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Dear Doug Collins

The Bonus Army: The Veterans Who Marched for a Promise, and Were Routed by Their Own Army

They had served in France, and in 1924 their country handed them a certificate — a promise of payment in 1945. In 1932, out of work in the depths of the Great Depression, they came to Washington to ask whether the promise could be kept early, while it could still save them. They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force. The answer they got, on July 28, 1932, was the United States Army: cavalry, infantry, tear gas, and tanks, sent against unarmed veterans and their families, and a camp burned within sight of the Capitol. This page is the documented record of what was promised, what happened that summer, and what was — and was not — settled afterward.

The service and the promise

The men of the Bonus Army had fought in the First World War, in the American Expeditionary Forces sent to France in 1917–18. They had served for about a dollar a day, while workers at home earned civilian wages many times higher. After the war, veterans’ organizations, led by the newly founded American Legion, pressed Congress for “adjusted compensation”: a payment to make up the difference between what a soldier had been paid in service and what he could have earned at home.

Congress agreed in principle long before it agreed in fact. President Harding vetoed a bonus bill in 1922; President Calvin Coolidge vetoed the next one on May 15, 1924, declaring that “patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism.” Congress overrode him — the House on May 17, the Senate on May 19 — and the World War Adjusted Compensation Act became law on May 19, 1924.

What the act actually delivered was deferral. A veteran’s credit was calculated at $1 a day for service in the United States and $1.25 a day for service overseas, capped at $500 and $625. Veterans owed $50 or less were paid in cash. Everyone else — more than 3.5 million men — received an adjusted service certificate: in effect, a paid-up twenty-year endowment policy, bearing interest, that could not be redeemed until 1945, or at the veteran’s death, whichever came first. The certificates outstanding by 1932 carried a total face value of about $3.64 billion. Veterans could borrow against them — after Congress overrode President Herbert Hoover’s veto of a loan bill in 1931, up to 50 percent of face value — but the principal stayed locked away for two decades. The men had a bitter name for the arrangement: the “Tombstone Bonus,” because, as they said, many of them would be dead before the government paid it.

Then came the Depression. By 1932, unemployment stood at roughly one in four American workers, and veterans were in the same breadlines as everyone else — except that they held a government certificate worth, on average, several hundred dollars they were forbidden to touch for thirteen more years. The promise was not in dispute; the date was the whole argument: 1945, said the government; now, while it can still keep a family fed and housed, said the men who held it. What follows is what happened when they came to Washington, in person, to make that argument.

What happened

The march began in Portland, Oregon, in the spring of 1932, where Walter W. Waters, an unemployed former Army sergeant, proposed that veterans ride the freight trains to Washington and present their case themselves. A few hundred men set out in May; contingents formed in state after state. They named themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force — the B.E.F., in deliberate echo of the American Expeditionary Force of the war — while newspapers called them the Bonus Army. Waters arrived in Washington on May 29, 1932.

How many came is a figure the record gives in ranges, and this page gives it the same way. The count most often cited is about 17,000 veterans, and about 43,000 people in all once wives, children, and affiliated groups are counted. Other institutional estimates vary — the Park Service puts the camps at at least 20,000 people, the Hoover Library the men alone at 8,000 to 25,000. The scale is not in dispute: tens of thousands, camped in Washington for weeks.

The largest camp rose on the Anacostia Flats, across the Anacostia River from the Navy Yard — a shantytown of lumber, packing boxes, and scrap tin the men named Camp Marks, after a sympathetic police captain. Smaller camps and occupied, half-demolished government buildings stood downtown near Pennsylvania Avenue. By the accounts of the National Archives and the Smithsonian, the camps were disciplined and, in segregated Washington, remarkable: Black and white veterans lived, ate, and organized together, in an integrated encampment the Army of 1918 had never permitted. Residents registered and proved honorable discharge; the men laid out streets, built sanitation facilities, and held daily parades. D.C. Police Superintendent Pelham D. Glassford, himself a wartime general, worked with camp leaders and helped supply food, and retired Marine Major General Smedley Butler visited to support the men. Through June, the Bonus Army lobbied Congress for Representative Wright Patman’s bill to pay the certificates immediately.

