From the Price of Service, CT History Review:
Hearing that a contingent of Danburians was planning to join the Bonus March on a warm and partly cloudy June 7th, local representatives from the VFW, John P. O’Keefe and American Legion, J. Irving Conley, joined a crowd of 300 that had begun to gather at 8AM at City Hall Square on Danbury’s Main Street. Mayor G. Walker Morgan had allowed a flier to be posted by bonus-seeking vets on the bulletin board at City Hall, announcing their imminent departure for Washington. Reporting in the Danbury Evening News the day before stated that sixty veterans had signed up to make the trip to Washington, and that two-hundred were expected to take part. Additionally, the Salvation Army were promising to provide the would-be marchers with sandwiches and doughnuts. Atop the Civil War monument in the square, a statue of a lone Union flag bearer was a silent witness as O’Keefe, Bethel’s former State Junior Vice Commander representing the VFW, and Conley, representing the local Legion post, attempted to dissuade vets from joining the thousands then gathered in Washington and the thousands reported to be on the way. Conley in 1932 was relatively well off; he owned his house and worked selling radios and electronics. He was also a Republican who had been a hatter before he turned 16 and who had served in France with the 56th Artillery. O’Keefe, a carpenter and combat veteran of the 106th Infantry, came armed with a telegram from the present VFW State Commander, informing those assembled that joining the march would hurt every veteran’s effort to receive a bonus. All were aware that the BEF had grown into a more significant demonstration since its modest beginnings in Oregon. Over the past week, local coverage of the march had increased in scope and volume; that day, the Danbury Evening News carried its first pro-Bonus March editorial. What had a week before been written off as a minor, symbolic and disjointed demonstration had animated veteran communities around the country, and now had animated Danbury. The assembled crowd and Tuesday morning passers-by watched as O’Keefe and Conley on behalf of their veterans’ organizations tried to dissuade the estimated seventy-five or so potential Bonus marchers lined up on the green from joining the demonstration in Washington.
