“This thing has ceased to be a joke”:
The Veterans of Future Wars and the
Meanings of Political Satire in the
1930s
Chris Rasmussen
For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—
laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a
colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only
laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter
nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons.
Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting.
—Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, 1918
Over drinks one afternoon in March 1936, a group of Princeton University undergraduates groused about the recent congressional passage of a bill for immediate payment of
a “bonus” to each of the 4 million veterans of World War I. The bonus payment had
originally been approved by Congress in 1924 but was not to be paid until 1945. How,
these Princetonians asked, could legislators vote to spend $2 billion amid the Great Depression? Why did Congress so readily cave to the veterans’ lobby? Disabled and elderly
veterans undoubtedly deserved assistance, but should the United States issue checks to
all veterans, regardless of their age, physical condition, or need? How many other citizens would seize on the veterans’ precedent and stake a claim to support from the federal
government?1
The veterans’ bonus was not the only issue on the students’ minds. A few days earlier,
the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had ordered German troops to occupy the Rhineland,
while Spain was being riven by political tension between left and right. The prospect of
war in Europe seemed to grow more ominous daily. One of the students, Lewis Jefferson
Gorin Jr., a senior majoring in political science, predicted that American troops would
inevitably be sent to fight and die in another European war, just as in 1917. Because
Congress seemed only too eager to appease the veterans’ lobby, Gorin suggested that
America’s “future veterans” ought to demand their bonus payment immediately while
they were young enough—and alive—to enjoy it. Gorin joked that young people ought
Chris Rasmussen is an associate professor of history at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He wishes to thank David
W. Seitz and the reviewers for the Journal of American History for their perceptive suggestions about this article.
Readers may contact Rasmussen at [email protected].
1
The World War Adjusted Compensation Act is informally known as the Bonus Bill. World War Adjusted Compensation Act, 43 Stat. 121 (1924).
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaw010
© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
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June 2016
Veterans of Future Wars and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s
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to create their own political lobby to urge Congress to authorize immediate payment of
a bonus to all men of draft age, and he dubbed this organization the Veterans of Future
Wars (vfw). A few days later, Gorin and his friends published the vfw manifesto in the
Daily Princetonian, demanding that the federal government immediately pay a bonus to
every “future veteran.”
The Veterans of Future Wars have united to force upon the government and people
of the United States the realization that common justice demands that all of us who
will be engaged in the coming war deserve, as is customary, an adjusted service compensation, sometimes called a bonus. We demand that this bonus be one thousand
dollars, payable June 1, 1965. Because it is customary to pay bonuses before they
are due we demand immediate cash payment, plus three per cent compounded annually for thirty years back from June 1, 1965 to June 1, 1935. All those of military
age, that is, from 18 to 36, are eligible to receive this bonus. It is but common right
that this bonus be paid now, for many will be killed or wounded in the next war,
and hence they, the most deserving, will not get the full benefit of their country’s
gratitude. For the realization of these just demands, we mutually pledge our undivided and supreme efforts. “Soldiers of America, Unite! You have nothing to lose.”2
Gorin’s satire soon attracted legions of supporters and detractors. Within only a few
months the vfw became a nationwide sensation, enlisting upward of sixty thousand
members on university campuses across the country. Commentators pronounced the
group the most potent antiwar movement in the nation and predicted that its humorous
attack on militarism would prove far more effective than the earnest but dreary tactics of
more sober antiwar organizations. Gorin’s most enthusiastic fans insisted that he deserved
the Nobel Peace Prize. The influence of the vfw’s satire can be measured not only by its
army of supporters but also by its equally fervent opponents, who castigated the organization as unpatriotic and heartless.3
Despite astonishing growth in membership, the vfw imploded after only a few months
because of disagreements over its political objectives and tactics. Some observers dismissed the vfw as a meaningless college prank, and it is often remembered as little more
than a hoax. The enthusiasm of vfw members and the vehemence of its opponents, however, indicate that the students’ pointed joke had struck a societal nerve. In an era of intense political controversy over war, veterans’ benefits, and the welfare state, Americans
alternately applauded the Veterans of Future Wars as a brilliant satire of militarism or reviled it as an unpatriotic slander of the nation’s veterans. Although the vfw proved shortlived, the ardent support and equally passionate opposition it received offer a glimpse of
American politics in the 1930s and the power and pitfalls of humor as a form of political rhetoric. While veterans’ organizations such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the
American Legion extolled veterans’ military service and the U.S. role in World War I, a
majority of Americans considered World War I a catastrophic blunder and recoiled from
the prospect of another conflict. At that moment the Veterans of Future Wars launched
its surprise attack against the self-serving patriotism of the veterans’ lobby.4
“Future Veterans, Unite!,”Daily Princetonian, March 14, 1936, p. 2.
James W. F. Carman to vfw [Veterans of Future Wars], March 17, 1936, Colorado folder, box 5, Regional Files,
Veterans of Future Wars Collection (Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J.); Mabel Hackett to Lewis Gorin, April 7, 1936, Michigan folder, box 3, ibid.
4
On the Veterans of Future Wars (vfw) as the second-best college prank of all time, see Museum of Hoaxes,
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/newsletter/nov2002.html.
2
3
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The vfw’s joke not only got a laugh but also prompted serious and sometimes-angry
debate over war and veterans’ benefits. Unfortunately, the lone historian who has recounted the rise and fall of the vfw, Donald Whisenhunt, fails to analyze the satire that is at the
heart of the vfw’s enormous appeal and that provoked oppositional furor. Whisenhunt’s
anecdotal history contends that the vfw founders were “very much in [the] tradition” of
utopianism dating to the Puritans, and they sought to reform or even perfect American
society. However, the Princeton students who founded the vfw sought to mock veterans’
hypocrisy and war’s false glory, not to build a city on a hill. Whisenhunt fails to appreciate the power and multiple meanings of the vfw’s joke, insisting that it was strictly a protest against the bonus and that the vfw “was not an antiwar organization.” He characterizes the thousands of students who flocked to the movement as having “misunderstood”
the vfw, mistakenly viewing it as an antiwar organization. But, as Paul Lewis observes
in Comic Effects, “because humor is a contextual phenomenon, we need to see how given
jokes function in particular situations.” Jokes, as he points out, can be hostile or benign,
oppressive or liberating, and can simultaneously convey divergent meanings. Gorin and
his comrades were initially provoked by the expense of the veterans’ bonus, but they were
even more annoyed by the chest-thumping patriotism of the veterans’ lobby, and their
satire strafed self-serving veterans, loudmouth patriots, craven legislators, and the folly of
war.5
The vfw’s carnivalesque spoof turned the tables on the veterans’ lobby, appropriating
its rhetoric and tactics to ridicule militarism. For a brief moment in the spring of 1936
college students turned the debate over veterans’ benefits and war upside down, as thousands of youths who had never spent a day in uniform proclaimed themselves “veterans”
and parroted the demand for an immediate bonus payment. Many of the students who
joined the vfw shared Gorin’s contempt for the veterans’ political opportunism, but they
laughed hardest at the vfw’s dark joke about the dangers of militarism and the absurdity
of war. Here, after all, was an organization that minced no words in its ridicule of war,
as students poked fun not only at veterans of World War I but also at the prospect that
they, too, would one day soon be dead soldiers and grieving family members. We can understand the vfw’s runaway popularity and ferocious opposition only if we comprehend
that joke.6
Satirists have lampooned the foibles of American life since the American Revolution.
During the Gilded Age the cartoonist Thomas Nast wielded his pen to skewer targets
ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to Tammany Hall, while Mark Twain and Ambrose
5
Donald W. Whisenhunt, Veterans of Future Wars: A Study of Student Activism (Lanham, 2011), xiv. For a succinct history of the Veterans of Future Wars, see Richard D. Challener, “vfw: A New Look by a History Professor at
an Old Princeton Satire,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, Oct. 19, 1956, pp. 13–16; and Lewis Jefferson Gorin, Patriotism
Prepaid (Philadelphia, 1936), 29–30. On Donald Whisenhunt’s contention that the vfw was strictly against the bonus but not antiwar, and that students around the nation simply misunderstood its political views, see Whisenhunt,
Veterans of Future Wars, 23, 33, 55, 117–18, 124. Paul Lewis, Comic Effects: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Humor
in Literature (Albany, 1989), 39.
6
On the carnivalesque, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.,
1968), 4–17; Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, by
Natalie Zemon Davis (Palo Alto, 1975), 97–123; Robert Darnton, “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of
the Rue Saint-Séverin,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, by Robert Darnton
(New York, 1984), 75–106; and T. J. Jackson Lears, “Making Fun of Popular Culture,” American Historical Review,
97 (Dec. 1992), 1417–26.
