Fortunate Sons and Daughters

Poor people have always fought rich people’s wars.  And the rich folks have always said thanks in one way or another.  Yesterday our airwaves were jammed with Veterans Day ceremonies, speeches, and heartfelt thirty-second thank yous to veterans from multimillionaire quarterbacks.  Applebee’s let veterans eat free for a day.

This gratitude used to take a more material form.  Military service bonuses began in 1776, and until about 1860, Continental army veterans received military service bonuses of both land (100 acres for a private, 1100 acres for a Major General) and cash.  As the number of wars increased and available land decreased, these payments were scaled back to the point where veterans of the Spanish-American War did not receive a bonus, and the millions of U.S. soldiers who participated in the carnage of the Great War received only $60 for their efforts.  In 1924, in response to political pressure led by the newly created American Legion, congress issued certificates of service to veterans that would mature in 20 years.

In 1932, at the crest of the Great Depression and finding themselves unable to wait to until 1945 to collect their benefits, 43,000 veterans and families of veterans, led by former army sergeant Walter W. Waters and calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, marched on Washington.  For about a month they camped on the Anacostia Flats, until President Hoover, utilizing a loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act, ordered the U.S. military to remove them.

On July 28, 1932 the United States Army, with fixed bayonets and Adamsite gas, and led by General Douglas MacArthur and Major George S. Patton, attacked its own veterans.  After the initial thrust drove the Bonus Army across the Anacostia River, President Hoover ordered the attack to halt.  But General MacArthur, beginning to hone his disdain for presidential authority, continued the assault and hundreds of veterans were injured and several were killed.

As is the case with most revolutionaries, the Bonus Army’s defeat turned into a victory for those who came after them.  In 1944, at the end of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt, fearful of another Bonus Army march on Washington, signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, more commonly known as the GI Bill.  This act provided veterans with unemployment relief and low-interest home loans, but its most important and far-reaching impact was on education.  Millions of veterans got a college education on the GI Bill. 

The GI Bill, along with the Women’s movement and the Civil Rights Movement, transformed public higher education.  But the GI Bill was only half the story.  State funding for flagship, land grant, and comprehensive universities grew dramatically after World War II.  At the same time that the federal government was investing in veterans, state governments were investing in public universities.  In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, public universities became the drivers of state economies and social mobility that they were created to be in the early part of the twentieth century.

But as genuine public responsibility for America’s wars declined, so did state support for public universities.  With the end of the draft in 1973, large portions of the U.S. middle and upper classes no longer have had to put their own blood on the line when our leaders take us to war.  Now more than ever, poor people fight rich people’s wars.    And since the 1980s, states have been steadily disinvesting in public universities and replacing state appropriations with increased tuition.  So as the military has become more and more the place where the dispossessed go for some economic stability, state universities have become more and more the playgrounds of the privileged. 

Recently, the education portion of GI benefits made a comeback. The Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008, originally introduced by veteran and Virginia senator Jim Webb, provides 4 years of state college tuition to veterans who served after September 11, 2001.  But, as with the original GI Bill, that can only be half the story.  Right now, veterans trying to take advantage of the 9/11 GI Bill are waiting by their mailboxes for checks that have been delayed due to cuts to institutional financial aid offices, and looking for classes that aren’t there any more due to budget cuts.

If Washington continues to cut funding to our state universities, our veterans won’t have access to the institutions where they can spend the tuition money they earned on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.