Benefits of the Doubt: Chapter Three: Moleskins, Russian spies and a 40% Fever Dream

Welcome to the DAV podcast. I'm Jonathan Cope Hanger 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. >> [music] [music] >> Chapter 3 Moskins, Russian spies, and a 40% fever dream. >> [music] >> In 1810, it was called the Military Bounty Lands and Pension Branch. >> [music] >> Around 1815, it evolved into the loosely structured Pension Bureau. In its first few years, the entire bureau consisted of just 18 clerks. Their job was to check handwritten letters against old, fire-damaged muster rolls from the 1770s. Formal consolidation of the Pension Bureau didn't happen until 1833. Originally, the Pension Bureau was part of the War Department because pensions were seen as a military matter. But by 1849, the US created the Department of the Interior to handle domestic home front issues. The bureau is moved there, signaling a shift. Pensions were now viewed as a social obligation of the government rather than just a military expense. >> [music] >> By 1860, the bureau thought its work was almost done. The Revolutionary War veterans were nearly all gone, and the bureau was [music] preparing to downsize its staff. At the time, there were only about 11,000 people on the pension rolls in total, and the annual cost was roughly $1 million. [music] Then in 1861, the Civil War [music] broke out. Within 4 years, those 11,000 pensioners turned into hundreds of thousands, >> [music] >> and that $1 million budget exploded into the hundreds of millions. By 1860, only 325 people applied for new pensions. By the end of the war in 1865, [music] that number jumped up to over 75,000 per year. The bureau had to hire hundreds of clerks just to process the literal miles of paperwork. And because the War Department held the medical and service records, the Pension Bureau became the middleman, >> [music] >> constantly verifying injuries with the military. The United States [music] Pension Bureau was the powerhouse of the federal government during the 19th and early 20th century. At its peak, it managed the single largest expense of the federal budget, a whopping 40% of all spending. And it operated out of one of the most magnificent [music] buildings in Washington, D.C. The Pension Building, now the National Building Museum here in D.C., was built by U.S. Army [music] Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs to serve as a memorial to Civil War veterans. You can find other examples [music] of General Meigs' work here in D.C. He supervised the construction of the wings and iron dome of the U.S. Capitol, and he [music] played a major role in developing Arlington National Cemetery. But the building he designed to help take care of veterans is something to behold. Designed in 1880, he included several intentional universal design features well before that term existed, specifically to aid [music] Civil War veterans. The most famous accessibility feature is the design of the staircase. Meigs designed them with [music] unusually shallow risers and extra-wide treads. The benefit was a gradual ascent, making it significantly easier for veterans [music] with prosthetic limbs, crutches, or respiratory issues to climb between floors without overexertion. I have been to the building museum, and I remember [music] saying to my friend that I really liked walking up the stairs. It's something that you notice right away if you visit, especially if like me you have a bad back. It's [music] super, super noticeable. Now, I do want to give a quick shout-out to the Society of Architectural Historians before we go further with our story. I don't know anything about 19th-century architecture, and I didn't have the first idea who to talk to about it, either. But they did. [music] They connected me with Ian Stevenson. Ian is a lecturer in preservation studies at Boston University, and is exactly who we need to hear from about how the government used buildings as benefits. >> [music] >> Ian explains that General Meigs was really a product of his time, and the time was changing how it dealt with things. >> There were no fixed rules at this time, really just conventions based on accumulated wisdoms of builders for centuries. But, you know, designers of buildings of all kinds made choices based on the needs or available materials, and they were constantly adapting. So, it's why we see so much variety in historic architecture and why old buildings are often permitted to be non-code compliant to this day. Earlier buildings in the colonial period tended to have very steep staircases, and by the Victorian period, the staircase had changed from being a purely functional piece of a house of a building to being something a bit more performative. So, in this Victorian era, staircases became front and center in buildings. And it was actually a space that visitors were meant to watch the owner of the house kind of descend the stairs into a sort [music] of waiting hallway. And it was a bit of a kind of social control. So, staircases were already becoming shallower as a way of sort of inviting the homeowner to kind of descend the stairs. So, so if you look in older building, they're very steep and very functional. And so, we were already headed this direction. So, Meigs was was within a cultural moment. However, I do think he was also responding to a need of veterans. And I can give an example of another building where something similar happened. So, in Maine, there's a