None of Uncle Sam’s doughboys ever thought that he would have to have a group of eye-witnesses to testify they saw him lying for hours in a rain-filled shell hole while doing patrol duty; none of Uncle Sam’s doughboys,during the bombardment of Verdun, or in the midst of the Argonne slaughter, ever paused to reflect on the necessity of having a personal audience or a camera to observe every act he performed, although the heaviest fighting usually took place in pitch darkness and it was worth a court-martial even to light a cigarette.
The law that took all these facts into consideration, the Disability Compensation Act, lived less than three years. It became effective in 1930 and in 1933, was repealed by the so-called Economy Act, designed to “maintain the credit of the nation.” With one stroke of the pen, our lawmakers suddenly decided that 500,000 World War veterans, suffering from disabilities that made it impossible for them to work even if they could find employment, would have to shift for themselves. At that particular time, the country was in the grip of a sudden hysterical demand for economy. In response to this clamor, the politicians decided that political shrewness required action. They armed the budget up one side and down the other, searching for an expenditure that could be eliminated and still only antagonize that group which represented the smallest organised band of voters. They picked on the veteran.
Despite all the predictions of panic and calamities, the reduction in veteran expenditures was the only major step taken to reduce the costs of the federal government. As soon as this was accomplished, the fad for economy became unpopular and was forgotten by the politicians. On the contrary, they immediately launched upon a spending spree that would put the traditional drunken sailor to shame. For example, we threw 500,000 veterans, each of them disabled physically, into the streets and took away their compensation, ranging from $12 to $40 a month. We turned around and created the Civilian Conservation Corps, with jobs for 300,000 boys and young men, for a flat wage of $30 a month. We repudiated the man who was physically unable to take care of himself, and who had proved by actual service his right to expect a favor from the federal government. We took to our hearts, and to our pocketbooks, the young and physically able individual whose only claim for favorable consideration from Uncle Sam was the fact that he happened to be living within the confines of the United States.
The circumstances that made the Disability Compensation Act both logical and humane were by no means repealed when the law itself was wiped from the statutes. Those sames circumstances exist today in even a greater degree. Because of these conditions, the American people may just as well resign themselves to the fact now that sooner or later we must have a general pension act that will provide care and compensation for World War veterans suffering from disabilities that make it impossible for these man to take care of themselves.
This World War veterans pension act is inevitable. Its advent is as certain as the dawn of tomorrow. The politicians who prefer to confine federal expenditures to appropriations that can be divided among their campaign contributors, can howl as they please. The United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Economy League, the Manufacturers Association, the American Liberty League, and the many other groups that are anxious to keep down federal expenditures in order to keep income taxes at a minimum, know that the demand for a World War pension act is on the horizon. Down in their hearts they also know,despite all the opposition they may be able to promote, that a World War pension act will eventually be enacted.
That group of industrial leaders, bankers, and others commonly regarded as representative of “big business,” the individuals who compose the memberships of the organizations named above, are fiercely opposed to a World War pension act because the burden of cost naturally be met through taxation.Uncle Sam derives the major portion of his revenue through income taxes. Every step to increase governmental expenses is a threatened increase in income taxes.
Big Business insists the federal government is not responsible for the care and welfare of America’s disabled veterans and these men must either care for themselves, or depend upon the charity they can get from relatives, or their local communities. With the hope of protecting themselves against an increase in income taxes, those who oppose the suggestion of a World War pension prefer to discredit the veteran, his sacrifices and the services he rendered to the nation in time of war by castigating him as a “treasury raider” and a “parasite upon the body politic.”
When congress eventually enacts a World War pension act, the responsibility of veteran welfare will be placed upon the shoulders of the federal government where it properly belongs. These men were drafted for the protection of the nation as a whole—and not to defend the boundary lines of any particular township, city or state. It therefore becomes the duty of the nation, as a whole, to share the costs of war and the care of its disabled soldiers. This is not only a moral obligation. It is a sound so economic policy that divides the burden of cost between all taxpayers in all sections of the country. It is neither fair, nor equitable, to force any one particular state,and its citizens, to assume the major burden of this expense.
In the eighteen years since the Armistice, World War veterans have moved from one state to another, seeking climatic conditions that are best suited to their health. In the southwest alone, thousands of veterans from other sections of the country have settled to live in the only climate that offers relief from tubercular afflictions. There is no reason why the tax-paying citizens of Arizona and New Mexico should be forced to assume the responsibility for disabled veterans who have moved to their states from every other part of the country. After having lived for years, and paid taxes, in Pennsylvania or New York, thousands of veterans have moved to other states in search of employment,or for some other reason. The same condition holds true in every corner of the country. As a result, one state may have a large veteran population while a neighboring state may have comparatively few.
