Bonus Army

Washington, D.C., 1932. Shacks built by the Bonus Army on the Anacostia flats burn after troops drove the marchers out, with the dome of the Capitol rising through the smoke behind them. The marchers were World War I veterans asking for early payment of a bonus Congress had voted them in 1924, and the Army cleared them on July 28, 1932. Accounts still differ on whether soldiers or veterans set the fires. A government turning on its own veterans, in sight of Congress, became one of the defining images of the Hoover years.