Paid Patriotism?

The Debate over Veterans' Benefits

James T. Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351627863
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Théorie économique

What does a nation owe its military veterans? Gratitude, esteem, land grants, medical care, pensions, higher education? Or is serving in the armed forces of one's country an obligation to be undertaken without any expectation of compensation? If veterans are to receive government aid, should a distinction be made between those who served in wartime or faced enemy fire and those who saw neither war nor combat?

These questions have been answered in varying ways by the American people and their elected representatives since the Revolutionary War. Paid Patriotism? explores the genesis and growth of soldiers' pensions throughout the nineteenth century, the Bonus experiment after the First World War, the passage and consequences of the GI Bill of Rights, the growth of the nation's system of veterans' hospitals, the evolution of veterans' programs during the Cold War and Vietnam, the post-9/11 GI Bill, and contemporary scandals and reform efforts within the veterans' bureaucracy, from its promotion to a cabinet department to wrongdoing in the Veterans Health Administration.

James T. Bennett examines the complex and politically charged history and heated present-day debate of what the late columnist William Safire called the "most sacred cow" in Washington: the veterans' bureaucracy. In the end, the United States and its citizens owe veterans a debt. But how has and how should that debt be honored—and at what cost?

1

Decrepit Old Men Asking Only for Their Due: The Origins of the Veterans Lobby

It is very seldom that we can be sensible of anything like kindliness in the acts or relations of such an artificial thing as a National Government. Our own government, I should conceive, is too much an abstraction ever to feel any sympathy for its maimed sailors and soldiers, though it will doubtless do them a severe kind of justice, as chilling as the touch of steel.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1863¹

Since antiquity, returning soldiers have been rewarded by a grateful nation, war-weary people, or nervous rulers. The Romans made gifts of land in conquered regions to their legionnaires in an early manifestation of the maxim that to the victor belongs the spoils. It was also wise social policy, given the possibly combustible combination of belligerence and restiveness in men who had been away from home killing enemies for years. "To give them land and get them away from the centers of political strife was good strategy," as economists John D. Black and Charles D. Hyson observed.²

The British followed the land-for-service custom in North America with respect to those who had fought in the French and Indian War. When the Americans won their independence from the British, they followed suit.

Land and cash were the lures employed by the Continental Congress to encourage men to fight for American independence. These differed from later inducements to military service, as Paul V. Lutz wrote in New York History, in that they were "promised in advance and served as incentives to enlistment rather than as recompense for services."³ They had the added attraction of populating the western fringes of a growing country.

States with extensive claims to western lands could afford to be generous; by the end of war, North Carolina was offering "from 640 acres for privates on up to 12,000 for brigadier generals," in what later became the state of Tennessee.⁴ Maryland, without disposable western lands, offered a flat fifty acres to enlistees regardless of rank. (Cash bounties rose and fell throughout the war as the value of paper currency fluctuated greatly.)

Also in August 1776, the Continental Congress offered fifty acres of land to "all such foreigners who shall leave the armies of his Britannic Majesty in America." This was boosted to 800 acres for captains two years later, though public lands historian Jerry A. O'Callaghan notes that the number of German mercenaries who defected has never been accurately reckoned.⁵ In September 1776, Congress extended the land-for-service offer to Americans, though the fact that the lands to be gifted were, technically, in the possession of the British Crown or the states themselves complicated matters somewhat. In fact, it complicated them so thoroughly that not until 1796 was the United States Military District opened for ex-soldier settlement in Ohio. By this act, 9,549,949 acres of public land were conveyed, over the next ninety years, to Revolutionary veterans and their descendants.⁶

Responding to an entreaty by George Washington, the Continental Congress enacted on May 15, 1778, a measure granting half pay for seven years after the termination of the war to all commissioned officers who fought for the duration. (This benefit was extended to widows and orphan children on August 24, 1780.) Washington had preferred half pay for life for officers, though he was mindful that "the principle of pensioning is incompatible with the maxims of our government."⁷ But the exigencies of war required it, in his view.

As Washington had averred to the President of Congress, "I do most religiously believe" that "the salvation of the cause depends upon [the half-pay benefit], and, without it, your officers will moulder to nothing, or be composed of low and illiterate men, void of capacity for this or any other business."⁸ Nevertheless, the measure met with sharp criticism. Governor Livingston of New Jersey protested that "I should be totally against the plan of allowing the officers half pay after the war. It is a very pernicious precedent in republican states; will load us with an immense debt, and render the pensioners themselves in a great measure useless to their country."⁹

As the word pension is pervasive within this text, a definition is in order. William Henry Glasson, an early twentieth-century political economist who was a pioneer in the field of pension studies, defined military pension as "a regular allowance made by a government to one who has been in its military service, or to his widow or dependent relatives." Those pensions granted for "wounds or injuries received or disease contracted in the military service" are called invalid or disability pensions; those granted for the mere fact of military service are service pensions.¹⁰

The former are relatively uncontroversial, though some might cavil at their size. "Among the people of the United States there has always been a strong feeling that the government is under moral obligation to provide for the aid and relief of those who have been disabled in its military service and for the support of the widows and dependent relatives of the slain," wrote Glasson.¹¹ In 1792, the Congress of the new nation established the principle that "any person . . . called out into the service of the United States" who was "wounded or disabled while in actual service . . . shall be taken care of and provided for at the public expense."¹² That phrase while in actual service will be a barrier that once breached, as we shall see, is damnably hard to restore.

