“Once I built a railroad” – The Bonus Army and the On-to Ottawa Trek
What went on in this country post-January 6th, and what’s going on in Canada now, have historical precedents not just in repressive dictatorships but even in the US and Canada. It seems that the authorities are always frightened of demonstrations by the proles if the proles are in disagreement with that government. I mean, look what happened in France some centuries back, and in Russia about a hundred years ago.
The historic precedents I’m thinking about, though, occurred in the US and Canada during the early 1930s and the Depression, when many working people became desperate for obvious reasons. I already had been aware of the US movement known as the Bonus Army, but I just learned about the Canadian event called the On-to-Ottawa trek.
Let’s take the Bonus marchers first. They were World War I veterans who had been voted bonuses by Congress for fighting in the war, but the money was going to be paid them in 1945 and they felt they needed it now. They were about 10,000 of them, and they came to DC in 1932 and set up several camps of makeshift huts in less inhabited areas, in many cases bringing their families. They were accused of being Communists, and there definitely were Communist infiltrators among them, but the vast majority were not Communists and they ousted Communists when they found them.
Then:
On July 28, under prodding from the Herbert Hoover, the D.C. Commissioners ordered Pelham D Glassford to clear their buildings, rather than letting the protesters drift away as he had previously recommended. When the veterans rioted, an officer (George Shinault) drew his revolver and shot at the veterans, two of whom, William Hushka and Eric Carlson, died later.
Both are buried in Arlington National Cemetery, by the way.
Later the army cleared out the main camp, with some familiar names in charge [emphasis mine]:
At 4:45 pm. commanded by General Douglas MacArthur, the 12th Infantry Regiment, Fort Howard, Maryland, and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, supported by six M1917 light tanks commanded by Maj. George S. Patton, formed in Pennsylvania Avenue while thousands of civil service employees left work to line the street and watch. The Bonus Marchers, believing the troops were marching in their honor, cheered the troops until Patton ordered the cavalry to charge them, which prompted the spectators to yell, “Shame! Shame!”
After the cavalry charged, the infantry, with fixed bayonets and tear gas (adamsite, an arsenical vomiting agent) entered the camps, evicting veterans, families, and camp followers. The veterans fled across the Anacostia River to their largest camp, and Hoover ordered the assault stopped. MacArthur chose to ignore the president and ordered a new attack, claiming that the Bonus March was an attempt to overthrow the US government. 55 veterans were injured and 135 arrested…
During the military operation, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower…served as one of MacArthur’s junior aides. Believing it wrong for the Army’s highest-ranking officer to lead an action against fellow American war veterans, he strongly advised MacArthur against taking any public role: “I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch not to go down there,” he said later. “I told him it was no place for the Chief of Staff.” Despite his misgivings, Eisenhower wrote the Army’s official incident report that endorsed MacArthur’s conduct.
…The shacks in the Anacostia Camp were then set on fire, although who set them on fire is somewhat unclear.
Historians think that the unpopular action contributed to Hoover’s defeat in the 1932 election. But, since nothing had been resolved concerning the bonuses, there was another march when Roosevelt was president. He handled it differently:
During the presidential campaign of 1932, Roosevelt had opposed the veterans’ bonus demands. A second bonus march planned for the following year in May by the “National Liaison Committee of Washington,” disavowed by the previous year’s bonus army leadership, demanded that the Federal government provide marchers housing and food during their stay in the capital. Despite his opposition to the marchers’ demand for immediate payment of the bonus, Roosevelt greeted them quite differently than Hoover had done. The administration set up a special camp for the marchers at Fort Hunt, Virginia, providing forty field kitchens serving three meals a day, bus transportation to and from the capital, and entertainment in the form of military bands.
Administration officials, led by presidential confidant Louis Howe, tried to negotiate an end to the protest. Roosevelt arranged for his wife, Eleanor, to visit the site unaccompanied. She lunched with the veterans and listened to them perform songs. She reminisced about her memories of seeing troops off to World War I and welcoming them home. The most that she could offer was a promise of positions in the newly created Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). One veteran commented, “Hoover sent the army, Roosevelt sent his wife.” In a press conference following her visit, the First Lady described her reception as courteous and praised the marchers, highlighting how comfortable she felt despite critics of the marchers who described them as communists and criminals.
