The War to End All Wars

Dir. Daniel Leonard Bernardi

Trt: 50:39

 

Script with Time Code

 

Trevor Getz

00:02:37:04 - 00:03:00:21 When the war broke out in Europe in 1914, the United States was very much a country in transition. Most of the population still lived on ranches and farms, sort of rural and semi-rural situations. But it was also a society that had been going through industrialization. More and more it was becoming a country of mines and big cities, and people moving from the ranches to the big cities, so really a huge transition.

00:03:01:13 - 00:03:16:21 It was also a country that was very divided in many ways. The sense of an American nation was not very strong. There were regional divides and there was tell a North - South divide, there were class divides, there was a small and very wealthy class who very much looked to Europe, their cultural home.

00:03:16:21 - 00:03:28:21 And then many other poor people, many of whom were recent immigrants from Europe who felt very much like they were making their home in the United States, but also were still somewhat attached to the countries from which they came.

00:03:29:10 - 00:03:48:15 And then of course, racial divides, it was a very divided country in terms of race, especially in terms of African American's , but in the far west in terms of Asian American's very mush not being part of the same social circles, not integrated with the white population. And Native American's very much, in many ways, they were segregated as well.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:03:53:02 - 00:04:50:21 The Escadrille Lafayette was a unit that was in the French Army and was composed of American pilots who had volunteered to fly for France. Interestingly, it was originally called the Escadrille American. Then there were problems with that because the German's protested, saying that since America was a neutral nation, to actually have a unit labeled as an American unit was a violation of that neutrality and the unit needed to be disbanded, but very smartly, instead of disbanding it, they changed the name. And so they picked Escadrille Lafayette and this was a reference to the Marquis de Lafayette, who had been a French nobleman who had come to fight in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, commanded the division and was close friend of George Washington's and so by reminding the Americans of this aid, you're really presenting the American volunteer effort in France, as a repayment of that debt, rather than a way to violate instructions from the government to remain neutral.

00:05:12:10 - 00:05:30:10 Most of the men who joined the Escadrille Lafayette were well educated. They came from the elite. So these were men who had often spent time in France, they had been educated in European cultures and languages, and so they felt a real affinity for France to begin with.

 

00:05:31:12 - 00:06:24:23 Secondly, this was a moment where the idea that war made men, that this was a manly adventure that came around, not often, and would need to be something you should take advantage of in order to really prove your masculinity, to prove your capability for leadership, this was a rite of passage. And if you chose not to seize this opportunity, that says something negative about you. And then finally, I think that as the war went on, there was a lot of publicity in the United States about the real plight that France was in, and so the sense that Germany really represented a unique threat to civilization, that they were raping women, killing babies, burning historic buildings and libraries that could never be replaced, that there was something uniquely evil about the German threat that needed to be combated.

00:06:25:19 - 00:06:43:22 And they were also men who were idealistic, I mean France was suffering and the idea that France would lose land, that it could potentially lose to Germany. This was really in people's minds. So they also fought for their idealistic motivations to actually prevent Germany from conquering France.

 

Raoul Lufbery III

00:06:46:00 - 00:06:57:11 The plane had just been invented by the Wright brothers a few years earlier and become a functional, operational plane at that point. It was the fascination that most people could not even imagine.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:06:57:22 - 00:08:53:23 The uncertainty that the U.S. Army had about how to utilize planes is kind traced in the organizational structure of the Air Force, so, first of all it's called the Air Service, which in and of itself is interesting because it's seen as kind of a service branch to the Army. And it begins initially as being attached to the Signal Corps and that was because the idea was that the real relevance that planes had was in their reconnaissance value, that pilots could go up, they could take pictures, they could maybe shoot down observation balloons, but really what they were there for was to provide information. Because United States enters in 1917, by that point event the allies had begun to develop the idea that you might be able to use planes to drop bombs from and maybe attach machine guns to strike the other side. If you're sending somebody up to take photographs, well, the other side is going to send their planes up to stop you from doing that. And so attaching machine guns to planes is something that happens almost immediately. The other idea of weaponizing them is to load them with bombs and then have that drop them on the opposing side. And the planes themselves are fragile vessels, meaning they can only caring two people, so you can't load them up with weapons. One of the tactics you can employ is to get away from this idea of the lone pilot sort of out there dueling, and begin to group your planes and squadrons, and so then just the sheer numbers that you have can multiply their force capacity. And you could see that like in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, where Billy Mitchell is actually able to pull together a bunch of American, British, and French planes in one day he masses them all and has one big bombing raid on German rear lines. It's the biggest bombing raid of the war, kind of demonstrates, if you really do it in mass, it can be quite effective.

