On January 3, 1946, President Harry Truman established the forerunner of today’s Veterans Health Administration when he signed Public Law 79-293, creating the Department of Medicine and Surgery within the Veterans Administration. The bill was the handiwork of three men: General Omar Bradley, the VA Administrator; Dr. Paul Hawley, his chief medical advisor; and Dr. Paul Magnuson, the chair of Northwestern’s Department of Orthopedics. This landmark legislation cemented sweeping changes to Veterans’ health care. The bill exempted medical personnel from the Civil Service hiring regulations, which allowed for doctors and nurses to be selected and appointed more quickly. Additionally, it linked the nation’s medical schools to the VA and initiated a program to construct new VA hospitals.
While the bill was popular with Congress and the public, a last-minute veto push from the U.S. Civil Service Commission threatened to derail its passage. Bradley and Hawley countered the Commission’s objections with their own high-pressure tactics to sway the president. Both threatened to resign on New Year’s Eve if Truman did not sign the legislation. The president chose to side with them and ignore the commission’s entreaties. When the bill became law, Dr. Hawley enthused: “With the signature of the Medical Department Act, our objective is clear, a medical service for the Veteran that is second to none in the world.” He added a promise: “[W]e shall build an outstanding service.”
Equipped with a $500 million budget, Bradley and Hawley set out to make good on that promise and reshape VA health care services. They launched many key initiatives, including the recruitment of 4,000 full-time VA physicians, nurses, technicians, and other medical personnel. They also established the VA Voluntary Service and the Veterans Canteen Service and hired the first 10 female physicians to care for women Veterans. These actions not only improved VA care and increased training opportunities for U.S. physicians but also set the stage for significant growth in VA’s medical research program.
View the Public Law 79-293 (PDF, 5 pages).
By Katie Rories
Historian, Veterans Health Administration
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History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 86: The Roll of Honor
“The following pages are devoted to the memory of those heroes who have given up their lives upon the altar of their country, in defense of the American Union.”
So opened the preface to the first volume of the Roll of Honor, a compendium of over 300,000 Federal soldiers who died during the Civil War and were interred in national and other cemeteries. The genesis of this 27-volume collection published between 1865 and 1871 can be traced to Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs and the department he oversaw for a remarkable 21 years from 1861 to 1882.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 85: Congressman Claypool’s “$1 Per Day Pension” Ribbon
Founded in 1866 as fraternal organization for Union Veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) embraced a new mission in the 1880s: political activism. The GAR formed a pension committee in 1881 for the express purpose of lobbying Congress for more generous pension benefits.
An artifact from the political wrangling over pensions is now part of the permanent collection of the National VA History Center in Dayton, Ohio. The item is a small pension ribbon displaying the message: “I endorse the $1 per day pension as recommended by the Departments of Ohio and Indiana G.A.R.” The button attached to the ribbon features two American flags and the phrase “saved by the boys of ’61-65.” The back of the ribbon bears the signature of Horatio C. Claypool, a Democratic judge who ran for the seat in Ohio’s eleventh Congressional district in the 1910 mid-term elections.
History of VA in 100 Objects
Object 84: Gettysburg Address Tablet
President Abraham Lincoln is one of the most revered figures in American history. Rankings of U.S. presidents routinely place him at or near the top of the list. Lincoln is also held in high esteem at VA. His stirring call during his second inaugural address in 1865 to “care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan” embodies the nation’s promise to all who wear the uniform, a promise VA and its predecessor administrations have kept ever since the Civil War.
Ever since Lincoln first uttered those memorable words in November 1863, the Gettysburg Address has been linked to our national cemeteries. In 1908, Congress approved a plan to produce a standard Gettysburg Address tablet to be installed in all national cemeteries in time for the centennial of President Lincoln’s birth on February 12, 1909.
