Posted on 09/23/2014 9:49:15 AM PDT by iowamark
He personally led troops against tax protesters didn’t he? Not even a SWAT team but troops.
George Washington was like a commie or something.
:p
The good news, though, is the returning troops and military factory workers put all that credit to good productive use, more than not. Which did benefit the economy over the following years.
What does our debt (”credit”) do now? Expand welfare and unproductive government programs? We are in deep kimchi.
Sorry, I fail to see the comparison. The WW I vets were not tax protesters, they were simply asking to have the date of payment of their rightfully-earned bonus moved up from 1945. You don’t send troops on horseback to charge through an encampment of veterans, many of whom were disabled, out of work, hungry, destroying their tents and belongings and physically chasing them out. The whole affair was shameful.
MacArthur was a pompous ass and should have been fired long before Truman finally did it.
who ordered MacArthur to do that?
My grandfather, who would be well over 80 today, he’d be 115..born in 1899..hated FDR. (He married my grandmother November 21, 1929 a month after the stock market crash.) He worked for Western Union his entire life so was able to be working despite the depression.
It is beautiful today, warm sunny dry. Humidity WAY DOWN! Bush’s fault!
I have that book! Great book!
Amen, you are right!
Exactly what I have been saying!
Obama is following FDR’s pattern. He is prolonging these economic doldrums so he can gain more power to the Fed Gov’t. The Obama EO’s are intended to achieve that.
I asked Ron Paul about Obama and the other democrats and RINOS in DC. He said they only care about POWER and CONTROL. .....which includes growing the government!
I wish I still had the paper I wrote on this. Unfortunately, we’re talking 40 years and a good many moves ago so it’s long gone. Wikipedia has a fairly concise page on this. I know they aren’t always the most unbiased source but from what I recall the info seems right. Alas, I didn’t have the luxury of the internet back in the 70s.
Well I'll be 89 this year which made me a grade school kid in NYC during the depression. As for FDR, what I remember is that when he got elected the streets were filled with people singing Happy Days are Here Again. FDR started the WPA which provided work.
There is a lesson here for today's GOP. The people wanted hope and FDR had a plan. The GOP had no plan other than the 'in the long run all will be well'. The party without a solution lost. The 'long run' ended with the next election. Today's GOP 'economy watch and wait' plus frying Obama may turn the trick in 2016 if they are not running against another FDR. BTW - My family did not like FDR, they were 'Al Smith' democrats. But he was a Catholic who wanted the end Prohibition and that didn't go over in the Bible Belt.
Schicklgruber was his name. He had a bastard daughter named Hildegaard. She was adopted by a father named Rodham.
The Bonus Army was an “Operation Wall Street” type deal. What few realized is that newspapers kept up various mentions of the possibility that because of the Depression...the bonus would be paid out more than a decade prior to the intended date. The amount of the bonus per individual differed. Some would have taken less than $50, and some might have gotten up to $800. If you were unemployed and standing in food lines...a mere check of $300 would seemed like a million bucks.
The problem was....the nation on acting on stupidity when they promised this in 1924 (Congress acted to get vote favors). They had no idea how they’d ever pay this in 1945).
All throughout 1931, with Hoover still running on his presidency...newspapers pressed on this issue. Congress had no intention of being forced into paying this. Somewhere in the background, some groups began to organize the Bonus Army, and they “deployed” to DC, and set up camp in Anacosta (today, the ghetto area of DC...far southeast corner).
Oddly enough, they had trucks deliver tents, cots, and blankets. The military guys organized the camps....had details to cook, tend to the latrines, etc. Some “talkers” were always in the middle to stir up their convictions, but strangely enough....disappeared after the riots. No one hears much of them ever again.
Once summer arrives in 1932...full heat on the Bonus Army topic, and neither Senate or House want to deal with it. Riots start up, and everyone realizes that the DC cops have no power to stop it. So, they decide to use the US Army, and Hoover calls MacArthur to head the anti-riot force. There were some simple instructions....mostly just to run the riot folks out. I don’t think anyone on the Hoover staff except for Maj Eisenhower knew the full extent of MacArthur’s stupidity.
MacArthur took his Army troops, turning them into thugs....turned loose tear gas....and in one afternoon brought Detroit-style riots to DC. Reporters covering the event were shocked at the mess. To be honest, the only deaths reported during the event (as I remember this) were a couple of newborn kids from women who’d come to the camps because of their husbands. Doctors tending the assault victims and the couple of dead kids...commented heavily against MacArthur’s actions, but labeled it all Hoover’s fault.
This was July, and the newspapers talked about this nationwide for weeks. November’s elections came, and it was a massive nationwide vote for FDR.
This single event....not really the Depression screw-ups by the FED or Hoover....was what did the massive vote for FDR. This is why no one can talk about this in a college history class because it strongly suggests some Democratic planners using this Bonus Army deal to draw masses into DC...lay out a problem that the Senate/House refused to handle....and then do a massive nationwide media event to counter Hoover.
If you notice all these efforts to digitize newspapers...a large number of the efforts stop prior to the Depression and start up again at start of WW II. Very few national newspapers have their editions out there that you could go back and follow events like this and ask stupid questions to the history professors.
It was the beginning....of the manipulation era.
“If you were unemployed and standing in food lines...a mere check of $300 would seemed like a million bucks.”
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My parents lived through it and used to talk about how people worked all day for fifty cents. Three hundred dollars would have been worth more in real terms than thirty thousand would now. Even after the end of WWII a lot of people would have been happy to work three months for three hundred dollars. I read a novel, the title of which I cannot remember now, about a woman who received ten thousand dollars during WWII when her husband was reported killed and she was the beneficiary of his GI life insurance. The family thought she was rich and she was in comparison to anyone else they knew. All kinds of problems developed because everyone wanted a share of her newfound “wealth”.
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