Posted on 01/11/2014 5:21:46 PM PST by chicagolady
There was no attack. MacArthur was ordered to clear out the mob. Soldiers formed a line and began marching. To avoid direct confrontation, tear gas was used to get the mob moving.
For certain not in MacArthur's book. Ike authored a number of books not all of which I have read.
I have heard that one lady may, or may not have miscarried and one boy who may, or may not have been present at the time troops cleared the Mall was later hospitalized and died of an intestinal infection.
Thankfully MLK’s freedom march turned out to be peaceful, so we were ordered to stand down and get back to our usual job of burying dead soldiers with honor. But if we had been sent into the demonstration and ordered to fire on the demonstrators or attack them with bayonets, we would have done so. Soldiers follow orders, period. They do not pick and choose which ones to follow as you state in your #30 or which ones are right or wrong as in your #129.
Here is my claim, people can decide if it is accurate.
***To: vladimir998
Actually hunger and inadequate diets, malnutrition, and slow starvation in some extreme cases, are known about the great depression, at least to most people.
Many of us had family that experienced it, and these men would have experienced it on the road and so far from home, it is what appears to have brought most of them to travel to DC in the first place, are you paying attention to this story at all?
You want to rage and attack people personally, but you don’t seem to be saying anything other than repeating over and over, that they weren’t facing starving and hunger.
If that is your opinion, then fine, to you it is all just Great Depression mythology, and poor people traveling at the time would not be dealing with such a problem, but your rage and hostility is off putting.
74 posted on 1/11/2014 7:15:18 PM by ansel12***
Post some evidence that the Bonus Army members were starving. If you have none, then don’t make the claim. We both know you’ll fail because none of them died on the march or in camp of starvation. None of them. Newspaper stories from the time period are clear on this. Fact, of course, don’t matter to you.
“”Starvation is a severe deficiency in caloric energy, nutrient, and vitamin intake. It is the most extreme form of malnutrition. In humans, prolonged starvation can cause permanent organ damage and eventually, death. The term inanition refers to the symptoms and effects of starvation.””
To: vladimir998
Hunger is a symptom of starvation, if you want to reveal some truth that disagrees with the history, then YOU need to show that none of them were suffering routine hunger and inadequate diets.
Then some of us can tell you about our families who were suffering hunger and inadequate diets, and starvation during that time, and they were not on the road to DC to protest, which makes for a much more difficult existence for someone desperately lacking in means.
56 posted on 1/11/2014 6:40:29 PM by ansel12 ( Ben Bradlee — JFK told me that “he was all for people’s solving their problems by abortion”.)
Indeed. The Bonus Army was seeking a special privilege for itself at a time when the country was strapped for cash.
Incidentally, FDR opposed paying the bonus during his 1932 presidential campaign. In 1936, when Congress finally passed a law to pay the bonus, it was over the president's veto.
Post some evidence that the Bonus Army members were starving. If you have none, then don’t make the claim. We both know you’ll fail because none of them died on the march or in camp of starvation. None of them. Newspaper stories from the time period are clear on this. Fact, of course, don’t matter to you.
LOL, hunger during the Great Depression, look at your posts on this thread, it is pure useless trolling.
You seem to be carrying some deep personal scar of some type, I must have hurt you badly on another thread.
chicagolady, Smokin’ Joe, Irenic, Depression history is wrong, the Great Depression news accounts are wrong, the descriptions of the bonus marchers are wrong, there were not issues with lack of food and nutrition during that era, according to some kind of a strange troll, who I think really isn’t posting about Great Depression hunger, but about something else.
Put up or shut up. Post some evidence that the Bonus Army members were starving. I can’t make it any simpler for you.
If you read my post, you will see that I objected to MacArthur willfully disobeying Hoover’s orders not to cross the bridge, and compared it to his disobeying Truman in Korea.
Have read accounts that variously favor and fault both “sides” in this incident...
But...Had not heard or read of that aspect...
If you have a source please post regarding the role of Commies in this incident...
Thanks fso301...
hahaha! They do say it’s the thought that counts.
Sure. For starters be sure to read post #89 by ProtectOurFreedom on this thread. You should also read MacArthur's account on pp 92-97 here. MacArthur's account starts in the middle of pp92 and ends in the middle of pg 97. After you've read that, head to a library and research newspaper articles from the period.
This was interesting, especially looking at the problems we are having today.
