For God, for Country, for Bonus

(See front cover)

From the day Congress meets until the day it adjourns some one in Washington is always counting noses. Last week the Associated Press published the first nose count for the 74th Congress. It began with the assumption that President Roosevelt could not prevent the preliminary passage by House and Senate of a certain measure, that his veto would be roughly overridden by the House. It ended with the discovery that 35 Senators--just two more than the requisite number--would vote to sustain the veto. According to the theory of responsible party government, the idea that the leader of 322 out of 434 votes in the House and 68 out of 96 votes in the Senate should find himself in this strait position was sheer extravaganza. But according to the theory of practical U. S. politics the idea was grimly realistic. For the measure on which the A. P. counted noses called for full and immediate payment of the Soldiers' Bonus, and behind the Bonus is an unbeaten organized minority which knows what it wants and how to get it.

Juggernaut. On March 15, 1919, in the city of Paris, some 1,000 U. S. veterans met to forget the War. On hand were such men as Captain Ogden Livingston Mills, Lieut.-Col. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Colonel William J. Donovan, Major de Lancey Kountze, Colonel Bennett Champ Clark, Major John Thomas Taylor. With Colonel Clark in the chair, they formed themselves into a society whose purpose was expressed in a preamble: "For God and Country, we associate ourselves together for the following purposes: To uphold and defend the Constitution . . . Law and order . . . 100% Americanism . . . Memories . . . Individual obligation to the community . . . Right . . . Peace . . . Justice, freedom and democracy . . . . . Devotion to mutual helpfulness. . . ."

Thus was the American Legion founded. In 1920 the Legion first proved the potency of its devotion to "mutual helpfulness" when it got the pensions of disabled veterans upped from $30 to $100 a month. A second proof came in 1924 when it induced Congress to vote a bonus payable in 20 years to some 3,500,000 veterans. In 1931 the Legion was back at the Capitol, demanding and getting, under threat of political reprisals, legislation whereby veterans could borrow 50% of the face value of their bonus certificates. And in 1934 it secured the restoration of a large part of the pension cuts made by President Roosevelt in the name of Depression economy. In 1931 the Legion membership reached a peak of 1,050,000. Last year it was down to 887,000. This year, with the prospect of more cash, it hopes to finish with 1,250,000 dues-paying members. Three-quarters of the Legion membership is in small towns, the kind from which most Congressmen come. Each Legionary has four or five voting relatives and friends who will use their ballots as he suggests. This political combination is what makes the Legion lobby so fearfully effective in Washington.

High Priest. The active head of that lobby is John Thomas Taylor. Son of a onetime police chief of Philadelphia, he went to Washington as a lawyer, learning the science of politics under that master politician, Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania. Back in Washington after the War, this A. E. F. major joined the Legion's lobby. That lobby was then headed by 1 ) Colonel Luke Lea who presently returned to Tennessee and ultimately went to jail in North Carolina, and 2 ) Major Taylor's law partner, Thomas Miller, who subsequently became Alien Property Custodian and served a term in the Atlanta Penitentiary for conspiring to defraud the U. S. Government. Major Taylor took up where they left off. He fumigated the lobby to get rid of unsavory odors left by his predecessors and buckled down to business in a way they had never dreamed of.

Today, after 16 years in the Legion's service,' John Thomas Taylor has the biggest reputation of any lobbyist in Washington. He gets only $6,000 a year but with a lucrative law practice on the side is not pinched. His title is Vice Chairman of the Legion's National Legislative Committee. The chairman of the committee is an appointive nonentity who changes every year. He and the Legion's national commander decide policies while John Thomas Taylor is the cult's high priest in the legislative temple.

For the altar which he serves Lobbyist Taylor has the best possible priestly attributes. In private life he loves his little luxuries (lobster Newburg, pastries, pies & cakes), but he never drinks a drop. His vestments are spats, a snap-brim hat, a walking stick. His aspect is impressive, a fine broad forehead, a jutting chin, sharp eyes, hair steely grey. His manner is positive bravado, his voice stentorian, his cigars black. His apostolic jewels are a magnificent row of decorations: from the U. S. a Silver Star (citation in orders); from France, the bronze Medal of Verdun and the cross of the Legion of Honor; the cross of the Crown of Italy, the medal of the Defenders of Poland and the cross of Poland Restored; and from the White Russians, the Order of the Compassionate Heart. His pronouncements, issued with passionate conviction, are oratorical. He boasts that only three Senators and three Representatives have been in Congress before his day, that by a wave of his hand thousands of telegrams of protest will descend on the Congressional desk that dares oppose the Legion. These, like many of his assertions, are ritualistic rather than literal truths.

Even those Congressmen who are not awed by his manner have a respect for Lobbyist Taylor. In his office he has bound in large green volumes records of every bill, resolution, hearing and report in any way affecting veterans over the last 16 years. Besides some 60 such volumes he has about 20 more giving in detail how every Congressman has voted on every such measure in the past--all magnificently cross-indexed. Many a Congressman who has forgotten how he voted calls up Mr. Taylor to find out. Although there are few Congressmen who would literally take orders from Lobbyist Taylor, his most effective work is done by his expert knowledge of Congressional procedure. He knows the right Representative to advance his bills at the right time. He knows how to persuade the Senate clerk to favor his bills in order to get them engrossed ahead of others when time is short. He knows the right Senator to let him into closed conferences where bills are really made.

