Those Who Have Borne the Battle (15 page)

Symbolically and emotionally, the decision to establish a monument in the United States for an unidentified casualty of the war, an unknown soldier, united a grateful nation. After some heated conversations, Congress authorized reinterring an unknown serviceman on Armistice Day 1921 at a new memorial created at Arlington National Cemetery. The selection of the remains to be honored and the ceremonial process of shipping him home from France were covered widely in the press. And the dedication of his burying place brought together President Warren Harding as well as former president Woodrow Wilson, then seriously ill and making his first public appearance since Harding's inauguration the previous March. Here Harding pledged “to the defenders who survive, to mothers who sorrow, to widows and children who mourn, that no such sacrifice shall be asked again. . . . Standing today on hallowed ground . . . it is fitting to say that his sacrifice, and that of the millions dead, shall not be in vain. There must be, there shall be, the commanding voice of a conscious civilization against armed warfare.”
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The American Battle Monuments Commission also sought to end another traditional practice as it reviewed plans for cemeteries and
monuments in Europe. The commission wanted national monuments and memorials, not those that celebrated units or states. Gettysburg, for example, had more than thirteen hundred markers and monuments, most of them honoring a state or local unit that had fought there. General Pershing headed the American Battle Monuments Commission, and he insisted that an
American
army, a unified national army, had fought and sacrificed in the war. He and the commission sought to underline that now North and South fought together for the country.

This sense of a national effort resulted in 1938 with the establishment of Armistice Day as a national holiday on November 11 and to a strong effort, led by federal agencies and by various arts commissions, to avoid the replication of copycat and often trite Civil War memorials. There was more of an emphasis on “living memorials,” such as civic centers, auditoriums and stadiums, parks, and playgrounds, that would evoke and engage the public. These were major contributions, often municipal, but there were still ample “doughboy” statuary and public memorials displaying the military contraband of war.
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Some senior army officers, concerned about postwar morale among US troops still in France, encouraged the formation of the American Legion in Paris in 1919 in order to provide a support organization for those who had served. This new body was committed to the principle that the military represented not sections or states, but a fully unified
nation
.

The Legion built upon a well-established history of organized veterans exerting influence. The power of veterans groups to shape the narrative of public memory and to influence policy toward veterans had been demonstrated by the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) following the Civil War. However, because that organization would not admit any who had not served in “their” war, its influence necessarily lessened over time. In addition, the GAR, due to the nature of the organization of the Civil War army, had a real bias in favor of state units. After the Spanish-American War, some veterans of that war organized the Veterans of Foreign Wars to provide support for veterans and to represent their interests in developing government programs.
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The American Legion would represent a significant political force in urging the federal government to provide support for veterans of the First
World War. At the outset, the administration of Woodrow Wilson and Congress provided a war-risk insurance plan for active-duty military personnel, who paid their own premiums. There was also a federal program providing for war disability and for widows and orphans of those killed while on duty or as a result of this service. There was an initial expectation that this support would be sufficient—but it proved not to be adequate in many cases to provide for transitions back to civilian life.

The sheer number of those who served during the war and who required medical support was consequential. In the 1920s about 20 percent of the federal budget went to veterans. And in 1921, in response to the increasing administrative demands, Congress institutionalized veterans' support with the creation of the federal Veterans Bureau. This agency was the source of some of the embarrassing corruption during the Warren Harding presidency, and in 1930 the bureau was reorganized as the Veterans Administration.

 

 

Most of the Great War veterans had received no medical treatment or disability-related support. Within a few years of the end of the war, they were increasingly of the view that they should receive some additional benefit in compensation for their service. Problems of economic dislocation encouraged this position, and the American Legion proved an effective voice in advocating what was defined as Adjusted Service Compensation. The Legion came to promote a view that some of the more labor-oriented veterans organizations had first raised.

Presidents Wilson, Harding, and Calvin Coolidge had all opposed the idea of any sort of payment or pension for veterans who had no war injuries. In this regard, they echoed concepts first heard in the revolutionary generation and felt even more strongly because of a common belief that Civil War veterans had taken advantage of political support and public gratitude. They would not support another such drain on the public treasury.
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When he vetoed the Bonus Bill for the veterans, President Coolidge argued that “patriotism that is bought and paid for is not patriotism.” He also noted, “Service to our country in time of war means sacrifice. It is
for that reason alone that we honor and revere it. To attempt to make a money payment out of the earnings of the people to those who are physically well and financially able is to abandon one of our most cherished American ideals.” A few years later President Herbert Hoover repeated Coolidge's opposition to these benefits by insisting, “The nation owes no more to the able bodied veteran than to the able bodied citizen.”
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Those who opposed any new veterans programs were pushing back against the history of the nineteenth-century precedent, against an embedded sense of national obligation to those who serve, and against the dynamics of politics. In 1924 veterans and their supporters finally secured, over President Coolidge's veto, passage of a bonus to be paid in 1945. This seemed a distant-enough date to overcome at least some of the resistance to such a program. It was really more of a life insurance policy than it was a bonus—but the latter became the term that was commonly used. The debate over this legislation had proved embarrassing—or at least provided ample opportunity for many to be embarrassed.

