Bonus Army 1932: MacArthur's Tanks, Adamsite Gas and Joe Angelo's Snub

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World War I veterans came home with a $60 discharge payment. In 1924 Congress passed the World War Adjusted Compensation Act over the veto of Calvin Coolidge, who had argued that patriotism bought and paid for is not patriotism. The act credited $1 a day for domestic service and $1.25 a day overseas. Most veterans got certificates that would not mature until 1945. When the Depression hit, they wanted the money immediately, but President Herbert Hoover feared that paying billions would wreck the budget. In 1932 about 43,000 people, including 17,000 veterans and their families, converged on Washington as the Bonus Expeditionary Force under former Army sergeant Walter W. Waters. On the Anacostia Flats, with quiet permission from police superintendent Pelham D. Glassford, they built an orderly camp they named Camp Marks after a friendly police captain.

On June 15 the House passed the Wright-Patman bonus bill, but on June 17 the Senate rejected it 62 to 18. On July 28 police moving to evict the marchers shot William Hushka and Eric Carlson, both later buried at Arlington. Citing claims of a communist plot, which the marchers rejected under the camp motto eyes front, not left, Hoover called in the Army. Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur led cavalry under George S. Patton, infantry with fixed bayonets and six M1917 tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue, then defied two orders from Hoover to stop at the Anacostia Bridge and burned the main camp. A second march in 1933 met a very different response from Franklin Roosevelt, and in 1936 Congress overrode his veto and paid the bonuses nine years early.

• Veterans had to show an honorable discharge or a bonus certificate to join the camp, and postage stamps were prized more than cigarettes.
• Major Dwight D. Eisenhower warned MacArthur against leading the operation himself, yet later wrote the official report endorsing it.
• Marchers cheered the troops at first, thinking it was a parade in their honor, before the cavalry charged and the infantry used Adamsite, an arsenical vomiting agent.
• Twelve-week-old Bernard Myers died after exposure to the gas, though a government investigation attributed his death to enteritis.
• Joe Angelo, who had saved Patton's life in the Meuse-Argonne in 1918, approached him the next day, and Patton had him sent away, reportedly saying he did not know the man.