Veterans of Future Wars and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s
87
Bierce directed their caustic wit at political chicanery in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The bewildering economic, political, and cultural upheaval of the
1920s and 1930s encouraged the satirist’s art. Margaret McFadden notes that the humor magazine Ballyhoo attained extraordinary success in the early 1930s by parodying
American advertising and advancing “serious and far-reaching critiques” of corporations,
politicians, and wealthy Americans. Humor magazines flourished on college campuses
in the 1920s and 1930s and helped set the sardonic tone so evident in the vfw’s parody
of the veterans’ lobby. America’s most acerbic newspaper columnist, H. L. Mencken,
ridiculed Republican presidents in the 1920s and taunted Franklin D. Roosevelt in the
1930s. Political satire was an extremely powerful rhetorical tool for skewering the foibles
of politicians throughout the 1930s, provoking controversy that attests to its effectiveness. Frank Capra’s 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington poked fun at political bossism and corruption. Capra’s satire, however genial, infuriated senators even more than a
partisan broadside.7
War, like politics, has inspired satirists since the time of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata. The
chasm between war’s supposed glory and its actual horror, the folly of leaders, the savagery
of combat, and the suffering endured by combatants and civilians, have provoked dark
comic responses. “Every war is ironic,” the historian Paul Fussell observed, “because every
war is worse than expected.” World War I proved uniquely horrific. When the conflict
began in August 1914, many Europeans confidently predicted that the fighting would be
“over by Christmas.” Instead, the appalling slaughter raged for four years, devouring the
lives of millions of soldiers and civilians. “The Great War was more ironic than any war
before or since,” Fussell wrote, because it not only consumed millions of lives but also
shattered the optimistic faith in progress, inherited from the Enlightenment, that had
reigned throughout the nineteenth century. Never was the gulf wider between a war’s ostensible aims and its disastrous results. Hailed as “the Great War for Civilization,” “the
War to End Wars,” and a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” the conflict failed
to establish an enduring peace in Europe. In its wake, widespread disillusionment gripped
Americans and Europeans alike, and political and economic instability in Europe soon
gave rise to the grim prospect of another war.8
Debate over the legacy of the war and the federal government’s obligation to its veterans roiled American politics amid the cultural and political upheaval of the 1920s and
1930s. As Theda Skocpol has pointed out, veterans, along with their widows and children, became the first group of American citizens to stake a claim to governmental support, and in doing so they helped lay the foundation for the welfare state created under
7
Bruce Ingham Granger, Political Satire in the American Revolution, 1763–1783 (Ithaca, 1960); Margaret McFadden, “‘WARNING—Do not risk federal arrest by looking glum’: Ballyhoo Magazine and the Cultural Politics of
1930s Humor,” Journal of American Culture, 26 (March 2003), 124–33. For some of H. L. Mencken’s best-known
essays, see H. L. Mencken, Carnival of Buncombe (Baltimore, 1956). For an evocative account of Mencken’s career,
see Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken (New York, 2002). On the heyday of college humor magazines, see Daniel Wickberg, Senses of Humor: The Self and Laughter in Modern America (Ithaca, 1998), 129. Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington, dir. Frank Capra (Columbia, 1939). On the controversy over Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, see Frank Capra, The Name above the Title: An Autobiography (New York, 1971), 287–93.
8
Satirizing warfare has a long history. Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata envisioned the women of fifth-century Athens staging a sex strike to halt the Peloponnesian War. Aristophanes, Lysistrata, trans. Alan H. Sommerstein (London, 2003). In the seventeenth century, Hans Jakob von Grimmelshausen chronicled the gratuitous cruelty of the
Thirty Years’ War. Hans Jakob von Grimmelshausen, Simplicius Simplicissimus, trans. Mike Mitchell (Sawtry, 2006).
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1975), 7–8. For a critique of Paul Fussell’s interpretation, see Leonard V. Smith, “Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory: Twenty-Five Years Later,” History
and Theory, 40 (May 2001), 214–60.
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the New Deal. The Grand Army of the Republic, which represented Union veterans of
the Civil War, became the nation’s first potent political lobby, securing generous pensions
for veterans, widows, and orphans in 1890. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, founded in
1913 by veterans of the Spanish American War, also became an influential political lobby,
numbering more than two hundred thousand members by the 1920s. The American Legion, founded by World War I veterans in 1919, quickly became America’s largest veterans’ organization, boasting more than 1 million members by 1931. By 1932—three years
before the passage of the Social Security Act—more than 850,000 American veterans,
widows, and orphans were receiving support from the federal government, and veterans’
benefits had become the government’s largest single expenditure. As Skocpol notes, the
welfare state was not suddenly invented under the New Deal; it had origins dating to the
Civil War.9
Veterans’ benefits, as Jennifer Keene has observed, figured prominently in debates over
progressive taxation, redistribution of wealth, and the role of the federal government
throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The veterans’ lobby, its ranks swollen with World War
I veterans, wielded considerable clout in Washington, D.C., and pressed for expanded
veterans’ benefits. In 1922 Congress passed the World War Adjusted Compensation Act
(informally known as the Bonus Bill) to authorize paying a bonus (“adjusted compensation certificates” in bureaucratese) to reduce the gap between soldiers’ pay and the wages
earned by workers on the home front). President Warren G. Harding vetoed the measure,
denouncing the prospect that “future defense is to be inspired by compensation rather
than consciousness of duty to flag and country.” Two years later, after intense lobbying by
the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, Congress again passed the bonus
bill, under which the federal government would issue to each veteran who had served at
least sixty days an adjusted compensation certificate worth $1.00 per day for service in
the United States and $1.25 per day for service abroad. These certificates would accrue
interest until they matured and became payable in 1945. President Calvin Coolidge vetoed the bill, declaring flatly that, “Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism.” Even so, compensating the veterans of World War I enjoyed popular support, and
Congress overrode Coolidge’s veto to pass the bill. Still, Harding’s and Coolidge’s blunt
veto messages attest to the significance they attached to the issue of veterans’ benefits.10
While prosperity contributed to the passage of the 1922 and 1924 Bonus Bills the
Great Depression aided veterans’ cause in the 1930s. At the depth of depression, many
veterans clamored for early payment of their bonuses, contending that it would help
9
Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: fdr’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New
York, 2006), 122; Patrick J. Kelly, Creating a National Home: Building the Veterans’ Welfare State, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). On Americans’ declining commitment to providing comprehensive social welfare for citizens
after World War II, see Jennifer Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1965 (Chapel Hill, 2005), 30; and Jennifer Mittelstadt, The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Cambridge, Mass., 2015).
10
Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore, 2001), 174–76; Anne
L. Alstott and Ben Novick, “War, Taxes, and Income Redistribution in the Twenties: The 1924 Veterans’ Bonus
and the Defeat of the Mellon Plan,” Tax Law Review, 59 (Summer 2006), 373–438; Stephen R. Ortiz, “The ‘New
Deal’ for Veterans: The Economy Act, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Origins of New Deal Dissent,” Journal
of Military History, 70 (April 2006), 415–38. On the political battle over veterans’ benefits, see “Text of President
Harding’s Bonus Veto Message,” New York Times, Sept. 20, 1922, p. 2; World War Adjusted Compensation Act, ch.
157, 43 Stat. 121 (1924); and President Calvin Coolidge, Veto Message, Adjusted Compensation for War Veterans, May 15, 1924, in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (20 vols., New York, 1897–1927),
XVIII, 9407–8.
Veterans of Future Wars and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s
89
them weather hard times and provide a tonic to the nation’s stricken economy. Texas
representative John Wright Patman, who had served in World War I, introduced a bill
that would immediately pay the bonus to each veteran of the war instead of making
them wait until 1945. Veterans’ organizations lobbied fiercely for the Patman Bonus
Bill, and more than forty thousand members of the Bonus Expeditionary Force (also
known as the Bonus Army), including seventeen thousand veterans, marched to Washington, D.C., in 1932 to urge Congress to authorize the immediate payment of bonuses more than one decade ahead of schedule. The House of Representatives passed
the Patman Bonus Bill, but the Senate overwhelmingly rejected it. Despite this defeat,
several thousand bonus marchers refused to retreat, remaining in the capital. On July
28 two marchers were killed in a confrontation with local police officers; that afternoon,
President Herbert Hoover ordered U.S. Army troops under the command of Douglas
MacArthur to forcibly evict the remaining veterans and destroy their main encampment
on the banks of the Potomac River in Anacostia Flats. Newsreel footage of the clash
between veterans and soldiers in the shadow of the Capitol dome furnished one of the
bleakest images of the depression. As Jonathan Alter observes, Hoover’s callous response
to the Bonus Army march cemented his reputation for heartlessness and effectively ended his presidency.11
President Roosevelt’s bold but vague pledge to offer the American people a “new deal”
during his 1932 campaign revived veterans’ desire for early payment of the bonus, but
those hopes were quickly dashed after his inauguration in March 1933. During the his
first hundred days in office, Roosevelt signed the Economy Act of 1933, which halved expenditures on veterans’ benefits to stabilize the federal government’s finances. Angered by
fdr’s retrenchment, a second Bonus Army marched on Washington in 1933. Too savvy
to repeat Hoover’s political blunder in quashing the march, fdr ordered the Veterans Administration to arrange campsites for the marchers at Fort Hunt, Virginia. The president
traveled to the camp to meet with the marchers and later dispatched First Lady Eleanor
Roosevelt, who charmed the disgruntled vets. A master at finessing political dilemmas,
fdr thus managed to deny the marchers’ demand without provoking an angry backlash
from either the veterans or the public.12
Despite considerable public sympathy for the veterans’ plight, the organized veterans’ lobby faced an army of detractors. Fiscal conservatives, represented by the National
Economy League and its offshoot, the American Veterans Association, both opposed the
Bonus Bill of 1924 as a colossal misuse of taxpayer dollars and warned that soldiers’ benefits were the first step toward the creation of a vast welfare state. Their diatribes against
veterans’ benefits invariably pointed out that the U.S. government was still paying survivors benefits to more than one hundred thousand widows of veterans of the Civil War
and four widows of veterans of the War of 1812! In 1934 the author Katherine Mayo
stoked opposition to the veterans’ lobby and the bonus, publishing Soldiers What Next!,
11
For John Wright Patman’s proposed legislation, see A Bill Providing for Immediate Payment to Veterans of
the Face Value of Their Adjusted Service Certificates, H.R. 7726, Congressional Record, 72 Cong., 1 sess., June 15,
1932, p. 13019. On the Bonus Army of 1932, see David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People
in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York, 1999), 92; W. W. Waters, B.E.F.: The Whole Story of the Bonus
Army (New York, 1933); Lucy G. Barber, Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition
(Berkeley, 2002), 75–107; Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, 179–204; Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen, The Bonus Army: An American Epic (New York, 2004); and Alter, Defining Moment,
120–23.
12
Ortiz, “‘New Deal’ for Veterans”; Economy Act of 1933, 48 Stat. 8 (1933); Alter, Defining Moment, 295–97.
