I’ll up the ante with this little discussed history lesson that includes some of our most “honored” leaders on the wrong side.
“WITH THE Great Depression causing mass unemployment and bread lines across the U.S., some 40,000 veterans of the First World War made their way to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1932 to demand immediate payment of a bonus under a law passed several years earlier.
The law granted compensation of a $1 a day for stateside service and $1.25 a day for overseas service to each veteran, but payment was delayed until 1945–leading veterans to derisively refer to the money as the “Tombstone Bonus,” because you would die before you collected it.
Facing the dire circumstances of the depression, veterans wanted Congress–which had already paid off debts and bonuses owed to corporations and war profiteers–to take care of veterans, too.
As the number of veterans who pledged to camp in the nation’s capital until they received their bonuses grew, alarm swept through the political establishment.
“If the farmers of this nation who are suffering united, as these men have united, and with the same abandon, started a march upon the Capitol, and joined ranks with those of the city whose souls have been seared with misery during the past few years, it would not be difficult for a real revolution to start in this country,” wrote California’s Republican Sen. Hiram Johnson in a letter to his son.
On July 28, Gen. Douglas MacArthur–aided by then-Majors Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton–led 200 cavalrymen, 400 infantrymen with fixed bayonets, and five tanks against the largest of the protesters’ encampments near the Anacostia River.
MacArthur’s troops drove the veterans out and burned the camp to the ground. By the end of the day, two veterans were dead, and dozens more–as well as many civilian onlookers–were wounded.”
Go back a little further in History and consider Douglas MacCarthur and the bonus marchers he dispersed, on orders from his President.