Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill
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Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill

How Veteran Politics Shaped the New Deal Era

Stephen R. Ortiz

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Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill

How Veteran Politics Shaped the New Deal Era

Stephen R. Ortiz

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About This Book

The period between World Wars I and II was a time of turbulent political change, with suffragists, labor radicals, demagogues, and other voices clamoring to be heard. One group of activists that has yet to be closely examined by historians is World War I veterans. Mining the papers of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion (AL), Stephen R. Ortiz reveals that veterans actively organized in the years following the war to claim state benefits (such as pensions and bonuses), and strove to articulate a role for themselves as a distinct political bloc during the New Deal era.

Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill is unique in its treatment of World War I veterans as significant political actors during the interwar period. Ortiz’s study reinterprets the political origins of the "Second" New Deal and Roosevelt’s electoral triumph of 1936, adding depth not only to our understanding of these events and the political climate surrounding them, but to common perceptions of veterans and their organizations. In describing veteran politics and the competitive dynamics between the AL and the VFW, Ortiz details the rise of organized veterans as a powerful interest group in modern American politics.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2009
ISBN
9780814762264
Topic
History
Subtopic
World War I

1

Veterans’ Policy and Veteran Organizations, 1917–1929

For the disabled veterans of the war and the dependents of those who fell the country cannot do too much. … But the fit and ablebodied veterans are offered the opportunities open to every other citizen.
—President Calvin Coolidge’s annual
budget message, December 10, 1923
In the 1920s, American citizens engaged in an extended political debate over the treatment of military veterans. The debate served as a constant, sometimes unpleasant, reminder that the consequences of the Great War would unfold well after the peace. This came as something of a surprise. After all, the federal government had created and implemented innovative wartime veterans’ policies in the hope that the kind of drawn-out, partisan disputes that had erupted over Civil War pensions could be avoided by an efficient new bureaucracy administering judiciously crafted policies. But the legacy of the Civil War era animated a new generation of veteran organizations, too. The Grand Army of the Republic’s success in building the Civil War pension system offered a sterling example for the organizations that would lobby the government on behalf of World War veterans. While the new bureaucracy and new civic associations such as the American Legion weighed in on World War veterans’ issues, Congress and the president continued to control the reins of policymaking. Even then, although Republicans controlled both the legislative and the executive branches of the government, the politics of veterans’ issues proved divisive enough to pit Congress against the era’s popular presidents. But two factors—the American Legion’s dominance in veteran circles and the conservative Republican hegemony in national electoral politics—successfully created a system of levees that kept veteran politics from cresting over into larger political battles. In 1929, however, those levees failed and a rising tide of veteran activism overflowed into the national political arena.1