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a scathing exposé that accused veterans’ organizations of sacrificing patriotism for crass
self-interest.13
Notwithstanding the critics, the Great Depression aroused sympathy for veterans, and
in 1935 both the House and the Senate voted to approve immediate payment of the bonus. Roosevelt vetoed that approval, and, in an unprecedented move, delivered his veto
message in person before a joint session of Congress and over the radio. He was keenly
aware that many Americans harbored misgivings about the burgeoning expense and scope
of New Deal employment and relief programs, and he was especially concerned about entrenched opposition to the Social Security Bill, still pending in Congress. He warned that
congressional effort to aid veterans, however well intentioned, would have severe political
and economic repercussions: “I do not need to be a prophet to assert that if these certificates, due in 1945, are paid in full today, every candidate for election to the Senate or to
the House of Representatives will in the near future be called upon in the name of patriotism to support general pension legislation for all veterans, regardless of need or age.”14
Despite Roosevelt’s opposition, public opinion and political considerations favored
the veterans. A Gallup Poll conducted in November 1935 revealed that 55 percent of
Americans supported early payment of the bonus. In January 1936 Congress again passed
Patman’s proposal (as the Adjusted Compensation Payment Act), overriding Roosevelt’s
veto. The federal government paid some $2 billion in compensation to more than 3 million veterans and incurred a carrying charge of $120 million annually for the next nine
years to service the debt incurred in making the payout. Fiscal conservatives furiously denounced the “bonus grab” as a brazen “raid” on the U.S. Treasury and accused Congress
of pandering to veterans in an election year. Debates over veterans’ benefits and the welfare state in general remained inseparable in the 1930s.15
To what extent did young Americans hold strong opinions about World War I, veterans’
benefits, and the prospect of renewed warfare? Both contemporaries and historians commonly depicted the youth of the 1920s and 1930s as apolitical. Young Americans in the
1920s were typically described as disillusioned in the wake of the war and distracted
by the decade’s heady prosperity. The journalist Maxine Davis’s The Lost Generation,
published in 1936, derided American youth for being as apathetic politically as their
predecessors during the Jazz Age. As the historian Paula Fass has argued, however, the
stereotypical view that the war had left American youth of the 1920s disillusioned and
cynical is a caricature, and the same holds true for young American of the 1930s. The
13
National Economy League, “Billions for Gratuities,” p. 2, National Economy League folder, box 1, National
Council Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection. Statistics from Henry Curran, National Economy League, to
Gorin, National Commander Gorin folder, ibid. The surviving widows of veterans of the War of 1812 were considerably younger than their husbands, perhaps marrying in part to become eligible to receive survivor’s benefits.
Katherine Mayo, Soldiers What Next! (Boston, 1934).
14
“The President Vetoes the Bonus Bill,” in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt: vol. IV: The
Court Disapproves, 1935 (New York, 1938), 182–93, esp. 192.
15
“Veterans’ Bonus,” in The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971, vol. I: 1935–1948 (New York, 1972), 4;
Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, 203. On the continuing battle over the veterans’
bonus in 1935 and 1936, see Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 92, 279; “The President Vetoes for a Second Time the
Soldiers’ Bonus,” Jan. 24, 1936, in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. V: The People Approve, 1936 (New York, 1938), 67; and “Bonus Bill Becomes Law,” New York Times, Jan. 28, 1936, p. 1. Adjusted
Compensation Payment Act, ch. 32, 49 Stat. 1099 (1936). On the role of election-year politics in the congressional
decision to approve the bonus, see Ray Tucker “Politics Greases the Ways for the Bonus,” New York Times, Jan. 19,
1936, p. E3.
Veterans of Future Wars and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s
91
Great Depression and the realization that World War I had failed to bring stability to
Europe led many students to become concerned about issues at home and abroad. In a
study published in the New York Times in 1936, the journalist Eunice Fuller Barnard
characterized college students as remarkably serious and well informed about contemporary political and economic issues.16
No issue, including the Great Depression, generated more concern among college students in the 1930s than war and peace. Debates over the legacy of World War I and its
horrific slaughter of millions of soldiers and civilians led a growing number of students
on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to espouse pacifism. In February 1933 the Oxford
Union, the renowned debating society of Oxford University, considered whether students
should be willing to serve in the military and fight for Great Britain. By a margin of nearly 2:1 the students resolved that they would “under no circumstance fight for King and
country”—a vow that became known as the Oxford Pledge. American pacifists rewrote
the pledge, vowing not to “support the United States government in any war it may conduct,” and this modified version of the Oxford Pledge became the credo of the American
pacifist movement in the 1930s.17
The staggering carnage of war not only caused many students to embrace pacifism
but also generated a powerful wave of isolationism in American politics, cresting in the
mid-1930s. Hearings conducted by the Nye Committee, chaired by North Dakota senator Gerald Nye, documented American manufacturers’ and financiers’ enormous stake in
the war. Accounts of the war’s causes published in the 1930s, such as Walter Millis’s, The
Road to War and Helmuth Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen’s Merchants of Death, confirmed many Americans’ suspicions that vested interests lay behind America’s entry into
the conflict. In the context of these pitched debates about the war, congressional approval
of early payment of the veterans’ bonus, and Germany’s annexation of the Rhineland, the
vfw launched its satirical attack on the folly of war.18
Grumbling about the day’s news within the confines of his Princeton eating club, Gorin
criticized the bonus as a shameless raid on the federal treasury by the veterans’ lobby,
which loudly trumpeted its patriotism to drown out opposition. The legacy of World
War I was vitally important at Princeton, where students and faculty members debated
Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism and his fateful decision to jettison neutrality and
embark on a crusade to make the world “safe for democracy.” Gorin resolved to establish
a lobby of his own, and on March 14 the Veterans of Future Wars published its mani16
Maxine Davis, The Lost Generation: A Portrait of American Youth Today (New York, 1936), 4–5; Paula S. Fass,
The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York, 1977), 329–39, 365–76; Philip G. Altbach, Student Politics in America: A Historical Analysis (New York, 1974), 17–56, 57–108. R. L. Duffus, “The Young
Americans of Today,” New York Times Book Review, March 22, 1936, p. 1; Eunice Fuller Barnard, “Now Youth
Raises Its Voice,” New York Times, April 12, 1936, pp. 6–7; Eunice Fuller Barnard, “The Class of ’36: Into a Baffling
World,” New York Times Magazine, June 21, 1936, p. 3.
17
On the Oxford Pledge and American students’ response to it, see Eileen Eagan, Class, Culture, and the Classroom: The Student Peace Movement of the 1930s (Philadelphia, 1981), 57–71; and Christopher Hollis, The Oxford
Union (London, 1965), 184–93. On the political views of American youth, see Robert Cohen, When the Old Left
Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929–1941 (New York, 1993), 79–86; and
Hal Draper, “The Student Movement of the Thirties: A Political History,” 1965, Marxists Internet Archive, http://
www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1965/xx/student30s.htm.
18
Walter Millis, The Road to War: America, 1914–1917 (Boston, 1935); H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen,
Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry (New York, 1934).
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festo, demanding that Congress immediately pay all men aged eighteen to thirty-six a
bonus of $1,000, plus interest, totaling $2,400.19
The Veterans of Future Wars might have remained the in-joke among a handful of
Princetonians had not one future veteran, Robert G. Barnes, written a press release about
the organization. Wire services picked up the story, and news of the satire spread from
coast to coast overnight. As the New York Times reported only days later, the vfw “is
sweeping the campuses of the land.” Within days the vfw had established 120 “posts” and
had six thousand members on college campuses across the nation. After only three weeks
the vfw boasted more than three hundred posts and twenty-five thousand members. Unexpectedly finding himself atop a burgeoning organization, Gorin appointed himself the
vfw’s national commander and commissioned his friends as its national council, comprising nine regional commanders, to manage the organization’s booming membership
rolls. Gorin rented office space in downtown Princeton and hired a secretary to respond
to the avalanche of correspondence that filled the vfw mailbox. One of Gorin’s pals, U.
J. P. Rushton, wrote excitedly that “this thing has ceased to be a joke. We are organizing
all over the country.”20
Publicity in the mass media fueled the organization’s astonishing spread to campuses
across the nation. In April 1936 the vfw was featured in a March of Time newsreel, distributed to more than five thousand theaters and seen by more than 20 million viewers.
Gorin and his compatriots reenacted the founding of the vfw for the newsreel, while
Commander James Van Zandt of the Veterans of Foreign Wars scoffed at the self-proclaimed “veterans.” In response to the newsreel release, a fresh wave of applications for
membership flooded the vfw mailbox. By the end of Princeton’s spring semester, scarcely
two months after publishing the manifesto, the organization’s ranks had swelled to more
than fifty thousand members and five hundred posts. The sudden notoriety made Gorin,
as the New York Times later put it, “The most famous collegian in America who did not
actually play football,” and he found himself in demand as a speaker on college campuses
and at antiwar rallies.21
Students across the nation responded enthusiastically to the vfw’s mockery of the strident patriotism of the veterans’ lobby and the horrors of war. The vfw’s carnivalesque approach distinguished it from earnest political organizations, capturing not only students’
support but also their imagination. Thousands of students embraced the organization’s
ironic spirit and added their own twists to the satire. Seminarians across the nation created the Chaplains of Future Wars. Engineering students at Cornell University created the
19
On isolationism, see Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935–1941 (Ithaca, 1966); and Robert A. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent: American Entry into World War II (New York, 1979), 16–19, 59–78. On veterans’ efforts to shape the historical legacy of World War I, see Fussell, Great War and Modern Memory; and G. Kurt Piehler,
Remembering War the American Way (Washington, 1995). “Future Veterans, Unite!,” 2.
20
Robert G. Barnes, “Society of Veterans of Future Wars Formed by Princeton Undergraduates,” Daily Princetonian, March 17, 1936, p. 1; “‘Future Veterans’ Seek a Bonus Now,” New York Times, March 17, 1936, p. 24; “Patriotism Prepaid,” ibid., March 22, 1936, p. 1E; “‘Future Veterans’ Now Have 30 Posts,” ibid., March 20, 1936, p.
21; “College Front Swept by ‘Future Veterans,’” ibid., March 29, 1936, p. E11; “Future Veterans,” Time, March 30,
1936, p. 38. U. J. P. Rushton to Edwin W. Finch, March 31, 1936, Tennessee folder, box 5, Regional Files, Veterans
of Future Wars Collection.
21
“Veterans of Future Wars,” April 17, 1936, The March toward War: The March of Time as Documentary and
Propaganda, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA04/wood/mot/html/neutrality.htm; Raymond Fielding, The March of
Time, 1935–1951 (New York, 1978), 138, 145–47. “Patriotism Prepaid,” p. 1E. Gorin to Mary Losey, April 8,
1936, Gorin Correspondence folder 1, box 1, National Council Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection; Gorin to
Maurice Ragsdale, May 28, 1936, Gorin Correspondence folder 2, ibid. “Lewis J. Gorin Jr., Instigator of a 1930s
Craze, Dies at 84,” New York Times, Jan. 31, 1999, p. 33.
