|
31 May 2004
The Bonus Army
It is Memorial Day, a solemn day across the land, with parades and bands and barbecues to honor the service of generations of veterans. Graves will be decorated in remembrance of sacrifice.
I try to get over to Arlington on this day and leave flowers as a token for those of the dead that I knew in life, remembering them merry and sardonic. I think that is a requisite of service. You can't take something too seriously that is so implacable and inconvenient.
I imagine I will see a lot of red Virginia dirt turned up over there, since the Dead are coming home regularly from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Arlington Cemetery was opened to accommodate the dead of Mr. Lincoln's War. There were over a million veterans of the War Between the States, enough for a steady business into the new century.
The was a brief spurt in activity after the Spanish War in 1898. Two decades later the casualties from the Great War were accommodated. Most of the soldiers from that one lived, as do most of us live past the bugle call that puts us in uniform.
My Grandfather was one of them. He was a tough Irish kid from a gritty Ohio River railroad town. He joined up in 1917 to go to the Big Show in France, and operated the military railroad there to get ammunition and food to the Front.
He came home, safe and sound, in 1919. There was a big parade in New York, and the celebration of ending war forever went on for almost a year. And then the great Spanish Flu swept the nation and there were other things to deal with. He had a lovely wife and three daughters and a job with the Pennsylvania and Ohio Railroad. Life goes on.
In 1932, three years into the Great Depression, he got on a train with some of his service buddies from the American Expeditionary Force to go to Washington. The veterans had a bone to pick with the government about a broken promise. At the end of World War One, a grateful government authorized payment of cash bonuses to war veterans, adjusted for length of service.
Congress actually passed the legislation in 1924, but the funds were never disbursed.
The simmering resentment came to a head with all the men out of work.
My Mom remembers him going, and the lead elements of the Bonus Army arrived on the National Mall in time for Memorial Day. She remembers him coming home, too, bedraggled and unsuccessful.
Most of the troops, like my Grandfather, had served honorably from 1917 until they were demobilized in 1919.
My grandfather was luckier than most in the Depression. He had a steady job with the Pennsylvania Railroad. But many did not. In the spring of 1932, during the worst part of Depression, a group of veterans Oregon named itself the 'Bonus Expeditionary Force' or 'Bonus Army,' and began traveling across the country to Washington to lobby the government up close and personal.
By Memorial Day of that year over 3,000 veterans and their families had made their way to the capital. The established a Hooverville of huts and tents on the mud flats by the Anacostia River, with forward detachments on Pennsylvania Avenue and the National Mall.
They say as many as 10,000 vets were on the streets downtown at any given time. People were jittery.
In congress, Texas legislator Wright Patman introduced a bill that provided "adjusted service certificates," equaling $1 a day for each day of service in the U.S., and $1.25 for each day overseas. President Hoover was against payment of these funds, saying it would cost the Treasury $4 billion.
It would have been worth a little less than a thousand dollars to my Grandfather, but remember, those were in real dollars, not the stuff we use today.
The bill passed the House and died in the Senate.
Some great veterans were on the Mall that early summer with my Grandfather. On the Bonus Army side was Major General of Marines Smedley Butler, Congressional Medal winner and hero of Haiti and Nicaragua.
Confronting them were General Douglas MacArthur, late of the Rainbow Division in France and son of Civil War Congressional Medal winner Arthur MacArthur. He was then the Army Chief of Staff, and his adjutant was Major Dwight D. Eisenhower. Major George S. Patton was second in command of the mounted regiment.
President Hoover considered the Bonus Army a threat to good order and discipline in the capital, and perhaps he had good reason.
The vets roamed the streets and their presence was an ominous reminder of the economic disaster. There is evidence that General Butler was approached by left-wing radicals to stage a coup d'etat of the Hoover regime.
Smedley declined to participate in such an endeavor, but tensions were high. Two veterans were shot by nervous cops at the foot of Capitol Hill near the monument to the other Greatest Generation, the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic.
Hoover finally told MacArthur to evict the Bonus Army from Washington. He mustered the troops from Fort Myer, which surrounds Arlington Cemetery. The 3rd U.S. Infantry is there, the oldest unit in the Army. They are the proud guardians of the cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknowns, although due to the shortage of manpower, they have been inserted into the rotation for service in Iraq.
Major Patton led a troop of Third Calvary to the Ellipse from the Ft. Myer Stables. They keep the ceremonial hearses there now, the only use the Army has for horses and caissons anymore.
Infantrymen donned gas masks and fixed bayonets, the cavalry drew sabers, and supported by light tanks, they moved down Pennsylvania Avenue to clear it of the Vets.
President Hoover had ordered MacArthur to clear Pennsylvania Avenue only, but you know that Doug could get carried away. He immediately began to clear all of downtown Washington, herding the veterans out and torching the huts and tents on the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial and the Ellipse. Tear gas was applied liberally and no shots were fired.
Hoover sent couriers to tell him to knock it off when the tanks had secured the Anacostia bridge that I cross each day to get to work. MacArthur ignored the President's orders, saying that he "could not be bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders."
Like Great Caesar, MacArthur crossed his Rubicon at 11:00 p.m., pushing the Vets and six hundred of their wives and children out of the camp. Then the regular troops burned the Hooverville to the ground.
Presented by the fait accompli of his Army Chief the next day, Hoover went along with the action despite his fury over the disobedience. MacArthur wouldn't get relieved for cause until Korea, but interestingly, he stopped wearing his WWI medals after 1932, and only wore the Congressional Medal he was awarded for the defense of the Philippines in 1944.
That service is recognized on a panel at the WWII Memorial, which is where some of the Bonus Army tents were once pitched.
Eventually, Grandfather was home. I don't know if he was gassed on the Anacostia Front, and if he talked about it, no one is left alive to tell me. My Great Aunt Barbara might have known, but she is gone now, too.
She outlived him by fifty years, and behind her merry Irish eyes she held all the residue of our history. Talking to her the last time, she made the old days alive. I wish I had known the questions I should have asked. Talking to her that sunny day, it seemed that my Grandfather had just stepped out for a beer.
In the end, Hoover was voted out and Roosevelt was voted in with his New Deal. The veterans vote might have helped him, but for them it was not an altogether new deal.
Grandfather and the Veterans got some money, but it wasn't what they asked for or what was contained in the legislation. It was a compromise, what the struggling Treasury could afford.
On the walls of Mr. Lincoln's monument are carved the words he uttered when he said that it was the obligation of the Nation to care for those who had borne the battle, and their widows and the orphans.
During the 1932 election campaign, FDR said: "No one, simply because he wore a uniform, must therefore be placed in a special class of beneficiaries over and above all other citizens. The fact of wearing a uniform does not mean that he can demand and receive from his government a benefit which no other citizen receives."
The Economy Act of 1933 slashed veteran's disability benefits and allowances by 25%. He did not care that much for special interest groups, and did not view those who had worn the uniform as anything more than a noisy bunch of malcontents.
FDR has his own monument down on the Mall now. He got it largely through the efforts of a new generation of veterans, who had to wait for their monument.
That's Washington for you. The logic of things here is always situational, and the importance of the veteran is directly proximate to the gravity of the peril.
I have looked pretty hard around town and have not found the monument to the Bonus Army.
Maybe I missed it over on the mud flats of the Anacostia River.
Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra
|