Grand Old Pension Party

A man-sized fight between President Roosevelt and Congress over veterans' pensions was cut short last June by the hurried adjournment of the Hundred Day special session. That adjournment by no means settled the issue for Congressmen who like to battle, bleed and die for pensioners. They could afford to compromise with the White House in 1933 because there was no election that year. But this is 1934 and the whole House and one third of the Senate must go to the voters in November. That difference largely accounted for last week's resurgence of the pension problem on Capitol Hill where the regular session had been sitting a bare fortnight.

Ever since its Chicago convention last October, the American Legion has been preparing a drive on Congress to get back as much as possible of the $250,000,000 cut from Veterans' pensions last June. At that time Congress empowered the President to cut pensions up to 25%, and purge the pension rolls of thousands of veterans whose post-War disabilities were classed as War injuries only by legal "presumption." To this end the Legion concentrated on a four-point program:

1) Restoration of the 25% pension cut. 2) Reinstatement as War-injured pensioners of all veterans whose disabilities acquired before 1925 could not be proved by the Government not to have been caused by the War.

3) Free hospital treatment for all "indigent" veterans suffering from any ailment.

4) Pensions of $15 a month for all widows and orphans of the World War--a brand new proposal which was not law even in the lush pension days of Coolidge and Hoover.

Cost of the Legion program, estimated by Legion Commander Hayes: not more than $80,000,000; by Veterans' Administrator Hines: $113,000,000.

Last week Senator Robinson of Arkansas and Senator Byrnes of South Carolina, Presidential wheel-horses both, rushed to the White House to tell Mr. Roosevelt that he had better do something about pensions or the whole American Legion program was likely to be tacked on to the Independent Offices Appropriation Bill.

Senatorial sponsor of the Legion program was Pennsylvania's David Aiken Reed, who last week before the Pennsylvania Threshermens & Farmers Protective Association announced his candidacy for reelection next autumn. More important, 20 Republican Senators in caucus had plumped for the Legion program. More important still, counters of political noses were sure that enough Democratic Senators would vote with the Republicans to pass the Reed measure. Most important of all, the House, which had passed the Independent Offices Bill under a gag rule, was virtually certain to side with the Senate when the measure was returned to it.

Well did Congressmen know that in every Legion post throughout the land is posted the record of how each Congressman votes on pensions. Firm is every Congressman's belief that each Legionary can control five votes for or against him. Easy would it be for Congressmen to explain that when the President had unbalanced the budget by nine billions, a few millions more or less for pensions would not matter.

To head off this Congressional drive on his economy program, President Roosevelt adroitly went a fraction of the way to meet the Veterans' demands. He announced that to "correct inequalities" he had by executive order restored certain of his pension cuts: an increase from $90 to $100 a month in pensions for total, service-connected disabilities; liberalization of hospital privileges for all sick veterans; an increase of burial allowances for dead veterans from $75 to $100. Cost of the changes: $21,000,000 a year, cheap if it serves to smother the Reed bill.

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