All conventional draft avoidance tactics required money and a certain knowledge and savviness about the system simply not available to less advantaged groups. The net effect was that college deferments became an exercise of class privilege, and, given the overrepresentation of minorities among the poor, of racial discrimination. It was not unlike the hiring of substitutes during the Civil War, during which a draftee could simply pay another person to take his place, but with the government itself managing the transaction in the case of the Vietnam draft. At least during the Civil War the
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