On June 16, 1932, the U.S. House of Representatives echoed a Texas member’s call for cash compensation for veterans of the First World War, but a bloody disappointment was in store for the “bonus army” that had invaded Washington.
As a freshman congressman from northeast Texas, Wright Patman introduced a bill in May 1929 mandating the immediate payment of the so-called “adjusted service compensation” for the two million doughboys that fought in France. Why should the ex-soldiers, who risked their lives to “make the world safe for democracy,” have to wait until 1945 to collect the thousand-dollar IOU’s?
Patman pointed out that the railroads and war contractors had not been kept waiting. When they whined about the money allegedly lost due to wartime price controls, the Harding administration coughed up $3.5 billion, a giant giveaway that added 23,000 names to the list of millionaires.
