Failing Our Veterans

The G.I. Bill and the Vietnam Generation

Mark Boulton

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780814724873
• eBook ISBN: 9780814770283
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

Returning Vietnam veterans had every reason to expect that the government would take care of their readjustment needs in the same way it had done for veterans of both World War II and Korea. But the Vietnam generation soon discovered that their G.I. Bills fell well short of what many of them believed they had earned. Mark Boulton’s groundbreaking study provides the first analysis of the legislative debates surrounding the education benefits offered under the Vietnam-era G.I. Bills. Specifically, the book explores why legislators from both ends of the political spectrum failed to provide Vietnam veterans the same generous compensation offered to veterans of previous wars.

Failing Our Veterans should be essential reading to scholars of the Vietnam War, political history, or of social policy. Contemporary lawmakers should heed its historical lessons on how we ought to treat our returning veterans. Indeed, veterans wishing to fully understand their own homecoming experience will find great interest in the book’s conclusions.

1

For the Wounded and the Worthy

Veterans’ Benefits from the Early Republic to the Vietnam Era

Though undying gratitude is the meed of everyone who served, it is not to be said that a material bestowal is an obligation to those who emerged from the great conflict not only unharmed, but physically, mentally and spiritually richer for the great experience.

—President Warren Harding, September 19, 1922

No person, because he wore a uniform, must thereafter be placed in a special class of beneficiaries over and above all other citizens. 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.

—President Franklin D. Roosevelt, October 2, 1933

Military service in time of war or peace is an obligation of citizenship and should not be considered inherently a basis of future Government benefits.

—Bradley Report, April 1956

The fractious political debates that would cause the problems associated with the Vietnam-era G.I. Bills had long antecedents in American history. Since the very founding of the nation, several areas of contention have dictated the scope and generosity of benefits offered to veterans. The first was simply the economic expediency of offering benefits. Depending on the scale and length of the military engagement, veterans’ benefits have at times constituted an enormous drain on the federal budget. Fiscal conservatives often succeeded in reigning in federal spending, even at times of greatest veteran need. The second point of contention was the potentially degenerative effects on citizenship of offering rewards for military service. From the Revolutionary War down through the era of the All Volunteer Force, lawmakers have questioned whether offering liberal benefits makes citizens more likely to enlist for personal advancement rather than for patriotic reasons. The third factor influencing the scope and nature of veterans’ benefits was the notion that the rewards on offer should be proportional to the level of sacrifice. Thus, disabled veterans and dependents of the war dead tended to receive the highest priority in the allocation of funds, whereas those veterans who had served for the shortest time or in the least hazardous environments received proportionally less consideration. A fourth factor determining the nature of benefits was the government’s motivation for passing them. At different times, veterans’ benefits have been used as a simple reward for service, an inducement to enlist, a readjustment tool to ease the transition back to civilian life, a medium for veterans to make up educational or vocational time lost from civilian life, or a means to stimulate the economy. A final factor affecting legislation has been the lobbying power of the veteran community. The Grand Army of the Republic, for example, exerted an enormous influence on the benefits offered Civil War veterans, while the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars repeatedly pressured Congress for greater benefits throughout the twentieth century. Although Vietnam veterans, many fresh out of the jungle, probably cared little and knew even less about this long history of veterans’ benefits in the United States, the G.I. Bills that would have a direct bearing on their own lives were directly influenced by the debates over veterans’ legislation that had waged for nearly two centuries.

The precedent of offering compensation for the hazards of military service was long established before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. Taking their cue from English legal precedent, several colonies passed laws promising benefits to veterans injured in the line of service. Virginia passed the first such law in 1624, the Plymouth colony followed in 1636, and by 1777 all colonies with the exception of Connecticut pledged to care for their disabled veterans.¹ Such payments for veterans injured defending the common interest proved to be one of least controversial areas in all future discussions over veteran funding. The idea that the rest of society should compensate any citizen whose life goals and means of earning a living might have been compromised while in uniform has historically enjoyed wide acceptance. By offering assistance to injured veterans, the government ensured that the burden of military service could be distributed in some small measure more equally across society. Although a slight hike in taxes hardly equates to the loss of a limb or other injury, the idea of disability compensation recognized that wartime hardships should not be limited to the few.

In August 1776, just weeks after cleaving from the British Empire, the Continental Congress made the first steps toward codifying the fledgling government’s obligation to veterans when it passed legislation providing for half-pay for life for disabled veterans. In a more contentious measure, lawmakers also extended the colonial tradition of offering land grants to soldiers who agreed to enlist for the duration of the war, although in part these land grants represented an attempt to induce mercenaries to defect from the British. In 1780, Congress codified the principle of providing assistance for veterans’ dependents when it pledged to give half-pay for seven years to the widows and orphans of Revolutionary War officers, while all veterans were to receive mustering-out pay. The provision of benefits to nondisabled Revolutionary War veterans raised early questions over which veterans were most worthy of compensation for service.

