 | The War Against the Vets: The World War I Bonus Army during the Great Depression Subjects: Bonus Expeditionary Forces; World War 1914–1918 -- Veterans -- Washington (D.C.); Protest movements -- Washington (D.C.) -- History -- 20th century; Washington (D.C.) -- History -- 20th century; Veterans -- Political activity -- United States -- History; "Who Murdered the Vets?" writer Ernest Hemingway demanded in an impassioned article about the deaths of hundreds of former soldiers. Their fate came as part of the larger and often overlooked story of veterans of the Great War and their deplorable treatment by the government they once served. Three years earlier, under orders from President Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur led the U.S. military through the streets of the nation's capital against an encampment of veterans and their families. The vets were suffering the ravages of the Great Depression and seeking an early payment of promised war bonuses. Tanks, troops, and cavalry burned down tents and leveled campsites in a savage and lethal effort to disperse the protesters, resulting in the murder of several demonstrators. The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt subsequently shipped the vets to distant work camps in the Florida Keys, where they were housed in flimsy tent cities that fell prey to a hurricane of which the authorities had been given ample warning. It was in reaction to the hundreds of bodies left in the storm's wake that Hemingway penned his provocative words. The War Against the Vets is the first book about the Bonus Army to describe in detail the political battles that threatened to tear the country apart, as well as the scandalous treatment of the World War I vets. Jerome Joseph Tuccille was born in the Bronx, New York on May 30, 1937. He received a degree in psychology from Manhattan College in 1959 and then entered the Marine Corps. In 1974, he ran for the governor of New York under the Free Libertarian Party. After his failed campaign left him broke, he became a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch and later for Shearson/American Express and other companies. In the 1990s, he became a financial writer for T. Rowe Price. His financial books included Everything the Beginner Needs to Know to Invest Shrewdly: A Step-By-Step Guide to the Basics of Financial Growth and The Optimist's Guide to Making Money in the 1980s: A Complete Program for Investing in the American Economic Miracle of the Next Decade. He wrote a series of biographies including Trump: The Saga of America's Most Powerful Real Estate Baron, Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller: The Life and Times of a Media Mogul, and Alan Shrugged: Alan Greenspan, the World's Most Powerful Banker. He also wrote books on his encounters with libertarianism and his intellectual development including Radical Libertarianism: A Right Wing Alternative, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, It Still Begins with Ayn Rand: Part Two of a Libertarian Odyssey, and Heretic: Confessions of an Ex-Catholic Rebel. One of his last book, The Roughest Riders: The Untold Story of the Black Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, was published in 2015. He died from complications of multiple myeloma on February 16, 2017 at the age of 79. (Bowker Author Biography) |
