Today is Veterans Day. It needs commemorating.
According to the Census Bureau, in 2022 there were 16.2 million veterans in the U.S., 6.2% of the total population¹. Today, a lot of them will hear, “Thank you for your service,” and deservedly so.
We’ve come a long way in the appreciation of our veterans. It wasn’t always so. One hot summer, fourteen years after Johnny came marching home from the battlefields of World War I, he was persecuted, dehumanized and then cast into the darkness of the Great Depression.
Mindful of what our President-elect thinks of veterans and soldiers, especially those who were killed or captured in combat (see this for background if by any chance you’ve been on another planet for a couple of months), the story I’m about to tell is worthy of the moment. It is horrifying and a stain on our nation’s history, but there is much to learn from it.
Here’s what happened.
1932 – Washington, D.C.
At the close of World War I, Congress decided to thank the war’s veterans for their service with some cash — $500, which, in today’s dollars, would be about $7,500. Quite a sum. But there was a catch: the “bonus” authorized by the Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 would not be paid until 21 years later in 1945. The veterans did not complain at the time. It was The Roaring Twenties. Everyone was flush.
But then, the black curtain rose on the Great Depression. The economy descended from full employment in August 1929, where the unemployment rate was 3.2 percent, into massive unemployment in 1933 when the unemployment rate reached 25 percent. From sitting on top of the world, plutocrats were suddenly seen jumping out of Wall Street skyscraper windows. Breadlines served the meals du jour. The word, “Hobo,” which had been hardly used since its first appearance in 1888, became a symbol for the forgotten man.
Out of work men, many of them World War I veterans, rode “Hobo trains” around the country to find work and food. It was a dangerous and difficult way to travel. A 20-year-old CBS Radio reporter named Eric Sevareid joined them in “riding the rails.” His experience of the harsh realities of the time provided a unique perspective, a light illuminating the darkness of the Great Depression.
When things were at their darkest, in the summer of 1932, a horde of penniless, desperate veterans and their wives and children descended on Washington, D.C. Four hundred of them had begun the journey from Portland, Oregon, in mid-May. They began the long trek to Washington not as hobos, but aboard a freight train, loaned to them for free by the rail authorities. After exiting the train in Iowa on 18 May they hitched rides and walked the rest of the way to Washington. Like Peter the Hermit’s doomed Peoples Crusade, they picked up other groups along the way. By the time they reached Washington, there were 25,000 of them.
They camped in District parks, dumps, abandoned warehouses and empty stores. They built homemade shanty towns. Their largest camp was a 30 acre site on the Anacostia Flats.
The aging warriors had come to the nation’s capital to ask Congress, admittedly 13 years early, for their $500. Newspapers christened them “the bonus Army,” or “the bonus marchers.” They called themselves the “Bonus Expeditionary Force,” the BEF.
The men drilled, sang war songs, and, once, led by a Medal of Honor winner and watched by a hundred thousand silent Washingtonians, marched up Pennsylvania Avenue bearing flags of faded cotton.
The BEF pleaded in vain with Congress for the money. They were ignored and left to wither. As a last resort they appealed to President Hoover to meet with them. He sent word he was too busy. Then, confronted with 25,000 squatters he would later label “communists,” while asserting less than 10% of them were veterans², he isolated himself from the city, canceled plans to visit the Senate, had police patrol the White House grounds day and night, chained the gates of the Executive Mansion, erected barricades around the White House, and closed traffic for a distance of one block on all sides of the Mansion. A one-armed veteran, attempting to picket, was beaten and jailed.
Conditions for the veterans were pathetic. The summer heat was severe. Lacking shade or screens, the BEF was beaten down by the climate’s fury. Since the founding of the city, Washington was viewed as a place to be avoided in the summertime. In the words of an official guidebook, Washington was “a peculiarly interesting place for the study of insects.”
The veteran men and their families had arrived at the height of Cherry Blossom season, but by July they were debilitated, ghostly, dehydrated, and hot. Very hot. The columnist Drew Pearson, writing in his syndicated column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” called them “ragged, weary and apathetic with no hope on their faces.” Downtown businessmen complained through the Chamber of Commerce that “the sight of so many down-at-the-heel men has a depressing effect on business.”
And that was the extent of their crime, their threat to the country. They weren’t good for business.
General Douglas MacArthur, the Army’s Chief of Staff and its only four-star general, who, even then, referred to himself in the third person, had met with some of the men and assured them if he had to evict them he would allow them to leave “with dignity.” But when the end came for the BEF at 10:00 A.M. on 28 July 1932 there was no dignity to be found. Hoover had had enough, and he ordered “Mac” to get rid of them. Trouble was, he didn’t tell the General “how” to get rid of them. MacArthur, who never did anything small in his life, did something big now.
First, he sent in Police Commissioner Glassford, who had been more sympathetic to the marchers than other authorities, and they appreciated it. He had asked Congress for $75,000 to feed the marchers, a request that was denied. Now, he told the men they had to leave, orders of the President. They refused, which was all MacArthur needed to unleash the Army. Led by then Major George Patton and his 3rd Mounted Cavalry — with him prancing at the front atop his privately-owned horse (he had a stable-full; he was rich) — followed by infantry and a World War I vintage Tank Brigade, bullets began to fly.
BEF men were killed. Two babies were gassed to death. And Joseph Angelino suffered a deep wound from Patton’s sabre-wielding cavalry, the same Joseph Angelino, who, on 26 September 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, had won the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second highest medal, for saving the life of a young officer named George Patton.
By midnight that day, the Army had driven the BEF veterans, their wives, and children across the Potomac and out of the city. But that wasn’t good enough for MacArthur and Hoover. The BEF was chased and harassed west and south, out past Ohio and all the way down to Georgia. Then, the veterans, their wives, and their children just folded into the vast transient population that roamed the land in 1932 — forgotten people.
Four years later, in 1936, by a margin of 322 to 98, Congress overrode a veto by President Franklin Roosevelt³ to immediately pay World War I veterans their full $500 bonus specified in the Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924.
Although about four million World War I veterans, around 25% of all who served, were eventually paid the bonus, which amounted to roughly $1.7 billion at the time, many of the bonus marchers had died; many more were never found.
Throughout our history, the sacrifices of the few have benefited the many.
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¹ To put this in context, at the end of World War II, the population of the U.S. was 141.39 million, 42% of what it is today. Thirty-three percent of all males were veterans. They totaled 16.5 million men. Less than 1% remain alive today.
² The Veterans Administration, which had the actual service records, would subsequently refute Hoover’s claim with an exhaustive study concluding that 94% of the bonus marchers were veterans of World War I.
³ This was not Roosevelt’s finest hour. He delivered his veto at a joint session of Congress, arguing the program would invite demands for similar treatment by other groups and that it was not a relief bill since it was not based on the demonstrated needs of the recipients. With respect to the veterans, aside from the wounded, he said: “I hold that that able-bodied citizen because he wore a uniform and for no other reason should be accorded no treatment different from that accorded to other citizens.”