 

 

Trevror Getz

00:08:54:08 - 00:09:41:16 It's only mid-way into the war that a couple of technologies actually make it possible for dog fights to occur and prior to that, in fact, what airmen would do if they want to attack each other, is they would throw things at each other, the most sophisticated being sort of like darts, or even maybe having revolvers and shooting at each other as they pass by. But often it was rocks or clods of dirt that they threw upon each other. And then part way through the war, the technologies developed by which a machine gun can be timed to shoot through a propeller and therefore not to shoot the propeller off and to fire forward for that reason. And the forward firing machine gun really changes things. It makes it possible for planes to engage each other for a single pilot to take on another pilot and to really engage in what we know today as the aerial dog fight.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:09:44:00 - 00:10:30:07 There was a strong learning curve for pilots when they were learning to fly. First of all just learning to fly in [inaudible] these planes were dangerous, often they were shoddy in their construction. They don't have parachutes so if they catch on fire or they need to evacuate, thy were either jumping or they're crashing. And the stairs level for these pilots was tremendous, but it also meant that they were given a lot of freedom, because what they were doing was so dangerous and they had to be reckless and they had to be courageous, they were also allowed to flout military regulations and rules in a way that say an infantry soldier never could. They were sort of allowed that leeway because what they were doing was so unique.

 

Raoul Lufbery III

00:10:30:17 - 00:10:54:12 Airplanes being used in a military war effort was extremely surprising to most people and the media reporters picked up on it very quickly. So it is said that the Lafayette Escadrille probably got the most publicity, both in France and the United States, and for that matter, other allied countries, than any other squadron had ever gotten from that day forward.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:10:55:08 - 00:11:15:06 The dangerousness of their task allowed them a lot of leeway and they took full advantage of it. So, for example, they all kind of developed their own unique style of dressing. They weren't required to wear official uniforms, and they took that to heart. They adopted two lion cubs as their mascots that they named Whiskey and Soda.

 

Raoul Lufbery III

00:11:15:18 - 00:11:30:06 A couple of the pilots saw, in a Paris newspaper, an advertisement for the purchase of a lion cub. They thought it would be a wonderful mascot so they went ahead and gathered up a few bucks and purchased the lion.

 

 

 

Trevor Getz

00:11:30:09 - 00:11:48:08 Whiskey and Soda themselves were, of course, very controversial mascots in that when the unit moved, the French railways were not happy to move Whiskey, and so the unit tried to pretend in the manifest, that whiskey was a dog. Of course the railway saw through it and so they had to crate Whiskey in order to move him to the new base.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:11:48:18 - 00:12:06:01 They trained Whiskey to jump on passersby as they were walking by and they would hide in the bushes and then laugh hysterically at this. I don't, almost feel sorry for the people that got jumped on by this lion cub, but they thought it was funny and they had an American Indian with a war bonnet that they painted on their fuselage.

 

Matthew Brown

00:12:06:19 - 00:13:04:13 The primary armament for the Lafayette Escadrille in their early years was a machine gun called the Lewis. Ammunition for this weapon came from an American company called, Savage Arms. When crates of this ammunition would arrive to the Lafayette Escadrille, it had the insignia of a Sioux war bonnet on the side. This was the logo of the Savage Arms company. Many of the pilots and the mechanics of this unit adopted that symbol as their unit logo and painted it on the side of their aircraft. So many people take a look at this Sioux war bonnet and this mosaic that we have on our monument and they become very concerned that we have a swastika right there, front and center, and I remind everybody that it wasn't until 1933 that the Nazis took that symbol and turned it into something evil. Before, and during this period, the swastika was a symbol used by many global cultures and it symbolized harmony with nature and peace.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:13:05:11 -  In some respects when you think about the First World War, which is a mass industrialized war, and much of the killing in happening on a large scale. So artillery bombardments, machine gun fire, it's hard to have individual heroes. It's not like earlier battles where you could point to one commander making a decision at a particular moment and that changes the course of the battle. That didn't happen in the First World War. So the people that you could look to as individuals who made a difference, were the pilots. Like these were the heroes and they kind of represented that idea that individuals matter and you think about the American ethos of individualism, pilots fed into that.

