Photographs of the swearing-in of Colonel Charles R. Forbes as the first director of the US Veterans Bureau on August 9, 1921, show him in sensible attire for the season—loose, extra-large white trousers (he had put on weight), blazer and tie, with a determined look on his face. The task ahead of him was formidable. Next to him stood Representative Burton Sweet, who initiated the legislation that established the Veterans Bureau, and on Sweet’s other side, General Charles E. Sawyer in his role as White House representative, buttoned-up and belt-clasped in his military uniform in the sweltering, un-air-conditioned heat.
The immediate challenge was to integrate three professional cultures—fiscal, medical, and educational—into a consolidated system. Vocational educational services were transferred from the Federal Board for Vocational Education overnight. On August 10, the Veterans Bureau acquired more than 6,000 employees in vocational rehabilitation, responsible for 90,000 men in training in 3,000 schools and colleges across the United States. For both the medical and educational communities, Forbes’s appointment as director rammed home a dismal message: the Veterans Bureau was the Bureau of War Risk Insurance under a new name, a victorious beast that was about to swallow them up. Forbes’s job was to consolidate services previously given by the three groups into a smoothly running national organization based in Washington; create standardized procedures and oversight mechanisms; decentralize the combined services to fourteen new district offices (plus more than a hundred subdistrict offices) across the United States and install managers in each of these; improve inadequate medical and hospital care, particularly for outpatient specialty services and hospitalization of veterans with mental illness and tuberculosis; shake up vocational education; and get beneficiaries into jobs. This all had to be done at once. Arguably, reforming veterans’ services demanded more drastic, destabilizing reforms than any others undertaken by federal agencies in the Harding administration or for that matter in the Coolidge and Hoover administrations that followed.1
Congress, having signed off on the legislation as a problem solved, simultaneously increased the demand for services by relaxing the requirement that a strict 10 percent disability rating must be shown for veterans to qualify for medical and related benefits. Under the assumption that soldiers were in good health when they were inducted, the door was opened to claims for all kinds of medical problems as war-related. Section 13 of Public Law 67-47 authorized the bureau to provide hospital, medical, dental, surgical, convalescent treatment, and prosthetic appliances to any veteran who could show a disability or aggravation of a previous condition in the line of duty, if the claim for benefits were made within a year of the legislation—initially by August 9, 1922, later extended, or a year after military discharge if that were later.
The bureau’s “clean-up” campaign, which looked for needy veterans who had not applied for benefits, added about 180,000 more ex-servicemen to the rolls. The exact number, 179,868, was provided by the bureau’s 300-member logistical support team at headquarters—emblematic of the demands of scientific management and business efficiency. Bureau employees and volunteers helped veterans with their claims, one by one, across the country, assembling the military, discharge, and medical papers necessary to evaluate each case. Forbes’s one and only annual report, for fiscal year 1922, was filled with tables and statistics. Almost 31,000 veterans were hospitalized under the bureau’s auspices in March 1922, and almost 110,000 beneficiaries were in vocational training programs in April, both, as it turned out, the peak months for these services.2
As director, Forbes had three immediate goals: (1) get the bureau’s district offices up and running as quickly as possible; (2) take a sharp look at the provision of vocational services, the weakest link in the chain; and (3) provide inspirational leadership, starting at headquarters. On occasion, he came down from the executive suite to interview applicants in the building’s new welcoming center. A couple of weeks into his new role a reporter wrote, “Colonel Forbes has the real human touch with the men.” He “impresses one with his sincerity, his clear, logical mind, his executive force and directness of thought and action. … [He] mingles with the boys, holds conferences with them, getting their stories.” As Forbes said: “A sick man is never a contented man … it is our job to make the men … as contented as possible.”3
He kept his executive offices and core staff, and acquired an invaluable secretary who acted as his personal and executive assistant, Mr. Merle LaRue Sweet (no relation of Representative Sweet), an experienced civil servant in his late thirties. Forbes and Sweet formed an appealing physical counterpoint: the midsized, squarish, dynamic, and expansive Colonel Forbes, and the six-foot, lanky, black-haired, pipe-smoking, whimsical Sweet from North Dakota. He traveled with Forbes on many of his official trips, handled his schedule and travel expenses, wrote reports and dictated letters, paid his boss’s insurance premiums for him, managed his bank account, and conducted independent site visits. In short, he got to know him well. Sweet liked his job and liked his boss. Both men worked hard and had a sense of the ridiculous. When called as a witness in the Senate investigation of the Veterans Bureau in the fall of 1923, months after Forbes had left government, Sweet testified that he knew nothing about Forbes’s engaging in any conspiracy, as then alleged; believed Forbes lived within his government income of $10,000 a year; never saw Forbes take a drink at the Veterans Bureau, and never observed him anywhere under the influence of liquor; and he was uniformly positive about Forbes’s work record. “I must confess to a personal regard for Col[onel] Forbes,” he added. “I have an affectionate regard for him.” He solemnly replied to questioning that yes, he recognized he had a higher loyalty to his country than to the Veterans Bureau and, no, that did not change his views.4
