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The Bonus Army : An American Epic

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Allen and Dickson have written a very compelling book on the history of the Bonus Army, veterans from World War I who converged on Washington in 1932 and subsequent years to demand their promised payment known as the "bonus". The authors give us a good background as to who some of these veterans were, what conditions were like in the country during the years of the First World War and the next two decades after that, who some of the major players were in the debates and issues concerning the Bonus Army and their time in the nation's capital, and lastly how our nation would treat veterans of future wars.

This book details some of the men who made up the bonus army and where they came from in their move towards the nation's capital, with special emphasis on Walter Waters and his group of men from Portland and their journey eastwards. In addition to these Bonus marchers we learn of Pelham Glassford, the Washington D.C. Police Chief who oversaw the gathering veterans, citizens and groups who gave aid to the veterans on their journey to Washington and while they stayed in the city, politicians like Representative Wright Patman who became a leading advocate for the veterans in the halls of Congress, and of course other political and military figures who would play crucial roles in the issues and events surrounding the Bonus Army.

We also learn of how America perceived these veterans as they marched towards Washington and during their stay there. One of the constant worries of some in power at the time, those in the Hoover Administration, the Congress, and the military was the threat of communism, i.e. the Red Scare. Some believed many of these veterans weren't real veterans, believing many had criminal backgrounds and held communist views who wanted nothing less than to incite violence in the nation's capitol or even overthrow the U.S. Government. These worries were vastly over exaggerated as there were very few communists in this group of veterans, and those that were had little or no influence. These were loyal Americans who had fallen on hard times and needed and deserved some help from their government.

The events of the end of July 1932 have garnered the most attention and left the most indelible impressions on the minds of those who have any knowledge of the Bonus Army. This was when the military was called out to disperse the veterans who had encamped in vacant city buildings as well as the larger concentration of veterans who had gathered at sites like Camp Marks on the Anacostia River.The use of force to disperse the Bonus marchers became a damaging symbol that left a stain on the Hoover Administration as well as the reputation of Gen. Douglas MacArthur who had led the effort to rid the city of these veterans. The authors of this book are fair in spreading blame and correcting some myths that had developed after these events, for example there were not upwards of 100 casualties in this event, which is detailed in one of the appendices at the end of the book.

Even FDR did not support the bonus payment, but his veto was overridden by both houses of Congress in 1936, thus the bonus became a reality. But the real accomplishment, as the authors mentioned, was the piece of legislation known as the GI Bill passed in 1944, helping veterans from the Second World War to secure the needed and well-deserved assistance from the federal government to help them fit back into civilian life. As the authors believe, the Bonus Army of 1932 and those that followed had led the way in securing even greater promises for future veterans who deserved and still deserve the thanks from a grateful nation. Allen and Dickson are to be commended for writing this compelling and important book on an often all too summarized period in American history.

The Bonus Army: An American Epic is a compelling historical narrative that reveals how a political issue during the Great Depression became part of a much larger American story. In 1932, 45,000 World War I veterans marched on Washington and built shantytowns in the city in order to lobby Congress for a wartime service bonus which they had been promised but would not be paid until 1945. Authors Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen explain the political dynamics that led Herbert Hoover to send troops with bayonets and tear gas (led by General Douglas MacArthur) to destroy the shacks and drive the veterans out of Washington. Government officials and military officers were so concerned that the protest was being infiltrated by communist and fascist elements that they ignored the glaring reality that most of the vets had come to seek relief from homelessness, unemployment, hunger, and desperation. The authors document how the routing of the vets in 1932 contributed to Hoover's defeat by Franklin Roosevelt later that year and ultimately to the passage of the G.I. Bill in 1944.

The Bonus Army really is a story about attitudes toward American veterans during the period between the end of World War I and the latter stages of World War II. At the beginning of one of the chapters, the authors include the H.L. Mencken quote, "In the sad aftermath that always follows a great war there is nothing sadder than the surprise of the returned soldiers when they discover that they are regarded generally as public nuisances, and not too honest." The narrative of the authors is filled with examples of how the patriotic "support our troops" attitude during World War I was forgotten when the troops returned home and tried to put their lives back together. Neither the Republican Hoover nor the Democrat Roosevelt displayed much sympathy for the veterans' plight. Dickson and Allen describe other political obstacles faced by the vets, including racist politicians who preferred to deprive white veterans of help if the same assistance would be given to blacks, and elitist university presidents who worried that providing tuition assistance to vets would compromise the standards of the American higher education system.

