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.