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 all 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 earthquake—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 soldiers 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 to 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 Serevice 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 veteruns 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 editerial 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 act, 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.
And just so long will soldiers have to fight their own as well as their country’s battles. If there’s one thing the last year should have taught us, it is that legislation is never a permanent quantity. Just when it gets to the place where this country is doing the decent, fair, honorable thing by the men whose service and sacrifice have made this country what it is,—a new Congress will convene and start meddling with the statute books. They pick on the laws having to do with government aid for veterans.