Creating the World War Veterans’ System

During the Great War, Progressives applied the same intensity and earnestness to soldiers’ welfare issues as they did to the experiments in labor relations, economic coordination, and social reforms such as Prohibition. On April 6, 1917, when Woodrow Wilson signed the declaration of war against Germany, the United States set out to “make the world safe for democracy” with one of the smallest armies among the warring nations. Six weeks later, Congress passed the Selective Service Act, putting the mechanism in place through which the United States ultimately would raise an armed force of 4.7 million men. Even before the first American doughboys experienced the grim taste of combat in France, a framework had already been created for how the country would handle the long-term needs of its soldiers and their dependents. On October 6, exactly six months after the United States officially became a belligerent, Congress passed the War Risk Insurance Act (WRIA), effectively establishing a new veterans’ system.2
The WRIA held out the promise that the Great War veterans’ system of benefits would be based on Progressive principles of impartiality and efficiency. More than anything, legislators sought to avoid, in the words of Representative Sam Rayburn (D, TX), “another saturnalia of pension frauds.” The WRIA utilized an agency formed in 1914, the Bureau of War Risk Insurance (BWRI), housed in the Treasury Department, to serve new veterans, rather than the much-maligned Pension Bureau. By giving this agency control over veterans’ issues, the WRIA successfully bypassed the administrative apparatus of the Civil War era and built a firewall around the old pension system. Initially created to insure ships and seamen traveling into war zones when private insurers balked, the new agency would take over the government’s efforts for soldiers and, eventually, veterans by administering to soldiers in four areas: family allotments for those in service, life insurance, disability payments for those with service-connected conditions, and long-term hospitalization for disabled veterans. Former President Theodore Roosevelt endorsed the measure, explaining that its features put “the United States where it ought to be, as standing in the forefront among the nations in doing justice to our defenders.” Congress passed the bill unanimously, desiring to do right for the men in arms but also to prevent the problems of fraud, corruption, and partisan cronyism that had plagued the nation for more than fifty years after the Civil War’s end.3
The WRIA created one of the largest centralized federal bureaucracies in the nation’s history when it tapped the Bureau of War Risk Insurance as the agency to administer soldiers’ welfare. The War Department deducted money from active-duty soldiers’ pay in order to provide for their wives and children, but the BWRI was responsible for the disbursement of family allotments directly to the dependents. Moreover, the BWRI handled life insurance coverage, also with payments withheld from soldiers’ paychecks. The insurance provision included up to $10,000 of term life insurance for servicemen with a pay deduction of only $8 per year for every $1,000 of coverage. For veterans, the WRIA constructed a schedule of payments for those who had suffered service-connected disabilities. Congress set the initial rate of $30 per month for the totally disabled, plus an additional $15 for the veteran’s wife and $10 per dependent child. In 1919, Congress raised the rate to $80 per month, a more reasonable reflection of the inflated cost of living. In addition, veterans who had suffered the loss of both hands or feet or total blindness qualified for a payment of an extra $100 per month. The BWRI calculated partial disability payments on the basis of the severity of the injury, adhering to a formal schedule of reductions in earning potential attributable to specific injuries and ailments.4
The WRIA also mandated that the federal government provide vocational rehabilitation training and long-term hospitalization coverage for the service-connected disabled. It did not, however, delineate the methods or the agencies responsible for these provisions. To address this, in 1918, Congress passed the Vocational Rehabilitation Act, which gave control over the rehabilitation program to the Labor Department’s Federal Board for Vocational Education. The program only served the needs of disabled veterans who demonstrated an inability to find work because of their disabilities. In fact, over 300,000 disabled veterans who applied were denied the training they sought because they did not meet the threshold of this requirement. Even so, more than 128,000 veterans completed vocational training between 1919 and 1928. On the issue of hospitalization, in 1919, Congress passed legislation giving the Public Health Service control over veterans’ long-term hospital care. At that time, the Public Health Service provided medical care to merchant seamen in twenty government-run hospitals. After the rapid demobilization of 1919, veterans requiring hospitalization inundated the Public Health Service facilities, leading to overcrowded and dangerous conditions. As an example of the dire hospital situation, as late as 1922, the Public Health Service somehow crammed 26,869 veterans into only 17,792 available beds. Veteran organizations issued vehement calls for the construction of new hospitals and expanded vocational training to accommodate the volume of veteran claimants, but neither provision provoked much in the way of political controversy because they applied to the genuinely disabled. And both provisions continued to be seen as bulwarks against the feared clamor for general veterans’ pensions.5
This veterans’ system replaced the Pension Bureau with important new agencies for implementation and took most, if not all, of the ambiguity and room for potential manipulation out of veterans’ welfare provisioning. While soldiers and ex-soldiers complained about the speed of implementation and about how little of their wartime paychecks remained after the mandatory deductions—not an insignificant complaint because it led to the postwar push for retroactive “adjusted compensation,” or a Bonus—the federal government succeeded in setting up a seemingly judicious and incorruptible new veterans’ system. In very short time, however, a new cohort of veteran organizations proposed to alter it to better serve veterans’ needs.

