Washington Got a Vote in Four Days

On March 15, 1783, General George Washington, commander in chief of the Continental Army, walked into a meeting of his officers at Newburgh, New York, who were talking about marching on Congress.¹ The shooting war was mostly over. Yorktown had been the last major campaign, but without a peace treaty the army could not go home, so about 7,500 troops sat along the Hudson watching the British army in New York City.² Congress owed the officers back pay and the lifetime half-pay pensions it had promised in 1780, and it had no power to tax to raise the money.³

Partway through reading a letter from Joseph Jones, a Virginia member of Congress who had raised his orphaned nephew, James Monroe,⁴ Washington stopped and reached for a pair of reading glasses.⁵ “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles,” he said, “for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service of my country.”⁶ The officers pledged their loyalty to Congress.⁷ Four days later, Congress voted them five years of full pay.⁶

Today is Veterans Day, and veterans are still waiting on Congress.

On December 1, disabled veterans and their survivors are due a 3.6 percent cost-of-living raise. Social Security’s raise happens on its own. The VA’s does not. Congress has to pass a bill every year directing the VA to apply it.⁸ This year’s Senate bill comes from the Veterans’ Affairs Committee’s Republican chairman, Jerry Moran of Kansas, and its top Democrat, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, with 15 cosponsors drawn from Republicans, Democrats, and independents.⁹ It was referred to committee on May 11, and the congressional record shows no action since.¹⁰ Last year’s bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent on November 9, the House on November 17, and was signed November 25.¹¹

The formula is permanent. The payment still takes a vote.

The Day

Veterans Day began as Armistice Day, the anniversary of the end of the fighting in the First World War on November 11, 1918. In 1919, King George V, great-great-grandson of George III, the king the colonies declared independence from, asked Britain for two minutes of silence. The Commonwealth has kept them since, and France made its own minute official in 1922.¹² President Wilson called for parades and a pause in business at 11 a.m.¹³

Congress made Armistice Day a legal holiday in 1938.¹⁴ After the Second World War, Raymond Weeks, a veteran from Birmingham, Alabama, asked Army Chief of Staff Dwight Eisenhower for a holiday honoring all veterans, and Birmingham held the first Veterans Day parade in 1947. In 1954, Congress renamed the day, and President Eisenhower signed the law.¹⁵

In 1968, Congress moved the holiday to an October Monday to give federal workers a three-day weekend. President Johnson promised more family time and “greater industrial and commercial production.”¹⁶ Veterans’ organizations answered that the date was the point, and in 1978 the holiday went back to November 11.¹⁷

Even the date needed a defense. The benefits needed more.

The Promises

Washington had talked his officers out of marching on Congress. Three months later, unpaid soldiers in Pennsylvania did what the officers had only talked about. In June 1783, several hundred of them surrounded the Pennsylvania State House, now Independence Hall, with fixed bayonets to demand their back pay.¹⁸ Pennsylvania refused to call out its militia to disperse them. Shaken, Congress voted to leave Philadelphia and reconvened in Princeton.¹⁹

Most Continental soldiers discharged in good health received nothing.²⁰ The Pension Act of 1818, prompted by President James Monroe, Jones’s nephew and himself a Continental Army veteran, paid only veterans who could prove they were poor. Not until 1832, 49 years after the war, did Congress pay pensions “without regard to rank, financial distress, or physical disability.”²⁰

On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln closed his second inaugural address with a promise “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan.”²¹ Union veterans organized to collect. The Grand Army of the Republic pressed Congress for ever more generous pensions, starting with the Arrears Act of 1879,²² and it campaigned for Black veterans to receive pensions on the same terms as white veterans. By 1893, Union pensions took more than 40 percent of federal revenue.²³

The First World War generation was promised adjusted compensation in 1924: $1 for each day of service at home and $1.25 for each day overseas, paid in certificates that matured in 1945.²⁴ In 1932, in the Depression, thousands of veterans camped across the Anacostia River from the Capitol to ask for the money early. The House voted to pay. The Senate did not.²⁴ On July 28, police killed two veterans during an eviction. Army troops under General Douglas MacArthur, with Majors Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, drove the rest out. The President twice told MacArthur to stop at the bridge. He crossed anyway, and the camps burned.²⁵ Four years later, Congress authorized immediate payment over a veto.²⁶

The memory of 1932 helped pass the GI Bill.²⁶ Harry Colmery of the American Legion drafted it by hand in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in December 1943. In June 1944, it sat deadlocked 3 to 3 in conference. The deciding vote belonged to Rep. John Gibson, home sick in rural Georgia. The Legion found him at 11 p.m., had him driven 90 miles through a rainstorm to the Jacksonville airport, and flew him to Washington by morning. He cast the vote. The President signed the bill on June 22.²⁷

The Pattern

One Congress makes the promise. A later Congress decides when to pay it. The gap closes when veterans organize, show up, and keep the date in front of Congress: the officers at Newburgh, the Grand Army of the Republic, the marchers on the Anacostia, the Legion’s overnight drive, and one man in Birmingham with a parade.

The current Congress can move fast when it wants to. Last year’s bill went from Senate passage to the President’s signature in 16 days.¹¹ This year’s bill has not left committee.

When we moved to Virginia, my kids joined a Scout troop run by veterans, many of them retired senior officers, alongside people still serving, some in the Pentagon’s E Ring. It was the best-run troop I have ever seen. The veterans ran the adult jobs efficiently and effectively, and they understood leadership well enough to make sure the Scout jobs were done by Scouts. It sounds easy. It is the hardest thing for an adult leader to do.

The Scout motto is “Be Prepared.”²⁸ Those veterans taught it as a set of habits: show up, organize, divide the work, and see it through. Every generation in this piece needed the same habits, because each one learned that a promise from Congress is not yet a payment. The veterans in that troop—and those all around our Republic—have earned their raise on December 1.

General Washington got a vote in four days. This year’s bill has 20.