Conscientious objectors during World War I set the first terms of America's twentieth-century experiment with conscription. Demanding an accommodation of conscience far outside the bounds of the 1917 draft law, they not only forced the government to recognize their rights and liberalize its policies, they set in motion a process of increasingly broadened tolerance enjoyed by subsequent generations of drafted men. This study concerns especially a small group of these WWI objectors and their intersection with military justice during and after the war. The narrow exemption provisions of the draft law created thousands of unrecognized conscientious objectors, and the irregular application of later War Department policies to those who were drafted into the army delivered hundreds into military prison. Had they bent even slightly, most of these imprisoned objectors would never have seen a court-martial. But they did not bend, and their experience exposes the fault lines beneath America's uneasy use of compulsory military service.

While thousands of WWI conscientious objectors gladly accepted the government's offer of noncombatant service in the military, only a relative handful - a few hundred men out of the millions drafted -refused completely, choosing disobedience and prison, or at least resisting long enough to force the War Department to extend to them a non-military alternative service. Using army records largely unseen since the war, this study shows how a small but determined group of men, through their moral, mental, and physical tenacity, rendered the laws of Congress irrelevant and the War Department compliant, and forced the civilian government, the army, and the public alike to reconsider just how modern America would adjust to its centuries-old commitment to the freedom of conscience.