Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 244, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1912 — WAR VETERANS FOR PRESIDENT TAFT [ARTICLE]

WAR VETERANS FOR PRESIDENT TAFT

Effectiveness of New Pension Law Depends Largely Upon Election of Republican. The old soldiers of Indiana are especially interested in the coming election, since upon its outcome Ib dependent in the next four years the effectiveness 6 f the pension law passed this year, in May. The National Tribune, the non-partisan organ of the veterans, declares that the best interests of the veterans demands that they support President Taft, and that the coming election has resolved itself into a contest between Taft and Wilson. The Tribune says of Wilson: “Born in the south, of rabidly .Confederate parents, spending his boyhood days among those who hated the Union soldiers with a consuming hatred, with all his earlier lifelong impressions fiercely against the men of the Union army, he can not help being even more hostile to the pensioners than Cleveland was, who came to manhood in a loyal community. All of Wilson’s utterances have been distinctly .unfriendly to the claims of Union veterans, and he undoubtedly shares the belief proclaimed by every prominent newspaper and public man who has supported him that the Union veterans are a singularly undeserving class that is pillaging the national treasury. He probably has this view much more strongly even than Grover Cleveland had.” The Tribune predicts if elected, Wilson would endeavor to make the pension act of May 11, 1912, of as little use as possible to veterans and says: “We know that this would be the case from the bitter calumnies with which the Wilson papers and the speeches of his supporters in Congress were filled during the consideration of the act of May 11, 1912. The veterans and their widows are now nearly twenty years older than they were when Cleveland made the merciless raid upon them. They are vastly less able to stand the mental distress and hardships of another such cruel period. They must rouse themselves, and induce all the voters that they can possibly influence against the man whose election threatens them with such calamitous consequences. Selfpreservation, if no other reason, should dictate that they should exert every means in their power to elect William H. Taft and prevent the election of Woodrow Wilson.”