If Lobbyist Taylor had had even one President on his side, his reputation would not be so great. He rammed through the Bonus over Calvin Coolidge's veto. He forced Herbert Hoover to his knees when he persuaded Congress to repass the 50% loan law over the President's veto. He gave Franklin Roosevelt his most humiliating licking when he got veterans' pensions restored over a veto. Thus John Thomas Taylor has put three Presidents in their places.

Weak Rival. One prime reason for the Legion's enormous legislative success is the simple fact that it has no worthwhile opposition. About 10,000 ex-soldiers who do not believe in the Legion's program of "mutual helpfulness" have banded themselves together as the American Veterans Association. The commander is Donald Atkinson Hobart of Bronxville, N. Y., distant cousin of Garret A. Hobart, 24th Vice President of the U. S. A machine-gunner in the Yankee Division overseas, he got no wounds, has no bonus certificate because he refused to apply for one. His attack on the bonus is being staged in a full-page advertisement in this week's Saturday Evening Post. Presently he is going on a speech-making tour. Last week he undertook a radio debate with Representative Wright Patman of Texas, No. 1 bonuseer. The gist of Veteran Hobart's argument : "During this brief debate the total national debt will have increased $2,015,487.* And it is at this time, in a country which has already spent more than $7,000,000,000 on behalf of its World War veterans and their dependents and when one out of every six families in the country is receiving public relief, that the demand for an additional $2,000,000,000 ... is made."

Demands. Last week Lobbyist Taylor was demanding some $2,000,000,000 from the U. S. on the strength of a resolution adopted by the Legion convention in Miami last November. Just prior to that meeting President Roosevelt, in a speech at Roanoke, had called attention to the fact that Legionaries have greater earning power than the average citizen (an indiscreet admission by the American Legion Weekly). Hence, by inference they needed no Bonus. Insulted, the Legionaries at Miami promptly made an outright demand for immediate payment of their Bonus in cash. To get immediate action they elected Frank Nicholas Belgrano Jr. of San Francisco to be their national commander (salary: $9,000). After the War, through which he served in the U. S., emerging a second lieutenant, Frank Belgrano went into his father's business, the Banca Popolare Fugazi of San Francisco. He was cashier of that bank in 1927 when Amadeo Peter Giannini, great imperialist among California's bankers, took it into his mighty chain. Today Legionary Belgrano is a vice president of Giannini's Bank of America, president of the Pacific National Fire Insurance Co., a financier by trade. A quick thinker, direct in action, a good organizer, the new national commander set out to fulfill the program given him by the Legion at Miami. That program included getting Congress to appropriate money to develop Soap Lake, Wash., to break off diplomatic relations with Russia, to ratify the Child Labor Amendment, to provide more cemeteries for War veterans. However, Financier Belgrano's chief job is to get cash, $2,000,000,000 of it, for all veterans here & now.

Mathematics. Two great reasons has the Legion for demanding immediate payment of the Bonus: 1) it is going to be paid sooner or later anyhow and the Government may as well wipe out its debt now; 2) payment now will help recovery. Both reasons are highly susceptible to mathematics. The mathematics of the recovery argument is simple. The Legion has a table prepared by Congressman Patman of how much Bonus money would go into every state: New York, $221,000,000; Pennsylvania, $156,000,000; Illinois, $141,000,000; Missouri, $61,000,000; Georgia, $32,000,000; Maine, $12,000,000; Nevada, $1,771,846. According to the Legion, businessmen in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Missouri, Georgia, Maine, Nevada would profit in direct ratio to the spendings of Legionaries in their States. The mathematical argument for the Bonus is less simple. In 1924 Congress figured that veterans were entitled to $1 a day extra for service in the U. S., $1.25 overseas. Then Congress pretended that the whole sum had been set aside and invested as an endowment insurance policy to mature in 20 years. Thus with interest at 4% the sum was doubled by maturity. To this total for each veteran was then added 25%, for no stated reason, and in this amount adjusted service certificates were issued, for payment in 1945. Since 1925 bonus finance has been a matter of imaginative bookkeeping save for: 1) the payments made to the beneficiaries of veterans who have died, and 2) $1,500,000,000 paid to veterans who "borrowed" on their bonus certificates.

Compromise. Last week's A. P. poll, showing that at least 35 Senators would uphold a veto of a law for full payment of the bonus certificates, will mean little by the time a bonus bill comes to passage. For the Senators committed themselves against "outright and immediate payment." In short, they are opposed to yielding to the Legion's full demand. In most Congressmen's minds the issue had last week boiled down to a question of how much cash to give. Messrs. Taylor & Belgrano have not yet set their seal to any definite bill. To compromise before it is necessary would only weaken their bargaining position. But the fiction of bonus bookkeeping will come in very handy. By tinkering with it Congressmen will be able to justify almost any figure they want to set for a cash payment in 1935. If they want to be ungenerous they might figure out that the veterans, as a group, should pay the Government the interest they are supposed to owe on their loans. If they want to be most generous they can figure out that the Government should pay the veterans the full $2,137,975,157 which the Legion asks.

*Mr. Hobart's calculation is from his estimate that the U. S. deficit is piling up at the rate of $16,123,901 a day in fiscal 1935.

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