Veterans of Future Wars and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s
93
Lewis Jefferson Gorin Jr., shown here in 1936 as a student at Princeton University, where he was
the founder and commander of the Veterans of Future Wars. “College Front Swept by ‘Future Veterans,’” New York Times, March 29, 1936, p. E11. Courtesy World Wide Photos/New York Times/
Redux, http://archive.reduxpictures.com/id/14512783.
Future Munitions Workers. Alvin M. Josephy Jr., dissatisfied with his job in a Wall Street
brokerage firm, wrote to the vfw to suggest that financiers and industrialists be organized
into the Profiteers of Future Wars. Journalism students at Rutgers University founded the
Propagandists of Future Wars, while students at City College of New York created the Foreign Correspondents of Future Wars, who vowed to write “garbled war dispatches for patriotic purposes.” Margaret Robinson, commander of the Bennington College vfw post,
proposed the creation of the Future War Spinsters, women destined to remain unwed because their future husbands would be killed in war. William Attwood, a senior at Choate
preparatory school, bravely volunteered to become the Unknown Soldier of Future Wars
and “to be buried in whatever country may be located near the battlefield on which I gloriously die in defense of whatever principle for which the next war may be fought.”22
22
On the Chaplains of Future Wars, see Paul Hostetter to Gorin, March 27, 1936, New York folder 1, box 4, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection; John Stoudt to vfw, March 19, 1936, Connecticut folder 1, ibid.;
W. McFerrin Stowe to Gorin, March 19, 1936, Massachusetts folder, box 5, ibid.; and W. J. Huneycutt to Gorin,
April 9, 1936, North Carolina folder, ibid. On other offshoots of the vfw, see Richard Lowe to Gorin, March 20,
1936, New York folder 2, box 4, ibid.; Alvin M. Josephy Jr. to Gorin, March 30, 1936, New York folder 5, ibid.;
Margaret Robinson to Gorin, April 29, 1936, Vermont folder, box 5, ibid.; and William Attwood to vfw, May 6,
1936, Turner Correspondence folder, box 1, National Council Files, ibid. “Future Veterans Bow to Criticism,” New
York Times, March 21, 1936, p. 19. Students also founded the Future Negotiators of Peace Treaties, and suggested
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One group of college students indisputably comprised “future veterans:” Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (rotc) cadets. The Students Army Training Corps, created in 1916
and succeeded by rotc in 1919, became a target of antiwar protest on many campuses
throughout the 1920s and 1930s. rotc programs and courses in military science directly
linked higher education to the military, and some colleges and universities mandated
military training for all male students. As future military officers, most rotc members
disdained the vfw’s mockery of war and militarism, but some rotc students at Princeton
and other universities did join the organization. Bertram “Cannon-fodder” Bernstein
and seven of his rotc comrades from Connecticut State College called the vfw “the best
way to satirize our existing war-propaganda machines,” such as the American Legion and
the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and they saluted its humorous protest as “the best possible
method towards peace.”23
Tens of thousands of students, many showing no previous interest in political causes,
rushed to join the vfw’s humorous assault on the veterans’ lobby. Some vfw recruits
shared the Princetonians’ contempt for the Bonus Bill, but most were attracted by satire’s
power to undermine militarism and the glorification of war. Kalman Druck, the editor
of the Syracuse University Daily Orange, wrote that “The students seem to feel that this
is the long-awaited semi-serious, semi-humorous movement which will crystallize antiwar opinion on all campuses throughout the country.” Many vfw members saluted the
organization’s ridicule of the veterans’ lobby, which had trumpeted its patriotism to secure the bonus in 1924 and to gain early payment of that bonus twelve years later. Jessie
Hawkins of Berkeley, California, wrote that “there is nothing like ridicule to puncture the
overbearing bubble of conceit and pseudo-patriotism that is making the Legionnaires a
present-day menace.” Those with a darker sense of humor laughed not only at veterans’
pomposity but also at the vfw’s satire of war’s carnage. An editorial in the Rutgers Targum
applauded the vfw’s “savage satire,” while another admirer snickered approvingly at Gorin’s “grimly magnificent joke.”24
Ridicule offered a particularly potent weapon for deflating the veterans’ lobby and
debunking the glory of war, and the vfw’s humorous tactics attracted many students
who shunned the dreary meetings and internecine squabbles that plagued many antiwar
the Future War Artists and Photographers, the Board for Future War Memorials, and many other organizations,
but the vfw encouraged them to confine themselves to the original group. See Louis E. Frechtling to vfw, April 23,
1936, Massachusetts Correspondence folder 3, box 5, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection; David
Weisman to vfw, March 22, 1936, New York Correspondence folder 3, box 4, ibid.; Robert Noble to vfw, April 7,
1936, Illinois Correspondence folder 2, box 3, ibid.; and Merle Medhurst to vfw, n.d., ibid.
23
On opposition to Reserve Officers’ Training Corp programs, see Arthur A. Ekirch Jr., The Civilian and the
Military: A History of the American Antimilitarist Tradition (New York, 1956), 217–33; Eagan, Class, Culture, and the
Classroom, 33–34, 110–14; Fass, Damned and the Beautiful, 339–43; and Bertram “Cannon-fodder” Bernstein et al.
to vfw, March 19, 1936, Connecticut folder 1, box 4, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection. Maus V.
Darling to Thomas Riggs, April 5, 1936, Riggs Correspondence folder, box 1, National Council Files, ibid.; Albert
Slutsky to vfw, April 30, 1936, Illinois folder 3, box 3, Regional Files, ibid.; Lyle Arnold to vfw, April 27, 1936,
Missouri folder, box 4, ibid.
24
The number of college students in the United States in 1936 was approximately 1.2 million. See U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States 1939 (Washington, 1940), 108, table 112. Kalman B. Druck to
Gorin, March 30, 1936, New York folder 5, box 4, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection; Jessie K.
Hawkins to Thomas J. Riggs, April 6, 1936, California folder 2, box 3, ibid.; “Savage Satire,” Targum, March 25,
1936, p. 2; G. H. Paine to Gorin, May 1, 1936, Patriotism Prepaid Responses folder 1, box 1, National Council
Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection. A few vfw posts were far removed from the ivory tower. Tanya, Queen
of the Nudists, whose Zoro Garden Nudist Colony became a sensation at the California Pacific International Exposition in San Diego, wrote to say that the members of her “cult” wanted to create a chapter of the vfw women’s
auxiliary. Tanya, Queen of the Nudists, to Gorin, Far West folder 1, box 3, Regional Files, ibid.
Veterans of Future Wars and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s
95
organizations. As Robert G. Barnes of the vfw National Council wrote to one member,
“our purposes can best be accomplished by satire, i.e., heading steadfastly in the opposite
direction, [rather] than by serious long-faced pronouncements.” A Cornell student observed that the veterans’ lobby could withstand “frontal attacks,” but would “wilt away
under a determined barrage of laughter.” The vfw attracted many students who previously showed no interest in political causes. Students at Southwest Louisiana Institute
wrote that they had struggled for years to launch a peace movement, only to be stymied
by student apathy and faculty opposition. The vfw’s satirical approach, however, appealed
to students and enabled the antiwar movement “to get away with almost anything.”25
Almost, but not quite. Two days after issuing its manifesto the vfw announced the creation of a women’s auxiliary, the Future Gold Star Mothers, an organization for women
whose future sons were doomed to be killed in war. (The Gold Star Mothers of America,
an organization for women whose sons had been killed in war, was founded in 1928.)
Foreseeing that many young women would inevitably lose sons in future conflicts, the
vfw demanded that the government immediately allocate $2,000 to each bereaved future
mother to defray the cost of traveling to Europe to assist the War Department in selecting
suitable cemetery sites for their future dead sons.26
When Gorin urged Marys Converse, a friend who attended Vassar College, to found
the first chapter of the Future Gold Star Mothers, the vfw provoked a firestorm. Ridiculing the veterans’ lobby incited criticism, but poking fun at bereaved mothers unleashed
howls of outrage. Lampooning maternal grief was comedy too dark for many Americans.
After the vfw announced the establishent of the Future Gold Star Mothers, both Gorin and Vassar president Henry Noble MacCracken found their mailboxes bulging with
angry letters and petitions from the Gold Star Mothers of America, veterans’ groups,
and irate citizens. W. E. Romiger, an American Legion member from Illinois, castigated
“this brazen, witless and totally inhuman baiting of defenseless, broken-hearted mothers,”
while Edgar Baker, commander of a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Washington, D.C.,
branded the Future Gold Star Mothers “a disgrace, not only to Vassar, but to American
youth.”27
25
Robert G. Barnes to Robert Scal, June 29, 1936, New York folder 3, box 4, Regional Files, Veterans of Future
Wars Collection; Ralph Steetle to Gorin, March 19 1936, Louisiana folder, box 5, ibid.; G. W. Keller to Gorin,
March 29, 1936, Connecticut folder, box 4, ibid.; A delighted Cornellian to vfw, March 17, 1936, New York folder
1, ibid. Robert D. Burr to vfw, March 21, 1936, Connecticut folder 1, ibid.; Hubert Phillips to Gorin, April 2,
1936, West Virginia folder, box 6, ibid.; Laird W. Sewell to Gorin, May 4, 1936, Massachusetts folder, box 5, ibid.;
Eleanor Williams to vfw, May 6, 1936, Florida folder, ibid.; Marion Dickson and Leon Picou to Gorin, March 20,
1936, Louisiana folder, ibid.
26
“V. F. W. Issues Manifesto Number Two,” Daily Princetonian, March 16, 1936, p. 2.
