Congress passed a bill that would have granted a pension to any disabled veteran. He vetoed this bill as well.
' The vast majority of his vetoes as president were for pensions for individual Civil War veterans. It is nearly impossible to imagine a president today refusing to authorize a pension for a supposed war hero. But as Cleveland wrote in one veto message:
“I am by no means insensible to that influence which leads the judgment toward the allowance of every claim alleged to be founded upon patriotic service in the nation's cause; and yet I neither believe it to be a duty nor a kindness to the worthy citizens for whose benefit our scheme of pensions was provided to permit the diversion of the nation's bounty to objects not within its scope and purpose.”
There was a general pension law already in effect which granted pensions to veterans disabled by service in the Civil War or the dependents of soldiers killed. However, Congressman found an easy way to buy support by passing individual pensions for constituents from their district. One veteran congressman laid out their logic, "You need not worry, you cannot very well make a mistake allowing liberal pensions to the soldier boys. The money will get back into the Treasury very soon." One veto message shows the lack of care with which these pensions were handed out.
“A sufficient reason for the return of the particular bill now under consideration is found in the fact that it provides that the name of Andrew J. Hill be placed upon the pension roll, while the records of the Pension Bureau, as well as a medical certificate made a part of the committee's report, disclose that the correct name of the intended beneficiary is Alfred J. Hill.”
Cleveland detailed in veto after veto that the claims for many of these pensions were flatly fraudulent. Old soldiers found it all too easy to blame their present maladies on some incident that had supposedly happened 20 years previous during the war. Take for instance, one of the more egregious examples of such fraud:
“(T)he following statement from his certificate of discharge, if trustworthy, sheds some light upon the kind of debility with which he was afflicted:
'This man has been in this hospital for the past eight months. We do not believe him sick, or that he has been sick, but completely worthless. He is obese and a malingerer to such an extent that he is almost an imbecile—worthlessness, obesity, and imbecility and laziness. He is totally unfit for the Invalid Corps or for any other military duty.
I do not regard it at all strange that this claimant, encouraged by the ease with which special acts are passed, seeks relief through such means, after his application, filed in the Pension Bureau nearly twenty years after his discharge, had been rejected.
Of the four comrades who make affidavit in support of his claim, two of them are recorded as deserters.'”
Or the case of one Mr. Carroll who received a pension from Congress on the testimony of a Mr. Perkins that they were wounded at the same time in the service of their country.
“After an investigation made at that time by a special examiner, he reported that Perkins and Carroll had collected a number of men together, who made their headquarters at the home of Carroll's mother and were engaged in plundering the neighborhood, and that on account of their depredations they were hunted down by home guards and shot at the time they stated.”
A President of the United States so committed to protecting the taxpayers he would be personally involved in investigating and vetoing singular pensions? Imagine that.
Cleveland also vetoed an expansion of the general pension law on the grounds that it had a broader scope than any previous pension and that it was just too expensive.
“While cost should not be set against a patriotic duty or the recognition of a right, still when a measure proposed is based upon generosity or motives of charity it is not amiss to meditate somewhat upon the expense which it involves. Experience has demonstrated, I believe, that all estimates concerning the probable future cost of a pension list are uncertain and unreliable and always fall far below actual realization." '
- from How Grover Cleveland Wielded the Veto Power to Curb the Growth of Government - Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org)
