Veto

"I am therefore obliged to return Senate bill 4808 . . . without my approval."

The Senate received last week a document (nearly 11,000 words*) concluding with these words and signed with the big C-flourish of the signature: Calvin Coolidge. It was his expected veto of the McNary-Haugen farm relief bill.

Said the Baltimore Sun (Democratic): "Mr. Coolidge did not merely refuse to sign the measure. He kicked it out of the White House with as strong denunciation of its provisions in sum and in detail as has been heard in or out of Washington during the months of its consideration. . . . That is what the country wanted him to do."

The veto message was not a masterpiece of style, organization or logic. It was repetitious. But it was also devastating. Many a disinterested person who was obliged to read it admitted he was ready to quit midway and concede the debate to the President. There was, however, one sharp aphorism reminiscent of the Coolidge first known to fame. It was: "Government price fixing, once started, has alike no justice and no end. It is an economic folly from which this country has every right to be spared."

For the rest, the President's paragraphs were like a well-trained pack of dogs worrying a clumsy bear to death.

Considered merely as a debate on which the President took the negative side, a referee from Mars would almost certainly give the decision to the President. For the following reason:

Those in favor of the bill were too inclined to shout as their major argument: "Something must be done. The McNary-Haugen bill is something--we don't know exactly what. Give it a try; it may not be so bad as it looks."

Whereas, the President, representing the negative, was able to cite dozens of specific defects in the bill and to suggest dozens of specifically evil consequences which, it could not be denied, might arise. Nevertheless, no Martian and few Earthmen could say that the President triumphed as a statesman. For this reason:

The President, in his penultimate paragraph, said that there were other farm relief measures for which "I wish again to renew my recommendations." But, if any of these measures have names,* the public generally does not know them, and the President is certainly not identified with them as he is, for example, with the Protective Tariff.

The President gave as basic rea-ons for vetoing the McNary-Haugen bill:

1) It is unconstitutional/- because the President's power of appointment is limited in the matter of selection of a "Farm Board."

2) It is unconstitutional because of its discriminating taxation (equalization fee).

3) It is price-fixing.

4) Under it, most farmers would suffer, a few would benefit only temporarily.

5) The scheme, however good or bad in theory, is unworkable in practice and would involve an unprecedented and horrifying bureaucracy.

Some of the President's sentences :

". . . It says in effect that all the agricultural scientists and all the thinking farmers of the last 50 years are wrong, that what we ought to do is not to encourage diversified agriculture but instead put a premium on one-crop farming. . . . The bill upholds as ideals of American farming the men who grow cotton, corn, rice, swine, tobacco or wheat, and nothing else. . . . If this is a true farm-relief measure, why does it leave out the producers of beef cattle, sheep, dairy products, poultry products, potatoes, hay, fruit, vegetables, oats, barley, rye, flax and the other important agricultural lines? . . . It seems almost incredible that the producers of hogs, corn, wheat, rice, tobacco and cotton should be offered a scheme of legislative relief in which the only persons who are guaranteed a profit are the exporters, packers, millers, cotton spinners and other processors. . . . To expect to increase prices and then to maintain them on a higher level by means of a plan which must of necessity increase production while decreasing consumption is to fly in the face of an economic law as well established as any law of nature. . . . To have effective control, we would have to have control of not only one food product but of all substitutes. . . . The administrative difficulties involved are sufficient to wreck the plan. . . . Some conception of the magnitude of the task may be had when we consider that if the wheat, the corn and the cotton crops had been under operation in the year 1925, collection would have been required from an aggregate of 16,034,466,679 units. . . . The main policy of this bill is an entire reversal of what has been heretofore thought to be sound. Instead of undertaking to secure a method of orderly marketing which will dispose of products at a profit, it proposes to dispose of them at a loss. It runs counter to the principle of conservatism, which would require us to produce only what can be done at a profit, not to waste our soil and resources producing what is to be sold at a loss to us for the benefit of the foreign consumer. . . . This measure is so long and involved that it is impossible to discuss it without going into many tiresome details. Many other reasons exist why it ought not to be approved, but it is impossible to state them all without writing a book."

*The National Affairs section of TIME averages about 5,000 words.

*One may be the Curtis-Crisp bill.

/-Unconstitutionality was argued by Attorney-General Sargent in a 5,000-word addendum to the veto.