War and American Life

Reflections on Those Who Serve and Sacrifice

James Wright

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781684580996
• eBook ISBN: 9781684581009
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

An engaging collection of essays focusing on American veterans.

War and American Life is a book of essays and reflections by celebrated historian and former marine James Wright, who has been active as an advocate, teacher, and scholar. Featuring both previously published pieces and new essays, the book considers veterans in America and the ways in which our society needs better to understand who they are and what they have done on the nation's behalf—and the responsibilities that follow this recognition.

III

HISTORY LESSONS

We Are Always Rewriting Our Past—We Must

July 2020

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP celebrated Independence Day 2020 on July 3 in South Dakota and on July 4 in Washington. For these occasions he provided a history lesson. But it was a lesson with a political edge: he was critical of those who were demanding the removal of offensive statues and he countered with his own plans for a statuary garden of heroes.

And his history lessons were based on what many would consider an ideological and partisan message rather than an affirmation of shared values.

At Mount Rushmore he argued, “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.” He insisted that left-wing radicals seek “to tear down every statue, symbol, and memory of our national heritage.” Recently he has defended the Confederate flag, statues honoring Confederate military and civilian leaders, and bases named after Confederate generals.

He has insisted that Americans need to be careful of radicals who seek to “rewrite” history. His comments notwithstanding, our understanding of history is not doctrinal and is fortunately being revised and expanded regularly. Being rewritten.

History is the study of the past—and “the past” is the totality of the human experience. As Arnold Toynbee is reputed to have said, many think that history “is just one damned thing after another.” And it is, much of which we can never recover in sufficient detail to really study. The past holds the record of human actions and of human reactions to those natural and human forces that affect them.

Seeking to know and to understand better the past is a basic human instinct. We need to know better where we came from, who and what preceded us, in order better to understand ourselves. Our lives and institutions are the products of our history. Abraham Lincoln cautioned, “we cannot escape history.”

The effort to “rewrite” history is not, as critics claim, an effort to alter the record of the past. We cannot do that. It stands—and challenges us to learn from it. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote, “History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.”

There is obviously an opportunity in this constant rewriting to seek a history that expands our understanding of our heritage, our origins, our antecedents. And to many there is also an opportunity to narrate what we want our past to be and to justify our lives and our interest. To glorify our past, to locate ancestors who are worthy of their descendants.

Perhaps one of the most egregious and successful rewrites of history was that of the late nineteenth century, which revised the history of the American South and of slavery and of the nature and causes and consequences of the Civil War. “The Lost Cause” celebrated the Old South, a land of happy folks, Black as well as white.

Advocates depicted an idyllic Old South destroyed by a Civil War in which Southerners fought gallantly to defend the states and their way of life, and further savaged by punitive Northerners in the Reconstruction period. This nostalgic revisionism defined what became the dominant Southern “history,” along with the savage Jim Crow laws and racism it accommodated. And the North acceded to this.

Whether it is our view of the Confederacy or Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson, this tension underlines what is substantively and intellectually at issue today—it is not about the history that happened, it is not about the history that historians write and teach and revise and rethink, but about the history we celebrate.

A few years ago, when I was meeting a class and speaking at West Point, a senior officer pointed out that in the superintendent’s office there was a wall with portraits of several of the exemplary leaders of the academy—Douglas MacArthur, Otis Howard, William Westmoreland, Sylvanus Thayer—and Robert E. Lee. He asked me what I thought of having General Lee there.

I replied that I understood that Lee had been an accomplished superintendent of the academy and had served admirably as an officer in the Mexican War, but that he had then taken up arms against the United States, an act of treason that violated the oath that he and all U.S. Army officers had taken. I thought it was inconsistent to celebrate him at the academy. Was he really a good role model for what we hoped for in our officers today? . . .

The past is fixed, a given. We cannot modify it even when it makes us very uncomfortable. The history by which we understand this past is something that needs to be written and rewritten, expanded and thought about. Being uncomfortable is part of this.

The history we celebrate too often has little relationship to what happened or to the understanding of that. But the history we celebrate does have consequences. There is much in the history of this country and its articulated values and ideals from which we can take pride. And much that is not a source of pride.

Confronting the racism of our past and its icons is critical to shaping a world that will provide a history about which those who follow can take genuine pride. It is time to take on that confrontation.

