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Veteran's Movement: History of Struggle

By Pete Zastrow

One very important chapter of American history that, like many others, has been carefully hidden from the American people is the history of the veterans' movement in the US. Traditionally, the way our "history" books have dealt with the story of the people's movements, the struggles against exploitation, racism and repression, has been to pretend that they never existed-simply omit any mention of them at all or so greatly distort what really happened as to literally rewrite history. Such is the case with the story of the veterans' movement; a history of militant struggle that goes all the way back to the very birth of our nation. In a series of articles, Winter Soldier will begin the process of telling the real history of the veterans' movement-a movement that is alive and just as much a part of our society today in 1974 as it was two hundred years ago.

The growing mass movement of veterans we see today in the US is not an isolated phenomenon. Its roots go all the way back to the period after our Revolutionary War. Then, and after every major war the US has been involved in, veterans have organized as a group to fight for a decent standard of living and for the fulfillment of promises the government made to them while they were in the service. This was not just coincidence either. After each of these wars, there was an initial period of brief economic prosperity followed by a deep economic crisis. In each of these economic depressions following on the heels of a war, veterans were among the very first to really feel the pinch. Organizing to fight for their rights and for decent benefits was a simple matter of survival.

In 1783, just after the Revolution, a group of Revolutionary War vets organized a "Pay March" to the Continental Congress, then sitting in Philadelphia. While the generals of the war, like Washington and Lafayette, had been rewarded for their service with large pensions and land grants, the enlisted men who had actually fought the war had not even received their pay since the Battle of Yorktown two years earlier. With a logic as sound today as it was then, the "Pay Marchers" felt they had a better chance of getting their back salaries by marching on Congress and forcing it to act rather than by waiting for Congress to do so on its own initiative. Congress thanked them for their troubles by asking Washington to send troops to attack them. Washington did so, calling the vets "soldiers of a day" and a "rough lot" (much as President Hoover would later call the famous Bonus Marchers of 1932 "criminals" and "reds.") While the "Pay Marchers" failed to win their demands, they did establish a time-honored tradition of the veterans' movement: the militant mass action of veterans fighting to win their demands.

About this same time another mass uprising was going on in Massachusetts. Today, this is known as "Shay's Rebellion" after its leader Col. Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary War hero of Bunker Hill. The severe economic crisis that followed the war caused particular hardship to thousands of small farmers who were losing their lands to mortgage foreclosures and lawsuits for past debts. These farmers formed themselves into armed bands to fight back against this. Joining with them were a great number of ex-servicemen of the war, out of work and trying to survive (many of whom were dispossessed farmers themselves). It took government nearly two years to put down Shay's Rebellion, and even then only by using very heavy armed force was it finally able to crush the revolt in 1787.

After the War of 1812, veterans again organized to fight for their needs. In 1818 vets had forced Congress to award payments for injuries and the burden of postwar economic hardships, even though these were not service connected disabilities. This was the first time vets had won any non-service connected disability payments and set the precedent for winning similar benefits for veterans after each war since then.

The end of the Civil War saw the now familiar pattern of a short period of economic prosperity followed by a serious economic depression. This economic crisis set the stage for the long run "pension fights" Civil War vets would wage well into the 20th Century. While the organization of Civil War vets, the Grand Army of the Republic, grew to be very powerful and drew the dutiful attention of every presidential candidate up to the First World War, vets and their families had to fight for every dime they got from the government.

To receive pensions for service during the Civil War, veterans (or their families, if they had been killed) had to fill out incredibly complicated forms so filled with red tape and bureaucratic gobbledygook that only a very experienced person could successfully complete them. This left most veterans prey to slick politicians who would dangle hopes and pensions before them for votes. It also subjected them to the even more insidious group of bloodsuckers known as "claim agents" and money lenders.

Often these "claim agents" were doctors who would verify the claims a vet would make for compensation. A government investigator of the time described the situation as follows: "claim agents would sit at the pay offices on pay days and seize the pensions of frightened, ignorant privates, frequently retaining more than half of it for themselves...the pensions..of Civil War veterans collected in the pockets of the loan sharks." Despite all the obstacles set in their way, however, Civil War vets continued their fight for decent benefits for well over 40 years. As late as 1918, after WWI had begun, there was still a slight increase in the classification of categories of veterans eligible for pensions.

By the time World War I had started, big business and war profiteers had learned the power of the veterans' movement. They wanted to prevent vets from organizing as an independent political force and avoid having to pay the great cost of veterans' pensions as they had to for both Civil War and Spanish American War veterans. In the next article in this series we will deal with the veterans' movement during the WWI period.