cottage that Union veterans built as a summer retreat. [music] And they actually created ground floor bedrooms for infirm veterans so that they didn't have to go up the stairs. And in fact, as more and more veterans became infirm as the years passed, they moved the dining room and the kitchen to a different level to create more ground floor bedroom space. So, >> [music] >> designers were kind of working within the needs of their constituents. >> The Pension Building's northern entrance, called the Gate of the Invalids, was positioned to provide the most direct access for veterans arriving specifically to file disability claims or seek medical-related assistance. The exterior terracotta frieze above the entrance specifically depicts a medical wagon and wounded soldiers, signaling to veterans that this was their dedicated space. >> Architectural historian Dell Upton has actually done some writing about how Americans, [music] in particular, can use physical spaces to define a community through what he calls artificial homelands that are designed to include some and exclude others. And so, in the case of Civil War veterans, [music] the distinction there might be between post-war civilians and those who had experienced the wars you know horrors first hand and so embedded imagery or motif >> [music] >> are this kind of external projection that's tied to an internal knowledge to let individuals know they're part of a kind of a collective right of a group and so the architecture is intentionally doing this as a form of storytelling so what Meigs is doing here is for wounded soldiers but this happened at other sites associated with Union veterans. So for example in 1885 just 2 years before the Pension Building was completed the headquarters building of the New Hampshire Veterans Association at Weirs Beach was built and it has its own freeze that has the every single core badge of the Union Army in sequence the first core second core etc. which were symbols that were readily known to the men and was meant to sort of imbue this sense of belonging. >> And while not a direct physical feature for the veterans Meigs installed an elevated document tract and dumbwaiters. This allowed the clerks to move the heavy pension files rapidly between the floors and was meant to reduce wait times for veterans as the bureau was managing over a million active claims at its peak. Once again here's Ian with more information. >> And this was all rapidly changing just in the moment that the Pension Building was being designed. So if it was 10 years earlier we may not have gotten there. What's considered the first skyscraper in the world the Home Insurance Building in Chicago was completed in 1885 so just 2 years before the Pension Building and it was the first building to use a steel skeleton shrouded in masonry. So essentially it was an efficient industrial product but made to look like something more familiar more classical that the public would understand. It was able to achieve new heights without adding massive width. So masonry buildings, the taller they go, the wider they have to be to sort of support their own structure. But, when you start to use steel frames, you can have buildings that are much more efficiently designed for space. And so, the architect of that Home Insurance Building, William Le Baron Jenney, knew the public would be skeptical of a steel building, and would be afraid of it. So, he puts a masonry facade to give people a sense of comfort. And it's no surprise that the build or or coincidence that the building is an insurance company, which is also meant to sort of project the idea of safety and comfort. So, Bigs this building off of the success of the Home Insurance Building by combining, in his case, this you know, marvel of structural steel [music] for weight-bearing for all those documents and things, but again, shrouding it in a classical facade for the sort of aesthetics of a monument that would be more readily understood by the public at that time. >> The Corinthian columns, just fun to say that. The Corinthian columns in the main hall were the largest in the world at the time. >> [music] >> And sitting there, unseen and waiting, are countless government documents that Big stuffed inside the hollow columns on the first and second floor arcades, which he thought would be interesting to the historians or the antiquarians of the age when the ruins of this building shall be open to the curious. That's a flowery 19th century way of saying, "Giggle, giggle, they're going to like this." And that's the building. Now, let's see what happened inside. Before 1832, pensions were seen as welfare, and you had to prove you were poor. >> [music] >> The 1832 Act turned pensions into a property right, and since veterans now had full pay for life, that money was legally considered part of their estate. When these veterans began dying, their widows argued that since the pension was an earned debt, it shouldn't simply vanish when the husband died. This legal shift made the 1836 Widow's Bill a logical next step rather than a brand new concept. Now, the 1836 Act finally recognized the earned rights of a veteran's family, but it's often considered a failure in its initial execution because of how many women it left behind. This failure, really three of them, is now seen as the final hurdle in the transition from charity to a true veteran's contract. The biggest snag [music] was the strict eligibility requirements. A widow could only