FROM THE ATTIC — FOR A KINDER, COOLER AMERICA
“History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
— ATTRIBUTED TO MARK TWAIN
It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times, the Summer of our Discontent. By the summer of 1932, three years of Depression had America reeling. Unemployment was 24 percent. Banks were closing. Thousands of jobless marched in city streets. Hobo camps, dubbed “Hoovervilles” dotted the landscape. Bread lines and hunger. Despair and defeat. Then in late July, the nation touched bottom.
That spring, 10,000 veterans and their families from across America headed for the nation’s capital. Calling themselves the Bonus Army, they rode freights, hitchhiked, lived off meals from well-wishers. Arriving in DC, they hunkered down in makeshift wooden shacks. President Hoover called the Bonus Army a “temporary disease,” and many called them communists. But poor and destitute, blacks and whites, they “occupied” DC and kept their eyes on Congress.
A bonus had been promised in 1924, a dollar for each day served in World War I. Passed over President Coolidge’s veto (“Patriotism bought and paid for is not patriotism”) the bill gave three million vets certificates promising bonus pay. But the bonus could not be claimed until 1945. The vets needed the money NOW. For weeks, they waited.
On June 15, the Democratic-controlled House passed a bill granting the bonus. Shouts and cheers resounded across Anacostia Flats. Two days later, as 8,000 vets occupied the Capitol steps, the Republican Senate overwhelmingly rejected the bill. Veterans fought tears, then rallied to sing “America, the Beautiful.” The stalemate continued, but chaos loomed.
All morning on July 28, police faced off against vets. By noon, batons were flailing, bricks flying. Shots rang out, killing two vets. By afternoon, President Hoover had seen enough. At 2:55 p.m. he ordered the army in. Commanded by Generals Douglas MacArthur and George Patton, troops assembled on The Ellipse fronting the White House, then marched up Pennsylvania Avenue. Veterans, thinking the army was on their side, cheered. Then the cavalry charged.
Using tear gas, bayonets, and tanks, federal troops routed veterans. Civilian onlookers shouted “shame, shame!” Soldiers fought former soldiers, driving them across the Anacostia Bridge. Hoover ordered the attack halted but MacArthur, convinced this was revolution, continued until every last veteran was driven off. “By midnight,“ TIME reported, “Bonus City, once the home of 10,000 jobless hungry men & women, was a field of roaring bonfires.”
There are some who say voting doesn’t matter. “But how can my vote — “ “Governments are all — “ Enough! Listen.
In November, voters elected FDR and a Congress that was 62 percent Democrat in the Senate, 72 percent in the House. And the New Deal began. The following spring, when a smaller Bonus Army returned to DC, FDR had the vets housed in a special encampment across the Potomac in Virginia. Army field kitchens served them “food like we never knew was left in the world.” Navy bands played “Over There” and other WWI songs. Eleanor Roosevelt visited the base, prompting one vet to joke, “Hoover sent the army, Roosevelt sent his wife.”
The government could not pay the bonus, FDR said, but would they like jobs? The new Civilian Conservation Corps required members to be young and single but Congress waived these requirements for vets. Some 2,500 went to work in the CCC. And in 1936, when unemployment had been cut by a third, Congress gave all vets their full bonuses. But the story doesn’t end there.
Eight years and another war later, 16 million were about to return from World War II. Haunted by the Bonus Army, the American Legion urged FDR to prepare. Three weeks after D-Day, the president signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, soon known as “the G.I. Bill.”
Free tuition for college or vocational training. Low interest loans to start a business or a farm. No interest home mortgages. A year of unemployment checks. The bill, FDR said, “gives emphatic notice to the men and women in our armed forces that the American people do not intend to let them down.”
The G.I. Bill was not a bonus for all. Returning black vets had no chance of entering segregated Southern colleges, nor of getting bank loans anywhere in America. The bill, historians say, worsened the racial divide. In that sense, as in others, the G.I. Bill made modern America.
Yet the bill sent 2.2 million vets to college. Another five million learned a trade. Four million bought homes. An entire middle class was created out of war and chaos.
There are no statues commemorating the Bonus Army, but the Summer of our Discontent carries a lesson. Nations, like people, can touch bottom, and resurge. History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
