This thing has ceased to be a joke

For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weaponlaughter.Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution-these can lift at a colossal humbug-push it a little-weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons.Do you ever use that one?No; you leave it lying rusting.-Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, 1918 Over drinks one afternoon in March 1936, a group of Princeton University undergraduates groused about the recent congressional passage of a bill for immediate payment of a "bonus" to each of the 4 million veterans of World War I.The bonus payment had originally been approved by Congress in 1924 but was not to be paid until 1945.How, these Princetonians asked, could legislators vote to spend $2 billion amid the Great Depression?Why did Congress so readily cave to the veterans' lobby?Disabled and elderly veterans undoubtedly deserved assistance, but should the United States issue checks to all veterans, regardless of their age, physical condition, or need?How many other citizens would seize on the veterans' precedent and stake a claim to support from the federal government? 1 The veterans' bonus was not the only issue on the students' minds.A few days earlier, the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had ordered German troops to occupy the Rhineland, while Spain was being riven by political tension between left and right.The prospect of war in Europe seemed to grow more ominous daily.One of the students, Lewis Jefferson Gorin Jr., a senior majoring in political science, predicted that American troops would inevitably be sent to fight and die in another European war, just as in 1917.Because Congress seemed only too eager to appease the veterans' lobby, Gorin suggested that America's "future veterans" ought to demand their bonus payment immediately while they were young enough-and alive-to enjoy it.Gorin joked that young people ought

Art · Joke · Literature · Political science · Politics · History · Law · Military History and Strategy · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact

• The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2020

  Gretchen Martin, Jonathan P Rossing et al.•Studies in American Humor•2022

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