Benefits of the Doubt Chapter 4: There are two Ds in V-E-T-E-R-A-N B-E-N-E-F-I-T-S

Welcome to the DAV podcast. I'm Jonathan Copehanger and you're listening to the story of our veteran benefits. The 250th anniversary of our country is more than just a celebration of independence. It's a renewal of the contract between the nation and those who paid for its freedom. Yet, for the first several years of our country's existence, that contract was largely unwritten. Just how did we get from total neglect to the modern VA? Well, it took a series of national scandals, a moment of political theater, and civilians causing a real stink. This is the history of the benefits we earned and the fragile moments where we almost lost them. You're listening to benefits of the doubt. >> Chapter four. There are two D's in v e t e r a n b e n e f i t s. Now, even though we ended chapter three in 1912 talking about the Sherwood Act, we're going back in time a little bit to start this chapter. Then we're going to jump back to the First World War. So, just hold on to something to help steady yourself. You see, I need to introduce you to someone who is solely responsible for the VA system we have today and you may never have heard of her before. And spoiler alert, the second D stands for DAV. It seemed logical to put the two D's together because without D number one, D number two might have never become a thing. Uh now, I don't want to get too much into the butterfly effect here. So, I'll stick with some true statements to start with. If D number one had never been born, the landscape of veteran care in the 19th century and beyond would have looked significantly more bleak. Without this person, the concept of the National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers and later the National Homes might never have taken root. Without this person, veterans would have ended up in local poorhouses, county farms, or insane asylums. And in the 19th century, this meant stripping a person of their civic dignity. Veterans who had survived Shiloh or Gettysburg would have been lumped into the proper category of the proper class, receiving the bare minimum subsistence. Cities would have seen an explosion of homeless veterans. Amputees and those suffering from what we now recognize as PTSD would have been forced to beg on street corners, relying on erratic private charity. If she didn't show up to save the day, veterans would have lacked access to institutional medical treatment tailored to medical injuries. DAV's founder, Judge Robert S. Marks, a World War I veteran, was injured on the last day of fighting and access this institutional medical treatment when his doctors operated on him. Was that what saved his life and allowed him to start DAV later? Maybe. We can say that without D number one, disabled veterans would have been viewed purely as economic drains rather than individuals capable of productive, dignified lives. Without her driving force, the federal government might never have accepted the premise that it owed a permanent, lifelong obligation of shelter and health care to its volunteer forces. When World War I arrives, subtract her from the equation and the government would have had no administrative or physical infrastructure to scale up for the massive influx of wounded doughboys. The creation of a centralized veteran health care system would have been delayed by decades, leaving 20th century veterans to fight from scratch for basic medical rights. For most of the 19th century, a veteran benefit was just a check in the mail, a pension meant to keep you from the poorhouse. But as the Civil War drew to a bloody close in March of 1865, the definition of what the government owed those who served was about to change forever. Abraham Lincoln signed one of his final acts into law that month, establishing a national home. Publicly, it looked like the work of great men, generals like Ulysses S. Grant and the power players in Washington. But if you look at the petition that sat on the president's desk, you'll find a very different story. It wasn't drafted in a war room or a Senate chamber. It was the brainchild of a woman who didn't even have the right to vote. She wasn't a soldier, yet she commanded the signature of the nation's most powerful men. She wasn't a doctor, yet she designed the blueprint for what would become the largest integrated healthcare system in the world. She saw that a pension wasn't enough, that a veteran's sacrifice required a sanctuary, not just a stipend. For over a century, her name has been a footnote, but without her, the very concept of VA healthcare might have never opened its doors. Today, we go behind the curtain of the 1864 power petition to meet the woman who turned a 30-page scroll of signatures into a federal mandate. This is the story of Delphine Baker. And to help tell it, we have Melissa Wynn, director of marketing and communications at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. Born in Bethlehem, New Hampshire in 1828, Baker was not your typical 19th century woman. She grew up in an environment that valued intellectual independence. Her father was a skilled mechanic, but it was her mother who seems to have provided the blueprint for her later life. Her mother was described as having a magnetic presence and a natural gift for leadership. Delphine herself would use these traits to stare down Congress eventually. Now, here's Melissa with more on Delphine. >> She did have an upbringing as well. She wasn't really taught that women shouldn't should be different and it really makes you realize how ingrained that idea is in women from the beginning at this time and and these real shifts in that thinking start to empower women to see themselves differently. Society might not be ready for it, but they are ready. And