Back From Battle, a Generation Kept Fighting

ON VETERANS DAY: Marine Darrell "Papa Bear" Pinson talks to fellow members of the U.S. Military Veterans Motorcycle Club at Arlington National Cemetery. Story, C1. (By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post)

By freight car and jalopy, on foot and on bikes, an army of destitute vets (more than 20,000 at its peak) descended on Washington in June and July 1932, lobbying for payment of the bonuses. With families in tow, they built a sprawling, tumbledown community of tents and hovels on acres of Anacostia mudflats and lived there for weeks.

To newsreel audiences across America, the vets were Everyman heroes in a time of economic catastrophe. To President Herbert Hoover and the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the spectacle looked like a brewing civil insurrection.

MacArthur's troops violently routed the Bonus Army, on Hoover's orders. Calvary soldiers wielding sabers rode along Constitution and Pennsylvania avenues ahead of infantrymen with fixed bayonets and columns of light tanks. Tear gas filled the air as the vets retreated to Anacostia. MacArthur's troops followed, drove out the men and their families and torched the shantytown.

It was a public relations debacle. In the melee, two veterans had been fatally shot by D.C. police, and hundreds had been hurt. Newsreel audiences, outraged, "were standing up in the theaters, booing the United States Army," Dickson said.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave them no relief, repeatedly vetoing bonus-payment measures. Then Congress overrode his veto in 1936.

Buckles, a merchant seaman at the time, got $800 in 1938, the equivalent of about $11,000 today. He gave it to his father, a struggling farmer.

Historian Jennifer D. Keene, author of "Doughboys, the Great War and the Remaking of America," said politicians, including Roosevelt, learned an important lesson from the Bonus Army and the public's sympathy for it. With 16 million Americans in uniform in World War II, the federal government feared massive civil unrest if the new wave of returning veterans got the same shabby treatment their fathers had received.

On June 22, 1944, months before World War II ended, Roosevelt signed the GI Bill. With its college tuition benefit and home loan guarantees, the bill is widely viewed as the most far-reaching social welfare program in U.S. history.

"I argue that without the World War I generation, we wouldn't have what we got, that they're responsible for the GI Bill," Keene said. "It's their legacy."

But the bill wasn't for the vets of 1917-18. They didn't share in the benefits.

They just grew old.

About 800,000 of them formed a new organization, Veterans of World War I of the USA, in the mid-1950s. "We had national conventions; there were thousands of us there," said Muriel Sue Kerr, who started work as a secretary at the group's Alexandria headquarters in 1974, one of 21 paid staff members. "Oh, we'd go to Hot Springs, Arkansas; Oklahoma City; Daytona Beach, Florida. Such wonderful, wonderful times."

There were a quarter-million members in 1974. Kerr, now in her 60s, said: "I was the luckiest girl in the world. I had 750,000 grandfathers." Then her grandfathers started dying, gone by the dozens each year, then the hundreds, then the thousands.

She became executive director in the early 1980s, and some of the calls she got from the vets made her cry: "You know, the caretaker wouldn't cut the crust off their bread. Or their driver's license had been taken away. Or someone had stolen something."

The conventions stopped. The office closed in 1990, and the staff disbanded. But Kerr is still the executive director. "Until the last of them is gone," she said.

The national commander: Frank Woodruff Buckles. His only duty is to wake up each morning.