The details presented in The Bonus Army reveal the roots of some of the subsequent political events of the 20th Century and mirror many conditions at the beginning of the 21st Century. As America now awaits the return of hundreds of thousands of new veterans from the Iraq War, the gripping and tragic story told by Dickson and Allen should serve as a warning about what our current troops might encounter when they arrive home.

In The Bonus Army: An American Epic, Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen have unearthed the sad but fascinating story of the Bonus marchers, a ragtag, determined group of veterans who changed the face of the United States.
When these men were young, they helped win World War I and a grateful nation promised to make their retirement years a little easier by paying them a bonus of a dollar a day for every day of service ($1.25 for overseas service) payable in 1945. When the Great Depression left thousands of them destitute, however, the vets banded together and asked their government to help them by paying the bonus immediately. But after the Senate refused to authorize payment, they were contemptuously chased out of Washington, D.C. by General Douglas MacArthur.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave many of the vets jobs, including about 600 who were sent to work camps in the isolated Florida Keys in 1935. There, administrators who were ignorant of the late summer dangers in that part of the world left the vets unprotected to face the most powerful hurricane ever to strike the U.S. More than 250 were killed, and the survivors were forgotten. My book, Storm of the Century: The Labor Day hurricane of 1935 (National Geographic Books, 2002, paperback 2003), also tells the story of this tragedy.
In their fine narrative, Dickson and Allen carefully and vividly explain how these woebegone men did a second noble service for their nation after their military service. The Bonus marchers called attention to the often-shabby treatment of veterans and insisted that former members of the armed services be treated with the respect they deserve. And they laid the foundations for the creation of today's prosperous American middle class by prompting political leaders to enact programs ensuring better treatment of vets returning from World War II. Among the vets' programs was the GI Bill of Rights, which put a college education within reach of anyone who had served honorably in the armed forces.
The men and women returning from military service in Iraq will be treated better than the vets who returned from Europe in 1919, and this latest generation of American vets will have the Bonus Army to thank for that. With The Bonus Army: An American Epic, Dickson and Allen remind us of shameful events in American history - the eviction of the vets from Washington and the needless deaths in the Keys - and give long overdue credit for the contribution these men made to our way of life.

General Douglas MacArthur, years before he became famous in World War II, commanded a cavalry charge, one which involved his aide Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the saber-wielding Major George S. Patton, as well as tanks, machineguns, and teargas bombs. It was a charge in Washington DC in 1932, and it was against an enemy army of 20,000 US military veterans, and their families, and it was quite serious and even deadly. Patton urged his troops to use their bayonets: "If they resist, they must be killed." This was despite the presence among the veterans of a former soldier who had saved his life in World War I. The details of the charge, what lead up to it, and its eventual beneficial aftermath are told in _The Bonus Army: An American Epic_ (Walker Books) by Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen. The Bonus Army, while not unknown in American history books, is largely forgotten and is greatly misinterpreted as being part of the Red Scare of the time. There is fine research here and dramatic recollection of events that fully justify the book's subtitle.

The bonus, about $600, sought by these veterans had been approved by Congress in 1924, but it could not be paid them until 1945. The Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF) were WWI veterans who were jobless in the Depression. Organized originally in Portland, Oregon, the veterans traveled to Washington, mostly by hopping freight trains, forming a junkyard city of around 15,000 near the Capitol. The BEF said it was staying until Congress granted the bonus, but with the adjournment of Congress, President Hoover found them especially unwelcome. The Attorney General began to evict veterans from vacant buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue, resulting in violence and the deaths of two veterans. President Hoover then called out MacArthur and his troops to attack the Hooverville, bayoneting veterans and their families and setting fire to their makeshift homes. The veterans did pull up and disperse, but Hoover had made an enormously unpopular mistake. When audiences all over the country saw the newsreels, they booed MacArthur and the Army. Hoover's reputation as unconcerned and heartless was only confirmed, and his loss in the 1932 election against Franklin Roosevelt was assured.

