World War I

After World War I, Americans discharged from military service faced a difficult homecoming. Many struggled to find work in the tight labor market created by a post-war recession. After a deferred payout, the Bonus Act, was passed, many Veterans marched on the capital to voice displeasure. The Bonus Army soon formed.

VA manages more than 1,700 historic properties, but none older than the Grist Mill and Mansion House on the campus of the Perry Point VA Medical Center in Maryland.

On July 21, 1930, President Herbert C. Hoover signed Executive Order 5398 establishing the Veterans’ Administration (VA), the forerunner of today’s Department of Veterans Affairs. Soon Adminstrator Frank Hines had created a new Veterans' Administration seal to go with the new agency.

To accommodate the growing number of African American Veterans in the south following World War I, the Veterans Bureau opened the Tuskegee Veterans Hospital in 1923 reserved exclusively for their use. Originally called the “Hospital for Sick and Injured Colored World War Veterans,” the installation was staffed entirely by Black doctors and nurses.

On February 22, 2022, the National Cemetery Administration unveiled a wayside sign at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery near seventeen graves of Black World War I soldiers from the 3-24th Infantry executed by the Army as mutineers after a violent, racially driven melee in Houston. The events led to an immediate, historic change to the courts-martial appellate-review process on January 17, 1918.

The present-day Bob Stump VA Medical Center campus in Prescott, Arizona has had a long and interesting history from the time the Arizona Territory was created in 1863. Established as Fort Whipple, the facility transitioned over many years to an eventual VA Medical Center campus.

After a night raid by German forces on Nov. 2, 1917, a group of U.S. soldiers became the first group taken prisoner in WWI. These POWs included Sgt. Edgar Halyburton and Pvt. Clyde Grimsley, and each suffered the privations that occurred in early 20th Century imprisonment.

Katherine Stinson was an early aviation pioneer, becoming the fourth woman to receive a pilot license in the nation. Her flying career took her to the doorsteps of World War I and back.

Florence Standish was a nurse who worked on the historic Asheville VA Medical Center campus in the early 20th Century when the Army maintained the hospital. A photo found by a local VA employee began a journey that helped identify this pioneering nurse.

President Warren G. Harding made a commitment to streamline and improve benefit services for the millions of World War I Veterans in the U.S. In August of 1921, he signed the bill creating the Veterans Bureau, the first independent federal agency to manage all facets of Veterans care. The legacy of the Veterans Bureau lives on in the modern VA, which continues its forerunner’s tradition of service to Veterans and their dependents.

On July 21, 1930, President Hoover signed Executive Order 5398 and the Veterans Administration was created. It would replace the Veterans Bureau and changed how the federal government managed the growing Veteran benefit system.