Unless President Trump suddenly decides to end his shutdown and allow federal workers to return to work today, hundreds of thousands of these workers will miss their second paycheck since the president shut down much of the government last month. They include an Ohio man who can’t afford the $200 payment to pick up his insulin, full-time workers forced to turn to food banks to feed their families, and TSA workers reliant on donated diapers and baby formula.
Yet, despite the hardship Trump’s imposed on so many families, the federal workforce has thus-far taken the shutdown in stride. There are reports of sick-outs, protests, and even early talk of more aggressive job actions, but for the most part government employees forced to work without pay have continued to do their jobs.
As the financial burdens of Trump’s shutdown mount, however, workers will grow increasingly desperate. Many of them, meanwhile, are furloughed and thus have plenty of time on their hands to engage in direct action against the man who refuses to pay them until he gets his wall.
And there’s a stark historical precedent for such action. In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, a literal army of protesters descended upon Washington to demand bonus payments they’d sought for more than a decade. At its peak, this “Bonus Army” numbered as many as 43,000 individuals — thousands of whom were World War I veterans demanding compensation for their service to the country.
For two months, veterans who styled themselves the “Bonus Expeditionary Force” made camp at the edge of Washington, DC — many of them joined by their wives and children. Under the command of Walter Waters, who served as a sergeant in the Great War, the Bonus Army lived under military discipline. They awoke with reveille and drilled during the day. Waters forbade alcohol, panhandling, and “radical talk” of the sort that could cast a cloud of distrust over his men.
The Bonus Army arrived in May and was driven out of town by soldiers still in uniform the next July. And they would not receive their bonuses for several more years.
Yet they also helped destroy a presidency. When New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who would go on to defeat President Herbert Hoover in a landslide that November, learned of how Hoover mistreated the Bonus Army, he offered a clear-eyed prediction — “this will elect me.”
Tombstone Bonus
The idea that World War I veterans should receive a bonus payment from the federal government began with a demand for equal treatment. In 1917, the Wilson administration began paying cash bonuses to civilian federal workers to offset the impact of inflation, yet there were no bonuses for members of the military. Veterans groups such as the American Legion objected to this disparity, and insisted that former servicemembers be placed on the same footing as civilian workers.
Yet their demands ran headlong into a wall named Warren G. Harding, then the president of the United States.
Harding’s objections to the bonus legislation read like the unholy love child of Paul Ryan and Ebenezer Scrooge. “We may rely on the sacrifices of patriotism in war,” Harding told the Senate in a speech urging them to halt consideration of the bonus bill. “But today we face markets, and the effects of supply and demand.”
Among other things, Harding objected to the bill because it would spend money that could otherwise be used for tax cuts that primarily benefited upper income earners.
Though a version of the bonus bill eventually passed Congress, Harding vetoed it. So did President Calvin Coolidge, who took office after Harding’s sudden death in 1923. Coolidge’s veto message objecting to the bonus bill was even more Ryanesque than Harding’s. “Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism,” said Coolidge, who never served in the military.
In part due to Coolidge’s callousness, Congress successfully overrode the president’s veto. Yet the new bonus law came with a catch. To garner enough votes to turn the bill into law, the bill’s supporters watered it down considerably. World War I veterans would receive a bonus of $1 for each day of service in the United States and $1.25 for each day spent overseas, but any payments greater than $50 would be delayed until 1945. Veterans could borrow a fraction of the money they were owed before 1945, but, for those with significant service records, full payment would have to wait.
When the Great Depression hit, many of these veterans labeled the delayed payment a “Tombstone Bonus,” because they expected to be dead before the money was ever paid out.
The evangelist
The last full year of Herbert Hoover’s presidency, 1932, was the worst year of the Great Depression. The nation’s GDP shrunk an astounding 12.9 percent that year. Nearly one quarter of American workers could not find a job.
By one account, according to Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen’s The Bonus Army: An American Epic, “America had a floating population of 25,000 families and 2 million boys and young men on the road.” Homeless and unemployed, they hitchhiked, hopped the rails, and even walked from town to town, constantly searching for work, a meal, and a place to sleep.
One of the victims of this ruin was Walter Waters, the former sergeant who began his military career as part of General “Blackjack” Pershing’s hunt for the Mexican bandit and revolutionary Pancho Villa. Sergeant Waters served in the trenches in France, amidst the death, hunger, and poison gas that defined service in the First World War. Then he remained behind through part of the occupation, receiving an honorable discharge in 1919.
As a civilian, according to DIckson and Allen, Waters worked “as a garage mechanic, an automobile salesman, a farmhand, a baker’s helper,” and then found work picking fruit in Washington State. He eventually became superintendent of a fruit cannery.
That cannery would be shut down thanks to the depression. Waters briefly found work at a second cannery in Portland, only to lose that position in 1932. By March of that year, Waters began a new career, of sorts, as an evangelist for immediate payment of the delayed bonuses for veterans.
Waters did not begin this career in a vacuum. As millions of Americans stared into the abyss of joblessness, over 1,200 members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars marched on Washington to present over two million signatures to lawmakers calling for immediate payment of the bonuses. Texas Congressman Wright Patman took up their cause, and Waters urged his fellow veterans to travel to Washington themselves to support Patman.
“I was anxiously watching reports in the newspapers of the progress of the Bonus legislation,” Waters said, explaining how he noticed that “the highly organized lobbies in Washington for special industries were producing results” such as federal loans to those interest groups. “Personal lobbying paid,” Waters concluded, “regardless of the justice or injustice of the demand.”
