…and (some) devasting *blockades* as well. Remembering three major insurrections of the 20th century—the 1932 ‘Bonus Army’ invasion of Washington D.C., the nationalized union occupations of 1936-37, and the 1965 ‘Bloody Sunday’ bridge blockade in Selma—helps put the Jan 6 ‘assault on democracy’ into context. The two earlier uprisings are now largely forgotten, but the latter affair is still celebrated each year. All three events had lasting impacts on American culture.

For most of the last century, the Democrat wing of the D.C. uniparty have been outspoken champions of unleashing organized chaos to promote their increasingly totalitarian agenda. Many establishment Republicans share their collectivist mindset or do nothing meaningful to oppose it. The harsh persecution of January 6, 2021 Trump supporters should not distract anyone from recognizing that core position, as the J6 show trials and ongoing theatrics are mostly about keeping Donald Trump away from the White House in 2024—not “law and order.”

For this essay, I’ll bypass most of the partisan intrigue over the brief, largely spontaneous J6 event at the Capitol and look back to lasting, systemic damage done to the U.S. economy and our previous liberties from three major insurrections of the 20th century. All three episodes have been so distorted by mainstream news and government education as to almost completely obscure their underlying importance to modern society. Participants from all three events (particularly the latter two) achieved their goals by employing blockades upon their enemies, a powerful weapon that few elites can honestly discuss.

In chronological order, the protracted occupation of Washington D.C. by a contingent of World War 1 veterans and political agitators in the summer of 1932 set the stage for generations of mindless deification of the federal military—something conspicuously absent from the prior three centuries of colonial and post-Revolutionary America. After “purchased patriotism” (to paraphrase President Coolidge’s disapproval of the Bonus Army’s demands in the 1920s) became a guaranteed “benefit,” American militarism would launch many more foreign adventures that would soon transform the voluntary union into a sprawling empire saddled by ruinous debt. I’ll deal with this event second, as the next incursion had more participants engaging in openly lawless activity.

Next on the historical timeline (but first up for this essay), I’ll review the sorry state of affairs that began with government-sanctioned industrial corruption in the 1800s (much of it still endorsed by both parties today) that understandably led to union hostilities in the late 1800s and early 1900s, then open warfare in the 1930s and beyond. This will include the nationalized union uprisings of 1936-37 that prolonged the Great Depression, caused major economic harm for future generations and eventually decimated U.S. manufacturing.

Lastly, I’ll touch on the race riots of the 1960s that turned hundreds of urban communities into permanent cesspools of violence and despair. I will specifically focus on a premeditated offensive—the 1965 ‘Bloody Sunday’ bridge blockade in Selma, Alabama—that is now annually commemorated in mainstream media to stoke hostilities and spur greater wealth transfers. Since racial animosity is once again rising to an artificial boil in America, I’ll also reflect upon more productive times of 1915 to 1960 when blacks and their appointed leaders looked to personal ownership of their condition, not slavish petitioning for political power.

At this point in America’s decline, confusion on labor, race and warfare issues all run deep. And it’s not just from “commie” agitators spewing simplistic Oppressor vs. Oppressed memes, although those attitudes are certainly common. Mainstream charlatans and sycophants who now dominate Western institutions have so badly clouded the picture on all three elements of this essay— habitually positioning themselves for corporate-state approval—that some basic unpacking is necessary. For that, I’ll start with labor affairs.

A Brief History of Labor Unions in America

For any serious discussion of organized labor, it helps to remember some general principles that “both sides” of mainstream orthodoxy studiously avoid. Regarding the basic human (and Constitutional) right of Freedom of Association, no reasonable person should oppose workers collectively meeting, planning and acting as a unified voice when dealing with management. After all, management (and its organized proxies in Human Resources) virtually always act as a unified front when dealing with workers.

