, while the death rate for all twenty- to thirty-nine-year-olds in the population was at most 1.92 percent. As in World War I, elite college students appear to have died at a rate higher than the rate for the population as a whole.
Vietnam and Korea resemble the Civil War. As in the Civil War, the death rate among elite college students is significantly lower than the death rates for all servicemen and for comparable age groups in the population. Casualty rates in these wars were very low in the population but even lower among elite college students.
Discussion
These results shed light on the military participation of elites. First, elites were underrepresented in the Vietnam War. Controlling for the size of the war and the population of the United States, elite college students died in Vietnam less often than did their nonelite peers. Assuming that disproportionately few Ivy League students were disqualified for lack of mental competency, these results understate the real differences between elites and the general population.
Second, inequality in Vietnam differed from the World Wars, where elite student death rates equaled or exceeded those of the civilian population. High student death rates might be expected for World War II, where mobilization was deep. They are more surprising in World War I, where mobilization was more modest and, unlike World War II, many did not serve.
Vietnam was unlike the Civil War in that death rates in Vietnam were less than one-fortieth of those for the Civil War. However, in both Vietnam and the Civil War elite college students died at much lower rates than their nonelite peers. These results are surprising given the deep mobilization and high overall death rates of the Civil War. Thus, the Civil War had a large absolute but small relative effect on colleges, while Vietnam had small absolute and relative effects.
Vietnam and Korea are very similar. This is unexpected to the degree that the strong student-based antiwar movement was associated with the avoidance of military service by college students. This similarity indicates that the causes of inequality in the Vietnam War may lie outside the political context of that war.
How has elite participation changed over time? Elite students were underrepresented in the Civil, Korean, and Vietnam Wars and overrepresented in both World Wars. In the twentieth century, there was a trend away from elite participation in wars. In World War I, elite college student participation was disproportionately high. In World War II, their overrepresentation was more moderate. In Korea and Vietnam, elite college students were dramatically underrepresented. 14
In sum, we see that low levels of elite participation characterize but are not unique to Vietnam. What accounts for this? The similarities between Vietnam and Korea as well as the low relative death rate of the Civil War suggest that the antiwar movement was not responsible for elite underrepresentation. Nor does the extent of mobilization consistently account for rates of elite death. High levels of mobilization corresponded to high elite participation rates in World War II. However, extensive mobilization is associated with low elite participation in the Civil War and moderate mobilization with high elite participation in World War I.
Perhaps the high rates of mobilization during the World Wars are related to the direct integration of colleges into the war mobilization effort itself. During both of the World Wars, colleges were transformed into officer training institutions. Enrollments dropped dramatically, and curricula were changed beyond recognition. In these wars, the college’s primary mission became the production of officers for war. Nothing similar occurred during the Civil War, Korea, or Vietnam. 15
Why were these institutions integrated into the war effort in some cases and not others? The answer may have to do with the relative institutional strength of both colleges and the military. Up through World War II, war required the dramatic expansion of small peacetime military forces. At its peak, the Civil War Union Army was sixty-one times larger than it had been in 1860; in World War I the army expanded by twenty-two times; and in World War II it expanded by forty-three times. In these wars, “the crux of the problem of expanding the Army to war strength was the question of finding adequate officers.” 16
Elites, because of their education, make good officers. During the Civil War, colleges and universities were few and small. They were not integrated into the war effort because they had little to offer. By World War I, elite and other colleges had grown in numbers and enrollments. They had something collectively to offer, and the military tapped their potential to deal with the crisis of expansion. In the World Wars, colleges were harnessed to the war effort as officer training factories, which were needed by an undersized military experiencing rapid expansion.
After World War II, the United States maintained a large standing army for the first time in its history. As a result, the military did not even double its size during the Vietnam War. In this situation, the military no longer needed to rely on colleges for the war effort. In the Civil War the colleges could not help, in the World Wars they did help, but in Korea and Vietnam their help was not needed.
Footnotes
Appendix
The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.