Waters introduced Butler as “a real soldier, a real man, a real gentleman, and a real comrade” - noting, in case anyone had forgotten, the two Medals of Honor.īutler looked over the crowd, now totaling about sixteen thousand stalwarts. Smedley took off his sport coat, rolled up his sleeves, and tucked his polka dot tie between two shirt buttons so it wouldn’t flop around. Word spread, and soon thousands converged around a wooden stage to hear what Old Gimlet Eye had to say. They strolled around the shanty town, greeting men Butler had last seen shuffling through his mudhole camp in France. Smedley Butler arrived at Camp Marks on July 19, accompanied by his son Smedley Junior, on summer break from MIT. Waters, sent an urgent invitation to the one senior military man who had taken a public position in support of the veterans - the one officer whom he knew the veterans would listen to. Hoover headed to his Shenandoah summer retreat.Īs dejected marchers began to take federal agents’ offers for train tickets home, the organizer of the BEF, Walter W. Senators left just before midnight, fleeing through the underground tunnels beneath the Capitol to avoid confronting marchers. On July 16, the Senate adjourned without taking the latest bonus bill up, effectively killing the measure. Most alarming to some, veterans of all skin colors were living in the bonus camps side by side at a time when the District of Columbia and military were strictly segregated by race. They denounced the occupiers as Communists and radicals. The marchers renamed the site Camp Marks in his honor.īut the federal and military establishments were not as pleased. police captain named Sidney Marks, sent to evict the largest encampment - on the mudflats across the Anacostia River - instead told the protesters they had his support. Many Washingtonians were sympathetic to the BEF. But President Hoover vetoed it, warning it would set a dangerous precedent by breaking “the barriers of self-reliance and self-support in our people.” The protesters’ goal in 1932 was to change his mind and force Congress’s hands. In response, Congress passed a bill allowing veterans to cash in part of their IOUs as loans. Angelo walked four days from his home in New Jersey to Washington to demand the bonus be paid immediately. When the Great Depression hit, many veterans realized their green-bordered bonus certificates was their only asset that still held any value. But there was a catch: if the sum was more than $50, it would only be paid to the veteran’s survivors after they died or in 1945, whichever came first. In 1924, Congress had finally passed a bonus bill over President Coolidge’s veto, mandating that most who served during the mobilization would get $1 of back pay for each day of home service and $1.25 for each day abroad. Many had come home from Europe to find their savings drained and jobs gone. The cause that drew them was known as the “bonus.” Veterans’ benefits had been minimal in the last World War. By July, there were some forty-five thousand veteran protesters, wives, and children living in shacks in the shadow of the Capitol dome. Calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, they set up encampments across Washington. Over the spring of 1932, veterans from every corner of the country began making their way to Washington, D.C. (Still from Fox Movietone News outtake, Moving Image Research Collections, University of South Carolina) Butler addressing the Bonus Marchers in Anacostia Flats, Washington, D.C., July 19, 1932.
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