receive the pension if she had been married to the veteran before or during his military service. The problem was most soldiers were young men and didn't marry until after they returned from the war. This excluded the vast majority [music] of war widows. And because the 1832 Act had been hit hard by fraud, the 1836 Act required extreme proof of marriage [music] at a time when public records were often nonexistent. If they couldn't provide a document, they had to find a witness [music] to testify. And for a woman in her 80s, finding a living witness to a wedding that happened in the 1770s was often an impossible task. And this roadblock was kept in place for a long time. And this became a problem for Charity Snyder, a Civil War widow living in Long Rapids, Michigan. She had to prove her marriage [music] to her late husband, James J. Van Lou, a Union soldier, to receive her widow's pension in 1900. Charity had to get creative when [music] it came to proving her marriage. She found an envelope but had lost the original letter from James that was addressed to my dear wife. However, she still had a very [music] special love token James had sent her from the front. During the war, a mole infiltrated James's [music] tent. Now, we're actually talking the rat-like thing and not a sneaky person. Either as a gesture or a joke, James killed it and sent [music] the pelt to Charity. Because the gift was so bizarre, it left a lasting impression [music] on those who saw it. Charity was able to provide four testimonials from friends who vividly remember the letter and the moleskin [music] from years earlier. Charity then wrapped moleskin in a note and sent it directly to the Pension Bureau as physical proof of their relationship. Charity was granted [music] her pension and today that moleskin remains in her application file and it's just one of [music] the 1.28 million Civil War Widow files in the National Archives. And then there is the remarriage penalty. If a widow remarried, she immediately lost her pension. This created an unintended consequence where elderly widows decided to live in adulterous cohabitation to avoid losing their only source of income. This led to further social stigma and legal battles as the government eventually began investigating the private lives of these women to find grounds to terminate their benefits. In the 1880s, the Bureau employed hundreds of special examiners. But unlike the clerks in Washington, these men were stationed in the field. By 1897, there were about 342 examiners stationed across the country. Think of them as the precursor to today's Inspector Generals. But their job was to investigate suspicious [music] claims. Most investigations targeted disreputable lawyers who took illegal fees from veterans or invented fake soldiers to pocket the money. While they caught many legitimate fraudsters, special examiners also became a tool of discrimination. African-American veterans of the United States Colored Troops and their widows were targeted [music] far more frequently for investigations. They often used their power to pry into the sexual and social lives of black widows looking for any immoral behavior they could use as a legal excuse to strip them of their pension. [music] That said, one of the most notorious fraud cases ever handled at the Pension Bureau involved a Russian aristocrat and Union spy, Captain Charles D. Arnauld. Well, at least he said he was a spy and an aristocrat and that his name was Charles D. Arnauld. D. Arnauld was a minor celebrity in Washington D.C. at the time. He claimed to be a Russian military engineer and a Crimean War veteran who had offered his services to the Union at the start of the Civil War. He claimed he had been a secret agent for General John Fremont. He swore he had been captured, tortured, and wounded in the head and leg while scouting behind Confederate lines. And he even claimed that Abraham Lincoln had personally told him that the nation owed him a debt of gratitude. For 20 years he lobbied Congress for a $50,000 payout. This would be millions in today's money. And a Medal of Honor. While waiting for his big payday, he filed for a standard disability pension claiming his old battle wounds made him unfit for work. The Bureau was suspicious but couldn't prove he was lying until a coincidence happened in May 1890. A doctor in Arkansas named Alfred Arnauld filed his own pension claim. When the clerks pulled Dr. Arnauld's service record, they realized that D. Arnauld had claimed he served under the exact same alias. Dr. Arnauld had a perfect, verifiable record of service. The examiner dug deeper and found that D. Arnauld had never seen the combat he described. In August 1890, a grand jury indicted D. Arnauld for presenting a false claim. The news was a national sensation and D. Arnauld's quest for the 50 grand ended in disgrace. >> [music] >> The failure of the 1836 Widows Act was so apparent that it forced Congress into a 20-year cycle of patchwork laws to fix the problem. In 1838, they relaxed the rule to include widows married before [music] 1794, but only gave them a 5-year pension. >> [music] >> In 1848, anyone married before 1800 could receive a life pension. And the real victory came in 1853, ending the 70-year-long argument between the government's wallet and nation's conscience. Congress finally removed all marriage date restrictions. The nation finally admitted that the debt owed to a veteran extended to his family, regardless of when