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.

My Corner of the Canyon: ­­­Despite Reality, Hope Springs Eternal

The exotic sits on the table. It is surrounded by decidedly un-exotic things: a parking ticket, a brochure from Gelson’s, the remote control and a stuffed, carnival-prize banana with a cartoon smiling face (Okay, that’s somewhat exotic).

I have never had an orchid plant before. This one was a gift as a thank-you for my work with a local Topanga home-school group. I had been invited to share creation stories and Greek myths with the students and direct them in acting out the tales. We all had a pretty good time, as young teens tempted by a serpent and the pursuit of knowledge were banished from the garden and moved on east of Eden.

In later classes they transformed into Gods and Goddesses rising from the mortal world to the rare heights of Mt. Olympus, decreeing who will live and who will die while draped in shiny fabric sheets, heads adorned with wreaths and plastic crowns.

I named the plant Pandora, which means gift of the Gods. Unfortunately I, as with the original Pandora, had no practical knowledge of how to care for my gift. It seemed easy at first, the plant just sat there looking pretty and elegant on those tapering, tropical stems, and sometimes I was even inspired to clear the cluttered debris from the dining table as a tribute to her delicate beauty. I was advised to water her with an ice cube about once a week, which somehow always made me covet a martini. Then one day a flower fell.

In an attempt at horticulture, I have gone on line to research my charge and discovered I have in my care a Phalaenopsis. To be exact I have a Phalaenopsis Aphrodite or Moon Orchid. It has petals of cloud white, soft, looking like powder with a pale yellow center and etched, deep within, rather spidery looking pink streaks. As I looked closely, some of the stems from which the flowers bloom are turning brown and I fear soon all will fall, silently and softly, dropping like Pandora’s tears for having unleashed all those sorrows on our world.

A book I found at the library, The Orchid Thief, written by Susan Orlean, contains more facts and history about orchids than one would reasonably want to know and it became a national bestseller. Evidently, there is quite an orchid cult and there is danger of the unsuspecting or weak of mind to become enthralled with the plant to the point of obsession. Some plants sell for thousands of dollars and from time to time greenhouses are pillaged and accusations fly. Murders have been committed. Devotees dream of orchids, scheme to create new hybrids and long to one day see the elusive and mythical black orchid.

Not everyone likes orchids. Tennessee Williams, as a young man, compared his glimpse of a prostitute’s genitalia to that of a dying orchid, the shock of which he claimed to have never gotten over and hence remained rather frightened of the flower throughout his life. I don’t know how he got himself into such a situation, where he had no business being in the first place, for we know that Mr. Williams was not predisposed to vaginal admiration, but I like to think he must have been in an especially dark poet’s mood that day or came at it from the wrong angle. However, I see his point. Vividly.

I myself am not much of a delicate exotic. I’m more of a pumpkin, sort of round, jolly and bright. I attempt from year to year to grow the fruit in my own hardscrabble, fallen garden. Planting in the spring yielded nothing. Not one pumpkin seedling sprouted and I suspected gophers had enjoyed my efforts, as I noted little piles of dirt all over the place. Not much on persistence, I let it go. Then something came over me about two weeks ago, an obsession of sorts. Some inner voice sounded and through all the clatter and strum of daily life, I heard it clearly, “Plant pumpkins, plant pumpkins now!”

I made a special trip to find seeds. One pack left. I did the germination math and figured it would take 110 days. If I planted, right now, this very day, I could have a pumpkin for Halloween. Surveying the yard, I planned to spread out, plant everywhere; if gophers ate the seeds in one part of the yard perhaps they would leave the other part alone, (just a theory). In the fading sun, on a Topanga afternoon with tropical clouds turning color, I planted. Five sections were sown with seed. Five possible pumpkin patches. I was hopeful; I saw the future. And indeed, in just a few days little sprouts burst through that dry earth, some inner power telling them to raise their green leaves toward the sun and grow.

There are three possible culprits: gopher, snail and rabbit. Suddenly the sprouts were gone like bad magic, disappeared back into the ground, called down by the God of the Underworld to grace his halls, not mine. I guess he, Hades, makes a fourth suspect and formidable, but to a large part I think it is snails. I saw some of the leaves chewed and noticed those phosphorescent silver trails around the ravaged plant. In an imaginative attempt at preservation, I took to covering the remaining plants with plastic cups at night. I had cut out the bottom and placed them over the sprout to allow for light and growth and for a while it seemed to work until I saw the cups tipped over and the plant, eaten or gone. Perhaps all my garden pests were working in tandem and sharing the spoils; bunny knocking over cup and nibbling, snail slithering in and slurping, gopher munching from below, Dark God laughing.