Bonus Army

Bonus Army. In 1932, with the nation mired in depression, thousands of unemployed World War I veterans traveled to Washington, D.C., to petition Congress for the immediate payment of thousand‐dollar bonuses that 1924 legislation had promised to pay them in 1945. Styling themselves the “Bonus Expeditionary Force” (a takeoff on the American Expeditionary Forces of 1918), these protestors, many with their families, set up camp in vacant federal buildings and in shacks on the Anacostia Flats a few miles from the Capitol.

The House approved the Bonus Bill, but in June the Senate decisively rejected it. Yet many members of the “Bonus Army” stayed in Washington. In July, the Herbert Hoover administration ordered the veterans' eviction from the federal buildings. During this operations, police gunfire killed one veteran. Hoover sent in troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur to restore calm. Exceeding his orders, MacArthur employed his forces, complete with a machine‐gun squadron and several tanks, to drive the veterans out of the District of Columbia entirely. Using tear gas and bayonets, the troops cleared the petitioners and their families from their makeshift homes, which were then burned.

The spectacle of U.S. troops forcibly driving from the nation's capital peaceful, unarmed citizens who were themselves veterans illustrated the gap that had opened between the government and Great Depression victims by the end of Hoover's presidency. MacArthur insisted that the “mob” was “animated by the essence of revolution” and bent on taking over the government. In fact, the rout of the nonresisting Bonus Army demonstrated that government officials were more fearful of a revolution in 1932 than the unemployed were interested in fomenting one.
See also Depressions, Economic; New Deal Era, The.

Bibliography

Roger Daniels , The Bonus March, 1971.
Donald J. Lisio , The President and the Protest, 1974.

Robert S. McElvaine