Books: Back from the Wars

WHEN JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME — Dixon Wecter — Haughton, Mifflin ($3).

On the Hudson River at Camp New Windsor the main Continental Army was disbanding. The men were ragged and war-weary, but they marched smartly, mindful of General Washington’s exhortation “to retire from the military theater with the same approbation of men and angels” that they had won in action.

Each man kept his musket, powder horn, wooden canteen, knapsack and uniform. In his pocket were four months’ wages in promissory notes, marketable at only two shillings to the pound. Veterans who thought this a meager reward (as most did) had the option of staying in camp until their enlistments were up. But, as Washington had shrewdly guessed, what every one wanted most was to get home.

“Allmost Descureged.” When Johnny Comes Marching Home is a timely history of homecomings from the U.S.’s three major wars : the Revolution, the Civil War, World War I. Author Dixon Wecter (The Saga of American Society; The Hero in America}, professor of English at the University of California, has written a fascinating study of the profound tension and misunderstanding between civilians and veterans, of civilians’ short memories and seeming ingratitude, of veterans’ increasing success in rewarding themselves through their organized political strength.

Of all veterans the Continental was least uprooted. As a soldier he had usually gone home for spring plowing, harvesting and emergencies. But when X-day dawned the veteran found himself in straits common to millions of veterans throughout history. Wrote one of them: “I com down by the markett and sits down all alone allmost Descureged and begun to think over how I had ben in the army, what ill success I had met with there . . . and now that I could not get into any besness . . . you may well think how I felt.” Like most of his fellows he began by selling his paper bonus to a speculator for a pittance. Then he pocketed his pride and begged. “I went into Nombers of there shops and would say, your servent gentlefolks, I wish you much Joy with the nuse of peace. . . . Some of them would pity us and would give us some thing, some half a Dollar, some a quarter, some less, some nothing but frowns.”

As after most wars, stay-at-homes expected the worst of the returning soldier, “remembering a robbed beehive or stolen goose more vividly than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” “We are become,” wrote a pensioned officer, “not only the objects of abuse in the publick prints and called the Harpies and Locusts of the Country, but are even so obnoxious as to be Mobbed.”

Ex-officers formed the influential Order of the Cincinnati, but there was no political bloc of the veterans’ rank & file. Not until 1818 did needy ex-enlisted men begin receiving pensions—of $8 per month. Another ten years passed before all Continentals who had served to the war’s end were pensioned to the full amount of their service pay. Thus the post-Revolution U.S. began the persisting practice of waiting until the veteran has become a gaffer before giving him effective help.

Americans in Defeat. The fall of tie Confederacy furnished “the only sample known of how Americans behave under final defeat.” For “Lee’s Miserables” there was no organized demobilization, no pay, not even railroads to carry them home. They trudged back singly or in stragglinggroups, living on handouts. At first many of them were treated as quitters in their home towns. Often they found their wives, mothers and other civilians as belligerent as ever. “The South was conquered but not subdued!” boomed a civilian to Confederate General Joe Johnston. “Well, sir,” snapped the General, “you may not be subdued, but I am.”

Deserters and ex-guerrilla fighters such as Jesse and Frank James “still claimed to be enemies of the Union and hence of law and order.” They disappeared into the hills and lived by rustling, moonshining and looting. But the vast majority of Confederate veterans went to work in the rubble of their ruined homes, on exhausted acres choked with nettles and burdock. The struggle was common to officers and men alike: “General Pendleton plowed his Lexington farm in clothes so ragged that passers-by took him for a hired hand. General Elliott peddled fish and oysters”—a forerunner of the host of apple-sellers of post-World War I. After Reconstruction, individual states began to provide old soldiers’ homes and small pensions for the needy.

“School of Demoralization.” In the North, victorious soldiers returning from Washington’s giant Victory Parade suspiciously repeated the slogan of the day: “The Only National Debt We Can Never Pay Is the Debt We Owe to the Victorious Union Soldiers.” With bonuses and back pay the average private left the army with $250 in his pocket. But as the tumult and the shouting died, the old civilian mistrust of the soldier revived. Jobs were easy to find, but veterans often discovered that an ,army record was something to conceal rather than to display. “The veteran,” wrote one newspaper, “has encouraged tales of his whiskey-drinking abilities, [recklessness] and foraging [until] citizens believe that the army has acted as a school of demoralization.”

But with the decline in civilian enthusiasm, veterans began to band together. For the first time in U.S. history “the soldier vote began to cast a long shadow athwart American politics.” The Grand Army of the Republic became a major political force. Pension claims began to pour in—at first for war wounds and illness, later for postwar failure in health, finally for war service regardless of need. Claim agents combed the country. One statesman remarked that the G.A.R., having saved the country, now wanted it.

Presidential vetoes only slowed the tide. When the Pension Bill of 1890 was passed, President Harrison urged the Commissioner of Pensions to be “liberal with the boys.” The Commissioner, an ex-corporal, promised to “drive a six-mule team through the Treasury.” Within a year the annual pension outlay had jumped 50% to $135,000,000.

Suckers and Bonuses. By the time the World War I doughboy came home in 1919, the pattern was set. For him, too, there was the wild reception and the speedy cooling-off, the switch in his reputation from hero to “trained killer,” a bonus fight lasting a score of years. But as a veteran the doughboy was strangely unlike the veteran of the Revolution and the Civil War. Said one: “We did not enjoy telling our tales as we thought we would, and our people did not enjoy hearing us talk war as we expected. . . . We felt ‘let down’ and disappointed over something. What that something is, I do not know.”

The “something” was not, at first, economic, though the Government provided no training for the veteran who had not been injured in service. Some guessed the trouble was that the “homefolks themselves had grown tired of the war before the boys came back.” Some thought it was all due to their own disgust “with the prattle about ideals.” But above all, for the first time in U.S. history the veteran found himself mocked by his countrymen as a sucker who had fought in vain.

Members of the newly formed American Legion reacted by plunging into a crusade for “Americanism.” Not bonuses but the “Bolshevist peril” became “the cement which held the Legion together.” Labor became “the target for [the Legionnaire’s] marked dislike of slackers, saboteurs, profiteers of labor, foreigners, and no-damn-goods in general. . . . The local post became a political machine on the Tammany model . . . plumping for ‘heroes in elective office’ and often strong-arming its enemies out of town.” Only when Legion membership began to dwindle did Legion chiefs revive interest by starting the long fight for the bonus.

Clean Slate? Today, reports Author Wecter, “the number of Americans eligible for some kind of veteran’s or veteran’s dependents’ benefits is approaching a majority of the population.” His solution for the gigantic problem thus posed: “Let Uncle Sam help the veteran early and promptly, equip him by training to get as good or a better job than before, leave him with unemployment insurance, and then (unless a high degree of service-incurred disability remains) wipe the slate of obligation clean.”