Battle of the Bonus

On the main street of Homer, Ill., one night last week War veterans burned a stuffed figure. On it hung the label: ANDY MELLON. That was what Homer's ex-soldiery thought of a Secretary of the Treasury who had dared oppose legislation in Congress to up their Bonus loans.

Simultaneously in Washington President Hoover was receiving from a Congress afire with hostility and defiance H. R. 17054, a bill to increase the loan value of veterans' adjusted service certificates from 22 1/2% to 50% (TIME, Feb. 23). On the advice of the same Homer-incinerated Andy Mellon, he prepared to return it unapproved to Congress with a full explanation of his veto reasons.

Last week's Battle of the Bonus between the White House and the Capitol was a fast-moving drama of legislation. The President was against it, financially, economically, morally. But that greatest of political bugaboos, the "soldier vote," had stampeded an overwhelming majority of Senators and Representatives toward H. R. 17054, regardless of their private judgment. Fortnight ago the House had rammed the measure through by a 363-to-37 vote. Last week came the Senate's turn to show its disdain of White House opinions.

While H. R. 17054 was still before the Senate Finance Committee for perfunctory consideration, President Hoover did an extraordinary thing that foreshadowed his veto. He wrote an informal but public letter to Chairman Reed Smoot listing his objections to the bill, warning Congress that the bill would retard prosperity by placing an additional burden on the credit and business of the country.

The Hoover warning was almost hooted in the Finance Committee which reported (13-to-3) H. R. 17054 unchanged to the Senate. There, before galleries packed with noisy veterans, the bill came up for six hours debate. Its supporters said nothing that had not already been said many times. Typical pro-Bonus argument by New York's expansive Copeland: "In the country a man can get out and catch an old rooster, parboil him and, with a few turnips, get along well enough but when poverty comes to my city there is nothing to eat but the sidewalks of New York."

The high point of bonus opposition came in a speech by Pennsylvania's slight, drawn-faced Republican Senator David Aiken Reed, A. E. F. Major of Artillery, family friend of Andrew Mellon and fellow-Pittsburgher. With shoulders humped, intense voice rasping, Senator Reed hammered away. But as he expected, his words changed not a single ballot. By the impressive vote of 72-10-12 the Senate passed H. R. 17054. Not one Democrat voted against it. The twelve anti-Bonus Republicans were: Borah, Fess, Goff, Hastings, Hebert, Metcalf, Morrow, Moses, Phipps, Reed, Smoot, Walcott.

Since less than ten days of the present Congress remained, the President might have killed the bill simply by doing nothing about it. Fearful that the President would take advantage of this constitutional technicality to kill the measure without giving Congress another chance to vote on it, Michigan's stubborn Senator Couzens announced that he would filibuster against all important legislation until President Hoover acted. This would force the President to convene the next Congress on March 4 in order to get money to carry on the Government. The Couzens tactics brought the Senate almost to a standstill. Alarmed, Senator Reed telephoned the White House, broke the jam with the declaration: "The President has authorized me to say that it is his intention to return the bonus bill to Congress the middle of next week with a message giving his reasons for a veto."

With such enormous pro-Bonus majorities in the House and the Senate, the overriding of the President's veto was anticipated as a matter of course.

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