Bonus Army Riots in Washington, D.C., July 1932

Today’s Document from the National Archives :

"Shacks, put up by the Bonus Army on the Anacostia flats, Washington, D.C., burning after the battle with the military. The Capitol in the background. 1932."

In the summer of 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, World War I veterans seeking early payment of a bonus scheduled for 1945 assembled in Washington to pressure Congress and the White House. After the Senate rejected the bonus, most of the protesters went home, but a core of ten thousand members of the "Bonus Army" remained behind, many with their families. On the morning of July 28, violence erupted between the protesters and police, and President Hoover reluctantly sent in federal troops under Maj. Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Ignoring the President’s order for restraint, the flamboyant general drove the tattered protesters from the city and violently cleared their Anacostia campsite.In the summer of 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, World War I veterans seeking early payment of a bonus scheduled for 1945 assembled in Washington to pressure Congress and the White House. Hoover resisted the demand for an early bonus. Veterans' benefits already took up 25 percent of the 1932 federal budget. Even so, as the Bonus Expeditionary Force swelled to sixty thousand men, the President secretly ordered that its members be given tents, cots, army rations, and medical care.

In July, the Senate rejected the bonus 62 to 18. Most of the protesters went home, aided by Hoover's offer of free passage on the rails. Ten thousand remained behind, among them a hard core of Communists and other militants. On the morning of July 28, forty protesters tried to reclaim an evacuated building in downtown Washington scheduled for demolition. Fighting back, police killed two marchers. Local officials sought help. Hoover reluctantly sent in federal troops, but only after limiting Maj. Gen. Douglas MacArthur's authority. MacArthur's troops would be unarmed. Their mission was to escort the marchers to camps along the Anacostia River.

In the event, MacArthur ignored the President's orders. Taking no prisoners, the flamboyant general drove tattered protesters from their encampment. After Hoover ordered a halt to the army's march, MacArthur again took things into his own hands, violently clearing the Anacostia campsite. A national uproar ensued. In far-off Albany, New York, Democratic presidential candidate Roosevelt grasped the political implications instantly. "Well," he told a friend on hearing the news, "this elects me."

At first, Hoover himself appeared to agree with Roosevelt. Intending to make only three speeches on his behalf, as the contest heated up, the President took to the campaign trail for weeks on end. He had no illusions. "We are opposed by six million unemployed, 10,000 bonus marchers, and 10 cent corn," he remarked, "Is it any wonder that the prospects are dark?"

His arguments did little to dispel the doubts of listeners. "Let no man tell you it could not be worse," he told one audience. "It could be so much worse that these days now, distressing as they are, would look like veritable prosperity." This was hardly an inspiring message, especially at a time when the magical Roosevelt was appealing to the "forgotten man." Everywhere Hoover went he saw evidence of the nation's bitterness. He was jeered outside a Detroit arena and hooted at in Oakland. After tomatoes were thrown at his train in Kansas, he said dejectedly, "I can't go on with it anymore." But he did, warning of the threat to individual freedom posed by Roosevelt's vaguely defined New Deal.

Election Day was a Democratic sweep, as Roosevelt carried all but six states. Hoover received the bad news at his California home. A few days later, on the eastbound presidential train to Washington, a friendly journalist encountered an exhausted chief executive. The President looked up at his visitor with a one-word greeting. "Why?" he asked.

And it was far from over. In the last weeks of his term, Hoover faced a desperate crisis of confidence as uncertain investors—or so he thought—sought reassurance that the new Roosevelt administration would defend the gold standard. On February 17, 1933, the President wrote the President-elect, seeking guarantees that Roosevelt would balance the budget, combat inflation, and halt publication of loans made by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Roosevelt, sensing that his discredited predecessor was trying to tie his hands, kept silent.

Soon banks in two dozen states began to totter. Hoover denounced corrupt bankers as worse than Al Capone ("He apparently was kind to the poor"). In his desperation he proposed that the Federal Reserve guarantee every depositor's account, an idea that would eventually become law. But in February 1933 the Federal Reserve's governors preferred a general bank holiday instead. Hoover refused to take such a drastic action without Roosevelt's agreement. And FDR had his own agenda.

Twice on the night of March 3, Hoover telephoned the President-elect trying to persuade him to join in concerted action. FDR replied that governors were free to do what they wished on a state-by-state basis. A little after one in the morning, the governors of New York and Illinois unilaterally suspended banking operations in their states. "We are at the end of our string," a bone-weary President remarked to his secretary that morning, "there is nothing more we can do."



https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/?dod-date=728

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army

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