The period between World Wars I and II was a time of turbulent political change, with suffragists, labor radicals, demagogues, and other voices clamoring to be heard. One group of activists that has ...yet to be closely examined by historians is World War I veterans. Mining the papers of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion (AL), Stephen R. Ortiz reveals that veterans actively organized in the years following the war to claim state benefits (such as pensions and bonuses), and strove to articulate a role for themselves as a distinct political bloc during the New Deal era.
Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill is unique in its treatment of World War I veterans as significant political actors during the interwar period. Ortiz's study reinterprets the political origins of the "Second" New Deal and Roosevelt's electoral triumph of 1936, adding depth not only to our understanding of these events and the political climate surrounding them, but to common perceptions of veterans and their organizations. In describing veteran politics and the competitive dynamics between the AL and the VFW, Ortiz details the rise of organized veterans as a powerful interest group in modern American politics.
What happened to veterans of the nations involved in the world wars? How did they fare when they returned home and needed benefits? How were they recognized—or not—by their governments and fellow ...citizens? Where and under what circumstances did they obtain an elevated postwar status? In this sophisticated comparative history of government policies regarding veterans, Martin Crotty, Neil J. Diamant, and Mark Edele examine veterans' struggles for entitlements and benefits in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Taiwan, the Soviet Union, China, Germany, and Australia after both global conflicts. They illuminate how veterans' success or failure in winning benefits were affected by a range of factors that shaped their ability to exert political influence. Some veterans' groups fought politicians for improvements to their postwar lives; this lobbying, the authors show, could set the foundation for beneficial veteran treatment regimes or weaken the political forces proposing unfavorable policies. The authors highlight cases of veterans who secured (and in some cases failed to secure) benefits and status after wars both won and lost; within both democratic and authoritarian polities; under liberal, conservative, and even Leninist governments; after wars fought by volunteers or conscripts, at home or abroad, and for legitimate or subsequently discredited causes. Veterans who succeeded did so, for the most part, by forcing their agendas through lobbying, protesting, and mobilizing public support. The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century provides a large-scale map for a research field with a future: comparative veteran studies.
Victims' State HSIA, KE-CHIN
2022, 2023-02-23, 2022-05-13
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Victims' State is the first integrated account of how Imperial Austria and the successor Austrian Republic responded to the needs of citizen-soldiers and their families in the age of mass politics ...and the First World War. It shows that compulsory military service and war mobilization changed the mission of the Austrian state and citizens' understanding of what they were entitled to, thus showing how war victim welfare was central to shaping modern European welfare state.
During and after World War I, policy makers, public health advocates, and veterans laid the groundwork for the extension of government-sponsored medical care to millions of former service members. In ...the process, they built a pillar of American social policy. In Burdens of War , Jessica L. Adler explores how the establishment of the veterans’ health system marked a reimagining of modern veterans’ benefits and signaled a pathbreaking validation of the power of professionalized institutional medical care. Adler reveals that a veterans’ health system came about incrementally, amid skepticism from legislators, doctors, and army officials concerned about the burden of long-term obligations, monetary or otherwise, to ex-service members. She shows how veterans’ welfare shifted from centering on pension and domicile care programs rooted in the nineteenth century to direct access to health services. She also traces the way that fluctuating ideals about hospitals and medical care influenced policy at the dusk of the Progressive Era; how race, class, and gender affected the health-related experiences of soldiers, veterans, and caregivers; and how interest groups capitalized on a tense political and social climate to bring about change. The book moves from the 1920s—when veterans requested better and more services, Congress continued to approve new facilities and increased funding, and elected officials expressed misgivings about who should have access to care—to the 1930s, when the economic crash prompted veterans to increasingly turn to hospitals for support while bureaucrats, politicians, and doctors attempted to rein in the system. By the eve of World War II, the roots of what would become the country’s largest integrated health care system were firmly planted and primed for growth. Drawing readers into a critical debate about the level of responsibility America bears for wounded service members, Burdens of War is a unique and moving case study.
The War Comes Homeis the first book to systematically document the U.S. government's neglect of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Aaron Glantz, who reported extensively from Iraq during ...the first three years of this war and has been reporting on the plight of veterans ever since, levels a devastating indictment against the Bush administration for its bald neglect of soldiers and its disingenuous reneging on their benefits. Glantz interviewed more than one hundred recent war veterans, and here he intersperses their haunting first-person accounts with investigations into specific concerns, such as the scandal at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. This timely book does more than provide us with a personal connection to those whose service has cost them so dearly. It compels us to confront how America treats its veterans and to consider what kind of nation deifies its soldiers and then casts them off as damaged goods.