FDR had more of the populist touch. In 1936, the heavily Democratic Congress voted to pay the veterans their bonuses, FDR vetoed the bill, and Congress overrode the veto.
So now, on to Canada. Here’s an account of the Canadian incident I’ve never heard about before. In this case, the demonstrators were more violent than either the Bonus Army or today’s present-day Freedom Convoy (which has been remarkably peaceful; not that that has protected them from the Trudeau government and media claiming otherwise). However, from what I’ve read, it seems that the Canadian demonstrators’ violence in the 1930s incident was sparked by the police initiating violence against them:
The Great Depression crippled the Canadian economy and left one in nine citizens on relief. The relief, however, did not come free; the Bennett Government ordered the Department of National Defence to organize work camps where single unemployed men were used to construct roads and other public works at a rate of twenty cents per day. The men in the relief camps were living in poor conditions with very low wages. The men decided to unite and in 1933, and led by Arthur “Slim” Evans the men created Workers’ Unity League (WUL). The Workers’ Unity League helped the men organize the Relief Camp Workers’ Union…
About 1,000 strikers headed for Ottawa. The strikers’ demands were: wages of 50 cents an hour for unskilled work, union wages for skilled, at least 120 hours of work a month, the provision of adequate first aid equipment in the camps, the extension of the Workmen’s Compensation Act to include camp workers, recognition of democratically elected workers’ committees, that workers in camps be granted the right to vote in elections, and the camps be removed from the purview of the Department of National Defence. Public support for the men was enormous, but the municipal, provincial and federal governments passed responsibility between themselves. They then decided to take their grievances to the federal government. On June 3, 1935, hundreds of men began boarding boxcars headed east in what became known as the “On-to-Ottawa Trek”.
They ended up stopping in Regina. But negotiations with the government didn’t work out, and then [emphasis mine]:
At 8:17 p.m. a whistle was blown, and the police charged the crowd with batons from all four sides. The attack caught the people off guard before their anger took over. They fought back with sticks, stones, and anything at hand. Mounted RCMP officers then started to use tear gas and fired guns….The battle continued in the surrounding streets for six hours.
Police fired revolvers above and into groups of people. Tear gas bombs were thrown at any groups that gathered together. Plate glass windows in stores and offices were smashed, but with one exception, these stores were not looted, they were burned. People covered their faces with wet handkerchiefs to counter the effects of the tear gas and barricaded streets with cars. Finally, the Trekkers who had attended the meeting made their way individually or in small groups back to the exhibition stadium where the main body of Trekkers were quartered.
When it was over, 140 Trekkers and citizens had been arrested. Charles Miller, a plainclothes policeman, died, and Nick Schaack, a Trekker, later died in the hospital from injuries sustained in the riot. There were hundreds of injured residents and Trekkers were taken to hospitals or private homes. Those taken to a hospital were also arrested. Property damage was considerable.
…The next day a barbed wire stockade was erected around the area. News of the police-instigated riot was front-page news across Canada….
…During the lengthy trials that followed, no evidence was ever produced to show that strikers fired shots during the riot. For his part, Bennett characterized the On-to-Ottawa Trek as “not a mere uprising against law and order but a definite revolutionary effort on the part of a group of men to usurp authority and destroy government.”
In the 1930s, the demonstrations both in the US and Canada were supported by the left as well as much of the populace, and the governments in question (both Bennett’s and Hoover’s, that is) were more from the right. Nowadays, in both Canada and the US, it’s mostly the right that is demonstrating against the control exercised by leftist governments (or in the case of January 6th, against a perceived fraudulent takeover by a leftist government).