Thomas Jefferson stated his apprehensions about the potentially corrosive effect on the nation’s moral character of offering pensions and payments to nondisabled veterans.² For Jefferson and his followers, it was the virtuous citizen-soldiers performing their civic duty who had fought and won the Revolution. Jefferson’s ideal was of the upstanding republican citizen who would put down his hammer or plow when the nation was threatened and pick up the musket. The soldiers of Jefferson’s republic would not require rewards for service. Instead, they would be performing their natural obligation of citizenship. For Jefferson, American citizens could enjoy the freedom from fear of standing armies and the potential higher taxes needed to sustain them if they answered their nation’s call in times of peril. He, like many after him, believed that all Americans should be expected to perform military service without the expectation of reward or recompense. Those who were able to return to their fields and their workshops without injury would do so with little more than the pride they had earned from the knowledge that they had performed their civic duty. Offering liberal benefits to able-bodied veterans threatened this ideal and raised the specter of transforming the cherished Minuteman into a Hessian mercenary.

The provision of Revolutionary War pensions gave Jefferson and his acolytes particular cause for alarm. Pensions, they suggested, constituted an unnecessary reward, and many feared that they might lead to the corrupting traditions of Old World standing armies. Moreover, some lawmakers feared that creation of special privileges for veterans would set them apart from the rest of society and thus undermine the democratic intent of the Revolution. At the core of revolutionary ideology stood the repudiation of class-based elitism associated with the Old World.³ The creation of a distinct and privileged group of veterans might foreshadow the formation of the kind of stratified society rejected in principle in 1776. In 1818, when Congress debated the passage of a Revolutionary War Pensions Act, North Carolina senator Nathaniel Macon warned that offering such benefits to those not injured in service was “repugnant to the principles of our Government, and at war with good sense and public justice.”⁴ For Macon, the government owed no debt to citizens who had fallen on hard times if their hardship was not related to service. Ultimately, the military exigencies of the War of 1812, combined with widespread press reporting of veterans’ hardships, overrode such objections, and in 1818 Revolutionary War veterans became the first recipients of a large-scale federal pension program in the United States. Early in the program, eligibility extended only to veterans demonstrating need, but in 1832, all veterans received pensions regardless of financial condition. Despite the enactment of such legislation, Jefferson’s vision of citizenship echoed long into the twentieth century, and presidents and politicians continued to question whether rewarding citizens for defending their nation undermined the democratic promise of America. As benefits grew more elaborate and generous, the questioning grew correspondingly louder.

The precedents established by the Revolutionary War eventually extended to the wars of the nineteenth century. Veterans of both the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War received land grants while disabled veterans received compensation. The issue of pensions was resolved less quickly. Not until 1871 did veterans of the War of 1812 receive pensions. Mexican-American War veterans had to wait until 1887. Union veterans of the Civil War received benefits similar to those awarded their predecessors, but the benefits became more generous and eligibility requirements more liberal. Under the General Pension Act of 1862, disabled Union soldiers received disability compensation at a rate determined by their rank and the degree of their disability. The act also provided ongoing benefits for widows and orphans of soldiers killed in action. Instead of outright land grants, the government gave veterans preferential treatment under the Homestead Act of 1862 by allowing them to count a period equal to the duration of their service toward the length of time required for them to own the land. For the first time, veterans also received preferential treatment when applying for federal employment. Injured and disabled veterans received medical care through the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers.⁵

Factors other than outright need contributed to the expansion of Civil War benefits. The lobbying efforts of pension lawyers greatly influenced the passage of the Arrears Act of 1879 that allowed Civil War veterans to claim benefits retroactively for service-related injuries. The Republican Party, keen to expand the spoils base of its patronage network, and the Grand Army of the Republic, the powerful Union veterans’ organization, helped push through the Dependent Pensions Act of 1890, which decreed that veterans could claim disability benefits even if their injury did not occur while they were in service. In effect, the provisions of the 1890 act established a permanent pension system for aging veterans who could claim some form of ailment.⁶ Because of the numbers of veterans and the more liberal benefits they received, the costs to government skyrocketed by the end of the nineteenth century. By one estimate, veterans’ pensions alone accounted for a staggering 43 percent of all government expenditures by 1893.⁷

