History of VA in 100 Objects

Smoke issuing from open-air burn pit at Joint Base Balad in Iraq in 2008. Burn pit emissions exposed troops to chemicals, particulate matter, and other toxic substances.

After World War II, U.S. Army investigators in the Philippines turned over a huge collection of captured documents, intelligence reports, press clippings, and Japanese banks checks to the VA office in Manila. The Manila office stored the collection in the “Loyalty Room,” so named because VA used the checks and other records to evaluate the wartime allegiance of Filipino Veterans applying for benefits.

In 1958, the Veterans of Foreign Wars conducted a nationwide survey of VA medical facilities. Its report spurred VA to undertake a multi-year improvement plan to revitalize its historic medical center campuses.

After World War I, the government revamped the way it evaluated disability claims resulting from military service. It replaced the inexact methods used to calculate pensions with a fixed schedule of disability ratings that represented the reduction in the Veteran’s earning capacity.

In 1918, the government created the first nationwide vocational training system to help disabled Veterans acquire new occupational skills and find meaningful work. Over the next 10 years, more than 100,000 Veterans completed training programs in every field from agriculture and manufacturing to business and photography.

In a first, the 1840 census collected data on Veterans and widows receiving a pension from the federal government. The government published its findings in a stand-alone volume titled “A Census of Pensioners for Revolutionary or Military Services.”

The Southern Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers opened in Hampton, Virginia, in late 1870. The circumstances surrounding the purchase of the property, however, prompted an investigation into the first president of the National Home’s Board of Managers, Benjamin Butler.

During World War I and afterwards, the United States committed to rehabilitating sick and wounded soldiers so they could resume productive lives in the civilian workforce. The emerging field of occupational therapy played a crucial role in the rehabilitative process.

The expansion of the Civil War pension system was a cash windfall for pension attorneys. These lawyers used their legal know-how to help Veterans obtain benefits, but they were also accused of exploiting their clients and fleecing the government.

In 1933, VA staff presented agency chief Frank Hines with a scrapbook commemorating his ten years of service to Veterans. Intended as a personal keepsake for Hines, the scrapbook also offers a snapshot of a particular time in VA history.

Seamen 1st Class Raymond Emory survived the attack on Pearl Harbor. Decades later, his research and advocacy led the government to add ship names to the markers of the Pearl Harbor unknowns interred in the National Cemetery of the Pacific.

In 1949, VA produced a 19-minute film titled “You Can Lick TB.”  The film follows a fictional conversation between a bedridden Veteran with tuberculosis and his VA doctor, dramatizing through brief vignettes the different stages of TB treatment and recovery.