Embattled Veterans: I. The Capture of Capitol Hill

VOLUME 152

NUMBER 4

OCTOBER 1933

BY ROGER BURLINGAME

I NEVER have had much sympathy,’ said Senator Williams of Mississippi, speaking on August 1, 1919, before the first session of the Sixty-sixth Congress, ‘with mixing up money and patriotism. . . . I do believe that every community, no matter how poor, ought to take care of those who in the service of their country have become crippled or otherwise disabled; but I cannot find it in my heart to approve of any system that calls upon the citizens of a country to come pretty near bankrupting themselves because you or I or somebody else had been called into the service and did his duty in the service. . . .

‘I cannot speak for all the soldiers coming back,’ the Senator went on, ‘but I do hope that our boys, having made a magnificent record in Europe for courage, fortitude, good nature, and enthusiasm . . . are not coming back with t he idea of bankrupting the United States Treasury. Of course, if they want to do that, they can do it; they have the votes; they can effect the necessary organization; they can influence politicians; they can make every member of the Senate and the House come up to the lick log, and, if they want to, they can literally bankrupt the government; but I do not believe they want to do it.’

Not quite fourteen years later, in March 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt said to Congress: ‘For three long years the Federal Government has been on the road to bankruptcy.’ His message went on to state the deficits since 1931, including the deficit estimated for the fiscal year 1934. ‘Thus,’ he said, ‘we shall have piled up an accumulated deficit of five billion dollars.’

The President’s message was short and direct. In it he asked, first, for legislation to reduce veteran costs, and, secondly, for reductions in Federal salaries. Congress responded with a bill ‘to maintain the credit of the United States Government.’ This bill made possible a cut of about three hundred million dollars in the annual cost of World War veterans.

Copyright 1933, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

It must have been a sad disappointment to Senator Williams, who did not believe the boys wanted it, to see the fulfillment of his tentative prophecy. But it must have surprised even such prophets as he to see the extent to which it has worked out. The darkest prophets of 1919 could not foresee that in fourteen years these boys of the World War would have cost the people of the United States the startling sum of five and a half billion dollars.

Senator Williams was speaking in the full flush of the post-war enthusiasm. American soldiers were still in Europe. The country resounded with the bands, the acclaim, the cheers, that greeted the returning transports. Public men fell over each other to grasp the hands of the conquering doughboys, Congress rang with their praise. ‘I say “All hail,”’ shouted Congressman Goodykoontz from the floor of the House, ‘“all hail” to the American veterans of the great World War! There is nothing too good for them.’

Yet Senator Williams was probably right. The boys did not want it. They were not, at the moment, ordinary boys. They were men animated by special ideals. They had been fighting not only for the defense of their country but for such abstractions as the safety of democracy and world peace. Most of them, with these ideals still quick in them, had not been able to fight; the war had stopped too soon, keeping them at home. Such men as these had no desire to bankrupt the government which they had saved.

But, at the moment the Senator was speaking, there was in process of formation an organization so powerful that it would shortly take these matters out of the hands of any individual. Organizations can do things which individuals cannot or will not do. In the summer of 1919, the will and the power of the World War veterans were taken over by the American Legion.

II

It was not until 1931 that the American people, harassed by a year of economic uncertainty, awoke to the fact that the government was passing from their hands into the hands of a few minority dictatorships. For years, under the cover of prosperity, the lobbies in Washington, abetted by Congresses which were half ambitious and half afraid, had been growing to despotism. Some of the lobbies were, from the start, the tools of selfish interests; others had begun by representing a popular cause and had continued after the cause had ceased to be popular because the lobbyists were reluctant to give up their jobs.

In 1931, two minority dictatorships stood out for the magnitude of their power. The Anti-Saloon League lobby, which for years had indirectly placed in the pockets of a small criminal class vast wealth that should have been enjoyed by the Treasury, was beginning to lose its grip. The dictatorship of the World War veterans, which, for still longer, had directed several hundred millions a year of the public money toward less than one per cent of the population, had not yet reached its pinnacle. Both these lobbies had begun in zeal for what they believed to be a moral or a patriotic cause.

We are not concerned here with the dictatorship of the Anti-Saloon League. It is now in process of being beaten by a majority of the people. No doubt all such lobbies will be so beaten in the end. Yet only in these last months, while popular referendums have come in avalanches to startle Senators and Representatives who were still dryvoting, has the unsuspected power of the majority been fully revealed. At last seeing the deception, perhaps the legislators will be less fearful, in future, of the other menacing figures who move through the halls of the Capitol. They may, in time, grow skeptical even of the despotic lobbyists of the veterans and doubt the traditional power of the veteran vote.

