ALARM BELLS AGAIN, JUST LIKE 1932

rat

Pixabay.com

As of  Fri day the 13th, we heard of a rat alert. Uncleanliness and havoc in the camps.

Wasn’t that the war cry in 1932? Eighty years gone, the Bonus Marchers, routed from
their improvised “Hoovervilles.” Can’t park your carcass on Federal land, it was said.

In rode the White Knight, General Douglas Macarthur, with a troop of cavalry.

MacArthur’s adjutant Dwight D. Eisenhower, was close at hand. Pistol cocked and ready.

Yet Ike never fired his weapon, it was reported at the time.

Tanks and ‘dozers rode over the tar paper shacks. Fire and choking pitchy smoke filled the air.

There was an alternate site then, too, as now. Folks with ‘ideas’ and crude printing presses squatted in crum- bling Victorian ttheatres and rooming houses, condemned for the gleaming Greco-Roman ‘Triangle’ soon to come. Is our own era kinder and gentler. For “sanitary reasons, Mayor Gray proposes to move the McPherson ‘movement’ over to the more manageable Freedom Plaza, where there might be ‘air to spare’ between the tiers of yurts and tents where calmer heads philosophize aloud.

When the hungry, angry Bonus Army was dispersed by the U.S. Army in ’32, it was shades of our
contemporary Katrina hegira, as moms and children were bussed and auto-ed out west to places not their homes, and untold platoons of their men were shipped off in open slat freight cars further
still. This forced exodus helped fuel the massive unfocused streaming of “Hoboes” across the vastness of America, as portrayed graphically in William Wellman’s wrenching opus “Wild Boys of the Road(1934)”.

The marchers weren’t paid their due from the First World War until after the Second World War.

How long from their dispersal will today’s “Occupiers” receive their just satisfaction?


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