That is, if an employee doesn’t like his annual performance review or salary adjustment, he can’t go shopping around the office for more accommodating bosses to override the wishes of the first (real) boss. But management routinely does just that, shopping around for the cheapest, most self-sacrificing employees to exploit for maximum short-term profit. (As a rule, “liberty” zealots don’t acknowledge a laborer’s Freedom of Association since it detracts from a business owner’s prevailing “right” to untrammeled capital formation. Likewise, “radical leftists” generally believe in government-granted privileges instead of universal human rights, and have no use for a concept that doesn’t directly lead to greater centralized power. As such, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the words “union” and “Freedom of Association” used in the same sentence, certainly not by any mainstream pundit or academic.)

In the early 1800s, workers were actually denied basic Freedom of Association on spurious grounds that collective labor activities were an illegal “conspiracy,” as described in The Unintended Consequences of Collective Bargaining published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. By 1842, the same authors note that the Massachusetts Supreme Court officially recognized a worker’s right to organize, and other states soon followed suit.

For the rest of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the balance of interests between labor and management were not always smooth—as corporations took full advantage of two immense legal privileges (monopoly patent grants and fiat bank loans) and Big Labor frequently flexed its muscles by imposing company-wide blockades (an overt act of war that belligerents of all persuasions revere).

Since the problem of political blockades (often mislabeled as “protests”) is fundamental to any analysis of modern labor, race and military affairs, I’ll flesh out that topic as well.

The Problem with Blockades

Aggressive elements in government and elsewhere have long used the tactic of blockades—cutting off food supplies and/or blocking economic activity of a designated enemy to force their adversary into submission—for nearly as long as we have historical records. In modern times, three of the more famous obstructions are Lincoln’s blockade of South Carolina (and then the entire Confederacy) that triggered the so-called Civil War, England’s starvation blockade of Germany from 1914 to 1919 that forced them to sign the punitive Edict of Versailles, and FDR’s antagonistic blockade of Japan in the late 1930s that prompted the Asians to retaliate for survival. Of course, Western government enthusiasts downplay all of those wantonly hostile maneuvers as “embargoes” or “sanctions” (both of which are implicitly backed by threats of violence) or in the case of Germany, as an alleged “treaty.” Subsidized thinkers will say almost anything for a price.

In all three cases, and probably most other historical examples, blockades were initiated by superior organized forces upon a weaker enemy that the aggressor viewed as immoral and subhuman, thus unworthy of basic respect or “rules based” diplomacy. The express goal of a blockade (at minimum) is to force the victim into humiliating surrender, accepting all terms of defeat. If the victim resists, the aggressor will use that as an excuse for more violent attacks (up to complete subjugation or total annihilation if necessary) of their weaker enemy, as Lincoln inflicted upon the South and as Western parties imposed on conquered WW1 and WW2 nations.

(None of this suggests that the victims of blockades/embargoes/sanctions are completely innocent, as was definitely not the case for lazy Southern plantation owners or German and Japanese militarists inflicting harm upon their neighbors leading up to World Wars 1 and 2, respectively. Domestic corporate-state enterprises are guilty of many abuses as well, none of which are addressed by labor or racial blockades.)

Using mob “sit-down” or “protest” blockades as frequent political tools, nationalized union vandals and race war profiteers have almost completely achieved their goals of dominating their targets, which both groups openly describe as subhuman “scabs” or evil white trash (i.e., “racists”). In the case of private sector unions, they probably never considered that foreign competition would cut into their stranglehold on coercive pay raises and generous “benefits” extracted from NLRB-castrated American businesses. In the instance of racial agitators, they likely never imagined that “systemic white power” would collapse so easily as it has done since the 1960s. In the case of government “civil service” unions that routinely bribe politicians for greater handouts and less work, there is virtually no remaining opposition to their rogue behavior.

But international acceptance of indiscriminate blockades has also (briefly) had some detractors. In a post-war declaration of semi-lucid humanity, the Geneva Convention of 1949 declared “the free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital stores” and “free passage of all consignments of essential foodstuffs, clothing and tonics intended for children under fifteen, expectant mothers and maternity cases” (Article 23) as fundamental for “the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.” Then in Article 59, the Convention stated more broadly: “All Contracting Parties shall permit the free passage of … consignments of foodstuffs, medical supplies and clothing” with no restrictions to age or sex.

