Taylor Branch has a fascinating article in the New York Review of Books on the Bonus Army (the gathering of WW1 veterans in Washington in 1932) and the G.I. Bill, which paid for millions of college educations and mortages for WW2 veterans. I knew about Herbert Hoover and the Bonus Army but I didn’t realize that Roosevelt later said no to them too or that “‘Opposition to the bonus,’ Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled, ‘was one of the virtuous issues of the day.'” Or that the press referred to work camps for veterans as “playgrounds for derelicts” who were “shell-shocked, whisky-shocked and depression-shocked.” Or that a major motivation for the G.I. Bill was to avoid similar political controversies, or that Martin Luther King was modeling his last campaign on the Bonus Army. There are also some political issues that Branch touches briefly upon, such as the ambigous role of the American Legion in the politics of the time, and the current status of soldiers and veterans in U.S. politics.

From a parochial academic perspective, the article reminded me of why political scientists need historians.

P.S. I’m not surprised that this is the first book by Paul Dickson to have been reviewed by the New York Review of Books. Dickson is, among other things, a Washington, D.C. aficionado with a charming and amiable writing style, and some of his earlier books are Jokes, Names, and Baseball’s Greatest Quotations.