The US Senator from California called the 1932 attack on the Bonus Army ‘one of the blackest pages in our history.’ Noting that the veterans had been hailed as heroes and saviors only a decade earlier, Johnson said that ‘The president sent against these men, emaciated from hunger, scantily clad, unarmed, the troops of the United States army. Tanks, tear-bombs, all of the weapons of modern warfare were directed against those who had borne the arms of the republic.’