Freepost: The 1932 Bonus Army scandal was always communist propaganda

Your high school history textbook was lying to you

This was one of the first articles to be published on this Substack, and one of the most relevant to today. In light of the growth that’s occurred over the last few months I’ve decided to repost this article for free to allow recent subscribers to enjoy it. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work and gain access to all articles and podcast episodes.

---

On July 28, 1932, what has been called one of the most shameful incidents in American history occurred. Months earlier, nearly 40,000 protestors from all over the country had descended on Washington, DC. A little less than half were veterans, nominally there to advocate that Congress redeem bonuses that they had been granted for WWI service.

When the bill granting the bonuses first passed it specified that the bonuses would only be redeemable 20 years after they were issued (maturing in 1945). However, in light of the ongoing Great Depression, the veterans thought they should try their luck and see if they could get the bonus term altered. Once fully mature, the bonuses would be worth a significant amount of money—a maximum of $19,170 in 2023 dollars.

The Bonus Marchers encamped in vacant lots and abandoned buildings all over Washington, DC, hoping that Congress would take up their cause. They ran tent revivals and had their own library operated by the Salvation Army. Boxing matches and baseball games were held. Full racial equality was achieved. Congress and the Hoover administration, by that point consisting of the Monopoly Man and a hodgepodge of WASP eugenicists (Nazi), coldly rejected the veterans’ demands for early payment.

Weeks passed. Then, on the fateful day of July 28, US Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur ordered his terror troops to attack the peaceful Bonus Marchers unprovoked. He likely wanted to disrupt the racial harmony emerging from the new favela enriching the streets of the nation’s capital. Scores of casualties (don’t look too hard into this) occurred. A shack was burned, its image famously reproduced in every contemporary article on the Bonus Army ever written.

This dark day happened to benefit the political fortunes of New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), President Hoover’s opponent in the upcoming 1932 election. The cruel slaughter inflicted on the Bonus Marchers, splashed across front pages and newsreels all over the country, proved disastrous for Hoover. FDR was elected in a landslide and would go on to act as America’s longest serving President, radically transforming the country in virtually every respect (for the better!).

This is the story that most Americans are taught in public schools. It’s faithfully recorded on many US government websites. Conservative commentators looking to puff populist credentials will cite the Bonus Army as an example of how an out-of-control government was willing to use force against its most noble and diverse citizens for the crime of meekly protesting against injustice. The problem is, this story is fake.

The Bonus Army scandal was not an example of government run amok, but rather of quick-thinking officials standing resolute in the face of revolutionary activity sponsored from abroad. How do we know this? One of the lead organizers admitted it.

John T. Pace was a Communist Party operative assigned as an organizer for the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League of Michigan. The League was a veterans’ organization created and controlled by the Communist Party. Pace worked with the League’s unemployment council but quickly rose through the ranks to other duties.

Pace was identified by both the Washington Post and the Daily Worker as the leader of the left-wing contingent of the Bonus Marchers. He was later arrested at a march that preceded the climactic events of July 28. Pace eventually became disillusioned with the Communist Party and was formally expelled from it in 1935. He later became a cooperating witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee.

In 1949, Pace gave extensive testimony outlining his activities during the Bonus March. He explained, in great detail, how communists capitalized on a spontaneous outburst of veteran protests in order to organize a national movement. The eventual Bonus March echoed earlier communist protests, called “Hunger Marches,” in which communist-organized groups of the unemployed would march on state capitals and camp out in order to demand policy concessions. Pace credited these earlier marches with planting the idea in the minds of millions.

Pace’s testimony outlined how communist organizations provided food, transportation, and legal aid to the Bonus Marchers. The Communist Party wanted to gather thousands of unemployed and desperate veterans and Washington D.C. for one purpose, as Pace explained in a August 28, 1949 article in the Washington Star:

I was ordered by my Red superiors to provoke riots… I was told to use every trick to bring about bloodshed in the hopes that President Hoover would be forced to call out the Army… The Communists didn’t care how many veterans were killed. I was told that Moscow had ordered riots and bloodshed in hopes that this might set off the revolution.

Pace described how, though relatively small in number, communists exerted massive influence over the Bonus Army after arriving in Washington. They began smear campaigns targeting the leaders of other contingents of Bonus Marchers, accusing them of selling out or being politically impotent, and encouraged the creation of new “committees” with competing authority in every camp of Bonus Marchers not controlled by the communists. When rival camps inevitably descended into infighting, the communists would sweep in and expand their networks.