On June 15, 1932, the House passed the Patman bill, 211 to 176, with veterans cheering from the gallery. On June 17, thousands of marchers massed at the Capitol as the Senate defeated it, 62 to 18. The Smithsonian records the moment the news reached the crowd: Waters called on the veterans to sing “America,” and when the song ended, most walked back to camp. Many marchers went home in the weeks that followed. Thousands stayed; Waters said they would stay until 1945 if necessary. In worsening July heat, the administration pressed to clear the downtown sites, and the eviction was set for July 28.

July 28, 1932 unfolded in two acts, and the distinction matters. First, the police: under orders from Attorney General William D. Mitchell to clear government property, D.C. police moved to evict the men from the downtown buildings. There was fighting — bricks thrown, officers injured — and in a second confrontation that afternoon, police opened fire. Two veterans were shot and died of their wounds: William Hushka, a Lithuanian immigrant who had sold his St. Louis butcher shop to enlist in 1917, and Eric Carlson of Oakland, California, who had fought in the trenches in France. Both were buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Then, the Army. On learning of the shootings, President Hoover ordered the Army to assist the District authorities in restoring order. The Chief of Staff, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, took personal command — over the advice of his principal aide, Maj. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, the Smithsonian records, urged him to stay off the streets. In the late afternoon the force moved down Pennsylvania Avenue: nearly 200 mounted cavalry with sabers drawn, led by their executive officer, Maj. George S. Patton; infantry with fixed bayonets, hurling tear-gas grenades; and tanks — six, in the contingent as usually counted. Veterans who had at first cheered, believing the troops had come in their honor, fled with their wives and children through the gas, and the downtown shelters went up in flames.

Hoover’s orders, as the National Park Service states plainly, were to drive the protesters back across the Anacostia River — and stop there. The Park Service records that Hoover twice sent messages to MacArthur not to cross the bridge, and MacArthur ignored them; the National Archives’ account is the same. That night, after the camp’s leaders were given a short time to evacuate women and children, the troops drove out Camp Marks with tear gas and set fire to it. It burned through the night, the flames photographed against the Capitol dome. By morning the Bonus Expeditionary Force was dispersed, its people on the road toward Maryland, and the wounded filled Washington’s hospitals. MacArthur defended the operation that night as having saved the government from a grave threat, and Hoover publicly backed the clearing: “a challenge to the authority of the United States Government has been met, swiftly and firmly.” Most historians judge that MacArthur went beyond the limits the President had set — the judgment of the Park Service and Archives accounts themselves; no court or inquiry ever made a finding.

What the institution did afterward

In the short term, the institution defended itself, presenting the clearing as a necessary answer to rioting and making much of alleged Communist influence among the marchers. The National Archives’ history is measured about that claim: there were radicals among the bonus seekers, in the judgment of historians Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen, “but they were an ineffective minority disdained and dismissed by the main body of the B.E.F.” The newsreel images told the country a simpler story. The Washington Daily News wrote what much of the press concluded: “If the Army must be called out to make war on unarmed citizens, this is no longer America.” Roosevelt read the accounts and told an adviser, by the Smithsonian’s account, “This will elect me.” In November, Hoover lost in a landslide.

For MacArthur, there were, in the National Archives curator’s words, “no discernible consequences, at least not for him.” He was not reprimanded, remained Chief of Staff, and went on to the commands that made him a central figure of the next war — as did Eisenhower and Patton, whose roles in 1932 were overtaken in public memory by what they did in 1944. No officer was disciplined for July 28, and no inquiry apportioned responsibility for the clearing, the burning of Camp Marks, or the day’s deaths and injuries. Hushka and Carlson had been killed by police gunfire before the Army ever moved; the record assembled for this page contains no prosecution, no compensation, and no official apology arising out of the eviction itself.

The veterans came back — peaceably, and to a different reception. A second, smaller Bonus March gathered in the spring of 1933. This time there were no troops: the marchers, about 3,000 by the Smithsonian’s account, were housed in a tent camp at Fort Hunt, Virginia, given food and medical care, and visited by Eleanor Roosevelt, who joined them in a sing-along in the rain; “Hoover sent the Army; Roosevelt sent his wife,” one veteran said. Roosevelt still opposed early payment — but he offered the men work in the new Civilian Conservation Corps, and by June 1933 about 2,600 had accepted; the rest were given transportation home. It was a genuine change of manner, and it was not payment.

