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.