Following Freedom from Fear, I have been digging a little deeper into Depression/New Deal history. I thank C-SPAN for recording and streaming an excellent series of discussions at the Roosevelt Presidential Library. The most interesting of these talks was Stephen Ortiz, who has recently written Beyond the Bonus March and the GI Bill (NYU, 2009). Ortiz's work is not very groundbreaking but offers some interesting questions and thought exercises. Why, Ortiz asks, is Franklin D. Roosevelt's opposition to Bonus bills not more widely recognized?
(Note: although there were a number of bills in Congress to allow World War I veterans to immediately receive service certificate payment - some of which differed in various details - I am using the term "Bonus Bill" to refer to all of them generally.)
This question has both merits and flaws. Of course, Herbert Hoover's reaction to the popularly-supported Bonus March (and General Douglas MacArthur's excessive use of force) is still decried to this day. Because that incident helped deliver the 1932 election to Roosevelt, it is easy to assume that FDR supported the Bonus Army's demand for early benefit payments.
That assumption, of course, would be wrong, but let us not set up a straw man. Is anyone actually making the assumption? Any close reading of 1930s political history should at least gloss over FDR's views in favor of balanced budgets and opposition to advanced veterans' payments. Ortiz is most interesting when he asks, more precisely, why the big news story of 1935-36 (the debate, veto, and passage of the Adjusted Compensation Payment Act) is hardly noted in today's history. He cites large, front-page newspaper headlines, a Madison Square Garden rally, and a joint session of Congress that was presided over by the president himself (a unique historical event). There is clearly a disconnect between the public's interest in the Bonus issue at the time and historians' interest in the issue today.
I have shared this experience during my historical research in college. While studying 1970s Baltimore, I browsed newspaper headlines about rallies, strikes, and lawsuits that were - and are - historically significant but not a part of the big-picture history of the era that has emerged. There is clearly something to be said about the forgetting of major controversies over the passage of time.
Nonetheless, I have quibbles about Ortiz's question. I think that the question of FDR's 'forgotten' Bonus Bill veto can be resolved with a simple point: the veto was easily overridden. It was a moot point. On top of that, it does not appear to me that FDR's opposition was really that inconsistent with his program. Early bonus payments - like the Share the Wealth or Townsend programs FDR also opposed - were massive expenditures. Social Security was ostensibly contributory, and Harold Ickes' budgets were tightly run. I wonder, too, if his defeat here actually foreshadows the difficult relationship he had with Congress in the late 1930s - a relationship widely acknowledged in New Deal history.
Additionally, I object to the idea that the Bonus March was a watershed in veterans' interest group politics. Ortiz does acknowledge that the Grand Army of the Republic set a precedent for these politics but inexplicably writes off the political centrality of Civil War veterans. It does not just suffice to cite Blight's Race and Reunion in this regard; I must point out that Civil War pensions constituted an enormous government expenditure, entitlement program, and political interest.
In spite of all of my objections, Stephen Ortiz's work is genuinely stimulating. The question of the Bonus Bill ties into several different topics and questions about the Depression and New Deal: Hoover's similarities and differences with FDR; the question of the balanced budget; inflationary policies; silver; FDR's conflicts with Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and, at times, congressional Democrats. New Deal history can, at times, be an endless list of events, legislation, and programs. The topic of veterans' benefits bisects so many issues that it is quite unique. Without reading the book, though, I wonder if it actually runs deeper that Stephen Ortiz even acknowledges.