27
“Future Veterans and Gold Star Mothers Use Humor to Oppose War and Bonus,” Vassar Miscellany News,
April 4, 1936, p. 1; Henry MacCracken to Dean Robert K. Root, March 20, 1936, folder 72.68: Gold Star
Mothers of Veterans of Future Wars, Miscellaneous within Vassar College, Aug. 1935–Aug. 1937 box, Series
VII: Miscellaneous within Vassar College, Henry Noble MacCracken Papers (Archives and Special Collections
Library, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.); [Robert] Gaylord Barnes to Miriam Bechtel, June 24, 1936, Correspondence folder 1, box 1, National Council Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection; A Bill for an Act to
Grant Adjusted Compensation to Veterans of Future Wars, to Provide for the Carriage to and from Future Battlefields
and Future National Cemeteries abroad of Prospective Mothers of Future Soldiers, Sailors, Marines Buried abroad, to
Select and Purchase Sites for Future National Cemeteries for the Burial of Future Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines Who
Shall Have Been Killed in Action abroad, and for Other Purposes, Lobbying Activities folder, ibid.; Marys Converse
to Gorin, March 19, 1936, New York folder 1, box 4, Regional Files, ibid.; D. A. Chapin to Daily Princetonian,
March 25, 1936, Crank folder, box 6, Correspondence Files, ibid. Patricia Wood to Thomas Riggs, March 31,
1936, New York folder 5, box 4, Regional Files, ibid.; Alexander Black to Eileen Sigler, April 14, 1936, Pennsylvania folder 2, box 5, ibid.; Robert G. Barnes to Judith Chambers, April 28, 1936, Barnes Correspondence
folder 2, box 2, National Council Files, ibid.; “Princeton’s ‘Veterans of Future Wars’ Accorded Chilly Reception
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Controversy over the Future Gold Star Mothers caused uproar on the Vassar campus,
where pacifist sentiment was widespread. President MacCracken called the organization a
“breach of good taste” and forbade Converse to form a chapter, informing her that she had
already exposed Vassar to a tidal wave of bad publicity. Converse offered to rename the auxiliary group something less controversial, but MacCracken denied her permission to form
an organization, no matter what it might be called. Converse relented and severed her ties
with the vfw but confided to Gorin that “it’s such a clever idea it will break my heart to
have to give in.”28
The Future Gold Star Mothers was not without defenders. The Vassar alumna Nellie
Smith protested MacCracken’s suppression of the organization and applauded the students’ efforts to “stave off the insane madness [of war] by holding the whole thing up to
ridicule.” The antiwar activist Edith Wynner praised the students for utilizing “the most
deadly weapon there is—satire” and accused MacCracken of allying himself “with the intolerant, un-American, and militaristic clique, which arbitrarily sets itself up as the sole
interpreter of Americanism.” Confronted by the barrage of irate criticism hurled at the
Future Gold Star Mothers, however, the vfw beat a hasty retreat and innocuously renamed its women’s auxiliary the Home Fires Division.29
While thousands of students across the nation immediately joined the vfw’s humorous attack on the veterans’ lobby, militarism, and war, some remained uncertain about
the organization’s target and its political stance. Was the vfw a serious political protest,
a pointed joke, or mere college hijinks? Did it aim its attack at the greed of the veterans’
lobby or at war? Was the vfw conservative, liberal, leftist, isolationist, or pacifist? Did it
at Vassar,” Poughkeepsie (ny) Evening Star, March 17, 1936, p. 1. D. C. Carey, “Comedy a Little Late,” New York
Times, April 1, 1936, p. 24; Edward Bulkeley Van Zile, “Those Future Veterans,” ibid. On the Future Gold Star
Mothers and the backlash against its establishment, see Pearl Laub, petition to MacCracken, May 6, 1936, folder
72.68: Gold Star Mothers of Veterans of Future Wars, box “Miscellaneous within Vassar College, Aug. 1935–
Aug. 1937,” Series VII: Miscellaneous within Vassar College, MacCracken Papers; Louis T. Grant to MacCracken, May 7, 1936, ibid.; Mrs. E. Andrews to MacCracken, May 20, 1936, ibid.; W. E. Romiger, “We Apologize
for Them,” Egyptian Legionnaire, [1936?], ibid.; H. R. Berridge to MacCracken, April 29, 1936, ibid.; Laura Eva
Von Ehrenfeld to MacCracken, March 23, 1936, ibid.; and Edgar R. Baker to MacCracken, March 21, 1936,
ibid. Stuart Ward to MacCracken, March 18, 1936, ibid.; Edwin A. Zelnicker to MacCracken, March 19, 1936,
ibid.; Alexander L. McCormick to MacCracken, March 28, 1936, ibid.; G. G. Hollander to the New York Herald
Tribune, March 21, 1936, clipping, p. 16, ibid. Criticism of the Gold Star Mothers provoked an outpouring of
angry letters to the vfw. See Richard T. Carter to vfw, [March 1936?], Illinois folder 1, box 3, Regional Files,
Veterans of Future Wars Collection; Scotty Hearn to Gorin, March 19, 1936, New York folder 1, box 4, ibid.; G.
G. Hollander to Gorin, March 27, 1936, Crank folder, box 6, Correspondence Files, ibid.; and Lowell Oswald
to Rushton, April 1, 1936, Louisiana folder, box 5, Regional Files, ibid.
28
“Vassar Head Protests,” New York Times, March 27, 1936, p. 46. Henry MacCracken’s forceful opposition to
the vfw may have been prompted by his desire to avoid controversy and to avoid antagonizing the college’s trustees.
On MacCracken’s career, see Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges
from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York, 1985), 295–302; and MacCracken to Converse,
March 23, 1936, folder 72.68: Gold Star Mothers of Veterans of Future Wars, Miscellaneous within Vassar College,
Aug. 1935–Aug. 1937 box, Series VII: Miscellaneous within Vassar College, MacCracken Papers. Converse to MacCracken, March 23, March 27, 1936, ibid.; MacCracken to Converse, March 25, 1936, ibid.; Converse to Gorin,
March 19, 1936, New York folder 1, box 4, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection. “What Next?,” Vassar Miscellany News, April 4, 1936, p. 2.
29
Nellie M. Smith to MacCracken, March 27, 1936, folder 72.68: Gold Star Mothers of Veterans of Future
Wars, Miscellaneous within Vassar College, Aug. 1935–Aug. 1937 box, Series VII: Miscellaneous within Vassar
College, MacCracken Papers. Herman Glaser to MacCracken, March 28, 1936, ibid. Edith Wynner had formerly
worked as personal secretary to the noted pacifist Rosika Schwimmer. Edith Wynner to MacCracken, March 27,
1936, ibid. Emily Cobb Holmes to MacCracken, April 2, 1936, ibid.; Walter Van Hine to MacCracken, March 27,
1936, ibid.; Glaser to MacCracken, March 28, 1936, ibid. On the vfw decision to change the name of the women’s
auxiliary division, see “vfw to All Posts,” March 23, 1936, Bulletins to Regional Posts folder, box 2, National Council Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection. “Future Veterans Bow to Criticism,” 19; Ella Sollenberger to vfw, May
6, 1936, Virginia folder, box 6, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection.
Veterans of Future Wars and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s
97
espouse any particular political ideology? One student put the question succinctly in a
letter to Gorin: “Are you a reactionary or progressive organization?”30
Uncertainty over the meaning of the vfw’s satire is understandable because the joke cut
in several directions and cannot be labeled simply conservative or progressive. The vfw’s
dark joke can be understood only in the historical context of the debates over war and
the welfare state in the 1930s. In the literary theorist Northrop Frye’s influential formulation, satire is “militant irony” directed against a perceived evil or injustice. “Two things,”
he wrote, “are essential to satire; one is wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the
grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack.” The literary scholars Brian Connery
and Kirk Combe have noted the trickiness of interpreting satire, because “satire is simultaneously humane and inhuman in its treatment of the world.” Satirists, they point out,
seize the moral high ground yet engage in remorseless, even cruel, attacks on their target.
Indeed, the vfw simultaneously championed peace and unsparingly ridiculed veterans,
fallen soldiers, and grief-stricken mothers. It lashed out simultaneously at the jingoism of
the veterans’ lobby, the horrific prospect of millions of soldiers and civilians being killed
in another European war, and the growth of the welfare state. The vfw’s opposition to
veterans’ benefits leaned rightward, but its ridicule of militarism tilted to the left.31
The leaders of the vfw remained cagey about their own political views to appeal to students across the political spectrum. As Gorin ambitiously stated: “We hope to arrive at
some plan to keep us out of the coming European War, but a plan which will appeal to isolationists, Jingoes, and pacifists. . . . I have found that practically everyone is united today in
a desire to avoid active participation in the coming European War. This is true even of the
most ardent internationalists as well as the isolationists.” The vfw aimed its sharpest barbs
not at the veterans’ bonus but at the “sham patriotism” that veterans’ groups had deployed
to justify their “raid” on the federal treasury. Gorin characterized the vfw as “a rebuke . . .
to sentimentalism about war; and a tolerant smile at the pathetic effort human beings make
to find in memories of war the glory they could never discover in war itself.”32
Eager to capitalize on the vfw’s meteoric growth, Gorin rushed his Patriotism Prepaid
into print, only two months after the vfw issued its manifesto. In it, he elaborated his
case that the future veteran had “a right to enjoy his honors and emoluments while yet
alive,” and he assailed both the veterans’ lobby and the nascent welfare state as menaces
to the American Republic. The ostentatious patriotism of veterans’ organizations, Gorin
charged, was only a tactic to win early payment of the bonus so that veterans could live
“in idleness at the expense of the government.” Most of the veterans eligible to receive the
bonus, he pointed out, had never seen combat, and some were still in basic training when
the armistice was signed in November 1918. Veterans now seemed to consider themselves
public employees rather than citizen-soldiers. “The word veteran,” Gorin wrote, “no lon30
Thomas Petrella to Gorin, April 6, 1936, New York folder 6, box 4, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars
Collection.
31
Northrop Frye, An Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957), 223–24. Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy
of Satire (Princeton, 1962). Sigmund Freud famously contended that humor is displaced aggression. Sigmund Freud,
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1963). Brian A. Connery and Kirk
Combe, “Theorizing Satire: A Retrospective and Introduction,” in Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism, ed.
Brian A. Connery and Kirk Combe (New York, 1995), 1–5; Darnton, “Workers Revolt,” 77–78. The anthropologist
Mahadev Apte emphasizes that humor can be appreciated only when one fully understands the culture and the context in which it is created. Mahadev L. Apte, Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach (Ithaca, 1985), 15–17.
32
Gorin to Marvin Perkins, April 18, 1936, New York folder 7, box 4, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars
Collection. On Gorin’s characterization, see “Veterans of Future Wars,” p. 2, Speeches folder, box 2, National Council Files, ibid.
