Bonus Army

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Hello and welcome.

to Citation Needed, a podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts.

Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Heath, and I'll be leading this military operation.

My call sign is call sign, obviously.

And I'm joined by the usual squadron.

First up, we have Tom, call sign, gravy seal, and

call sign Marine Corinary.

Gravy Seal, that's a call sign I wasn't just given, Heath, but I earned.

I guess somber five.

And we also have Eli, call sign fly BS, and it's Cecil something battalion.

Amazing.

That's amazing.

Could it be untrue?

Be untrue?

Keith.

I'm going to boop your nose here.

We separately wrote the exact same joke on the exact same episode.

100% cheers to you, my friend.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Cheers to you, Cecil.

All right, Noah.

What person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event are we going to be talking about today?

Today, we're talking about the bonus army.

All right.

And why did you pick that topic?

Because we record these episodes in advance, Heath, and by the time this airs, Trump will have been president for like a week and a half.

By then, I just, I feel like that time the president ordered the army to clear out peaceful protesters with chemical weapons and tanks has a really solid shot of being being topical at that point.

You do run the risk of the mutants who make up our next generation of listeners not knowing what a president was.

So it's tough, right?

Jesus.

All right.

So what was the bonus army?

It was a group of protesters with a legitimate grievance against the government forced to wallow in squalid conditions for weeks and weeks before being forcibly ousted at gunpoint.

Okay.

Kind of like Occupy Wall Street, but like way better organized.

Yeah, a lot like that.

Yeah, yeah.

So now, in defense of the government, nobody was killed in this action.

Or I'm sorry, only one person was killed.

It was a 12-week-old baby, but it was already pretty fucked up.

It was all fucked up already, though.

That being said, anytime the president directly orders cavalry and tanks to march against American citizens and his chief of goddamn staff personally commands them and they've committed no crimes, it's definitely worth a few pages in the history books.

I believe we actually now call that a day of love, Noah.

That's what it says in the pardons.

Those people are all pardoned now.

That's so good.

In the interest of context and in the interest of making the word count, we're going to start with the bonuses themselves.

Since the very beginning, war bonuses were a thing in the U.S.

military.

They weren't going to be a thing, but then George Washington had a major conversion on the issue after a mass desertion at Valley Forge.

But the idea was that in addition to whatever pay the soldiers were getting for being soldiers, at the end of the war, they deserved a bonus in line with how much more money they would have made had they not been in the army the whole time.

Basically, it's a way to defer the payment to soldiers until after the war, which is a great deal for the government because A, countries are at war, are cash-strapped.

B, you might not win the war and you don't have to pay them.

And C, soldiers die a lot.

So any deferment of payment works out great for the people paying the checks.

Okay.

Feels like you're setting up a bunch of murders there at the end.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, all right, Valas, war's almost done.

Just one last thing.

Just need you to head over to Eurasia in the kayaks.

You got to go.

Look, guys, I know we're having a good time with this barbaric remnant of history, but is it really any crueler than promising an 18-year-old with BTSD that you're going to pay for his college education?

No, no, no.

This was the better, right?

Yeah, these are the good old days.

So these bonuses led to unrest pretty much right away.

The Continental Army was demobilized in 1781, and by 1783, veterans were marching on the Capitol Capitol and surrounding the state house to demand back pay.

This was back when Congress, of course, met in Princeton, New Jersey.

And if you're thinking to yourself, but Noah, Congress started out meeting in Philadelphia and then went on to D.C.

There was never a point where they met in Jersey.

You're underestimating how scared they were of these veterans.

The motherfuckers fled from Philadelphia to Jersey for several weeks until the marchers were pushed out by the Continental Army's replacement, the U.S.

Army.

Jersey's actually where Ted Cruz ran to during January 6th.

Oh, this ran.

Pauli was too fast.

Yeah.

No, of course, the early government was cash poor, but they were also land-rich.

So at first, a lot of the bonus came in the form of a land grant.

A Continental Army private, for example, got a bonus of $80.

That's about $2,000 in today's money.

Not a lot.

But he also got 100 acres of arable land.

which is 100 acres of arable land in today's land.