The object of the Veterans Bureau, Forbes announced after meeting with President Harding, was to create “a coordinated and an efficient business, conducted as great going concerns are run everywhere else in the land.” Veterans would be given the benefit of the doubt in cases in which an individual’s eligibility for services was ambiguous: “the presumption is always in favor of the claimants.” Action on all claims would be prompt. The new legislation extended Forbes’s responsibility for policing the hospitals to which the Bureau sent patients on a contractual basis, even shutting them down when deficient and although the US Public Health Service would not transfer its veterans hospitals for another nine months, this too was anticipated. Forbes made it clear he would not stint: “I intend to have a hospitalization program put into effect that will provide a place in a perfectly equipped institution for every temporarily disabled man or woman desiring treatment, and I intend to have his surroundings such that he will be happy while there.” Brave words, with expensive connotations, but they met Harding’s need to show optimism and progress in the Veterans Bureau and forestall the passage of the “Soldiers’ Bonus.”5
Forbes faced the enormity of his task with outward equanimity, accepting General Dawes’s earlier model of a strong chief executive who wielded a meat-ax and cut red tape. Few stopped to consider the mechanics of his expanding job, its size and changing scope; its organizational, interpersonal, and political pitfalls; and, not least, the ever-present Washington danger of hubris. By the end of June 1922, ten months into his directorship, almost 30,000 individuals were working for the Veterans Bureau. By then, almost half of all bureau employees worked through decentralized districts, with a further third working in Veterans Bureau hospitals. Colonel Forbes was charged to do what Congress had not agreed to do for other civilians; that is, provide a “department of public welfare” for World War I veterans.6
An immediate need was for a senior official to oversee the transition of vocational rehabilitation into the organization. In late August 1921, Forbes announced the appointment of Major Arthur Dean, head of the Vocational Training School at Columbia University, as an assistant director of the Veterans Bureau. Dean had spent eight years as director of vocational education in New York City and served as a major in charge of reconstructive work in army hospitals during the war. He was “one of the best informed men in the country,” Forbes announced, and “particularly fitted to assist in the mammoth work of rehabilitation of the ex-service man.” However, “assist” meant “working under my direction.” Once again (as in his spat with consultant engineers in Honolulu), Forbes proved inept in working with civilians in leading professions who had a high opinion of themselves. The day Dean was appointed—and apparently without consulting him—newspapers reported that President Harding and his cabinet had discussed a radical departure from the policies favored by vocational educational specialists, who believed in finding education and job placement for veterans near where they wanted to live. The new plan was to develop a huge residential vocational school at an abandoned army cantonment (in Chillicothe, Ohio) where there were buildings in which trainees and faculty could live and others would be available for workshops and teaching. Forbes suggested there should be four such national centers. He had taught the rudiments of communications technology to raw recruits at special centers in wartime France and knew that education in the trades could be done effectively in this way, at least in the military. Professor Dean must have recognized immediately that he would have little voice in policy making. Worse, he might find himself constrained to carry out policies in his area of professional expertise with which he strongly disagreed.7
Forbes’s assertive style reverberated through debates about the poor quality of vocational education during the early weeks of his administration. “The men are farmed out in cheap tailoring establishments and mushroom institutions, where the only interest to the proprietors or instructors is the amount of money that can be obtained from the government,” he told the press. “It is nothing short of slavery to put men in certain types of these institutions. We want to establish schools so the men will be honestly and properly rehabilitated instead of destroying their morale.” He named schools that had submitted vouchers to the government for nonexistent students, closed some New York schools, and was prepared to close the Berkeley Pre-Vocational School in Boston, with 500 trainees, in the face of considerable pressure not to do so. A William Blackburn of Lynn, Massachusetts, aged 72, he reported, had “cost the government $130 a month since July 24, 1919, to teach this man how to write his name,” which he could now trace in a “feeble scrawl.” Blackburn had reportedly enlisted in the naval reserve and his disability was “indigestion.”
By mid-October, Forbes had disallowed training contracts at thirty-two schools (Southern California was the worst area, he said) for reasons ranging from “asininity” (his word) to graft. Universities around the country were looking askance at the projected government training centers. They would not impinge on university-type courses, Forbes assured them: “We will call the schools ‘technical training centers,’ if they like.” However, the Chillicothe experiment was not a success. World War veterans did not want to go to a center far from home, particularly one in which they might be treated as if they were still in the military.
