The Bonus Marchers' camp outside Washington D.C.
In Chapter 9 Meyer opens with the example of the Bonus Marchers of 1932, which I find particularly interesting being a member of Army ROTC. The basic idea behind the Bonus Marchers was for WWI veterans march to Washington D.C. and persuade the government to give them their monetary bonus for serving in the war immediately, instead of waiting till 1945, when it was originally scheduled to be paid. Their “Bonus Bill” was shot down in 1932, but in 1933 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president, they returned to protest again. Finally, by 1936 the Bonus Marchers’ continual protest was rewarded as Roosevelt agreed to pay the bonus ahead of schedule.
There are two things that I’d like to highlight in this story. First, that protest can affect policy. This is the theme of this chapter in looking at how exactly this happens. Second, this is an example of a social movement that fully achieved their goal. Unlike many of the social movements that we’ve looked at so far, the Bonus Marchers actually accomplished what they set out to do, and when they finished, they disbanded and went home. This will become important later on in this post.
Let’s look at the first topic, how exactly can protests affect policy? Meyer seems to point to a few different reasons, all leading up to the fact that in order to change policy, social movements have to go through the government in order to get their reforms enacted. Meyer talks about how the Bonus Marchers had contacts in government, and how they had their “Bonus Bill” heard in congress. But ultimately, everything has to go through government. Protests serve to gain attention, to spread the concerns to a wider audience, and then, once enough people are upset, the politicians have to do something about it.
Now why does this matter? What do we care that hundreds of people are camping out in Washington D.C. for a bonus that they’ll get paid eventually anyway? Meyer says that “When a mobilized effort demonstrates strength and commitment, it can make the current policy course untenable or make long-simmering ideas appear suddenly viable” (Meyer, 172). When enough people are upset it looks poorly for those in command. President Hoover had to explain why he didn’t favor helping the veterans when there was an unemployment problem already. The key seems to be numbers and persistence.
Finally, another way that I thought was key to this issue, and wasn’t really talked about very much in the chapter, was the fact that the Bonus Marchers had an achievable goal. It seems common sense that if you want to achieve your goal, you want to make your goal achievable. This is how I would critique some of the movements that just strive for “social equality” or to even out the wage dispersion like OWS wants. How is one ever going to fully achieve social equality? Or how can we ever make everyone have exactly equal pay? It just seems that sometimes smaller goals can get heard and made into policy more than the larger ones.
I’ve said a lot in this post that was hopefully provocative in some way. If you agree or disagree, please let me know by commenting. Thanks!
I liked your post, Josiah. I definitely agree with what you are saying about the whole “tangible goal” idea that Meyers does not mention. I find any movement that does not have a goal in mind will have a difficult time achieving what they set out to do. While I read this chapter, I thought about the Civil Rights Movement and how leaders like Ella Baker and MLK both had different styles of achieving their goals, but were both fighting for similar, if not the same reasons. I think within the same movement you can have different methodologies but without the same goals and a goal that is tangible, not much if anything can come of the social movement in terms of having a true effect on the political policies.
YES!!! Thank you Josiah for bringing in that comment about OWS. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was about OWS that irked me but you figured it out for me. Although I consider myself a hopeful person, I have definitely been shaped into a realist. OWS has such high and unattainable goals that I don’t understand why they are not focusing more of their time on issues they can actually change. Although Meyer did not outright mention the importance of a social movement having tangible goals, I believe he did make that point through the examples he gave in Chapter 9. Meyer acknowledged the success of the Bonus March because the people went after an issue they knew they could actually effect. Another reason why I think OWS has not been successful is because they do not have a unified policy of what it is they want to accomplish. Meyer examines the importance yet complexity of public policy on page 169. He then goes on to talk about how policy shapes the way people look at a movement, and the lack of policy as in the OWS case, could explain why so many people (or at least me) are wary of the whole movement.
