Gallery of Photos
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Read the Bonus certificate
(click to enlarge)
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During
World War I, Major George S. Patton, Jr. commanded the First U.S. Tank
Brigade in France. He stands before one of his French-built tanks, predecessor
to those he would lead in World War II
(U.S. Army Military History Institute)
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Among the Bonus Army’s early arrivals in Washington were veterans from Chattanooga, Tennessee, who drive past the White House on May 18. The main contingent, formed in Portland, Oregon, was still en route.
(Underwood & Underwood/
Library of Congress)
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State-owned trucks bearing Bonus Army members crawl through Montgomery, Ohio, on May 29. At the state line, West Virginia trucks will pick up the vets and deposit them in Maryland, last stop before Washington.
(Authors’ Collection)
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On June 6, bonus marchers from New Jersey start to build what they call Camp Camden, across the Anacostia River from downtown Washington. The site later was named Camp Marks in honor of a friendly police officer.
(Authors’ Collection)
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Defiant veterans celebrate their takeover of a roundhouse in Cleveland, where railroad officials and police tried to keep them from riding boxcars eastward. The confrontation helps alert newspapers to the bonus story.
(Brown Brothers)
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J. Edgar Hoover, as he appeared at the time of the Bonus Army, was director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation– forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which he would head for 48 years.
(Underwood & Underwood/
Library of Congress)
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Washington Police Chief Pelham D. Glassford, on his blue motorcycle, routinely inspected the B.E.F. camp in Anacostia. Glassford, a general during the war, designed the camp with army-style company streets.
(Underwood & Underwood/
Library of Congress)
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Veterans’ sheds, tents, and shanties sprawl across the Anacostia flats. Jutting on the horizon to the left are the three masts of the U.S.S. Constitution, in the Navy Yard during a visit honoring George Washington’s bicentennial.
(National Archives)
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Roy Wilkins, a writer for Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, shown in 1932. He visited the bonus marchers, and found no Jim Crow in the Anacostia camp—despite, he wrote, many U.S. Army officials claiming that “whites and blacks could not function together…”
(NAACP Collection/
Library of Congress.)
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More than 6,000 bonus marchers take over Capitol Hill on June 17, awaiting the Senate vote on the bonus bill, which the House has passed. To the tune of “The Yanks Are Coming,” veterans sang, “The Yanks are starving, the Yanks are starving…”
(Underwood & Underwood/
Library of Congress)
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Bonus Army leader Walter W. Waters, in his officer-style uniform, leads 5,000 veterans who gathered at the Capitol on July 2 to protest the decision to adjourn Congress without taking action on the bonus bill.
(General Douglas MacArthur Foundation)
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Violence suddenly flares during an attempt to evict vets from abandoned government-owned buildings on the morning of July 28. The clash began when men carrying an American flag tried to break through police lines.
(General Douglas MacArthur Foundation)
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Douglas MacArthur (center, with handkerchief) and Dwight David Eisenhower (right, smoking) on July 28. The two leaders became increasingly distant over time. Writing about July 28 in his memoirs, MacArthur said, “I… brought with me two officers who later wrote their names on world history,” referring to Eisenhower and Patton.
(General Douglas MacArthur Foundation)
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Soldiers in gas masks drive veterans away from their billet near Pennsylvania Avenue. Bonus marchers had been allowed to live in abandoned buildings on a site that would become the Federal Triangle.
(General Douglas MacArthur Foundation)
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Smoke veils the Capitol dome as fire engulfs veterans’ shanties, set
afire by soldiers. Later that night, General MacArthur, defying presidential
orders, would send soldiers into Camp Marks, which would also go up in flames.
(General Douglas MacArthur Foundation)
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Smoke rises from the ruins of the Bonus Army’s Anacostia camp on the morning after troops—using tear gas, bayonets, and torches—drove out the veterans and their families. “And this,” said a veteran’s wife, “because they cry for food… Because they beg for work…”
(General Douglas MacArthur Foundation)
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A
young Ernest Hemingway recovering from his wounds of July 8, 1918 in
the Ospedale Croce Rossa Americana in Milano. This experience will
not only help shape him as a writer but give him great empathy with
war veterans.
(Hemingway Collection/
J. F. Kennedy Library)
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First view of the relief train blown off the tracks by the Labor Day hurricane, September 2, 1935, photographed on Wednesday morning.
(American Red Cross)
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The
recovery of corpses at Islamorada. This image, hitherto unpublished,
was taken by Ernest Hemingway, and was discovered with a small collection
of hurricane snapshots in the Hemingway holdings at the John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library in Boston.
(Hemingway Collection/
J. F. Kennedy Library)
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Veteran Alfred W. Hyadd of Allston, Massachusetts
received his bonus bonds at the Chelsea Naval Hospital on June 15, 1936,
eighteen years after the end of the war.
(Boston Traveler Collection/
Boston Public Library)
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For further information about
THE BONUS ARMY
or for review copies or interview arrangements
contact Peter Miller at Walker & Company
212-727-8300, ext. 3011.
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