Based on extensive research, this highly praised history recounts the 1932 march on Washington by 15,000 World War I veterans and the protest's role in the transformation of American society. "Recommended." — Library Journal.

In the summer of 1932, General Douglas MacArthur led regular United States Army troops into the streets of Washington, D.C. to evict more than ten thousand veterans of the Great War from the streets of Washington. This is the story of those veterans, told by one of their number. Walter W. Waters, a World War I Army sergeant, set out from Portland, Oregon with 300 other veterans in 1932 to petition Congress for early payment of the bonus promised to veterans of the World War. With the Great Depression at its height, these men crossed the county on freight trains, then lived in shacks and abandoned buildings in Washington while seeking to improve their circumstances. This is their story, told by one of their own.

The period between World Wars I and II was a time of turbulent political change, with suffragists, labor radicals, demagogues, and other voices clamoring to be heard. One group of activists that has yet to be closely examined by historians is World War I veterans. Mining the papers of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion (AL), Stephen R. Ortiz reveals that veterans actively organized in the years following the war to claim state benefits (such as pensions and bonuses), and strove to articulate a role for themselves as a distinct political bloc during the New Deal era. Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill is unique in its treatment of World War I veterans as significant political actors during the interwar period. Ortiz’s study reinterprets the political origins of the "Second" New Deal and Roosevelt’s electoral triumph of 1936, adding depth not only to our understanding of these events and the political climate surrounding them, but to common perceptions of veterans and their organizations. In describing veteran politics and the competitive dynamics between the AL and the VFW, Ortiz details the rise of organized veterans as a powerful interest group in modern American politics.

“Who Murdered the Vets?” writer Ernest Hemingway demanded in an impassioned article about the deaths of hundreds of former soldiers. Their fate came as part of the larger and often overlooked story of veterans of the Great War and their deplorable treatment by the government they once served. Three years earlier, under orders from President Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur led the U.S. military through the streets of the nation’s capital against an encampment of veterans and their families. The vets were suffering the ravages of the Great Depression and seeking an early payment of promised war bonuses. Tanks, troops, and cavalry burned down tents and leveled campsites in a savage and lethal effort to disperse the protesters, resulting in the murder of several demonstrators. The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt subsequently shipped the vets to distant work camps in the Florida Keys, where they were housed in flimsy tent cities that fell prey to a hurricane of which the authorities had been given ample warning. It was in reaction to the hundreds of bodies left in the storm’s wake that Hemingway penned his provocative words. The War Against the Vets is the first book about the Bonus Army to describe in detail the political battles that threatened to tear the country apart, as well as the scandalous treatment of the World War I vets.