And just as with Hoover in the US and the election of FDR, the conservative Bennett of Canada felt the political repercussions:
The events helped to discredit Bennett’s Conservative government, and in the 1935 federal election, his party went from holding 135 seats to just 39. After the Trek, the Saskatchewan government provided free transportation as a peace sign back to the west. The camps were soon dismantled and replaced by seasonal relief camps run by the provinces, and that paid the men slightly more for their labor than the earlier camps. Although the Trek did not reach Ottawa, its reverberations certainly did. Several demands of the Trekkers were eventually met, and the public support that galvanized behind the Trek set the tone for the social and welfare provisions of the postwar era.
In other words, Canada and the US veered to the left after these incidents, in part as a result of government heavy-handedness on the part of the right. Will history repeat itself – or at least rhyme – only this time with the parties reversed?
[NOTE: The title of this post quotes a line from the song “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” It came out in 1932, and there are references to the Bonus Army without actually naming them outright:
Once in khaki suits
Gee, we looked swell
Full of that yankee Doodle De Dum
Half a million boots went slogging through hell
I was the kid with the drum
Say don’t you remember, they called me Al
It was Al all the time
Say don’t you remember, I’m your pal!
Brother can you spare a dime?
The song’s lyrics were written by two socialists. There were a lot of people turning to socialism back then, because the Depression caused a lot of doubt about capitalism.]
One thing leaders have learned is if you throw enough money at the citizens you can pacify enough of them to keep the protests in check and that is what we have seen the last two years.
No matter how justified the grievance, power sees mass protest as a threat and knows only one response; force.
Only when convinced that force will bring about its demise will power seek appeasement, while planning to betray their agreement. Just as FDR tried to veto paying the vets what was lawfully owed them. Rhetorical question; when Congress overrode FDR’s veto did the compensation paid to the vets include the interest that had accrued over the past 18 years?
PS MacArthur and Patton’s actions speak ill of them. But… they were just following orders, right?
Geoffrey Britain:
No, that’s not the way the bill originally granting the bonuses worked. The original bill included a delay in payment till 1945. The vets wanted a hardship advance, and FDR vetoed a new bill granting them the advance. So no interest was necessary.
This verse is particularly apt given our current class warfare of the laptop class against the working class:
Once I built a railroad
I made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad
Now it’s done
Hey, buddy, can you spare a dime.
We will have to wait to see what the final outcome is. I don’t think the interval will be very pretty.
Also, about this time, The Businessmen’s Coup was afoot.
General Smedley Butler (War is a Racket) was being courted to lead the veterans in a coup against Roosevelt.
Except he smelled a rat and exposed them.
One of the interesting things about this was one of the businessmen telling Butler that he’d spend half his millions to protect the other half.
I think there is some of that going on today.
neo,
“The original bill included a delay in payment till 1945.”
I stand corrected on that point. Though a bonus with a delay of 27 years is an insult to men who put their lives on the line for their country. Many might well fail to live to see 1945…
We can learn a couple things from our current political class:
The first is the brittle, arrogant and defensive response of our ruling class to any kind of political opposition nowadays. What kind of mind turns parents complaining at a school-board meeting into some sort of “domestic terrorism” threat? (The same kind that turns peacefully protesting truckers into “insurrectionists,” I suppose.)
In what previous age of Canadian and American history would secret targeting and federal investigations of people engaging in a bedrock institution of participatory democracy have been seen as appropriate? Who calls people racist for wanting their kids to learn?
In this age, alas, those things happen, and the people doing them — the people who are supposed to be our society’s leaders, the best and the brightest, the level-headed non-extremists of the establishment — are frankly more than a little bit crazy.
No sane person would respond this way, and yet respond this way they do, over and over again. (And every time they do, they label their opponents racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, etc., wielding those adjectives like magic curse words.
Geoffrey Britain:
The long delay in payment for the original bonus bill was one of the things the Bonus Marchers were upset about, especially once the Depression intervened (the bill had been passed in 1924, I believe). I think the delay had something to do with not wanting to raise taxes to pay for it. There’s a lot of info about that at the Wiki link.
neo, Ann in LA:
Thanks for the references to “Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime.” It’s been covered by a ton of people from Al Jolson to Bing Crosby to Judy Collins to Tiny Tim and justly so.
