Edison High School and the Vietnam War's Unequal Burden

Between nineteen sixty-five and nineteen seventy-one, sixty-four former students of Thomas A. Edison High School in Philadelphia died in the Vietnam War. That number, more than any other high school in the nation, is not an accident. Edison served a working-class neighborhood where young men had few of the tools that allowed others to avoid military service. College deferments, medical exemptions, and influential connections were not evenly distributed across American society.

The sixty-four names attached to this school represent a larger truth about how the war was fought. Poor communities, urban and rural alike, carried a disproportionate share of the casualties. Whether the men of Edison High enlisted out of patriotism, were drafted, or simply ran out of options, they bore a burden that fell unevenly on those least able to refuse it.