they're they're they're not really asking for something they don't think that they can do. They they feel that they can do it. She doesn't feel put in her place by society that she's not allowed to have feelings or or start a newspaper and raise money and, you know, um she doesn't feel that those are things she shouldn't shouldn't be able to do. >> In her 20s, Delphine did something nearly unheard of for a single woman in the mid-19th century. Besides thinking for herself, of course, she became a traveling speaker. She traveled through what we now call the Midwest delivering lectures on the intellectual culture of women. Unlike some of her contemporaries who focused on the right to vote, Baker argued that the key to women's liberation was education and professionalization. She believed that if women were intellectually trained, they would become an unstoppable moral force in society. When the Civil War broke out, Delphine was living in Chicago. She threw herself into the war efforts as an independent agent, basically a one-woman supply chain. She used her public speaking skills to fundraise, bought medical supplies, and personally rode the trains to deliver them to hospitals. However, the physical toll of 19th century travel and the conditions in the wards broke her. In late 1861, she suffered a total physical collapse. Most people would have retired from public life, but Baker's response to her illness was her most clever move yet. Unable to carry heavy boxes of bandages, she realized she could carry ideas. In spring 1862, she launched a sophisticated monthly journal called the National Banner. It wasn't just a gossip rag or a simple newsletter. It featured heavy-hitting articles on science, literature, and the arts to attract a wealthy intellectual readership. Here's Melissa with some information. >> You know, she was an intelligent woman. You know, it was a hard time to be an intelligent woman, but she really had a drive and then and then innovative spirit about how to do it. I mean, she creates this paper to raise money to, you know, help fund the home. That's You know, she doesn't just propose an idea, she actually goes about forming a a way to make the money for it. >> She directed 100% of the profits to the care of wounded soldiers. This journal became her primary weapon as it gave her funding, prestige, and the platform to eventually move to New York and start the National Literary Association, the group that would eventually draft a petition for the National Home. Now, to understand why Delphine Baker became so singularly focused on this mission, you have to look at the gap between what she saw in the hospital wards and what the law actually provided at the time. In the mid-19th century, veteran benefits were almost always exclusively financial. Pension was meant to prevent starvation, but Baker realized that for the generation of men returning from the Civil War, a check in the mail was useless if the veteran had no place to live, no way to work, and no one to provide medical care. Once again, here's Melissa Wynn. >> So, uh what I think is really neat about Delphine Baker's vision is this kind of idea of whole care that was really kind of new at the time, you know. It was not just treating wounds and bandages. It was looking at care in a recreational way, you know, considering their lives as as whole lives, not just making sure that they could feed themselves or, you know, accommodate for some of these things that they weren't able to do anymore. >> Now, before the Civil War, the US actually did have homes for veterans. However, these were strictly for regulars or career military men. The millions of men who dropped their plows and pens to volunteer for the Union were legally ineligible for these facilities. Baker saw this as a moral crisis. The government was willing to use civilian volunteers to save the Union, but was also prepared to leave them to the mercy of local charities once the fighting stopped. During her time as a volunteer nurse in Chicago and St. Louis, Baker saw the hastily arranged wartime hospitals firsthand. At that time, St. Louis was a clearing house for the broken bodies coming off the riverboats from battles like Pea Ridge and Wilson's Creek. The hospitals were often just converted warehouses, drafty fairground buildings, or even repurposed stables. >> So, I think, like a lot of women who were serving as nurses during the Civil War, helping to treat the wounded during the Civil War, she saw that there was a real need for these men that were coming home to have long-term care. They were really were experiencing some injuries and wounds that they were life-altering, you know, there were a number of amputations during the war. There was more than 60,000 amputations performed during the Civil War, and while those are life-altering, they're also life-saving surgeries that you know, saved their lives, but changed these men's lives forever. So, a lot of these men would come home with these injuries. They were farmers, they were laborers, and they were no longer able to participate in life in that way. Um, many of them really needed some assistance living, just day-to-day lives. >> In the early years of the war, healthcare for a volunteer was often just a spot on a cold floor. Reports from Cassville and St. Louis described men laying on thin layers of straw, using their own blood-stained knapsacks as pillows. They wore the same clothes they had fought in, stiff with blood and soil, because there were no federal funds to provide them with fresh hospital gowns. These were temporary structures designed for acute trauma, not long-term recovery. Delphine witnessed soldiers being discharged into homelessness because they were too disabled to return to their old trades, but healthy enough to be kicked out of