That's fucking huge.

But it also served Congress's other purposes of going out and populating all this land they were trying to run the natives out of.

So in 1855, they actually increased the land grant to 160 acres.

And that applied to anybody who'd served in the military for at least 14 days or

any time whatsoever in battle.

Okay, just lots of sprained ankles right when the battle started.

Like every time.

They didn't let you out of the battle for that, though.

Everybody's rolling around like a soccer player got slid.

So, fun fact: this land grant is the basis of a ton of sovereign citizen bullshit, right?

So, from what I understand, and I don't, because it's insane.

The reason people are corporations and laws are secretly military laws is that this bonus army land grant secretly owes the entirety of the U.S.

to the military.

And so, that's

why that doesn't make any sense at all.

Nope, sure does.

You had, I thought you had a moment there.

See, so I was

not about you, man.

Nope.

Nope.

Nothing.

So, of course, eventually you start to run out of land.

By 1860, the government had given out some 73.5 million acres of land like this.

A full 40% of the arable land in Tennessee was accounted for by these land grants, which sounds way higher than it is given how little of Tennessee is arable, but still, it's a lot.

In 1860, the government decided because of that to switch to a cash-only bonus system.

And after the the Spanish-American War, they switched to a you'll get fuck all and you'll like it system.

They did.

Everyone just wiping their brow, quietly saying thanks that they're not getting cursed with land in Tennessee.

Yeah, thank goodness.

But, but World War I was a much more brutal conflict than the Spanish-American War.

Well, for the American half of that war anyway.

And it touched far more American lives.

Nobody alive at the time could suffer under the illusion that glory was sufficient payment for the sacrifice that those veterans had made.

So the government gave him 60 bucks.

Now, like, that's, yes, it's worth $1,000 in today's money, but still, that is an insultingly small sum of money to offer as a bonus for World War I.

So veterans demanded more.

The American Legion was created the year after that war ended largely to advocate for better treatment and compensation for veterans of that conflict.

And then it quickly turned into a bar that smells like mothballs and spilled miller-like.

Well, yeah, that was inevitable.

But it is a fitting reminder that there's actually no group of Americans that those in power won't fuck over and ignore till they organize, including literally the war heroes they pretend to laud.

Yeah.

But also let's not forget that a lot of those heroes were only heroes because they got drafted.

So

they heroically had no choice.

So like I think being press ganged into trench warfare deserves more than like a Starbucks gift card or whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, well, so did they, Tom.

And by 1924, there was enough political pressure to that end to convince Congress to pass a bill granting larger bonuses to World War I vets.

But then President Calvin Coolidge vetoed it.

Boo.

Yeah, right.

Saying, quote, patriotism bought and paid for is not patriotism, end quote.

But ultimately, Congress overrode his veto and passed the World War Adjusted Compensation Act, which would offer reasonable bonuses to the tune of 10 grand in today's money eventually.

So they'd give the Doughboys their bonuses, but in the form of a certificate of service that would mature 20 years later.

Wow.

Jesus.

You also get a carton of lucky strikes.

Enjoy those.

Keep getting those for sure.

Also, a non-fungible wooden nickel.

Here it is behind your ear.

Yeah.

Now, to be fair to the government, the adjusted value of the bonuses that we're talking about here is $65 billion,

right?

The government didn't just have an extra $65 billion laying around.

And back then, they actually had to have the money to some degree to pay for their shit.

So they actually did need time to collect these funds.

Plus...

The veterans were allowed to borrow up to 22% of the certificates value from the fund that it would eventually be paid through.

So there was an immediate payout and a significant one.

So most of the vets begrudgingly accepted that compromise and collected their certificates.

But then

along came the Great Depression.

Yeah, the U.S.

government is that buddy who was totally going to pay you back, but then, but then his mom's dog died and he just can't right now, okay?

He can't.

He loved that dog.

Okay, it was a monkey, Eli, and I'll pay you back after the factor check is.

Jeez.

All right.

So now, when the Depression hit, Congress did up the amount that you could borrow from the fund to 50%.

And there was a lot of support in Congress for just allowing them to redeem the certificates early.

