Ninety-four years ago this week, the United States government sent tanks against its own veterans.
Men who had worn the uniform in World War I were driven out of their nation's capital at bayonet-point by the very army they'd served in. Some of them even died.
If you've never heard this story, you're not alone. It's the story of the Bonus Army, and it's one of the most shameful days in American history.
Here's what happened:
After World War I, Congress promised veterans a bonus for their service. The catch was that it wasn't payable until 1945. Then the Great Depression hit, and millions of those veterans found themselves out of work and out of options. Men who'd been promised money in 1945 were watching their kids go hungry in 1932. So they asked the government to give them what they were owed. It was, after all, their money—earned for a war they'd already fought.
Tens of thousands of them traveled to Washington to appeal to their government in person. Estimates run as high as 43,000 people once you count the many wives and children who came along. They built a shantytown of tents and scrap-wood shacks across the Anacostia River and settled in to wait while Congress debated.
They kept the camp orderly, ran roll calls, and (remarkably for 1932) kept it fully racially integrated at a time when the Army itself was still segregated. The camp was full of waving American flags.
These weren't agitators. They were desperate patriots asking their country to keep a promise.
The House passed a bill to pay them, but the Senate voted it down. Heartbroken and feeling betrayed, most of the veterans packed up and went home, but a few thousand stayed. Mostly because they had nothing to go home to.
Then, on July 28th, the government decided to clear them out by force.
It started with police trying to evict veterans from a downtown building. A scuffle broke out, and police opened fire and killed two veterans. William Hushka was an immigrant from Lithuania who, when the US entered World War I, sold his butcher shop in St. Louis and enlisted at the age of 22 as a private in the 41st Infantry. He died instantly when gunfire tore through the camp. Eric Carlson who fought in the trenches of France during the war was mortally wounded and died the next day.
Then it got worse.
President Hoover ordered in the Army. The men who led that operation are names you'll recognize from the history books as heroes: General Douglas MacArthur in command, with a young Dwight Eisenhower assisting and George Patton leading the cavalry charge.
Six hundred soldiers. Cavalry with drawn sabers, infantry with fixed bayonets, and six tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue.
When the troops first assembled, the veterans actually cheered because they thought the Army had shown up to support them. Then the order came to charge, and the cavalry rode into their own former brothers-in-arms. The infantry followed with tear gas, driving men, women, and children out of the camps, and then set the whole shantytown on fire.
MacArthur was ordered by Hoover to stop at the river, but he ignored the order, crossed the Anacostia anyway, and burned the largest camp to the ground.
Over a thousand people were injured. One veteran's wife miscarried. And a twelve-week-old baby named Bernard Myers died after the tear gas swept through the camp. (A government inquiry later attributed the death to other causes, though a hospital worker's flat assessment was that the gas "didn't do it any good.")
The whole thing was captured on newsreel and played in theaters for weeks. The country was horrified watching its own government rout its own veterans. One writer at the time called it a "pitiful spectacle": the mightiest government on earth chasing unarmed men, women, and children with tanks.
So why has almost no one ever heard of the US government’s civil war against the Bonus Army?
Well, the men who carried it out went on to become celebrated American heroes. There's no tidy partisan lesson to draw, no side that comes out clean, and no lesson but, “governments can and do turn on their own.” And so it slides out of the textbooks, and most Americans grow up never knowing it happened at all.
But it's exactly the kind of thing our kids most need to know. Because the real, permanent lesson of the Bonus Army has nothing to do with 1932. It's this: government power, once it exists, will eventually be turned on the very people it was supposed to serve. Maybe not always with the violence seen in this story, but given enough pressure and enough fear, and the same government that asks men to die for it will run them out of the capital at bayonet-point when keeping a promise gets inconvenient.
That's not a republican lesson or a democrat lesson. It's just the truth about concentrated power, and it's as relevant today—in an age of surveillance cameras and no-knock databases and "trust the experts"—as it was on the banks of the Anacostia in 1932.
A kid who grows up knowing what happened to the Bonus Army is a kid who's a little harder to fool the next time the powerful decide that some group of ordinary people has become inconvenient. That's the entire reason we built our America's History series to begin with. As a way to tell kids the whole story of this country—the parts that make us proud and the parts that should make us wince. Not to tear America down, quite the opposite actually. Because a kid who only knows the flattering version of their history isn't equipped to protect actual freedom. But a kid who knows all of it—warts and all—grows up loving this country with his eyes open to what it was meant to be and with a determination to keep it from going further off track.
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Ninety-four years ago, a lot of brave men learned that the government they'd bled for would turn on them in an afternoon. It doesn’t do any good to teach kids about Tiananmen Square, if we don’t teach them about the Bonus Army.
For decades, Americans have learned that totalitarianism happens “over there” and that it couldn’t happen here because we are the “land of the free,” but slogans only go so far in silencing opposition to truly totalitarian actions by government when kids grow up knowing about the things that have happened here, on American soil, against American people.
If we want to raise a generation of kids who will actually have a shot at building a free, peaceful, and prosperous future for us all, then we’d better take seriously the job we have of teaching them truth.
We make resources that help you in this most important task. Thanks for letting us help.
— Connor