00:14:45:15 - 00:16:54:16 When Germany resumes unrestricted submarine warfare in January of 1917, and begins to attack American merchant ships, and at this point is no longer interested in any type of negotiation, it seems clear the threat to the American economy, to American shores, is only going to escalate. Germany will only get stronger. They're sinking so much allied shipping that's heading from the U.S. to Britain and France, that it really looks like Britain and France may have to capitulate. And the sense that Germany could actually win this war, that that's a very likely scenario is realistic in 1917. So then Wilson has to think, okay what does a world look like in which Germany is the preeminent power in Europe? And I think by April of 1917 he comes to the conclusion that that directly threatens the United States, because who's to stop them then from securing bases in the Caribbean, from maybe developing a foothold in Canada?  Who's to stop them from expanding into the western hemisphere? There's no guarantee that that could not happen. It's not just about helping France, it's not just about helping Britain, now we need to help ourselves and that requires stopping Germany. The second part of it is that Wilson, through his continued articulations of a peace without victory, of collective security as the wave of the future through a league of nations, these ideas that he's been repeating, now he begins to really develop a strong commitment to making this happen. And he understands that if he wants to shape the peace, he can't do that as an outsider. He can't be shouting across the Atlantic, hey Europe, you won this war, now do what I tell you to do. He has to be at the peace table and that's only going to happen if America fights. So it's this combination of national defense and hopes for shaping the peace that give Wilson this kind of dual motivation for actually entering the war. And that is such a long answer. Because wouldn't it be better if I could just tell you, well the Lusitania was sunk and so we decided to enter the war? It would be so easy then.

00:16:55:18 - 00:17:22:06 I feel better about a President that agonizes over going to war. That really knows what a monumental decision this is. Than one that just is kind of a knee jerk reaction. Because I have to protect national honor or I don't know what else to do. And he goes into this war with his eyes open. He knows the cost of this war. He's kind of torn apart about asking America to pay that cost.

00:17:44:14 - 00:17:59:02 The Navy had a critical role in the First World War because if you think of one of the precipitating reasons the U.S. came into the war, which was the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare by the Germans, the Navy had the role of trying to shut that down.

 

Trevor Getz

00:17:59:06 - 00:18:10:19 So the U.S. Navy, during the war, is involved in a number of duties which include; searching for German surface raiders, and especially protecting convoys carrying American troops from Germany U-boats.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:18:11:05 - 00:18:25:18 And this was very important. There was not an American troop ship that was sunk by Germany U-boats over the entire war, and by using convoys, they dramatically reduced the effectiveness of the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign.

00:18:26:07 - 00:18:40:08 And so getting American troops overseas safely, getting American goods overseas safely was key to bolstering the Allied effort in 1917 and 1918. And the Navy really played an important role in making that happen.

00:18:41:05 - 00:19:04:13 The other important thing that the Navy did is that they basically created this sort of 250 mile long and 35 mile wide, swath of mines to block off any goods or contraband slipping its way into Germany and so the Navy was instrumental in laying that barrage and then after the war, picking it up, which was dangerous, dangerous work.

00:19:12:18 - 00:19:30:17 If you think about the American military before World War I, people felt that they led a kind of degenerate lifestyle, they gambled, they smoked, they ran around with women, there wasn't a sense that these were necessarily upstanding citizens that were joining the military.

00:19:31:07 - 00:19:44:11 So in the Selective Service Act of 1917, there's a clause that creates these anti-vice zones around each military training camp. And in those zones, it outlaws prostitution and it's illegal to sell a soldier in uniform alcohol.

00:19:44:22 - 00:20:33:23 The Selective Service Act was meant to distribute the burden of serving broadly, and it actually worked to do that. The Army does become a snapshot of society. In that way that the Army had not been before. Because before when you're relying on volunteering, you can end up with a much less representative force in your military. So the force that goes in, pretty much does represent America, most people were working class, most people were white, but yet 13% was African American, and one out of every five soldiers was foreign born, we just had all these waves of immigration. America is a place where there's a lot of diversity. And the military represents that in terms of the men that it's bringing in. The Army estimated that men coming into the military spoke about 46 different languages.

