Book Event Held for Rosemary Stevens, PhD, MPH

On January 18, the Milbank Memorial Fund (MMF) and The New York Academy of Medicine hosted a book discussion and reception in honor of Rosemary Stevens, PhD, MPH, the author of A Time of Scandal: Charles R. Forbes, Warren G. Harding, and the Making of the Veterans Bureau (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Professor Stevens, a longtime member of the Board of the MMF, is a DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar in Social Medicine and Public Policy at Weill Cornell Medical College, Department of Psychiatry. She is also the Stanley I. Sheerr Professor Emeritus in Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Stevens’ new book tells the story of President Warren G. Harding’s founding, in the early 1920s, of a huge new organization to treat disabled veterans: the US Veterans Bureau, now known as the Department of Veterans Affairs. Harding appointed his friend, decorated veteran Colonel Charles R. Forbes, as founding director. Forbes lasted in the position for only 18 months before stepping down under a cloud of criticism and suspicion. During the Coolidge administration, he was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the federal government by rigging government contracts and sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary. Stevens uses previously unused records to illustrate Forbes’ role in the United States’ initial commitment to veterans. Her conclusion is that Forbes is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted.  She also describes President Harding’s somewhat confusing efforts to bring business efficiency to government.

During the event, Stevens was interviewed by David Rosner, the Ronald H. Lauterstein Professor of Sociomedical Sciences and Co-Director for the Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He is also a regular op-ed contributor to The Milbank Quarterly.  Professor Rosner noted that the book is part history and part mystery, encompassing a set of very interesting intertwined stories.

“I hope readers come away thinking about the following,” said Stevens, “that creating the Veterans Bureau was a task that deserves understanding and celebrating; that Forbes was unfairly targeted as a crook, misidentified as to his character, and wrongly convicted of conspiracy to commit fraud against the federal government; that the times were ripe for scandal, including creating scandalous caricatures and destructive stories of prominent individuals; and last, that the Harding scandals which came to prominence in the Coolidge administration had some long-term positive effects, among them their role as a unifying force in national politics and as racy stories for more recent times.”