All for one, but most for some: Veteran politics and the shaping of the welfare state during the World War II era

This dissertation investigates how veteran benefits formulated during World War II altered the shape of the American welfare state and changed popular conceptions about who deserved benefits and why. Rather than simply expanding access, broad entitlements for veterans actually undercut efforts to win universal opportunity and equality of citizenship. Early in the war, New Dealers proposed plans to guarantee employment, housing, medical care, and education for all Americans. By 1942 the erosion of federal domestic outlays rendered those plans, along with many other New Deal innovations, untenable. A cohort of conservative lawmakers, allied with leaders of the American Legion, justified the relative drop in domestic social welfare by emphasizing the unparalleled sacrifice exhibited by members of the nation's military. By exaggerating the prevalence of combat as a feature of military service and diminishing the contribution of civilian workers to the war effort, they built a case that only military veterans deserved postwar benefits. In fact, their allocation of these benefits had less to do with actual service rendered than with an ideology of exclusion. With a legal ceiling limiting the number of women who could participate in the armed forces to 2 percent of the total, and widespread segregation constraining service members of color, the military was male and disproportionately white. Entitlements for veterans promised to boost the economic position of white men at a moment when depression and mobilization had eroded their privilege. Progressives---including notable numbers of African Americans, women, and even some white male veterans---balked at the special rights and militarism implicit in veteran legislation, citing the democratic and universal rhetoric of the war. These veterans and non-veterans squared off against those who supported exclusive veteran benefits, arguing that the very integrity of the democracy was threatened when the federal government distributed basic rights in accordance with a particular construction of sacrifice.