Veterans of Future Wars

There could be found no poignant example of contemporary youth's prematurely cynical attitude toward the fallings of its elders than the organization recently founded at Princeton. Calling itself the Veterans of Future Wars, the group advances as the chief plank of its platform the immediate payment of a bonus to all males who will be killed in the next war. A similar movement at Vassar, The Gold Star Mothers of the Veterans of Future Wars, declares that it intends to send delegates to view the future burying ground of the future dead.

Ridicule has always been a telling weapon in the fight against society's foibies. . . . Such an attempt at ridicule as Princeton's may be too obvious to call forth more than a tolerantly amused laugh from young and old alike; still it will attract attention, and that is probably all its progenitors hoped to achieve. The splendid points of the program, the stab at Congress that will drain its coffers painfully dry, the shaft directed at sometime patriots who in return for a sacrifice to their country now demand a neutralizing and unnecessary sacrifice, these are lost in the superficial hilarity of the thoughtless abandon of youth.

The striking fact to be observed is that in such a movement, no matter how frivolous, is expressed the bitterly callous attitude of our generation toward the evils that have been troubling mankind since the world began. It would have been a remarkable thing, nineteen years ago, to find college students making statements like this: "Since the coming of the future war will deprive the most deserving bloc of its veterans of their bonus, by their sudden and complete demise, the Bonus must be paid now." The Princetonians who conceived this clever bit of humor are not to be censored. Youth must play; and deadly fatalism is quite as diverting as belligerent and shallow pacifism. --Harvard CRIMSON, March 18, 1936