The Bonus Army and the City That Drove Them Out

In the summer of nineteen thirty-two, at the bottom of the Great Depression, approximately twenty thousand World War One veterans and their families came to Washington and built a city. They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, the Bonus Army. They put up camps of tents and scrap lumber on the Anacostia Flats and in vacant lots near the Capitol, and they stayed.

They had come to demand early payment of the service bonuses Congress had promised them in nineteen twenty-four, with payment deferred until nineteen forty-five. The veterans wanted the money now. A third of the workforce was unemployed. Breadlines stretched for blocks. The bonus certificate a man held was sometimes the only asset standing between his family and complete destitution.

The House passed a bonus bill. The Senate defeated it. Many veterans stayed anyway, having nowhere particular to go. President Herbert Hoover, under pressure from his aides who saw a communist conspiracy in the encampment, ordered the Army to clear the camps on July twenty-eighth, nineteen thirty-two.

General Douglas MacArthur commanded the operation personally, with Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower on his staff and Major George Patton commanding a cavalry unit. The Army advanced with infantry, cavalry, and tanks. The veterans' camp on the Anacostia Flats was burned. More than one hundred people were injured. A three-month-old infant died of gas exposure, though the Army disputed the cause. Two veterans were shot and killed by police in a separate incident before the Army's action began.

MacArthur exceeded his orders. Hoover had instructed him to clear the downtown camps and not cross the Anacostia River. MacArthur crossed the river.

The photographs and newsreel footage of American soldiers routing American veterans circulated widely. Herbert Hoover lost the election in November in one of the most lopsided defeats in presidential history, carrying only six states.