Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Bonus Army

WYTS: Washington Commanders. Original post here.

Okay, next one is Washington DC… which riot to pick...? There is that obvious one from a few years ago at the Capitol... But I’m being told that was actually a peaceful demonstration and we were very unfair to those gentlemen. Sorry, I should call them "heroes". You’re just not allowed to question this. So instead, let's go back to the most politically-safe deep past of a century ago. Here’s the Bonus March of 1932.

Herbert Hoover is not remembered as a particularly great president. Now in fairness to him, he was an excellent disaster relief administrator, who saved millions of lives providing food to starving people across Europe. He was very good to post-Revolution Russia in the early 1920s, even while the US was having a face-melting freak out about the Bolsheviks. The Great Depression was not necessarily his fault either, the post-WWI chaos in international markets, along with years of incompetent Republican financial management did that. I’m not sure any president could have done a great job saving the economy. However, waiting for the free market to save the day was not the wisest of choices.

Also, anybody could have made better choices this in July incident than Hoover did.

This is before the GI Bill. Prior to a proper VA Administration, the government granted financial support its veterans in a messy, random way. This was usually land grants until we ran out of land to grant. It is not like our history of keeping promises to soldiers was all that great either. In 1783, the then-capital Philadelphia was besieged by Continental Army vets demanding Congress pay up their long overdue back pay.

 

As for the men who survived the trenches and beat the Germans in France, the plan was to only give them their regular weekly paychecks and nothing else. This changed in 1924 when Congress passed the World War Adjusted Compensation Act, over President Coolidge’s Veto (fuck Coolidge). That granted the veterans a dollar a day for service, with an extra daily quarter if you served overseas. However, this was made extremely complicated, with the dreaded Means Testing. Instead of getting the money right there and then, veterans were given a trust fund system, along with some options to borrow against their bond. In effect, they were not getting paid until 1945. In the Great Depression, the economy was fucked. "It's my money and I need it now!" said the soldiers, and there was no J.G. Wentworth and no opera to help. That bonus could be as much as $625.00 ($11,740.00 today) and when you’re starving, another thirteen years is a long, long time to wait.

In 1932 the veterans decided that the free market was not going to save them, in fact, no matter what Hoover believed. They traveled however they could, in some cases literally tramps riding the rails, and began to gather in Washington DC on the south side of the Anacostia River. They made camp with the Capitol Dome in sight. By July, there were 17,000 veterans with 26,000 others, many families, all set up in a tents in the open fields in the “Black side” of DC. This terrified the federal government, since these guys were calling themselves the “Bonus Army” or “Bonus Expeditionary Force” (BEF). Remember that in Europe, veteran movements had turned violent and fascist, such as Mussolini’s March on Rome, or the German Freikorps.

Despite the government's fears, the March went very peacefully and did not find a dictator to install. The closest thing was their leader, Walter W. Waters, who dressed in a brown uniform along his a small guard of... unfortunately-named "Khaki Shirts" (too similar to Brown Shirts for anybody's liking). The Bonus Army did have military ranks but this was informal. Waters claimed the rank of "Vice-Field Marshal". Walters had served in the 41st Infantry in the Great War, so would have seen combat at the Meuse–Argonne offensive, fighting until the Armistice. After the war he wandered around the country, not finding a place, a similar problem for many Shell Shocked young men. His life became all the more unstable with the Great Depression, when he lost his job. After the events in Washington, Waters would write about his experience as the unofficial leader of the BEF. I've skimmed his work. He's rather humble and gives a sober, truthful account of what happened, obviously self-serving, but this is not Mein Kampf. A reckless firebrand that demanded the heads of capitalists could have turned this into a violent coup, maybe. From what I can see, Waters was not that guy - I'm sure he's in some Hearts of Iron IV alt history mod as a tyrant of some kind. With his tone deaf fascist-adjacent costuming, Waters became an easy scapegoat to justify some very brutal federal responses.

 

In actuality, the Bonus Army had no plans to overthrown anything. They were just families waiting for the government to act. The Bonus Army had a very well-organized camp. It reminds me a lot of large strikes during the labor movement twenty years earlier, where whole families peacefully resisted against the Rockefellers for fair wages. As Hoovertowns went, the Bonus Camp was excellent, with libraries and mutual aid. They had no weapons. Even the superintendent of the DC police department, Pelham D. Glassford, treated the Marchers well and saw this was not a threat. He gave them food, supplies, and I'm told that crime rates went down in the city during the Bonus Army occupation. The Bonus Camp was even racially integrated, unlike the actual army back then.

On June 15th, the House passed the Bonus Bill to pay these men now. The Senate, meanwhile, defeated it in a 62-18 vote a month later. (Fuck the Senate.) Hoover promised to veto it too, so Congress went home for the summer.

The veterans were ready to stay for months, years if needed, Congress or no Congress. And they were very disciplined. This is one of the riots not 100% not started by protestors, but by the police. Speaking of, Washington DC’s appointed government had enough. (By the way, Washington DC had no home rule yet; the city would not get its own elected mayor until 1975!) On July 28th, during a march on Capitol Hill, there was a small police skirmish where two Bonus Army men killed. Then the army were sent in at 1:40 PM, led by soon-to-be very famous officers, themselves Great War veterans. The Washington Commander of this operation was General Douglas MacArthur with his junior aide, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower. He sent in hundreds of infantry backed by the 3rd Cavalry led by Major George S. Patton, with five light tanks against a Bonus Army lacking a single rife.

At first the Bonus Army cheered their brothers in arms. Then as the non-Bonus Army advanced with bayonets raised, the veterans realized this was anything but friendly. Soon it was chaos as they were chased off the streets and teargas filled the air. In one of those nasty ironies of history, WWI veterans were gassed once again, now by their own government. They fled back across the Anacostia River to their camp. MacArthur’s orders were just to disperse the men at the Capitol, but always horny for a grand advance, MacArthur kept going against orders, crossed the river, and burnt the camp. They were all "Communists" anyway as far MacArthur was concerned. The Bonus Army fled the city for their lives.

Twenty years later in North Korea, MacArthur will lead the US military to one of its greatest defeats by ignoring orders and advancing recklessly right into the jaws of the PLA. But that’s a story for another day. (Oh and fuck Douglas MacArthur.)

Back in 1932, it seems only those first two men died, but there were a further 55 injuries, including onlookers. The Bonus Army ceased to be - for now. Hoover’s re-election campaign for that fall was destroyed, his legacy secure as a failure of a president and now a national pariah. A second Bonus March happened a year later, testing a new president, FDR. This one ended peacefully with the men being granted Civilian Conservation Corps jobs. In 1936, Congress finally paid out the Bonus early, over Roosevelt’s Veto, by the way.

Walter W. Waters ceased to be a major political actor after the Bonus March. He did not take part in later Bonus Army events, claiming ill-health. He went on to write his book, worked at a gas station, and in 1935 got a job at the War Department under General MacArthur. It seems Waters also fought in WWII as a navy man. Details on his life are hard to verify after 1932. MacArthur later said, "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away", and that applied for both Doug and Walter.

Veterans would get better deals from the nation post-WWII and the GI Bill. But let’s not pretend all is good and rosy with our war veterans. We still have a lot of broken people and you can never fix what you’ve done to them. Few people survive a war 100% in fact. But hey, I’m sure randomly firing tens of thousands of VA employees will fix those problems.

 

Also, one day that free market will save us all, I’m sure.