This entry is a subentry of Veterans.
There were approximately 4.5 million veterans of the eighteen‐month U.S. participation in World War I. The average had served twelve months. About half went overseas for an average of 5.5 months. Some 1.1 million actually saw combat; of these, 204,000 were wounded or otherwise disabled. Veterans were simply mustered out of service from their bases in the United States. The government was unprepared to deal with the problems faced by returning veterans, especially unemployed or disabled veterans. A brief postwar recession in which unemployment reached 16 percent ended by 1921, the year in which the Veterans Bureau (forerunner of the Veterans Administration) was created. A system of veterans' hospitals was established that provided long‐term care especially for war‐related wounds and illnesses, tuberculosis caused by poison gas, and mental illness caused by “shell shock.”
Throughout the 1920s, veterans' benefits averaged $650 million per year, about 20 percent of the federal budget. In 1924, Congress, under pressure, acknowledged that the dollar per day enlisted men received had been outpaced by wartime inflation and voted World War I veterans an “adjusted compensation” (“the Bonus”), to be paid in 1945. During the Great Depression, unemployed veterans, calling themselves the “forgotten men,” demanded immediate payment of the bonus. Congress agreed, but President Herbert C. Hoover vetoed it. When many “Bonus Army” marchers remained camped in Washington, D.C., U.S. Army troops under Gen. Douglas MacArthur used tanks and tear gas to clear the capital of the protestors.
In the 1936 election year, the bonus was paid ahead of schedule at a cost of $3.9 billion of a total federal budget of $8.4 billion. In addition to the “Bonus,” hospitals, and disability benefits, World War I veterans also received civil service preference at all levels of government. Between one‐fifth and one‐third of surviving veterans belonged to the American Legion, formed by World War I veterans in 1919. Having served briefly and gloriously in the Great War, most veterans valued their experience in uniform for comradeship and travel, especially as three‐quarters of the veterans had never seen combat.
Bibliography
- William P. Dillingham, Federal Aid to Veterans, 1917–1941, 1952.
- William Pencak, For God and Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941, 1989
