Knowledge is Power

Charles Sheehan-Miles served in the U.S. Army in the 1991 Gulf War and is a founding member and executive director of Veterans for Common Sense. Here he blogs about a previously out of print book which recounts a remarkable struggle by WWI veterans to get what they were owned by our government. Sound familiar? Knowledge of our history is critical to our survival and advancement! Read it! http://www.sheehanmiles.com
Bonus Army
The is the story of the 1932 march on Washington by tens of thousands of World War I veterans who were eventually driven out of the Capitol by the U.S. Army at the order of President Hoover.
Walter W. Waters was an Army sergeant who had served in Europe during the first World War. Like millions of other Americans during the great depression, he struggled to find a livelihood for his family, with little luck.
In 1932, he led 300 veterans in a cross-country odyssey to petition Congress for release of the promised bonus for World War I veterans. Eventually, more ten thousand veterans gathered in DC.
They were driven out. From Waters’ account of the tragedy:
“The troops stopped at the buildings in the Pennsylvania Avenue area and took them one at a time. Each one housed forty to a hundred men. The men were chased out with drawn bayonets and gas bombs. The men of the B.E.F. had come to Washington, hoping to get something from the Government. They were getting it—the most modern type of tear gas.”
While a number of accounts of the Bonus March exist, this is one of the only first-hand accounts, written by one of the leaders of the movement.
http://www.bonusmarch.info/
FBI FOIA Documents The FBI has released under the Freedom of Information Act a number of documents related to its investigation into the Bonus marchers and whether or not the march was dominated by communists. Downloads required Acrobat Reader.
Wikipedia - Bonus Army
National Public Radio: Soldier Against Soldier, The Story of the Bonus Army
Eyewitness to History
Library of Congress - The Bonus Army March
Amazon.Com’s Book Description:
In the summer of 1932, General Douglas MacArthur led regular United States Army troops into the streets of Washington, D.C. to evict more than ten thousand veterans of the Great War from the streets of Washington. This is the story of those veterans, told by one of their number.