World War Veteran Organizations

After the Armistice, Great War veterans negotiated the terrain of veterans’ policy through their organizations. The American Legion quickly developed into the foremost of these. Founded in Paris in 1919 by members of the American Expeditionary Force, the Legion sought to become the representative organization of all Great War veterans. While soldiers serving overseas had started the organization, the Legion offered admission to honorably discharged veterans of the conflict regardless of their stationing. This gave the Legion a pool of some 4.7 million potential members. A little over a year after its creation, 843,013 veterans swelled the Legion’s ranks. Thanks to this significant membership, on September 15, 1919, Congress granted a charter to the organization in acknowledgment of its contributions to the national public interest. Moreover, the War Department gave the Legion official recognition and offered assistance with members’ war records and bureaucratic problems too tangled for individual veterans to contend with on their own. These gestures from the federal government confirmed and further enhanced the Legion’s rapid ascension to the forefront as the dominant World War I veterans association.6
The Legion’s growth to prominence, however, hinged on more than membership growth and official recognition. A group of men drawn from the nation’s political and economic elite dominated the Legion’s national leadership and steered the fledging organization through its first steps. Relying on wealthy leaders’ creditworthiness and on the assistance of financial backers such as Morgan Guarantee Trust, the Legion founders quickly created a solvent national organization. Never far from the reins of national political power, founding members such as Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., Eric Fisher Wood, Ogden Mills, William J. Donovan, and Bennett Champ Clark correspondingly exerted a tremendous amount of control over the Legion’s policies. While rank-and-file veterans often complained about this Legion oligarchy—referred to usually as “the kingmakers”—there was no question that the Legion’s powerful leadership and financial stability helped it gain its immediate national standing among veterans and among elected officials across the nation.7
The Legion rapidly became the dominant veteran organization, but World War veterans did have other options. Veterans’ groups sprang up from across the ethnic, religious, racial, and ideological mosaic of the United States. Some of the largest of the ethnoreligious variety included the Catholic War Veterans, the Jewish War Veterans, and the Polish Legion of American Veterans. African American veterans quickly formed two organizations, the Grand Army of Americans and the more militant League for Democracy, marrying martial camaraderie with the struggle against racial discrimination. A radical group known as the World War Veterans arose and then quickly fell victim to the first Red Scare. (After 1930, the Communist Party–affiliated Workers’ Ex-Serviceman’s League took its place, offering veterans another radical, albeit small, organization to channel their revolutionary zeal.) An organization was founded in 1920 on the basis of service-connected disability, but the Disabled American Veterans of the World War (DAV) enrolled only 25,000 of the 350,000 disabled veterans. Furthermore, the organization focused almost exclusively on issues affecting the disabled, which meant that the DAV was not regarded as an important voice for the vast majority of veterans. Another smaller organization, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), would ultimately prove quite significant for Great War veterans.8
The VFW traced its origins to relatively obscure veterans’ groups that formed after the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars: the National Association of the Army of the Philippines and the American Veterans of Foreign Service. In 1914, these groups in Colorado, Ohio, and Pennsylvania officially consolidated into the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States. Unlike the American Legion, which sought an exclusively doughboy membership, the VFW opened its doors to all honorably discharged veterans who had served “on foreign shores or in hostile waters in any war, campaign or expedition recognized by Congress with a campaign badge or service clasp.” In 1917, the VFW added veterans of the Great War to those of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, and various expeditions into Latin America. Many members had served in multiple conflicts. For example, in late 1917, VFW national commander Albert J. Rabing boasted that some 15 percent of the organization’s members were in military service for the second time.9
Throughout the 1920s, the VFW did not seem a likely candidate to challenge the American Legion for the allegiance of World War veterans. Even though the VFW inducted active-duty doughboys in France, the organization struggled mightily to get World War veterans into the fold. In 1920, the VFW’s membership stood at 20,000 veterans, not appreciably larger than it had been in 1917 and minuscule in comparison to the 800,000 Legionnaires. Even as late as 1927, the VFW had just 70,000 members. A difference in potential membership partially explains why the VFW never approached the size of the American Legion. After all, the organization’s pool of potential members was only around 2 million—fewer than half of the 4.7 million from which the Legion could recruit. As important, the organization faced the perception that it was for an older generation. In 1920, seeking to alter this perception and to bump membership recruitment higher, the VFW tried touting the news that a World War veteran had been elected to the position of national commander. While this was true—two-time national commander Robert G. Woodside was a high-ranking VFW official even before his second tour of service during the Great War—the VFW continued to struggle with the younger generation as the WWI-age cohort remained reluctant to join and, when they did, slow to assume leadership positions throughout the organization.10