Arthur Dean, for whom this outcome was obvious, was conspicuous by his absence from the public press. Forbes’s enthusiasm “ran away with him,” the New York Times reported; there had been too much “muddling through.” Nonetheless, the vocational education system needed cleaning up. At the district level, as new staffs were assembling and trying to work together, counselors struggled to make sense of the patchwork of placements, apprenticeships, educational offerings, and employers who ranged from excellent to exploitative.8
According to Veterans Bureau staff, the Federal Board for Vocational Education had allowed ex-servicemen to enter training in any field they chose, no matter how unrealistic. Here, in paid government-sponsored training, as listed in Forbes’s annual report, were aspiring actors and aeronauts, auctioneers and auto painters, bankers and bell boys, candy makers and clergymen, designers, editors and reporters, fingerprint readers, grocers, gunsmiths, hotel managers, industrial art workers, jewelry factory workers, lawyers, lens grinders, musicians, nurses, officials (city, county, state, and federal), piano and organ tuners, real estate agents, stagehands, telegraph operators, warehouse packers, and many others, several hundred categories in all—a mirror of postwar American aspirations. A Veterans Bureau officer lamented: “Men without any background whatsoever have demanded that they be trained for some musical vocation and a large number have insisted on training for the vaudeville stage.” Another: “The cultured invariably seem to want rough outdoor life. The illiterate and uncultured often want indoor work. The strong want light work as an objective. The weak often disown their disabilities and want to train for rigid work.” The new district managers pressed on as best they could. Forbes lambasted the system at the first annual meeting of district managers in Washington in October, his words reported in the Washington Post: “I am only astounded that rehabilitation chiefs would send men to school and shops where the most cursory investigations would have found conditions to be as I have exposed them.” He exhorted his new lieutenants into action. The bureau was going to be operated “on sound, modern principles, and every phase of it is going to be clean and above board. … I know that with the help of God we can put it over by all working together.”9
Arthur Dean participated in a major conference on rehabilitation called by Forbes in December 1921, but he was neither the welcoming speaker nor conference chair. Forbes opened the session, stressing the need for the “human touch.” Dean lasted in his position as assistant director through mid-January, when Forbes dismissed him. His firing raised hackles on several fronts at once, not least among the vocational education workers who had worked for the Federal Board and now worked for the Veterans Bureau. For Disabled American Veterans, Dean’s dismissal was tantamount to a “blow straight to the heart” and was caused because he disagreed with Forbes’s “wild-cat scheme” of national training centers. Dean returned home, claiming he was intending to resign anyway, but Forbes “beat me to it.” From Columbia University’s Faculty Club, he accused the Veterans Bureau of being dominated by the “War Risk Insurance group,” lamented the bureau’s interference into professional policies, and damned Forbes as an uneducated nonprofessional who had nothing to do with “real” education. Dean added an extraneous social-class critique. Forbes had built “public works,” using “‘employees’ and rough materials” before coming to government, he proclaimed; that is, he had run a construction gang of uneducated migrants or, as Dean put it, “coolie labor.” When asked by a reporter, Forbes gave no reason for Dean’s leaving: “Just say that Prof. Dean for some time has been under the weather.”10
Forbes clashed with his medical service chief as well: the eminent Dr. Haven Emerson, detailed to the Veterans Bureau from the US Public Health Service (the man who had insulted General Sawyer). Emerson was a national leader in medicine, hospitals, and public health, who considered himself a consultant with no line responsibilities. Forbes needed a medical workhorse who would deal with the bureau’s increasing responsibility for medical services and help develop staff in the Veterans Bureau districts. Each man bristled when annoyed. Each sought victory over compromise. Emerson was an aristocratic superstar who felt no intrinsic loyalty to the bureau and certainly not to Forbes. It would never have occurred to him not to speak his mind. He was famous for his intolerance of “fuzzy-minded nitwits who speak with authority concerning matters they do not understand.”11
Matters came to a head while Forbes was making his first major trip as director of the US Veterans Bureau to inspect services in the American West in his second month in office (September 1921). In Oakland, California, Forbes was greeted as the hero of the hour. An elaborate ceremony in his honor at Oakland’s municipal auditorium included members of the American Legion, the American Red Cross, the Oakland and San Francisco fire department bands, community singing, speeches, vaudeville, syncopated music, and a dance. However, as the Oakland Tribune put it, in the modern world of a national press and telegraphic communications, he could not escape “the centers of two storms which have been whirling over the heads of his department.” One was the usual flurry of local concern that cropped up everywhere reform was in view; in this case, proposals to abandon the Palo Alto Hospital as a center for veterans and cancel contracts with private hospitals, both of which would mean withdrawing federal money from the area. The second was national news that Haven Emerson had charged the bureau with political patronage and inefficiency—sizzling the wires from coast to coast. Forbes, caught unawares, lashed out. Dr. Leon Fraser, the bureau’s executive officer in Washington, sent him news of some unrecorded dereliction of duty by Emerson—though Forbes said later that he had been misinformed. Forbes shot off a cable or telegram (later he could not remember which) to tell Emerson he was dismissed. Emerson’s version was that Forbes had accepted his resignation just after he began as director, to take effect September 15.12