There is one inescapable fate in the aftermath of every war. The bill must be paid. It is inevitable that the people themselves must pay that bill. This expense may be met either directly or indirectly through federal state or local taxation or charity. We have not yet reached that stage in America where people are left to die or suffer in the streets. If disabled veterans are unable to get help from the federal government, they will be forced to turn to local agencies. Nevertheless, the people will pay. If these veterans are left to charity, the care of veteran organizations, the American Red Cross, county and state poor farms and hospitals—the burden of cost still rests upon the individual citizen. However, unless this cost is shared by every taxpayer in the country, we saddle the expense upon the shoulders of a few, within the confines of certain countries and states. By dividing this cost between taxpayer’s as a whole, the proportionate share of each taxpayer’s contribution will be that much smaller. This deduction involves no mysterious arithmetical computations and no complicated theories. The problem is national in scope. The solution is simple. The sooner this fact is accepted by the American people at large, the more quickly will we be able to dispose of our disabled veteran problem and definitely remove it from the field of politics.
Under existing conditions, and even after we have given our disabled veterans the consideration they deserve, the soldiers who took part in the world war will still be the only real losers in that unforgettable conflict between nations.
Government Aid for Veterans (Undated)
Well, if you boys haven’t taken the wind out of my sails! I’m telling you—I’m a changed man. “Gimlet-eye!” “Stormy petrel!” Me? Huh—I’m a cooling dove—I’m a woolly lamb that’s forgotten how to say baa-a. I’m going around these days with a smile stretched across my face from ear to ear.
Because why? Because you boys are yourselves again, that’s why! And is it good to have you back? Why, doggone it, you’ve got me all sentimental. Just a few months ago I thought you’d all gone forever. I couldn’t seem to find a single trace of the boys I used to know. I thought they’d a
ll gone and changed into a lot of dummies standing around with “Kick me” signs pinned to their coat tails. Oh, I heard ‘em whining some, and here and there were still a few that stood up and talked like men, but most of ‘em were just so many silly geese. They acted like they were out to show they “could take it!” Who wants a soldier who only knows how to “take it?” What does it prove? A straw dummy in bayonet drill can take a lot of punishment, too, so that’s nothing to brag about.
But there, I’m not mad. I still get a little hot around the collar when I think of the miseries and injustices and rotten discriminations you have been up against for years—and I haven’t forgotten that we’ve still some distance to travel—but on the whole I’m mighty well pleased with the way you boys have gotten together and backed your enemies up against the ropes.
You see, I’d just about give up all hope. I honestly thought you blessed dim-wits had forgotten how to fight. All I could see was you taking punches—punches on the chin, punches that had you groggy. And that damn near had me delirious! Here I was, going around yelling my head off at you, and thought you didn’t even hear me. Congress and Wall Street, and our leading “financial geniuses,” whatever they are, and the Economy League and a lot of stuffed shirts who strut on the millions of dollars their crooked old grand-dads sold their souls to the devil to get, were calling you names and kicking you downstairs and blaming you for everything from the price of wheat to the last California earth-quake—and you were taking it. First, you let them use you. I don’t blame you for that. I’ve been doing the same thing all my life and I don’t know yet how it can be helped.
It’s pretty easy to be “against war.” Who isn’t? Except, of course, the munitions manufacturers and the ghouls who are only too glad to translate human lives and blood and all the other hideous penalties of war into terms of personal profit. But being “against war” doesn’t do us much good when war is once declared. It’s only a very ignorant person or a fanatic who believes that individual opposition to war, or individual refusal to participate in war, can do away with war. If every man, woman, and child in the United States refused to have anything to do with active participation in war, that still wouldn’t affect the causes of war which are international hatred, nation ambition and envy, and racial differences and economic rivalries.
No, the world being what it is, and human nature being what it is, you can’t do away with war merely by recognizing war’s bitter futility. Once this country is in a state of war, there isn’t anything for you and me and every other red-blooded man in the United States to do except to try our best to make it as short as possible. Secretary of War Dern recently made a fine, intelligent speech in which he said that it isn’t the Army that causes war—people cause war and the Army stops it. He’s right and only a shallow, superficial, half-naked mind could think otherwise.
But I’m getting away from my subject. I was saying that solders and sailors and marines do the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in the country when they’re called upon. It isn’t that we like to kill. We don’t really enjoy handling the gun or the bayonet that sends a human soul out into the great unknown, we don’t prefer army rations to any other food we ever ate, and most of us have better beds at home than we get in the trenches or in No Man’s Land. No—you know and I know—and anyone with a grain of sense should know that men fight wars because there are wars to fight and because, as men, there isn’t anything we can do except fight. It’s our job. It’s any man’s job to fight when his country is at war.
But the thing that burns me up is the way governments and people change once a war is over. Yesterday’s heroes become today’s blackguards, treasury raiders, snipers behind the lines, and everything else down to and including yellow dogs. A man sacrifices his job, his wife and children, his health and his happiness, and then, when he’s down and out, sick, perhaps maimed, if he so much as asks his country to give him enough medicine to keep from dying, enough food to keep from starving, and enough money tob pay for a roof over his head, millions of our “best people”—meaning the richest and stingiest—and bankers and newspaper editors and big income tax-payers, raise their voices to heaven in loud, long yells of protest and rage.