One more entry belongs in this section. In 1934–35, jobless veterans were placed in federal work camps in the Florida Keys, building a highway to Key West. On September 2, 1935, a hurricane struck; a rescue train was delayed and derailed short of the camps, and, in the Smithsonian’s accounting, at least 256 veterans were killed. Hemingway, who reached the scene, charged the veterans had been “practically murdered” by official failure; the Smithsonian’s historians cite “a series of bureaucratic bungles and misunderstandings in Miami and Washington.” None of those men had yet been paid the bonus.

Payment, when it came, came the way the original bonus had come in 1924: over a president’s veto. Congress passed the Adjusted Compensation Payment Act in January 1936; President Roosevelt vetoed it on January 24; Congress overrode him, the Senate completing the override on January 27, 1936, 76 to 19, and the act became law that day — Public Law 74-425. The certificates were replaced by Treasury bonds redeemable for cash from June 1936. The Smithsonian’s summary gives the scale: payments averaging about $580 a man, and ultimately nearly $2 billion distributed to about 3 million veterans — scholarly estimates of the initial payout run slightly lower, around $1.8 billion. The money the men had marched for in 1932 was in their hands in the summer of 1936, nine years early, and four years after Hushka and Carlson died asking for it.

Where it stands now

The fight over payment is finished, and has been since 1936. The bonuses were paid, the certificates redeemed, the last of the Bonus Army long dead. The larger argument the marchers forced — how a country treats the veterans of a war it has just fought — was answered in part by their successors’ war: the National Archives and the Park Service both record the judgment of the Bonus Army’s historians that its deepest legacy is the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the G.I. Bill, written so that 1932 would not be repeated for the next generation of veterans. The ground is kept, after a fashion: the Anacostia Flats where Camp Marks stood are now parkland and playing fields, with a historical marker telling the story of the march and its burning.

The account for July 28, 1932 itself stands exactly where it was left that summer. The clearing is taught, documented, and filmed — the National Archives holds the Signal Corps footage — but it has never had an institutional reckoning: no official apology for the eviction, no compensation for the men shot, gassed, injured, or burned out in it, and no discipline or formal finding against the commander who, on the Park Service’s account, ignored his president’s order twice in one evening and burned the camp anyway. The payment question was settled by Congress in 1936, over a veto. The conduct question was settled by nobody. It was simply outlived — by Hoover, who defended it; by MacArthur, who was promoted past it; and by the veterans, who took the money they had always been owed in 1936 and carried the memory of the tanks and the fire for the rest of their lives.

That is the pattern this page exists to document, in its starkest form. The men were right about the debt — Congress itself said so, twice, over two presidents’ vetoes, in 1924 and in 1936. In between, when they came to the capital to ask for what the law already said was theirs, their own Army was ordered out against them, two of them were shot dead by police, and their camp was burned. The debt was paid. The day was never answered for.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

The Bonus Army was extensively filmed — newsreel cameras were in the streets on July 28, 1932, and the images moved the country. Four films: the Signal Corps footage, the documentary, and two short histories.

The period footage. U.S. Army Signal Corps film of the July 1932 evictions, from the National Archives' holdings (Identifier 24730): police clearing the downtown buildings, then cavalry, infantry, and tanks in the streets. (U.S. National Archives.)

The documentary. "The March of the Bonus Army" (2006), narrated by Gary Sinise, built from archival photographs, newsreel film, and eyewitness interviews — the film the National Archives screened with its makers in 2006. (Documentary film, as uploaded.)

The story in brief. History Curator's account of the Bonus Expeditionary Force: the certificates, the integrated camps, the Senate's refusal, the eviction, and the 1936 payment. (History Curator.)

The expeditionary force. Daily Dose Documentary's short history of the 1932 march — how unemployed veterans converged on Washington, and how the Army was sent to remove them. (Daily Dose Documentary.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.