Mobilization through History: A Closer Look at the Bonus Army

and Occupy Movement

Kelly Kern

Nathalie Davidson

The Bonus Army

The Occupy Movement

Research Questions

• Our overall question asks what are the similarities and differences between these comparable movements?  

• Our sub-questions being: how is the veteran identity used in the Bonus Army and in Occupy? How is the veteran identity portrayed in movement produced media?  

• How does the media (mostly newspapers) frame veterans specifically within each movement?  

• How are camps used as a form of protest and how does the media frame this tactic?

Research Methods

• Textual & Video Analysis • Focusing on articles from the 1930s and from the 2010s• Focusing on The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the

Washington Post/Times. To randomize our sample we chose every third article in all of our searches.

• For the Bonus Army we will search “Bonus Army” in SuperSearch, a Wellesley College library resource, (restricting the results to newspaper articles.)

• For Occupy we will search “Occupy Camps.”• To research the veteran identity, we will be focusing only on articles

that include the word “veteran” in the headline. • In researching veteran framing in the Occupy movement, we will

also be looking at the Occupy Marine website and facebook page.

Bonus Army Veteran Identity

Occupy Veteran Identity

Camps in the Bonus Army

Occupy Movement Camps

Conclusion