The Bonus Army: An American Epic

Written by Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen and published in 2004, this is a very well researched history of the World War I veterans who wages a long campaign to force the government to pay the cash bonus promised to compensate them for their service.  During the war, solders were paid $1 per day while workers back home were making much higher salaries as the economy hummed along. 

In 1924, over Coolidge's veto, Congress approved a bonus of $1.25 per day for oversees service and $1 per day for domestic service (less the $60 discharge payment).  This wasn't really a bonus, however, as it was only payable at death or in 1945, making it more of a twenty year endowment life insurance policy.  Veterans were given certificates showing the amount due in 1945, including twenty years of interest.

This was acceptable in 1924, but less so once the Depression began and veterans, as so many other people, lost their jobs and their homes.  Pressure from veterans began to build for immediate payment.  (Not all veterans' groups agreed: the VFW was supportive, the American Legion was not). 

Members of Congress, notably Wright Patman, a Texas Democrat, introduced and introduce bills to issue payment, only to have them vetoed by Hoover and Roosevelt.  Opposition varied, from concerns about the cost of the bonus, to reluctance to giving handouts and discouraging the veterans work ethic, to putting money in the hands of African Americans (primarily a Southern concern).

In 1932, as many as 45,000 veterans came to Washington by car, truck, railroad car, and foot, to demand immediate payment.  Despite the best efforts of Pelham Glassford, the D.C. police chief, Hoover's government eventually decided to clean out the camps and unleashed Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, a reluctant Dwight Eisenhower, and the U.S. Army.  There were only a few deaths, but the veterans and their families were pushed out without their belongings and the camps were burned.  Many other familiar names show up, including J. Edgar Hoover, as the government used the almost non-existent threat of communist control of the Bonus Army as part of their justification to put tanks in the streets.

Ultimately, in 1936, the bonus was finally paid, over FDR's perfunctory veto. This was not before hundreds of veterans died in a New Deal work camp in the Florida Keys in 1935.  The veterans, and others, could have been evacuated, but government agents waited too long, despite sufficient warnings.  A cover-up that rose to the highest levels of the U.S. government prevented a serious effort to bring criminal charges.  Ernest Hemingway, a Roosevelt hater, wrote the only honest account of the not-natural disaster.

The book concludes with the passage of the G.I. Bill, showing that at least something was learned from the WWI bonus fight.

While reading this book, it's easy to see the differences between the Bonus Army and the Occupy movement, but there are also a lot of similarities, as both groups of Americans attempt to hold their societies accountable for the disparities resulting from the two greatest economic catastrophes of the last 100 years.

Cryptonomicon

This is the first Neal Stephenson novel I've read.  The book follows three threads, two set in World War II, that focus on a Marine and an academic recruited as a code breaker by the U.S. government. The third thread is set in the present time (published in 1999) featuring a computer whiz involved in a somewhat shady deal to create a data depository in a small Pacific island country that will be anonymous to its clients (a kind of digital Switzerland).  Moving through 1,130 pages, the stories converge in the jungle of the Philippines when what was lost becomes found.

Very intellectual thriller, with much detail on code breaking, including an appendix with explanation of how to use a very unique and (according to its creator) very secure encryption algorithm using two decks of cards.

Stephenson's novels include many generation of the same family, over long periods, plus one character who seems to appear throughout.  My next book, Quicksilver, the first volume in the Baroque Cycle, set in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

Very innovative and well written, with compelling characters.  I recommend the book, but some readers (me for one) will skim through some of the more highly technical parts.

Speak (not too) softly and carry a (not too) big stick.

"Roosevelt loads his gun too heavy. ...The recoil hurts him more than the shot does his enemy.  He is bound to make a big noise but the kick of the gun is so much power taken from the force of the bullet.  People react vigorously against him as they always do to his surplus verbal energy."

John Burroughs
quoted in
The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
Douglas Brinkley

Another crazed left-wing radical

Every civilized government which contains the least possibility of progress, or in which life would be supportable, is administered on a system of mixed individualism and collectivism and whether we increase or decrease the power of the state, and limit or enlarge the scope of individual activity, is a matter not for theory at all, but for decision upon grounds of mere practical expediency.