00:21:48:23 -  00:22:04:07 The Harlem Hellfighters was the nickname that was given to the 15th New York infantry regiment, was the National Guard regiment which, when it was federalized became the 369th infantry regiment. And the Harlem Hellfighters in some ways was a very unique unit.

 

Trevor Getz

00:22:04:09 - 00:22:18:09 They were one of the most successful army units sent over to France during the war. Once they made it to the front line, they were actually extremely successful in defending sectors that they were sent to do, and were known for their military prowess.

 00:22:22:19 - 00:22:39:15 But in addition they're well-known because they brought over an incredible band and this was the band that James Reese Europe and Noble Lee Sissle helped lead, and it was a band that toured around France and it really, in many ways, helped bring Blues and Jazz to France and to start a European craze for American culture and music.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:22:40:01 - 00:23:10:14 But on the other hand, it experienced a lot of the things that all African Americans soldiers experienced, and that was mainly the pervasive racism in American society and within the American military. So, for example, initially the 369th was sent down to Camp Spartanburg in South Carolina to train and they only lasted about 2 weeks down there before they were pulled out because there were so many problems with the townspeople who just were incensed at the idea that they were going to have black combat troops stationed in their midst.

 

Noble Lee Sissle Jr.

00:23:12:22 - 00:23:31:17 They put them on a boat and sailed them around, sailed them around, a ship called the Pocahontas. It broke down at least twice before it even left the New York harbor, but it made it to France. And when that ship landed, that made the first African Americans to land in France on New Year's Day 1918.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:23:32:09 - 00:23:53:20 Then when they get to France, even though they've trained to be an elite combat unit, they're put to work unloading boxes from ships. So, when their white commander, Colonel Hayward, is given the choice of well, stay here working or go fight for the French, they go fight for the French and it was a decision that his men completely supported.

 

Trevor Getz

00:24:03:13 - 00:24:09:15 The Battle of Belleau Wood, in many ways was the central battle for the marine contingent in particular.

00:24:10:07 - 00:24:56:12 And it was a horrifying battle that wasn't a wide open, a no man's land as we normally think of it. Instead, the battle was within the trees, and because it was within the forest, two things happened; the first is that artillery would actually explode in the trees and you'd have shrapnel just coming down on you along with tree branches and things like that. Much of the battle took place at night, often it was very smoky, you couldn't see much. And so, it was particularly horrible in that way. But the other thing was that because there wasn't an open area, there weren't clearly defined lines, and you could encounter friend or foe at any moment, and in doing so, you had to quickly figure out who is this person? Is this an enemy or not? Firing at close range, hand to hand combat, it was bloody, it was brutal, and the marines really had to take it on.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:25:05:19 - 00:25:31:09 Pershing, in training American soldiers, had put an emphasis on something he called, open warfare. He didn't like trench warfare, he thought trench warfare had become too defensive and that what the armies needed to do was learn how to break out. And in open warfare, the things that he really privileged were rifle fire power, using maneuver and cover to advance, and individual initiative on the part of the line commanders.

00:25:32:04 - 00:25:49:08 Actually in Belleau Wood, that's how the marines fought and that's how they were able to move forward. Even later on in the Meuse-Argonne campaign where they also have to fight in the Argonne Forest which is also a dense, hilly, wooded area, those are tactics that work very well in advancing in that terrain.

 

Trevor Getz

00:25:50:10 - 00:26:06:19 When doughboys and marines talk about battle, they talk about a couple of things especially; one is just the adrenalin taking over. There was fear of course, and there was some anger or emotion going on, but mostly it was just this terror.