While the lawyers and politicians who crafted the Geneva Convention (the 1949 edition was officially its fourth such treaty) were not so bold as to explicitly denounce the tool of economic blockades, the strong language in support of “free passage” of food, medicine and clothing gave essentially the same impression. The USA and 195 other nations agreed to the Convention of 1949. At least in writing.

But organized labor unions have never agreed to any legal restrictions on their actions against business owners. In their minds—and the minds of their supporters in Washington and mass media—anything is fair game, including protracted blockades of plant operations—in forcing management to succumb to union demands. As a result, trespassing and blockades have been essential union weapons for well over a century, with government police frequently refusing to enforce the law, and companies forced to hire private security (like the hated Pinkertons) to protect their legal interests.

As we will see towards the end of this essay, black militants also love blockades—particularly of one bridge in Alabama that activists still flock to each Spring as legacy media cheers them on. With urban law enforcement failing yet again to neutralize black-welfare aggression, race war advocates have upped their tactics to arson, looting and deadly riots in hundreds of episodes since the celebrated “marches” of the 1960s.

But legalists tend to be the biggest hypocrites. And war-mongers don’t like their victims showing any signs of resistance. So we can forget about hearing any clear message on blockades from the ruling authorities.

When truckers in February 2022 briefly blocked access to the Ambassador Bridge between Canada and Detroit with their “Freedom Convoy” against vaccine mandates that were killing their jobs, there was no talk of “workers’ rights” or “mostly peaceful protests,” even though the truckers never caused any property damage. Instead, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, was given free airtime to denounce the truckers’ actions as an “illegal blockade” that was causing an “economic crisis.”

That same month (just as war broke out in Ukraine) globalist mouthpiece The Atlantic was slamming Russia for just the thought of restricting its own gas sales to Europe, calling that defensive contingency “Essentially an Act of War.” No word yet if they view America’s physical attack on that same Russian gas pipeline to also be an “act of war.”

Nationalizing Employment in 1935

Getting back to nationalized labor unrest of the 1930s, after Franklin Roosevelt (elected Governor of New York in 1928) did nothing to curb the rampant bank fraud and stock market speculation in his own back yard, he was elevated to the U.S. Presidency in 1932 to supposedly “fix” the problems he and his predecessor, Democrat NY Governor Al Smith, had largely created. (At that time, there were no institutional investors, retirement pensions did not exist, there was no interstate highway system, and the economy was much more localized. As such, blaming the incumbent President Herbert Hoover—as spastic and prone to overreaction as he was—for the 1929 NYC stock market crash is absurd.)

Among the many wild schemes of FDR’s academic “brain trust” was to inject arbitrary federal power into labor-management negotiations, correctly surmising that millions of blue-collar votes would be their reward. After some bumpy test runs during Roosevelt’s first two years in office, this new federal power was officially vested in the National Labor Relations Board, a creation of the Wagner Act of 1935. The NLRB was and is a typical Washington bureaucracy that writes its own rules (found in Title 29 of the Code of Federal Regulations), enforces its own mandates, then judges whether its 1,300 unelected agents (as of 2019) are being “fair” in implementing those same rules. Having no shred of Constitutional merit and minimal Congressional oversight, the NLRB quickly took to its ongoing pattern of tilting the scales of justice towards organized labor, which Congress had started back in 1914 by exempting union collusion from anti-trust legislation.

With Big Labor now formally backed by the full force of Washington, unions were free to unleash their wrath on “greedy” employers who dared to resist. Thanks to New Deal union interference via its new bureaucracy—the National Labor Relations Board of 1935—“the number of ‘strike days’ doubled in one year, from 14 million in 1936 to 28 million in 1937.” Backed by the new powers of the federal government to suppress management opposition, union membership soared “from 13 percent of the work force in 1935 to 29 percent in 1939.” (stats from UCLA economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian and also cited in Robert Murphy’s Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, page 108).

The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, a pro-union anthology published in 2009, states: “In March 1937, the sit-down wave peaked, with 170 occupations involving 167,210 workers” (page 208). One of those 170 occupations involved retailer Woolworth’s, as depicted here (photo and caption from Encyclopedia of Strikes).