It is with the minority dictatorship of the World War veterans that we are here concerned — how it started, how it grew, what its methods were, how in the end it effected the capture of Capitol Hill. Where does the responsibility lie? Why was it that patriotic soldiers, returning from a war in which they believed they had saved their government, should fight for fourteen years to capture that government, bind it hand and foot, and reduce it, at last, to financial instability?

These sound like difficult questions. The answers, however, are simple. They require only the most elementary understanding of politics and human nature.

III

We must go back, now, to 1919. In August, at the moment of Senator Williams’s speech against a soldier bonus, a bill was pending in Congress to incorporate a patriotic, nonpolitical society called the American Legion — to give it, in short, a national charter. It is only by understanding the American Legion — its structure and the peculiar circumstances which predestined it to political activity in spite of any nonpolitical clause it might write into its constitution — that we can understand the capture of Capitol Hill by the veteran minority.

The Legion began in France. A Paris ‘caucus’ in March after the Armistice was attended by delegates from the whole A.E.F. The Paris caucus moved between enthusiasm and suspicion. There were skeptics who dreaded another G.A.R. The soldiers suspected the officers, and both suspected politics. But the caucus, in the end, conducted as it was by idealistic and able men, resolved the doubts.

If the Legion had confined itself to the boys in France, it might, conceivably, have held aloof from political activity. But while there were two million soldiers in France, there were two million others who had never got to France. These men in America were certainly animated by the same patriotism; they were merely ‘out of luck’ because the war had stopped too soon. ‘Let them in!’ shouted the Paris caucus. So organizers were sent home posthaste to organize the Legion in America. This second organization culminated in the celebrated St. Louis Caucus of May 1919.

Thus the new society of World War veterans offered membership to anyone who had worn the uniform of the United States at any time or place during the war. Its structure, therefore, fitted like a glove over t he structure of the selective draft. And the selective draft had fitted almost like a glove over the system by which voters elect their Congressmen.

The draft had operated through local boards, one for each county or for each thirty thousand of city population. From each electorate, then, a bloc of voters (aged twenty-one to thirty) went into the service. When these men entered the army, they had different trades, prejudices, and political penchants. The army leveled out these differences. It put the men in uniform so that they were hardly distinguishable one from another. It made them act in unison, tried even to make them think alike. When the war was over and the soldiers came back to their communities, they were inclined to vote alike, too. When they came home they were no longer Republicans, Democrats, or Socialists; they were Veterans.

Furthermore, when they came home, they were looked up to by those who had remained, because of the mysterious adventure they had been through. They may never have got beyond a training camp or a typewriter in an ordnance office; nevertheless they had marched away behind a band, and they had been absent for a while from the home circle. They had eaten white bread and sugar of which the civilians had deprived themselves. So when they returned they were persons of influence, and each of them therefore added two or three votes to the veteran bloc.

In time these men would have drifted back to old parties and old prejudices. They would have forgotten more and more the war which had held them for a short time in bond. But immediately along came the Legion. ‘Let’s stick together,’ said the Legion. ‘Let us perpetuate the memories and incidents of our association in the Great War.’ So the Legion solidified the blocs and created what has since been called ‘the veteran vote.’

In organizing the men who had stayed in America, the Legion went a step further toward politics than the selective draft. It operated frankly through Congressional districts, not because this was political, but because it was convenient. It could not operate through army or navy units, as the French organization had done, because the units here were already demobilized.

IV

No sooner had the applause of the St. Louis caucus over the nonpolitical article in the Legion’s constitution died down than the caucus decided to apply to Congress for a charter in the District of Columbia. The Executive Committee thought it wise to send this application to Washington in the care of a group of men whom they called the Legislative Committee.

To head this committee they appointed two widely known politicians — Luke Lea, ex-Senator, of Tennessee, and Thomas W. Miller, ex-Congressman, of Delaware. These men turned out later to have been unfortunate choices as representatives of an idealistic and nonpolitical society,¹ but both had fine war records and both were well equipped to introduce the Legion to Congress.

