When WWI veterans came to Washington DC, 90 years ago...
It was the Depression, and their plea to Congress was to pay their war bonuses early. They wanted them NOW so they could survive. They came from all over the country to form the Bonus Army.
They built encampments, families came too, and they surrounded Congress. For months.
They slept in parks, condemned buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a shanty town in Anacostia. They weren't going home till Congress voted to pay them their bonus.
They organized as the BEF, the Bonus Expeditionary Force, reminding all of their war service in Europe as the American Expeditionary Forces.
By the end of May, 1932, there were 10,000. That grew to 43,000 by July. They were well led and organized. Some communists joined their ranks, which led President Hoover and others to focus on their fears of radical elements.
As a result of daily protests outside the Capitol in June and July, the House voted to pay their bonuses.
But the Senate had their own fiscal concerns and voted the House bill down in late July - and then went home for recess. That left the President to deal with the BEF.
General MacArthur, his aid Eisenhower, and Patton all oversaw the cavalry with drawn sabers, infantrymen, and tanks dispersing tear gas and smoke bombs and torching the shantytowns. Here's a contemporaneous TIME magazine account, worth reading to get more of the other side's thinking.
Hoover loses, FDR wins. His strategy: send in Eleanor
FDR also opposed paying the bonuses, but when the vets returned the next year, he set up a special camp for them, provided three meals a day, transportation to and from the capital, and entertainment.
Eleanor visited the site unaccompanied. She lunched with the men, listened to their songs, reminisced about her own memories of the troops going off to the Great War and then welcoming them home. She suggested letting them join the new Civilian Conservation Corps which FDR later made happen. But not until 1936, did Congress authorize the immediate payment of $2 billion in bonuses - and then overrode Roosevelt's veto.