Word: bonus
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With troops, tanks and tear gas President Hoover succeeded in driving the Bonus Expeditionary Force out of Washington fortnight ago. But that did not break up the tatterdemalion army and scatter it home. With diplomacy replacing armed force, the rest of the job was accomplished last week by the combined efforts of Daniel Willard, president of Baltimore & Ohio R. R., David Barry, brother-in-law of Steelman Charles Michael Schwab, and "Eddie" McCloskey. scrappy little Mayor of Johnstown...
...citizens committee called on Mayor McCloskey, told him of the B. & O.'s offer, induced him to use his hard-boiled political oratory to get the B. E. F. to entrain. He could, he was assured, take all public credit for arranging the evacuation. Johnstownians feared that the Bonus marchers would never accept the B. & O.'s offer if they knew it had been inspired by Washington...
Only real bait offered was a cash bonus of ?1 for every ?100 worth of bonds converted prior to Aug. 1. Obviously to convert was no business transaction. It was a great act of united national patriotism. To put it over all the stops of Wartime propaganda were pulled out. Posters went up on the hoardings, there were placards in Trafalgar Square. Orators spellbound theatre audiences in the intermissions. Newspapers printed honor rolls of firms who had converted all their War Loan Bonds, heaped honors on superpatriots who refused to accept their ?1 cash bonuses. And it worked...
Comment. Most of the nation's Press approved the manner in which the President had dealt with its B. E. F. Public blame, if any. was placed less on members of the B. E. F. than upon those Representatives & Senators who by agitating full and immediate Bonus payments had lured veterans to Washington and kept them there with false hopes and promises...
...heading for a "highly nationalistic form of Fascism" which will be "the last stand of Capital-ism." The country, he believes, is ripe for a dictatorship, with the mass of people stunned into inaction by the Depression. All that is lacking is the dictator himself. The Bonus Expeditionary Force encamped at the capital, he once thought, offered fertile soil for such a backward movement but its leaders did not measure up to the political opportunity. "If the country wasn't so sprawling." declared Socialist Thomas, "a man like Senator Huey Long might seize demagogic control...