Emerson’s initial tirades predated those of Arthur Dean but continued far beyond them. Like Dean, he saw Forbes through the lens of social and professional class. In his view, the bureau was “being made the football of politics.” It was wasting half a million dollars on political patronage, with “plumbers and policemen … being substituted for scientific medical men.” One version substituted “blacksmiths” for “plumbers,” thus casting aspersions on three stalwart occupations. In Emerson’s view, the director of the Veterans Bureau was far from being a “professional, with science and ethics at his disposal,” or, by analogy, a gentleman, who knew how to behave. Forbes retaliated in a similarly aggressive tone: “I expected some such silly statement from a disgruntled employee whose services have proved unsatisfactory. … The facts are that I found the medical division, under his direction, in a chaotic condition. He had 65,000 cases awaiting action and was losing ground every day while sick and destitute men clamored for aid. … I intend to keep no employee who obstructs legitimate veterans’ claims by incompetence and I would have dismissed Emerson earlier had I had a substitute.” Furthermore, he added, “It is too bad Emerson lost his head and his manners.” Press coverage was on balance favorable to Forbes. The Washington Post called Emerson’s remarks “the only pessimistic note heard recently” about veterans’ services. The New York Times considered the firing of two top figures at the bureau to be appropriate business practice: “Naturally the director prefers lieutenants who are in sympathy with him. … He has addressed himself to the solution of the insurance, hospitalization and rehabilitation problems with intelligence, courage and resolution.” Nonetheless, the contretemps left ripples of anger in its wake.13
Calling Emerson an “employee” was like waving a red rag at a bull. Emerson continued his attack with the thoroughbred scorn of a patrician. He became an implacable enemy, fanning fires of moral outrage about lay interference in medicine into virulent personal criticism. By May 1922, he was explaining in print that he had resigned “because politics interfered with professional efficiency,” that under Forbes there was “vacillation” and “interference with professional policies,” educational and medical, plus “flagrantly unfit appointments” and “special favors for claimants coming from suitably endorsed sources.” Nothing, he wrote, stood in the way of success except the “quality of leadership and direction of the Veterans Bureau.” The bureau’s real potential as a place where medical professionals would regain their proper standing would not be fulfilled until the president replaced “his political lieutenant from the realms of pioneer power plant construction” with a “real administrator” and established a “regime of competence and merit.” If this critique had not struck a chord in various constituencies, it might have been regarded as an entertaining skirmish, which in many ways it was. Public Health Service physicians, working for the bureau and feeling the Forbes machine steamrolling over their prerogatives, were the first and most obviously receptive audience, but anyone with a grievance against the bureau (and there were many, some of whom had been battling with parts of the system for years) formed a large, inchoate second: politicians with a vested interest in the bureau, veterans and their supporters frustrated about the slowness of change, conservatively minded legislators and other citizens who saw their tax dollars flowing excessively into Forbes’s domain, community leaders and organizations whose members bewailed lack of services or low standards in existing hospitals and vocational schools, and many others. Emerson made it possible for critics to see Forbes from two dramatically negative perspectives: (1) as the central problem of the Veterans Bureau and (2) as an inappropriately elevated public servant who was ill-prepared, ill-mannered, and possibly unethical. Forbes was a decisive and charismatic leader who could be undiplomatic to the point of hurting himself, as well as others, when maneuvering in the civilian world.14
Haven Emerson did not address Forbes’s criticism of the medical work done while he was medical adviser to the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, and did not develop a more sympathetic view of Forbes. In an oral history completed in the 1950s, he said simply: “I resigned and Forbes was subsequently sent to jail, to my great delight.” Forbes later regretted firing Emerson. “I saw and read a great deal of his work afterwards,” he said. But he stuck to his basic point, namely, that Emerson was “a wonderful physician but not a good administrator.”15
The good news was that he brought in two superb, result-oriented military officers to replace Emerson and Dean. Both were detailed to the bureau from the US Army. Both understood loyalty and chain of command, as did Forbes. The practical and affable Lieutenant Colonel (Dr.) Robert U. Patterson, in his mid-forties, came in to manage the rapidly expanding medical division. Patterson had commanded US Army Base Hospital No. 5 (the Harvard Unit) in France and held the Distinguished Service Medal and the British War Medal. Eventually, he became surgeon general of the army, a major-general, and on retirement a medical school dean (at the Universities of Oklahoma and Maryland, respectively). Colonel Robert I. Rees, also a career army officer, took over the rehabilitation division. Rees had served as an aide to General John J. Pershing in the war with responsibility for educational work in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF). He was a brigadier general when he left the army in 1924 to work in the private sector at AT&T. Rees began to get the vocational system under control. He had no problem shutting down inferior schools or policing the length of vocational training, which was much longer in the United States than in other countries. Up to four years of paid training was allowed, compared with six months in England, and twelve to eighteen months in France. In May 1922, Albert A. Sprague, a Chicago businessman who spent most of his time working for veterans through the American Legion, paid tribute to what Rees had accomplished in only a few weeks. Forbes “turned over to him a disorganized, poorly functioning and a badly overloaded machine. I believe that chaos is being eliminated slowly but surely.” However, Sprague warned, the vocational training part of the bureau was the “most difficult and dangerous part … where, if there is a big scandal, it is going to break.” This comment was prescient in one way (there would later be a scandal) but not in another. The scandal would center on new problems: those of hospital construction and hospital supplies.16
