1932
Bonus Expeditionary Force at the Capitol, 1932
Ah, what a year it had been! The economy was in the crapper, and the world was shambling into a place that no one wanted to go. Everything seemed to be interconnected in a way that it never had been before the steamship and the locomotive and the flying machine. The portents were everywhere in that year, mixed with the ethereal and monstrous.
There were uplifting events that showed the basic nobility of the human spirit. The majestic rigid airship Graf Zellepelin soared in lofty beauty as it began regular intercontinental service from the Fatherland to Latin America. The Olympics were an American show: Lake Placid hosted the winter games, and languid LA roused from its eternal summer to showcase the summer games.
It is easy now to pick out the small events that would prove to be the pivot points of later grand motions, but then it was hard to discern the significant in all the noise. Charles Lindbergh, Jr., son of the most popular public figure in the world, was kidnapped and murdered by Bruno Hauptman, probably. H.L. Menken called it “The biggest story since the Resurrection.” President Herbert Hoover, vowed to “move heaven and earth” to recover the missing child.
Hoover had his problems that year, and it must have been refreshing to commit the Federal Government to a local crime over which he had no jurisdiction. Elected in 1928 over the known Catholic Al Smith, a Democrat who favored repeal of Prohibition and God knew what else. Hoover was a “dry,” and the former mining engineer and Wonder Boy Commerce Secretary vowed a new regimen of regulation to bring Wall Street under control.
Instead, it became his unhappy task to suffer through Black Friday, and then sleepwalk, apparently helpless, as the world economy tanked.
O, the sad old world! The Brits had to arrest Mohandas Ghandi for his non-violent rabble-rousing that threatened the foundation of the Raj, crown jewel of the Empire. In Germany, six million were unemployed, and an Austrian veteran named Hitler was naturalized to permit him to run for the office of Chancellorship of the Reich. The Japanese occupied Shanghai, the real pearl of China.
Based on a mystical dream by King Faisal of Iraq, the bodies of Hazrat Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman and Hazrat Jabir ibn Abd-Allah, two of the companions of the Prophet of Islam, are moved to Salmaan Paak.
The King dreamed that water had infiltrated the tombs. Much later, I would help target the biological weapons center that Sadam built there, so I need you to take special note that we intended no disrespect to the Faith, in’shallah, or harm to the corpses.
So, in May of 1932, the first wave of approximately 15,000 veterans of the American Expeditionary Force, the AEF, began to arrive in Washington to agitate for the immediate payment of their military bonus, authorized in 1924.
Grandfather Mike Foley was one of them. He was impressed by the stirring oratory of Walter Waters, the former Army sergeant from Portland who had struck a chord with the men who had served in France. Times were hard. The Federal government had made a promise, and that promise should be enforced, regardless of what Mr. Coolidge or Mr. Hoover said.
Grandpa rode a freight ridden a freight from the little river town of Bellaire north along the Ohio River and changed trains in Pittsburgh, to arrive at the Union Station downtown, right across the park from the Senate side of the Capitol. He would have taken a streetcar to the Mall, where some of the Vets camped out, or more likely, Camp Marks, the bustling Hooverville in SE, on the other side of the Anacostia River.
It was a muddy swampy area then, meadows, if you want to put it charitably. Today it is Anacostia Park and the Naval Air Station to the south. The east side of the river has never showed its best face to the city of gleaming marble. It has always been the disreputable younger step-son to the placid Potomac to the west, and the confluence of the rivers that nestle official Washington has always demarcated a social boundary.
The Camp Marks Hooverville was constructed from materials donated by patriots who wanted to help out the vets, and other lumber scavenged from a nearby dump. The camp itself was named for the Police Chief of the Anacostia Force, who helped out, and other Vets were housed in vacant Federal buildings arranged by the DC Chief, General Pelham Glassford, another Vet himself. The Headquarters of the BEF were on 11th Street SE.
Impromptu or not, the camp had a certain military order to it. Streets were sanitation were laid out, security provided by patrols of Vets and parades were held daily. Veterans were required to register with BEF officials, and prove they had been honorably discharged.
Over the course of the summer, from Memorial Day on, the ranks of the BEF swelled and included families and assorted fellow-travelers. The public called it the Bonus Army, which must have been irritating to General Douglas MacArthur, who had just become the youngest Chief of Staff of the real one.
