After seeing the tear gas in Tehran last month, it is worth remembering another group of protesters who were gassed on July 20 1932 — veterans of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in World War I, they had come to Washington, D.C. to get what they deserved and desperately needed. Instead they got tear gas. It was America’s version of Tiananmen Square.
In the summer of 1932, the Depression’s worst year, 25,000 former “doughboys”—World War I infantrymen, many of whom were combat veterans—walked, hitchhiked, or “rode the rails” to Washington, D.C. Organizing themselves into a penniless, vagrant army, they squatted, with their families, in abandoned buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue and pitched an encampment of crude shacks and tents on the banks of the Anacostia River. They had come to ask Congress to pay them a “bonus” promised to veterans in 1924 and scheduled to be paid in 1945. Starving and desperate men, they had families going hungry, no jobs, and no prospects of finding one. They needed that bonus to survive. Calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF), they were better known as the “Bonus Army.”
Here is some fascinating archival footage of the Bonus Army: Bonus Army Marches on Washington 1932
Although the House of Representatives passed a relief bill, it was blocked in the Senate. The Congress adjourned. The men’s pleas for relief fell on deaf ears. To Hoover, some members of Congress, lawmen, and the newspapers, these weren’t veterans but “Red agitators.” (Hoover’s own Veterans Administration surveyed the Bonus Army and found that 95 percent of them were indeed veterans.) On July 20, 1932, some of the Bonus Army marched toward toward the White House and were met by the police with tear gas.
A week later, on July 28, the Attorney General ordered the Bonus Army cleared out by the police. That failed. Instead of meeting the BEF’s leaders, Pres. Hoover then called for troops, commanded by General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) with his young aide Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969). The assault was led by the Third Cavalry, sabers ready, under the command of Major George Patton (1885–1945). Behind the horses, the U.S. Army rolled out to meet the ragged bunch of men, women, and children with tear gas, tanks, and bayonets.
Patton’s cavalry first charged the Bonus Marchers, now mixed with curious civilians who were getting off from work on this hot July afternoon. Following the cavalry charge came the tear-gas attack, routing the Bonus Army from Pennsylvania Avenue and across the Eleventh Street Bridge. Disregarding orders—a common thread running through his career—MacArthur decided to finish the job by destroying the Bonus Army entirely. After nightfall, the tanks and cavalry leveled the jumbled camp of tents and packing-crate shacks. It was all put to the torch. At least two men were shot and killed during the day, and there were more than one hundred casualties in the aftermath of the battle, including two babies who reportedly were suffocated by the gas attack.