Congress welcomed the Legislative Committee with open arms. Behind the infant Legion, many Senators and Representatives saw the veteran vote, theirs for the asking. They saw, too, an efficient medium of liaison in the amateur Legislative Committee — especially if, later, it should become professional. Some doubted, fearing, like Senator Williams, that danger lay ahead. Others feit only a sentiment of gratitude to the saviors of the country.

The Judiciary Committee of the House reported on the charter bill, recommending not a mere charter in the District of Columbia, but a national incorporation for the American Legion. ‘While Congress has been loath,’ the report read, ‘to grant special charters, it is believed that this should be an exception to the rule. . . . The committee is of the opinion that . . . the society should be made a corporation of the United States and not of the District. The object of the corporation is national in scope.’

The bill went through without a struggle. In it appeared part of the Legion’s constitution and a section prohibiting the Legion from taking part in political activities.

So little effort was required from Messrs. Lea and Miller that, during their stay in Washington, they had plenty of spare time. They were able to receive and return visits from Senators and Congressmen and explain to the legislators what the Legion was and what the boys were likely to want. The Congressmen made suggestions. The bonus, for instance, had come up many times since the Armistice. It was being debated at that moment in the Senate. ‘Various Congressmen,’ a later Legion report admits, ‘began to demand an expression of opinion . . . on the attitude of the Legion toward such legislation.’

The amateur Legislative Committee was embarrassed by the question. The St. Louis caucus had looked with scorn on the idea of a bonus, and a resolution about it had been laid on the table. ‘The thunderous “Aye” which tabled this resolution,’ says George Seay Wheat in his Story of the American Legion, ‘might well be recorded in letters of gold.’ So the Legislative Committee could not answer, though they thought the resolution might be picked up again from the table and considered by the first national convention in the fall.

But the members of Congress were insistent. There were other things? Yes — retirement of officers; reëmployment of veterans who had lost their jobs; soldiers’ preference. The committee would think over these things; meanwhile, they thanked Congress for its solicitude.

The amateur committee went home.

They told the Executive Committee of the warm welcome of Congress. The Executive Committee thought it would be wise to make the Legislative Committee permanent.

In November, then, the first national convention transformed the amateur committee into a professional committee, instructed them to return to Washington, establish offices there, and be paid for their services. The convention also loaded them down with work — to such extent, in fact, that in the following year they caused no less than 473 bills to be introduced in Congress.

Thus began, in the winter of 1919, the World War veterans’ lobby.

V

The capture of Capitol Hill was not, really, a capture by battle. It was, rather, a slow invasion. Congress invited it. Congress opened the doors to the veterans, overcame their shyness. There was only an occasional battle, brought about by sporadic resistance.

The National Legislative Committee went to work immediately after the first National Convention. They adopted as their motto: —

FOR GOD AND COUNTRY
SERVICE TO THE DISABLED MAN
SERVICE TO THE EX-SERVICE MAN

Except for a few extraneous matters such as the abrogation of the Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan, the punishment of conscientious objectors, and the deportation of alien slackers, they concentrated on the ex-soldiers. A vivid account of their activities is given in an official Legion booklet called the Manual for American Legion Speakers. ‘The Legion,’ says this picturesque manual, ‘. . . has extracted from Congress . . . in one year more than the Yanks of ’61-’65 were able to get in thirty years and more than the Spanish-American War veterans in ten.’

There is, in fact, no record of a lobby working on such a scale, getting under way so quickly. Almost immediately the lobbyists were at home in the office of every Senator and Congressman. They investigated and tabulated the record of every legislator and sounded him out on his attitude toward the veterans. On the doubtful ones they kept a constant watch.

At hearings on veteran bills they were always represented, calling in their own experts to give testimony. They made an intensive study of parliamentary procedure so that they could pick the proper moment to introduce a bill or to bring it out of committee and have it voted on with as little debate as possible.

‘Since 1921,’ a member of the Legislative Committee told me, ‘no Legion measure has passed in the House except under suspension of the rules.’

When Thomas W. Miller was appointed Alien Property Custodian, his work was taken over by Colonel John Thomas Taylor, whose detailed knowledge of parliamentary method might well be envied by everyone in Congress. To save the time of the legislators, Colonel Taylor wrote, himself, the bills he wished to have introduced. Hundreds of these have become law without material change. He then chose the Senator or Representative (usually a Legionnaire, for Congress has always been abundantly dotted with members of the Legion) to introduce them.

Colonel Taylor was not feared in those days as he is now. Rather he was smiled at, welcomed, greeted with sincere cordiality. This was, first, because there was no public opposition to his measures; second, because the Legion behind him was still an infant.

