What Does The Bonus Army Tell Us About Occupy Wall Street?

They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or the Bonus Army or Bonus Marchers for short, and in 1932 they set-up semi-permanent encampments in Washington D.C. Nearly 80 years later, people are occupying Wall Street, and many, many other places around the country. And as loud as the shouts of deliberate mass media ignorance were a month ago, the Occupy movement is not all over everything, and it’s as difficult to avoid coverage now as it was to find it then. It seems to be a unique construct, a product of now—nonviolent, persistent and inchoate in the sense of there's too much to say (rather than not being able to say it). But they're walking in someone else’s footprints, whether they know it or not.

Comparisons of Occupy Wall Street to the Bonus Army are not entirely new; mentions have been made in the past month (and more recently by Frank Rich in his piece looking at the new Class War), and rightfully so. In fact, efforts to parse Occupy Wall Street by historical comparison are a new cottage industry. Correlations with the Tea Party (both of them) are popular, based purely on the putative populist nature of each, and echoes of the war protests of the '60s do pop up as well.

No one is suggesting that a wormhole opened up and pulled a historical event straight into modern times, or that, say, a magic shoe was found and worn by an Occupy Wall Street organizer, filling him or her with the channeled knowledge of Eugene Debs manifesting itself in the form of a well-managed listserv. I just recommend that a comparison the Bonus Army is apt, because in 1932, what they did basically was Occupy D.C.

The arrival of the Bonus Army was quite dramatic. They came from all over the country. Some of them just picked up stakes and brought the family with them, figuring there was nothing left to come back to. They made their way, some in groups, some one by one. More fortunate America helped them along: road and bridge tolls were waived, and the travelers weren’t rousted like the everyday forgotten man. When they reached D.C., they set up camps, tents when they could, or shanties cobbled together from tarpaper and scrap wood and whatever they could scrounge.

Occupy Wall Street is somewhat more diffuse in its goals, and more in line with the 18th century events that Hogeland writes about. Though, to be fair, Occupy Wall Street has been very, very vague (and purposefully so) as to what they’re looking for. I asked Hogeland if that was in any way unique, from an historical perspective: “The absence of articulated demands on the part of OWS may be unique or at least highly unusual in American economic-related protest. The 19th-century Populists demanded specific, radical legislation to benefit ordinary people. The Whiskey Rebels wanted fair taxation. The Shaysites wanted fair taxation and debt relief. And they said so.”

Maybe it's spurious to compare the circumstances of the two: then, the occupiers were veterans, crushed by the circumstances of the Great Depression, moved to uproot their lives in hopes of a very real result, and now, a melange of the generally dispossessed, moved by frustration over a financial system suspected to be rigged. There are similarities, so maybe not as spurious as it is too tenuous to avoid refutation.

The two movements shared an analogous backdrop. Just as Occupy Wall Street unfolds in the shadow of the fiscal crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, the Bonus Army congregated in the full bloom of the Great Depression. Without the downturn, neither protest actually could have happened. There was even a specific federal program that inflamed each: instead of the TARP program that doled out free taxpayer money to financial institutions recently, Hoover had established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an entity to save the large banks and railroads through government loans, just months before the Bonus Army declared their march. So both the Bonus Army and Occupy Wall Street were set into motion in response to almost deliberately provocative federal policy, and the economic horror show that necessitated it.

Try to imagine that speech given in small bites, repeated in waves throughout an Occupy Wall Street general assembly, and it wouldn’t be out of place at all, would it? (And some not-bad advice to boot.)

And there is one trait that, of the major American protests, is shared only by Occupy Wall Street and the Bonus Army, that of a population, moved by varying degrees of perceived unfairness, to make not just a statement but to erect a semi-permanent edifice, to occupy. Not a march, not a riot, not a long-term picketing effort, but people uprooting themselves and planting themselves in a temporary autonomous zone, in the interest of making a point. Occupy Wall Street has Zuccotti Park, and the Bonus Army set themselves up primarily Anacostia Flats, across the river to the southeast from the Capitol in a bit of land within the skewed cube of the D.C. city limits that would otherwise be Maryland.

To be fair, while they both share occupation as a tactic, Occupy Wall Street is using it to address the ineffability of its goal in a way that did not confront the Bonus Army—not just a squishiniess in targeting, but the conundrum of possible tangible results. Says Hogeland, “Sitting at a white's-only lunch counter deliberately breaks the precise law you want ended, and it calls the world's attention to the law's immorality; arrests dramatically underscore all that. Civil disobedience doesn't work when there's no law for protesters to deliberately break in hopes of getting it ended.” Setting up a camp, attracting attention, is a different creature than civil disobedience, and is more like the polite but insistent refusal to not be paid attention to. The Bonus Army was ready to leave once they got their bonuses. It's as if once Occupy Wall Street stops occupying Wall Street, they will lose cohesion and purpose, as Occupy Wall Street will be ready to leave when, well… I guess we don’t know when they’ll be ready to leave, or what the outcome will be (barring further drum circle controversies). That will be one for waiting.