At first, Waters’ call for an army of veterans to descend on Washington and demand their bonuses fell on deaf ears. That changed in May, however, when the House Ways and Means Committee rejected Patman’s bonus bill. President Hoover, the committee reasoned, would veto a bonus bill. So moving forward with legislation was pointless.
Ten days after the bill failed, Waters led a crew of 280 men to the Portland train yard, where they eventually hitched a ride in empty cattle cars that still smelled of manure.
Camp Marks
Waters, and the many thousands of men who emulated him, were initially met with kindness when they arrived in Washington, DC. Police Superintendent Pelham Glassford, a former army brigadier general, set aside a tract of land across the Anacostia River where the Bonus Army could make camp. He worked with local merchants to provide the men with food, lumber, and nails — even paying for some of these supplies out of his own pocket.
Evalyn Walsh McLean, a wealthy mining heiress who lived in Washington, visited the camp soon after the extended protest began, gifting the Bonus Army with a thousand sandwiches and a thousand packs of cigarettes. The veterans named their new home “Camp Marks,” after a police captain named S.J. Marks who accommodated the small city that suddenly emerged at the outskirts of Washington.
As tens of thousands of veterans and their families took up residence at Camp Marks and elsewhere in DC, the political tide seemed to turn in their favor. Patman’s bill made it through the committee and, in mid-June, passed the House by a narrow vote. Two days later the Senate scheduled a vote on Patman’s legislation.
Tensions were high on the day of that vote. As the Smithsonian recounts the final day of debate, “more than 8,000 veterans gathered in front of the Capitol. Another 10,000 were stranded behind the Anacostia drawbridge, which police had raised, anticipating trouble.” The vote did not happen until late in the evening. At 9:30, Senate staffers sent a message to Waters asking to speak with him inside the Capitol.
They told him the bill had failed.
Though much of the Bonus Army left Washington after this demoralizing vote, over 20,000 persisted. But tensions continued to grow. Waters struggled to find enough food to feed his army. Splinter groups, many of them angered by Waters’ increasingly dictatorial rule, began to form among the veterans (some contemporary accounts likened Waters’ control over his men to fascism). One such group began marching in circles around the Capitol, briefly leading Vice President Charles Curtis to summon active duty marines to confront them.
The turning point came on July 28, when police tried to evict a group of veterans who’d taken up residence in condemned government buildings. In the ensuing melee, two veterans were mortally wounded, and three cops suffered injuries.
And then the tanks arrived.
Only a few hours after the skirmish with police, Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur ordered his men to evict the veterans. By late afternoon, hundreds of cavalrymen, soldiers with fixed bayonets, and five tanks confronted the Bonus Army. The infantrymen donned gas masks and fired tear-gas at the protesters. That evening, they crossed the bridge to Camp Marks and set the encampment ablaze.
Hoover’s end (and Trump’s)
The spectacle of American soldiers attacking homeless veterans proved catastrophic for Hoover. The president, already struggling amidst the worst economy in American history, was heckled on the campaign trial for his administration’s cold-blooded response to the Bonus Army. After the election, Major George Patton, the future World War II general who severed as second-in-command of the cavalry that helped remove the Bonus Army, commented that, by moving “against a crowd rather than against a mob,” the military response to the Bonus Army “insured the election of a Democrat.”
Ironically, the new President Franklin Roosevelt did not support immediate payment of the World War I bonuses — though Congress eventually overrode Roosevelt’s veto of this legislation in 1936. Yet the Bonus Army did not leave Washington empty handed either. Shortly before their eviction, Hoover did sign legislation increasing the amount of funds that veterans could borrow against their 1945 bonuses.
When Roosevelt took office, a second Bonus Army briefly marched on Washington, but Roosevelt calmed its members by offering them jobs in the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps. FDR knew better than to antagonize veterans who so utterly shamed his predecessor.
The question for the victims of Trump’s shutdown is whether our current president can be pressured by such tactics. As Jill Filipovic writes, “it’s tough to shame someone who has no shame.”
Government shutdowns ordinarily follow a familiar rhythm. When the shutdown begins, both parties attempt to lay blame on the other. Before long, however, polls typically break against the party that instigated the shutdown. That party then looks for a face-saving way to end the shutdown without being utterly humiliated in the process.
But Trump does not respond to stimuli in the same way that fully functional humans do.
Trump literally bragged on national television that he was “proud” to shut down the government. His polls are in the toilet. A recent AP-NORC poll found that 60 percent of the country says Trump bears a “a great deal of responsibility for the shutdown,” while less than a third say the same about Democrats in Congress.
And yet, Trump refuses to negotiate. He stormed out of a meeting with Democratic leaders. His supposed “compromise” offer to Democrats hoping to reopen the government contains a poison pill that would gut much of the law protecting asylum seekers.
The one thing that is clear, however, is that ordinary tactics are not working. Trump is impervious to his own unpopularity. And his allies in Congress appear incapable of acting independently of the accidental president.
The Bonus Army, and the eventual eviction of these protesters, is a dark chapter in American history. If furloughed federal workers embrace similar tactics, they risk a dangerous confrontation with leaders that clearly do not have their interests at heart.
Nevertheless, in the long run, the Bonus Army worked. The marchers got their bonuses. Many of them got jobs. And Hoover ceased to be president.