00:26:07:14 - 00:27:04:09 First was the artillery, the artillery either meaning the attack was coming or our artillery saying you're going to go over the top soon. And if you were a doughboy or a marine, you hope your artillery was doing the job and would make things easy for you, and then the rush into no man's land. You could run, but it was of course treacherous and eventually there'd be so much fire coming at you, from machine guns, from artillery, from trench mortars, that you just sought shelter. It might be a foxhole, it might just be a shell hole with dead people in it already and you would, as much as possible, stay in that shelter until initiative built up and enough people try to push forward again. People are dying around you, the officers are often killed in higher levels, so they're way behind or they're not around you. There's smoke, there's the fog of battle, nobody knows what's going on. All you know is what's in front of you and what's happening to the people next to your side. And so there's this sort of flood of emotions that doesn't go away for a long time after the battle.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:27:05:05 - 00:28:25:11 Unless there was an act of offensive going on, men only could stand the stress and strain, sleeplessness, the constant concern over artillery shelling, often not having hot meals, they could only sustain that for a certain amount of time and then they needed to be rotated out. It also meant if you were on the Allied side and the Americans primarily served in French trenches during the war, that you were in lower ground. The Germans had dug in first so they picked higher ground that was above the water table, but the French, the British, they were often digging down into the water table so this I swear you start having problems with mud and having to sort of constantly be repairing the trenches from artillery shelling. You have people defecating, you have corpses, this is going to allow the rat population to explode, you're sitting in the same clothes for three weeks, so lice were prevalent. What kind of food are you getting? Probably not hot food. Poison gas drills, sometimes real, sometimes fake, where they have to put on their gas masks, leave them on for hours at a time, which you're sort of suffocatingly claustrophobic for many men.

00:28:26:21 - 00:28:58:03 They're experiencing their first artillery barrage which is an experience that men talk about is just simply unimaginable to somebody who has not been through it, just the sight, the noise, and the chaos, and just the sheer terror that you have knowing you are helpless, that you are just sitting there hoping that fate is on your side. And the strain is obvious.

 

Nelle Rote

 00:29:54:01 - 00:30:03:12 She had dark hair, she was five feet two, 120-some pounds, she was probably the smallest person in my family.

 

Christene Hallett

00:30:06:00 - 00:30:41:13 I think U.S. nurses were amazing really, in terms of the fact that a lot of them started to consider getting involved interest First World War before the U.S. actually entered the war in April 1917. Medical units went first and soldiers followed. They didn't start nursing their own American patients until the summer, autumn of 1918. So in the summer of 1917, they were nursing British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand patients as part of the surgical teams within British units.

00:30:44:11 - 00:31:15:21 There weren't many alternatives for women at that time. What they were expected to do was stay at home, get married, have children, run a household, sit and drink tea in the afternoons, so many of them didn't want to do that. They wanted to actually answer the world's largest fear and do some work that was worthwhile. So, nursing was an opportunity for them back nursing was seen as something that it was okay for women to do. You could be a teacher or you could be a nurse, and nursing did look quite exciting to a lot of them.

00:31:18:16 - 00:32:42:12 If you think of the lines of evacuation, you had to bring back the wounded from that front line. So having rescued a wounded man from the battle field, stretcher bearers would bring him to a regimental aid post where you had doctors and orderlies. He would then be loaded into an ambulance, after some initial emergency treatment and then taken back to a casualty clearing station. Casualty clearing stations were the closest a trained nurse got to the front lines, you didn't have any volunteer nurses there because the point of the casualty clearing station was that it had to be pretty close to the front, so your hospital is always going to be very near to where the shelling is taking place. And nurses talked in their memoirs about how deafening the thunder of their own guns was, and how frightening it was when shells from enemy artillery landed close to their hospitals. So close that when the shell burst, you could even hear the zip of the splinters, gas shells were also landing quite close to the hospital and patients were being brought in with their uniforms impregnated with gas. The first thing they had to do is get the mustard gas off the patients. What that meant was removing the patient's uniforms. They said that their tented wards just became full of this vapor, so they were being exposed to it even though they weren't on the front lines.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:32:42:23 - 00:33:11:17 They thought poison gas was going to be that weapon. That was going to be the weapon, that was the game changer. And it wasn't at all. And one of the reasons why poison gas doesn't get used that much in the future is part because of people's sense of morality about it, but also it's because it's just not effective. If it had been effective, whether it's moral or not, people would use it. What difference does it matter if you die with an artillery shell explosion or you die inhaling poison gas?