Military service was widely—though certainly not universally, especially in libertarian-tinctured eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America—regarded as an obligation of citizenship, so pensions were a gratuity, a bonus, a tip, and not a payment for services rendered.

The pensioning of wounded soldiers dates to the earliest European settlements in America. As Glasson writes, "In 1636 the Pilgrims at Plymouth enacted in their Court that any man who should be sent forth as a soldier and returned maimed should be maintained competently by the colony during his life."¹³ Virginia, New York, Maryland, Rhode Island, and other colonies followed similar practices, including provision for the widows of soldiers who died in service of the colony (slain, presumably, in fights with Indian tribes).

The Continental Congress followed the precedent of the colonies in enacting a pension law of August 26, 1776, which provided "that every commissioned officer, non-commissioned officer and private soldier who shall lose a limb in any engagement, or be so disabled in the service of the United States of America as to render him incapable of afterwards getting a livelihood, shall receive during his life or the continuance of such disability the one-half of his monthly pay from and after the time that his pay as an officer [or soldier] ceases."¹⁴ (A captain of infantry in those early days of the Revolution earned monthly pay of twenty-six dollars; a private’s pay was six dollars per month.) Administration of the claims was left to the states. Regular soldiers who remained in service till war’s end, though not qualifying for a pension, were to be given a gratuity, or bonus, of eighty dollars at the conclusion of hostilities.

This was all very nice, but neither the incipient national government nor the states had the means to back up these promises. Still, promises are free, and on October 21, 1780, again at General Washington’s urging, the Congress voted to grant half pay for life to officers who stayed the course.

As the war wound down, a "fierce clamor of opposition" arose to the half-pay-for-life scheme.¹⁵ It was profligate, unaffordable, and encouraged an unmanly reliance on the dole. However, to renege on this promise would be an act of craven treachery, asserted its defenders, and an affront to those whose courage and hardihood had won the war.

Nonetheless, via the Commutation Act of March 22, 1783, Congress again altered the terms of compensation, converting half-pay-for life to a lump sum of five years' full pay or interest-bearing securities. This satisfied General Washington, though it raised an outcry in New England, where Revolutionary fire-breathers denounced an act "calculated to raise and exalt some citizens in wealth and grandeur, to the injury and oppression of others."¹⁶ That was the Spirit of '76 roaring. The New England states protested that such an act was beyond the powers granted to Congress by the Articles of Confederation; if allowed to stand, the Commutation Act would set a precedent for all manner of subsidies and intrusions by what was supposed to be a confederation of strictly limited and jealously guarded powers.

The wolf of Big Government was at the door—and it was only 1783. This opposition subsided by the time the army had been officially disbanded on November 3, 1783.¹⁷ The 2,480 officers whose service entitled them to payment under the Commutation Act constituted an obligation that the penurious Confederation could not meet. Rather than receiving a lump sum payment, these veterans were given interest-bearing (6 percent) certificates that were, in practice, unredeemable. Most quickly sold these almost worthless scraps of paper to speculators for pennies on the dollar.

After the Articles of Confederation had given way to the new US Constitution, with its greatly strengthened federal government, the Congress of the United States sought to rectify the perceived injustice done these officers of the Revolution. As of January 1, 1791, bearers of the commutation certificates received "a three per cent stock for the interest in arrears, a six per cent stock for two thirds of the principal, and a deferred stock, bearing no interest until the expiration of ten years—and then at six percent—for the other third."¹⁸ Alas, the prime beneficiaries of this correction were the army of speculators who had snapped up the certificates years earlier for pennies on the dollar.

The disabled received more solid guarantees. In 1785, Congress urged the states to pension disabled officers at half pay and privates or noncommissioned officers at a five-dollar monthly rate. Monies paid out toward these pensions would be deducted from the state’s annual levy under the government of the Articles of Confederation.

As of 1792, a grand total of 1,472 invalided Revolutionary War veterans were receiving pensions.¹⁹ One significant, even portentous, amendment of pension law came in 1805, when pensions were extended to veterans of the Revolution who were prevented from earning a living by ailments or injuries apparently contracted during the war—even though upon their discharge from the army, they had been hale and sound. This carried the germ of mischief—or generosity, depending on one’s viewpoint—that would manifest itself in a major way much late...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Decrepit Old Men Asking Only for Their Due: The Origins of the Veterans Lobby
• 2 Shark-Infested Waters: The Scramble for Pensions after the Civil War
• 3 The War to End All Wars Does Not End All Wars but Does Give Birth to the Boners and Revives the Veterans of Foreign Wars
• 4 The 1944 GI Bill: Hype Exemplified
• 5 An Endless Parade of GI Bills? Korea, Vietnam, and Post-9/11
• 6 The Best Medicine? The Growth of the Veterans
• Index