Veterans victims of neglect

Not much in the news today, too many newspapers (and I heard Drudge yapping about it last night), the Washington Post, the Washington Times, specifically, are reporting that Hillary is out-raising all of the Presidential contenders. Why should anyone think that is news is beyond me. All of her friends are guilt-ridden millionaires. The best way to assuage guilt, for the Left anyway, is throw money at the candidate who promises to take money away from them to level that nebulous “playing field”. After all, the government knows best, right?

Well, Cynthia Crossen has an historical account in today’s Wall Street Journal (it may require a subscription) of the veterans of WWI President Roosevelt shipped off to the Florida Keys to build the causeway there in 1934;

They were troubled souls — misfits, roughnecks and roustabouts, many of them psychologically damaged and alcoholic. They were World War I veterans who couldn’t find their place in American society. In 1934, in the depths of the Depression, the federal government shipped hundreds of them to isolated work camps in Florida, out of sight and, thus, out of the newspapers.

But the government inadvertently had sentenced many of these men, who had survived artillery shells, sniper fire and poison gas, to death in the Florida Keys.

The story of how some 260 World War I veterans were killed by the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 is also a sorry tale of bureaucratic arrogance and bumbling — part of a long and continuing series of controversies surrounding the treatment of soldiers by Washington once their duty is done.

In this case, the chain of responsibility for what Ernest Hemingway described as “manslaughter” began in Franklin Roosevelt’s White House and extended to the Florida statehouse, the National Weather Bureau and administrators of the three island work camps.

You could probably draw two parallels to the events of today with the Washington Post’s Walter Reed fixation and the victims of Katrina – arguably all victims of uncaring government incompetence. But I think Americans can draw lessons that rang true in 1935 and in 2007. Pinning your life, your family and all your worldly possessions on the hope that government isn’t a pack of incompetent boobs is a fool’s errand.

Anyone who has spent more than a minute in uniform knows that the government hardly knows you exists, and as long as they direct-deposit your pay check every month, you learn to adapt.

Ms. Crossen continues with her story;

Within a week, the federal and state governments and the American Legion had launched separate investigations. The finger-pointing began. Many people wanted to fix the blame on the Weather Bureau for its vague forecasts. But why hadn’t camp officials, who had been told by some longtime Keys residents that the men were in danger, ordered a train earlier? Why had the director of Florida’s work camps taken a two-hour lunch on Labor Day, during which he couldn’t be reached? Whose idea was it to put jerry-built camps in low-lying areas during hurricane season?

Harry Hopkins, director of the Works Progress Administration, immediately sent a team to the Keys. “Washington bureaucrats may be mixing a viscous vat of whitewash,” commented a Miami newspaper. As one of the investigators, John J. Abt, later wrote, “We were on a political mission to defend the administration against charges of negligence. The investigation took all of a day.”

The report, based on interviews with 16 people, ended: “To our mind the catastrophe must be characterized as ‘an act of God’ and was by its very nature beyond the power of man … to permit the taking of adequate precautions.”

Investigators from the American Legion came to a different conclusion. The vets died because of the “inefficiency, indifference and ignorance” of camp administrators, they said.

All of it sounds familiar, doesn’t it? You’d think we’d have all learned our lesson 70-odd years ago that government is not the solution to all of our problems – Hell, they’re probably not the solution to even some of our problems. So why are we so encouraged by candidates who promise to make our lives better? I’ll never understand.

Category: Historical, Politics