This is the story of how women in France and Britain between 1915 and 1933 appropriated the cultural identity of female war veteran in order to have greater access to public life and a voice in a ...political climate in which women were rarely heard on the public stage. The 'veterans' covered by this history include former nurses, charity workers, secret service agents and members of resistance networks in occupied territory, as well as members of the British auxiliary corps. What unites these women is how they attempted to present themselves as 'female veterans' in order to gain social advantages and give themselves the right to speak about the war and its legacies. Alison S. Fell also considers the limits of the identity of war veteran for women, considering as an example the wartime and post-war experiences of the female industrial workers who led episodes of industrial action.
Sacrificial Limbs chronicles the everyday lives and political activism of disabled veterans of Turkey's Kurdish war, one of the most volatile conflicts in the Middle East. Through nuanced ...ethnographic portraits, Açiksöz examines how veterans' experiences of war and disability are closely linked to class, gender, and ultimately the embrace of ultranationalist right-wing politics. Bringing the reader into military hospitals, commemorations, political demonstrations, and veterans' everyday spaces of care, intimacy, and activism,Sacrificial Limbs provides a vivid analysis of the multiple and sometimes contradictory forces that fashion veterans' bodies, political subjectivities, and communities. It is essential reading for students and scholars interested in anthropology, masculinity, and disability.
A study of American attempts to come to terms with the legacy of the Vietnam War, this book highlights the central role played by Vietnam veterans in shaping public memory of the war. Tracing the ...evolution of the image of the Vietnam veteran from alienated dissenter to traumatized victim to noble warrior, Patrick Hagopian describes how efforts to commemorate the war increasingly downplayed the political divisions it spawned in favor of a more unifying emphasis on honoring veterans and promoting national “healing.”
At the end of 1941, six weeks after the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany had begun, Gestapo offices across the Reich received an urgent telex from Adolf Eichmann, decreeing that all ...war-wounded and decorated Jewish veterans of World War I be exempted from upcoming "evacuations." Why this was so, and how Jewish veterans at least initially were able to avoid the fate of ordinary Jews under the Nazis, is the subject of Comrades Betrayed. Michael Geheran deftly illuminates how the same values that compelled Jewish soldiers to demonstrate bravery in the front lines in World War I made it impossible for them to accept passively, let alone comprehend, persecution under Hitler. After all, they upheld the ideal of the German fighting man, embraced the fatherland, and cherished the bonds that had developed in military service. Through their diaries and private letters, as well as interviews with eyewitnesses and surviving family members and records from the police, Gestapo, and military, Michael Geheran presents a major challenge to the prevailing view that Jewish veterans were left isolated, neighborless, and having suffered a social death by 1938. Tracing the path from the trenches of the Great War to the extermination camps of the Third Reich, Geheran exposes a painful dichotomy: while many Jewish former combatants believed that Germany would never betray them, the Holocaust was nonetheless a horrific reality. In chronicling Jewish veterans' appeal to older, traditional notions of comradeship and national belonging, Comrades Betrayed forces reflection on how this group made use of scant opportunities to defy Nazi persecution and, for some, to evade becoming victims of the Final Solution.
This book is intended for everyone in higher education - whether in the classroom, student affairs, administration, admissions, health services or faculty development - who is, or expects to be ...teaching, advising, or serving student veterans. This book is the outcome of a partnership between the Center for Teaching and Learning and the office of Disabilities Services at the University of South Dakota that led to the development of the Fides program whose goal was to establish high-quality, evidence-based development opportunities specifically designed to enable key university constituencies-the faculty, staff, and administration-to understand their role in providing extraordinary learning experiences for veterans. The program was funded through a congressionally directed FIPSE grant. Materials from Fides have been featured by prominent educational organizations, and are being used by the National Center for PTSD, colleges, universities, and boards of regents across the US. This book provides the background and guidelines you need to leverage the strengths that student veterans bring to your institution, to ease the challenges they face in transitioning into higher education, to facilitate their learning, and to ensure their successful graduation. Student veterans bring many strengths to your campus - maturity, significant life experiences, and cross-cultural awareness. They are highly motivated to serve others and value education. Student veterans may however face significant challenges. Student veterans have typically been out of high school for some time, where they may have earned average grades. Many are married with children and more than a few are single parents. They are approximately 20% less likely than non-veterans to attain a bachelor degree and slightly more likely to drop out of higher education without attaining a degree of any sort. Deployments extend their time to degree, and multiple deployments can significantly delay graduation. The challenges ass
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