While coping with changes in Washington, DC, Forbes and his staff selected managers at top speed to get the district offices off the ground and running. The fourteen districts, each covering services in more than one state, were based on the old Public Health Service districts, repurposed, and expanded to cover the complete span of veterans’ services. There were no villains in the culture clashes. It was only human for the former physician manager of a Public Health Service district to feel entitled to the much-larger job—and for physicians to believe the bureau should be medically run. “Colonel Forbes has already replaced the medical men by laymen in Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, Cincinnati, and other cities,” reported the journal The Survey of the early weeks of Forbes’s tenure. The bureau also established 126 suboffices (the law allowed a maximum of 140; Forbes was deliberately saving money here), each of which needed a manager. Then as now, good managers were in short supply.
Six of the district offices had more than a thousand Veterans Bureau employees, working in offices, dispensaries, and vocational schools, not counting hospital staffs. The urgency to get going meant that managers were selected for their availability. There was no time to wait for a “best fit.” Some of the prospects were already on the spot working for one or other part of the service. Others were recommended by the American Legion and other veterans’ organizations, by the Red Cross, and by congressmen, senators, and local dignitaries, in good faith or as patronage positions. Each manager had to meld together the claims, medical, and vocational training personnel and deal with a vociferous chorus of critical veterans and politicians. When managers failed, they had to be replaced. The physician manager in Philadelphia ran afoul of local critics and was brought back to headquarters; the bureau’s executive officer, Major (Dr.) Leon Fraser was moved out of Washington to solve problems at the visibly disorganized district office in New York. Jobs were wearing at all levels. Fraser commented to a friend during his New York experience, “Frankly, I have had rather too long a sojourn with the Bureau.”17
Forbes relocated District Office 4, which served veterans in Washington, DC, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, to the Arlington building (Veterans Bureau headquarters, where the number of staff was shrinking)—thus saving a substantial amount in rent and showing that local clients were being served. Progress was uneven across the country. The American Legion placed representatives in every district to help in the transitions. The first national meeting of these legion representatives was rowdy with complaints, reported a bureau officer who attended. The second meeting, five months in, was “much more dignified and less caustic”; district managers were at least “trying to handle the work properly.” But there was also abundant criticism along lines that would continue to haunt the bureau—“political appointments” in District 1 (Boston); allowing “politics” to enter the district office in District 11; the continuation of “old dissensions and ill-feeling” between the personnel previously employed in the Federal Board for Vocational Education, the Public Health Service, and War Risk Insurance in Districts 2 and 3; closer contact needed between the district and central office in District 5; general issues on competence of staff and low salaries; not enough centers for psychiatric and tuberculosis care in District 10; and a report that “some fifteen hundred men are roaming around Arizona without being properly hospitalized,” from District 12. There were no complaints about graft or stealing.18
The country was so large and the span of responsibility for disabled veterans so great that at any one time something was bound to be seriously wrong with veterans’ services somewhere in the United States. The bureau was newsworthy, and stories about its services and deficiencies were widely disseminated through national news services such as Associated Press and United Press International. Complaints about poor conditions at the Longview Hospital in Cincinnati were headlined in the Washington Post: “Charges Insane Yanks Must Sleep on Floor.” Denver hospitals, like those in Arizona, were reportedly in crisis, flooded with 7,000 veterans with tuberculosis who had flocked in from other states in the belief that treatment of tuberculosis at high altitude was essential for a cure. Tuberculosis specialists disagreed, but that made little difference.19
Forbes pushed ahead. Anticipating the transfer of Public Health Service dispensaries and outpatient clinics for veterans (plus their staff), he approved an ambitious program for establishing federal government clinics in every district and subdistrict along lines that still read as “modern.” The largest type, designed for the nation’s nineteen largest cities, was a comprehensive multispecialty clinic, which included internal medicine, general surgery, tuberculosis, ophthalmology, ear-nose-throat, orthopedics, physical therapy, dentistry, x-ray, laboratory and pharmacy, with facilities for social service and administration. “Neuropsychiatry,” a major diagnostic category for disabled veterans, was not included; there were too few trained psychiatrists, and it was assumed that patients who were severely mentally ill required hospitalization. The bureau operated sixty-three clinics within five months, including all the largest ones, fourteen of them associated with the district centers.