Even after the Supreme Court finally stopped the “sit-down” occupations in 1939 (just in time for FDR’s military-industrial buildup for WW2) the lasting damage from union mayhem could not be undone. To this day, management can do almost nothing to discourage its workers from joining a union, or to effectively manage its union employees, without facing costly harassment from the NLRB for charges of “unfair labor practices.”

Unlike the relatively harmless (but perhaps foolish) Jan 6 event that caused Washington to shudder in terror, the 1936-37 union uprising caused massive economic upheaval and a permanent loss in essential American freedoms. Economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway of Ohio University estimated that union price fixing, collusion and other abuses cumulatively reduced American GDP by $50 trillion over the period of 1947 to 2000. (This is probably a low-ball figure, since it omits organized union pressures to enact corporate pensions and other “benefits” which waste trillions every year on idle seniors and overpriced healthcare.)

Economist Walter Williams, one of the few mainstream figures to challenge union ideology in our times, noted in 1994:

The National Right to Work Committee estimates that almost 6,000 violent incidents have occurred during strikes since 1975, including the 1990-93 Greyhound bus strike, where buses were shot at 52 times.

The compounding poisons of wasteful corporate “benefits” and widespread labor violence, intimidation and other abuses have all been recklessly abetted by federal interference in union-management negotiations since the 1930s. These were major factors in sapping U.S. industrial strength to the point of chasing tens of thousands of manufacturers out of the country a few generations later, something politicians now blame on China specifically or international trade in general. The leisurely stroll of a few hundred unarmed Trump supporters through the public Capitol building on January 6, 2021 did nothing of the sort.

Which brings us back to the two main photos from 1936 and 2021 featured at the beginning of this essay.

Top Lead Photo: Staged propaganda shot of union members taking a break from drinking, playing cards and sabotaging factory operations while trespassing for 44 days at the General Motors Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Michigan during 1936-37, one of many such insurrections against American liberty that FDR callously encouraged. For decades afterwards, Democrats and legacy media celebrated their organized assaults as a bold stance by oppressed workers against a cruel and ruthless “auto behemoth.” For example, the History Channel whitewashes this protracted union uprising (a full blockade of nation-wide industrial production) saying: “Instead of walking out, they simply sat down and refused to leave.” Socialist Worker.org takes a similar tone and praises the unionized “class struggle” of those exhilarating times.

Presumably few (if any) of the union criminals were arrested during the massive 1936-37 orgy of lawlessness—as subsequent accounts don’t mention anything of the sort. And the Roosevelt administration steadfastly refused to enforce the law, to the disgust of FDR’s own Vice President John Garner other moderate Democrats including Senate majority leader Joe Robinson and scores of business leaders. (John Flynn, author and columnist for the New Republic during the 1930s, elaborates on Roosevelt’s waffling on the labor situation in his book, The Roosevelt Myth in Book two, Chapter 1 of the online version.)

Bottom Lead Photo: Man with foot on House Speaker Pelosi’s desk, Richard Barnett, retired firefighter from Arkansas. This remains as one of the more memorable scenes from the January 6, 2021 protests of Trump supporters who trespassed for a few hours in public offices and corridors, leaving some broken doors and windows, and hundreds of shattered egos on Capitol Hill.

The audacity of common Americans to openly “attack” D.C. corruption triggered months of political and media denunciations of the Trump “mob” of “rioters” who “threatened democracy itself,” with zealous Deep State investigations resulting in over 1,000 participants being charged in federal court. Democrats and a few RINOs, temporarily opposed to some trespassing, even held a primetime publicity stunt aired over 8 days from June through July 2022 by its House Select Committee to wring every last drop of zeitgeist out of the J6 affair—something they did not do after the 2020 George Floyd Riots or the 2017 Anti-Trump Inauguration Riot. Curiously, no one in legacy media (that I can find) now claims Mr. Barnett “simply sat down” in Nancy’s office. (As of this writing, Richard Barnett was convicted by a Washington jury on eight charges including obstructing government proceedings and disorderly conduct while carrying a “dangerous weapon” that was a thin walking stick. He currently is awaiting sentencing scheduled for May 24. Barnett faces a maximum of 47 years in prison for his trivial misdeeds.)

