derson of
Nebraska. Finally, "Corporal" Tanner's extravagant management became
so intolerable to the Secretary of the Interior that he confronted
President Harrison with the choice of accepting his resignation or
dismissing Tanner. Tanner therefore had to go, and with him his system
of reratings.

A pension bill for dependents, such as Cleveland had vetoed, now went
triumphantly through Congress.* It granted pensions of from six to
twelve dollars a month to all persons who had served for ninety days
in the Civil War and had thereby been incapacitated for manual labor to
such a degree as to be unable to support themselves. Pensions were
also granted to widows, minor children, and dependent parents. This law
brought in an enormous flood of claims in passing, upon which it was
the policy of the Pension Bureau to practice great indulgence. In one
instance, a pension was granted to a claimant who had enlisted but never
really served in the army as he had deserted soon after entering the
camp. He thereupon had been sentenced to hard labor for one year and
made to forfeit all pay and allowances. After the war, he had been
convicted of horse stealing and sent to the state penitentiary in
Wisconsin. While serving his term, he presented a pension claim
supported by forged testimony to the effect that he had been wounded in
the battle of Franklin. The fraud was discovered by a special examiner
of the pension office, and the claimant and some of his witnesses were
tried for perjury, convicted, and sent to the state penitentiary at
Joliet, Illinois. After serving his time there, he posed as a neglected
old soldier and succeeded in obtaining letters from sympathetic
Congressmen commending his case to the attention of the pension office,
but without avail until the Act of 1890 was passed. He then put in a
claim which was twice rejected by the pension office examiners, but
each time the decision was overruled, and in the end he was put upon the
pension roll. This case is only one of many made possible by lax methods
of investigating pension claims. Senator Gallinger of New Hampshire
eventually said of the effect of pension policy, as shaped by his own
party with his own aid:

"If there was any soldier on the Union side during the Civil War who was
not a good soldier, who has not received a pension, I do not know who
he is. He can always find men of his own type, equally poor soldiers who
would swear that they knew he had been in a ho