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
But if the press ignored the integration phenomenon, it made much of a small Communist faction within the ranks of the veterans, giving credence to the official line that had been expressed by Theodore Joslin, who was President Hoover’s press secretary: “The marchers,” he asserted, “have rapidly turned from bonus seekers to communists or bums.”
Meanwhile, at the Justice Department, J. Edgar Hoover, the 37-year-old director of the Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner of the FBI), was coordinating efforts to establish evidence that the Bonus Army had Communist roots—a charge that history does not substantiate.
*snip*
In the days that followed, many bonus marchers returned to their homes. But the fight was not over. Waters declared that he and others intended “to stay here until 1945 if necessary to get our bonus.” More than 20,000 did stay. The hot summer days turned into weeks; Glassford and Waters became concerned about worsening sanitary conditions and the dwindling supply of food in the camps. As June gave way to July, Waters showed up at Evalyn Walsh McLean’s front door. “I’m desperate,” he said. “Unless these men are fed, I can’t say what won’t happen in this town.
*snip*
The scene remained quiet until shortly after 1:45 p.m., when Glassford noticed vets skirmishing among themselves in a building adjacent to the armory. Several policemen went in to break up that fight. Accounts differ as to what happened next, but shots rang out. When the ensuing melee ended, one veteran lay dead, another mortally wounded. Three policemen were injured.
*snip*
Eyewitnesses, including Eisenhower, insisted that Secretary of War Hurley, speaking for the president, had forbade any troops to cross the bridge into Anacostia and that at least two high-ranking officers were dispatched by Hurley to convey these orders to MacArthur. The general, Eisenhower later wrote, “said he was too busy and did not want either himself or his staff bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders.” It would not be the last time that MacArthur would disregard a presidential directive—two decades later President Truman would fire him as commander of U.N. military forces in South Korea for doing just that.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/marching-on-history-75797769/?page=8