But by then, Herbert Hoover was president, and he was physically incapable of making a good decision.

He argued that paying the bonuses off early would force the government to raise taxes, which would stifle the recovery that already wasn't happening.

Batter idea.

How about we give all the certificates to really rich people and then all that money will just eventually trickle down when you still pay?

Right.

Found another wooden nickel behind your ear.

Salary worker.

I love how there's a debate here about how much of their own money people should be allowed to borrow.

Yeah.

What the fuck is wrong with us?

What is that?

So along comes former Army Sergeant Walter W.

Waters, a man so influential that they would eventually name the World Wide Web after him.

So WWW

was a perpetually out-of-work veteran.

Fucking normal.

Yeah, trip dubs, hex triple U there.

He was an out-of-work veteran who kept running into other perpetually out-of-work veterans.

So he got together with like 400 other guys and they decided to head towards Washington, D.C., and demand full payment of their bonuses.

And crucially, they were starting from Portland, Oregon.

So their group had a lot of time to pick up other perpetually out-of-work veterans along the way.

By the time they reached D.C., their numbers were in the thousands.

And then word got around that thousands of marchers were descending on Washington to get their bonuses.

So those numbers swelled to the tens of thousands.

Yeah, and all of them were sporting.

I survived mustard gas, and all I got was this lousy war bond of t-shirts.

Yes,

exactly.

So tens of thousands of angry veterans march through D.C.

They yell at the Capitol building a bunch and nothing happens.

Congress apparently takes a waited out approach.

They've actually been doing that since Obama's first term.

Yeah, haven't they?

Right?

Now, but these veterans, they're all unemployed.

They're all homeless.

So they just fucking stayed.

They found a big open area on the Anacostia flats that the police agreed to kind of look the other way about, and they set up a Hooverville, a makeshift town built from whatever cardboard boxes and scrap tin they could find in nearby dumps.

As you can imagine, this impromptu shantytown was disgusting.

The area it was in was a swampy, muddy, flat area to begin with, and that's before you stick 30,000 people into it with no running water.

That being said, the town was, by all accounts, well-disciplined.

The veterans didn't have much else to do, so they did public works.

They built sanitation facilities, maintained roads, kept the mud clean, and they policed the area heavily.

Now, Waters, who just sort of fell into the leadership role by accident, he knew that their whole ploy relied on public support.

And nothing was going to rob them of public support quicker than stories of drunken debauchery at the camp.

Cool.

Yeah.

So pretty much nothing like Occupy Wall Street.

Really?

Yeah.

This is where it diverges.

Yeah, they also wouldn't let communists in.

And if you're wondering where these people's families were, well, they were there in the shanty down.

They even set up makeshift schools and the Salvation Army set up a library and a mail facility so that people living at the camp could receive mail.

And in order to live in the camp, you had to prove that you were a veteran that was honorably discharged from the U.S.

military.

And to their credit, they did a commendable job keeping the place peaceful.

Nice.

The D.C.

police, not so much.

Okay.

Well, this time, I think I want them to stop the steal and storm the Capitol.

Like, I really do.

We'll see how it goes after a quick break or something related.

Nice, Super Bud.

Sir?

Yes, private.

How are things down at the camp?

They are too good, sir.

Too good.

I see a bunch of vagabonds.

How can they be too good?

Well, sir, they've kept themselves in check.

You see, they've maintained their own roads, even built in sanitation.

Not much mucking about for us to jump in and condemn them for.

But

how exactly have they done that?

I don't know, sir.

They just

did it.

But

they they have no mayor, no town council, no alderman.

How have they made policy and applied it?

Again, sir, they just apparently they just

do things.

But if

people can just do things and take care of each other, that would make the government largely unnecessary, which it is not.

Definitely not, sir.

Not.

No.

Governments build roads and

schools.

That's right.

And

you can't

do those things without a government.

No, no, you can't.

We backed into anarchy again, didn't we?

We did, sir.

I'll find us a minority to kill.

Yes, thanks.

And do please hurry.

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Active registered voters will receive a vote-by-mail ballot that they can return at a drop-off location in person or by mail.