Forbes had expressed his concern about dental price gouging in the private marketplace. After ten months on the job, eighty-seven Veterans Bureau dental clinics had opened. Graduate nurses were assigned to do follow-up work on more than half a million cases in the districts, where they provided medical care, made home visits, conducted school and placement interviews, and dealt with individuals struggling with a wide variety of medical and reentry problems, including the need for “social adjustment.” Concurrently, Forbes reorganized the central office into eight divisions (plus some special sections) to support the decentralized system. He brought in an experienced social worker, Albert E. Haas, former national service director of the American Legion to help veterans negotiate with the district services. Haas trained the contact representatives (mainly ex-servicemen), who helped clients present their claims and explained the services made available under the law.20
Forbes’s official report for the fiscal year ending in June 1922 described the first months as a “trying” period for bureau employees, who were busy standardizing procedures for monetary and medical claims, conducting claims reviews that were already in the pipeline, and transitioning into their new roles. More than 300,000 case files had been sent out from Washington, though there were thousands more to go, and new claims were going directly to the districts. The bureau included a foreign relations subdivision, responsible for thousands of US veterans living in Puerto Rico, Canada, the Philippines, and other countries. Reflecting the segregated federal bureaucracy of the time, there was a “Negro Section,” responsible for the needs of black veterans. This was headed by Dr. J. R. A. Crossland, an African American physician from St. Joseph, Missouri, who was a prominent Republican and former US minister to Liberia. He was assisted by an all–African American staff of clerks and stenographers. Crossland’s son, Sergeant J. R. A. Crossland, Jr., was killed in action in 1918 and buried at St. Joseph with military honors.21
As he had in wartime, Forbes functioned well under stress. After the fracas with Emerson and Dean, he had made excellent leadership appointments. But it was clear that no one could manage the central office, work the Washington political circuit effectively (to make himself known and safeguard his reputation), and be visible in every district on a regular basis as entrepreneur, salesman, and troubleshooter, encouraging workers and adjudicating disputes, though in this latter task he was very effective. Major William F. Deegan, a prominent member of the American Legion in New York, remarked at the end of one long meeting: “There is something about you, Col[onel] Forbes, that when you are away from us, we cuss you and when we are near you, you have the iron hand on us. You have a magnetic personality.”22
The decentralized services for Veterans Bureau beneficiaries meant that Forbes spent half his time away from Washington. Fortunately, he liked to be on the move. He made efficient use of overnight train travel on comfortable sleepers, took staff with him to write reports, and often reserved a “drawing room” in which to conduct meetings. A typical travel schedule for shorter trips: left Washington, DC, at 12:20 a.m. (i.e., after midnight) for New York City, arrived 6:10 a.m. the same day; left the next day for Boston, overnight arriving 8 a.m. on day 3. Left Boston on day 4 for Washington, DC. The days were spent working with Veterans Bureau clients, staff, and other figures in the districts. For some trips, he used his own automobile—an Aero-Eight manufactured by Cole.23
Charles F. Cramer, head of the bureau’s 200-man legal division and an acquaintance of the president and Mrs. Harding, was a possible deputy for Charles R. Forbes—at least on paper. Cramer was slim, well turned out, and bespectacled, in his forties, with a high forehead and receding hair, blue eyes set in an oval face, and a damaged arm. He had been general counsel for two oil corporations in California before moving to Washington as the agent of California wartime oil interests, selling aircraft fuel to American allies. When the demand for military aircraft fuel disappeared, he had to fall back on private practice. In 1921, a reasonably paid government job was attractive. Cramer’s wife, Lila Davis Cramer, was his most obvious attribute when the two of them were seen together: a twenty-something stunning redhead who stood 6 feet tall in her shoes, with a shrewd mind and the looks of a showgirl. The Cramers married in 1918, when his career was at its height, and made a three-month trip to Europe in 1919 at the invitation of the British government. Lila Cramer played the Washington social game with zest, gave and attended lunches with members of Congress and their wives, had a box at the Washington opera ball, made newsworthy trips to the Adirondacks, and attended the Yale-Harvard boat races with her spouse.24