00:33:12:21 - 00:33:33:02 It's more that gas did not prove to be effective. You couldn't control it. It just made people miserable but there's really not one battle that was won because you employed poison gas. So in that sense, and that's a new technology that doesn't really end up maintaining its appeal as you move into the future.

 

Nelle Rote

00:33:34:09 - 00:33:48:12 I would like people to realize how hard nurses in general work. [inaudible] makes me so glad that I had the opportunity to write about one, and she's one of so many.

 

Trevor Getz

00:35:47:12 - 00:36:20:22 At the end of the war, demobilized soldiers coming back were competing for jobs with Americans who had stayed at home. War industries were beginning to close down. There was a lot of transformation and there was a lot of social tension. And these culminated in a number of incidents in which white citizens, especially in the mid-west, attacked African American communities and in some cases, returning soldiers. And one of the really sad events that happened during this were a series of lynching's of African American soldiers who were returning home. At least ten of them were lynched, many in their uniforms.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:36:23:12 - 00:38:15:15 1919 is one of the worst years of racial violence in American history. The summer of 1919 is termed the Red Summer for the amount of blood that's flowing in the streets. And a lot of the causes of that have to do with the expectations that African Americans have developed, that this war is going to change the racial status quo, met with the equally strong resistance from many white Americans that that is not going to happen. There's a lot of competition for jobs and a lot of just instability in general. And also this fear that African American soldiers who have been in France have been in a climate that has allowed them freedoms that they normally don't enjoy in the United States, especially their interactions with French civilians, especially their relationships with French women. This idea of French ruins Negroes, coming back to the United States with new ideas about who they are and about their place, that is a pervasive fear throughout white America. And so any perceived transgression of the racial status quo becomes fodder for violently reminding African Americans of their second class status and of where they belong and so when you look at the individual incidents, the things that trigger off these race riots seem relatively minor but when these larger concerns are attached to that one incident, then suddenly it can become quite explosive. So if you think about Chicago for example, when you have a black teenager why, by mistake on Lake Michigan, swims over this imaginary line that separates the white and the black side of the beach, and he's stoned to death by a white mob on the shores. That's the trigger for the Chicago race riot.

00:38:28:21 - 00:39:06:23 But the final thing that makes the violence, in some ways, more significant than other periods of racial violence in the United States, is that a lot of African American veterans, who in some ways maybe are the catalyst, because of concerns about how they may expect things to change, also become actors and fight back. You have veterans organizing, they're leaders, they're really basically saying to white America, you can attack us but we will fight back, so the death will not just be on one side. So if you want to go there, we'll go there with you, but just recognize that it's going to be different this time around.

 

Trevor Getz

00:39:19:14 - 00:39:32:14 The Bonus Army March was really a product of the Great Depression and veterans' increasing needs during the Great Depression. In 1924, when the economy had still been pretty good, Congress had voted to give a bonus to veterans of the war.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:39:32:16 - 00:40:35:02 The United States does not have defense needs that require it to have a large standing army at this moment in history. It's not part of our tradition. Our tradition is you raise the force quickly when you need it, and then you demobilize just as quickly. People are worried about a large military establishment, it's expensive, it's perceived as a threat to democracy, so we go right back to that. There were hopes that United States might have learned its lesson from having had such a small peace time force before World War I, but that doesn't happen. So you have about four million men that you're trying to integrate over a course of about 9 months, now half of those men, two million of them are still in the United States because we didn't take all four million to France. Two million are still in the training camps, and so those men are somewhat easier to get home and they haven't experienced too much disruption to their lives. The veterans that go to France, of course, it's longer to get them home, especially if they've been in combat, they could certainly be suffering from a host of health issues.

00:40:35:19 - 00:41:41:17 But the larger question for a lot of these American veterans is that they start developing this resentment about coming home at a moment of recession and then maybe meeting a guy down at the corner store who worked in a war time industry during the war, made a lot of money because wages went up, and they started thinking well, this doesn't seem very fair, I mean, what's war really doing to people? Some people stay home and make money, the workers, the industrialists, I go and serve my country, I come back to a recession and now, not only can I not get a job, but I'm further behind than I might have been if I had been able to stay home and work.  So this sense that veterans had suffered disproportionally from serving, that was a kind of shared grievance and then it didn't really matter if you served at home or overseas, because the negative financial impact on you was the same. And this was an important feeling because this is the resentment that leads to the demand for something called, adjusted compensation.

