Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1921-07-09
LET HARDING 90 IT."
SAID THE BONUS FAKERS
Politicians Who Have Been Lying to
Service Men Left II to the Presi-
dent to Tell the Truth


dent to Tell the Truth
THE Administration pronounccment rela-
L tive to soldier bonuses broke silence
in Congress that has been long, painful and
filed with piquant significance.
No one in Congress has desired to talk
plainly on the bonus. The subject is whis-
pered about in the lobbies and dismissed as
dynamite.
1t is not the habit Of the average Con-
gressman to take a national view Of any
problem. He thinks usually from the View
point of his constituents or of a particular
vote machine, and leaves the rest to chance
and Providence.
So even the leaders in the Presidents
own party were content to shift the respon-
sibility to the shoulders Of the Executive.
The President met the situation manfully
enough.
Speaking through Secretary Mellon, he
expressed an opinion which virtually all
other officials in Washington share and
which few ever would have the courage to
voice when he said fatty that the bonus
plan, If it were put through now, would
bring about something very much like
Treasury crisis.
Fishers for votes In both parties rather
than the service men in or out of the Ameri-
can Legion started the talk about bonus.
From the stump and in newspapers they
whipped up bonus sentiment among former
soldiers who had no great desire for money
reward for their service of honor.
These same politicians know now that
an additional weight of $4,000, 900, 900 to
the national debt is unthinkable, that the
awards made to veterans would have to come
in turn out of the pockets of those who re-
ceived the money or out of the pockets of
their children in the form of excess taxes.
Those who were loudest in their advocacy
of the scheme have been for long silent.
They knew that they had made false prom
ises and they waited to let some one else
take the blame for seeming reversal Of
party sentiment
The so called soldier vote is an unknown
quantity politically. How real it is no one
can know yet.
There probably is no such thing as a
soldier vote. Service men probably will fol-
low the dictates of their conscience in future
elections as they always have done in the
past.
But the belief among politicians that there
was a soldier vote purchasable with money
brought about the agitation for the bonus,
created hopes that from the first seemed
exaggerated and finally opened way to a
very painful situation at the White House
and at the Capitol
Did the men who fought in France and
served in the United States actually want a
money reward for their service?
That is n question that ought to be an
| swered Enthusiastically before the Government
assumes to establish a bonus system now or
| in the future.
| In the American Legion opinion seems to
be sharply divided. There are politicians in
the Legion, too, and there is no doubt that
much of the pro- bonus sentiment would in
the end be traceable to them rather than to
the rank and file of the membership.
1t would be disaster if any governmental
| policy were to unite all service men into q
self interested voting bloc as the soldier
vote was deliberately organized after the
| Civil War under a pension system that put
a constantly growing burden upon the coun
try from year to year until, in 1913, fifty
years after the Battle of Gettysburg, it re.
quired larger expenditure from the Ma,
tional Treasury than in any previous year.