While the elected leader of the Bonus Army, anti-communist veteran Walter Waters, attempted to lobby Congress for early payment, Pace and the well-organized communists used the veterans as a cover engineer confrontations with DC police and government employees. Although a bill to pay the bonuses early passed the House of Representatives in mid-June, the accompanying Senate bill failed decisively. Legislators saw the “protests” as crude intimidation tactics. The huge crowds of transients and regular disruptive marches alarmed local authorities. Congress recessed and legislators went home, taking any chance of a legal solution to the Bonus Army’s demands with them.

Pace and the communists then set their sights on escalation. Roughly 5,000 veterans under Pace’s command began to seize and occupy newly-empty government offices, nominally to provide living accommodations. Benjamin Gitlow, a former Communist Party employee who also became disillusioned with leftism explained:

The communist high command demanded that the leaders of the veterans who refused to comply with the communists be driven out of Washington. They laid down a policy calling for violent demonstrations in harmony with militant class warfare and demanded that the veterans be kept there until hell freezes over in order to exasperate the government and force the hand of Hoover.

With Congress out of town and the peaceful purpose of the Bonus March removed, large numbers of veterans began to leave the city. The government provided transportation loans to any man who could prove military service and wanted to leave, a policy that continued through the end of the crisis. By July, many of the moderates were gone, Waters had been removed as leader of the Bonus March, and the communists were steering the ship.

What followed was an enormous wave of aggression. On July 14, 10,000 demonstrators led by Pace staged an illegal march on the Capitol and a communist committee stormed the Vice President’s office. On July 18th they swarmed the DC Courthouse. On July 22, they occupied the Capitol building and had to be removed. On July 25th, a large confrontation occurred with Capitol Police in which many communist leaders, including Pace, were arrested. The city was paralyzed.

It’s important to note that a significant proportion of the crowd assembled in DC had prior criminal histories. FBI ran fingerprint matches on Bonus Marchers who had applied for travel loans and found that 24.4% of them had criminal convictions. That figure ran up to 33.3% for those arrested in the July 25th confrontation. A third of those arrested weren’t even veterans.

By July 28th, President Hoover and the DC authorities had had enough. On top of the massive disruptions, the huge encampments (with open air latrines close to densely populated areas) posed a serious public health risk. Hoover ordered the limited eviction of Bonus Marchers from an abandoned Treasury Department building on Pennsylvania Avenue. The 200 occupants of the building had been ordered to evacuate 4 times beforehand.

When a small crew of Treasury Department workmen escorted by 75 police officers attempted the eviction, they were confronted by 5,000 Bonus Marchers from nearby camps. The scene quickly turned into a full scale riot. Bystanders from surrounding neighborhoods gathered to watch the chaos unfold. The crowd was estimated to be 20,000 strong. Police were attacked with bricks and clubs, but had been ordered not to draw their guns. Dozens of officers suffered serious injuries. Later, as reinforcements arrived and a huge fight for control of the building broke out, two police officers were cornered on the upper floors. They fired in self defense, killing two Bonus Marchers. These were the only two fatalities of the entire ordeal.

Far from a surprise assault, the military’s intervention into the Bonus Army crisis was an emergency response to a riot in progress. The DC police realized they could not control such a large crowd without firing into it and requested military assistance. MacArthur arrived with tanks, infantry, and, most importantly, tear gas.

The show of force worked. MacArthur’s troops, led in part by future WW2 General George S. Patton, fired tear gas and pushed the massive crowd back at bayonet point. The defeated rioters were not allowed to simply return to their camps afterwards. Against Hoover’s orders, MacArthur kept pushing the retreating Marchers all the way out of the city, giving camps time to evacuate before they were cleared out one by one. There were no deaths and very few injuries. The troops didn’t shoot anyone.

It’s not even clear what started the famous shack fire that came to represent the entire incident. The troops weren’t carrying torches. Though a tear gas grenade might have set off the blaze, it’s equally likely that something just got knocked over in the hurried evacuation of the shantytown. The fire also might have been deliberately set by the Marchers themselves on their way out.

Although footage of gas-mask clad troopers pushing out the veterans shocked nation, few were aware of violence that had preceded it. Gitlow stated plainly:

It was just what the communists wanted. It was what they had conspired to bring about. Now they could brand Hoover as a murderer of hungry unemployed veterans. They could charge that the United States Army was Wall Street’s tool with which to crush the unemployed and that the government and the Congress of the United States were bloody fascist butchers of unarmed American workers.

