UA Prof. Michael Schaller: Military troops on the streets of Washington, D.C. — in 1932

The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:

The spectacle of heavily armed police and National Guard troops chasing peaceful demonstrators from the streets of Washington, D.C. and other cities has raised fears that fundamental American freedoms are threatened.

Many were appalled when the Trump Administration ordered that gas, flash grenades, helicopters, and rubber bullets be used to clear Lafayette Park near the White House so the president could pose holding a Bible in front of a nearby church. Trump justified the action by labeling the protestors as “terrorists” and “thugs.”

Although this nation has largely been spared from federal troops being used as agents of domestic crowd control, there have been some exceptions, such as during the Civil War era draft riots, the enforcement of desegregation orders in the 1950s and early 1960s, and during urban riots in the late 1960s.

Perhaps the most dramatic peacetime example occurred during the summer of 1932, at the height (or depth) of the Great Depression. Then, police, mounted troops, and tanks attacked thousands of peaceful demonstrators who had come to Washington to plea for financial assistance.

The aftermath of the attack upon the so-called Bonus Marchers drove a once popular president from office and ushered in a peaceful revolution in American politics.

During the three years after the stock market crash of October 1929, the nation’s economy spiraled downward. Industrial and farm income fell by at least half, thousands of banks shuttered, and at least 25 % of workers had lost their jobs.

In June 1932, roughly 20,000 unemployed World War I veterans – calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF) were joined by 25,000 family members who descended on Washington.

Although both most of the nation and Washington, D.C. were strictly segregated, movement organizers explicitly welcomed both white and black veterans to share their encampments in abandoned city buildings and in makeshift shelters in fields along the Anacostia River, just outside the capital.

They dubbed the shacks and tent city “Hoovervilles,” mocking Republican president Herbert Hoover who just three years earlier boasted that poverty would soon be banished in America.

The Bonus Marchers picketed the White House and Congress to demand immediate payment of a previously authorized bonus, or veterans benefit, of $1,000 (worth about $17,000 in today’s dollars.) The original legislation called for payment in 1945, but given mass unemployment, the veterans wanted their money sooner.

Hoover, like most “respectable” Republicans, denounced aid to needy individuals as extortion and a raid on the Treasury. Following the president’s lead, Congress offered the demonstrators nothing beside bus or train tickets home. One despondent BEF member remarked “we were heroes in 1917,” but “now we are bums.”

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Over the next month about half the Bonus Army, as the media dubbed them, drifted away. But nearly 10,000 remained, some sleeping in city buildings and more in Anacostia. Their peaceful marches around the capital were constant reminders of the grim human toll of the Depression and a symbol of Hoover’s discredited policies.

The president, basically locked himself in the White House (no bunker in those days) and demanded the city be cleared. Hoover, no doubt, was influenced by the counsel of his friend and Army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur. The general claimed (falsely) that Communist agitators among the Bonus Army planned imminent “revolutionary action” under the guise of seeking redress.

Following MacArthur’s warning, on July 28, Hoover ordered the city and nearby locations cleared of demonstrators. Within the capital, city police roused BEF members from abandoned buildings, killing two of them.

To clear the larger encampment, MacArthur assembled nearly a thousand troops to assault the BEF camps in Anacostia. They included cavalry under the command of George Patton, tanks, and additional ground troops and armored vehicles.

MacArthur’s chief aid, Major Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, urged his boss to keep a low profile during the operation. Ignoring Ike and believing he would benefit from public exposure, MacArthur put on his formal dress uniform and mugged in front of newsreel cameras as the attack began.

As Ike later told a friend, “the dumb son-of-a bitch” believed his own press releases about “incipient revolution in the air.” While the troops pummeled the unarmed veterans and burned their ramshackle camps, they accidentally killed an infant.

The print and newsreel accounts of the “battle of Anacostia flats” effectively doomed Hoover’s presidency. The public – appalled by scenes of heavily armed soldiers and police attacking peaceful veterans — overwhelmingly condemned the assault and turned their attention to Hoover’s Democratic opponent, the energetic but relatively little known governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In the aftermath of the incident, FDR, as nearly everyone soon called him, privately described MacArthur as one of the “two most dangerous men in America,” the other being the flamboyant Louisiana populist senator Huey Long who ruled the state as his fiefdom and promoted a dubious “soak the rich” scheme to solve the Depression.

In his Fall 1932 presidential campaign, Roosevelt promised a “new deal” for the American people that would lift the awful burden of the Depression from the shoulders of the “forgotten man.” That November, Roosevelt won in a landslide.

Recalling the Bonus March and shabby treatment of WWI veterans, in 1944 Roosevelt and an overwhelming majority in Congress passed the “Serviceman’s Re-adjustment Act,” better known as the GI Bill.

This final piece of New Deal legislation provided the soon-to-be demobilized “greatest generation” not only up to one year’s financial support after returning home but a remarkable array of educational, housing, medical, and business start-up assistance.

In many ways, the GI Bill became a pillar of postwar mobility and prosperity.