Pierre Du Pont, whose chemical company had flourished with wartime contracts, said that healthy veterans were “the most favored class in the United States, having health, youth and opportunity.”
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As far as he was concerned, they surely did not need a bonus. One Texas congressman said that as long as they had a bonus, black veterans “will not chop cotton nor pull corn,” and the Chamber of Commerce insisted that the country could not afford both the bonus for veterans and a tax cut and the latter was far more important. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon opposed the bonus due to a pending budget deficit. When his projection proved wrong two years in a row and the Treasury in fact had significant surpluses, those whose opposition was fiscal had lost their main base for argument. A conservative American Legion official was so upset by these attacks that he admitted to being “almost bolshevist in my feelings” toward the opponents of the legislation.
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As the economy worsened, by the early 1930s many veterans and their supporters sought early payment of the 1945 bonus. Unemployment among World War I veterans during the Great Depression was significantly higher than it was for the overall population. President Hoover opposed any such payment, and the American Legion leadership was,
sometimes reluctantly, supportive of the Republican president. Many Legion posts around the country challenged their national organization on this matter.

In 1932 a group of veterans in Portland, Oregon, called for veterans to assemble in Washington to petition the government to expedite payment of the bonus. By early summer there were a few thousand gathered in some abandoned government buildings and in a camp in Anacostia Flats. They met with and argued with their representatives, but in July the Senate soundly defeated legislation that would have provided payment of the bonus. By this time there may have been as many as twenty thousand veterans and families in the nation's capital.

President Hoover's administration was increasingly nervous about the protesters. Rumors of violence and of communist influence only increased the tension. In fact, leftist organizers had minimal success with this group, identified as the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or the Bonus Army. The veterans presented a tightly organized group. A skirmish in Washington with police seemed to provide the necessary provocation, and the president agreed that Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur could evict the group from the government buildings. Over the objections of his aide Dwight Eisenhower, MacArthur personally led mounted cavalry commanded by George Patton, tanks, and infantry with tear-gas canisters and bayonets to expel the veterans. Despite Hoover's contrary instructions, General MacArthur then moved on to destroy their encampment at Anacostia Flats.
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Most Americans were shocked by the news photos of the United States Army attacking the veterans' camp. President Hoover, already suffering politically fatal wounds from the depth of the Depression, saw his support deteriorate even further. He was handily defeated in his reelection bid that fall by the Democratic candidate, Franklin Roosevelt.

In most regards, Roosevelt shared Hoover's view opposing expedited payment of the bonus. He had some traditional conservative views about the need to keep the budget in balance, and he was worried about the suffering of all Americans, not only the veterans. He said, “The veteran who is disabled owes his condition to the war. The healthy veteran who is unemployed owes his troubles to the depression. Each represents a separate
and different problem. Any attempt to mingle the two problems is to confuse our efforts.”
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As a cost-cutting measure Roosevelt early on ordered a reduction in payment for all veterans benefits, including those for wartime disability. But Roosevelt was far more politically adroit than Hoover. When a veterans group again came to Washington, the president ordered the army to find facilities for them—ten miles from the city. He sent them food and clothing, and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt visited them. He urged New Deal agencies to look to provide employment opportunities to veterans.

Franklin Roosevelt did say early on in his presidency that “no person, because he wore a uniform, must therefore be placed in a special class of beneficiaries.” FDR was of the mind that military service was “a basic obligation of citizenship.” In the fall of 1933, he spoke at the American Legion national convention and told the delegates that while he applauded each veteran who had served in the nation's military in wartime, “The fact of wearing a uniform does not mean that he can demand and receive from his Government a benefit which no other citizen receives.” In 1936 he vetoed a bill to provide payment of the World War I bonus—but he did not seem that troubled when Congress quickly passed the bill over his veto. By the end of that year, some 3 million veterans of the Great War had received a check from the US government.
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The rhetoric of those who resisted any obligation to healthy veterans as well as the emotions of the struggle in the 1920s and 1930s may well have suggested that the United States had in those years a view of veterans that was similar to that of the eighteenth century. Of course, there were constant themes. In the twentieth century opponents of veterans' programs did insist that wartime military service was a common obligation of citizenship for which there would be no extra compensation or gratuity for those who were healthy. Increasingly, however, those who argued against veterans' programs cast their reservations more in terms of fiscal prudence and equity. This was not a static debate, however; the history of the 150 years prior to the passage of the 1936 veterans bill had been marked by a growing public embrace of the idea that war veterans occupied a special place in the narrative of American democracy. It became harder to insist that they had met only a common obligation of citizens
if that obligation had not been commonly shared. And as the war veterans became, almost by definition, more heroic in the narrative and in the memory, their roles became even less common. Once this uniqueness of service and sacrifice had been established, the principles of fairness and equity and obligation seemed to require special acknowledgment and recognition.

Even as Congress approved the Bonus Bill, a new world war was on the horizon. The Second World War would require American engagement at an unprecedented level and would result in major casualties and sacrifice. This conflagration found Americans unified in their gratitude and willingness to provide generous programs to support the veterans.

I
N 1984 WHEN STUDS TERKEL published his rich oral history of World War II,
The Good War
, he prefaced it with a note: “The Title of this book was suggested by Herbert Mitgang, who experienced World War Two as an army correspondent. It is a phrase that has been frequently voiced by men of his and my generation, to distinguish that war from other wars, declared and undeclared. Quotation marks have been added, not as a matter of caprice or editorial comment, but simply because the adjective ‘good' mated to the noun ‘war' is so incongruous.”
¹
Terkel displayed an uncommon caution and sensitivity. Few Americans have had any difficulty declaring World War II “good”—embracing the adjective unencumbered and unqualified by quotation marks.