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Not the first time Veterans were mistreated. Hoover’s brutal repression of the ‘Bonus Army’ [1]
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Date: 2025-03-16
In 1924, Congress finally responded to the demands of WW1 war veterans that Congress honor its earlier promise to pay “adjusted compensation” for their service by passing a bill that would offer them a cash bonus. The bill was vetoed by Republican President Calvin Coolidge, who stated that “patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism,” but his veto was overridden by Congress and the bill became law. Under it, veterans who were scheduled to receive $50 or less would receive their money immediately, but the rest were given certificates that could be redeemed for cash in 1945. The only way the bonus could be paid before that date was for the recipient to die and allow his heirs to collect the money. This led veterans to name the arrangement the “Tombstone Bonus.”
In 1929, Rep. Wright Patman (D-TX), a war veteran himself, introduced a bill calling on Congress to give them the bonus. But Congress seemed to have lost interest in the veterans and the bill died. Then came the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, which made the veterans even more urgently want to receive their bonus
After a new version of the Patman bill had been introduced in the House, veterans’ units formed and headed to Washington. The movement grew as radio stations and local newspapers reported on the growing ‘Bonus Army’ and its mission. “The March was a spontaneous movement of protest, arising in virtually every one of the forty-eight states.”
When Waters learned that the bill had been defeated in the Senate, he immediately shared the news that the bonus would not be paid. Many of the marchers refused to leave, and following a skirmish that left two marchers dead and three policemen injured, Republican President Herbert Hoover ordered the Army to evict them. Using tear gas, six hundred soldiers, six light tanks, and a troop of saber-wielding cavalry commanded by Major George S. Patton, U.S. Army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur drove the marchers out of Washington and burned their main camp on the Anacostia Flats.
A young Dwight D. Eisenhower, MacArthur’s chief of staff, had argued with his boss, insisting that the Army should stay out of what was essentially a local police matter. He tried to convince MacArthur not to cross the bridge into Anacostia. Secretary of War Patrick Hurley, speaking for the president, had specifically forbidden this action. Eisenhower told MacArthur that Hurley had sent two high-ranking officers to deliver orders directly to MacArthur, but MacArthur refused to see them.
Americans were shocked by disturbing newspaper and newsreel images of Army tanks, soldiers marching with fixed bayonets, and saber-waving mounted cavalry chasing off veterans and their families in the shadow of the Capitol Dome. “It’s war,” a newsreel narrator intoned. “The greatest concentration of fighting troops in Washington since 1865. They are being forced out of their shacks by the troops who have been called out by the President of the United States.” Movie audiences in many cities booed the U.S. Army and jeered at MacArthur and Patton when the newsreels were shown. To many Americans, the veterans were heroes, not the soldiers used to disperse them.
Democratic presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt benefitted politically from the expulsion of the Bonus Army, although he himself was opposed to the immediate payment of the bonus (and later even tried to veto the payments when they were finally granted by his own Congress), because it would benefit one class of citizen at a time when all groups were suffering.
Lessons were learned, however, and one of the greatest results was the 1944 G.I. Bill, officially known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, which became one of the most important pieces of American social legislation of the twentieth century. Nearly eight million World War II veterans took advantage of its generous grants, which paid for college tuition and job-training programs and provided low-interest loans for homes, farms, and small businesses. The G.I. Bill resulted in a well-educated and well-housed American middle class whose accomplishments fueled the soaring postwar economy.
Much of the above is taken - with slight alterations - from Paul Dickson’s piece found at
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-bonus-army
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