Book Review

Among its other qualifications for being the king of American bureaucracy, the Veterans Administration currently maintains, and has for some time been, the largest health care system in the nation. Given such obvious "state-building" appeal, one can only be surprised to note the scant attention that the Veterans Administration has received from historians. However, Patrick J. Kelly's new work, Creating a National Home, provides an important corrective to this oversight. It does so by telling the story of the forerunner to the now-dominant VA hospital system: the "national homes" set up by the Reconstruction Congress for Union veterans of the Civil War.	1
Kelly traces the story of the National Home for Disabled Veterans (NHDVS) to its earliest contemplation by the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) during the Civil War. As the Union's most powerful state-building engine, the USSC consideration and later abandonment of the project for disabled veterans represented, Kelly argues, "a lost opportunity" (50). Dismayed by the notorious European example of asylum care, the USSC instead opted to encourage the reintegration of disabled soldiers back into their community, workplace, and home. This strategy left care of the veterans in "local, private, and female hands" (10) and Kelly sketches the sort of philanthropic assistance that middle- and upper-class women worked to provide for the returning soldiers.	2
As the central state gradually released itself from commitment to the Union soldiers and female philanthropy worked to fill the void, there seemed to be little prospect for developing institutional assistance to the needy veterans. But, as seems to be the case for much late nineteenth-century politics, in stepped partisan politics where others feared to tread. A Republican machine eager to keep Union veterans within its coalition to counter the sectional strength of the Democratic South had every incentive for generosity, as earlier histories of Union pensions have already demonstrated. In wresting the care of veterans away from female philanthropists, party leaders, as Kelly spends considerable time discussing, adopted the reassuring language of domesticity; a rhetorical move that, he argues, allowed acceptance of an institution that seemed so antithetical to American notions of community and family.	3
In his most vivid and fully formed chapters, Kelly creates a picture of life in the NHDVS system, drawing from a very realistic, ambivalent argument that the care in the homes was "at once generous and confining" (127). For instance, though the diet in the homes was plentiful and regular (and therefore superior to what many of these veterans could expect in the care of their own communities), residents had only fifteen minutes to eat their meals. Such regimentation was a fact of institutional life, and it certainly must have been a major reason for what Kelly reveals to be a cyclical pattern of admission, discharge, and later readmission for many soldiers in NHDVS' care. Kelly provides other quotidian aspects of life in the homes, including its all-important relationship to the surrounding community, and in so doing he leaves the reader with an expanded understanding of late nineteenth-century culture and society.	4
The success of the homes "thickened," in Kelly's words, the relationship between state and society and provided an important precursor for the social citizenship of the twentieth century. That such a precocious development was possible can be attributed to the two structuring arguments of Kelly's work: the potency of "martial citizenship" and the particular brand of local-regional-federal control that built the NHDVS. Of the two, Kelly pays more attention to the first, and he does so with scrupulous citing of other historical work on classes of citizenship and their relationship to welfare provision. The second argument reinforces another genre of scholarship (heretofore centered around political parties, the courts, and another federal bureaucracy, the Post Office) in its argument that there existed routes in American politics that successfully negotiated between the poles of localism and state building. As Kelly points out, "given the right circumstances, localism and state expansion could complement each other neatly," and certainly any brief review of the veterans' history in this country confirms their success at finding and turning to their advantage such circumstances (180).	5
That there exists a relationship between these two arguments, one of political claim and the other of institutional structure, is the truly exciting aspect of Creating a National Home. This connection, though it is not there in explicit presentation, is apparent through narrative, and it is one of many good reasons for historians to further inquire into Kelly's work.	6
Kathleen Frydl University of Chicago

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