THE CONGRESS: Ex-Precedent

In 146 years 32 Presidents have written 674 veto messages for trusty White House clerks to carry back to Congress. Of these vetoes only 49 have been overridden by a cantankerous House & Senate.* Last week President Roosevelt tossed the custom of the country out the window and made a breezy bit of history by carrying Veto No. 675 up to the Capitol in person and making it stick. Whereas all other Presidents have been content to let Congressional clerks read out their objections to bad measures, nothing less than the rostrum of the House of Representatives would serve him as an eminence from which to thunder his disapproval of the Patman Bill to prepay the soldier Bonus with printing press money.

The Senators filed into the House Chamber two by two. The floor was filled. The 553 available seats for the House gallery were jammed with the lucky spectators who, among 5,000 applicants, had managed to get tickets. Mrs. Roosevelt was there with her knitting (on which she did not work) and Ambassador Josephus Daniels. Then Franklin Roosevelt marched in and up the special gangway to the rostrum. In the hush that followed the outburst of applause, the ice tinkled out as Secretary Marvin McIntyre poured his chief a glass of water. Laying his glasses on the lectern, President Roosevelt, unsmiling, began to read his message, a thorough, unequivocal rebuttal to the advocates of bonus and greenbacks.

Reasons in Person."Mr. Speaker, Members of the House of Representatives. . . . Under the Constitution, I address this message to the House of Representatives, but at the same time I am glad that the Senate by coming here in joint session gives me opportunity to give my reasons in person to the other house of the Congress. . . . With your permission, I should like to continue from time to time to act as my own messenger. . . .

"There has been expended up to the end of the last fiscal year more than $7,800,000,000 ... in behalf of the veterans of the World War, not including sums spent for home or work relief.

"With our current annual expenditures of some $450,000,000 and the liquidation of outstanding obligations under term insurance and the payment of the service certificates, it seems safe to predict that by the year 1945 we will have expended $13,500,000,000. . . .

"The bill before me provides for . . . paying $1,600,000,000 more than the present value of the certificates. It requires an expenditure of more than $2,200,000,000 in cash for this purpose. It directs payment to the veterans of a much larger sum than was contemplated in the 1924 settlement. It is nothing less than a complete abandonment of that settlement. It is a new, straight gratuity or bounty to the amount of $1,600,000,000. . . .