However, Cramer had no particular commitment to the Veterans Bureau. Forbes had known little about him when he recommended him for appointment. Political interests were involved. Cramer had the strong support of the California Republican congressional delegation. Glowing references for him came from the two US senators from California, Hiram W. Johnson and Samuel M. Shortridge, and from Congressman John I. Nolan of California—influential Republicans all. Johnson had sponsored Cramer as a member of the exclusive Metropolitan Club in Washington. Attorney General Daugherty also supported Cramer. Harding’s wishes to favor this group were the deciding factors. Mr. and Mrs. Cramer had bought the house at 2314 Wyoming Avenue previously owned by Warren and Florence Harding, and Mrs. Harding relied on Cramer for initiating corrective action in response to letters of complaint from veterans that were received at the White House when Forbes was away. Forbes appointed Cramer as a “special expert,” a category falling outside civil service procedures, and awarded him a salary equal to his own as director of the Bureau of War Risk Insurance.25
Forbes did not give Cramer broad authority in the bureau. Their personal relationship was strained, particularly after an awkward set of negotiations done by Cramer on Forbes’s behalf in the fall of 1921. Forbes learned that Cramer was going to be in Northern California on other business and asked him to scout out sites for a tuberculosis hospital in the region. Senator Hiram Johnson of San Francisco, a demagogue and former governor of California who could arouse public fury at the snap of a finger, was pressing Harding to get a veterans hospital built in Northern California. “Turbulent popular feeling is breath in Johnson’s nostrils,” was the way one commentator put it. Johnson disliked Harding, and Harding had reason to do him a political favor in exchange for his support. Forbes had no authority to select sites or build hospitals at the time, but he could make suggestions to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon for consideration by his consultants on hospitalization (the White Committee). Cramer, eager to please all sides, found the grape-filled Cresta Blanca vineyard at Livermore, secured an option for its purchase at a price far above prevailing prices, and Forbes, or someone for him, signed a letter to the Treasury Department recommending a contract.
Trouble ensued when Treasury officials saw the recommended price—$150,000 (more than $2 million in twenty-first-century terms). Mellon’s consultants had already considered the site and rejected it. The situation had become politically embarrassing for Harding. Mellon handed the problem to Colonel Forbes, Cramer’s boss. Forbes, the former vice president of a major construction company, had the price brought down to $105,000 (still high) and included in the contract seven to ten additional acres and water rights for the whole property, plus a sixty-foot easement on both sides of the property. With these adjustments, the Treasury acquired the Livermore site, and the consultants put it on their list. Cramer had also arranged to employ a California architect who turned out to be expensive and incompetent. Forbes was not inclined to involve Cramer on projects that fell outside his role in the legal department.26
The most obvious individual for Forbes to partner with in Washington was Dr. (and Brigadier General) Charles E. Sawyer, White House physician and Harding adviser. Both men worked directly for Harding, revered him, and supported his policy agenda. Their partnership was a nonstarter. Sawyer saw himself as the overseer of health and welfare policy, had little confidence in Forbes’s ability to direct the Veterans Bureau, and disagreed with him on fundamental questions. Notably, Sawyer thought Forbes was too soft toward veterans instead of toughening them up and favored expensive, specialized medical treatments over the milder approaches of Sawyer’s homeopathy. Forbes had accepted the idea that he, and he alone, was running a federal business: the US Veterans Bureau. Personal jealousy of each other’s involvement with Harding no doubt also played a role. Sawyer kept an eye on what was happening in the Veterans Bureau and talked freely with its staff, as he had with the Bureau of War Risk Insurance. His appointment as White House public welfare adviser provided entrée to government offices as a matter of course. Forbes became frustrated when Sawyer waved a letter in front of him signed by the president and reported what he said were the president’s views. Without a federal public welfare department, Sawyer had no other domain in which to exert authority over health and welfare policy, and he was protective of what he saw as Harding’s best interests. Sawyer could be difficult. To Forbes, quite simply he was a meddler.
With respect to management style, Forbes followed the Dawes committee report of April 1921, which suggested corporate authority and a military-type command-and-control model for the Veterans Bureau. Eliminating or cutting through red tape was an important part of the mission. However, two months later, General Dawes established the federal Bureau of the Budget, which required new rules in the interest of modernization, not tossing all regulations away. What, exactly, was red tape? The Veterans Bureau was an “independent federal organization,” but what did that mean? It was still part of the federal government, which included partially implemented civil service regulations and rules for advertising and bidding on government contracts. Forbes’s driving energy and assertive entrepreneurial action in the interest of speed were suited to the initial organizational reforms in the bureau, but in the long term, any director would have to play by civilian, not military rules, and what those rules were was not always clear.