Here’s Bing’s version:
–Bing Crosby, “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” (1932)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbcZmnhaEYM
huxley:
The song’s Wiki entry says the tune is based on a Russian Jewish lullaby.
neo:
Interesting.
Made me think immediately of Irving Berlin’s “Russian Lullaby.” There’s a boatload of covers for that too. Sounds not the same, but close. Wouldn’t surprise me of a relationship.
Here’s Ella Fitzgerald’s soulful version:
__________________________
Every night you’ll hear her croon
A Russian lullaby
Just a little plaintive tune
When baby starts to cry
Rock-a-bye my baby
Somewhere there may be
A land that’s free for you and me
And a Russian lullaby
–“Ella Fitzgerald – Russian Lullaby”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao0ICrT4OtY
Thomas Edison’s father and mother were refugees from Canada after the 1837 Mackenzie rebellion. We might be seeing more.
@ Chuck > “Thomas Edison’s father and mother were refugees from Canada after the 1837 Mackenzie rebellion. We might be seeing more.”
Why would anyone want to come to America from Canada for more freedom?
From Venezuela and most of Africa, sure, at least for a while longer, but Brandon and Brandeau are using the same playbook as the leftists that ruined those places.
@ Geoffrey > “a bonus with a delay of 27 years is an insult to men who put their lives on the line for their country. Many might well fail to live to see 1945…”
@ Neo > “I think the delay had something to do with not wanting to raise taxes to pay for it.”
Wikipedia:
As Geoffrey notes, a payout is no good if you died in the meantime, unless it was inheritable (Wiki doesn’t say). Why didn’t the marchers take out the loans for immediate use (who knows?) and why is raising taxes to disburse loans okay but raising taxes to make lump sum payouts is not?
I suspect there is more to the story that isn’t being included in the established narrative.
Note that the trust fund swindle was also replicated with Social Security, where the age for drawing the pension exceeded the normal life expectancy at that time.
Wikipedia does not mention any of the following that I could see.
https://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/IncRetAge.html
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2019/004-508.pdf
(from the table)
Do the math.
They weren’t expecting to have to pay too many people; however, they did end up making the claims heritable by widows and children, before then making the whole Ponzi scheme into flat-out welfare.
Because Congress decided to use the collected funds for current spending and stick IOUs into the “trust fund.”
Who really knows what was happening with the Bonus Trust Fund?
Most likely something similar: maybe they couldn’t pay the bonuses (or even make loans?) because there wasn’t really any money there after the Depression began, having been “invested” in some of the failing enterprises.
* * *
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)
“MacArthur chose to ignore the president and ordered a new attack.”
LOL – that statement jumped out at me. Not that what happen is funny; but, the fact that MacArthur seems to have had a habit of ignoring orders and going for another attack. Something which eventually led to his being relieved of command.
huxley: It’s the Bing version I had in my head when I posted.
I took a US History since 1877 in college in the 80s. The only references to Patton and MacArthur where their actions with the bonus army. They did not receive one mention in the WW II chapters. This is the kind of history that has only become more pronounced in the intervening decades.
huxley: It’s the Bing version I had in my head when I posted.
Ann in L.A.:
It’s all part of the neo synchro-mesh!
I didn’t realize Bing could have such dreamy eyes until I saw the accompanying photo.
Thanks for the piece on the bonus marchers Neo. I had heard of the federal promissory certificates and that there was dissatisfaction, but not much else.
I found this from Neo’s Wiki link interesting:
Our little family farm has been in our family for 140 years now. It was awarded to a member of the Massachusetts Militia via a document signed by President Buchanan in 1855. The amount of land? 160 acres. The document maybe says he was a surgeon (old sawbones?), if I’m reading the old cursive correctly. Cool stuff.
I surmise that very few today can appreciate how desperate people were in the 1930s; although we may learn for ourselves in due time.