It was a sturdy infant, to be sure, and growing rapidly in size, organization, and discipline. The lowest unit was the post. Over the posts were the departments, one for each state. Over the departments stood the Executive Committee, composed of the National Commander, five National Vice-Commanders, and representatives from the departments. Over all — presumably — was the National Convention, which met annually and represented the great body of the Legion. But as the convention met only once a year, and grew, as the years went on, more riotous, most of the serious business was done quietly, between conventions, by the steam roller — the Executive Committee.

The theoretical procedure was this: The posts passed resolutions and sent them to their department. If the department liked them, it passed them at its local convention and sent them up to the National Convention. If the National Convention liked them, it adopted them, and, if they required laws, handed them to the Legislative Committee, which introduced them in Congress — and the Congress of the United States then passed them whether it liked them or not. Thus the resolutions of the posts became the law of the land. In practice, this procedure has often worked in reverse, in that the resolutions were first suggested to the posts by the Executive Committee — often at a hint from the lobby.

In the first years, however, Congress liked the laws, and, in many instances, it was right in liking them. The first laws put through by the lobby included the excellent Sweet Bill (establishing the Veterans Bureau), a generous appropriation for hospitalization, an appropriation for vocational training, an act requiring an investigation of the Federal Board of Education, several homesteading laws, and a law opening 30,000 acres of Oregon land to veterans. These acts helped the disabled and the men who had been thrown out of work. The cost was comparatively small.

The first real battle of Congress versus the Legion came over adjusted compensation — no longer called the bonus. This and one other were the only two hard-fought engagements in the capture of Capitol Hill. The American Legion won them both.

VI

There were several reasons why, in 1923, the lobby should have pressed harder for the bonus than it had done in 1919.

In the first place, by 1923, the lobby’s first duty — to the disabled — had been adequately fulfilled. The war casualties had been luxuriously cared for, and medical ‘presumption’ had been stretched to cover all the doubtful cases. So in this direction there was nothing more for the lobby to do.

In the second place, Legion headquarters was seriously alarmed over loss of membership. The official report gives total membership in 1920 as 814,512. (There is a slight divergence of figures between different publications of the Legion, for the American Legion Dictionary of Facts gives the 1920 total as two and a half million.) Assuming the official report to be correct, there was a falling off of 44,000 in 1921. Yet in this year the lobby had worked hard: 333 bills had been introduced in Congress, and the cost to the government of World War veterans had jumped from 146 to 317 millions. In 1922 there was a sinister drop in membership of 72,000, In this year World War veteran benefits increased to 452 millions. In 1923, the membership fell again, to 629,000 — less than a sixth of the number eligible.

In many ways these successive decreases were not to be wondered at.

Most of the boys were back at work and engrossed in the occupations of peace. They had grown tired of preserving ‘memories and incidents,’ especially since, with many Legionnaires, those incidents had been confined to a few months of training. And most Legionnaires were healthy men who had no personal interest in the disabled, so that the intricacies of compensation laws and the presumption of war-connected tuberculosis or shell-shock did not hold their attention.

The bonus was another matter. Almost everyone would be eligible for a bonus. The first repugnance, the fear of becoming mercenaries, the reluctance to ‘ sandbag ’ the government, as Colonel Roosevelt had put it, had been largely overcome by a campaign of education conducted by the Executive Committee. It had been made clear that, in spite of government allotments made during the war to the families of service men, these families had suffered from reduction of income while the breadwinners were away fighting for their country. It had also been made clear that other men, not soldiers, had earned fabulous wages in munitions factories and so on, and that the railroads and other businesses had been reimbursed for their war losses. The poor soldier, meantime, had got nothing but his $30 a month, plus $15 for his family, plus food, clothing, and doctors, plus insurance at peace-time rates, and the privilege of sacrifice for the defense of his birthright.

Each year at the convention, the bonus resolution had been more exigent. Yet Congress, which had started the bonus idea, seemed now to become more wary with each new resolution. One bill, which passed with a large majority in the House, died in a Senate committee. All the efforts of the lobby could not save it.

One reason for this Senatorial change of heart was that there was apparently dissension in the Legion itself on the bonus question. Posts here and there had asserted themselves independently.