The VFW lacked not only the Legion’s size and attendant lobbying strength but also its prominent, politically connected leadership. Throughout the 1920s, VFW leaders were older veterans of the Spanish-American War era and rarely came from the nation’s economic or political elites. Commander Woodside, for example, was one of the most advantaged of the VFW leaders. The Pennsylvanian parlayed his law practice and military experience into a position as Allegheny County sheriff, and then as County controller. These were no small positions in Allegheny County, but they paled in comparison to the Wall Street and Washington connections of the Legion leadership. Yet the absence of “kingmakers” in the VFW did have one benefit. VFW leaders proved slightly more responsive to the membership than their Legion counterparts because they were less entrenched in positions of power within the organization. The VFW leadership’s lack of economic and political stature, however, translated into a shocking and perpetual shortage of organizational funds. Individual leaders of far lesser means than their Legion counterparts lent the organization not inconsiderable sums of money just to keep it afloat. Thus, in the 1920s, the power-brokering Legion towered over the VFW not just in membership but also in power and prestige, however they were measured.11
While marked differences existed at the leadership level and in the national status of the Legion and VFW, more subtle differences could be found in their rank-and-file memberships. Both organizations took pride in a cross-class national membership. The thorny issue of race, however, tested the supposed inclusiveness of the organizations. Each allowed state departments to decide on racial matters in tacit complicity with the southern Jim Crow system and the racial system that was emerging in the north during the 1920s. Therefore, while both the VFW and the Legion included African American veterans as members, typically they were shunted into segregated posts in both northern and southern states. As far as class composition is concerned, however, there was a key difference between the Legion and VFW.12
Limited existing evidence from Legion polling and VFW post rosters suggests that rank-and-file Legion and VFW members differed in their class origins. Legionnaires tended to be from the middle or the upper-middle class. A 1935 membership survey conducted by the Daniel Starch advertising agency in New York found that 22.4 percent of Legionnaires came from the ranks of the professional and managerial class. The survey discovered that 43 percent of the members either owned small businesses (22.2) or were sales or clerical workers (20.8). Only 3.8 percent of the Legionnaires surveyed were farmers, while just 16.1 percent and 6.2 percent were skilled and unskilled workers, respectively. In 1938, another marketing survey confirmed this class composition by revealing that some 64 percent earned more than $2,000 a year at a time when the average family income was $1,244.13
The VFW’s membership, on the other hand, hailed from the middle or lower rungs of the social ladder. Very large numbers of skilled workers joined with small businessmen such as barbers and grocers and clerical workers of the lower-middle class to make up the majority of the VFW membership. A much larger percentage of unskilled laborers filled the ranks, too. In 1935, for example, skilled workers made up 44 percent of the 111 locatable members in Kankakee, Illinois, Post 2857. The post had nearly the same percentage of unskilled workers (10 percent) as of professionals and managers (11 percent). Clerical workers and small-business owners constituted 21 and 14 percent, respectively, of the membership. Home ownership statistics corroborate this social portrait. Only 28.8 percent of the members owned homes valued at or above the median home price for Kankakee County. Fourteen percent owned homes worth less than the median value, while the majority of the members (56.7 percent) were renters. Members of Post 2350 in Elko, Nevada, were of a similar class composition: 47 percent were skilled workers, and every other category, including farmers and unskilled workers, accounted for 11.7 percent. Only 17.6 percent of the Elko veterans owned homes over the median county value of $2,555. Nearly 65 percent of the Elko VFW members rented. In this regard, the nonelite VFW leadership more accurately reflected the social makeup of the group’s rank-and-file members. These class differences between the organizations would play a large role in the future of interwar veteran politics.14
Despite their differences, between 1919 and 1929, the Legion and the VFW shared a number of organizational characteristics and posi...

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