There was not nearly so much tuberculosis in the Army as the medical authorities had anticipated. In the expectation of a wide prevalence of the disease resulting from the severity of field conditions in France, the Medical Corps established nine tuberculosis hospitals in the United States. Afterwards, although 100,000 of the 4,000,000 men were sent to hospitals as tuberculosis suspects, the positive diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis was confirmed in less than 15,000 cases. The result was that at no time did the Army use more than seven of its tuberculosis hospitals, and after it adopted the policy of discharging tubercular patients on certificates of disability it maintained only two of these hospitals. Discontent and homesickness are deterrents to the cure of tuberculosis, and the Medical Corps generally allowed sufferers from the disease to continue their own cures at home under instructions or to enter the hospitals and sanitariums of the Public Health Service near their own homes.
The other class of disabled ex-service men in need of extended medical treatment were the nervous and mental cases. Such victims were turned over to the Public Health Service, and they constituted the largest class of cases treated by that agency after the armistice.
After a disabled man was discharged from the Service, he automatically became eligible for vocational rehabilitation under the direction of the Federal Board for Vocational Education. The only four conditions were that the man must have been honorably discharged after April 7, 1917, that he must have a disability incurred in, aggravated by, or traceable to, the military service, that the disability must be, in the opinion of the Federal Board, an actual vocational handicap to him, and, lastly, that vocational training was a feasible thing for him. In other words—to clarify the final condition—the Vocational Board would not give training to a lunatic or give training of any sort beyond a man’s mental capabilities. Within these necessary restrictions, however, there was practically no limit to which the Federal Board could not go. Most of its beneficiaries, to be sure, received training in the purely mechanical vocations in shops and factories; but the Board could and did send men to colleges and even to the postgraduate schools of universities. The objective of the Board was not only to overcome by training the man’s physical handicap, but also to carry him forward in training as long as his progress and his mentality warranted it. More than one war veteran found that his disability brought to him educational opportunities which might otherwise never have come his way. The Board possessed funds to pay not only for tuition, textbooks, and incidental expenses, but also for the maintenance of the student and his family, if he had one, while he was in training. According to the number of persons dependent upon the student, the Board was authorized to pay for maintenance as much as $150 a month. At first the disabled men were slow to make application for vocational training; but, once they understood the advantages which were theirs for the asking, there was a great rush to avail themselves of the opportunities thus freely offered by the Government.
The three rehabilitation services, though interdependent in their operation, were independent of each other in their management and control. The Public Health Service conducted the physical examinations on which the War Risk Bureau rated men for their disability allowances. The War Risk Bureau certified men to the Public Health Service for medical treatment, and for vocational training to the Federal Board for Vocational Education. A man could not legally receive his disability allowance from the War Risk Bureau while receiving a training maintenance allowance from the Federal Board. While in effect, therefore, conducting three branches in the single main enterprise of caring for the men left disabled by the war, the three federal agencies were independent in their executive managements. This anomalous arrangement resulted in such distressing delays and stirred up so much discontent among the ex-service men that in the spring of 1921, upon the insistence largely of the American Legion, the veterans’ own organization, the three services were brought together under a single direction.
The agitation which led to the amalgamation of the three welfare services undoubtedly created a wide impression that the Government had neglected the ex-service men. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. The complaint was not against the generosity of the Government, but against the method of administering that generosity. It was often difficult for the ex-service man to obtain the benefits which Congress had provided for him. The lavishness of the hand of Congress is shown by the fact that up to the present (June, 1921) its appropriations of money for ex-service men have amounted in sum to about $800,000,000. This is more money than the Government provided for veterans of the Civil War during the first thirty years after the conclusion of that conflict. The appropriations to date include the money for the physical and vocational rehabilitation of disabled World War veterans, for death claims paid by the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, and for allowances paid by the War Risk Bureau to disabled ex-soldiers, but they do not include the sixty-dollar bonus paid to all ex-service men in 1919. This bonus accounted for about $200,000,000 of the Government’s money. Altogether, therefore, the Government has either paid out or obligated itself to pay out about one billion dollars for the benefit of men who served in the American forces during the World War.
