AFRH and The Department of Veterans Affairs
“When the Civil War began on April 12, 1861, it is estimated America had 80,000 Veterans from previous conflicts, who were treated at a handful of Veterans homes scattered across the nation. The Civil War added more than 1.9 million Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines to the rolls.” The U.S. Soldiers Home and the Philadelphia Naval Home were completely inadequate to this challenge: thus the “National Asylum for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers,” a system of eleven homes with attached hospitals that were build across the country between 1865 and 1930. These institutions, the foundation of the Dept of Veterans Affairs, today have the mission of “hospitalization and rehabilitation and return, as soon as possible, of veterans to civilian life….” The Department of Veterans Affairs provides representatives to sit on the “Armed Forces Home Trust Fund.” Otherwise, the Armed Forces Retirement Home, an agency of the Dept of Defense, has no connection whatever to the VA, beyond the historical one, and is today primarily a retirement home.
Read more about this topic: Armed Forces Retirement Home
Famous quotes containing the words department, veterans and/or affairs:
“While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“To the cry of “follow Mormons and prairie dogs and find good land,” Civil War veterans flocked into Nebraska, joining a vast stampede of unemployed workers, tenant farmers, and European immigrants.”
—For the State of Nebraska, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“There is a very holy and a very terrible isolation for the conscience of every man who seeks to read the destiny in affairs for others as well as for himself, for a nation as well as for individuals. That privacy no man can intrude upon. That lonely search of the spirit for the right perhaps no man can assist.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)