LEWIS J. GORIN JR.,
INSTIGATOR OF A 1930’S CRAZE,
DIES AT 84
If Mr. Gorin’s 1936 achievement is hardly remembered, there is a reason. For if fame is fleeting, so is innocence, and World War II is no longer the laughing matter it could still be in March 1936, when as a Princeton senior Mr. Gorin founded and became the first national commander of the Veterans of Future Wars, an organization formed expressly to obtain an immediate $1,000 bonus for each of the 15 million young Americans who were sure to serve in a war that had not even started.
As Mr. Gorin deadpanned at the time, with war in Europe clearly imminent and with eventual American involvement a foregone conclusion, the future veterans wanted their bonuses while they were still young and healthy enough to enjoy them—and (as he made clear in a follow-up satiric book, “Prepaid Patriotism,” published two months later) while the nation still had enough money to pay them before greedy World War I veterans succeeded in squeezing the country dry.
At a time when there was widespread resentment against the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars for having browbeaten Congress into passing, over President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s veto, $2 billion in accelerated bonuses for 4 million World War I veterans, most of whom had never made it beyond stateside training camps, Mr. Gorin’s inspired spoof had farreaching resonance.
Mr. Gorin, who said he got the idea while drinking tea at a campus coffee shop, had no intention of forming an actual organization until a friend, Robert G. Barnes, bet him $5that he could get the group national publicity if it had a program. Mr. Barnes, who happened to be the campus correspondent for The New York Times and The Associated Press, won the bet.
Within days after Mr. Gorin, Mr. Barnes and a handful of others had founded the organization and published a manifesto in the student newspaper on March 16, the movement had generated reams of headlines, spread to scores of campuses across the country, enlisted tens of thousands of members, and spawned a women’s auxiliary, the Association of Future Gold Star Mothers. Instead of bonuses, the women demanded free trips to Europe to view the future graves of their unborn sons.
Catching the spirit, students elsewhere added wrinkles. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Future Profiteers demanded advances on future war contracts, and Sweetbriar College students formed a chapter of Future Golddiggers “to sit on the laps of future profiteers while they drink champagne during the next war.”
Not everyone was amused. James E. Van Zandt, national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, denounced the Gorin group as “a bunch of monkeys,” and declared they would never be veterans because they were “too yellow to go to war.”
Like others, including some who saw the Veterans of Future Wars as pacifists and others who viewed them as communists, Mr. Van Zandt missed the point.
A descendant of the Revolutionary War general Artemus Ward and a man who was later active in the Sons of the American Revolution, the Society of the Colonial Wars and the Society of the Cincinnati, Mr. Gorin saw himself as the consummate patriot, one who would willingly answer his country’s call in time of war, accept his soldier’s pay, then return to civilian life without feeling entitled to further feedings at the public trough.
By the fall of 1936, with Mr. Gorin at Harvard, the country distracted by a Presidential campaign and the gifts that had kept the group’s headquarters humming now drying up, the joke was over. The Veterans of Future Wars suspended operations, revoking the charters of 500 posts across the country.
Four years later, as a young lawyer in Louisville, Mr. Gorin was among 21 civic leaders who signed an ad calling for an end to American neutrality laws that blocked aid to allies.
As he had expected, when the United States did go to war, Mr. Gorin, along with the vast majority of the former Veterans of Future Wars, went with it, serving as an artillery captain in Italy, France and Germany and later writing and publishing “The Cannon’s Mouth,” a history of field artillery in World War II.
After the war, he accepted an offer from a childhood friend, Billy Reynolds, to join the family’s aluminum company, Reynolds Metals, and became an executive with its international subsidiary, first in Louisville, where he made an abortive run for Congress in the 1950’s, later in Bermuda and ultimately in Richmond, Va.
After his retirement in 1981, he returned to Louisville, operated a farm in southern Kentucky and continued to amuse his friends with his geniality and once-renowned wit.
Mr. Gorin is survived by his wife, Eleanor; a daughter, Eleanor Leuenberger of Schlossrued, Switzerland; a son, Jeff of Tempe, Ariz.; a brother, Standiford of McMinnville, Tenn., and five grandchildren.
January 31, 1999