a surgical ward. This revolving door of misery convinced her that the benefit needed to be institutional and permanent, not just a temporary wartime measure. And many of the men Baker nursed weren't just wounded by bullets or cannonballs. They were hollowed out by camp fever, which was typhoid, dysentery, and chronic diarrhea. But because there were no permanent benefits, these men, once their fever broke, they were often sent back to the front or discharged onto the streets, still too weak to stand. Early in the war, nurses were almost exclusively other soldiers, often too sick or lazy to fight. Baker observed that these men were frequently inhuman in their treatment, lacking the patience or empathy required for long-term recovery. She saw the benefit that a professional, compassionate staff would provide. Delphine Baker realized you couldn't charity your way out of a national catastrophe. She had seen men die not from the wounds, but from the neglect that follows a battle. She saw that as long as care was a gift from a local ladies' aid society, it would always be temporary. To Delphine, healthcare shouldn't be a gift, it had to be a right. But as the war dragged into its third year, Delphine Baker hit a wall. She had seen the limits of human kindness. She had watched women across the north stitch thousands of quilts and bake endless crates of hardtack, and she realized it would never be enough. In the 1860s, a veteran benefit was a fragile thing. It relied on the whims of local charities and the spare change of neighbors. If the local ladies aid society ran out of money, the veteran ran out of medicine. Delphine saw a looming catastrophe. A million men were about to come home. Many of them broken, and the government's only plan for them was a small pension check and a thank you for your service. To her, as long as veteran care was a charity, it was a choice. She wanted to make it a debt. And here's Melissa Winnegan. >> I think she was really a remarkable woman for the time, and people were impressed with what she was doing. And again, I do think she's she's talking about an idea, and she's one of the first to it's 1862 when she starts talking about it. Lots of other people aren't really talking about veteran care until much later in the war. And again, I do think that's where her experience in the hospitals is is beneficial here because she's very early on she can see these men are going home and they need help. They're not going home the same people that they came, and they're not going to live normal lives. Now, Delphine Baker is unique to our story because she wasn't going to rely on the power of shame alone. She knew she couldn't shame Congress into acting. She had to corner them. She needed a weapon that was louder than a magazine and more permanent than a bandage. So, she packed her bags for New York City, traded her nurse's apron for a lobbyist bid, and began drafting a document that would change the federal treasury forever. She called it a petition, but history calls it the power petition. But, how does a woman with no vote and no office corner the most powerful men in the world? Well, using her magazine as a VIP pass, she spent 1864 stalking the hallways of power in New York and DC. She didn't just ask for a signature, she offered these men a chance to be part of something elite. And she started with the biggest name she could find, General Ulysses S. Grant. >> You know, there's not a lot of people who are getting close to Grant at that time, too. And she does, and to get those famous people or really influential people in government involved just solidified her cause so much. >> Once Grant's ink was dry on that paper, the rest of the dominoes began to fall. Suddenly, being on Delphine's list wasn't a burden, it was a status symbol. She had turned a plea for veteran health care into the most exclusive club in America. Abolitionists and intellectuals of the time started tripping over each other to sign the petition. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Horace Greeley signed up. Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, added her powerful name to the list. But, Baker knew that once she had names like Grant, Longfellow, and Barton, it was only a matter of time before the country accepted her idea. Grant provided the military weight. Longfellow gave the draft moral gravity. She just needed visibility. So, she snagged the signature of one of the most widely known human beings on the entire planet, arguably the most famous man in America, P. T. Barnum. Barnum was the ultimate populist, and by securing his signature, Delphine signaled that the movement to house disabled veterans wasn't just an elite project or a niche bureaucratic concern, it was a cause with mass market appeal. If the prince of humbugs thought this was the most important thing for the public to focus on, well then the public was going to listen. Getting anyone at the time to listen was extremely difficult. The country was incredibly polarized in the mid-1860s. Obviously the Civil War was a primary driver, but the tensions went far beyond the battlefield, infiltrating every aspect of daily life from the pews in the churches to the editorial pages of local newspapers. Oh, and those newspapers. The 1860s was an era of hyper-partisan journalism. Most newspapers were explicitly aligned with a political party. They didn't simply report news. They used vicious language to attack opponents and create echo chambers that only reinforced existing anger. As the war drew to a close, polarization shifted towards the future. The debate over how to reintegrate millions of soldiers and what rights to afford the 4 million newly freed black Americans created a new sharp divide. Should the South be punished or welcomed back? Who was entitled to