Future Veterans

. . . War is imminent. It is high time that we openly admit that America shall be engaged in it. . . .

To this end the Veterans of Future Wars have united to force upon the Government and people of the U. S. the realization that ... all of us who will be engaged in the coming war deserve, as is customary, an adjusted service compensation, sometimes called a Bonus.

We demand that this Bonus be $1,000, payable June 1, 1965. . . . We demand immediate cash payment plus 3% compounded semiannually for 30 years back to June 1, 1935. . . .

Soldiers of America, unite! You have nothing to lose.

Many a Princeton undergraduate was mystified one morning last fortnight when he read this manifesto in the Daily Princetonian. Members of Terrace Club, upper-class eating sodality, were not so puzzled. The dank midwinter in semi-isolated Princeton is a tedious time. Between long games of Monopoly and billiards and work on an honors thesis about Machiavelli, Senior Lewis Jefferson Gorin, a small, grave Terrace member, had fallen to brooding about the way his elders and betters run the world. In the midst of these reveries, Congress had voted to cash the soldiers' Bonus in full ten years before it was due (TIME, Jan. 20).

If premature Bonus payment was to become national policy, pondered Senior Gorin, why not pay "veterans" before they were even called to the colors? It would be a particularly happy circumstance for those who would not come back from the war to collect. Into his sardonic scheme he let a club-mate, Thomas Riggs Jr. The pair formed the Veterans of Future Wars, rented office space on Nassau Street, issued their manifesto. By last week the Veterans of Future Wars idea was rampaging over the nation's campuses.

Neither Gorin's father, a Louisville, Ky., tobacco merchant, nor Riggs's, a onetime Governor of Alaska, entered any objection to their offsprings' activity. Princeton's William Starr Myers, official Historian of the Republican Party, solemnly pronounced the scheme "a very constructive movement." At Columbia the Spectator launched a Bonus campaign. At Chicago undergraduates promptly set up "Fort Dearborn Post No. 1," declared: "We will make the world safe for hypocrisy!" At Vassar an auxiliary called "Association of Gold Star Mothers of Future Veterans" (later changed under public pressure to "Home Fire Division") demanded free transportation to Europe "to view the future burying ground of our dead," a program supported by "National Commander" Gorin in a second, copyrighted manifesto. At City College in New York an association of Foreign Correspondents in Future Wars organized to dun the Government for money "to establish training courses for members of the association in the writing of atrocity stories."

When Veterans of Future Wars had spread to some 50 institutions, including North Dakota University, Catawba College and the Pennsylvania Law School, adults took notice. National Commander James E. Van Zandt of the Veterans of Foreign Wars sneered: "They're too yellow to go to war. . . . They'll never be veterans of a future war." In Washington, Texas' Representative William D. McFarland snorted: "Publicity seeking boys! The tools of Wall Street coupon clippers!" Moaned Maine's Representative Simon Hamlin: "The Government is paying enough pensions already." Nevertheless Texas' liberal Representative Maury Maverick announced that he would soon introduce a Veterans of Future Wars Bonus bill in the House.

Meanwhile, in Princeton an irate, bona fide veteran accosted "National Commander" Gorin on Bank Street, swung at him, missed. Exclaimed Lewis Jefferson Gorin: "God! This is an amazing thing!"

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