And there was a time not so long ago when you boys actually seemed to be letting them get away with it. They took away your hospital benefits, they took away your disability compensations. They let you go jobless and hungry, they demanded impossible proof of the service connection of your injuries and illnesses, and they blamed you for everything that was wrong anywhere in this whole country. And it seemed to me that you began to actually believe it yourselves. You wouldn’t get together. You squabbled among yourselves. You couldn’t get far enough away from your own personal viewpoints to see the thing as a whole. You wouldn’t coordinate—you couldn’t cooperate. You just sat and whined and waited for somebody else to fight your battles for you.
At least, that’s how it seemed to me. But glory be, you came to life! For you did get together and you did act and you did get somewhere, didn’t you? I’ve been in and out of Washington quite a lot there last few months. I’ve been able to watch what your Commander-in-Chief and your legislative committee have been doing. I’ve followed the militant, unceasing battle that Foreign Service has been making for the V.F.W. legislative program and policies. I’ve been tickled to death with them all but—I’m even more delighted with the way you veterans have backed up your leaders. You’ve done what had to be done—you told Congress—told ‘em through Jimmy Van Zandt and George Brobeok—told ‘em with thousands upon thousands of personal letters and telegrams. Told ‘em with your mass meetings, and your veterans’ rallies and through the newspapers you’ve taught to see the light! And it worked!
Congress didn’t pass the Independent Offices Appropriation bill over the Presidential veto just because they were tired of being good, obedient little boys. They didn’t upset Mr. Roosevelt’s nice little apple-cart just to hear the crash. Congress passed that bill because you veterans and your organizations told ‘em to—literally. You told ‘em why and you told ‘em how. You have some good loyal friends in Congress. With their assistance, and the weight of your own united, single-purposed thought and effort, you put over a real concession in veteran legislation.
Every Spanish-American War veteran—every blind World War veteran—every one of those 29,000 totally disabled presumptive cases whose names have been restored to the government pension rolls by the Independent Offices Appropriation bill, have the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States to thank for that fact. It’s no secret that another veterans’ organization, whose name I need not mention because you know it as well as I do, did what the V.F.W. refused to do. They compromised! They went so far as to tell Congress that they were sure the President would sign the bill if it included the compromise measures—75 instead of 100 percent restoration of outs. They must have felt plenty silly when Congress believed ‘em and accepted the amendments and then President Roosevelt vetoed it anyway. And they must have felt even sillier when Congress passed that bill over the veto by such a huge majority that it was perfectly evident the bill would have been safe—amendments or no amendments.
At this time of writing, nobody knows what’s going to happen to H. R. I, the “bonus” bill. No one can even guess. A lot of editorial writers and other bright boys guessed on the other and they guessed wrong. Lots of people were plenty surprised when H. R. I was passed by 295 to 125 votes in the House. By the time these word are in print, the immediate cash payment of adjusted service certificates may be a closed issue for this Congressional session. It may pass the Senate. If it does, the President’s pretty sure to veto it, as you all know. If he does, I think it still has a mighty good chance of being passed over his veto. The first and greatest hurdle it must jump is the Senate vote.
In the meantime, you and I—and every other soldier and veteran in the United States, must keep on working and fighting and pulling together. Even with the Independent Offices Appropriation a
ct, even if the bonus bill passes, we must not forget for one moment that there are still 500,000 sick and disable veterans in this country of ours who have been completely eliminated from the federal pension rolls. We must not forget that these men are just as much the victims of war as the men who lost their lives on the battlefields of France. We must not forget that we—you and I and the V.F.W. and veterans in general—must stand together between those 500,000 men and death—between them and their families and starvation or charity.
Men, this war ain’t over yet. I’ve a mighty strong suspicion that this fight is a permanent fight. We’ve not only got to keep the veterans’ welfare legislation we already have, but we’ve got to go and get more. We can’t stop until every disabled veteran in this United States is being cared for by his country as he ought to be cared for. We can’t stop until every heart-broken widow and orphan of a veteran is being given at least a decent living and a chance to live.
If there’s anything under heaven that makes me jump up and down and howl with rage, it’s the way the United States of America is treating the wives and children of the fine-husky, brave lads and men who died in its honor and defense.
“Thirty dollars a month,” we tell these sad-eyed women. “We broke your heart and took away the men you loved and robbed your children of their fathers’ love and care, so in return, and by way of cancelling our debt to you and yours, here’s $30 a month for yourself and $6 or $8 each for your minor children.”
Isn’t that big-hearted?
No sir, let me tell you something. As long as there are wars—which means as long as human nature endures; as long as there is human pride and selfishness, and the age-old death-struggle between right and might—just so long will honest, decent, civilized men and women have to fight the forces of greed and power and wealth and man’s natural sinfulness.
War Is a Racket Page 8