Remember the Bonus Marchers

Seventy-nine years ago today, on a sweltering day in Washington, D.C., the United States Army, led by three officers who would later become icons of military heroism, acting on the orders of the President of the United States, attacked and killed peacefully demonstrating World War I veterans, their wives and their children.

From Wikipedia:

The Bonus Army was the popular name of an assemblage of some 43,000 marchers—17,000 World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups—who gathered in Washington, D.C., in the spring and summer of 1932 to demand immediate cash-payment redemption of their service certificates. Its organizers called it the Bonus Expeditionary Force to echo the name of World War I's American Expeditionary Force, while the media called it the Bonus March. It was led by Walter W. Waters, a former Army sergeant.

Many of the war veterans had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression. The World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 had awarded them bonuses in the form of certificates they could not redeem until 1945. Each service certificate, issued to a qualified veteran soldier, bore a face value equal to the soldier's promised payment plus compound interest. The principal demand of the Bonus Army was the immediate cash payment of their certificates.

Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most popular military figures of the time, visited their camp to back the effort and encourage them. On July 28, U.S. Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered the veterans removed from all government property. Washington police met with resistance, shots were fired and two veterans were wounded and later died. President Herbert Hoover then ordered the army to clear the veterans' campsite. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded the infantry and cavalry supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.

A second, smaller Bonus March in 1933 at the start of the Roosevelt Administration was defused with promises instead of military action.

From William Manchester's The Glory and the Dream:

"In the desperate summer of 1932, Washington, D.C. resembled the beseiged capital of an obscure European state. Since May some twenty-five thousand penniless World War veterans had been encamped with their wives and children in District parks, dumps, abandoned warehouses, and empty stores.

"The vets had come to ask their government for relief from the Great Depression, then approaching the end of its third year; specifically, they wanted immediate payment of the soldiers' 'bonus' authorized by the Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 but not due until 1945. If they could get the cash now, the men would receive about $500 each. Headline writers had christened them 'the Bonus Army,' or 'the bonus marchers.'

"They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force." BEF members had hoped in vain for congressional action. Now they appealed to President [Herbert] Hoover, begging him to receive a delegation of their leaders. Instead he sent word he was too busy and then proceeded to isolate himself from the city."

The following is a combination of paraphrase and quotes of Manchester's book:

... at about 11:00 in the morning of July 28th, a former Brigadier General named Pelham D. Glassford -- who was now the Chief of Police in the District of Columbia -- took on the onerous duty of rousting the squatters of the Bonus Army. Glassford, who had made no secret of his compassion for the unemployed veterans, was in an absolutely untenable position.

The Attorney General, William D. Mitchell, had ordered the BEF to be moved off of government property, despite the fact that some of the abandoned and dishevelled buildings and lots occupied by the veterans had only recently been purchased by the federal government. The problem was acute. The Bonus Army was there and they had nowhere else to go, for there were fifteen million people unemployed in the States, and more than two million were homeless and wandering.

At 10:00 AM Treasury Agents went to bonus marchers on Third at Pennsylvania and told them to leave immediately. Then they left and the bonus marchers stayed. So Glassford formed up his police detachment and began clearing some of the abandoned buildings at about 11:00 AM, on a typically hot and humid D.C. summer day.

There were no incidents to begin with, according to Manchester, who writes on the eviction of the Bonus Army with great passion. But by the early afternoon, the greater part of the Bonus Army moved to cross the Eleventh Street bridge from Anacostia, where they had made a huge campground with ramshackle huts and tents. When the police tried to raise the bridge, they found that they were too late, and the surge of ragged veterans became a general melee'. Bricks were tossed and curses exchanged and the melee' became a riot. In one desperate moment the police officers opened fire on the Bonus men. Eric Carlson, a disabled veteran from Oakland, California, was "mortally wounded." William Hrushka, a butcher, of Chicago and the 41st Infantry was shot dead, a bullet to his heart.