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ger implies that you have engaged in battle. It simply means that you have worked for the
government at less than the usual rate of pay.” The book’s sales benefited tremendously
from the publicity swirling around the vfw in the spring of 1936, and it received flattering reviews. The New York Herald Tribune pronounced it “the best and grimmest joke of
1936,” while the New York Times predicted that Gorin’s “portentously serious” satire “may
yet expand into a major factor among the forces fighting against militarism.”33
Veterans’ groups, however, were not laughing. The reviewer Bernard W. Kearney dismissed the book in Foreign Service, the magazine of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, calling it
nothing more than a tedious catalog of slogans and falsehoods promulgated by opponents
of veterans’ benefits. The American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars resented the vfw’s
criticism of the bonus, but were enraged by its mockery of veterans as selfish “patrioteers”
eager to cash in on their service to the country. In addition to winning early payment of the
bonus, the veterans’ lobby sought to valorize America’s role in World War I and brooked
no criticism of the war or the military. It reacted viscerally when smart-alecky college kids
dared to criticize the war and veterans’ benefits. The Veterans of Foreign Wars—the original “vfw”—castigated the Veterans of Future Wars as unpatriotic and disrespectful toward
the sacrifices made by World War I soldiers. James Van Zandt, national commander of the
Veterans of Foreign Wars, blasted the students: “They’ll never be veterans of a future war,
for they are too yellow to go to war.” The appropriation of the abbreviation vfw by the
Veterans of Future Wars infuriated the Veterans of Foreign Wars, as did the group’s use of
the military lingo of commanders, posts, and ranks. (The upstart vfw even considered designing a uniform for its members but found them prohibitively expensive.) The Veterans
of Future Wars also devised its own salute, in which members extended their arm, “itchy”
palm turned upward in expectation of receiving a handout from the government. This irreverent gesture, modeled on the fascist salute, rankled many veterans.34
Opposition to the vfw was fueled not only by patriotism, nationalism, and support for
veterans’ benefits but also by class resentment. Critics charged that college students, especially those at elite institutions such as Princeton, were oblivious to the hardship endured
by soldiers, and they accused the nation’s universities of failing to inculcate patriotism. A
cartoon in Foreign Service caricatured the officers of the Veterans of Future Wars as a gang
of rich, snotty college boys giddily desecrating the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A veteran from Minnesota called Gorin and his comrades “war profits babies,” whose privilege
was built atop the doughboys’ sacrifice and suffering. One critic, who identified himself
only as “Blackjack,” minced no words in criticizing the Ivy Leaguers’ wealth and privilege:
“your fathers and mothers were lying in soft beds having sexual intercourse while the Veterans were wallowing in the mud. Furthermore, your yellow bellied daddy was coining
plenty of money, while the Veterans were getting $1 per day.”35
33
Gorin, Patriotism Prepaid, 7, 49–50. “Ridicule of War Most Potent Weapon, Assert Reviewers,” New York
Herald Tribune clipping, Lippincott folder, box 1, National Council Files, Veterans of Foreign Wars Collection;
Florence Finch Kelly, “Satiric Mercenaries of Unfought Wars,” New York Times Book Review, May 17, 1936, p. 6.
34
Bernard W. Kearney, “It Can’t Happen Again!,” Foreign Service, 24 (May 1936), 39. On the salute reflecting
the spirit of the vfw, see Richard K. Washburn to Gorin, March 24, 1936, Massachusetts folder 2, box 5, Regional
Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection. “Future Veterans,” 58.
35
Charles A. Peterson to Gorin, March 27, 1936, Congratulations folder, box 6, Correspondence Files, Veterans
of Future Wars Collection; Marvin Nye, “The Vandals of 1936,” Foreign Service, 24 (May 1936), 5; Frank B. Fox to
the Daily Princetonian, March 23, 1936, Pennsylvania folder 2, box 5, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection. John H. White to Gorin, March 18, 1936, Texas folder, box 6, ibid. Charles A. Peterson to Gorin, March
27, 1936, Congratulations folder, Correspondence Files, ibid. Anonymous to Gorin, n.d., Crank folder, ibid. Eli D.
to vfw, n.d., ibid. “Blackjack” to vfw, April 1, 1936, ibid.
Veterans of Future Wars and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s
99
The Veterans of Future Wars salute, shown here, was illustrated for Lewis J. Gorin’s
book by Albert M. Barbieri. The outstretched “itchy” palm, always ready to receive
government support, and its similarity to the fascist salute enraged many veterans.
From Lewis J. Gorin Jr., Patriotism Prepaid (Philadelphia, 1936), 98. Courtesy Eleanor
H. Gorin.
Critics of the vfw also impugned the students’ manliness and femininity. The National Legionnaire, the magazine of the American Legion, published “An Ode (to Princeton and Vassar),” which rhapsodized about “the Pansies of Princeton” and “the maids
of Vassar.” The Princetonians (“Sweet cuties with lace on their panties / And carmine
red rouge on their claws”), ensconced in their cozy Ivy League enclave, were sissies who
could only “hurl powder puffs at the foe!” The poet hinted that some Vassar students
were lesbians who would never wed or become mothers, while others were sexually
promiscuous and would “mass produce” enough children to overwhelm the nation’s
enemies.36
Hate mail, signed and unsigned, poured into the vfw mailbox, as critics assailed Gorin
as a coward, a communist, a Nazi, a traitor, a moron, and a sissy. “You nasty little lamebrained adolescent,” began one letter from an anonymous “wife of a veteran” in Overland Park, Kansas, who suggested that Gorin be forced to work in a veterans’ hospital
and “wait on the blind, the legless & the tubercular. Especially on the mentally afflicted.”
“Dear Rat’s and Skunk’s,” wrote Mrs. M. K. Carney of Denver. “Your a disgrace to the
36
“An Ode (to Princeton and Vassar),”National Legionnaire, 20 (April 1936), 3, reprinted in the Daily Princetonian, April 28, 1936, p. 2. A Veteran to vfw, March 17, 1936, Crank folder, box 6, Correspondence Files, Veterans
of Future Wars Collection.
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The leaders of the Veterans of Future Wars are depicted here as a gang of snotty, unpatriotic
college boys. Reprinted from Marvin Nye, “The Vandals of 1936,” Foreign Service, 24 (May
1936), 5. Courtesy Veterans of Foreign Wars.
U.S.A. . . . Princeton is composed of the scum of America.” She looked forward to seeing
the “yellow slackers” of the vfw hanged from telegraph poles for shirking their duty when
the next war came. The World War I veteran Ray Beymer declared that he wanted to line
up the vfw leaders “& turn a machine gun loose—I feel sure I would be protecting the
old flag more than when killing the Hun’s—you filthy pups.”37
The vfw also encountered staunch opposition from university administrators, some of
whom prohibited the creation of a vfw post on their campuses. The Princeton administration tolerated the vfw but forbade it from using the university’s name and insisted
that its headquarters be located off campus. College presidents and deans opposed or
even prohibited the vfw at Brown University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, Temple University, Indiana University, Southern Methodist University,
and many other schools. President John S. Nollen of Grinnell College contemptuously
dismissed the vfw as a “farce” and barred students from founding a post. He pointedly
informed the Princetonians that “Grinnell College is an educational institution,” adding
that “we do not desire that our students be marshaled into propagandist movements.”
vfw members on other campuses encountered even stiffer resistance. Albert Harting, the
37
Wife of a Veteran to Gorin, March 23, 1936, Crank folder, box 6, Correspondence Files, Veterans of Future Wars
Collection; Mrs. M. K. Carney to vfw, March 21, 1936, ibid.; Ray Beymer to vfw, March 23, 1936, Nebraska folder,
box 4, Regional Files, ibid.; Anonymous to vfw, March 17, 1936, Crank folder, box 6, Correspondence Files, ibid.
Veterans of Future Wars and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s
101
commander of the Southern Methodist University post, was confronted by the school’s
president and dean, who berated his lack of patriotism and threatened to revoke his
scholarship unless he resigned from the organization. At Iowa State Teachers College, an
irate faculty member enlisted a gang of fraternity brothers to disrupt a vfw meeting. vfw
members at Lawrence College were clubbed by police when they held an antiwar march
on campus. Bert Thompson, vfw post commander at San Antonio Junior College, endured harassment from members of the local American Legion chapter and received the
following note (which he dismissed as an idle threat sent by a crank):
“Have you ever fought man to man for your life? Have you ever seen a buddy blasted to Hell? No. I thought not. Yet you make a farce of something you nave never
experienced. I think we have had enough of your foolishness for once. YOU WILL
CEASE YOUR ACTIVITIES WITHIN FIVE HOURS OF RECEIVING THIS
LETTER OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES.”38
—A Veteran of the Past War
Debate over the vfw extended to the halls of Congress, where representatives and senators, who were bitterly divided over the veterans’ bonus, similarly disagreed about the
vfw. Arkansas representative Claude Fuller, a staunch ally of the veterans’ lobby, addressed
Congress to denounce the vfw as communist, fascist, and pacifist. But Connecticut representative Herman Koppleman praised the vfw’s tactics in a speech on the House floor,
observing that, “an occasional dose of satire wakes up the American people where all the
preaching and storming and earnest pleading gets us nowhere.” Texas representative Maury
Maverick, who had been wounded in the war, traveled to Princeton to declare his support
for the future veterans, and Indiana representative Louis Ludlow sought the vfw’s endorsement for his proposed constitutional amendment to require a national referendum for the
United States to declare war unless the nation had been invaded. fdr prudently remained
silent about the vfw, but First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt said, “I think it’s just as funny as it
can be! And—taken light, as it should be—a grand pricking of lots of bubbles.”39
Newspapers and magazines variously saluted the Veterans of Future Wars as a brilliant
political satire, dismissed it as a college prank, or savaged it as an unpatriotic cabal. The
New York Herald Tribune endorsed the vfw and predicted that it would soon become the
38
John S. Nollen to William Breese, May 2, 1936, Iowa folder, box 2, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars
Collection. Richard Robb to vfw, April 22, 1936, Iowa folder, box 4, ibid. On criticism of the vfw on other campuses, see Allen Krause to Penn T. Kimball, March 27, 1936, Rhode Island folder, box 5, ibid.; John I. Loving to
Alexander Black, April 15, 1936, D.C. folder 1, ibid.; Loving to Black, May 23, 1936, ibid.; Dean H. G. Doyle to
Sam Booth, March 31, 1936, D.C. folder 2, ibid.; Albert Postle to Allan C. Barnes, April 19, 1936, Pennsylvania
folder 2, ibid.; Isadore Krieger to vfw, May 18, 1936, Indiana folder 2, box 3, ibid.; and Albert Harting to Breese,
March 24, 1936, Texas folder, box 6, ibid. On criticism of the vfw at Iowa State Teachers College and Lawrence
College, see Norris T. Pritchard to vfw, April 3, 1936, Iowa folder, box 4, ibid.; Joseph Heinzkill to Gorin, June 15,
1936, Gorin Correspondence folder 4, box 1, National Council Files, ibid.; George Dickinson to John Paul Jones,
May 17, 1936, Indiana folder 2, box 3, Regional Files, ibid.; and Julian Fromer to Jones, April 6, 1936, Wisconsin folder, ibid. Anonymous to Bert Thompson, March 25, 1936, Texas folder, box 6, ibid. Emphasis in original.
