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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.

The study of military veterans and politics has been a growing topic of interest, but to date most research on the topic has remained isolated in specific, unconnected fields of inquiry. Veterans' Policies, Veterans' Politics is the first multidisciplinary, comprehensive examination of the American veteran experience. Stephen Ortiz has compiled some of the best work on the formation and impact of veterans' policies, the politics of veterans' issues, and veterans' political engagement over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States. By examining the U.S. government's treatment of veterans vis-à-vis such topics as health care, disability, race, the GI Bill, and combat exposure, the contributors reveal how debates regarding veterans' policies inevitably turn into larger political battles over citizenship and the role of the federal government. With the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq now the longest military operations in U.S. history and the numbers of veterans returning from overseas deployment higher than they've been in a generation, this is a timely and necessary book.

This article examines the impact of military veterans on the New Deal era. In 1934 the passage of the Economy Act, which severely cut veteran benefits, triggered a wave of political mobilization that laid the foundations for organized New Deal dissent. The response of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) to the Economy Act situated the organization in the vanguard of \"New Deal Dissidents,\" including Huey P. Long, Father Charles E. Coughlin, and their supporters. In this coalition, military veterans expressed early and crucial \"voices of protest.\" And the politics of veterans' pensions and benefits, in turn, profoundly shaped the New Deal era.

An interview with professors Christopher Capozzola, Andrew Huebner, Julia Irwin, Jennifer D. Keene, Ross Kennedy, Michael Neiberg, Stephen R. Ortiz, Chad Williams and Jay Winter is presented. Among other things, they talk about World War I.

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.

The study of military veterans and politics has been a growing topic of interest, but to date most research on the topic has remained isolated in specific, unconnected fields of inquiry. Veterans' Policies, Veterans' Politics is the first multidisciplinary, comprehensive examination of the American veteran experience. Stephen Ortiz has compiled some of the best work on the formation and impact of veterans' policies, the politics of veterans' issues, and veterans' political engagement over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States. By examining the U.S. government's treatment of veterans vis-à-vis such topics as health care, disability, race, the GI Bill, and combat exposure, the contributors reveal how debates regarding veterans' policies inevitably turn into larger political battles over citizenship and the role of the federal government. With the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq now the longest military operations in U.S. history and the numbers of veterans returning from overseas deployment higher than they've been in a generation, this is a timely and necessary book.

In 1927 the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), the national organization founded in 1899 by veterans of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, appeared destined for historical obscurity. The organization that would later stand with the American Legion as a pillar of the powerful twentieth-century veterans’ lobby struggled to maintain a membership of 60,000 veterans. Despite desperate attempts to recruit from the ranks of the nearly 2.5 million eligible World War veterans, the VFW lagged behind both the newly minted American Legion and even the Spanish War Veterans in membership. The upstart Legion alone, from its 1919 inception throughout the 1920s,