Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran by John M. Kinder (review)

John M. Kinder’s Paying with Their Bodies provides a much-needed connection between the new field of disability studies and military history. As with most militaries themselves, the majority of war studies fail to treat wounded and disabled veterans with the respect they deserve, often consigning them to the margins of war and its aftermath. While disability studies is a new discipline, it too has yet to place wounded veterans in the centre of its field of study, despite war being a significant cause of physical and psychological disability. A few studies have attempted to bridge this gap, including Joanna Bourke’s Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago, 1996), Deborah Cohen’s The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Great Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley, 2001), and Christina Jarvis’s The Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War II (DeKalb, 2004). Kinder provides a major new contribution to the study of how wounded and disabled American veterans of World War I were perceived and treated by the government and American society in the decades following the war.

Kinder argues that in the two decades following World War I Americans first began to seriously consider the effects of war on the bodies of American soldiers. Many began to wonder if the costs of war were worth it when several hundred thousand American veterans returned home both physically and psychologically wounded. Not only were many of these wounds shocking and horrific, but Americans had to consider society’s responsibilities to help wounded and disabled veterans recover and reintegrate into the postwar world. While disabled veterans were often venerated as symbols of patriotic sacrifice, they also came to be associated with a new set of perceived anxieties: broken bodies and damaged masculinity; burdensome dependency on the state; and an unwanted legacy of war in a society that had little desire for further military interventions. Thus, rather than considering war wounds as problems, disabled veterans of World War I themselves became problems in American society: “problems to be solved, problems to be exposed, and problems to be ignored” (8).

930,000 American veterans applied for disability benefits in the first five years after the war, more than 200,000 of whom were permanently disabled (5). Tales of neglect, abuse, and ill treatment of the wounded by the medical establishment soon led to the creation of the US Veterans’ Bureau (usvb) to assist veterans with grievances, medical care, and compensation, though this agency soon became mired in scandal, with its first director ending up in prison. War-weary citizens embraced President Harding’s “return to normalcy” slogan and mostly rejected the notion of permanent economic care of the disabled, fearing that wounded veterans would develop an “unhealthy dependence upon the state” (98). This led to an emphasis on physical reconstruction of soldiers’ bodies (via surgery and prosthetics) and vocational training, designed to train the wounded in a job so they could break their economic dependency on the state as quickly as possible. These rehabilitation programs were ended by the late 1920s, with most considering them overly expensive and only partially successful at reintegrating wounded veterans into the civilian labour force. After the war, the number of veterans’ organizations exploded, with the largest being the American Legion and the Disabled American Veterans of the World War (dav). These groups helped to carve out preferential legal status for disabled veterans and, not incidentally, the militarization of American culture via the promulgation of the militantly patriotic ideology of “100% Americanism.” Thus, wounded and disabled veterans came to occupy a complex array of positions in postwar American society: sometimes heralded as heroic figures who had admirably performed their civic duty via military service, and sometimes feared as sources of militarism or criminality, painful reminders of the costs of war...