WAUPACA POST

July 5, 1894

 

WAUPACA HOME BADLY MANAGED.

[Madison State Journal]

 

            The report of the committee, instigated by the Wisconsin department of the G.A.R., to investigate the management of the Veterans’ Home in Waupaca, is a most serious impeachment.  The committee – E.D. Coe, of Whitewater, State Senator P.J. Clawson, of Monroe, and Job Meehan, of Darlington – state their conclusions as gently as possible – but they would have done better to use fewer qualifications, for their findings declare unmistakably the unfitness of the superintendent and matrons, and suggest the appropriateness of redress against trustees Woodnorth and Roberts, whose modesty and delicate sense of honesty have not deterred them from furnishing supplies for the Home as tradesmen and in turn auditing the accounts as trustees of the institution. There was no bidding, no advertising, no competition.  These gentlemen, in calm contempt of the law providing imprisonment in the county jail for not more than one year or fine not exceeding $5,000, sent in the goods and charged any price they pleased.  It was bad business and the end is not yet.

            The report raps the other trustees for lax methods, objects to the employment of so many members of the Caldwell family about the institution – some half a dozen of them line up on pay day – and exposes the absence of anything like systematic bookkeeping.  The inmates were improperly cared for.  The report says:

            “They have suffered from cold, and the sick could not be properly cared for in their chilly rooms.  The trouble is originally chargeable to the fireman, Mr. Richardson, whose negligence, indolence and total inefficiency seemed to have been covered from proper exposure by his wife, who is the assistant matron.  It is difficult to consider the gross and wicked neglect in this matter with the least tolerance.”

            The Waupaca Home seems to have been “all in the family” – its enjoyments and profits; and, while the old veterans and their wives suffered, the young people made merry in the dining room with the electric lights extinguished.

            A soldiers’ home of all places on earth should be made a peaceful, comfortable, congenial place.  There will not long be a call for such institutions.  The remaining time to those who wore the blue and of the women who toiled and prayed away the days and nights in the absence of their husbands, should be made the most enjoyable of their life’s allotment. That these inmates are poor is irrelevant.  Bravery and self-sacrifice gild any station and exalt the most lowly.  It is indecent a well as unlawful that these 300 inmates of Waupaca should be ordered about, oppressed, annoyed and in some cases abused by professional office holders who had no more sympathy with the ageing people in their charge than did Dickens’ school masters of odious memory.  We know of no more awful existence than to be consigned to an institution conducted by professionals who have no interest in their work, no sympathy with their charges – keepers who feed, lodge, amuse and bury the inmates as a part of mechanical, bloodless routine, and who improve opportunities to work off their own irritation with the world at large by discomforting those under them, and do not hesitate to turn a penny at the same painful expense of unfortunates.

            The radical reforms urged by the investigating committee should at once be adopted, and a gentle, sympathetic regime inaugurated at Waupaca.  Our union veterans have had their share of abuse, and their wives are too old and have suffered too much to justify further indignities and hardships, even at the hands of vixen matrons, pert young officials and contract sharks.