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The Bonus Army was a group of 43,000 demonstrators – 17,000 veterans of U.S. involvement in World War I, their families, and affiliated groups – who gathered in Washington, D.C., in mid-1932 to demand early cash redemption of their service bonus certificates.
Bonus Army, gathering of some 10,000 to 25,000 World War I veterans who, with their wives and children, converged on Washington, D.C., in 1932, demanding immediate bonus payment for wartime services to alleviate the economic hardship of the Great Depression.
In May 1932, jobless WWI veterans organized a group called the “Bonus Expeditionary Forces” (BEF) to march on Washington, DC. Suffering and desperate, the BEF’s goal was to get the bonus payment now, when they really needed the money.
The Bonus Army was the name applied a group over 17,000 U.S. World War I veterans who marched on Washington, D.C. during the summer of 1932 demanding immediate cash payment of the service bonuses promised to them by Congress eight years earlier.
One of the exceptions was the Bonus army in March of 1932. After victory in World War I, the US government promised in 1924 that servicemen would receive a bonus for their service, in 1945. The bonus was also known as the “Tombstone Bonus.”
In 1932 World War I veterans seeking a bonus promised by Congress were attacked and driven out of Washington, D.C., by troops of the U.S. Army under the command of Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Patton.
In March, a riot at Ford's River Rouge plant in Michigan left four dead and over fifty wounded. Thus, when a band of jobless veterans, led by a former cannery worker named Walter W. Waters,...
The Bonus March. World War I veterans block the steps of the Capitol during the Bonus March, July 5, 1932. Many in America wondered if the nation would survive. Although the United States had little history of massive social upheaval or coup attempts against the government, hunger has an ominous way of stirring those passions among any population.
During the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover orders the U.S. Army under General Douglas MacArthur to evict by force the Bonus Marchers from the nation’s capital.
Eleven days after Congress failed to compensate the “Bonus Army,” General Douglas MacArthur and the Army were ordered by President Hoover to drive the camp inhabitants away and bulldoze their settlements after riots erupted.