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And we're back.

When we left off, an extremely ethical protest was happening.

So, time for the cops to yell, stop resisting, and do some murders.

What's that?

Something like what I just said?

No, that's it.

That's it.

Spoilers.

Heath, I guess we can close now.

You want to do the quiz, too?

Yeah, okay.

So, to understand the story, you have to realize that almost everybody is on the side of the bonus army.

Everybody in the country agrees that World War I veterans got fucked.

Everybody agrees that everybody needs every penny they can possibly get at the height of the Depression.

So dangling these vouchers worth thousands of dollars in front of broke-ass, starving people who are half-tempted to burn them for warmth seemed particularly cruel.

The police are on their side.

The army's on their side.

The camp, in fact, was named Camp Marks after a friendly police captain who helped coordinate food deliveries for the residents.

And those food deliveries, the supplies, came in the form of donations from all over the country from people sympathetic to their cause.

Could you imagine if you protested our current government with a camp that even remotely sounded like Marx?

Holy Jesus.

Oh, see, so there's so much awesome stuff about communists trying to infiltrate this camp that I wanted to fit in and there wasn't room for.

I could almost do another essay on that.

It's really fascinating.

But okay, so everybody starts seizing the means of the soup that's coming in for free.

Not season, seize in.

So, but okay, at least one person, though, had no sympathy for the bonus army whatsoever, and that was the guy who was in charge of the country at the time.

So, in late July of 1932, two months after the bonus army has started their squad, Herbert Hoover pressed the D.C.

police to clear protesters out of abandoned buildings in the city.

Right?

So, like I said, you had to be a veteran to live in the shantytown, but a lot of people who showed up weren't veterans, didn't have certificates, and were just there because they wanted the government to give them some damn thing.

Those people had to go somewhere.

So they started just squatting in vacant buildings around town.

So once it became clear that they weren't going to just drift away on their own, Hoover ordered that the buildings be cleared by force.

Okay, it seems like we need a new rule.

Like if you own a building, a vacant building like that, it only works for like paintball or a lair at that point, and you don't set up paintball or a lair, people could just live there.

Now, so I'm sure it'll surprise nobody to learn that the efforts to clear the buildings turned violent.

During an altercation, a cop named George Chenault drew his pistol and fired on two protesters, both of whom would later die of their wounds.

Both men, William Hushka and Eric Carlson, were World War I veterans, and they were both interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

Chenault died eventually, too, but nobody gives a fuck where they buried him.

Oh, so I'm just supposed to pee on random graves and hope no illusions.

You have to

read the headstones.

But

at this point, with protesters killed, the clock was ticking before the whole thing exploded.

And clearly, it was a job too big for the D.C.

police.

So Hoover called out the literal fucking army.

And it is crazy how much top brass is involved in this thing.

So the military action is directly commanded by then Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur.

along with his junior aide at the time, Dwight D.

Eisenhower.

And he had a cavalry regiment that was commanded by George fucking Patton.

Hey, boss.

We're going to get ours, though, after this, though, right?

Our bonus.

Like, you pinky swore?

You

swore it.

Amazing.

This is just my 14 days, you see.

So

shortly after the police, my ankle.

My ankle.

So shortly after the police shooting, MacArthur's forces started to amass on the ellipse south of the White House, which is fucking nuts to visualize, right?

This force consisted of an infantry regiment, a cavalry regiment, and half a dozen light tanks.

We're talking about a thousand soldiers, half of them on horses, complemented by another 800 policemen forming up on the ellipse and then marching in formation down Pennsylvania Avenue.

And this march, it happens, by the way, right at 5 p.m.

just as thousands of civil service workers are getting off for the day.

So they just end up lining up watching this huge force march against a fucking shanty town on a Thursday evening.

Okay, if this is New York City, a bunch of people are like, ah, that's going to fuck up the commute.

God damn.

You're going to join the shanty army.

I'm out.

I'm out here anyway.

Yeah.

Actually, according to Waze, it just says time to home a standard Chicago.

It's bad.

So in perhaps the saddest note in this whole fucking story, when the bonus army folks first get sight of this army that's marching against them, they assume it's like a parade in their honor.

