By Dr. Patrick Chura, Ph.D,
Professor, English Department – University of Akron-OHIO
Eighty-eight years ago this week, during a bleak period of the Depression, the United States made war on itself in a hideous convergence of authoritarianism and election-year politics.
Approximately 20,000 veterans of World War I, jobless and desperate, journeyed to Washington in July 1932 to demand early payment of a promised bonus for their military service. They called themselves the Bonus Marchers or “Bonus Army;” set up camps on public property and held demonstrations and parades dressed in remnants of the uniforms they’d worn in Europe.
President Hoover’s re-election was in doubt. Worried by the popularity of a Democrat named Roosevelt, he wanted to look strong and ordered the veterans evicted. On July 28, US infantry and cavalry, supported by tanks and commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, mustered near the White House and marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. The Bonusers thought they were marching in their honor until the men on horseback drew their sabers. Behind the cavalry, the infantry fixed bayonets, put on gas masks and lobbed tear gas grenades. They drove the veterans across the Anacostia River into a muddy field where their wives and children, many of them sick and hungry, were living in a tent city.
That night, MacArthur’s forces set fire to the Bonus encampment. Families fled as a hellish blaze lit up the sky. Two veterans were killed and at least sixty injured. In November the atrocity rebounded on Hoover, sealing his landslide loss to FDR in a realigning election that gave White House to Democrats for two decades.
Among the many historical accounts of the Bonus incident, almost none are written from the perspective of the victims. An exception is leftist writer Mike Gold’s “The Honorable Pete,” a two-act play that humanizes the besieged as they witness the appalling crackdown.
“I can’t believe it—tactics—war on veterans,” says the play’s title character, a Pennsylvania miner’s son, “You can’t shoot down your veterans—no country does. Veterans are the country itself,” to which the African American vet Orlando responds, “I never made the mistake of crediting our lynchers with having a heart.”
At this cultural moment, Orlando is the most important character in Gold’s play. A telling exchange occurs after a peaceful protester is bayoneted. Pete, an Italian-American, feels robbed of his country:
She’s making war on us. I still can’t believe it. Can a nation make war on its people? I loved her like a mother. Look at what she’s doing to us.
It falls to Orlando to voice a truth rarely acknowledged in the 1930s:
She’s treated her Negro children like this for a long time–now you know, Pete.
Last week, President Trump sent federal forces in camouflage to Portland to crush Black Lives Matter protests. A 53 year-old Navy veteran stepped forward to ask the military to remember their oaths; he was pepper sprayed and beaten. At the same protest, a woman who’d served in the Air Force said that “never in a million years” would she have believed the country could be so warped as to attack its veterans. Again Portlanders are now forming walls of moms, veterans, dads and nurses to shield activists for racial justice.
The question many are asking now—”Are we really declaring war on each other?”—was asked 88 years ago. But while similarities between the two election years are worth exploring, so are differences. Summer 1932 saw an outrageous attack—an assault, according to Gold’s character Pete, on “the country itself.” It helped bring about the rejection of a president and the redemption of the country. This year we’re reckoning with something else—a centuries-long assault on Black Americans. Will November bring an analogous response?
The fact that there is a need to protect “Black Lives Matter” demonstrators is a disturbing reminder of how closely first amendment freedoms to have been tied to white privilege. The fact that the bodies of vets and moms aren’t stopping Trump (he is planning to send armed agents to other cities) is an equally bad omen, confirming that the president is doubling down on a strategy that worked once. (Not all those who voted Trump in 2016 were racists, but they were OK with having one as President.)
If Trump’s crackdown backfires and Biden wins in a landslide, the victory will hinge on the country’s level of disgust at the current authoritarian dynamic. But that will in turn depend on, and require, a long overdue recognition of black America as “the country itself.”