Elsewhere, the Oath Keepers’ founder Stewart Rhodes is scheduled for sentencing on May 25 for the politically driven J6 “seditious conspiracy” conviction. The Justice Department is seeking 25 years of jail time. Evidence of real harm by the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and other J6 defendants was so weak that prosecutors resorted to withholding thousands of hours of exculpatory security footage for over two years. When Republicans later released that footage to Tucker Carlson, Democrats demanded his firing from Fox News.

In stark contrast to today, by failing to address the widespread union criminality of 1936 and beyond, once-thriving American industries became weaker and thousands eventually failed, including the infamous Fisher Body Plant in Flint (a suburb of Detroit) where labor activists focused their initial assault. Today, vandalized remains of the Fisher Body Plant bear witness to decades of union mischief backed by political indulgence that brought the factory—along with greater Detroit and much of the U.S. auto industry—to an early demise.

That 24-slide pictorial (featured in April 2023 by Bill Gates’s MSN media empire) makes no mention whatsoever of union activity at this plant or any of the Abandoned American Factories they now celebrate as a “popular spot with urban photographers.”

The Fisher Body company that had once operated 40 plants and employed over 100,000 workers when it was fully purchased by General Motors in 1926 would be dissolved in 1984.

The inability of Americans to recognize and repudiate the 1930s hooligans among unions, military advocacy groups and New Deal authoritarians led to even bigger sociopaths taking control during the 1960s Great Society spasm of federal power. Subsequent failures to deal with those “hippy” delinquents led to the “woke” lunatics now dominating Hollywood, mass media, universities and most of Washington. (Conservatives that believe America’s decline began during the Obama or Clinton administrations are overlooking quite a bit.)

While the union insurrections of 1936-37 were devastating to the U.S. economy, they were not the first such instance of organized looting during the decade. For that, we can thank our military heroes of World War 1.

Even before union militants unleashed 170 occupation events on American businesses (and indirectly onto about 100 million consumers), perhaps 20,000 WW1 veterans and some socialist provocateurs in 1932 launched a domestic invasion of their own that prompted a more vigorous defense of law and order—albeit after months of government coddling of criminal behavior. And powerful “military rights” organizations like the American Legion were encouraging the looters every step of the way.

Hoover’s Finest Hour: Standing Up to the ‘Bonus Army’ Hoodlums of 1932

For all the disastrous spending and bureaucratic bungling of ‘Wonder Boy’ Herbert Hoover that helped turn a stock market correction into a Great Depression, one shining moment stands out: using minimal force to confront a gang of violent military thugs who were occupying Washington and demanding early payment for a “bonus” they never earned.

The standard account of this moment in American history glosses over most of the relevant details and jumps right into harsh condemnation. ABC News called it “one of the Depression’s sorriest spectacles” in their coffee table encyclopedia The Century. In the PBS docudrama “The Roosevelts – An Intimate History,” a collection of state-media-historians claim that “veterans were brutally driven from the capital,” elevating trespassing to a universal human right.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Nearly all of Hoover’s record has been subsequently warped out of recognition thanks to FDR admirers in Hollywood and mass media needing a dark Republican villain to contrast against their shimmering planetary savior Prince Franklin. Hoover’s reckless spending and deficits have somehow been twisted into the failure of free-market enterprise. Likewise, his sober response to a small horde of military bandits in July 1932 has been enlarged into some kind of domestic version of Hitler’s march into Poland.

Who Promised Vets a ‘Bonus’ in the First Place?

After World War 1, which formally ended in November 1918, a group of military enthusiasts became bored with their return to civilian life and decided to form a tax-favored organization known as the American Legion to relive their glory years. Besides their standard fare of drinking beer, showing off war medals and re-telling stories of battlefield heroics, the policy leaders at the Legion would go on to inject massive federal interference into the college and university system (an institution many conservatives now bitterly denounce) via the 1944 G.I. Bill, which they call “the Legion’s single greatest legislative achievement.”