government support? This was the climate in which Delphine Baker operated. Her power petition succeeded precisely because it managed to find a rare sliver of common ground that regardless of political stance, the broken bodies of volunteer soldiers could not be ignored. All right, hang on. I need to get a good breath here. Cuz this is a bear of a title. An act to incorporate a national military and naval asylum for the relief of the totally disabled officers and men of the volunteer forces of the United States was signed by President Lincoln on March 3rd, 1865. That was the formal mouthful of the title used in the congressional record, but it is most often referred to as the National Asylum Act. The bill was relatively short compared to its title, but it carried immense legal weight because it did something the federal government had never done before. It took permanent taxpayer-funded responsibility for civilian volunteers. The bill essentially acted as the birth certificate for the modern Department of Veterans Affairs, formalizing a federal obligation that had never existed on such a scale. With its birthing bill, for months she coached a reluctant Congress through the labor of legislative doubt, using to let the power petition be stillborn in committee. Her intervention helped the country move away from the pension-only model, a hands-off approach that essentially handed men a small stipend, left them to fend for themselves in isolated small towns, and pushed it towards a centralized system of clinical and residential care. It was a transition from a government that merely paid its debts to one that actually provided a roof, a bed, and a doctor for those who had borne the battle. And after her legislative triumph, well, Miss Baker's exit from the spotlight was nearly as swift as her rise to influence. Almost immediately after Lincoln signed the bill, the Board of Managers was appointed to take over the homes. While Baker had been the visionary and the primary lobbyist, she wasn't given a seat on the board or an official role in the administration of the home. In the 1860s, the management of a federal military institution was seen as strictly men's work. Baker returned to her roots as a publisher and editor. She continued her work with the National Volunteer, the journal she had used to advocate for the homes. However, without the singular focus of the power petition, her public profile began to fade. The labor of the petition took a heavy toll on her. Baker had spent years living in boarding houses and traveling at her own expense to lobby Congress. And by the late 1860s, records suggested she was struggling financially and physically. As the National Homes in Togus and Dayton grew into massive, bustling campuses, Baker's name was rarely mentioned in the dedication ceremonies. The military generals who managed the homes became the faces of the institution, while the woman who gathered the who's who of America to make it happen was largely relegated to the footnotes. Historical records of Baker's later life are sparse, a common fate for 19th century women who stepped out of their proper sphere for a specific cause. She lived in New York in relative obscurity compared to the celebrity status she held while she was walking the halls of Congress with a petition. >> Too, I know she did spend a lot of time, you know, working on organizing the first hospital, too. So, she was involved with it, but it's just a much more quiet effort to organize and set up sort of a military, you know, type of institution and, you know, make sure they're doing roll call and that kind of stuff. Um it's it's very administrative. So, I don't think she didn't really need to go on a lot of um talks or any kind of speaking circuit or anything. So, I think everything that she does after this effort goes through is very administrative and, you know, so she just kind of you know, fades into into work, you know. >> The debt we veterans owe our defenders is eternal, and so too is our debt to the woman who commanded the nation to pay it. Delphine Baker didn't just advocate. She built the very lifelines that pulled broken men and women back from the brink. Her legacy is etched into the survival of every veteran who found peace, dignity, and justice because she refused to back down. Now, this is just my opinion, but a name that meant life to so many should never be whispered. It should be shouted. And that name is Miss Delphine Baker. 50 years later, a true value of Baker's fight for centralized federal responsibility would be put to the ultimate test. As the US entered World War I, Congress realized that the old pension model was bankrupting the treasury. They wanted a new system that more like a modern insurance policy. So, they passed the War Risk Insurance Act. It established the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, a direct rival to the Pension Bureau. And instead of a pension granted decades later, soldiers could now buy life insurance and receive disability compensation and vocational rehabilitation. This act introduced the ideas of allotments and allowances to support the families of men currently in the field, rather than waiting for wives to become widows. But as World War I veterans returned home, they found a bureaucratic nightmare with three different agencies all handling different parts of a single veteran's claim. The system was so broken that thousands of disabled veterans were left without medical care or checks for months. By 1920, the American veteran benefit system was a bureaucratic shell game designed by three different architects who weren't speaking to each other. Modern warfare, defined by mustard gas and high explosives, required a medical and insurance-based response that 19th century handwritten ledgers just couldn't