Instead of partnering with Forbes, Sawyer found a new opportunity for exerting influence through Budget Director General Dawes. Dawes was planning federal coordinating boards as part of the administration’s efficiency agenda. President Harding signed executive orders for two such boards, a Federal Purchasing Board and a Federal Liquidation Board, in August 1921, just after the Veterans Bureau was created. Sparked by Sawyer’s interest in public welfare and backed by Harding, Dawes next had in mind a coordinating board for federal activities for public health, veterans’ relief and other activities, including hospitalization, which would necessarily involve the Veterans Bureau. Sawyer was “a man of great ability and common sense,” Dawes wrote in his journal, “but he needs an authoritative position to fully control the wasteful duplication in building and the use of facilities now going on.” The major federal hospital construction projects were for veterans, and Forbes would be the main target, but the new coordinating board would also include hospital activities of the army, navy, the marine hospitals of the Public Health Service, St. Elizabeths Hospital (a huge federal psychiatric hospital in Washington, DC), the National Home for Disabled Soldiers, and Indian Affairs—each supplying a member of the board. Harding signed an executive order to establish the Federal Board of Hospitalization on November 8, 1921, with Sawyer as its chair and chief coordinator. Thereby, Sawyer assumed titular authority in two major areas: (1) the construction of veterans hospitals and (2) hospital supplies. The stage was set for an open clash between Sawyer as multiagency “coordinator” and Forbes as head of the executive agency with immediate interest in new federal hospitals. Forbes became vice chair of the board.27
Harding’s first budget message to Congress in December 1921 called for lower federal expenditures in fiscal 1923 than in 1922, a sign of his efficiency agenda. The Bureau of the Budget would be the instrument to impose this policy. Dawes recognized that the destabilizing reorganizations required in the first year or two of the Veterans Bureau required further expenditures during the transition. With costs centralized into one budget, however, for the first time, Americans could see how much was being spent on World War veterans. The approved budget of the new consolidated Veterans Bureau was $510 million (more than $7 billion in twenty-first-century terms). Colonel Forbes was responsible for the expenditure of more than a million dollars a day. A leading senator pointed out that this was “more than the entire expenditure of the whole United States in any year prior to 1897.”28
How quickly would World War I veterans be recast as an expensive social burden? The magnitude of the administrative machinery to handle their affairs was becoming obvious across the nation, including the establishment of new, multipurpose district offices in major cities. For example, in New York, Veterans Bureau District 2 leased the eighth and tenth floors of the Grand Central Palace building, stretching between Forty-Sixth and Forty-Seventh Streets and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. “One of the largest and most important leases of the year,” reported the New York Times. The name of the building suggested excess, though it was simply one of the buildings near the Grand Central railroad station. Forbes explained, to no avail, that the combined rental was less than what had been spent before. The revealed size of the Veterans Bureau raised questions about preferential treatment for disabled veterans compared with ordinary employed and unemployed Americans, who had neither a national health service nor paid vocational training. Rumors of waste and graft in government built on such observations. Members of Congress had little interest in posing philosophical or moral questions of how much the nation should spend on its war veterans, and why. Legislators pushed for as much as they could get for the voters in their constituencies. Congress was not designed to be efficient.29
As he had been in Hawaii, Forbes’s performance was underrated, as were the enormous problems he faced. In his first nine months in office (August 1921–May 1922), he created the Veterans Bureau districts while absorbing additional services into the bureau, forged ahead under pressure, took decisive action whatever the fallout might be, and brushed off hostile criticism, not always with tact or common sense. There were problems across the system, including grumblings from staff moved out from headquarters to other parts of the United States, or moved in reverse to the central office, but the bureau was accepted as a single government entity, here to stay. That was probably all that could be achieved in this time frame. Meanwhile, Forbes had acquired an army of critics.
Naval officer Joel T. Boone, a White House physician who worked with General Sawyer, wrote in his journal of a lovely spring day in 1922: “Rode horseback with Gen’l Sawyer in Potomac Park. … Gen’l Sawyer says Colonel Forbes is an autocrat. There is apparently friction.” Leading mental health expert Thomas W. Salmon wrote to Colonel Sprague of the American Legion early in April 1922: “A good many rumors reach me regarding Forbes’ coming downfall.” If that meant getting a superb man in the job, all to the good, but if not, he noted, a change of director could be another blow for disabled veterans. Sprague was of the same mind. There was no point in “trying to cross the stream on another horse,” and someone else could delay things further: “Forbes certainly has shown his disposition to work hard, to cooperate and I feel has his heart set on making good.”30