‘Whereas,’ said a Minnesota post, disregarding Legion discipline and sending a resolution direct to its Senator, ‘whereas the Government of the United States already is burdened with excessive war debts causing great public unrest: Therefore be it

‘ Resolved that the Wallace S. Chute Post No. 76 of the American Legion express itself as opposed to the American Legion being put in the position of asking for such a bonus. . . .’

And ‘Whereas,’ came another, ‘the American Legion was conceived in a spirit of patriotism for all things American . . . now therefore be it

‘ Resolved, that Cheyenne Post No. 6 . . . unequivocally repudiates the idea that the services of the soldiers and sailors and marines who served in the Great War can be measured by dollars and cents and declares it to be the sentiment of said Post that no such bill . . . should receive favorable consideration at the hands of Congress. . . .’

A little more than a year after the Senate heard these two renegade resolutions and others, the National Commander of the Legion announced that not only the Legion but ex-service men in general were ‘unanimously’ for adjusted compensation, so those posts must have become convinced in the meantime along with some three and a half million non-Legionnaires. Still Congress demurred.

A second reason for the doubts in Congress was that some of the other lobbies were at work. Big Business, which originally had fostered the Legion as a bulwark against Bolshevism, had turned against it. The powerful Chamber of Commerce and the powerful Manufacturers’ Association and the National Industrial Conference Board, in a panic about taxes, were flooding the country and the Congress with anti-bonus propaganda.

So, when Congress convened on December 3, 1923, the lobby was harassed. Pressed on one side by the National Headquarters, fearful of loss of membership, and on the other by Congress, the lobbyists had to gird up their loins in a hurry.

‘Your National Legislative Committee,’ it reported later, ‘had discarded all the polls of the House of Representatives and the Senate which it had made during the year past. A recheck of the attitude of each Senator and Congressman was necessary following the deluge of anti-adjusted compensation propaganda. This recheck was accomplished through Department Headquarters and Department leaders . . . through other Senators and Congressmen as well as directly by representatives of your committee in Washington.’

Yet it was the psychological moment for a fight. A victory now would convince the three and a half million veterans who were not Legionnaires of the effectiveness of the Legion.

So in January the lobby opened fire. It put down w hat it calls, picturesquely, a ‘barrage.’ The barrage worked as follows. The lobby wired the departments, the departments wired the posts, the posts called up the members. The next morning every opposing or doubtful legislator in the Congress of the United States got a flood of menacing telegrams from his veteran constituents. No telegrams came from the unorganized majority of taxpayers. What telegrams may have arrived from other sources, the Legion hastened to assure Congress, were inspired by the monster of Big Business.

At the same time barrages of boiler plate, clip sheets, and so on descended on 10,000 newspapers from the Legion News Service attacking the interests, and so virulent were some of these attacks that the editors must have had to look twice to be sure that they had not emanated from radicals.

The Adjusted Compensation Act passed over President Coolidge’s veto on May 19, 1924. It called for an average bonus of $500 by means of a twenty-year endowment policy to about four million men. The act has been amended six times, making it more expensive. It has cost, so far, about a hundred million dollars a year to the people of the United States.

Immediately afterward, the Legion launched a membership campaign based on the victory of the bonus.

VII

It was now obvious to the Legion lobby that they need no longer confine their attention to men disabled in war service. So in 1924 — a big year for the veterans — they caused to be passed the World War Veterans Act, which entirely supplanted the old War Risk Act of 1917.

This act prescribed that all cases of tuberculosis developing up to January 1, 1925, would be conclusively presumed to have originated in the war; they were therefore to be treated free and compensated in cash. The act also specified that all neuropsychiatric disorders developing up to 1925 be presumed to have war origin unless successfully rebutted. This made possible a case which I shall describe in a later article of a man treated and compensated for tuberculosis notwithstanding his sworn statement that he had contracted the disease six years after the Armistice. (The Legion now denies responsibility for the ‘conclusive’ clause and for the date 1925, though the lobby claimed credit at the time.)

It never occurred to the lobby that by giving a few border-line cases the benefit of the doubt they were demoralizing thousands of men who would take advantage of this law, knowing that they had no ethical right to it. No, they said, the new policy of the government was for broad legislation — special pensions had been abolished.

The same act included a provision that where there were vacant beds in veteran hospitals they might be used for non-war cases. The lobby was abetted in this, curiously enough, by President Coolidge, who, in a message to Congress, recommended it and went even further than the lobby in suggesting the building of new hospitals. In 1932, 60 per cent of the beds in veteran hospitals were occupied by admitted peace-time casualties.

