*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
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