Perspiring on the raw-wood platform in the broiling heat of a July day in
Washington, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, retired, took off his
coat, rolled up his sleeves, and opened his collar.  His violent deep-set eyes
surveyed ten thousand faces upturned among the lean-tos, shanties, and tents
on Anacostia Flats.
 Bums, riffraff, drifters, and troublemakers-those were some of the
descriptions being applied to the Bonus Army.  Many of the ragged veterans
who had marched on the Capital had been sleeping in doorways and under
bridges, part of the vast army of twelve million unemployed.  Some were the
same men who had fought under Smedley Butler in the Spanish-American
War, the Philippines campaign, the Boxer Rebellion, the Caribbean
interventions, the Chinese intervention of 1927-1928, and World War I.
 Butler had come to Washington in 1932 at the urging of James Van
Zandt, head of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, to lend moral support to
veterans at a crucial moment.  Congress had just voted down the Patman
Bonus Bill to pay veterans the two-billion-dollar bonus promised them in
bonus certificates payable in 1945.  Bonus Army Commander Walter W.
Waters, a former army sergeant, and other leaders feared that their
discouraged followers would now give up and return home.
 When Waters introduced Smedley Butler to the huge crowd of
veterans gathered along the Anacostia River to hear him, he was greeted
with an enthusiastic roar of acclaim that echoed through Washington like
thunder.  They all knew Old Gimlet Eye, one of the most colorful generals
who had ever led troops