The political fallout from the rout of the Bonus Army was swift and severe. Roosevelt , into office by a wide margin. However, he was also the last Republican president until Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated in However, when the veterans held a similar protest in May , he provided them with meals and a secure campsite. On January 27, President Roosevelt vetoed the bill, but Congress immediately voted to override the veto. Almost four years after they had been driven from Washington by Gen.
MacArthur, the Bonus Army veterans finally prevailed. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile.
Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. Johnson announces that he has ordered an increase in U. Johnson also said that he would order additional increases if necessary. He pointed out that to fill the increase in military manpower On July 28, , President John F. In , after graduating from George Washington University, Jackie toured Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.
The crowd dispersed quickly at the first whiff of tear gas. Nobody was hurt. There is no sign of life in them … The infantry advances cautiously.
They move in single file along the river bank. There is a line of hovels which have been erected for veterans with families. They are deserted now. The soldiers apply the torch to them. They are like tinder. A delegation from the Anacostia camp was met with sympathy and cigarettes and, after a pleasant chat, escorted to General MacArthur, who granted the veterans time to collect their belongings.
It was nearly midnight when the women and children, evacuated to an embankment above the camp, saw flames suddenly burst from the center of the ebony bowl below. The platform where they had gathered with their men for vaudeville shows and the windy oratory of visiting spellbinders had been put to the torch. The flames, fed by fires the marchers began to set themselves, spread slowly, engulfing the big gospel tent, the packing boxes, egg crates, automobile bodies, and pup tents.
Silhouetted in the flickering shadows of the burning camp, the routed army began to regroup, stunned families reunited, fathers taking the smaller children into their arms as they drifted off. Some stumbled toward the Virginia border, only to find it blocked by soldiers. The Maryland line was guarded by state troopers. Some of the veterans wandered aimlessly; others dropped to the roadside, dabbing their eyes with damp handkerchiefs to ease the sting, while the children coughed and whimpered from the tear gas they had drawn into their lungs.
Transportation to Johnstown was cheerfully provided by Maryland authorities eager to rid the state of this human refuse. Driven out of Washington, herded across Maryland, the dazed men, women, and children of the B. State troopers were waiting for them at a Jennerstown traffic signal nineteen miles from Johnstown. The trucks were directed west over Laurel Hill and Chestnut Ridge instead of north toward the abandoned amusement park on the outskirts of Johnstown, where stragglers were already being sheltered by Mayor McCloskey.
Once the men in the trucks realized they had been duped, they stopped the trucks, clambered down, and headed back toward Johnstown. Malcolm Cowley of the New Republic gave two of them a lift in his car: One was a man gassed in the Argonne and tear-gassed at Anacostia; he breathed with an effort, as if each breath would be his last. The other was a man with family troubles; he had lost his wife and six children during the retreat from Camp Marks and hoped to find them in Johnstown.
He talked about his service in France, his three medals, which he refused to wear, his wounds, his five years in a government hospital. And no such approval would be given. The Governor of Pennsylvania dispatched a committee of trained social workers to the Johnstown camp. The redheaded former prize fighter was impressed by the wisdom of accepting the generosity of the B.
Now I am going to send you home. Some men, women, and children were dumped in Chicago, spent two days in a condemned building, then were hustled out of the city. Little Joe Maida, a four-foot six-inch dynamo, organized a camp in Denver, where sixty-four families with ninety-eight children had access to a hospital, a diet kitchen for undernourished youngsters, and an entertainment center, but most of the refugees drifted back into the shifting ranks of the unemployed, disappearing into shack cities, railroad jungles, and overcrowded missions.
When a convention of the B. The men, shivering in the autumn rain, filed into a gloomy warehouse, shouted themselves hoarse, then shuffled away. Their leaders, quarrelling among themselves, split into various groups—the Khaki Shirts, the Rank and File, the Blue Shirts, and assorted local organizations, each claiming to be the real B.
He soon sank back into the obscurity from which he had sprung, and the B. The B. Anyone to the left of Andrew Mellon was suspect in their eyes, and for inspiration they turned not to Stalin but to Mussolini and Hitler. In trying to rally the unemployed to the ranks of the Khaki Shirts, The B. For five years Hitler was lampooned and derided.
But today he controls Germany. Mussolini before the war was a tramp printer, driven from Italy because of his political views. But today he is a world figure. The bonus marchers, plunged by circumstances into a potentially revolutionary movement, had been the despair of the Communists tugging from the left and the Khaki Shirts from the right.
They had marched on Washington not with the clenched fists of revolt, but with the slumped shoulders of helpless acquiescence. They were the kind of men to be found in bread lines, not at barricades.
Hoover, writing nearly twenty years after the event, described the evicted remnants of the B. Crime had actually decreased in the capital during the invasion. A few months after the eviction of the B. Glassford conducted a survey of conditions among young transients of the Depression, turning in a report which contributed to the establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps. After victory in World War I, the US government promised in that servicemen would receive a bonus for their service, in By , the Depression was still dragging on, with no end in sight.
Out of sheer desperation, some of the veterans decided to march on Washington to ask for the bonus right away. If the movement had an official beginning, it would have been in Portland, Oregon.
They began a long trek to Washington aboard a freight train, loaned to them for free by the rail authorities. After exiting the train in Iowa on May 18 they hitched rides and walked the rest of the way to Washington.
Smaller splinter groups reached the capital on their own. By June 1, some 1, men, some with their families, were in Washington. They camped out in homemade shanty towns.
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