A paid police department or paid fire department is in itself a manifestation of state socialism.  The fact that such departments are absolutely necessary is sufficient to show that we need not be frightened from further experiments by any fear of the danger of collectivism in the abstract.

Theodore Roosevelt
quoted in The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
Douglas Brinkley
pages 739-740

Perhaps not

And yet these facts were largely incommunicable.  He spent his time among businessmen, not scholars.  He rarely invited people to dinner, and could be emphatic and monologic.  He tended to flourish his facts as querulous challenges rather than as invitations to conversation, though this wasn't perhaps his real intention.

James Wood
The New Yorker
November 7, 2011

There and back again

...as he got older and busier, he acquired far more books than he could read...  The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.

James Woods
The New Yorker
November 7, 2011

Best dedication ever?

To the Beatles,

     to the Airplane and the Spoonful and the Dead,

     to Simon and Garfunkel, Joplin and Hendrix,   

     to Buffalo Springfield and the Rolling Stones,

     to the Doors and the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas,

     to Melanie, to Donovan, to Peter, Paul, and Mary,

     to the Who, and the Moody Blues, and Moby Grape,

     to Country Joe and the Fish, Paul Revere and the Raiders,

     to Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs and Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell

     to the Mothers of Invention and the Smothers Brothers,

     to the Hollies and the Association and the Beach Boys

         and even Herman and the Hermits,

     to Creedence Clearwater Revival,

     to lost innocence and bright, shining dreams,

and, especially, to Paris:

     looking at you, I hear the music.

The Armageddon Rag

George R. R. Martin

Past the Tipping Point

…when you're under murderous assault is precisely not the time to turn your entire political culture inside out. That's what the terrorists want you to do, that's what they are dying for you to do. But you're supposed to resist that temptation.

Instead, in thrall to the serpentine blandishments of fear, we spooked ourselves (or at any rate allowed our political class to spook us) into the grotesque disfigurations of the Patriot Act; the witch hunts aimed at Arabs and South Asian immigrants (many of them second- and third-generation American citizens); the botched invasion of Afghanistan; the calamitous Iraq fiasco; the preposterous fetishizations of Hallowed Ground and the Families and the Heroes; in sum, the hysterical deformation of virtually all of American politics, which in turn allowed the egregiously incompetent President George W. Bush that second term with its Katrina debacle, burgeoning deficits, and the whole clueless build-up to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

...

The 10 years just passing, as we all must realize if we are being honest with ourselves, constituted the hinge decade, the decade when something substantial had to be done if the world were going to avoid the exponential catastrophe into which we have now embarked. (You can't go on sagely noting, year after year, that we have only 10 years left within which to confront the crisis, without at some point those 10 years having run out.) Perhaps we could have done both: honored the victims of 9/11 while at the same time tending to the far greater devastation bearing down on us. The point is that, obviously, we weren't able to, and in almost every conceivable way, the result has been an utterly squandered decade.

Shame. Shame on us.

Lawrence Weschler, New York Institute for the Humanities, New York University

The Chronicle Review, August 11, 2011

Be Afraid! Be Very Afr... I'm sorry, what?

…Islamic terrorism has not posed as large a threat as reporters and the public think – certainly not as large a threat as Al Qaeda and its affiliates intended. They routinely complain about the failure of Muslims to join their movement.

Of the 56 million people who die each year around the world, around two million die from HIV/AIDS.  Nearly one million die from malaria.  Almost three quarters of a million die from violence.  According to the National Counterterrorism Center, terrorism peaked in 2007, with 23,000 fatalities, half of them in Iraq – a terrible toll, but not a leading cause of death.

In the United States, 15,000 people are murdered each year.  Islamic terrorism, including the Beltway sniper attacks, has accounted for almost three dozen deaths in American since 9/11 – a small fraction of the violence that the country experiences every year.  The toll would have been higher if the perpetrators has been more competent…Even so, the number of perpetrators has been relatively low.  Fewer than 200 Muslim Americans have engaged in terrorist plots over the past decade – that’s out of a population of approximately two million.  This constitutes a serious problem, but not nearly as great as public concern would suggest. 

Charles Kurzman, University of North Carolina

The Chronicle Review, August 12, 2011

Isn't it wonderful to live in a post-racial society.

 
 
This picture was taken by James Edward Bates in August 2002 in Petal, Mississippi.


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