What Walter Waters was after, and what resonated so strongly in bad times was the immediate cash payment of the Service Certificates granted them eight years earlier in the Adjusted Service Certificate Public Law of 1924. Recently-retired Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler joined the harangue. Butler was famous for having earned two Congressional Medals of Honor, and writing a book entitled “War is a Racket” upon his retirement from active duty,
Grandpa may have seen him on active duty. General Butler commanded Camp Pontanezen at Brest, France, the first marshalling point for the AEF arriving in France.
It is important to remember that the Vets were not imagining a new entitlement here- they were insisting that the Government honor the commitment by Congress. This was an article of faith, and Grandpa considered his certificate as good as the gold that backed it.
Each Service Certificate bore a face value equal to the soldier's promised payment, plus the miracle of compound interest. The certificates (like bonds) were intended to mature twenty years from the date of original issuance, something like a Savings Bond, and would thus be eligible to be cashed out in 1945.
There was a long tradition of paying bonuses to volunteer soldiers. The concept began as compensation for the differential between military pay and what the volunteer could have made, had he not enlisted. A private solider in the Continental Army like my Great-Etc.-Grandfather James Socotra for example, was granted 100 acres of land and a cash payment at war’s end. Not that the government was being generous.
The framers of the Constitution remembered the incident in 1783, in which mutinous Revolutionary War troops surrounded the Continental Congress as it met at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Seeking immediate payment of arrears in their pay, the troops pointed their muskets at James Madison and the other founding fathers.
Congress responded with conciliatory words and fled to Princeton, New Jersey, where they ensured that Posse Commitatus- the separation of military and police functions- was the law of the land only outside the capital.
The Indian Wars saw the land grant increase, and time-served requirements dropped to participation in a single battle, which qualified a national guardsman named Abe Lincoln.
The long peace after 1865, in which a small volunteer Army fought Indians, dimmed the idea of compensation to the troops in the face of the largesse handed out to Greatest Generation of the 19th Century- the ones who had borne the brunt of the Civil War. The vets created by the Spanish-American conflict received nothing; possibly because they were so few, and because the suppression of the Philippine Rebels was so brutal.
Uncle Sam is pretty tight with a buck, but it helps to win wars, as would be noted by the Americans who lost their attempt to leave the Union. The Doughboys coming back from France were allotted only $60.
The highly influential Grand Army of the Republic, the association of Union vets, was fading as a political force as its ranks dwindled through natural attrition. There were no provisions to accommodate the veterans of the 1898 fight, much less those fought against Pancho Villa or WWI. To fill the void, in 1919, the American Legion was formed, and immediately began to agitate for additional compensation for those who fought.
It was a hot topic. Silent Cal Coolidge vetoed legislation in 1924 which intended to grant vets a dollar for each day of domestic service, up to $500, and $1.25 for each day of overseas service, to a maximum of $625. Anything less than $50 was to be paid immediately, with larger amounts covered as twenty-year bonds.
Congress overrode the veto and shoved it into law.
I tried to calculate what Grandpa’s share might have been, but I would have to be the manifest information for the sailing of his troopship. Let’s call it a little more than a year of service, with more than half of it overseas: something around $500.
This was not an inconsequential amount of money at the time, when the greenback was backed by gold. That is why Silent Cal considered it irresponsible. Some 3,662,374 military service certificates were issued, with a face value of $3.638 billion dollars. That amount of money rivaled a peacetime Federal budget of the day, and accordingly Congress established a trust fund to receive 20 annual payments of $112 million. With accrued interest, it would finance the $3.638 billion dollars owed to the veterans in 1945.
Meanwhile, there were provisions that veterans could borrow up to 22.5% of the certificate's face value from the fund. As the Depression deepened in 1931, the loan value was increased to half of face value.
Then, as now, Congress was supportive of an immediate pay-out. President Hoover was opposed, since it would negatively affect impact a variety of stimulus packages. Meanwhile, the American Legion continued to vocally press for early redemption.
Congressman Wright Patman (D-1-TX) was a radical young politician who had also been a machine-gunner in the AEF. He announced his intention to introduce legislation to that effect, and that is what brought the Bonus Army to Washington. Patman remained in Congress all the way to Watergate, as chairman of the House Banking Committee. They named the Congressional Credit Union after he was ousted from that position, and I was surprised to find myself banking there when I worked on the Hill.
’ll have to tell you about how the Bonus Army left town tomorrow, and who made them get out.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com