Drafting the Citizenry: Conscription, Race, and the Interstices of Citizenship in World War I Hawai'i

The last decade has witnessed the dramatic growth of work on the history of citizenship in the United States.  Scholars from a variety of disciplines have mapped its social, legal, economic, and cultural dimensions.  Others have explored how various groups have clashed with one another and the state over citizenship matters.  More recent scholarship has begun interrogating the significance of “statelessness,” or what Linda Kerber has called “the ambiguous space between the domestic and the foreign,” for citizenship’s construction.

The World War I draft, an unprecedented extension of state power into early 20^th century Americans’ lives, remains an understudied piece of this puzzle. Serving in the American military has at times been understood as a responsibility of citizenship.  Indeed, during the Great War only citizens could be drafted; aliens could volunteer but not be compelled to serve in the military of a state to which they did not belong.  Thus World War I draft officials found themselves in the business of sorting citizens from noncitizens as they built an army– a messy project, to be sure, for the borders between citizen and alien were not always clear.

This paper uses the WWI draft in the U.S. territory of Hawaii as a lens for exploring the interstices of citizenship.  Hawaii had a remarkably high proportion of noncitizens on its draft rolls, and American nationals- who were neither citizens nor aliens- were a particularly vexing subset of this group.  By drafting noncitizens, officials in Hawaii laid the foundations for direct challenges to racial restrictions on naturalization and widened gaps in the framework of citizenship. This study shows how the federal draft was not simply an exercise in raising an army; rather, it became a front in the fight over the boundaries of American citizenship.