War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America

Abstract

In an erudite and gracefully written first book entitled War’s Waste, Beth Linker explores the cultural, political, and medical meanings ascribed to the rehabilitation of disabled soldiers and veterans during the World War I era. For Linker, the book’s title carries a double meaning, referring to the war-ravaged bodies of American soldiers and to the widely held anxieties about the financial and moral costs to the nation should this returning cohort of men follow in the footsteps of the Civil War pensioners (a generation viewed disdainfully by Progressive Era politicians and medical authorities). Linker argues that the attempts to reconcile these two phenomena found expression in an ethos of rehabilitation that emerged in the relatively new community of orthopedic specialists, in the military’s medical establishment, and in the federal government’s agencies and congressional committees assigned to create a new veterans’ welfare system during the war. To Linker, the basis of the rehabilitation ethic was the idea that the government needed to remake disabled veterans—viewed as potentially dangerous dependents of the state—into constructive, integrated members of society through the use of prosthetics, intensive physical therapy, and free but mandated hospital care. She writes, “The veterans of America’s First World War were expected to become citizen-workers once their military service was over; they were to make useful lives, not to languish at the expense of the US Treasury” (p. 13). Grounding the process in the gendered terms of the Progressive Era, she adds, “Since wage-earning often defined manhood, rehabilitation was, in essence, a process of making a man manly” (p. 4). Linker’s study connects this process to other major themes of the era by contending that the cultural premises of rehabilitation led to specific forms of institution building and medical specialization, first in the military and then spilling over into the civilian treatment of industrial disability. She notes that “Rehabilitation was born as a Progressive Era ideal, took shape as a military medical specialty, and eventually became a societal norm in the civilian sector” (p. 7).