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C h a p t e r 4 World War I Redux The Doughboys Are in Washington It was 1932, and we had been in New York just over a year when the veterans of World War I came in great numbers to Washington, D.C., for a big event the newspapers were calling the Bonus March, and whose purpose was to petition for promised bonuses. Though it was true that the bonuses had not been promised for delivery until 1945, these men, out of work like everyone else, desperate like everyone else, had concluded that those bonuses would never be more needed than they were now, so now was when they wanted them. As my father explained to ten-year-old me, the situation was like my weekly nickel allowance, which was awarded to me on Saturdays: “Let’s say you’re dying of thirst on a Wednesday,” he explained, “and you could be saved by a dope [what in Union City we called a CocaCola when we weren’t calling it a “Co-cola”], wouldn’t I be mean not to advance your allowance?” And when I agreed that he would be very mean, he said, “So what these men need is an advance on their bonus. They need a lifesaver.” My father was not a veteran, having been given a deferment like all other fathers with children under twelve, but he was as ardent a patriot as could be found. And on Hoover and his response to the Bonus Marchers— Hoover’s response was, largely, to ignore them—my father was unusually outdone and outspoken, and he would say, “The man’s the boss, for crying out loud. What boss don’t look out for his customers?” To this ardent patriot, the reception in Washington was a slap in the face to America’s noblest. What the veterans were demanding seemed to 42 World War I Redux my father fair enough, and he would ask, “Since when is petitioning for a bill to advance their bonuses such a terrible thing?” My mother too felt that the “doughboys,” or as she called them in her way, the “dogboys,” were being treated badly, and she offered “Oy, that terrible man,” meaning Herbert Hoover. It had none of my father’s zing, but we had long accepted that minimal comments, softly articulated, were the best she could do. It really didn’t matter, because her sentiments, however stated, always echoed my father’s, except, notably, the times when her two imperatives came charging out. Newsreels now led off with the story of the veterans and their takeover of Washington and how more than seventeen thousand veterans of the Great War had marched into the capital. Newspapers were full of the story as well, and we were shown scenes of veterans setting up housing as near to the Capitol building as possible—in the Mall, in the parks, and along the river. At the movies, as Ruth and I sat looking at their shelters—tents, abandoned automobiles, flimsy wood constructions laid over with thatch and scrap tin rescued from nearby junk piles—I would think that Peaches, the horse owned by my friend Doris, lived better than these veterans did. Some of the veterans brought along their wives and children, and while Congress carried on its deliberations, the wives tried to create a semblance of a home by hanging up rags of some sort over holes in the “walls” and putting up men’s pants to act as a front door. And they grew things. Newsreels showed women planting seeds right there in the Mall sward, the children helping in a sort of listless way, as if they would rather be anywhere than in Washington, D.C. We wondered if the veterans would be there long enough for the plants to mature, and we definitely hoped they wouldn’t. We wanted their bonuses to be awarded, and soon. Because of the strong focus of the newsreels and newspapers, we felt we were watching the very lives of the Bonus Marchers. We saw the men standing around in clusters as they waited, and we saw them impatiently moving around the city, talking among themselves, no doubt reinforcing each other in the hope that the march—in effect, an occupation of Washington , D.C.—would pay off. And as they waited, we waited with them. Hip, hip, hooray! The House passed it—passed the bill! Newspapers gave the news their biggest, blackest headlines...

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