The Bonus Army March

In the summer of 1932, approximately 20,000 World War I veterans descended on Washington, D.C., and built a city. They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force — a sardonic echo of the American Expeditionary Force they'd served in — and they had come to demand early payment of the bonus certificates Congress had promised in 1924, redeemable in 1945. The Depression had turned those certificates into the difference between eating and not. The veterans erected shantytowns on Anacostia Flats and in abandoned federal buildings, maintained military discipline, held daily roll calls, and waited for Congress to act. Congress voted the bonus bill down in June. Most veterans stayed.

President Herbert Hoover, persuaded that communist agitators had infiltrated the camps, ordered them cleared on July 28. Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur commanded the operation; his aide was Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, who later wrote that he had advised MacArthur not to personally lead it. MacArthur disregarded Hoover's explicit order to halt at the Anacostia Bridge and drove his troops — with fixed bayonets, tear gas, and cavalry — through the veterans' main encampment. The shantytown burned. One infant died from tear gas exposure. Two veterans were shot by police. Newsreels showed an American army routing American veterans with horses and fire.

The political consequences were immediate and durable. Hoover's handling of the Bonus Army crystallized public revulsion at his administration's response to the Depression and contributed to his landslide defeat to Franklin Roosevelt that November. Roosevelt drew the lesson carefully: when veterans marched again in 1933, he sent Eleanor Roosevelt to walk through the camps and talk. He offered enrollment in the Civilian Conservation Corps and sent coffee. No troops were needed. The bonus was eventually paid in 1936, over Roosevelt's own veto — Congress, for once, moving ahead of the president on behalf of the men a previous president had tear-gassed.