Roosevelt didn't want the bonus, either, but handled the veterans with more skill when they marched on Washington again the next year. He sent his wife Eleanor to chat with the vets and pour coffee for them, and he persuaded many of them to sign up for a scheme of new jobs making a roadway to the Florida Keys. A disastrous hurricane swept many of them and their flimsy barracks away in 1935, but that was also the year that a bonus bill was passed over Roosevelt's veto. The authors have shown that the eventual victory of the Bonus Army was exceedingly important for our nation, which had even after the Revolutionary War handled badly the problem of returning combatants. The Bonus Army left an impression that something would have to be done for the vets of World War II, and in 1944 Congress and Roosevelt passed the GI Bill of Rights, which not only helped millions of vets get higher education and loans for homes, but also was a foundation for the forthcoming technological and academic success of the US. It wasn't precisely the victory the Bonus Army was fighting for, but the vets had won a victory for the nation.

Paul Dickson and Tom Allen filled me in on a fascinating and overlooked slice of American history. And they did it in a newsy fashion that made it seem like it all happened just last week. The Bonus Army is full of front-page events, colorful characters and intriguing side stories.

As a Vietnam veteran and G. I. Bill beneficiary, I appreciated learning how this important social legislation emerged from the political battle for the bonus, and how, in turn, tuition benefits broadened the American middle class through democratization of our universities. I now know that I owe my college degree to those tens of thousands of down-and-out World War I vets who marched on Washington in the summer of 1932.

For other side stories, Dickson and Allen do a great job on the paranoia over Communism that clouded the judgement of the military/intelligence community back then, the significance of the racial integration of the bonus marchers, FDR's public relations genius, and why southern politicians and old-line university presidents resisted the G. I. Bill.

The Bonus Army is a good read with lots to learn about the forces that shaped and misshaped 20th century American society.

In 1917, when millions of young Americans joined the military and marched to Europe to save the world for democracy, they were considered heroes. In 1932, when forty-five thousand destitute veterans of the Great War marched to Washington, D.C. to lobby for payment of their wartime bonuses, the Hoover administration considered them bums, criminals or Communists, and they were brutally attacked and tear gassed by American troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. How could this happen?
Now,thanks to the new Paul Dickson and Tom Allen book, The Bonus Army: An American Epic, we know why. It's THE definitive history of this shocking event and shows how it led to what has now become fair, humane and responsible treatment of our veterans.
For the last seven years, I've been researching and writing a historical novel based on the bonus march, and have read most of what's been published about the event. Without a doubt, Dickson's and Allen's new book brings the story to life. What I like is the lucid, well-constructed linear organization and how they've dramatized episodes in scene, complete with quotations and dialogue.
In my opinion, this very readable book is the right history of the right event at the right time.

We World War Two veterans, and vets of later wars, can thank the determined marchers of the Bonus Army for opportunities that no veterans before us ever received. "The Bonus Army" tells the forgotten and largely unreported story of those World War One vets and their campaign for just benefits. The strong narrative by Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen tells how the Bonus Army of the early 1930s led to the creation of the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and finally to the GI Bill. One fascinating part of the book is how two Republican Congresswomen, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine and Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, were the real "mothers" of the GI Bill. These far-sighted women were our heroes, the true champions of veterans. They took up the cause of the Bonus Army marchers, and with colleagues from both sides of the Congressional aisle created the GI Bill, the greatest and most important social legislation in American history. "The Bonus Army" brings history to our lives.

The 1932 march of the Bonus Army, world war one veterans angry over cancelled Bonus's is one of the epics of american history now buried as it was coming on the heels of the Great Depression and FDR. This is an epic and much needed account of this fascinating episode that finally found Macarthur ordering american troops to fire on the those heroes of the Great War. Anyone interested in american history should pick this up, it is a fantastic easily accesible account.

Seth J. Frantzman

Individually, Dickson and Allen are in the front rank of historical narrative nonfiction writers. Together, they tackle an event that everyone who has seen the newsreels thinks they know about, but don't. The Bonus Army is meticulously researched; they found eye witnesses that had never talked before and a trove of photos and film previously unseen. The result is a real bonus for the history buff and the fan of classy writing. Their characters come alive and the story they tells resonates---often painfully---with the plight of today's veterans of today's war

Finally a book that tells the story of veterans who had served their country and the struggle for recognition and payment of their First World War bonus. The well researched book gives the reader a historical perspective of the bonus problem while experiencing the emotional strain and struggle of the time. The authors present an unabridged explanation of the political and social issues that were part of the problem and solution for the veterans.

This books is mandatory reading for any student of this era and veteran who has or is going to receive the G.I. Bill. This book should also be on every shelf in every American Legion, Disable American and Veterans of Foreign Wars Halls.