I was born in ’35, so the depression had ended, and WWII had started before I had any conscious awareness of the world. Still through the years, although overshadowed by the war, I heard personal accounts of life during the depression. My parents were married in ’31 and I was not born until four years later. Given the hit and miss nature of birth control in those days, I presume that considerable effort was made to delay my arrival; and I attribute that to the depression. No one ever discussed that with me.
Two of my older cousins were in the CCC before they went into WWII service. Since they came from a hard scrabble farm, powered by mule and human sweat, in which able bodied, teen aged labor would be prized, I assume that things were really desperate. Maybe, in part, because the only cash crop was tobbacco, and the government put severe limits on how much a small farmer could produce. Why? (BTW, Roosevelt’s ballyhooed programs did reach into rural Suwanee County Florida (among other Southern locales) until some time after my last summer on the farm. There was still no electricity, telephone service, or paved roads in 1947; and no law enforcement or emergency/civic services of any kind.) Only “white privilege” he noted, snarkily.
Oldflyer:
My mother, who was a young adult during the Depression, told me many stories. Her own family never suffered much and remained comfortable although not rich; I’m not sure how they did it, but they did. However, she knew tons of people who had hardship of various kinds.
The form many of her stories took in the 1950s and 1960s was to point to some of their friends (with whom she’d grown up and gone to school) and explain how this one and that one had been forced to drop out of high school to earn money for the family and had had to give up their dreams of becoming a [fill in the blank]. I think one, for example, had wanted to be a teacher, and ended up working his whole life in the garment district pushing those huge racks of clothes around the city streets. In my mother’s case, she was engaged to someone who was in law school, but when he graduated he could not get a job. Just could not. So he broke up with her and joined the army and became a career guy in the military. I believe he attained the rank of colonel and married many years later. This may not seem like the kind of hardship that starving people endured – and it wasn’t – but it still was very hard for her to lose her fiance because of the Depression. These stories of course occurred in an urban environment.
I grew up thinking in terms of the Depression and human tragedy – loss of hopes and dreams – rather than starvation, although she also told me about bread lines and the like.
neo:
Good points all.
My grandparents and their children thrived during the Depression. They owned the plant which employed half their hometown. They became the local royalty. It was a mixed blessing.
When I was young, I didn’t understand my grandparents were rich. For all I knew everyone’s grandparents retired to a killer beachfront home in Ormond Beach, which eventually got a spread in “Better Homes and Gardens.”
My mother showed me her childhood pictures and it was years later I understood what it meant that for Christmas, during the Depression, she and her sisters got Shetland ponies.
I’m boasting some here, but it is a cautionary tale. All of my grandparent’s children ended up seriously screwed-up. The sisters committed suicide. The brother rejected his parents entirely and dropped out as a hippie into the Haight-Ashbury when he was in his 40s.
I see my family as Ground Zero for the sixties culture war, which we are still living through today.
FYI: My mother’s generation blew the family money.
I got a bit of an inheritance and a bit of trust fund, which gave me the leeway to retool from being a garden-variety electronics tech to a Silicon Valley programmer where I made my own money.
My mother told me that the depression didn’t make any difference for her. My maternal grandparents were share croppers, so not much to lose. My father’s family was also poor by choice, my grandfather spent his time preaching in WV, walking the hills and building a religious camp. My father gained 30 pounds after he joined the army in the summer of 1941.
The strange thing is that about half of my mother’s siblings attended college and my father’s father learned calculus in high school and taught himself Greek in order to read the New Testament in the original.
AesopFan wrote: “Because Congress decided to use the collected funds for current spending and stick IOUs into the ‘trust fund.’” (That really means “collected funds **in excess of the program’s current obligations**.”)
Beyond that, if one thinks carefully about how an entire society saves for its future, one will realize that such surpluses **have to be used**. In physical terms, you can’t just throw dollar bills into a vault and then come back when they’re needed and expect that they’ve also earned interest in the meantime.
