28 May 2018 — 1346 mdt
Veterans by the numbers analysis produces surprises
My grandparents, all born in the nineteenth century, always called Memorial Day by its original name, Decoration Day. Every year, at the end of May, they solemnly placed flowers and flags on the graves of friends, family, and fellow Americans, who had fallen defending our nation. I’ve not continued the practice, limiting my ceremonial involvement to flying Old Glory from my front porch, and spending part of the holiday reading history. This Memorial Day weekend, I looked at the distribution of veterans in the fifty states and territories.
Montana has the third highest concentration of veterans among its adult population of all the state, ranking behind Alaska and Virginia. I’ve displayed the results in the graphs below.
PDF for printing
The first graph uses a logarithmic scale on the X-axis to keep the smaller states from bunching up on the left side of the graph. This graph employs a linear X-axis, which is easier to use, but requires discarding the four largest states: California, Texas, Florida, and New York.
The U.S. Veterans Administration displays this information in the map below.
There’s another way of making the calculation. As displayed in the map below, the U.S. Veterans Administration, in its excellent Profile of Veterans 2016, calculates the concentration of veterans as a percentage of a state’s entire population, yielding lower percentages but generally the same rankings. The map below is from page 23. Conceptually, the per capita approach is not as sound as the per adult approach because military service is an adult activity. More data on veterans are available at the VA’s National Center for Veterans Analysis and Statistics.
California and New York, two of the most heavily Democratic states, and both states with large numbers of immigrants, have concentrations of veterans that are well below the national mean. Texas is just below the national mean, and Florida is several points above.
Montana’s high percentage of veterans is why Sen. Jon Tester takes such a strong interest in helping veterans. Helping them is the right thing to do, of course, and there are so many in Montana that no responsible public official can turn a blind eye to their needs.