So much for the post-armistice care of the wounded and otherwise disabled. The other principal phase of welfare work for the Army after the armistice had to do with the able-bodied soldiers; and, concretely, it meant getting jobs for them. The War Department did not regard a soldier as completely demobilized until he was once more placed in an occupation in civilian life. The Department could exercise no authority over the veteran once he had received his discharge, but it could and did exercise a friendly solicitude as to his economic future. Therefore the War Department led a nation-wide movement under the slogan, “Jobs for Soldiers”—and that meant jobs for approximately 4,000,000 men thrown suddenly into the labor market just at the time when industry was going through the critical transition from war to peace.
In demobilizing the men of the Army, the War Department adopted a policy the diametric opposite of the British policy of discharging soldiers by trades as they were needed in industry. With our enormous and varied industry, we had everything in our favor to make a success of the industrial plan of troop demobilization; but, nevertheless, the War Department settled upon the questionable policy of discharging the troops by military units, regardless of the effect such a policy might have upon general industrial conditions. As it was, the United States faced an economic crisis in the transition of its war industry, and to inundate the country with unemployed ex-soldiers was only to add to the difficulties of those who were trying to bring industry safely through the readjustment. Later on, the War Department modified its policy by providing that any soldier who faced unemployment after discharge might, upon his own request, be held in the service for a reasonable time while he tried to locate a job for himself in civilian life, and that, on the other hand, if work were waiting for any man not yet in line for immediate discharge, such a man might, upon submitting proper proof that there was a civilian demand for his services, receive his discharge forthwith. The Department permitted officers to take thirty-day leaves of absence with pay while they sought work.
There was, of course, danger that the wholesale outpouring of ex-soldiers upon an industrial field already complaining of a labor surplus would precipitate a business crisis; yet it seemed certain that a wise guidance of the internal affairs of the nation could avert such a calamity. The world was short of almost everything which man consumes, and it seemed evident that it would take several years of brisk production in every field to build up the reserves wasted by war and overtake industrially the demands of the consuming public. It was evident, in short, that there was plenty of work for all, if business did not become hysterical in the face of a difficult transition. The part for the Government to play was to conduct a skillful graduation of war industry into the pursuits of peace and at the same time to take the lead with its own agencies in infiltrating the demobilized troops into the ranks of trade and industry.
Fortunately, for this latter purpose, the Government possessed an agency at hand—the United States Employment Service, a branch of the Department of Labor. The war had built up this organization to great size and usefulness. Its branches covered the United States. Before the armistice it had been instrumental in staffing some of the more important war industrial establishments, particularly the new shipyards and the government powder plants. This agency would have been competent alone to secure employment for all discharged soldiers, but for the circumstance that, in the spring of 1919, there came into office a Congress of a political complexion the opposite to that of the administration. This Congress at once adopted a program of economy, but it was a spurious economy to the extent (which was considerable) that it arbitrarily cut down appropriations needed for important projects. The United States Employment Service received a scant $5,000,000 with which to finance the work of securing civilian employment for 4,000,000 men, when twice that sum would not have been overabundant. The result was that in this final scene of the war the Government was forced to call upon outside and volunteer aid in the conduct of an essential war activity.
At this point the semi-governmental Council of National Defense stepped into the breach. Shorn of most of its purely industrial functions, the Council of National Defense had become largely an organ consolidating and directing all volunteer civilian effort in aid of the Government in its war and demobilization problems. It had built up a field service covering the entire United States, consisting principally of the state and local councils of national defense. Meanwhile, with the expansion of the United States Employment Service restricted by lack of money, the Secretary of War made plans to use some of the emergency war funds in the soldier-employment project and called to Washington Colonel Arthur Woods, the former police commissioner of New York City, making him an assistant to the Secretary of War in charge of all war department activities in reëstablishing service men in civil life. The Director of the Council of National Defense created, in March, 1919, its emergency committee on employment of soldiers and sailors, with Colonel Woods as chairman. The membership of the committee linked up the United States Employment Service and other interested governmental bodies in an emergency organization for Colonel Woods to command. The committee also tied in all state and municipal employment agencies, welfare societies everywhere that were taking part in the solution of the employment problem, and also the thousands of community councils of national defense. Thus was evolved in brief time a fairly efficient employment service of national scope.