39
“Lobbies for Bonus in College Recess,” New York Times, April 2, 1936, p. 23; Thomas Riggs Jr., “Sketchy Report on Activities in Washington,” 1936 Report on D.C. Posts folder, box 1, National Council Files, Veterans of
Future Wars Collection; Claude Fuller, speech in Congress, in vfw Bulletin, 3 (no. 1–2, 1936), clipping, Bulletins
to Regional Posts folder, box 2, ibid. Herman Koppleman to Thomas Riggs, March 28, 1936, Riggs Correspondence folder, box 1, ibid.; Riggs to Koppleman, April 18, May 15, April 7, April 21, March 30, 1936, ibid.; Maury
Maverick to Gorin, March 18, 1936, Lobbying Activities folder, ibid.; Gorin to Maverick, March 20, 1936, ibid.;
Gorin to Maverick, March 30, 1936, ibid. “Future Veterans Amuse First Lady,” Washington Post, April 3, 1936,
p. 1.
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largest student group in the nation. The Chattanooga (tn) Times wrote that students in every college and high school in the nation would form vfw chapters, creating “more effective an enemy of war than all the peace pacts ever devised.” Time magazine ranked the vfw
alongside Woodrow Wilson as Princeton’s two most significant contributions to American
life. Tellingly, magazines at both ends of the political spectrum applauded the vfw. The
liberal New Republic observed that the “solemn pretensions of patrioteering organizations
need ridicule as much as anything,” while the conservative Literary Digest admired the students’ “serio-comic” commentary on the issues of veterans’ benefits and war. Heywood
Broun and Oswald Garrison Villard both touted the upstart vfw in the Nation. Villard
offered “unqualified admiration” for Gorin’s “brilliant” satire and speculated that the vfw
would prove an effective weapon for defending the United States against militarism and
fascism. Even the Christian Century, a sober and steadfast advocate of pacifism, endorsed
the vfw’s comic approach to antiwar activism. Pacifist meetings, petition drives, and
antiwar marches had grown stale, while the vfw’s humor offered new tactics for opposing
militarism. The magazine praised the satire as “nonsense with a deadly serious purpose”:
ridicule of war and veterans might prove more potent than all the antiwar manifestos,
meetings, and protests combined: “This ironic attitude toward the traditions of patriotism
is far more subversive of a nation’s will to fight than any communist attack on imperialism or pacifist attack on the use of force. . . . no army with tongue in cheek, with fingers
crossed, which winked as it paraded under its own slogans, ever marched far or for long.”40
Some writers, however, detected political fissures between conservatives and progressives within the vfw. James Wechsler, a Columbia University undergraduate and director
of communications for the left-leaning American Student Union (asu) praised the vfw
in the Nation as an inspired protest that had unmasked the phony glory of militarism.
Wechsler also noted with dismay, however, the divergent goals of the vfw’s founders and
rank-and-file members. Few college students were agitated about early payment of the
veterans’ bonus, but thousands rallied to the vfw “because they saw in it a devastating
criticism of war.” An editorial in New Democracy was even more perceptive about the gulf
between the vfw’s leaders and its members. “The uncouth undergraduates of the cow colleges” in the Midwest and the West, the magazine wrote, ignored the vfw’s attack on the
bonus, opting instead “to make fun of war itself.” By hijacking the vfw’s original joke,
its members had created a mordant political satire from Gorin’s gag about a lobby for
future veterans. The magazine directed its own biting sarcasm toward the Princetonians’
flippancy—and their inability, ultimately, to comprehend their own joke. The schools
and colleges of the partially enlightened peasantry made serious use of the grim weapon
of ridicule. Undergraduates who had never quite captured the blasé attitude of superior
disdain toward organized slaughter contorted the innocent ideas of Arthur M. Winfield’s
fun-loving Rover boys to serve the ends of their own seditious beliefs.41
40
“Fair Play for Future Veterans,” New York Herald Tribune, March 20, 1936, p. 26; “Devastating Satire,” Chattanooga (tn) Times, March 18, 1936, p. 6; “Future Veterans,” p. 38; Louis Ludlow to vfw, n.d., Lobbying Activities folder, box 1, National Council Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection. “The Week,” New Republic, April 1,
1936, p. 207; “Ask Bonus for Future Wars,” Literary Digest, March 28, 1936, p. 18; Rev. James W. F. Carman to
vfw, March 17, 1936, Colorado folder, box 5, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection; Mabel Hackett
to Gorin, April 7, 1936, Michigan folder, box 3, ibid.; Heywood Broun, “Broun’s Page,” Nation, April 1, 1936, p.
417; Oswald Garrison Villard, “Issues and Men,” ibid., April 8, 1936, p. 450. “Students and War,” Christian Century, May 6, 1936, pp. 656–57 .
41
James Wechsler, “Treason among the Future Veterans,” Nation, May 27, 1936, pp. 672–73; “A Jest Turns Earnest Out West,” New Democracy, May 1936, p. 46. On Arthur M. Winfield (pseudonym of Edward Stratemeyer)
and his Rover Boys series for young readers, see Trudy Abel, “A Man of Letters, A Man of Business: Edward Stratemeyer and the Adolescent Reader, 1890–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1993).
Veterans of Future Wars and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s
103
The vfw officers, surprised by the organization’s sudden growth, were unprepared for
the crossfire of political debate in which they found themselves. Tensions between the
antibonus vfw leadership and its more progressive antiwar rank-and-file members divided the organization. The vfw National Council at Princeton lampooned the “sham
patriotism” that the veterans’ lobby deployed to win early payment of the soldiers’ bonus
and harbored deep forebodings about the prospect of the United States sending troops to
fight and die in another European war. But the vfw leaders were wary of presiding over
a strictly antiwar organization or being branded as leftists or pacifists.
Some vfw members shared the leadership’s concern over the clout wielded by the veterans’ lobby, and they strove to tilt the vfw’s politics accordingly. A Minnesota vfw member, Victor Johnson, wrote to Gorin that he was “sick and tired of the god-damned veterans’ organizations and their greedy lobbies.” James Dean of Knoxville, Tennessee, was
even blunter, hailing the vfw’s effort to “bring shame to these blood-suckers and to the
spineless Congress that yielded to them.” Some vfw members were determined to prevent
leftists or pacifists from gaining control of their posts. E. R. Bartlett assured Gorin that
the Williams College post contained “no Reds and they are not pacifists.” Edward Jonsson, commander of the University of Pittsburgh post, reported that “I am making sure
that no rabid radicals join.” Even so, other posts were affiliated with or even run by leftists and pacifists. Lyle Arnold, commander of the University of Missouri post, wrote to
complain that “every Communist and Socialist on this campus is flocking to this organization,” while James Reilly of Brooklyn College, where students ranked among the most
progressive in the nation, wrote that the vfw chapter had been commandeered by leftists. John Barry wrote to the vfw to accuse the commander of the University of Southern
California post of being a communist and a member of the American Student Union.42
The overwhelming majority of students who joined the Veterans of Future Wars,
though, were attracted by its stunning potential as an antiwar movement. Some were
isolationists; others were pacifists; many were leftists. Many of these rank-and-file members sought to ally with other progressive and pacifist groups, to participate in antiwar
marches, and to ridicule war and militarism. Some members urged the national council
to ally the vfw with the asu and other pacifist groups. The vfw leaders, however, recoiled from supporting the Oxford Pledge, peace marches, or any position that exposed
them to charges of being leftists or pacifists, as evident in their response to the 1936
Student Strike against War. College students had staged the first nationwide strike of
students against war in 1934, when an estimated twenty-five thousand students walked
out of classes for one hour to demonstrate their opposition to militarism. In April 1935,
175,000 students participated in the strike. The American Student Union, founded in
1935, sponsored the strike and predicted that a record number of college students and
high school students would join the 1936 walkout. Many members of the brand new
vfw were eager to lay down their notebooks to join the strike, but the national council
instructed post commanders “not to accept affiliation with any other organization” and
42
On the payment of the bonus, see Keene, Doughboys, 176; Victor Johnson to Gorin, March 17, 1936, Minnesota folder, box 4, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection; and James W. Dean to Gorin, March 20,
1936, Tennessee folder, box 5, ibid. E. R. Bartlett to Gorin, May 6, 1936, Gorin Correspondence folder 2, box 1,
National Council Files, ibid.; Edward D. Jonsson to Gorin, April 17, 1936, Pennsylvania folder 3, box 6, Regional
Files, ibid.; Lyle Arnold to vfw, April 27, 1936, Missouri folder, box 4, ibid.; James Reilly to vfw, March 28, 1936,
New York folder 4, ibid.; John E. Barry to Gorin, May 23, 1936, California folder 3, box 3, ibid.