War Veterans and American Democracy

February 2, 2010, at the University of California, Berkeley

THIS LECTURE affords me the occasion to share some of my reflections and understandings about our historical treatment of veterans. In this presentation I would like to describe some of the assumptions and conflicts that frame the history of veterans’ affairs in the United States. I will summarize the historical record of support for veterans. And I will share some reflections about changes in the dominant public attitude toward war veterans, from those who served in Vietnam to the present veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

One point I would like to make at the outset—this lecture is not going to assess American foreign policy nor the causes and justifications for U.S. wars. Nor is this a military history—at least not in a conventional sense. And finally, my focus on American war veterans and their casualties is taken fully cognizant of the fact that there are non-U.S. casualties and that these, notably the civilian ones, need be acknowledged. War is a violent and cruel human exercise, and can often be indiscriminate in its reach.

My subject today is U.S. war veterans—those who have served as part of a mobilized force drafted or otherwise called up for a declared or an undeclared war. For most of our history the U.S. military has been in a peacetime state and those who have served in these forces have been volunteers. Military forces during wartime on the other hand have been conscripted, drafted, or called up to duty from militia or reserve units. These have been the much-celebrated “citizen soldiers.”

Last August at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention President Obama said of the legacy of support for veterans, “America’s commitments to its veterans are not just lines in a budget. They are bonds that are sacrosanct—a sacred trust we are honor bound to uphold.” In November the United States Supreme Court seemed to affirm this commitment when it ruled in Porter v. McCollum for a new hearing for a Korean War veteran who had been convicted of a 1987 murder. The Court held that the defense had not presented evidence of the psychological state of the veteran as a result of his war experiences. The justices noted, “Our nation has a long tradition of according leniency to veterans in recognition of their service, especially for those who fought on the front lines.”

I would defer to others to debate sacred or legal obligation. But I would suggest that the history of our relations with veterans is more complicated—less generous and more ambiguous—than these observations imply.

From the beginning of this republic, in revolutionary rhetoric and in legislative provision, those who established the new nation expressed an aversion to the idea of professional or standing armies. This was one of the issues that led to the revolt against the Crown. The minutemen at Lexington and Concord ennobled the American ideal, the citizen soldier.

As it turned out, the widespread discomfort with the idea of a standing army also provided some practical budget advantages for the young nation—armies and navies were expensive. And the citizen soldier offered a political supplement to the constitutional checks on the declaration of war: it was a widely shared and enduring assumption that in a democracy no war fought by the citizens of that democracy can be sustained unless there is clear popular support for the commitment and for the cost. This was consistent with an abiding principle of American democracy: civilian control of the military.

The ideal of the citizen soldier was a crucial element in debating the decision in the 1970s to end the draft and move to an all-volunteer force. And in recent years most proposals for a reinstatement of the draft have focused less on military requirements and have been based on the assertion that such a system would provide a more significant popular check on military activities. The assumption was that if all of our sons and daughters faced the possibility of being engaged in armed conflict in Iraqi villages and in the Afghanistan mountains, perhaps no sons and daughters would face this exposure—or if they did, there would be a full discussion and acceptance of the national interest that required this service.

This debate about the composition of the military obviously informs broader views toward veterans, but my question is a simple one: What does a democracy owe to its veterans, following their wartime military service? This simple question does not have a simple answer in practice. Prior to World War II, the prevailing view tended to be that the country owes little to those discharged war veterans who are physically fit: as citizen soldiers, as beneficiaries of the compact of the democracy, their service was not a contract for which further compensation was due, but rather was the necessary obligation of citizenship in a free society.

Clearly this view of no compensation for healthy veterans has not been the prevailing one for the last seventy-five years. The GIs of the Second World War were cultural heroes and came home to a grateful nation. This reframed the dominant view of veterans’ benefits. Yet it is important to note that even prior to World War II there were major exceptions to the principle that there was no obligation to healthy veterans.

The passage of time has always been important in the development of public affection for—and even mythologizing of—wartime service. Surely a grateful republic embraced the Revolutionary War veterans. In the early years, however, it was but a quick embrace, as the new nation and its citizens had much to do. Within a few years, however, the celebration of the historic revolution and those heroes who fought it became an important ritual of national unity. The pattern of support for veterans that evolved following the Revolution would frame the fundamentals that would mark our policy down through the First World War: support for widows and orphans of those who died in combat action, some limited support for combat-related disability, selective land grants down through the 1850s, and, for Revolutionary War and Union Civil War veterans, pensions for aged survivors.

The First World War was a war of citizen soldiers—conscription drew broadly from the population as the military forces increased in eighteen months from approximately 125,000 to nearly four million serving by November 1918. President Woodrow Wilson and the Congress provided a war-risk insurance plan for active-duty military personnel, who paid their own premiums. There was an initial expectation that along with health care for combat injuries, this would be sufficient—but it proved not to be adequate in many cases to provide for transitions back to civilian life.

