A War Between the Rich and the Poor

IN 1932, THOUSANDS OF DIRTY, DETERMINED men walked into Washington D.C. and camped out. They were world War One veterans, and many of them had walked across the entire country. They were hungry and broke, suffering from the great depression, and they had come to collect the five hundred dollar bonus the government had promised to pay them in 1945. They needed it now. They stayed the summer, occupying abandoned buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue and in nearby neighborhoods. As the weeks passed, Washington's aristocracy got tired of their being there. They were unsightly... President Hoover grew frustrated, and labeled these war heroes "communists", "troublemakers". agitators". he had no intention of meeting their demand. Holed up in the white House, hoover had no idea what to do, as the bonus army waited. finally, something had to be done. Hoover felt the pressure. Douglas McArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George S. Patton led a military unit which drove the bonus army out of town, killing several of them. Hoover's presidential opponent in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt, remarked to his wife that he would not even need to bother to campaign for the presidency; Hoover had handed it to him. Riding in the back of a limo was seven year old gore Vidal, sitting next to his grandfather, Thomas gore, the first ever senator from the new state of Oklahoma. Senator gore was blind, and Vidal's job was to assist his grandfather. According, his grandfather, a Republican, didn't believe in giving anything to anybody, ever. He later remembered rocks and tomatoes being thrown at the car, and realizing, for the first time, that in America, a war between the rich and the poor was quite possible. Fast forward eighty five years. Gore Vidal has been dead a few years, after a successful career as a writer. Everybody has a smart phone, even poor folks, who are poor, we are told, because they are not smart enough, don't work hard enough. Fair enough. In 2017, one half of one percent of the American people own twenty five percent of the wealth, and ten percent of the American people do not know if they can afford supper. Everybody seems angry, at something or other. if you haven't noticed, you haven't been paying attention. We are stressed, medicated, angry, and we vaguely sense that things are not right, that we are going nowhere. A war between the rich and the poor? never in a million years. Not in this country. how could the American people ever have any sort of war among themselves? maybe not in a million years. maybe in five, or maybe in ten.