they wed. While the public celebrated the patriotism of age of veterans like Joseph Winter, politicians in Washington were sounding the alarm. >> [music] >> They feared the Widows' Pension Act had created a market where young women traded their youth for a veteran's recession-proof federal check. To the skeptics, these May-December matches were a fiscal disaster. To the veterans, they were a final desperate lifeline of care. The reality was these weren't just marriages, they were the first informal long-term care plans in American history. And on November 12th, 1906, let me see that date one more time, November 12th, 1906, the New York Times marked the end of the Revolutionary War Widows' Pension era with this headline, "Last Revolutionary War Widow Dead." >> [music] >> Mrs. Esther Damon, 92 years old, passed away at Plymouth, Vermont. Esther was born in 1814, during the War [music] of 1812. She married Noah Damon, a veteran of the Continental Army in 1835 when she was 21 and he was 75. And while we're on the last of things, the very last person in the US to receive a Civil War pension died on May 31, 2020. Irene Triplett was only 8 years old when her father Moses died in 1838. He was 83 when she was born in 1930. Her mother, Alida Hall, was Moses' second wife and was about 50 years younger than him. Under the rules of the Pension Bureau, a veteran's pension usually ended when the veteran or the widow died. >> [music] >> However, there was a specific exemption for a helpless children. Irene had cognitive impairments that began before she was 18 and that classified her as a helpless child of a veteran. And that entitled her to a lifetime survivor benefit of $73.13 each month. Now, to help put this in perspective, when the pension was first authorized, the primary mode of long-distance communication [music] was the telegraph. And the fastest transport was a steam locomotive. By the time the last check was issued, Irene could have used a smartphone to watch a live-stream of a private rocket docking with International Space Station. Times sure changed. >> [music] >> The final brick laid in the foundation of what we now know as the Department of Veterans Affairs [music] happened on March 3, 1865 when President Abraham Lincoln signed the National Soldiers Asylum Act. And while the Pension Bureau handled the check in the mail, the Asylum Act addressed the physical reality of the broken army. Hundreds of thousands [music] of men returning from the Civil War with missing limbs, soldiers' heart, which was PTSD, and no family to take care of them. In the Victorian times, the word asylum meant a place of sanctuary [music] and safety, not a psychiatric ward. In 1737, the name was changed to the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers to remove any lingering stigma of [music] asylum. Before 1865, a disabled veteran without a family often ended up in a local almshouse or poor farm alongside the destitute mentally ill. [music] Here's Ian Stevenson again. >> So, the design of these facilities was twofold. One was to support the veterans, right, and their caretaking and treatment, but it was also about keeping them physically separated from the larger community both for their own benefits but but as well as creating a sort of um image of veteranhood at this time. So, you know, unfortunately, many veterans with both physical and hidden wounds in the 19th century turned to self-medication such as alcohol and opiates to cope. And so, federal and state governments were keen to reduce that dependency A, but also remove it from the public eye in order to minimize the stigmas against veterans that were already kind of emerging in this period. So, for instance, having a drinking establishment, a canteen as they were called, on the campus kept veterans that wanted to have alcohol on site instead of going into town and drinking and perhaps over consuming and then create, you know, adding to the sort of stigma of the drunk veteran. [music] This was also the era of the rise of the temperance movement, so alcohol consumption in general was becoming more and more uncouth and seen as sort of unmasculine, really. So, you know, the the government was was understood that these men who were masculine in sort of the sense of serving their country, they didn't want to undercut >> [music] >> that um you know, from the war experience by having their consumption of these um things uh front and center. >> [music] >> But, at the same time it wasn't only about that. Having centralized facilities actually allowed for efficiencies of scale, right? To to manage the sheer number of veterans in need. And as you mentioned, aging populations, this just grew as time went on and more became informed. So, um, [music] you know, on the plus side, it really reflects the acknowledgement by the government, both federal and then also at some of these state facilities, that they needed to provide services to this class of people and not rely entirely on charitable organizations, you know, nonprofit, um, entities, which was the case in the past. >> The 1865 Act declared that men who were invalidated by service deserved a dedicated federal space. >> [music] >> The Act created a series of branches across the country. These weren't just barracks, they were massive, self-sustaining campuses. >> [music] >> And helping us with more information on these is VA chief historian, Mike Visconich. >> There was a surprising amount of thought when you go back [music] and read some of the um, some of the diaries of the time, some of the the [music] reports of the campuses, the efforts that were made to go out of the way to do things that that made it more comfortable for the veterans. [music] And an interesting research we did, uh, that was done on, uh, Thanksgiving celebrations and Christmas celebrations on the campuses. They did, [music] um, raise some of their own crops, they raised some of their own animals to the degree possible. You know, veterans had jobs on the campuses and uh, this idea of of >> [music] >> uh, not only a place for them to be to be, you know, they weren't warehoused there. There [music] was a lot of thought to to it being more than that. Both on the immediate thinking of how they were established and how they evolved in terms of the relationships with the administration on the campuses, but veterans themselves played [music] a key part in driving some of the the additional things they chose to do on campuses to enhance their own lives. >> [music] >> The first three were the Eastern Branch in Togus, Maine, the Central Branch in Dayton, Ohio, and the Northwestern Branch in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. >> [music] >> These homes featured libraries, theaters, farms, and even post offices. They were designed to help keep veterans active and productive. [music] Initially, the law was strict. Only those who were totally disabled in the line of duty could apply for these homes. >> [music] >> However, as a Civil War generation aged, the government realized that old age was its own form of disability. So, by 1884, eligibility was expanded to include any veteran who couldn't support himself, regardless of whether his disability was combat-related. This transformed the homes from hospitals for the wounded into retirement communities for the aged. And just like [music] the Pension Building in DC, the Soldiers' Homes were built to be grand and beautiful. This was a deliberate choice. By building palaces for disabled veterans, the government was signaling to the public that these men were not charity cases. They were honored guests of a grateful nation. In fact, in the late 19th century, [music] the Dayton Branch of the National Homes was not just a hospital, it was the Disneyland of the Gilded Age. By the 1880s, it was attracting over 15,000 people annually. And by 1910, that number peaked at a staggering 660,000 [music] every year. To put that in perspective, Dayton's population at the time was only about 116,000. [music] Here's Mike with more. >> There was beautiful grounds. There was over 500 acres at that time. There was a beautiful garden grotto that the that the veterans had created themselves. [music] They had created these fishing ponds. They again the parades they held, the zoo, the uh What a great place as [music] a destination. >> And the crown jewel of the campus was the grotto. It started as a limestone [music] quarry used to source stone for the home's building. A veteran resident and [music] former florist named Frank Mundt, a German immigrant who served in the Union Army during the Civil War, saw the jagged [music] empty pit and began planting vines and flowers in the rock crevices. Over time it evolved into a lush green paradise with exotic tropical plants brought out from the steam heated greenhouses. It featured man-made lakes, [music] waterfalls, and stone arches that were considered more beautiful than New York's Central Park at the time. Month would go on to become the chief gardener for the [music] entire national home system. And while the term garden therapy didn't exist yet, Month was an early pioneer of horticultural therapy. He eventually [music] led a crew of fellow veterans who found that working in the soil was much more effective than any 19th century medicine for their shattered nerves. The board of managers for the branch believed that wholesome recreation was part of a soldier's rehabilitation. To entertain the veterans and the public, they established a full-scale [music] zoo and park. The grounds featured a deer park with over 50 domesticated deer, a buffalo paddock, and enclosures [music] for wolves, bears, foxes, elk, but the most famous attraction [music] was a pond filled with alligators complete with an indoor nursery for their babies. Victorian era tourism [music] had a strong patriotic and sometimes voyeuristic streak. Tourists came specifically to see the men in blue. Again, here's Mike. >> So, at its peak of the latter of the the turn of the 19th of the 20th [music] century, over 600,000 annual visitors of that era in the United States, fascinating. They had to build a hotel right off campus for the visitors. They built an extra rail spur line to get visitors, you know, out to the campus. You know, at its peak it had uh about 8,000 veterans in residence. So, you just imagine this thriving community with all of these things going on. Absolutely, people want to come out and listen to the band and watch the parade, all of these things. And good for them, good for the veterans. Just a really, you know, a unique relationship that um wasn't wasn't particular necessarily just today. I mean, this was this was part of that national home experience. Depending a little variance, depending on how many residents and in location. >> Visitors would gather at the parade grounds to watch thousands of veterans, many with empty sleeves and wooden legs, perform military maneuvers and marching drills to the