This Date in History

Nationalized Domestic Military by Woodrow Wilson

The National Defense Act, a nationalization of America’s unique and individual state militias, was enacted by Woodrow Wilson on this date in American history. On June 3, 1916, U.S. President Wilson enlarged the size and scope of the ambiguous National Guard, creating the nation’s permanent domestic reserve force.

The U.S. government’s National Guard logo depicts an American Revolutionary statue of the Minuteman, distorting both the National Guard’s origins and the facts, history and essential philosophy of the Minutemen.

The History Channel reports that:

The National Defense Act mandated that the term National Guard be used to refer to the combined network of states’ militias that became the primary reserve force for the U.S. Army. The term had first been adopted by New York’s militia in the years before the Civil War in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette, a French hero of the American Revolution who commanded the Garde Nationale during the early days of the French Revolution in 1789. The…