Led by Communist Vice Presidential candidate James Ford, the Bonus Marchers attempted to regroup nearby in Virginia. However, local authorities raided the meeting, arrested Ford and 42 other attendees, and decapitated the remaining resistance. About 5,000 veterans and other civilians, all that was left, were ferried out of the area by the Red Cross. After nearly 2 months of chaos, the crisis was over.

The Bonus Army scandal is instructive in a lot of ways. It’s one of the increasingly few historical anecdotes that a relatively large number of Americans are aware of. History books refer to it in passing as a great crime. I’ve often heard it referenced by conservatives, who use it to highlight the government’s systemic mistreatment of veterans and willingness to harm the American people. And yet, pretty much every aspect of the mainstream story is fake. The good guy victims were actually really bad and the aggressors. The bad guys like President Hoover, Douglas MacArthur, and George S. Patton, were some of the greatest Americans of all time. It’s likely more police officers were injured than demonstrators. The quack debunked allegations of a communist plot were actually 100% true.

The information isn’t hard to come by. It doesn’t come from disreputable sources. It just doesn’t get printed. Everyone lies at once, and then the lies get laundered through thousands of different secondary sources until they become common knowledge. This is how fake history gets made. Eventually people look at you funny when you reference what heroes who were actually there said about the event.

Why does this happen? Because all the “respectable” people involved supported the violence: the journalists who covered the March, the charity workers who provided services to the Marchers, the free lawyers who demanded answers as to why the “peaceful” veterans were attacked. Everyone knew what was going on back then, just like how the “legal observers” and “medics” and human shields for the 2020 BLM rioters knew exactly what they were supporting.

It was a textbook leftist pressure campaign: Organized groups glom on to some organic public anger and amplify it using professional activist networks. They use the ensuing crisis to try and extract political concessions. If the authorities don’t respond, they look weak and lose credibility (if the government doesn’t just get toppled, as the communist were planning). If they do respond, they’re portrayed as monsters acting totally without provocation.

The Bonus March also illustrates how leftists disguise these campaigns to prey on the sympathies of conservatives. If it had been more obvious that the Bonus Army was controlled by the communists, the public would have overwhelmingly supported harsh action. Instead, communists used the veterans as camouflage, knowing that any force used against them would be seen as an outrage.

They hung American flags all over the camp. There were women and children living in the squalor, too. They printed pamphlets declaring that they weren’t communist and hated communism. Most probably believed that. Deliberate confrontations went unreported and instead the public saw feel-good stories about how the humble veterans set up their own post office. Conservatives need to be more aware of how their sentimentality can be employed against them. Once you know that leftists are involved in any mass protest movement (historical or contemporary), whatever the goal or whoever they’re putting in front of the camera, your heart needs to harden real fast. The organized terror America saw livestreamed in 2020 was nothing new.

The incident also shows the only way conservative officials can short circuit this: not by bargaining or granting concessions, but rather by sticking to their guns. The Senate refusing to pass the new Bonus bill despite mob pressure sent the message that they would not be intimidated. It forced the communists controlling the Bonus Army to escalate to more overt aggression and reveal their hand. Governments that concede immediately when tens of thousands of people, organized by radical political movements, show up on their doorstep demanding money tend not to last.

Finally, it illustrates the most important feature of governments that survive revolutions: having the will to preserve themselves through force. Serge Obolensky was a Russian aristocrat and cavalryman who fell in with a group of counterrevolutionaries on the eve of the 1917 October Revolution. Knowing that the Bolsheviks planned to overthrow the government, his men had surrounded the Bolshevik headquarters in secret and prepared to attack it in a last ditch effort to save their nation. However, the order to advance never came. The government had lost its nerve. Obolensky, who later immigrated to America and became a commando and business tycoon, wrote in his memoirs:

… the entire incident remains as a clear warning, what can happen to a government, like Kerensky’s, whose members are afraid to shoot to defend their parliamentary system or fight for their constitution. After all, it was only a Bolshevik minority that took over St. Petersburg with mob violence. This minority then consolidated in the north and then did the same thing over again in Moscow, and so on throughout all the cities of Russia. After that there was no stopping them.

Once the Russian government fell, a horrible process began. The country was plunged into civil war, famine, and mass social upheaval. More than 10 million people died, millions more had to flee, and the world historical threat of the Soviet Union was created. Running off desperate people with tear gas and bayonets is nasty business. Refusing to bend to the mob is never popular at the time. Leftists will never forgive you for it, Hoover and MacArthur are still smeared to this day for their heroic actions. Those actions were also necessary. Being willing to take them is what made these men great. They showed, in the most direct way possible, that America and Americans still had the civilizational will to live.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to support my work and receive future content.