“The Veterans’ Insurance Dividend”

Never try to fool a storyteller with a tall tale. A case in point involves Cindy Guthrie, a professional storyteller in Akron, Ohio.

The story she sent to me begins—on a neatly printed form—“PLEASE PASS THIS ALONG TO YOUR PARENT, OR FRIEND, IF NOT APPLICABLE TO YOURSELF.” Guthrie’s husband, a clergyman, received several copies of these sheets from his barber so that he could distribute them to veterans in his congregation.

The notice claimed that Congress had passed a recent bill granting World War II veterans a dividend of 65 cents per $10,000 of their insurance for each month of their active duty. The flier warned that “THE DIVIDEND CANNOT BE RECEIVED UNLESS IT IS REQUESTED.” (The use of all capital letters is a hallmark of unreliable notices, by the way.)

Suspiciously, a sample dividend figure quoted was off by one dollar, according to the stated rate of the flier, and the mail-in form addressed to the Veterans Administration regional office in Philadelphia began rather unbureaucraticly, “Dear Sir or Madam.”

Her storyteller’s instincts alerted, Guthrie decided to query me about the matter. Then, she wrote, a few days later the Akron Beacon-Journal —as have many newspapers—debunked the veterans’ dividend story, headlining its report “VA calls circular a hoax” and tracing it back thirty years. Guthrie went ahead and sent me both the flier and the newspaper clipping to add to my files.

The Veterans Insurance Dividend appeals to human desire, if not human experience. Who wouldn’t like to discover a cash benefit that you were eligible for and unaware of? It’s a nice dream, even if you have never known anyone who has enjoyed such a windfall.

During the last forty years, thousands of veterans have heard the rumor and applied for their supposed dividends. The story surfaced around 1948, according to VA spokesmen, and different forms of the printed notice pop up regularly, setting off new waves of applications.

Just a few days after I heard from Cindy Guthrie, retired Marine Corps Colonel W. G. Swigert wrote me from California, describing his own embarrassing encounter with the same story in the summer of 1986. Colonel Swigert’s son brought home a copy of the flier that his fiancée’s mother received from a colleague.

The colonel wrote, “The amount wasn’t enough to make me an instant millionaire, but it wasn’t insignificant.” The next day he mailed his application, and two weeks later, he wrote, the magazine Parade ran a story debunking the claim. Colonel Swigert never heard from the VA.

The Veterans Insurance Dividend is more a hoax or rumor than a true legend, because it lacks much narrative content. The closest that most versions come to a story line is when the fliers allude to specific veterans who have supposedly already collected their dividends.

But this hoax does shares a characteristic with bona-fide urban legends—that is variation. For example, one version says that payments of “55 cents to $1000” are possible, figures echoing the more common wording, “65 cents per $10,000.” The name of the VA center in Philadelphia also varies, though the P.O. box and zip code stay fairly consistent.

George B. Griffin, a writer for the Worcester (Massachusetts) Evening Gazette sent me an amusing account of his experiences with the lucky-vets story. He had looked into the claims made by the fliers and written a documented denial of them in 1981.

The Evening Gazette reader-response column “ Contact ” also debunked the dividend myth in 1986. In both instances, spokespersons from the Boston VA office denounced the story as a complete fabrication. Nevertheless, they said, inquiries were still coming in to VA offices across the country at the rate of about a half million per year.

Then, in the winter of 1987, another version of the flyer started circulating in the Evening Gazette’s offices, especially through the efforts of an editor who distributed copies to fellow veterans on the staff and posted one on the city-room bulletin board.

Griffin says he had to dig out the previously published debunkings and pass them around in order to convince co-workers that the story was false. But the editor still wasn’t convinced until Griffin pointed out that he—that very editor himself—had edited the 1981 story for publication.

People trust this plausible story not simply out of wishful thinking, but because an authoritative-looking printed form cites specific figures and an actual address. There is usually even an index number for the claimed congressional bill, something like the bogus petition number on another anonymous flier that is supposed to refer to a nonexistent petition asking the government to ban religious broadcasting.

Other unverifiable rumors that circulate in printed or photocopied form include warnings against imaginary health and safety threats, and accounts of fictional drug crimes or child-abduction cases.

The government in general and the military in particular—with their complex offices and regulations—are the subjects of several urban legends. These include stories about a verbose government memo setting the price of cabbage, about a mix-up in orders that puts a mathematics teacher in command of a battleship, and about outrageous benefits that welfare recipients have supposedly received within the letter of the law.

But “The Veterans’ Insurance Dividend” remains one of the most durable of these stories. On January 4, 1989, the Madison (Wisconsin) Capitol Times reported that the old rumor was still going strong: “Veterans Being Hoaxed by Phony Insurance Letter,” reads the headline. A Veterans Administration spokesman is quoted saying that the “hoax” costs his agency some $5 million to $20 million a year in letters and phone calls to deal with it. The Wisconsin version of the letter specified that payoffs for one, two, or three years of service amount to $264, $316, and $528 respectively. So much cost to debunk such a piddling story!