The money has to be used in some fashion. If it’s invested in productive enterprise, then there may be additional real wealth generated that can serve to pay off the obligation when it’s needed
From _The Cost and Financing of Social Security_, by Lewis Meriam and Karl Schlotterbeck (Brookings Institution, 1950), p. 155:
“The establishment of the Trust Fund has given an aura of soundness and solvency to the OASI [Old-Age and Survivors Insurance] system. Many believe that this reserve fund ‘earns’ income in the same sense as do private insurance reserves; that, if need be, all claims could be met by liquidation of the reserves; and that an individual, with his final payment of OASI taxes, will have paid in full for his retirement benefits.
“The operation of the OASI Trust Fund is NOT [emphasis in original] similar in character to that of a private insurance company. Private insurance reserves (…) are usually invested in projects that directly participate in or promote the production of goods and services. These investments are procreative in character and thus ‘earn’ income. Furthermore, they are assets of the insurance company reserve, but they are liabilities of OTHER [emphasis in original] enterprises. The OASI Trust Fund is invested in federal government securities. Since the money is used by the government in meeting its regular expenditure requirements, no real reserve is created. The obligations of the government (liabilities) deposited in a trust account do not represent assets; they merely record future obligations which can be fulfilled only through the levy of future taxes upon the economy in general. The Trust Fund is thus a fiction — serving only to confuse.
“The explanation of the failure to establish trust fund assets analogous to those provided by private insurance companies is presumably that the sums ultimately involved are so stupendous that available investment securities of productive enterprises would not be adequate for the purpose. The deposit of its own liabilities in a so-called reserve fund thus appeared as a happy solution to the problem.”
Neo, I’m not sure that the Wikipedia entry on the Bonus Army is at all accurate. According to one source I read (a biography of MacArthur, but one I can’t locate offhand), he never received Hoover’s order not to cross the Anacostia.
And the Eisenhower quotes appear to stem from an interview he gave in 1954, when MacArthur was a political rival. His diaries and papers at the time seem to have supported MacArthur unreservedly.
The whole event was truly stupid, but the accounts have been heavily politicized.
AesopFan asked “why is raising taxes to disburse loans okay but raising taxes to make lump sum payouts is not?”
This question is a category error. The proper question is “why might a long series of tax payments during prosperity have different effects than a sudden large tax increase during a depression?” For a hint at an answer, ask why falling into an airbag from ten stories up might different effects than falling into a concrete sidewalk.
AesopFan also made the old “life-expectancy at birth” error. Yes, the figure given for 1900 is absolutely accurate. That is because (by modern standards) infant mortality and child mortality were sky-high in 1900. The relevant question here is “What was life expectancy at the beginning of working life (around age 14-22 in 1935) when Social Security was established?” The number of children who never worked and never had a SS account is irrelevant, and the number of children who died before SS was established is doubly irrelevant.
Shut up, peasant!
huxley,
Quite the family story. Many moons ago Neo spoke of someone who accumulated a great deal of wealth and then made an off-hand comment about how that would sustain the family for many generations.
I pointed out that on average such wealth lasts about three generations. At first I didn’t remember whether the number 3 included the wealth builder’s generation or not. It did. It’s kind of amazing, but understandable.
TommyJay:
Thanks.
For years I wondered what terrible family secret laid waste to the subsequent generations. I never found a classic traumatic answer. I finally concluded it was the curse of nouveau riche.
My grandparents came from hard-working Scots-Irish settlers in the Oklahoma Territory. They were decent, intelligent, hard-working folks, who believed in God and the good ole USA. They were Republicans even. However, they didn’t manage to pass that ethic to their children.
Instead they gave their kids what the kids wanted all too easily — an understandable parental response. So, my mother, aunt and uncle hit adulthood without developing important strengths from youthful struggle and disappointment.
There was also the envy response from the townspeople, which made relationships treacherous.
So in spite of their advantages, they had weirdly hard lives.
I once tried to explain my mother to a college friend. I mentioned that my mother never had to work. My friend surprised me by saying, “How awful!” When I thought about it, I realized my friend was right.