Paid Patriotism? The Debate over Veterans’ Benefits

291 Pages·2017·2.257 MB·English

by  James T. Bennett

First published 2017 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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ISBN: 978-1-4128-6524-1 (hbk)
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Decrepit Old Men Asking Only for Th eir Due:
Th e Origins of the Veterans Lobby 7
2 Shark-Infested Waters: Th e Scramble for
Pensions after the Civil War 31
3 Th e War to End All Wars Does Not End All Wars but
Does Give Birth to the Boners and Revives the
Veterans of Foreign Wars 89
4 Th e 1944 GI Bill: Hype Exemplifi ed 145
5 An Endless Parade of GI Bills? Korea,
Vietnam, and Post-9/11 201
6 Th e Best Medicine? Th e Growth of the Veterans
Medical Complex and a Culture of Entitlement 225
Index 275

Acknowledgments
I am grateful to many for their assistance with and support of the
research and editing of this book. Th e research would not have been
possible without the generous fi nancial support of the Sunmark Foun-
dation. Research assistance was provided by Nicholas Pusateri. I am
especially grateful to my editor, Bill Kauff man, for I am indebted to
him for signifi cant contributions to this study.
James T. Bennett
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA
vii

Introduction
What does a nation owe its military veterans? Gratitude, esteem,
land grants, medical care, pensions, higher education, and so on, or is
serving in the armed forces of one’s country an obligation to be under-
taken without any expectation of recompense? Surely, those who have
been wounded fi ghting their government’s wars should be cared for
at government expense. But what of the hale and healthy? If veterans
are to receive government subvention, should a distinction be made
between those who served in wartime or faced enemy fi re and those
who saw neither war nor combat?
Th ese questions have been answered in varying ways by the Amer-
ican people and their elected representatives since the Revolutionary
War. In Paid Patriotism? Th e Debate over Veterans’ Benefi ts, we will
examine the complex and politically charged history and present of
what the late columnist William Safi re called the “most sacred cow”
in Washington: the veterans’ bureaucracy.1
Th e economist Randall G. Holcombe calls American veterans “the
fi rst organized interest group that was able to use the political process
to systematically transfer large sums of money to themselves through
the political system,” thus serving as “the precedent for [the] interest
group transfers that are such a visible feature of 20th century dem-
ocratic government.”2 Unlike those later interest group recipients of
federal largesse, veterans had a strong emotional claim on the public
purse—and their spokesmen have been adept at playing heartstrings.
Th e book is sectioned chronologically and thematically. Chapters
explore the genesis and growth of soldiers’ pensions throughout the
nineteenth century, especially in the aftermath of the Civil War; the
bonus experiment after World War I; the passage and consequences
of the GI Bill of Rights; the growth of the nation’s system of veterans’
hospitals; the evolution of veterans’ programs during the Cold War and
Vietnam; the post-9/11 GI Bill; and contemporary scandals and reform
1