The U.S. Army Burned Its Own Veterans Out of Washington, D.C.

They called it the "Tombstone Bonus," because, they said, many of them would be dead by the time the government actually paid it. The veterans weren't wrong to be skeptical.

In 1932, tens of thousands of impoverished World War I veterans traveled to Washington, D.C., many out of work since the Depression began three years earlier. Congress had promised them a service bonus in 1924, payable in 1945. They wanted it now. The movement was extraordinary in at least one respect: unlike the U.S. military itself, it was racially integrated. Black and white marchers arrived together beginning in May.

The Senate rejected early payment. Most veterans went home. Several thousand, with nowhere else to go, stayed.

On July 28, President Hoover ordered the U.S. Army to clear them out. General Douglas MacArthur led the operation, with Majors Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton among his officers. Troops used tear gas on the encampments. Then, against direct orders from the president, MacArthur pushed his forces across the bridge into the main Anacostia Flats camp. The fires they set burned through the night.

MacArthur claimed the Bonus Army was riddled with Communist agitators. Later historical assessments found that claim significantly overstated. The camp, meanwhile, was ash.

Four years later, the veterans were paid their bonus when Congress overrode Roosevelt's veto. In 1944 came the G.I. Bill, though its benefits were administered at the state level, and Black veterans were routinely denied access to what their white counterparts received.

The men who burned the camp became the heroes of the next war. The men who lived in it are a footnote.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine, February 2003

Hot Take: The officers who tear-gassed veterans in 1932 had monuments by 1945, which says less about those men than about how institutions decide which chapter of a story becomes the official one. The Bonus Army got a name that sounds like a promotion instead.