The Bonus Army: An American Epic (review)

Drawing on an impressive range of primary and secondary sources, Bonus Army offers a riveting account of the struggle by World War I veterans to secure adjusted compensation—a bonus—from the federal government. Paul Dickson and Thomas Allen are not the first historians to write about the long struggle that began shortly after Armistice Day and continued until the bonus was finally paid in 1936, but they have offered a richly textured narrative that pays particular attention to experiences of the rank and file who participated in the Bonus Expeditionary Force.

Dickson and Hart are at their best in describing how the corrosive impact of the Great Depression resulted in thousands of desperate veterans descending on the nation's capital in the summer of 1932 demanding an early payment of their bonuses. Living in abandoned government buildings and open fields in Anacostia Park in Washington, these proud veterans tried to maintain their dignity under trying circumstances. Despite the widely held belief of the Military Intelligence Division, General Douglas MacArthur, and the Hoover administration, more wives and children could be found among the bonus marchers than communists. For scholars, one of the strengths of Bonus Army is the focus on the question of race. Although the nation's capital remained a segregated southern city, the bonus encampments were integrated; moreover, black and white veterans marched together when they paraded on Pennsylvania Avenue or gathered on the Capitol grounds.

Dickson and Allen are empathetic to the plight and grievances of the World War I veterans who sought a bonus. They skewer the Hoover administration for its insensitivity toward these veterans and lambast MacArthur for driving them out of Washington, D.C., at the point of a bayonet. They are also critical of the Roosevelt administration's effort to diffuse later bonus marches by sending destitute veterans to CCC camps in Florida where many would be killed tragically by a hurricane in 1935.

Dickson and Allen write with sincere passion, but Bonus Army would have been a stronger book if the authors grappled with the question at the heart of the debate over the adjusted compensation: What does the nation owe to returning veterans? Do veterans have a special claim on the federal government? This reviewer wishes the authors had given the opponents of the bonus more of their due, especially given the diverse ideological opposition to it. Four presidents—Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt—were against it. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover opposed it because they envisioned a limited role for the federal government and feared the immense cost to the public treasury. Roosevelt had fewer reservations about an expanded federal role and believed the national government should aid Americans buffeted by the Great Depression. He did not, however, believe healthy veterans, by virtue of their wartime service, should receive special benefits.

Dickson and Allen see the passage of the G.I. Bill of Rights in 1944 as a legacy of the Bonus March. Surprisingly, their account of the passage of this groundbreaking legislation does not draw upon the scholarship of either Davis R. B. Ross or Keith Olson, but relies on the superficial work of Milton Greenberg. In many ways, the Second World War veterans did not have to fight the same battles as their World War I counterparts. But the lingering debate over how to treat returning veterans continued after both Korea and Vietnam. In his forthcoming dissertation focusing on the G.I. Bill of Rights and the Vietnam Veteran, Mark Boulton of the University of Tennessee argues that the 1944 G.I. Bill of Rights did not permanently settle the debate central to the Bonus March. As presidents, both Dwight Eisenhower (an aide to MacArthur during the Bonus March) and later Lyndon B. Johnson sought to place strict limits on veterans' benefits. Like his Republican counterparts of the interwar years, Eisenhower believed in a more limited...