The Democrats’ Stalinesque trial of January 6th participants is not the first suppression of legitimate grievances by the citizens who elected them.
“Throughout June of 1932, the Bonus Army composed of approximately 15,000 World War I veterans, congregated in D.C. with their wives and children to pressure Hoover’s Republican Congress to make funds scheduled to be paid the veterans in 1945 be made available immediately. This was during the Great Depression. They moved into abandoned shacks and set up shanties along the Anaconda River. Congress voted down the bill and many veterans left for home discouraged. The rest were driven away by the U.S. Army – Douglas MacArthur leading the forced dispersal.”
“When the veterans of the Bonus Army first tried to escape, they found the bridges into Virginia barred by soldiers and the Maryland roads were blocked by State troopers. They wandered from street to street or sat in ragged groups, the men exhausted, the women with wet handkerchiefs laid over their smarting eyes, the children waking from sleep to cough and whimper from the tear gas in their lungs. The flames behind them were climbing into the night sky. About four in the morning as rain began to fall, they were allowed to cross the border into Maryland, on condition they move as rapidly as possible to another state.
The veterans were expected to disperse to their homes – but most of them had no homes, and they felt their only safety lay in sticking together. Somehow the rumor passed from group to group that the mayor of Johnstown had invited them to his city. And they cried, as they rode toward Pennsylvania or marched in the dawn twilight along the highways, “On to Johnstown!”
Their shanties and tents had been burned, their personal property destroyed, except for the few belongings they could carry on their backs; many of their families were separated, wives from husbands, children from parents. Knowing all this, they still did not appreciate the extent of their losses. Two days before, they had regarded themselves, and thought the country regarded them, as heroes trying to collect a debt long overdue. They had boasted about their months or years of service, their medals, their wounds, their patriotism in driving the Reds out of their camp; they had nailed an American flag to every hut.
When threatened with forcible eviction, they answered that no American soldier would touch them: hadn’t a detachment of Marines thrown down its arms and refused to march against them?
But last night, the United States Army infantry had driven them out like so many vermin.
“You know what this means don’t you?” a man shouted from the side of the road. “This means revolution.” – “Yes, you’re damned right it means revolution!” But 1,000 homeless veterans, or 50,000 don’t make a revolution. This threat would pass and be forgotten. No, if any revolution results from the flight of the Bonus Army, it will come from a different source, from the government itself. The army in time of peace, at the national capital, has been used against unarmed citizens – and this, with all it threatens for the future, is a revolution in itself.” – Malcolm Cowley, The Flight of the Bonus Army, August 17, 1932; Annals Vol. 15, p. 148
My grandmother told me when Grandpa heard of it, he burned his Big Red One doughboy uniform and threw his medals (including a Purple Heart) in the Arkansas River.
After January 6th, I feel like doing the same.
