Thanks for Fighting: One Beer Per Person, Please.
January 18, 2010
At the turn of the twentieth-century, the U.S. had gone to war with Spain in Cuba and the Philippines in a skirmish that came to be known as the Spanish-American War. The main mobilization for this effort was staged out of San Francisco, more specifically the Presidio of San Francisco, and all of the Boys in Blue shipped out of the newly constructed Ferry Building aboard ships named after Civil War Generals: the USAT Sheridan, the USAT Sherman, etc. After the Spanish were licked, the U.S. considered Cuba and the Philippines to be their hard earned property. The Filipinos, however, saw it differently and immediately after the U.S. had washed its hands of the Spanish, its boots were covered in the mud of yet another “uprising,” the Philippine Insurrection (now more accurately referred to as the Philippine-American War or the Philippine War of Independence). What these wars created was the largest population of recovering wounded or ill soldiers since the Civil War, and veterans homes and hospitals were popping up all over the nation. As they became more prevalent, the government began to oversee them to ensure its investments were properly managed: both the men and the institution themselves, which concomitantly became assets and symbols.
And in the middle of these two wars, it would make sense that the War Department would focus on only the most pressing of matters. This excerpt was taken from the “Annual Reports of the War Department for the Fiscal Year Ended in June 30, 1900: Report of the Secretary of War. Miscellaneous Reports,” (Washington: Government Printing Office), 1900; from a section discussing issues which arose in the wake of an inspection of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, it is titled “Beer Checks”:
“A large money value is represented in these checks, and the method of their destruction after use is defective and should be corrected to prevent their being presented more than once for redemption. The treasurer, or other officer having the beer hall in charge, should personally see them destroyed. This duty in some Branches’ is now delegated to a clerk or employee, and the usual method is to burn them. I was informed at one Branch that scorched beer checks ahd been presented in payment for beer, thereby basting reflection on the thoroughness of the methos. As a solution of the difficulty, some such mutilation as practiced by railroads and street cars, that of punching, to reenforce the rpesent method would probably prove effective.”