By 1925, then, the capture was almost complete. Colonel Taylor walked through the Capitol and the Senate and House offices like a commander. When Congress was in session he could go to a door of the Senate Chamber or the Hall of Representatives and send a page boy for a Senator or Congressman; the person summoned would come running. He could, and often did, walk into the office of any legislator, and all business would be put aside during his visit. Very few people on Capitol Hill dared say no to Colonel Taylor. Any Senator or Representative of the United States who did say no to Colonel Taylor would hear, within twenty-four hours, from ‘the boys back home.’

From 1925 to 1932, the annual cost of World War veterans jumped from 371 to 567 millions.

VIII

But there was still one more battle to be won before the capture would be sure, and that is one of the most curious fights a lobby has ever fought. The result was unimportant because it cost so little, — a sum of money picayune indeed compared with the many millions of benefits which were obtained without a struggle, — but it took nine years of hard, concentrated, often heartbreaking work to win.

At its caucus in May 1919, the infant Legion complained that, while officers of the regular services were retired for disabilities incurred in service on three quarters of their pay for the rest of their lives, the brave emergency officers of the army — in it only for the war period — had to content themselves with the compensation of a private for as long as their disability lasted. The War Department objected that disabled regular officers had to give up their profession, while an emergency officer, who in civil life was a lawyer or broker, did not. This argument only angered the Legion.

For a democratic organization like the Legion, in which rank, according to Article I of the Constitution, did not exist, this attitude was surprising. Congress was frankly surprised. And Congress, furthermore, refused to believe that the boys back home were behind this thing.

Senators looked at the figures and could hardly believe their eyes. If this bill (introduced by the lobby in 1919) were passed, a disabled captain — and only 30 per cent disabled at that — would get $150 a month for the rest of his life, while a totally disabled private got only $100 and a widow of a man killed in action got only $30. No, they said, the rank and file were not behind this bill.

They were right. The rank and file were not behind it. But the rank and file knew almost nothing about it. It was sketchily presented at Legion conventions. It involved so little money that there was nothing about it in the press.

The reason the Legion lobby worked so hard over this bill was that it would not brook being thwarted by the national legislature on a piece of legislation it proposed. If the Legion lost one battle, it could never complete the capture. The fight against this bill, the lobby explained, had ‘ developed into a fight on the American Legion.’

In the years that followed, every possible parliamentary trick was tried. The committees considering it delayed; the lobby prodded them. The lobby placed menacing letters on the desks of Representatives. Barrages were put down; people all over the country telegraphed in loyalty to the Legion, not knowing what they were telegraphing about.

Finally Senator Tyson, a member of the Legion, introduced a new bill and gave it a lucky number, S. 777 — a good old doughboy crap number. It was jointly introduced in the House by Congressman Fitzgerald. The TysonFitzgerald bill became law in May 1928.

In the nine years of the battle, the number of officers eligible for retirement grew from a thousand in 1919 to six thousand in 1928; the cost of the bill from $600,000 to $11,000,000.

IX

In 1930, the famous Disability Allowance Act went through. This provided cash compensation to veterans 25 per cent disabled in any way except in war service. This disability must not be the result of the veteran’s own misconduct. It also must be paid only to veterans who, the year before, were exempt from income tax.

The Legion repudiates responsibility for this act, though by accident, in the lobby’s 1930 report, it is listed under ‘Accomplished.’ But the Legion is, truly, not to blame.

Nevertheless, once it was passed at a cost to the nation of a hundred millions a year, the Legion agitated to remove from it two clauses — the willful-misconduct clause, and what they call the ‘pauper’ clause. I questioned one of the lobbyists on this. His answer is interesting.

‘We are against willful-misconduct clauses in all legislation. We do not mean it to apply especially to this bill. It is important primarily in the provisions for service-connected disability.’

‘Why,’ I asked, ‘is it important?’

‘On account of venereal disease,’ he said. ‘Remember, in the war our government sent these millions of men away from home. They were removed from association with decent women and they were surrounded by temptations. The government must accept responsibility for what happened to them.’

I admitted that venereal disease might be considered a war disability. ‘But,’ I said, ‘in this war the government went to great effort and expense to provide an efficient prophylaxis. You remember that a man who contracted disease was punished in the army for having rendered himself unfit for service unless he could show that he had taken advantage of the prophylaxis. The army considered venereal disease a self-inflicted wound.’

