[In honor of
Veteran’s Day, a series on cultural and historical moments and issues related
to that sizeable and growing American community. I’d love to hear your Veteran’s
Day thoughts, connections, and perspectives for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On the distinct
and even contrasting reasons why veterans’ organizations are formed.
As Alfred F.
Young’s wonderful book The
Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (1999) demonstrates,
American veterans have been gathering to remember and celebrate their service
for as long as there’s been an America. The 50th anniversary commemorations
traced
in Young’s book were not organized under the banner of a single veterans’
organization per se, but they certainly represented a collective effort to
memorialize not only the Revolution’s principal events (such as the titular Tea
Party, among many others), but also those individuals and communities who
contributed to them. And those dual and complementary purposes—gathering with fellow
veterans to memorialize and celebrate the events and service they share—represent
obvious but certainly central elements to any and all veterans’ organizations.
Young also
convincingly argues that there was a present and political purpose to those
commemorations, however—an effort to influence contemporary debates and issues
through remembering the Revolutionary events and service in particular ways. That
purpose to veteran organizing became even more pronounced later in the 19th
century, when competing
Civil War veterans’ organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) and
the United Confederate
Veterans (UCV) fought both to establish their own vision of the war’s
histories and meanings and to advocate for concurrent contemporary political and
social goals. Partly in an effort to distinguish themselves from these Civil War
organizations, but partly to advocate for their own memorializations and goals,
veterans of the Spanish
American War formed yet another such organization, the Veterans
of Foreign Wars. And after World War I, even though the VFW could have
certainly covered all that war’s veterans, the
era’s own political conflicts and controversies led Congress to charter
instead a more overtly patriotic new organization, the American Legion.
There’s no
reason why these distinct organizational purposes—community and commemoration
on the one hand, political and social advocacy and activism on the other—have to
be mutually exclusive, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that the more
overtly political late 19th and early 20th century
organizations weren’t also genuinely communal and commemorative. But I think it’s
also important to note that the present and political purposes would also have
a limiting effect—that is, that veterans who might otherwise fit the
organization’s definition but who did not share its political orientation (for
example, African
American World War I veterans not inclined toward the kinds of jingoistic
patriotism expressed by the American Legion) would find themselves excluded,
unable to take part in the organization’s communal and commemorative activites
and functions. Given the challenges and struggles that all veterans face, the
kinds captured so eloquently in a text like The
Best Years of Our Lives, it seems to me that the most successsful veterans’
organizations would be those that welcome and support all veterans.
Last veterans
post of mine tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other veterans texts, moments, or issues you’d share?
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