SCHAUMBURG – On a groundhog’s day in 1901, the U.S. Congress passed, and a president signed into public law, an Act to “increase the efficiency of the permanent military establishment of the United States."
Preceded by an Act of three years prior which “provid[ed] for temporarily increasing the military establishment of the United States in time of war,” and subjected not immediately thereafter to perennial amendments, the 1901 Act repealed all laws theretofore inconsistent with it, and reorganized the army into regiments of cavalry and infantry, a corps of artillery, a medical department, a signal corps, a corps of engineers and, among others, Indian scouts. The Act afforded also promotions and honorary titles to persons who had served in a Volunteer Army, as distinguished from a Regular Army, during a war with Spain in the preceding three years. The Act is silent with respect to militia.
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Fifteen years later the US congress passed a rejoinder law described marginally as the National Defense Act (of 1916). It recognized members of an unorganized militia as constituents to the Army, legislating that “the Army of the United States shall consist of the Regular Army, the Volunteer Army, the Officers’ Reserve Corps, the Enlisted Reserve Corps, the National Guard while in service of the United States, and such other land forces [a]uthorized by law.” It is worth quoting a provision of the 1916 Act to its end, which defined the militia of the United States as “all able bodied male citizens of the United States[,]” who "shall be divided into three classes, the National Guard, the Naval Militia, and the Unorganized Militia.”
A persistent haunt accompanying an unorganized militia withstanding, the classes comprising the militia were distorted forty years later, in 1956, when Title 10 (Armed Forces) and Title 32 (National Guard) were revised and codified to US code. The 1956 revisions dispensed with reference to a volunteer army and defined the militia to consist of only two classes: “(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard of Naval Militia.” The “composition” of the Army, as recited in a subsequent section of the Act, likewise reflected an exclusion of an unregulated militia from it.
“The United States has never had a well-regulated militia,” W. Thomas Olson, a candidate for the US senate in Illinois maintains. “The 1956 law admitted exemptions from militia to the Vice President and members of the armed forces on active duty, as examples, but teachers, police officers, gorillas, and dishwashers were, and continue to be, recognized under US law as members of the militia.”
The seriousness and severity of hundreds of millions of guns at the predisposal of hundreds of millions of persons comprising an unregulated militia not without standing, Olson points up its irony, “Notwithstanding his age, the former Vice President is free to associate as a member of an unregulated militia which earlier this year attempted to take him into its custody.” The candidate speculates further, “Members of the unregulated militia have often earned awards for their valor, and I suspect several of its members would have been richly decorated had their new year’s resolution been executed.”
Obfuscations to military in the name of an amorphous militia have stark relevance to a polity which suffers cheers of nationalism in the US Senate, Olson insists. “My opponent has equated a normality of carnage with a morality of patriotism, and has taken an oath to defend a constitution as odiously compromised as the laws which spin from it. To glamorize soldiering, furthermore, is to soil a discourse already polluted by not a few members of the militia who purport membership also to a body for old men.”
According to the Library of Congress, ten days prior to the 1956 Act, a closely related law was passed which permitted appointments of female reserve officers serving as medical specialists to be members of the Army and Air national guards—however wrought it was by an habitually patriarchal provision to disqualify a dependent “unless he is in fact dependent on his wife for over half of his support, and the child of such a member may not be considered dependent unless he is in fact dependent on his mother for over half of his support.” On the same day, the US house and senate resolved to establish a national motto, (“In god we trust.”)
Olson draws a relation between them: “After almost two centuries of shameless concealment adhering a constitution, old white curs in a congress threw in the towel and prayed for the best.”
- W. Thomas Olson
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