Despite inadequate housing, sanitation, and food, the movement’s leader, Walter W. Waters, managed to maintain order and to oust agitators. The bonus bill was defeated in Congress, however, and most of the veterans left for home discouraged. The rest, variously estimated at 2,000 to 5,000, over the next few weeks engaged in protests and near-riots, producing an atmosphere of restlessness and threats of turbulence
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/73256/Bonus-Army
*snip*
“I was horrified to see plain evidence of hunger in their faces.”
Evalyn Walsh McLean was the wife of the owner of the Washington Post and a pillar of Washington Society. She describes the scene as the Bonus Army first entered Washington and marched past her elegant mansion:
“On a day in June, 1932, I saw a dusty automobile truck roll slowly past my house. I saw the unshaven, tired faces of the men who were riding in it standing up. A few were seated at the rear with their legs dangling over the lowered tailboard. On the side of the truck was an expanse of white cloth on which, crudely lettered in black, was a legend, BONUS ARMY.
*snip*
I was burning, because I felt that crowd of men, women, and children never should have been permitted to swarm across the continent. But I could remember when those same men, with others, had been cheered as they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. While I recalled those wartime parades, I was reading in the newspapers that the bonus army men were going hungry in Washington.
That night I woke up before I had been asleep an hour. I got to thinking about those poor devils marching around the capital. Then I decided that it should be a part of my son Jock’s education to see and try to comprehend that marching. It was one o’clock, and the Capitol was beautifully lighted. I wished then for the power to turn off the lights and use the money thereby saved to feed the hungry.
When Jock and I rode among the bivouacked men I was horrified to see plain evidence of hunger in their faces; I heard them trying to cadge cigarettes from one another. Some were lying on the sidewalks, unkempt heads pillowed on their arms. A few clusters were shuffling around. I went up to one of them, a fellow with eyes deeply sunken in his head.
‘Have you eaten?’ He shook his head.
Just then I saw General Glassford, superintendent of the Washington police. He said, ‘I’m going to get some coffee for them.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I am going to Childs’.’
It was two o’clock when I walked into that white restaurant. A man came up to take my order. ‘Do you serve sandwiches? I want a thousand,” I said. “And a thousand packages of cigarettes.’
‘But, lady - ‘
‘I want them right away. I haven’t got a nickel with me, but you can trust me. I am Mrs. McLean.’
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/bonusarmy.htm
From where do you get such understanding?
I watched the U-tube video.
both houses of Congress offered a meager gesture to the veterans by agreeing to provide them with transportation money for returning to their homes. Most of the veterans were exhausted by their stay in the sweltering capital and accepted the funds; however, about 2,000 determined protestors remained. Metropolitan police were called in to disperse this remnant and violence erupted that resulted in the deaths of two policemen and two veterans.
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1513.html
*snip*
As the men headed east, the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division reported to the White House that the Communist Party had infiltrated the vets and was determined to overthrow the U.S. government. The president, however, didn’t take the matter entirely seriously; he called the protest a “temporary disease.”
*snip*
. In response, the veterans, who had crossed the river by footbridge, uncoupled cars and soaped the rails, refusing to let trains depart. The governor, Louis L. Emmerson, called out the Illinois National Guard. In Washington, the Army deputy chief of staff, Brig. Gen. George Van Horn Moseley, urged that U.S. Army troops be sent to stop the Bonus Marchers, on grounds that by commandeering freight cars, the marchers were delaying the U.S. mail. But the Army chief of staff, a West Point graduate who had commanded the 42nd Division in combat during the Great War, vetoed that plan on the grounds that this was a political, not a military matter. His name was Douglas MacArthur.
*snip*
There would soon be more than 20,000 veterans in the camps. Waters, the Bonus Army’s “commander in chief,” demanded military discipline. His stated rules were: “No panhandling, no liquor, no radical talk.”
*snip*
All the veterans, wrote syndicated Hearst columnist Floyd Gibbons, “were down at the heel. All were slim and gaunt. . . . There were empty sleeves and limping men with canes.”
*snip*
While newspaper reporters produced almost daily dispatches on camp life, they largely missed the biggest story of all: in this Southern city, where schools, buses and movies remained segregated, Bonus Army blacks and whites were living, working, eating and playing together. Jim Banks, the grandson of a slave, looks back on the camp as “the first massive integrated effort that I could remember.” Roy Wilkins, the civil rights activist who in 1932 wrote about the camps for The Crisis, the NAACP monthly, noted that “there was one absentee [in the Bonus Army]: James Crow.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/marching-on-history-75797769/?page=4
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