There had to be federal intervention. Only the federal government could marshal the resources, could borrow and spend, could organize on a national level. Many Conservatives in positions of authority at the state and local level knew this. They could see the suffering, and they could extrapolate from it the political risks to themselves and their party. They could also see the appeal of an alternate ideology (like fascism) if the present one proved unable to help.
Federal intervention, however, could only happen with a willing Congress and a willing President. Two years into Hoover’s Presidency, it was clear that both were absent. This framed, in the spring of 1932, one of the most interesting and impactful moments for the entire decade—the Bonus March. ‘ The Bonus March was all about a little piece of paper called an “Adjustment Compensation Certificate” that had been authorized and issued by Congress (over Coolidge’s veto) in 1924. Recognizing the difference in rates of pay for the boys who had gone “Over There” with the American Expeditionary Force and those who had stayed home, Congress created a program whereby WW-I veterans would be given additional compensation for a portion of the differential. For each day they were overseas, they earned an additional $1.25, and, for service in the United States, $1.00. The hitch to “The Bonus” was that it wasn’t payable until 1945.
Still, it was an asset, and for many vets who were destitute, a potential lifeline. A group of Portland-area servicemen, led by a laid-off cannery worker by the name of Walter W. Waters, decided that their Bonus Certificates were the only way out. They needed the maturity date accelerated. This was not entirely a new idea. In December 1931, a Texas Congressman, Wright Patman, who had also served in the AEF, introduced a bill to do just that, but Patman’s bill was bottled up in the Ways and Means Committee, essentially putting it into a state of suspended animation.
Of course, the immediate fate of the bill didn’t eliminate the issue, and, in mid-May, roughly 300 of Waters’ vets decided to head across the county to Washington to make their case. They marched, perhaps not as crisply as they had done more than a decade before, but they marched, and, when they hit East St. Louis, Illinois, they tried to commandeer a freight train on the old B&O line. They were met by Illinois National Guardsmen and (not particularly gently) loaded onto trucks aimed out of state, where they reconnected with train lines headed in the general direction of DC. From there, it was like a relay. Sometimes they were driven by local veterans’ groups that wanted to lend a hand, sometimes more brusquely, by state governments that didn’t want to deal with them and so transported them as quickly as possible.