Oh, no.

Yeah, they were legitimately cheering for the troops that they assumed were coming out to like, you know, pay their respects or whatever, right up to the point that Patton ordered his cavalry to charge them.

After the cavalry charge, the infantry advance with fixed bayonets and tear gas, a chemical called Adam site, which the wiki describes as, quote, an arsenical vomiting agent, end quote, which sounds unpleasant.

Sykes.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

I know it's not funny what's happening here, but good.

Two guys fighting while they're both vomiting is objectively funny.

It's like physically funny.

It's true.

You got a point there.

Just a whole line of horses slide past on the vomit, their legs flailing like Scooby-Doo, making that bangabongo sound effect.

Right past.

See?

Funny.

No, that's okay.

No, it's good stuff.

Thank you, Cecil.

Cheers.

Now, this first attack was against the unofficial camps that had sprouted up in vacant warehouses and shit.

The bonus marchers that weren't arsonically vomiting from the tear gas or whatever, they mostly fell back across the river to Camp Mark, where at least they briefly formed up like they were going to fight this army.

It's okay.

They're killing the other guys would come to be the new American ethos for 100 plus years.

Yeah.

Yep, man.

Now we're making the episode all ironic.

Damn it.

Thank you, Eli.

No one's listening to it on ham radios anyways.

It's going to be like a

digital restoration project by the aliens.

Right.

So at this point, the specifics get a little harder to pin down because everybody involved would spend the rest of their lives blaming somebody else.

Once the buildings are cleared and the protesters had gone back to the sort of officially designated space for them, Hoover ordered the army to fall back.

That much is definitely true.

But either that order wasn't delivered to MacArthur, or MacArthur got it and chose to ignore it.

Given what we know about MacArthur, it's real easy to believe that he just ignored it.

So, despite specific orders not to enter Camp Mark, MacArthur sent his army across the bridge and mowed it the fuck down.

They're destroying everything, and one soldier turns to another.

Look at how clean this mud is.

It's amazing.

All right, so we can't say for certain who who started the fire.

Billy Joel started it.

No, he didn't.

That's the whole thing.

He's been trying to

listen to this.

He's been trying to.

I don't know any Billy Joel songs.

You were conceived to a Billy Joel song.

I was conceived of Glenn Miller, dude.

Get the fuck out of it.

See what happens when you not conceive to a Billy Joel song.

Yeah, right.

Joe, we're in the mood.

Well done.

Well done.

So, okay.

So we don't know who started the fire that burned the place down, but I feel like it doesn't matter when it comes to blame, right?

Because once a thousand armed men march against unarmed, starving, homeless veterans and their families who are like just taking part in a peaceful protest, I feel like they're responsible for whatever the fuck happens.

And what happened is that Camp Mark burned to ash, destroying all the meager belongings of the residents.

55 veterans were injured.

135 more were arrested.

One woman miscarried during the retreat.

And a 12-week-old baby died in the hospital during the tear gas attack.

Now, officially, that baby died of intestinal inflammation called enteritis, but as a hospital spokesman pointed out at the time, the tear gas didn't do him any fucking good.

I noticed none of us wrote into this space for hilarious traps.

Noah has left us here.

Don't everyone crowd in at once now?

Hey, hey, Tom wrote in.

Damn it.

I can always count on Tom.

Still better than this year's norovirus out there.

Take your Tom.

Another Billy Joel song.

No.

So the public reaction was severe but ephemeral.

People were furious that the U.S.

Army was called out against peaceful protesters, but the commanders in charge weren't punished.

In fact, as you may have noticed, they would go on to have some of the most distinguished careers in the history of the American military.

One of them would go on to be the fucking president.

Speaking of which, the only person in charge who did suffer any real consequences was Hoover.

His reaction to the bonus army march is largely believed to have contributed heavily to his landslide loss to Roosevelt in the election later that year.

To be fair, though, when the popular nickname for dire homeless encampments made of garbage is your last name, Ville, I feel like you were going to lose that election one way or the other.

Okay, if that's how you get a new deal, we need to get a new deal.