My friend began then to talk about innocent infections, so I did not pursue the subject. I was disturbed anyway at his regarding these soldiers of the World War as helpless children.

X

Like many dictatorships, the American Legion went, in the course of thirteen years of power, too far in its tyranny. It began as a benevolent despot; it did, certainly, incalculable good to the disabled. In its early years it cleaned up the administration of veteran affairs when that administration was a flagrant scandal. It obtained employment for men who had lost their jobs during the war. It brought about an efficient vocational rehabilitation of crippled men. It took care of countless children. The individual posts have performed great services, rounding up criminals, rescuing lost or kidnapped children, giving relief in time of disaster.

The fault lay in the lobby. The lobbyists were underpaid, but they were interested and zealous and wanted to hold their jobs. They were harassed by such fears as the constantly threatened loss of membership in the Legion at large. They enjoyed fighting for its own sake. They took pride in their influence upon Congress. For these reasons they forgot about the cost. And prosperity — while the public slept — helped them to forget. It was only when the depression came that they began to realize that the burden they had placed on the backs of the people was too great to be borne.

The 1932 report of the National Legislative Committee begins with a lament. ‘The first session,’says the Foreword, ‘of the Seventy-second Congress which convened on December 7, 1931, developed the turning point in the legislative activities of the American Legion. For the first time in our history we were placed on the defensive by the marked attitude of Congress, not only to refuse the enactment of new legislation, but also to cut down the present appropriations and take away existing veterans’ benefits.'

The lobby, in short, was frankly worried. Yet now it had the Legion itself to contend with. No sooner was this report presented to the Portland convention, in September 1932, than bedlam broke loose, and, with yells, shrieks, stampings, boos, and catcalls, the delegates voted for immediate cash payment of the bonus. The lobby had reached a turning point. But the Legion, coddled, babied, spoiled, and loaded with gifts for thirteen years by the lobby, refused to recognize the change.

In 1932, also, organized veterans were shaken by the startling reëlection to Congress of Lewis W. Douglas of Arizona. Douglas (though a Legionnaire) had for years opposed extravagant veteran benefits. His campaign was a campaign of economy. He was elected by 6000 plurality in a state where 20 per cent of the voters were veterans.

XI

The interesting question, after we have shown how such a minority dictatorship as this developed its power until it held the Congress in the hollow of its hand, is: Who will bear the hardest burden of its tyranny?

Not Congress, certainly. Congress has a traditional flair for wriggling out from under. Congress always reverses itself in time. The people, then? Yes, the people have already suffered from increased taxation. The treasury? That depends on the success of President Roosevelt’s economy measures. It is unlikely that he will permit complete bankruptcy as long as he holds the power to prevent it. No, the real sufferer is the veteran himself.

In March 1933, by President Roosevelt’s economy act, hundreds of thousands of veterans were cut off from part of their subsistence. Many lost their entire incomes. Thousands of men who, for a time, have lived on disability allowance for peace-incurred disabilities will find themselves with nothing to live on. They have abandoned work, knowing they could live on this dole, and have got out of the habit of work. Thousands more of men who derived a subsistence from the absurd presumption of war origin for tuberculosis or nervous diseases will have to discover new sources of revenue at a time when normal sources are dried up.

So the Legion, piling Ossa on Pelion in its zeal for the ex-soldier until the pile became top-heavy and fell of its own weight, has worked the greatest hardship on the very men it tried to help. It has demoralized the ex-service man by salving his conscience with legislation. It has stripped his service of the glamour of patriotism. It has impaired his power to work for a living. But, hardest of all, it has made promises to him which it cannot keep.

The Legion lobby realizes this. The saner element in the Legion realizes it. The great body of the Legion realizes nothing. Innocent at the beginning of all this drive for power, the great body of Legionnaires, now drunk with the power that has been thrust upon them, are still ignorant of the consequences.

As this present writing appears, the American Legion is preparing for its national convention. For the sake of the World War veterans, of whom I have the privilege of being one, I hope that the saner minds of the Legion will triumph. I hope they will say to the convention: ‘These things have gone far enough. We admit that our zeal has outrun our wisdom. Let us abide now by the rules the President has laid down, and fight no more for ruinous legislation, even if it means abolishing our Washington lobby. Let us do this for our own sake, lest the name of veteran become anathema in the land.’

(In a second paper Mr. Burlingame will describe the fight on the Roosevelt economy bill. In a third he will endeavor to predict the immediate future of veteran legislation.)