Bonus Army: An American Epic, The

Army, Mar 2005 by Hymel, Kevin M

The Bonus Army: An American Epic. Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen. Walker & Company. 370 pages; black & white photographs; maps; appendices; index; $27.

In 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression, World War I veterans who had been promised a monetary bonus from the U.S. government to be paid in 1945 decided that they could not wait that long for what they called their "tombstone bonus." They decided to march to Washington, D.C., and demand what was rightfully theirs. Their march and their subsequent eviction changed the way the United States has dealt with its veterans ever since.

The Bonus Army chronicles in flowing prose and high drama the veterans' experience. The march began as an idea by a veteran in Oregon; the movement took on national prominence as vets from all over converged on Washington. The story of the journey itself is quite a tale, as veterans hopped on trains across the country and were greeted in some towns as heroes, with parades in their honor. Once in D.C., the vets set up camp in empty buildings close to the Capitol and in open fields across the Potomac River. Once again, they were treated like heroes and acted like them, keeping discipline in their ranks.

Two things were unique about this group: while there were communists in the Bonus Army, they were separated from the rest of the vets, so intense was most vets hatred of that ideology. Also, the Army was integrated, with blacks living next to whites in their improvised huts; they were all brothers fighting for the same cause.

It was a serious effort to lobby by marching in the United States, and it did make some progress. Congress had been debating an early payout of the bonus, encouraging the march. Rep. Wright Patman (D-Texas) pushed for the legislation and became the patron saint of the bill. The arguments on the House floor were dramatic and passionate. One congressman even died as he spoke for the bill. The opposition argued that the government simply did not have the money for it.

The Bonus Army started its own newspaper and distributed articles on its cause. Major still-photograph companies circulated images of daily life in the camps, but the vets were largely shunned by Hearst, Fox and other major media players, and did not receive newsreel coverage.

The authors point out that the bonus, estimated at between $500 and $600 per vet, was not a sum randomly picked as a tribute, but a solid compensation for duty. During World War I, while some young men donned doughboy uniforms in the service for Uncle Sam at a government wage, others went into factories to arm the war machine. Congress gave businesses huge financial bonuses to spur production, and those bonuses made their way down to the laborers, who profited nicely from the war. The veteran bonus was designed to make up for that discrepancy.

When the legislation passed in the House but failed in the Senate, and the senators left the Capitol, the Bonus Army seemed finished, but many of the vets chose to stay in the building. When the local police tried to evict them, shots were fired, killing two vets. The Army was called out and tanks, gas-masked infantry and cavalry pushed the veterans from the city.

Surprisingly, the Army's eviction of the Bonus Army, the most famous incident of the entire odyssey, takes up only one chapter of the book, so orderly was its action. Contrary to myth, no veterans or children were killed in the eviction.

It spelled the end of the Hoover administration and helped elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, who still denied the veterans their bonus. Instead he offered them work in Florida as part of his New Deal.

Finally, in 1935, Congress overrode Roosevelt's veto to grant the veterans their bonus. The entire epic left a lasting impression on America, paving the way for the GI Bill, a promise of immediate money and education to soldiers retuning from World War II.

Dickson and Allen have done some great research and are superb storytellers. They expand beyond the dimensions of a conventional history, telling the stories of veterans in the camps, the leaders of government and the local residents. Congressman Patman and Pelham D. Glassford, the D.C. police chief who paid for food for the vets out of his own pocket, are the heroes, while Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who saw communists everywhere and exceeded his orders to remove the vets from downtown, is decidedly the villain.

Up to now, contemporary accounts of the bonus march could only be found in the biographies of the participants.

This highly readable book covers the event in fine detail. It serves as a great civics lesson on how countries should and should not treat those who serve in uniform.

-Kevin M. Hymel