We need to round up some crisis actors and make a meeting.

In a few weeks, we won't need actors.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

Bright side.

Oh, by the time this episode comes out, that joke will be stale.

So it's worth adding here that the D.C.

police superintendent at the time, a guy named Pelham D.

Glassford, was so furious over the handling of the situation that he later resigned.

He was one of the main forces in organizing food and medical supplies for Camp Mark.

He was a vocal supporter of the bonus marchers.

He was a firm believer that the police could have cleared the space with no tanks being used at all.

So, after the military intervention, the bonus marchers mostly just drifted west.

There were so many of them riding the rails, in fact, and so much local interest in getting the fuck out of DC that rail lines just got in the habit of adding extra empty boxcars to each train just to accommodate more of them.

Yeah, and when they stopped the train, they would let those veterans board with group one.

Now, of course, their bonuses were still unpaid, they were still broke, and they still have all these worthless fucking certificates.

And there was a new president on his way.

So in 1933, veterans got together for a second march in May, two months after Roosevelt was sworn in.

But Roosevelt, who had come out against the bonus army's demand during the campaign, had a radically different strategy and how to deal with them.

First, he set up a special camp for them with 40 field kitchens that supplied three meals a day, gave them a warm place to stay.

Also, they had bus transportation back and forth to the Capitol and entertainment in the form of military bands.

Fan favorite Eleanor Roosevelt even visited the camp and helped hand out food and shit, leading one protester to quip, quote, Hoover sent the army, Roosevelt sent his wife, end quote.

One thing Roosevelt did not offer, though, was to redeem the certificates early.

But he did offer the veterans something that they wanted way the fuck more.

He offered them jobs.

He issued an executive order allowing for the enrollment of 25,000 veterans in the Civilian Conservation Corps, which exempted them from the normal requirements that CCC employees be unmarried and under the age of 25.

Wait, is like, is that demand-side economics?

That doesn't even make sense.

I don't understand what you're saying.

Right?

And then a couple of years later, Congress overrode Roosevelt's opposition and his veto, and they redeemed the bonus certificates early.

Though, to be fair,

they were 11 years in at that point on the 20-year clock.

So it wasn't that fucking early.

All right.

And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

Somebody should have randomly thanked these poor guys for their service at a grocery store.

That could have self-and-a-re-ready for the quiz.

I'm always ready for the quiz.

All right, Noah, this week's story is a great reminder of what?

A.

We have always treated our veterans like the dead bodies we hired them to be.

Jesus Christ.

B, the non-violence of the bonus army brought exactly zero of them back to life.

C, the myth of the successful peaceful protester is a direct direct propagandic reaction to the rise of the black militia after the death of Malcolm X.

Or D,

something Cecil doesn't have to edit out.

All right.

I feel like MLK and Gandhi would disagree with you about the success of peaceful protests if we hadn't killed them.

The peacefully protesting protests.

I don't want to laugh.

All right, Noah.

What would my nickname be if I were in the bonus army?

A general rebate.

B, major savings.

C company discount

or D, buy one, get a paramilitary.

Hey, it would have been Caesar something battalion.

You wrote that joke first.

The fact that you wrote it at the end and Heath wrote at the beginning, that doesn't change that.

Separate.

Is anybody going to curb the fact about what happened there time-wise?

All right, no, we have the right to peaceably assemble to ask the government to fix shit.

Why?

A,

because it doesn't work, so really what's the harm?

B, as long as protests are confined to free speech zones, nobody will bother you.

C, violent mob actions become a day of love if you're the one the violent mob loves.

Yeah.

Secret answer D, until they decide to take it away.

Always, every time.

Also, you stumped him, though, somehow.

Tom, you win.

Okay.

All right.

I don't know how this works.

Hey, Cecil, you should do an essay next.

All right.

Sounds great.

All right.

Well, first Cecil, Noah, Tom, and Eli, I'm Heath.

Thank you for hanging out with us.

We'll be back next week, and Cecil will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Dissonance, Awful Assembly, Dear Old Dads, God-Awful Movies, The Scathing Atheist, Skeptocrat, D ⁇ D Minus, and the brand new No

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