E. B. White on the Bonus Army

Both Frank Rich, in New York magazine, and Brent Cox, at the Awl, this week use the Bonus Army—an encampment, in 1932, of thousands of veterans of the First World War and their supporters in Washington—as a way of offering historical perspective on the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Bonus Army was big news in those waning days of the Hoover Administration and, in the summer of 1932, E. B. White devoted three Comment columns to the protest and the economic woes it highlighted. While deeply sympathetic to the plight of the jobless in the Great Depression (see this Comment from earlier in the year), White was largely dismissive of the Bonus Army.

The protests had begun with a simple demand: the early payment of a “bonus” due to veterans in 1945, to help them through the Depression. But that message was mixed with more general calls for jobs and even revolution. In the first of his columns, published in the issue of June 25, 1932, White, like many of Occupy Wall Street’s critics, took the protesters to task for their lack of focus:

In a democracy, there are a thousand, ten thousand groups…. Each has its own particular sorrow and its grievance; there exists no common tyranny against which to rebel, not even the tyranny of hard times. If you mixed bonus marchers with Kentucky miners, they would probably spend the rest of their lives arguing about what to rebel against.

White concluded, “People are in a sad, but not a rebellious mood,” and a week later, he identified the root of that sadness as widespread unemployment:

Being out of a job perforates the walls of the mind, and thoughts seep off into strange channels. To say that the country is as rich as it ever was is a joke: something is gone that used to be here—the spirit of millions of men is gone, and a man’s spirit is just as real a natural resource as gold or wheat or lumber.

White proposed the creation of a Peace Army, in which men could enlist “not to destroy the enemy, but to recapture their own soul.” Even if there was not enough work for the members of this army, he wrote, “Men want direction now, direction from above, to which they can give their loyalty and their strength in return for three meals a day and a place to bunk.”

At the end of July, the Bonus Army was forcefully removed from its encampment by troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. Tanks and tear gas were used; two of the protesters were killed in the confrontation. In August, White again used the Bonus Army protests to discuss what he saw as larger problems in the country. Like some commentators on the Occupy Wall Street Protests, he lamented that the tyranny of hard times had turned “practically everybody … into an economist.” Prefiguring many of the early criticisms of the present protest, White argued that the universal obsession with economics was distracting the nation from more pragmatic pursuits: “We have businessmen, commuters, the salt of the earth, riding into town in the morning, and what are they thinking about—their own business? Not at all; they are reading Walter Lippmann.”

The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—are available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.

Origin
Source: New Yorker