President Warren G. Harding Is Personally Overwhelmed, and Expresses Solidarity in the Inspirational (and Famous) Case of the Badly Disabled Serviceman

“It is so exceedingly good to know that one so excessively impaired as you has found his way to a state of self help and self-expression as you make it manifest…If my good wishes addressed to you personally are of any encouragement please know that you have them in all the sincerity which I can command.”

Harding was deeply moved and sent this emotion-filled Typed Letter Signed as President, on White House letterhead, Washington, October 24, 1921, to Bronner. “Admiral Andrews was so much impressed by a letter which you wrote to him under date of September 24th that he sent the letter to the Secretary of the Navy who in turn submitted it to me for my reading. I cannot tell you how tremendously I was pleased to read an expression of your undaunted resolution and your cheerful hopefulness. It is a mighty blow to suffer the loss of one's vision and one's hands, and to have such a gratifying evidence of your ability to express yourself through your typewriter has brought to me a real spirit of helpfulness when there are problems to face which seem exceedingly difficult. I should rejoice to know that a service man who has been so terribly injured was making progress toward real accomplishment in spite of excessive disability, but it is so exceedingly good to know that one so excessively impaired as you has found his way to a state of self help and self-expression as you make it manifest in your letter to your old commander. If my good wishes addressed to you personally are of any encouragement please know that you have them in all the sincerity which I can command.”

This letter led to Bronner’s becoming a cause celebre. It was reported by the New York Times and doubtless many other publications, and in September 1922, Office Appliances magazine printed Harding’s letter in full. A follow up letter from Harding is now in a major institution.

In November, the Baltimore Sun took notice of the story, writing in an editorial: “Carl Bronner…is one who did not quit being heroic in France, whose heroism is even greater in peace, sightless and handless, than it was when he stood unmaimed and keen-eyed in battle…Men who, like Bronner, can face the most dreadful facts of life with a smile belong to the supreme brotherhood of heroism.” And in April 1922, the Popular Science Monthly not only mentioned Bronner, but published a photograph of him typing under the headline, “Blind Sailor Types Without Fingers.” The U.S. Veteran’s Administration cited Bronner in its 1922 report, remarking that he was starting law school at the University of Maryland.

The story does not appear to have a happy ending. According to the school’s yearbook, just a few months before his scheduled graduation from law school in 1925, Bronner was stricken with a mysterious and ongoing illness and could not graduate with his class. The next year he was honored by the House of Representatives, leaving us to conjecture that, sadly, the young man had died.