Even though World War I individual veteran benefits were limited, the magnitude of the numbers who served in the armed forces 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 need Congress institutionalized veterans’ support with the creation of the federal Veterans Bureau. This was the source of some of the embarrassing corruption during the Warren Harding presidency and in 1930 the agency was reorganized as the Veterans Administration (VA).

Within a few years of the end of the war, many of its veterans who had not required any of the medical treatment or disability-related support were increasingly of the view that they should receive some benefit in compensation for their service. Economic problems encouraged this position. In 1924 the veterans achieved, over President Calvin Coolidge’s veto, passage of a bonus to be paid in 1945. By the early 1930s many sought early payment of this bonus as a result of the Great Depression, and a group organized as the Bonus Expeditionary Force or Bonus Army marched on Washington to lobby and to protest. In the summer of 1932 President Herbert Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to remove them physically. He did this by using tanks and tear gas to expel them from their Washington encampment. This entire experience was an embarrassing one for many in the United States. The government’s desire to avoid a repeat of any such confrontation was an important part of the policy consideration for the comprehensive veterans’ programs provided to veterans of the Second World War.

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—known simply as the “GI Bill”—was a program that fundamentally shifted the nation’s treatment of war veterans. The comprehensive legislation provided for all veterans, including the able bodied, and was passed by Congress prior to the conclusion of the war. It expanded traditional medical and disability programs but also provided for a significant investment in the transition of all veterans back into American society. The legislation provided for up to fifty-two weeks of unemployment benefits, established an interest-free loan program for the purchase of homes, farms, or businesses, and offered a comprehensive and generous plan to support education or training for veterans.

As with earlier veterans’ legislation, the 1944 GI Bill provided medical support, but this legislation set a new standard with an investment in healthy veterans. The GI Bill was not without flaws, however. There were political calculations involved in passage of the legislation and there were instances of fraud in the administration of benefits, as pointed out by Berkeley historian Kathleen Frydl in her thorough analysis of the political context and full consequences of the law.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that the provisions of the GI Bill encouraged and helped underwrite much of the creative energy that American society experienced following the war. The education provisions of the GI Bill stand with the civil rights and women’s rights movements in expanding the system of American higher education so that it became a model for access and democratization. Within a few years, veterans comprised nearly half of the students enrolled in American colleges and universities.

The GI Bill was more than a compensatory handshake, a gratuity, for the citizen soldiers of the global war. It built upon New Deal programs and one of the goals of the GI Bill was to ease the demobilization of a military force of nearly 16 million men and women. The GI Bill was the largest entitlement program up to this point in American history (Social Security would shortly surpass it but it had not yet done that). In the several years following the war the Veterans Administration had the largest number of employees of any government agency. In 1950, 71 percent of federal payments to individuals went to veterans through the various veterans’ programs.

The public generosity toward war veterans in the 1940s would not be sustained at the same level even into the next decade. In the Cold War years and in the major postwar economic and social adjustments, there were a number of competing budget priorities. And there were concerns about some of the allegations of fraudulent claims under the GI Bill. In establishing programs for Korean War veterans and then Vietnam War veterans, the government increasingly scaled up military service requirements for eligibility and scaled down levels of support, including reduced unemployment benefits and loans. By the Vietnam period, the benefits simply did not cover full educational costs.

It is revealing that no one really questioned the basic assumptions of the GI Bill, even as they scaled back its coverage. The educational benefit came to dominate: the principle had been established that a grateful nation owed to its wartime citizen soldiers compensatory support that would enable them to pursue an education in order to advance their lives and to pursue their ambitions. Future debates would be over details, not over the principle. Additionally, there was broad acceptance of policies and programs that provided for medical and other support for veterans from discharge to death, and the medical support was not restricted to service-connected disabilities. Other veterans could meet eligibility standards for VA health care.

Vietnam veterans faced a nation divided in its support for the war, which for some at least meant a lessened sense of gratitude to those who served in the war. Even though there had been unpopular wars historically, there really was no precedent for a significant public sentiment blaming those called to fight these wars. The nature and the unpopularity of the Vietnam War did not noticeably influence the traditional programs for veterans—other than the reduced coverage that followed the post–World War II pattern. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Do You Know My Brother?
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Semper Fidelis
• I: Reflections
• II: Advocacy
• III: History Lessons
• IV: Responsibilities
• V: Challenges
• Sources for Previous Publications and Presentations
• About the Author