Not to just jump on the band wagon here, but I also totally agree with you. I really liked when said “if you want to achieve your goal then you must make your goal achieveable”. Even though social movements may have broad aspirations, it’s necessary to have concrete ideas as how to get there in order to make progress.
After our class discussion, I do agree that smaller, more tangible goals are excellent steps in the direction of reaching the larger goals. It is ineffective for a movement to have a vague campaign with no practical means to achieve their mission, and I agree that OWS seems to be operating like this.
When you said “How are we ever going to achieve social equality?” it makes me think of the big problem with societal progress. When one group’s concerns are met, it usually detracts from the interests of another group. For instance, in welfare, if we want to give to the poor and equalize wealth, that means that money is taken from the richest group. In every situation, where there are winners there must be losers. I think people need to sacrifice their own selfish desires to focus on the long term and what policies may be better for the whole of our nation.
While I totally agree with what everyone has said to this point I feel that our blog needs a little more controversy, so I will try to play the role of devil’s advocate here. We discussed in class on Wednesday how “winning” is not always the best thing for a social movement due the complacency it creates. If a movement believes it has won the members will take their foot of the gas and demobilize, ultimately causing the movement to loose all steam that it worked so hard to create. We all, myself included, have criticized OWS for not having obtainable goals, but maybe their broad and seemingly unobtainable goal of social equality will ultimately keep the movement alive and fighting. Achieving economic and social equality is a goal comparable to world peace in that it most likely will never be achieved. That being said, as Josiah pointed out in class, although one cannot achieve world peace one can stop the violence in one particular village. In this case, as long as the goal for this specific individual is world peace and not something obtainable like stopping violence in one area, he or she will not stop fighting for the cause. Using this theory for OWS, if the goal of the movement remains broad than the movement will not die down when one small victory for the movement is achieved. Therefore, maybe it can be beneficial for the movement to have the broad, almost unobtainable goal of social equality because it will prevent the movement from “winning” and dying down.
Like everyone else, I thought that your blog post was very good. I’m not sure that I 100% agree with your statement that everything has to go through the government. Not every social movement’s goal is to change policy, but if that is the purpose then I agree with you. I like the way you clearly say that protests serve the function of drawing attention to the movement and gaining more followers. Then, hopefully politicians will see that people are unhappy which will promote them to take action. In another class that I am taking this semester, we are talking about how politicians’ main focus is to maximize the votes for them. When they see a huge crowd of people together that are upset, it obviously does not look good for them. It is then in their favor to do something about the issue, or else risk losing votes.
Two other things in your post that I thought were important were when you said that numbers and persistence are key, and that a movement needs to have achievable goals. I think that these concepts hold for pretty much any social movement that I can think of. The purpose of having smaller achievable goals, though, is to hopefully work towards a larger, more difficult goal in most cases. This was not the case for the Bonus Marchers since they only really had one small goal, but I think that this is the exception rather than the norm.
Ethan, I like your comment and appreciate you playing Devil’s advocate. Even so, I’d like to develop some of the arguments/points that you made a little further. I think it’s important to distinguish between different types of “winning” because otherwise your point about it making people complacent wouldn’t be quite true. The Bonus Marchers “won” and it didn’t create complacency, it created satisfaction because there was nothing left for them to do, as pointed out in my post. So I think there’s a difference between winning the smaller goals of an organization, and winning the overall goal.
But I’d also like to come at the complacency argument from a different angle as well. Let’s look at the other side of this argument, where OWS has the one big overarching goal, which is supposed to defeat complacency and continue to urge people on to (seemingly) perpetual activism. So what about despondency? If an organization does not win the little goals, then the people in the movement will begin to depressed and think that they’re wasting their time, at least I would. So is there a balance between winning the small goals and growing complacent, and not winning them and growing despondent? It’s mainly for this reason that I think smaller, more reasonable/obtainable goals are better as the overarching goal. That way you win the small goal, and become even more motivated because you saw what you did actually producing a favorable outcome. Thoughts?