handle. Imagine you're a doughboy back from the Argonne Forest. Your lungs are scarred from mustard gas. You are caught in a triangle of red tape between the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, Public Health Service, and the Federal Board for Vocational Education. Your life goes like this. The Insurance Bureau has your money, but they won't unlock the vault until a doctor proves you're dying. The Public Health Service has the doctor, but they're so backlogged, you'll be dead before you get an appointment. The Vocational Board has your future, but they only want you if you're just the right amount of broken, disabled enough to need a new job, but healthy enough to work it. It was a Catch-22 in triplicate. You'd be told by the hospital you were too sick to work, told by the school you weren't sick enough to train, and told by the Insurance Bureau that because the two reports didn't match, your check was being voided. Weren't a human being, you were a file folder being drop-kicked between three different buildings. Just look at the mechanics, Schwab. A veteran started training to fix engines. Then his service-connected TB flares up. His lungs are basically on fire, so he's rushed to a sanitarium. Instantly, vocational ed cuts his pay because his attendance is poor. Then the War Risk Bureau stops his disability check because his status is now pending reevaluation. He is lying in a hospital bed, literally suffocating with zero income, while three separate government agencies are arguing over which part of money his life belongs to. In 1920, the war was over, but for the veterans, the siege of paperwork had just begun. Into this multi-agency war zone stepped a man who refused to let wounded doughboys become collateral damage to red tape. Enter Judge Robert S. Marks. Marks wasn't just a detached legal scholar looking for a cause. He was a man fighting for his own survival. He had looked into the abyss of modern warfare and only survived because of the precise institutional medical treatment he received. He knew firsthand what it meant to have your life hanging on the competency of federal care. He looked into the labyrinth of the War Risk Bureau, the Public Health Service, and the Vocational Board, and he saw a grand scale of betrayal. He realized that a fragmented government would always leave disabled veterans isolated, and that a scattered authority was actively costing lives. To fight a broken system, Marks realized veterans needed a unified unbreakable voice. So, he built one. D.A.V. In June 1921, at the first D.A.V. national convention in Detroit, consolidation was the primary mandate. Marks and the early members of D.A.V. took the fight to Washington, arguing that scattered authority was costing lives. Their advocacy was the driving force behind the Sweet Act of August 9th, in Now, Delphine Baker may have been the birthing doula of the VA healthcare, but Judge Robert Marks was the defender who kept it from being strangled by its own red tape. He proved that the contract between a nation and its defenders wasn't just about a financial check, it was about a functional, permanent system of dignified care. The Sweet Act did exactly what DAV demanded. It merged the competing agencies into the US Veterans Bureau, a single entity reporting directly to the president. It created 14 regional offices, moving the checkbook out of DC and closer to the veterans. And for the first time, it established a presumptive period for diseases like tuberculosis and shell shock, which was PTSD, recognizing that the effects of war often took years to surface. The passage of the Sweet Act was DAV's first major legislative victory. It proved that the veterans contract wasn't just about a check, it was about a functional, integrated system of care that treated the whole person. This victory moved the nation out of the 19th century pension era and into the modern era of the Veterans Administration, which followed in 1930. To get this done, Marks had to prove that the system was broken. DAV members began documenting lost cases where veterans had died waiting for a single piece of paper to move from one office to another. They used these tragic receipts to shame Congress, arguing that the government was winning the war but losing the soldier. Legend has it that DAV leaders spent late nights in DC hotels, cornering representatives who were trying to avoid the veteran problem. Because DAV was freshly formed and lacked the massive treasury of older organizations, they relied on personal persuasion. Marks, being a judge, was a master orator. He famously testified before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, essentially putting the US government on trial for negligence. He argued that the Sweet Act was the only way to centralize responsibility and that no veteran should be told it was the other department's fault ever again. Here's just a fun fact, the Sweet Act was named after representative Barton E. Sweet of Iowa. But, within the veteran community, it was known as DAV's baby because of how hard they fought to draft the language of the bill. The next big piece of veteran legislation was the World War Adjusted Compensation Act enacted in 1924. It's one of the most significant and controversial pieces of veteran legislation in American history. It's more commonly known as the Bonus Act and eventually led to one of the biggest protest movements our country has ever experienced. In our next chapter of Benefits of the Doubt, we finally meet the villains of the story of veteran benefits and just to help balance things out, I think chapter five is the perfect time to introduce you to the veterans fairy godmother, too. But, that's next time. Chapter five, The Ashes of Anacostia and the Golden Handshake. I'm Jonathan Copper nickel. Bye for now.