You can see the Ferris wheel on Santa Monica Pier off there in the distance, between the first and second fence posts. Santa Monica has a wonderful beach. The water is cold, but the beach is broader and has more possibilities than the ones here in Hawai’i. We wouldn’t trade locations, though.
We were thinking about the Bonus Army today.
In the summer of 1932, 90 years and a month ago, more than 20,000 World War I veterans, many with families, were gathered in camps in and around Washington D.C. demanding bonuses promised to them by Congress in 1924, but with a catch—the bonuses couldn’t be redeemed until 1945 or when the holder died, whichever came first.
This being the Great Depression, the veterans thought “immediately” would be a better time frame, and they, veterans with war heroes among them, gained and held the public’s sympathy. What they lacked was support in Herbert Hoover’s administration, including within the War Department (still the apt moniker).
Which is why General Douglas MacArthur, aided by Majors Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, with 200 cavalrymen, six battle tanks and some 5000 troops, with tear gas, supported by the D.C. police, overran the unarmed veterans, destroyed their camps and pushed them out of town.
Two dead, hundreds injured, fires everywhere, and that was that. MacArthur claimed to have destroyed an army of subversives.
Franklin Roosevelt was one beneficiary of the events, reflecting poorly as they did on Hoover. After his election Congress enacted new legislation paying out the bonuses immediately; FDR vetoed it twice but was overridden the second time, and the veterans got their bonuses in 1936.
So the veterans ultimately succeeded. MacArthur’s rout removed them from Hoover’s view, but made a big enough impression on voters, hence on Congress, to get them what they wanted four years later.
We were thinking about the implications of that for the evidently, and pointlessly, intractable issues of the day.
How, for example, do we influence Congress to pass the Green New Deal or something like it—rather than a bill requiring that fossil fuel companies get theirs before anybody else does—in time for it to matter?
The answer seems evident: we have to persuade Congress to override the fossil fuel lobby’s veto, and we have to do it in a way that eliminates the possibility of a fix like the original veterans’ bonus—you’ll get it, eventually, if you’re not already dead.
And how do we do that if not by physically impressing the urgency of the matter upon our elected representatives?
We had thought until recently that something along the lines of the Bonus Army would be adequate to the task: boots encamped on the ground, but in the larger numbers needed to make an impression today, and to prevent them from simply being swept away when someone loses patience.
We don’t think so any longer. Recent events have made a successful occupation of the city more difficult both physically and in terms of public support. The boots need backup boots.
Republicans, for instance, would be calling to turn the cavalry and tanks upon the crowd, à la MacArthur. We know they want to, because they’ve said they want to.
And the mass of Democrats, ever willing to quote John Lewis’s exhortation to “make good trouble,” are generally embarrassed by actual trouble, where laws and property are broken in service to a worthy cause. They might well side with Republicans if a Climate Army showed up in their view.
More and better Democrats, that’s the ticket.
The press would allege hypocrisy in anyone who deplored the Capitol riot but supported the ruffians out in force demanding that Congress act to keep the planet habitable.
(Must see both sides, see?)
It’s a conundrum, isn’t it? Spend the next 50 years electing more and better Democrats, or risk one’s life in a likely futile attempt to short the circuit.
If you watched the second Battlestar Galactica series, the one which aired beginning in 2004, you may remember the excellent rabble-rousing address delivered by chief engineer Galen Tyrol in service of a general strike against the vessel’s leadership.
The address is based mostly on free-speech activist Mario Savio’s 1964 call for students to shut down the University of California at Berkeley. It’s commonly known as the ‘bodies upon the gears’ speech.
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!
A mass of people closing off Capitol Hill would only be a mass of people closing off Capitol Hill, to be dealt with as suits the dealers. One can already hear the speeches refusing to capitulate to mob rule, and regretting the necessity for violence.
What’s required to make a Capitol Hill presence meaningful is a simultaneous assault on Capital Hill, with millions of people across the country putting their bodies upon the gears (or at least taking their bodies out of service) to shut down the machine.
This is to say that we need a general strike. But general strikes are, in any meaningful iteration, illegal under current labor law.
Why are they illegal? They’re illegal because they work. When masses of people withhold their labor, across individual industries or a spectrum of them, it’s not long before the machinery—the machinery owned by the people whose people fund Congress—begins to creak and groan.
(Here’s a handy primer on the legality of strikes.)
Conveniently, the pandemic has provided us a good idea of how many people need to stay home, and for how long, to begin affecting the economy. In Part Two of this interminable piece, we’ll look at that and at other factors important to attempting a general strike.
(Musical contributors to this post include Amythyst Kiah, “Pensive Pop;” Tony Allen & Hugh Masakela, “Rejoice;” Angel Olson, “All Mirrors;” Yo La Tengo, “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out;” Jona Lewie, “Gatecrasher;” Fela Kuti, “Expensive Shit;” Chumbawamba, “Un;” and Beck, “Odelay.”)
Thanks for voicing this possibility as I have thought about it for a long time. Everyone stock up for a month and stop using everything. Stay home, read, parking with neighbors. No planes, trains or automobiles ...
It's a pleasure to read you, Weldon. I think the public inertia is really rooted in the ambiguity, signal-to-noise problems, and the uncertainty about how one might respond. I told a friend of mine awhile back that when people started getting rounded up, decent people would take to the streets.
I will. But I wonder whether I'll be alone.