Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1898-02-05
Buns Annually Through the Chan
nels Of the Pension Office.
TEE KLONDlKE OF TEE old SOLDIER
Huge Proportions of a Business
That is Still Growing.
INSIDE THE BIG BUILDING
Written for The Evening Star.

Written for The Evening Star.
Copyright. 1898. by Frank G. CarpenterJ
1 spent two hours recently travelling
through the pension office with Mr. Hen
~ Clay Evans, the United States COM
missioner of pension. i had asked Mr.,
Evans to give me some idea of Uncle
Sans pension business. and together. we
walked from bureau to bureau and office
to office, asking questions of the officials
IN charge and gathering the material
which I give you in this letter. The COM
missioner has the Office in a better business
condition than 1t has been for years. He
not only ordered that everything be fur
nished me, but he personally aided in my
investigations. The journey was no small
one. The pension Office at Washington fills
the biggest brick building of the world 1
doubt that there has ever been a building
made Of brick which surpassed it In size,
although the baths of Diocletan, the ruins
Of which stand by the Via Nazionale, in
Rome, were mile in circumference. This
building covers only two acres, but Il is
three stories high and there is a big attic
up under its glass roof. 1t has court
IN its center bigger than any barn yard you
have ever seen, and the huge brick pillars
which rise from floor to roof each contain
enough brick to build three good-sized
houses.
The Pension Files and Mail.
Both court and offices are filled with pa
pers. There are hundreds of millions of
pages of writing packed away here There
are enough files in the cases of the pen
sion bureau court to carpet county, and
the old documents among its records, II
they could be pasted together, in single
strip. would be long enough to cover a
wagon road reaching clear around the
world. The pension office deals in big fig
ures. Take the mail, for instance 1t was
to this division the commissioner and
first went. The commissioner receives DO
600 pieces of mail day, or more than
100000 pieces every year. He gets more
than 100000 letters in a year. If you
could paste the answers to his mail to-
gether in one single strip 1t would make a
ribbon of white letter paper covered with
typewriting reaching from New York to
Chicago. If he had to pay his postage at
the rate of cents per letter his stamp
bill would be over 100000 a year. and
when you figure up the labor and brains
you would have number Of life times en-
bodied in that one item. 1t takes forty
three clerks to handle this mail. There is
one corps of men who do nothing but open
letters. Another stamps the date of re-
ceipt upon them. and third reads the let
tiers and sends them to the proper divisions
for answer. From four to eight thousand
letters are answered every day, and the
correspondence increases from year to
year.
The Klondikc of the Old Soldier.
Every one of these letters has a money
end to it. The pension office is the Klon-
dixie of the old soldier, and not few men
and women who are not old soldiers seek
to pan gold out of the sands of its rivers
Last year the amount of money distribute
cd was more than $1iO,OO0,0O0 This was
an increase of more than S1,o00,000 over
the sum paid out in 1896, and the commits
taltt- hot will %
paid out this year than last The gold
mines of the world are now producing
more than ever before, and still the total
output of them all is only about S2D0.0o0,-
600 a year. If the gold mines of all the
world were run to their full extent for the
next ten years they could not get out as
much gold as this office has paid out for
pensions on account of the war of the re-
bellion. Up to last June the amount was
more than $1,000 900, showing a steady
increase from the close of the war up until
1890, and an enormous increase since them
This sum is beyond conception, and, as 1
have stated. it is on the increase. 1t
amounts to SO much now each year that
If every man, woman and child in the
United States contributed 81 the aggregate
sum would just about pay the pension
bills This is equal to about $40 for every
family in our country. OF this, over $780,
600 goes abroad. Between 5000 and 1000
pensioners live in foreign countries and
draw their money from us. The remain
der are scattered over the United States
from Florida to Maine and from Massa-
chusetts to California, and the streams of
money which flow here and are damned
up In the treasury are turned into the
great pension irrigating bitches every year
ard carry this golden flood to all parts Of
the country.
The Work of the Pension Office.
During our walk through the pension
office Commissioner Evans and myself
spent some time in each of the divisions
watching the hundreds of clerks at work.
There were old and young men among
them, and there were plenty of old and
young women. 1 asked a number of ques-
lions as to the efficiency of the employees,
and was told that while the most of them
were very efficient clerks, some were lit
tie good except to tie up papers. One man
told me the poorest clerks he had were the
girls in his bureau were of less value than
the men. One chief of a division said
some of his best employees were colored,
and he pointed ont young man with a
face as black as piece Of camel coal,
who, he said, could take the heart out of
a pension case quicker than any man he
had. There are examiners and clerks scat
tered over the country, so that, all told,
Commissioner Evans has about 1000 men
under him-an army more than half as
large as that which Xenophen led on his ia
nous march to the sea. In one division 1
found about 10 doctors. These men pass
see misstatement in the evidence if it
is not very carefully covered. All of them
have studied medicine and not a few of
them have been active practitioners. An
other division is largely made up of law
yers, who pass on the legal aspect of GER
tain cases, and another might be said to be
made up of detectives, for it is their bust
ness to ferret out frauds
A great part of the work of our congress-
men consists in pushing along pension
cases. There are now an average of about
five hundred congressional calls every day,
and during the last four days more than
two thousand congressional applications
for information have been received Each
of these necessitates the looking up of the
papers in a certain case.
What One Pension Case Means,
Since the close of the war more than
two million claims for pensions have been
filed, and of these more than a million and
a half have been allowed. There are hun
dreds of thousands Of additional claims
filed for increase of pensions. After the
pensioner dies his widow and children are
kept on the rolls and a single pension case
means an enormous amount of work and
money. Every one of the claims, both
those granted and those pending, has to be