A Good Story, but Was It Accurate?

We hear a lot about fake news but what about fake history?  How do we know that everything in history books is based on fact?   We don’t. That is why history is always open to revision, and doing it requires a critical mind and the skills of a detective. I am a historian who loves mysteries, and this story is one of them. 

A Time of Scandal presents a new and expanded picture of a racy scandal about political corruption and bad behavior in the early 1920s --  a time when Prohibition had shut bars and spawned bootleggers, drugs were widely available at least in major cities, women could vote and wear short skirts but were still treated as second-class citizens, hostility toward immigrants was tinged with fear for the nation (sound familiar?), and rumors of scandal were picked up eagerly by a commercialized press and spread across the nation. 

 The story that has come down in other history books goes as follows: Colonel Charles R. Forbes, the founding director of a huge new agency for military veterans of World War I, was accused of using his position to “loot” the federal government by engaging in a conspiracy to rig hospital building contracts and dispose of government supplies. He was quickly dubbed a villain, and a merry one at that, who partied, drank to excess, and attracted women. He was tried, convicted, and sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary. His name became a symbol of the dangers to the nation of corruption in high places. This story continued without reexamination into the 21^st century.

It was a good story, but was it accurate?  Was Forbes even guilty, and if so, of what? I had some doubts. In one charge Forbes had wasted or absconded with more than $200 million in 1920s dollars in his 18 months of tenure. The bureau’s annual budget was about $500 million. How could he have taken tens of millions of dollars out of this large system without anyone noticing at the time?  If he did, he was a brilliant crook –and that was not his character as described in the literature. And what did he actually do? Did he take a large amount of money from his dubious friend, Mort Mortimer, as a payoff, in a bathroom at a Chicago hotel?  No one had been able to trace the money to Forbes. Mortimer’s word became the evidence.

I embarked on a quest to find everything possible about Forbes, his past, his wives, and his associates, the FBI’s records on the case, the role of the two presidents concerned (Harding and Coolidge) and other relevant information. Four of Forbes’s grandchildren and one great-grandson provided letters, photos and other information. The results are more complicated – and more dramatic -- than the story handed down across the decades. Verdict: Forbes did not commit the crimes for which he was convicted.

Rosemary Stevens is professor emeritus of the history and sociology and science at the University of Pennsylvania and the De Witt Wallace Distinguished Scholar in Social Medicine and Public Policy at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is the author of In Sickness and in Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century, The Public-Private Health Care State: Essays on the History of American Health Care Policy, and her latest, A Time of Scandal: Charles R. Forbes, Warren G. Harding, and the Making of the Veterans Bureau.