When Federal Troops Swept Away the Bonus Army – By Carl M. Cannon (Real Clear Politics) / July 28 2020
On this date 88 years ago, an American president superseded local authorities and unleashed the U.S. Army on protesters who’d been camped for two months in Washington. The troops rousted the demonstrators from the capital and torched their makeshift homes.
As the conflagration lit up the night sky, many Washingtonians living through that grim July in the heart of the Great Depression wondered if the nation was coming apart. The men driven from their shacks had been soldiers themselves. Only 15 years earlier, they were the cherished “Doughboys” who had sailed the Atlantic under John J. Pershing and marched into battle as the American Expeditionary Forces.
In 1924, Congress had voted the World War I combat veterans a bonus for their service, but the legislation was little more than an election-year publicity stunt by political incumbents. No money was appropriated to finance the program, and the vets wouldn’t draw on their bonuses until 1945. When the Great Depression threw many of these men out of work and left their families destitute, they marched again, this time on their own capital. They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Forces.
But Congress held fast, and local health officials began to fear an outbreak of disease in tent and shack encampments along the Anacostia River. That was one concern; another was Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur’s belief that the Bonus Army was headed by communists. In any event, President Herbert Hoover gave the order to force the evacuation, and armed columns of infantry, backed by tanks, cleared them out — a confrontation with current reverberations.
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