Word: bonus
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Last week the lid was clamped down as never before. The Cabinet met, Congressional leaders came & went, the President's message was revised, policies for 1935 were thrashed out. Such all important questions as how the demands for immediate payment of the Bonus, for inflation, for the 30-hour week, for the Townsend plan could be blocked in Congress or held to harmless proportions were canvassed. And for once the Press & public were kept in ignorance not by a plethora of conflicting information but by a silence undefiled...
...Anxious to hold Bonus enthusiasm in check, the President made public a 1,150-word letter he had written to the commander of an American Legion Post in Texas. Without at any point flatly rejecting the Legion's demand for immediate payment of the Bonus, he explained in detail just why that demand amounted to holding up the U. S. Treasury for $2,320,000,000 over and above the Bonus originally voted to veterans by Congress...
Heralded by a brief skirmish in yesterday's news, a major encounter of the coming Congressional session is sure to be the struggle between President Roosevelt and supporters of the veteran's bonus. Although cynical observers predict a victory for the ex-doughboys by the margin of three star-doughboys by the margin of three star-spangled banners and one bloody shirt, more hopeful commentators on the situation feel that Roosevelt, with Congress so predominantly Democratic, might be able to check their exorbitant demands on the national treasury...
...kindred organizations. The payment of 2,000,000,000 dollars, an obligation which will not mature until 1945, and is computed as with interest to that date, appears to be too much of a burden for the financial resources of the government to bear. The government, in paying the bonus now, would be deprived of the use of those funds for ten years, during which time the compound interest would amount to a most appreciable figure. Mr. Roosevelt does not subscribe to the veterans' ploa that 2,000,000,000 dollars released in bonuses now would help recovery enough...
...enough Senators and Representatives could take their minds off the political consequences of their votes for a long enough time to act in accordance with what they think is best for the government of the United States, the soldiers' bonus would have been a dead issue long ago. But our timorous legislators in Washington are too fearful of the populace which puts them in office, and that populace, in turn, is too easily swayed by such skilfully propagandizing institutions as the American Legion to use judgment in electing or rejecting its representatives. A shining hour of opportunity presents itself...