The American Legion today boasts of over 13,000 local posts and nearly 2 million decorated, nationalistic, flag-waving members who are immensely prideful of their past foreign invasions. This is the “good” kind of xenophobia that legacy media admires. While right-wing partisans mock liberals today for “identity politics,” these fellows are a prime example of such ideology, which has since led many to blind adoration of all things military (except for local militia and private gun owners, of course).

Back in their early years, first up for the Legion’s agenda was pressuring Congress for retroactive payments for performing their “patriotic duty” (as they subsequently claimed) during the Great War. After a few years of concerted lobbying, Congress caved and granted a bonus payment of $1 for each day of service domestically and $1.25 for each day of foreign incursion between April 1917 and July 1919. To finance the World War Adjusted Compensation Act (as the bonus legislation was called) lawmakers would defer payment to the next generation in 1945, long after the generous politicians of the 1920s were out of office.

When the economy soured in the early 1930s, most Americans adjusted their lifestyles and looked harder for gainful employment. Other Americans embraced a radical approach of authoritarian communism—with Socialist Party presidential candidate Norman Thomas winning 2.2% of the popular vote in 1932. A small percentage of those radicals included ex-military inductees (at most, 0.5% of the 4.7 million Americans who served in WW1) who looked to Washington for handouts. This was long before welfare became fashionable to mainstream Americans, although no shortage of political activists and media supporters were egging them on with claims of entitlement.

What Happened in July 1932 and How Did the Public React?

The hostilities of 1932 were inspired by Walter W. Waters, a resident of Portland, Oregon who had participated in America’s “liberation” of France in World War 1. Mr. Waters, then 34 years old and unable to hold a steady job (even before the Crash of ’29) decided an “immediate cash payment” for a tax-funded “bonus” was the best option to feed himself. A pro-military account of the Bonus Army march on Washington describes Waters:

Ever since returning from the battlefields of France and receiving an honorable discharge as a sergeant, Waters had struggled to find a place in society. He’d worked as a mechanic, a car salesman and a baker in the 1920s, with none of the vocations sticking. He even tried to take on a new name, Bill Kinkaid, in a vain attempt “to break more decisively with the past.”

A more balanced account from the conservative American Thinker website (staunchly pro-war, but skeptical of this insurrection) adds:

In May of 1932, about 300 veterans, led by Walter W. Waters, entered the yard of the Union Pacific Railroad in Portland, Oregon; refused to leave until they were allowed to ride in empty boxcars; and started on their way to Washington, D.C. to “lobby” for the immediate payment of their “bonuses.”

While the West Coast veterans were on their way to D.C., unemployed veterans from the East Coast joined the effort and “The first contingent of Bonus Army marchers arrived May 23,” according to Smithsonian magazine. This small collection of bonus soldiers was joined by the Portland contingent who reached the capital on May 29. Both groups were determined not to leave without either a payout or a fight.

With relentless news coverage encouraging more veterans (or anyone interested) to join the struggle, perhaps 40,000 to 45,000 people eventually reached the nation’s capital, based on various modern estimates. During this two-month occupation, feckless politicians including President Hoover showered the vets with “charitable contributions to set up their camps and kitchens” and a field hospital funded by the federal Veterans’ Administration, per the American Thinker article.

Smithsonian recounts how D.C. Police Chief Pelham Glassford:

oversaw the establishment of the camp [for the veterans in D.C.] as best he could, making sure that at least a certain amount of building materials—piles of lumber and boxes of nails—were supplied. The chief solicited food from local merchants and later added $773 out of his own pocket for provisions.

But coddling the veteran squatters did nothing to soften their resolve. And the fiction that vets were violently removed without warning (as suggested by the PBS blurb below) bears no resemblance to contemporary accounts.

The mythical levels to which these Bonus Army vagrants have now been elevated even rivals the breathless reverence of the crusading savior of the Great Depression, FDR himself. PBS’s 7-part infomercial “The Roosevelts – An Intimate History” (carried recently on Netflix for over a year) leads off with a historian offering the assessment: “These two Roosevelts were exceptional with a capital ‘E’, underscore.” In episode 4, at about 1 hr and 38 mins, the narrator intones:

When 17,000 mostly jobless veterans of the Great War and their families descended on Washington to demand an immediate payment of a bonus they’d been promised [sic], Hoover called out the Army. The veterans were brutally driven from the capital.