music of the home band. The veterans lived a regulated life, wearing their Union blue uniforms and responding to bugle calls. For the public, this was a living monument to the Civil War. The campus was designed as a city within a city with high-end facilities. The hotel housed overnight guests who arrived by train. And the trains would come from as far away as Cleveland and Cincinnati. Railroads would offer a special soldiers home picnic excursion, dropping tourists directly off at the gate. >> That is so fascinating to me, right? We really have a hard time conceptualizing that today. But, in the period, one couple of practical why, the why? Well, one, to visit veterans, so you may have had a a family member and the idea um that that was [music] a something that you wanted to do and and they do was certainly great, but you know, I talk about how the veterans did things, you know, to create some things to make their lives [music] better. Well, you know, they these parades, the band, for instance, the band, in one newspaper report, [music] uh the band in particular, again, the Central Home was written up as being second only to John Philip Sousa's band. So, in that era of the late 1800s, that was the era of those Sousa-style [music] bands, right? And in the era before radio, in the era before other entertainment, well, gosh. >> The Dayton branch was ahead of its time in several respects, most notably in its demographic makeup. It housed a significant portion of the United States [music] Colored Troop, a force that comprised roughly 10% of the Union Army. Even as the nation retreated into the era of Jim Crow and Reconstruction era tensions, the Dayton branch maintained a complex [music] racial landscape that, while different from modern standards, represented a unique social experiment for the 19th century. Mike explains for us a little bit better. >> So, the idea of of segregation is we can find it is that in those early days it wasn't so much there was a formal segregation, but the way that the campus was set up was oh, uh units barracks together. So, if you were a US Colored Troop, you were in the US Colored Troop barracks. And guess what? You attended to eat at the the the dining table with your buddies from the US Colored Troops or the 7th Cavalry or whatever you you know, you you might have been with. So, it sort of played out that way for quite a while. Later, we started to see, you know, a more formal segregation, you know, language in certain um aspects. But, I think, you know, what is interesting, you know, in that era where we're figuring out as a nation, right, how to remedy this this this ill. And what to do with our victory, you know, in the Civil War was you know, um there were it wasn't very specific in the sense that um whether you were African-American or whether you well or or white or whatever or if you were another minority, the benefits were exactly the same. >> As the 19th century turned into the 20th, the Civil War generation was passing away. By World War I and World War II, the focus of veteran care shifted from shelter and scenery to modern clinical medicine. The zoo was dismantled. The ornate gardens fell into disrepair, although they have been recently restored, and the campus transitioned into the high-tech Dayton VA Medical Center that exists today. Now, it does need to be stated at some point that there was a difference between being a Union veteran and a Confederate veteran. To put it bluntly, in the eyes of the federal government, Confederate soldiers weren't veterans. They were insurrectionists. >> [music] >> Under the Constitution, levying war against the United States is defined as treason. A government does not traditionally reward people for trying to overthrow it. Providing federal pensions to Confederate veterans would have been a legal admission that the Confederacy was a legitimate separate nation, rather than a collection of states in rebellion. And they didn't just create a policy, they had it written into the supreme law of the land. Section 4 of the 14th Amendment explicitly prohibits the US and individual states from paying any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection of rebellion against the United States. The disparity between Union and Confederate veterans benefits was massive, largely because they were funded by two completely different sources. Union veterans were supported by [music] the federal treasury. Confederate veterans had to rely on individual southern states, many of which were economically devastated for decades after the war. By 1900, nearly 95% of Union veterans were receiving some sort of benefit, while many Confederate veterans received nothing at all, or waited decades for a small state-funded stipend. >> [music] >> Public Law 85-425 [music] was passed in 1958 to fix this. Almost a century after the war ended, and long after almost every Confederate veteran [music] had passed away. By the time it passed, there were no undisputed surviving Confederate veterans left to collect the money. It did, however, provide federal [music] support to roughly 1,000 surviving widows of Confederate veterans who were still alive at the time. >> [music] >> Now, technically, there were a couple of other laws passed earlier that gave Confederate veterans benefits. In 1906, the Act of March 9th authorized [music] federal headstones for those who died in Union prisons. Then Public Law 810 in 1929 authorized federal headstones for all Confederate