Paying with Their Bodies: Disabled Veterans in an Age of Global War

For decades, historians of globalization and empire have chronicled the legacies of the United States’ martial adventures around the world.  Unfortunately, scholars have paid far less attention to the ways the United States’ military encounters have shaped attitudes toward global intervention at home.  This paper attempts to help correct this imbalance by examining twentieth century Americans’ attempts to reconcile their international ambitions with the bodily hazards of overseas combat.  During much of the late nineteenth century, disabled veterans were venerated as icons of manly courage and national sacrifice.  By the end of World War I, however, many Americans came to associate disabled veterans with pathological dependency, compromised masculinity, and the dangers of foreign war.  Drawing upon a wide range of sources, this paper argues that, throughout the twentieth century, disabled veterans were literally and figuratively at the center of two competing visions of American global power, both of which remain relevant to this day. The first imagined military force as a crucial tool in the United States’ emergence as a world leader.  In this vision, the disabled veteran—and his successful reintegration into postwar society—was an index of the United States’ ability to enter the global arena and return home functionally, if not aesthetically, unscathed.  The second vision painted a very different picture of America’s global future.  To pacifists, isolationists, and critics of American empire, disabled veterans were symbols of the perils awaiting young Americans upon leaving U.S. shores.