PBS omits the fact that political activists with no military experience were a significant part of the ranks during the D.C. insurrection of May to July that year. Wikipedia’s entry for Douglas MacArthur now spins this embarrassment as:

MacArthur was concerned that the demonstration had been taken over by communists and pacifists but the General Staff’s intelligence division reported that only three of the march’s 26 key leaders were communists.

Here we are encouraged to believe that the other 23 “key leaders” and their followers were marching on Washington to demand unprecedented federal spending for their own sectarian interests… but were patriotic heroes, not “socialists” of any kind. Furthermore, their entry for the Bonus Army lists the aggressors as “17,000 veterans [and] 26,000 others” under the heading of “Parties to the civil conflict” compared to “500 infantry, 500 cavalry, 6 light tanks, 800 policemen” on the side of law enforcement.

PBS also omits any objective data on injuries or deaths, since this would contradict their gruesome implications. And they omit any background on how this dubious political “promise” came about or its impossible cost of $3.6 billion (almost twice the entire $1.9 billion federal tax collections of 1932). Instead, PBS’s Roosevelt celebration shows footage of Washington cluttered with debris and people running in chaos, with sounds of gunfire interspersed with their ominous declaration of “brutal” tactics. This is how state-affiliated Public Broadcasting works.

So how “brutal” was Hoover’s crackdown on the Bonus Army? Wikipedia notes of the July 28 clash between veterans and the military: “The troops advanced with bayonets and sabers drawn under a shower of bricks and rocks, but no shots were fired. In less than four hours, they cleared the Bonus Army’s campground using tear gas.”

According to ABC’s coffee table book The Century, two vets died from initial clashes with the D.C. police, not the federal Army. Wikipedia’s entry for the Bonus Army agrees with this count, adding that 55 protestors and “at least 69 police” were injured, still whitewashing the criminal nature of the occupation.

And how did the public view Hoover’s actions of July 28, 1932, “six days after giving notice” to veteran squatters to cease their illegal occupation that had transgressed for two full months? PBS and others make it sound like Hoover’s standing up to the Bonus Army’s trespass and extortion practically cost him the election. But they fail to provide any evidence of public polls siding with the insurrectionists, as common people then held little sympathy for revolutionaries—regardless of past military experience. ABC’s book The Century, which is highly sympathetic of the marchers, gives some indication of public attitudes by the veterans’ own slogan: “Cheered in ’17, Jeered in ‘32” (page 154).

More importantly, the key figures involved with leading the federal removal of the Bonus Army fared well in their subsequent political and military careers. The ones leading the military cleanup of the 1932 veteran squatters—General Douglas MacArthur and then-Majors Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton—didn’t suffer any significant public disapproval later in life. At that time, qualities like maintaining public order and fiscal responsibility were viewed more positively than misplaced military pride.

Where FDR proved unwilling to confront union trespassing in 1936-37, Hoover had shown much greater character, vision and leadership in handling some disgruntled WW1 vets in the summer of 1932. One reason why Hoover could be confident in standing up to the Bonus Army insurrectionists was the vastly different public attitude towards the federal military at the time, an important historical shift I’ll leave for another day.

For now, suffice it to say that for all the conservative handwringing about wasteful government entitlements, few today remember that disgruntled WW1 veterans in 1932 seeking billions in tribute—for (at best) past “duty” serving U.S. political interests, or (more accurately) blindly following orders to spread international chaos—served as role models for America’s first organized looting spree at taxpayer expense.

Is There an Alternative to Endless Racial Conflict?

Which brings us to the last segment of this retrospective on approved political violence. If anything refutes the feigned left-wing shock and horror over the Jan 6 mini-riot, it’s the unqualified showers of praise those same establishment voices lavish on career extortionists and terrorists since the 1960s. But there’s much more important history to U.S. race relations than the manufactured conflict that garners almost exclusive attention these days.

I’ll add that liberal hypocrisy on political violence is less than half of the remaining “unreported” story (even considering the epidemic of Print