00:41:43:15 - 00:41:49:13 It ends up being a bond, and so they get this bond in 1924, and it's payable in 1945.

 

Trevor Getz

00:41:50:03 - 00:42:16:00 It was sort of figured into the budget that over that amount of time, it would be okay to pay that great expense. But then along comes the Great Depression in 1929, and suddenly, veterans don't have jobs at all, veterans can't get loans, veterans can't find employment, veterans can't get any money and so a group of veterans in several locations got together and essentially decided that they needed to apply for their bonus as soon as possible.

00:42:16:22 - 00:42:56:09 And when the government refused the bonus, they began to march on Washington. And a number of the marches came together in Washington DC and there they were actually met by both the police and the army. And the police actually wanted to take care of the problem themselves but General Douglas MacArthur decided that the army needed to get into it and he actually mobilized infantry, cavalry, and six tanks. And what resulted was a big brawl and in that melee, a number of the marchers were actually injured, others died from disease on the long road into Washington DC, but all in all, it was a huge conflict of veterans trying to assert their needs for these kinds of benefits and unable to get them for a long time from the government.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:43:36:22 - 00:45:11:01 Part of the problem in the First World War is that the quick demobilization means that a lot of veterans come home without clear medical records. And so, if you can't prove a service connection to your disability, you're not going to get treated for it. And that's really difficult for some of these veterans, partially again because their records are incomplete, people would sign anything to get out, even if they were still suffering, they didn't care, they didn't want to have to stay in the military to be treated. And then there were some problems that took time to manifest themselves. So, things like gas related tuberculosis, you could have inhaled poison gas, but it's going to take a while for the real effects of it to manifest themselves, mental illness, shell shock. American Legion is also very active in trying to create a veterans health system to help veterans, passes legislation to have a presumption that there's a connection to military service to some of these ailments. And so that's a really important thing that they do as well, because when we say that societies unprepared to welcome these veterans home, they're not prepared to handle their health problems either. So we think about something like the Veteran's Administration, the Veteran's Administration hospital system, the idea that there should be special hospitals just dedicated to veterans, that comes out of the First World War. Soldiers homes, where you could go and live if you were Civil War, Spanish-American War veterans and poor, you go live in these homes.

There were pensions for Civil War veterans and Spanish-American War veterans. But there was no government run healthcare system solely for veteran patients.

 

Trevor Getz

00:45:12:14 - 00:46:19:08 At the end of the war, a number of American officers looked around and saw that the British and the French had these servicemen's unions that would help veterans after the war. That would help lobby for veterans rights and that would help reintegrate veterans into society, and that would also help them to serve their countries coming home because they could do more service after the war. And so these officers actually met while they were still in France, and decided that there needed to be a similar union for American servicemen coming back. And then when they return to the United States, they had a series of conferences where they brought people together and managed to jump start this organization. And it was an organization that was immediately very active, it was most active in terms of things like veterans rights, and lobbying for disability payments, lobbying for healthcare, things like that. It was also culturally and politically active, it was active as a force for law and order, and saw it as being politically very conservative, and at the same time, it was also active socially in supporting the Boy Scouts and other organizations that veterans felt would help create American manhood for the next generation.

 

Jennifer Keene

00:46:26:01 - 00:47:31:10 You have to think about the veterans administration is being created in 1930, what's 1930? It's one of the worst years of the Great Depression. So, you're in the midst of this financial crisis for the United States and Herbert Hoover was somebody who believed in balanced budgets, he believed in self-sufficiency, I mean it wasn't just that he created the Veteran's Administration to streamline costs and to deliver more efficient care to veterans, and at the same time, did it as a way to limit any potential expansion in the future, of veterans' benefits. He was also thinking about efficiency across the government, he was thinking about ways to prime the pump so that people could help themselves. So, for example, when you look at Hoover's policies across the board in response to the depression crisis, he's willing to give money to banks, to mortgage companies, to life insurance companies, but he's not going to give direct relief. He's not going to create works programs; he's not going to give people financial help in order the pay for groceries or their rent. He's a person, philosophically, who believes that you create a structure in which people need to help themselves.