Here is a time where our government murdered it's own verterans. Could it happen again?
Bonus Army
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to:navigation, search
Bonus Army Conflict
Shacks, put up by the Bonus Army on the Anacostia flats, Washington, DC, burning after the battle with the military, 1932. The Capitol building can be seen in the background.
Date 17 June 1932
Location Washington D.C., United States of America
Result Bonus Army dispersed, demands rejected
Belligerents
Bonus Army United States Army
Commanders
Walter W. Waters
William Hushka †
Eric Carlson † Herbert Hoover
Douglas MacArthur
Dwight D. Eisenhower
George S. Patton
Strength
17,000 2 regiments
Casualties and losses
4 dead; 1,017 injured At least 69 police injured
The self-named Bonus Expeditionary Force was an assemblage of some 43,000 marchers—17,000 World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups, who protested in Washington, D.C., in spring and summer of 1932. Called the Bonus March by the news media, the Bonus Marchers were more popularly known as the Bonus Army. It was led by Walter W. Waters, a former Army sergeant. The veterans were encouraged in their demand for immediate cash-payment redemption of their service certificates by retired U.S.M.C. Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, one of the most popular military figures of the time.
The war veterans, many of whom had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression, sought immediate cash payment of Service Certificates granted to them eight years earlier via the Adjusted Service Certificate Law of 1924. Each Service Certificate, issued to a qualified veteran soldier, bore a face value equal to the soldier's promised payment, plus compound interest. The problem was that the certificates (like bonds), matured twenty years from the date of original issuance, thus, under extant law, the Service Certificates could not be redeemed until 1945.
On July 28, U.S. Attorney General Mitchell ordered the veterans removed from all government property. Washington police met with resistance, shots were fired and two veterans were killed. President Hoover then ordered the army to clear out the veterans. The infantry and cavalry were supported by six tanks, and commanded by Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur. Major, later President, Dwight D. Eisenhower was his liaison with Washington police, and Major George Patton led the cavalry. The Bonus Army, their wives and children were driven out with fixed bayonets and adamsite gas, an arsenical vomiting agent, and their shelters and belongings burned. Two more of the veterans, and an unknown number of babies and children, died (accounts range from one to "a number" of casualties).
After Franklin D. Roosevelt's election, his wife, Eleanor, urged members of the Bonus Army to apply for work with the Works Progress Administration building the Overseas Highway to Key West. Several hundred veterans were later killed in the September 1935 Florida Keys hurricane. Congress overrode a Roosevelt veto in 1936 to give the veterans their bonus 10 years early.