Within minutes the word of this rioting and bloodshed was communicated to Herbert Hoover. He was having lunch when he heard the news. As Manchester relates it, "the President told Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley to use troops" against the Bonus marchers. Hurley communicated this order to the Chief of Staff for the Army, and his principal assistant.

In the summer of 1932, that was General Douglas MacArthur and one Dwight David Eisenhower, a Major. There were, naturally, some delays in getting things organized, not the least of which were caused by the insistence of MacArthur that armored tanks be brought over with the infantry from Fort Myer. The great general proposed to use tanks and bayonets against unemployed veterans, many of whom were camped in shantytown conditions with their children and wives. The only shots fired thus far had been fired by policemen, and the men killed were Bonus marchers.

By late in the afternoon of this sweltering July day, MacArthur and Eisenhower were in uniform and the troops were assembling. Among the detachments were troopers from the 3rd Cavalry, under the command of Major George S. Patton. They advanced with sabres drawn, and the column following them included machine guns and elements of the 12th Infantry and the 13th Engineers.

"The operation was the worst-timed in MacArthur's career. Fifteen minutes earlier [ 4:30 PM ], the District's civil service workers had begun pouring into the streets, their day's work done." As Manchester describes it, "twenty thousand of them were massed on the sidewalks across from the bewildered, disorganized veterans. Someone was going to get hurt if the cavalry commander didn't watch out". In an incredible moment of irony, the Bonus marchers first applauded the arrival of Patton's 3rd Cavalry troopers, thinking that the soldiers had been ordered to parade for their benefit. They and the thousands of workers watching were badly disillusioned within minutes.

Without "the slightest warning," as reported by J.F. Essary of the Baltimore Sun, the troopers charged into the crowd, which meant that both men and women were "ridden down indiscriminately". George Patton liked action and he wasn't ashamed to see his troopers ride down the innocent bystanders ... including U.S. Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut. MacArthur was similarly inclined to take drastic measures. Three thousand gas grenades had been provided to the infantrymen and they used them without hesitation or provocation. Within a few hours most of the Bonus marchers had recrossed the bridge to Anacostia and the main encampment. Herbert Hoover then sent a message to Douglas MacArthur instructing, forbidding, the deployment of any troops across the Eleventh Street bridge "into the largest encampment of the veterans". MacArthur chose to ignore this direct order and marched his soldiers, with Dwight Eisenhower by his side, over to Anacostia and into the campgrounds.

"The Anacostia camp was a jumble of packing crates, fruit crates, chicken coops, burlap and tar-paper shacks, tents", writes Manchester. "It didn't seem possible that anyone could have become attached to so preposterous an array of junk, but it was the only home the BEF families had."

By 10:00 PM the infantry was in the camp and they routed the Bonus Army and their children with their tear gas bombs. The vegetable gardens planted by the homeless veterans were trampled and by 10:30 most of the shacks and tents were a-blaze. The bravado of MacArthur's troops was considerable. A seven-year old boy was bayonetted in the leg for trying to save his pet rabbit and more than a hundred other casualties were reported. Two infants died of asphyxiation from the irritating gas. The final agonizing irony of this scene from Dante's Inferno came at about 11:15.

"Major George S. Patton, Jr. [led] his cavalrymen in a final destructive charge. Among the ragged bonus marchers routed by their sabers was Joseph T. Angelino," notes Manchester, "who, on September 26, 1918, had won the Distinguished Service Cross in the Argonne Forest for saving the life of a young officer named George S. Patton, Jr."

MacArthur compounded the tragedy in the hours and days after the Bonus Army was routed. He never mentioned Hoover's direct orders not to cross the Eleventh Street bridge and instead, praised the President for reacting to "a very grave situation". Later he said that the Bonus marchers were "insurrectionists". He was quoted as maintaining that ... "if there was one man in ten in that group who is a veteran it would surprise me." Herbert Hoover and his aides made the situation even worse by laying down an official line that the Bonus Expeditionary Force was under the leadership of communists and criminals. And that there were not that many veterans among them.

Liberals know that when you push people into desperation, then attack them for exercising their Constitutional right to seek redress from their government, the backlash is more horrible than you imagine.