“The Most Efficient Educator”: The Great Society, Jobs Training, and the Vietnam Draft

This paper traces the understudied history of “Project 100,000,” which recruited tens of thousands of poor and working-class nonwhite men into Vietnam from 1966-1971 as an explicit component of the War on Poverty. In the hopes of labor official Patrick Moynihan and others in the Johnson administration, “Project 100,000” would simultaneously solve military manpower shortages and also serve a social function by providing vocational training, steady income and benefits, and a masculine space away from the “pathology” of the stereotypical Black matriarchal family. The paper thus shows how the Great Society state combined paternalistic welfarism and conscriptive militarism to discipline and manage a marginalized and underemployed nonwhite urban population – an important but unrecognized precursor to the later rise of the carceral state.