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Memorial Day presents an opportunity to shift our focus back to our long-past, and recent-past, histories to honor those who have served our country. A time to be proud, share that pride and not face disgrace or embarrassment from any current events. Today, as a nation, we don’t seem to quite know what should constitute “shame” and what is honorable. Half of our population is currently worried about the history we may be creating now. Is it honorable? Is it shameful?
Previously, we assumed that any reference to shameful or reprehensible history in the U.S. had to do with slavery or first peoples of native tribes. But that’s not always the case. This story is strikingly dreadful, and the type of scene we hope not to see duplicated or repeated.
Veterans of ‘Bonus Army’
I never learned (or perhaps was purposefully never taught) about an incident not long after WWI. In 1932 a group of 43,000 demonstrators consisting of over 17,000 WWI veterans, along with their wives, children and affiliated groups had long been suffering in the Great Depression and from lack of work. The group was nicknamed the Bonus Army; their self-proclaimed name was actually the Bonus Expeditionary Force, similar to a WWI active force. They were led by a former sergeant Walter Waters from Oregon.
Their complaint was clear; they had not received monies they were due. Under Woodrow Wilson almost a decade earlier, the World War Adjusted Compensation Act had been passed to adjust for inflation. (Regarding the name of the act, remember that at the time we did not anticipate there would be more than one World War.) This act was not actually offering a bonus, not an addition to their salaries, but an ‘adjustment’. Still, a decade later they simply had not been paid their full promised salaries.
The act promised them ‘certificates,’ which represented cash and interest as an adjustment to their salaries. The desperate veterans who had fought in the trenches of WWI were in Washington DC to demand payment on those certificates. Some had set up temporary makeshift shelters in a type of shanty-town or “Hooverville” in a mud-laden, swampy area now near Anacostia Park, and outside the major parts of Washington.
Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover had each spoken out against the act from the beginning. Then, after a clash with Washington DC police, Hoover ordered the military to remove the Bonus Army from the city at once.
Attack on the Veterans
At this time, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff. He, along with General George S. Patton, led a regiment of infantry soldiers and mounted cavalry into the fray. Even when the protesters fled, satisfying Hoover, MacArthur, who called them communist protestors wanting to overthrow the government, continued to pursue them.
Under MacArthur and Patton’s lead, the army troops fully geared with bayonets affixed to their rifles, charged into the shanty town and launched tear gas into the crowds.
Reporters and photographers were there to capture the scene.
“Cavalrymen and infantrymen jerked gas masks out of their haversacks.
The spectators, blinded and choking with the unexpected gas attack, broke and fled. Movie photographers who had parked their sound trucks so as to catch a panorama
of the skirmish ground away doggedly, tears streaming down their faces.”
Reported by the Baltimore Evening Sun
Patton’s tanks crushed the makeshift buildings. And most of the ‘homes’ were burned as women and children escaped the area. Soldiers held people at bayonet-point. Veterans and their families took lungs full of tear gas. Folks were wounded, maimed and slaughtered. The injuries reported by the local hospitals were over 1,000 and some veterans died.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was later to say of MacArthur, who was then his senior, that he didn’t approve of the action. “I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch not to go down there. I told him it was no place for the Chief of Staff.”
As a follow up in 1933 there was a smaller protest. Roosevelt, now president, approached things differently although the depression was still upon the country and he had concerns with the act as did his predecessors. He too did not want to pay the soldiers before a 1945 deadline, but he approached the situation more moderately. Roosevelt enlisted his wife, Eleanor, to help in the matter. She listened to the veterans’ concerns and treated the families with respect. The Roosevelt administration fed them, established a campsite for them, offered jobs in the CCC or transportation back to their homes. Finally, in 1936, the congress overruled President Roosevelt and passed a bill freeing up funds for the veterans’ pay, which amounted to more than $2 billion.
Generations of Patriots
Most of U.S. generations have seen unfulfilled promises to soldiers who had fought for their country. Yet few have later been attacked by that same country and military. The former soldiers of the Bonus Army got their due in terms of what was really ‘back pay.’ Still, they had to fight their own nation and brothers-in arms to get it.
I assume I speak for most Americans when I say we all hope that peaceful, serving patriots of any kind never have to face such an enemy within again. Further, we hope that all Amercian citizens who consider themselves constitutional patriots never face such an opposition from domestic foes.
“These are the times that try men’s souls.
The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will,
in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country;
but he that stands by it now,
deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
Thomas Payne
(First line of “The American Crisis”,
a 1776 pamphlet appearing 5 months before adoption of Declaration of Independence)
FINAL THOUGHT
In memory and memorial of all who have served the military, the governance, their communities, or for friends and family. And deep respect for those who will do so still.
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Resource: The Bonus March (May-July, 1932) | American Experience | Official Site | PBS
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Title Picture credit: Flag in field Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