graves. >> [music] >> The big kicker at the time was the Arrears Act of 1879. It allowed veterans to claim back pay for the years that they should have been eligible. This resulted in an average lump sum check of nearly $1,000 at a time when the average worker earned only $400 a year. No such windfall ever existed for Confederate veterans. The Arrears Act was arguably the most significant and controversial turning point for the Pension Bureau. It transformed the [music] pension system from a relatively modest social and safety net >> It's the money. >> into a massive federal entitlement program that dominated the US budget for decades. >> Money. >> Basically, it was the 19th century version of back pay on a national scale. Before 1879, if a veteran waited 10 years after the war to apply for a disability pension, his payment only started from the date the application was approved. He lost [music] those 10 years of potential benefits. The Arrears Act changed that rule. It stated that if a veteran's claim was granted, [music] the government owed him a lump sum covering the entire period from the date of his discharge, which was usually 1865, [music] to the date the pension was granted. For many veterans, this resulted in a sudden, life-changing check. A veteran who was receiving a modest $8 [music] a month, who was finally approved in 1880, might receive a check for roughly $1,400, [music] which was nearly 45 grand today. And this was often more cash than a farmer or laborer >> [music] >> would see in a decade. The act triggered an absolute frenzy. In the year following its passage, the number of new pension claims more than doubled. And a new industry emerged, pension attorney. Today, we sometimes refer to these cats as claim sharks. These pension attorneys would scour the country to find veterans who hadn't applied yet, charging fees to help [music] them file for the arrears windfall. And since the stakes were now so high, veterans began claiming internal or invisible disabilities like rheumatism, chronic diarrhea, ugh, or general debility that was hard for the doctors to disprove 15 years after the war. The financial impact was staggering and again completely underestimated by Congress. Before the act, the government spent about 27 million a year on pensions. By the late 1880s, [music] that number ballooned to over a hundred million dollars. This is why the Pension Bureau eventually consumed over 40% of the entire federal budget. The Arrears Act split the country's opinion in two. Supporters argued it was a simple matter of justice. The government had owed the money since 1865. The date of the paperwork shouldn't matter. Critics, including many newspapers, called it a pillage of the treasury. They argued it incentivized healthy men to fake illnesses and turned the noble Grand Army of the Republic into a lobbyist group for pauperism. The Arrears Act is what necessitated the special examiners and the high-tech filing system General Meigs designed for the Pension Bureau. It turned the Pension Bureau from a small office into a surveillance state. Because when the government is cutting a thousand-dollar checks in 1880, they suddenly care very much if a widow has remarried or if a veteran's limp is actually from a war wound. Between 1879 and 1921, the US government underwent a massive transformation on how it handled veterans. This period saw the pension system evolve from a disability only program into what was effectively the first national social security and old age retirement system. The big one though was the Dependent and Disability Act of 1890. It shifted the entire philosophy of veteran care. Before 1890, you had to prove your disability was caused by the war. This act allowed any veteran who served 90 days >> [music] >> and was incapacitated for manual labor to receive a pension, regardless of how or when they were injured. It turned the pension into a universal disability benefit. >> [music] >> By 1893, nearly 1 million people were on the rolls and the Pension Bureau was spending over $100 million a year, the largest single expense of the federal government. As the Civil War generation reached their 60s and 70s, it became harder to distinguish between war injuries and just getting old. So, Congress passed the Act of February 6th, [music] 1907. This act was the first to use age as a qualifier. If you were an honorably discharged veteran of the Civil War or Mexican War and reached [music] age 62, you were automatically eligible for a pension. This officially turned the veteran benefit system into an old age pension. It was the first time [music] the US government provided a retirement check based solely on age and service. The Sherwood Act of 1812 [music] was a thank you to the aging boys in blue. It significantly increased the monthly rates and made the age-based tiers even more generous. And that does it for chapter three. In chapter four, we discover [music] a woman who couldn't vote, but somehow commanded the signatures of the nation's most powerful men to design the blueprint for what became the largest [music] integrated health care system in the world. Then fast forward to the aftermath of World War I, where wounded doughboys survived mustard gas, only to find themselves trapped in a bureaucratic shell game of red tape. But that's next [music] time in chapter four. And it's called "There are two Ds in v e t [music] e r a n s b e n e f i t s". I'm Jonathan Kropfinger. >> [music] >> Bye for now.