[On September
17th, 2011 the Occupy Wall
Street protests began in lower Manhattan. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
that event and four other mass protests, leading up to a special weekend post
on mass protest in the age of Trump.]
On the veterans
movement that ended in both tragedy and success.
Americans have a long tradition
of marching on Washington in protest. And I’m not trying to seem young and talk
about the 1960s like
they require getting into the way back machine—I’m talking about a long tradition, one that actually
predates the Constitution and even led to a particular clause being included in
it. In 1781, with the Revolutionary War still ongoing but entering into a
significantly less heavy phase, much of the Continental Army was demobilized
without pay, and in
1783 a large number of veterans marched on Philadelphia (which was the
nation’s capital at the time, so this counts), surrounded the State House, and
demanded that money; Congress fled to New Jersey, forces in the regular army
expelled the protesters, and four years later the Constitution was framed to
include a section noting that the Posse Comitatus Act (which forbids the
use of the army in civilian police work) did not apply within the borders of
Washington, DC. But despite this founding presence of marches on Washington, I
would argue that the
1932 Bonus Army, in its own moment and most especially in the years
afterward, signaled the true arrival of this form of social and political
activism.
The Bonus Army, which was the
popular shorthand by which the self-titled Bonus
Expeditionary Force came to be known, was a gathering of over forty
thousand World War I veterans, family members, and interested parties that
descended on Washington in the spring of 1932. The vets, who had not in many
cases been what we would consider adequately compensated during the war, had
been awarded Service
Certificates by a 1924 law; but those certificates did not mature and could
not legally be paid until 1945, and with the Depression in full swing and
veterans hit particularly hard by unemployment and its attendant ills (as they
always seem to be), the Bonus Army decided to push for immediate payments. To
say that their march on and then multi-month occupation of Washington ended
badly is to understate the case—in late July the
Hoover administration ordered the army (led in prominent roles,
interestingly enough, by Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, and George
Patton) to remove the marchers, and in the course of that removal the marches
(who again included women and children in significant numbers) were driven out with bayonets and
poison gas, and their makeshift camp was burned to the ground. Hoover
wasn’t likely win the 1932 presidential election in the best-case scenario, but
these
events, coming about three months before that election, likely cemented
Roosevelt’s victory.
And it’s precisely the aftermath
of the Bonus March, the way in which such a literal and tragic defeat became a
multi-part public relations and then very real victory, that made it a potent
model for future protesters. Among the Roosevelt administration’s earliest
actions was an effort to reach out to the marchers, with Eleanor
Roosevelt in particular working to get many of them enrolled in the Works
Progress Administration. When Roosevelt balked at actually changing the law to
pay out the Service Certificates early, Congress stepped in, overriding a
presidential veto, and paid the
Certificates in full in 1936, nearly a decade before they would legally
come due. And many contemporary observers and subsequent historians have
credited the publicity surrounding the Bonus Army with contributing heavily to the
creation of the GI Bill of Rights in 1944, an act that made immeasurably
better the reentry into civilian life for veterans of World War II. For all
these reasons, organizers and leaders of the 1963 Civil Rights-connected March
on Washington for Jobs and Freedom cited the Bonus Army very specifically as a
key influence and inspiration, and of course many later groups have likewise
taken up similar strategies of social and political protest and activism on the
most national and public stage.
Last protest
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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