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to refrain from using the vfw’s name if they did choose to strike. The vfw officers insisted that their objective was to preserve the organization’s independence, but they were
especially concerned about making common cause with the leftist asu, which had endorsed pacifism and the Oxford Pledge. Some five hundred thousand students, including
many vfw members, participated in the strike. At Columbia, five hundred vfw members marched with signs reading, “Spend your bonus here, not in the hereafter,” while
Barnard College students marched as future war widows, clutching dolls representing
“future war orphans.”43
As soon as students had enjoyed a laugh at the vfw’s joke on veterans and war, they
wondered about the organization’s next move. In the spring and summer of 1936, the
vfw leaders received dozens of inquiries about future plans for satirizing war or protesting against the veterans’ lobby. Many members suggested that the vfw National Council
should capitalize on the organization’s momentum by creating a permanent movement
with an explicit antiwar program. The Princeton senior Cadwallader Benedict urged the
vfw to devise a substantive program to refute the criticism “that youth mocks, but does
not act, that youth tears down but does not build up.” Other members worried, however,
that any effort to establish a serious agenda would sap the organization’s irreverent attitude and its appeal. Josephine Rathbone of Augusta, Georgia, warned that converting the
vfw to an earnest antiwar organization would “blunt the edge of the irony” and transform
the satire into “just another boresome society.”44
As the fall 1936 semester began, the vfw received many queries from local posts about
plans for the upcoming academic year. “A generation stands ready and waiting, the responsibility for making the world laugh in the face of Mars is yours!” wrote Richard P.
McCormick of the Rutgers College vfw post to Gorin in September. Gorin had already
decamped for Harvard Law School, however, and the vfw officers abruptly suspended the
organization’s activities and revoked the charters of all five hundred posts, boasting that
the organization had achieved its principal goals because, “we did awaken the people of
the country to (1) the absurdity of war and youth’s reaction to it, and (2) the equal absurdity of the treasury exploitation in which various veteran organizations have been allowed to indulge.” Gorin claimed that the vfw had fallen silent only because the debate
over war and soldiers’ benefits had subsided, and he vowed to revive the organization if
American entry into war became imminent. Many vfw members were incensed by the
leadership’s decision to disband and its tight control over posts on other campuses. Israel Gold of Brooklyn College angrily resigned from the vfw to protest its undemocratic
“policy of having this movement channeled with inaction by a ruling handful at the top
and the stifling of the voices of equally capable followers at the bottom.” By this time the
43
F. Cyril Sander to vfw, Aug. 4, 1936, Oregon folder, box 3, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection; Wechsler, “Treason among the Future Veterans,” 672–73. On vfw leaders’ unwillingness to be associated with
pacifist or left-leaning political organizations, see Eagan, Class, Culture, and the Classroom, 120–33; vfw Bulletin,
[April 1936], issue 4, Bulletins folder, box 2, National Council Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection; Robert
K. Scal to John C. Turner, April 3, 1936, New York folder 3, box 4, Regional Files, ibid.; and Richard D. Waters
to Scal, April 7, 1936, ibid. Robert Bean to Gorin, April 20, 1936, North Carolina folder 1, box 5, Regional Files,
ibid.; “The Student and Peace,” New York Times, April 19, 1936, p. X10; “Gestures for Peace,” ibid., April 26, 1936,
p. E8. Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young, 152–53; “Half Million Students Unite in Peace Strike,” Vassar Miscellany News, April 25, 1936, p. 3.
44
Cadwallader Benedict to U. J. P. Rushton, Aug. 7, 1936, North Carolina folder 2, box 5, Regional Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection. Hugh A. Bayne to Gorin, March 31, 1936, Congratulations folder, box 6, Correspondence Files, ibid.; Josephine Rathbone to Beatrice Winser [secretary, Friends of the vfw], June 15, 1936,
Friends of vfw Members folder, box 6, Auxiliary Organizations Files, ibid.
Veterans of Future Wars and the Meanings of Political Satire in the 1930s
105
heady enthusiasm of the spring of 1936 had dissipated, and the Veterans of Future Wars
vanished as quickly as it had appeared.45
Had the vfw not folded so abruptly, other events would still have almost certainly
dampened members’ fervor over the next few years. The menace of Nazism steadily eroded isolationist and pacifist sentiment among the American public, and fdr gradually
nudged the nation toward war with Germany. When the United States entered World
War II in December 1941, Gorin’s satire became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as he and all of
the vfw National Council (except one officer, who had been paralyzed in an automobile
accident) enlisted in the armed forces. Cdr. Gorin became Col. Gorin and served in the
U.S. 6th Field Artillery Regiment in Europe. Ironically, after the war, he became eligible
for the benefits of the G.I. Bill, a pension, and other veterans’ benefits. Reminiscing about
his service, the founder of the Veterans of Future Wars understood World War II, unlike
World War I, as a just and necessary war. In 1973 he published The Cannon’s Mouth, an
account of the role of artillery in the war, in which he praised Roosevelt’s efforts in the late
1930s to steer the American public away from isolationism and prepare the nation and
the military for war with Germany and Japan.46
Political satire of the sort created by the Veterans of Future Wars was disrupted by the
seemingly unstoppable drift toward World War II and the subsequent onset of the Cold
War, but it foreshadowed a political culture suffused with theatricality and irony. The
vfw subjected militarism to a barrage of ridicule that would largely vanish from American political discourse in the 1940s and 1950s. After the United States entered the war
against Germany and Japan, criticism of war and the military nearly vanished. During
the conflict Bill Mauldin’s iconic cartoons of American G.I.’s offered a genial depiction
of the hardships borne by soldiers rather than a criticism of the military or militarism.
In the war’s aftermath, Americans generally reckoned World War II a required—even a
“good”—war, and most criticism of America’s role in it remained muted. Proponents of
the Cold War against the Soviet Union stifled criticism of the U.S. government and military throughout the 1950s, although a few audacious comedians kept political humor
alive during that decade. In the 1960s, biting satire of militarism reemerged in American
culture, as writers, filmmakers, comedians, cartoonists, and antiwar activists dared to ridicule war and the military brass. Joseph Heller’s darkly comic novel Catch-22 (1961) and
Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1964) savaged the military’s bureaucratic mind-set
and modern warfare’s wanton slaughter.47
45
Richard McCormick to Gorin, Sept. 27, 1936, New Jersey folder, box 3, Regional Files, Veterans of Future
Wars Collection; Gorin to Thomas Riggs, Oct. 5, 1936, Bulletins to Regional Posts folder, box 2, National Council
Files, ibid.; Riggs to Gorin, Oct. 10, 1936, ibid.; Riggs to Helen Morton, Oct. 10, 1936, ibid.; vfw to all posts, Oct.
22, 1936, ibid.; Riggs to Ted Moore, Dec. 7, 1936, Ohio folder 3, box 3, Regional Files, ibid.; Israel Gold to John
C. Turner, Oct. 29, 1936, New York folder 9, box 4, ibid.; “Future Veterans Give Up Trenches,” New York Times,
April 4, 1937, p. 15. Presiding over a nationwide organization, authoring a book, and maintaining a hectic speaking schedule nearly prevented Lewis Gorin from fulfilling Princeton University’s requirements for graduation in the
spring of 1936. To enable him to receive his diploma the Politics Department faculty agreed to accept his book,
Patriotism Prepaid, in lieu of his unfinished senior thesis on Niccolo Machiavelli. See “The Saga of the Veterans of
Future Wars,” Nassau Sovereign, April 29, 1941, p. 32, clipping, Printed Material folder 2, box 6, Printed Material
Files, Veterans of Future Wars Collection.
46
The G.I. Bill is the informal name of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, 58 Stat. 284. Divine, Reluctant
Belligerent; Eagan, Class, Culture, and the Classroom¸ 183–232; “As Time Goes By,” Time, July 26, 1943, p. 22. “‘Future
Veterans’ Change War Views,” ibid., March 4, 1944, p. 30; Lewis J. Gorin Jr., The Cannon’s Mouth: The Role of U.S.
Artillery during World War II (New York, 1973), 44, 261. Gorin made no mention of his role in founding the Veterans
of Future Wars in The Cannon’s Mouth, but Maj. Gen. Thomas de Shazo noted it in the introduction. See ibid., 12.
47
For a historical account of antimilitarism in America, see Ekirch, Civilian and the Military. On American culture in the 1930s, see Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New York,
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June 2016
Why did the Veterans of Future Wars grow so rapidly, generate such extraordinary support and opposition, and then disintegrate—all in only a few months? The vfw inspired
more enthusiasm among college students and did more to discredit the self-serving patriotism of the veterans’ lobby than the combined efforts of the earnest antiwar organizations
that sprang up in the 1920s and 1930s. Had the vfw been founded a few months earlier
it might have prevented Congress from voting to pay the veterans’ bonus ahead of schedule. Even so, Gorin and his comrades could not have foreseen the size the vfw would
attain and the publicity it would draw, and they were largely unprepared for the ensuing
debate among leftists, liberals, and conservatives. As a result, they failed to reconcile their
contempt for the self-serving “sham patriotism” of the veterans’ lobby with the staunchly
antiwar sentiments of the vfw’s rank-and-file membership. The vfw’s satire cut several
directions at once, lampooning self-serving veterans, strutting patriots, spineless politicians, and the horrific prospect of another world war. As a result, liberals and conservatives, isolationists and internationalists, pacifists and advocates of preparedness endorsed
the satire of political opportunism and militarism. Less than two decades after World
War I, thousands of young Americans raced to enlist in a carnivalesque parody of the
veterans’ lobby and the looming specter of war. Laughter briefly upended political debate
over the veterans’ bonus as college students called themselves “veterans,” ridiculed one of
the nation’s most potent political lobbies, and countered efforts to glorify the American
military’s role in World War I. The Veterans of Future Wars did not force Congress to
rescind the veterans’ bonus, much less spare the nation the bloodbath of World War II,
but the extraordinary response to the vfw’s irreverent mockery of militarism displayed the
immense but mercurial power of satire.48
2009); and Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century
(New York, 1984), 150–235. For a broad sample of Bill Mauldin’s work, see Bill Mauldin, Up Front (Cleveland,
1945). Joseph Heller, Catch-22: A Novel (New York, 1953); Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Bomb, dir. Stanley Kubrick (Columbia Pictures, 1964).
48
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987), 222–41, 285–94; Stephen E. Kercher,
Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America (Chicago, 2006); Richard Zoglin, Comedy at the Edge: How
Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America (New York, 2008); Paul Lewis, Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of
Conflict (Chicago, 2006). The dark humor about war’s casualties that fueled the vfw’s satire returned in the 1960s,
notably in “Country” Joe McDonald’s protest song against the Vietnam War. Joe McDonald “The Fish Cheer and
I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” performed by Country Joe and the Fish (1967), Electric Music for the Mind and
Body (lp record; Vanguard Records vsd 79266; 1967).