[In honors of Veterans Day, a
series AmericanStudying veteran figures, histores, and stories. Leading up to a
crowd-sourced post on all things veterans and Veterans Day—share your own
stories and connections, please!]
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 a United States of America. The 50th anniversary Revolutionary
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
Boston Tea Party, among many others), but also those individuals and
communities that 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 the text I’ll focus on in tomorrow’s post (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 post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Stories or histories you’d share for the weekend post?
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