[rollei_list] OT: Bonus Marchers
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx,rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:15:24 -0400
At 04:49 PM 9/28/2009, Robert Lilley wrote:
>Nevertheless ti was a sad day for veterans.
Well, so said Patton, grandstanding for the
Press. Several of the senior Generals wanted to
court-marital him and boot him out of the service
but MacArthur intervened and shipped him off to
Hawaii, where he managed to immediately piss of
the Departmental Commander. But Patton survived
to become the finest senior armored commander to date.
The Bonus Marchers were generally perceived as a
threat to public order at the time. We now view
them through different lenses, but, at the time,
most USians were deathly afraid of the
Marchers. To understand this, go back thirty
years to Coxey's Army, a similar march in the
1890's which included a few veterans arguing for
an early payment of their Civil War Bonus but was
primarily a group of radicals and roughnecks
headed by an avowed syndicalist radical. So, the
Bonus March was seen as a rebirth of Coxey's
Army. We have all but forgotten Coxey's Army
save for the long-memoried South, where a worthy
repast is said to include "enough food for Coxey's Army".
After all of the US Wars until World War II, the
Congress promised to pay veterans a Bonus many
years after the end of the War. As you had to be
alive to claim the Bonus, this meant that most of
the Veterans would be dead by the time the Bonus
was due and the bill to the Government would be
reduced. Through the Civil War, this Bonus was
payable 50 years after the end of
hostilities: thus, a soldier standing at
Appomattox to view Lee's capitulation would be
paid his bonus in 1915, when he would be either
in his late 60's or older. The Spanish-American
War and World War I Bonuses were to be paid after
30 years, so the WWI Bonus was due to be paid in
1949. In the end, Congress DID pay the WWI Bonus
in 1936, though FDR -- who was even more
frightened of the Bonus Marchers than Hoover had
been -- vetoed the Act to pay this and it had to be passed over his veto.
In 1942, the Republicans, then a minority in both
Houses of Congress, proposed that, instead of a
WWII Bonus, a comprehensive Veterans Bill of
Rights be adopted. Roosevelt fought this
tooth-and-nail but once he realized that the GOP
had gotten enough support from Democrats to pass
the Bill over his veto, he gave in. "GI
William", as sixty years of US servicemen have
called it, did a lot of good to my family -- Dad
got his college paid for and got his initial
house loan, and I got my law school paid for and
my first home load the same way, as did a slew of relatives.
There is a recent history of the Bonus March, THE
BONUS ARMY, by Paul Dickson and Thomas B
Allen. I recommend it to you though I found it
hopelessly slanted in favor of the Marchers and
feel that it neglects the public horror at the
March. I am not otherwise familiar with Dickson
but Allen co-authored the definitive history of
DOWNFALL, the proposed US invasion of Japan in
1945, and he is not unfair to MacArthur.
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
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