The provision of liberal benefits to veterans while much of the country struggled to adjust to the economic pressures of industrialization set veterans apart as a special class in the United States. As Theda Skocpol notes in Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, veterans avoided the stigma attached to government handouts because society deemed that they had earned their benefits through military service. Many Western countries responded to the growing pains of industrialization by offering benefits to those most negatively affected. The United States followed a different path, eschewing nationwide federal relief to their most needy. But veterans had now solidified their privileged position in society, establishing, in Skocpol’s words, “a moral ordering of claims on the federal government’s largesse.”⁸ Nineteenth-century benefits legislation was retroactive and few citizens would have enlisted in anticipation of future pensions. No one was going off to war to get rich, but lawmakers were clearly setting the precedent that the government was becoming increasingly responsible for the post-service financial status of the nation’s veterans. The first major pension law of the twentieth century continued this trend, as the Sherwood Act of 1912 provided pensions to all veterans irrespective of their physical or financial health. The adoption of such an expensive obligation raised questions of just how much veterans should continue to be compensated for service. These questions intensified after the government called upon nearly five million of its citizens to serve in World War I.

The cost and inefficiency—including allegations of fraud—of the nineteenth-century benefits system prompted a change in the philosophy and distribution of benefits during World War I. The 1914 War Risk Insurance Act offered merchant seamen at risk from submarine attacks low-cost insurance to compensate them or their families in the event of death or disability. Following the recommendations of Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 Council of National Defense, the government extended this provision to all of the nation’s soldiers, hoping this measure would preclude the need for costly pensions at some later date. The government, for the first time, also offered benefits for vocational training—including funds for tuition, school fees, and a living stipend—for disabled veterans. Over 128,000 disabled veterans received training under this provision. The motive behind offering education benefits was that veterans would be given the opportunity to catch up on the potential opportunities they would have been enjoying had they remained civilians. Nonveterans would have attended school or learned a trade, so the government attempted to give veterans the kind of advancement in life they could have received had they not entered the military. The philosophy behind this readjustment benefit would prove highly influential on future legislation. But in the aftermath of the conflict, the most contentious debates over funding centered on the issue of a proposed cash bonus for veterans.⁹

Proponents of the bonus argued that servicemen earned less in military service than they would have as civilians and should be compensated through a one-time cash payment. While civilian wages had increased due to the wartime demands for labor, the relatively low military pay of approximately thirty dollars a month had placed veterans at an economic disadvantage relative to their civilian counterparts. Spurred on by the organizational efforts of the recently formed veterans’ groups the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, nearly seventy-five thousand ex-servicemen marched on the streets of New York demanding payment of a bonus. Their efforts were initially futile.

Critics of the bonus claimed that it was financially irresponsible and further suggested that it would have a degenerative effect on the national character. In the heady laissez-faire atmosphere of the early 1920s, Warren Harding and other fiscal conservatives, such as influential Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, warned that the creation of an entrenched system of benefits might make veterans a special-interest welfare group. Harding even took the unusual step of appearing on Capitol Hill in an attempt to dissuade the Senate from voting on a bonus bill.¹⁰ In addition, and despite the seemingly healthy state of the nation’s finances, Harding’s arguments also contained warnings about the financial burden of the bonus. In his message before the Senate he warned that such a measure might “emperil the financial stability of our country.”¹¹ Harding chose to veto the Bonus Bill when it finally did pass both houses, and in his veto message he reiterated the view that the government owed fewer obligations to able-bodied veterans. He stated, “Though undying gratitude is the meed of everyone who served, it is not to be said that a material bestowal is an obligation to those who emerged from the great conflict not only unharmed, but physically, mentally and spiritually richer for the great experience.”¹² As his glowing assessment of wartime service might reveal, Harding had never served on the front lines. His arguments contained strains of Jefferson’s view that military service should not be a basis for benefits if the quality of a soldier’s well-being had not been overtly harmed.

Despite this setback, veterans’ organizations continue to lobby hard for the bonus bill, and Congress soon had another version of it to present to Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge. Again, the president vetoed the bonus, arguing,

Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not pa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “A Chance for Learning”
• 1. For the Wounded and the Worthy: Veterans’ Benefits from the Early Republic to the Vietnam Era
• 2. The Clash of the Texans: The Making of the 1966 Cold War G.I. Bill
• 3. A Peacetime Bill for the Warrior: Shortchanging the Vietnam Vets
• 4. Mr. President (Have Pity on the Fighting Man): Nixon’s Right Turn for America, Wrong Result for the Veterans
• 5. On the Streets and in the Schools: The Veterans Come Home
• 6. Denouement: Ford’s War on Inflation and Teague’s Last Stand
• Conclusion: “A Chance for Learning” Missed
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author