'The Bonus Army' Lesson: What Supporting Troops Really Means

[RC]

The Bonus Army' Lesson: What Supporting Troops Really Means
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The Bonus Army tells the story of how the GI Bill came to be. In the summer of 1932, 45,000 World War I vets marched on Washington demanding bonus pay promised them before the war. But a bill that would have allayed their grievance was defeated in the Senate after it passed the House.

Fearing the racial implications of an integrated “bonus army” erroneously believed to be controlled by communists, President Herbert Hoover, Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur and others decided that the protesting soldiers had to be kicked out of Washington by force. And they were, with tanks, tear gas and bayonet-tipped rifles.

FDR seized the moment and used the issue to help propel him to the White House. In the book’s prologue, the authors discuss how they set out to answer a question raised in a 1994 thesis paper. “‘Why,’ (it was) asked, ‘had historians seen the Bonus March as an insignificant event?’”

Following that lead, “we tracked that change and discovered an odyssey that began in Portland in 1932, wove through the Great Depression and into World War II, and re-turned finally to Washington, where in June 1944 (FDR) signed into law the GI Bill.”

Because of the GI Bill the doors of colleges and universities were blown open for the middle and lower classes, the book notes, The number of college grads more than doubled between 1940 and 1950.

By the cutoff date of July 25, 1956, 2,232,000 vets had enrolled in college using the GI Bill. “The education produced 450,000 engineers, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 22,000 dentists, and more than a million other college trained men and women.”

Nearly 8 million vets benefited from the GI Bill with 11 million homes being built in the 1950s, financed by GI Bill loans. Amazing how neocons completely ignore such things when chastising “liberals” about free-market panaceas and how government programs only make things worse.

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