The veteran’s compensation law enacted by Congress over Calvin Coolidge’s veto in 1924 allowed for $5.00 per everyday the veteran (under the rank of Major) served abroad in WWI and $1.00 per day while serving stateside up to $625.00 to be paid out in 1945. With compound interest, the bond (in lieu of cash) would be worth an average of about $1,000.00 per veteran. But the national economic circumstances of 1932 encouraged the vets to ask congress for an early payout—at the 1932 value of the bonds. That is what rankled Washington so. The vets thought it was fair, anyway.
But the story of the Bonus March didn’t end with the Washington debacle.
Many people at the time said that Hoover’s reaction to the 15,000 Bonus Marchers in Washington put Roosevelt in the Whitehouse. Under the Roosevelt administration’s new Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), many of the former Bonus Marchers signed up for work on a huge new WPA construction project to extend US Route 1 (which ran from Fort Kent, Maine and terminated in Miami) from its southern terminus in Miami 130 miles to the city of Key West alongside Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railroad.
Three years after the March on Washington over 400 of these veterans, many claiming to be former Bonus Marchers, were among the estimated 1,000 workers and residents in work camps along the string of islands between Miami and Key West on Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys. On Labor Day, September 2, 1935 people watched with sickening apprehension as winds rose and the barometers plunged to 26.35 inches (892 mbar) – the lowest sea-level reading ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. By the time the storm hit the Keys at Islamorada the winds were near 200mph by modern estimates.
“At 8:20 that evening a rescue team – 11 (railroad) cars hastily sent from Miami and already loaded with refugees – reached Islamorada, on the Upper Matecumbe Key. Winds by then screamed at nearly 200 miles an hour (Cat. 5). The engineer, backing up to avoid a time-consuming turn-around, was blinded by waves surging across the track. At first he missed the little station where hundreds more (workers) waited.
“He pulled forward and people struggled toward the cars. Then a monstrous wave – survivors estimated it at 20 feet high – smashed in from the sea, engulfing the fleeing islanders and sweeping the cars from the track.
“Next morning, the Keys began counting their dead. Roughly half the bodies found were those of construction workers, victims of the Great Depression who were helping to build a highway parallel to the railway. Some 41 miles of the railroad had been smashed into a jumble of twisted rails and washed-out roadbed, drowning hundreds of World War I veterans who had gone down to pick up Depression wages of $30 a month working on the federal highway.”
—Henry Flagler, by David Leon Chandler, 1986, MacMillan Publishing, NY; p. 267.
It is impossible to tally the final count of the dead. At the time, the count was 408, 259 of them veterans. But for more than a decade after the Labor Day Hurricane, the bleached skeletal remains of victims were found suspended in the mangroves, buttonwood and cypress hammock from Matecumbe along the southern part of the Everglades to Cape Sable on the Southwest coast of Florida.
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Composing members:
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