The Bonus Army

 

In the spring of 1932 thousands of unemployed ex-servicemen poured into Washington, the nation’s capital. They wanted the government to give them some bonus payments that it owed them from the war years. The newspapers called them the “bonus army.”

The men of the bonus army were determined to stay in Washington until the President did something to help them. They set up a camp of rough shelters and huts on the edge of the city. Similar camps could be found on rubbish dumps outside every large American city by this time. The homeless people who lived in them named their camps “Hoovervilles,” after the President.

This gathering of desperate men alarmed President Hoover. He ordered soldiers and the police to burn their camp and drive them out of Washington. As the smoke billowed up from the burning huts of the bonus army, a government spokesman defended Hoover's decision. He said that in the circumstances “only two courses were left open to the President” – that is, that the President could do only one of two things:” One was to surrender the government to the mob. The other was to uphold law and order and suppress [crush] the mob.”

An anonymous poet took a different view of what had happened:

 

Only two courses were open,

As anyone can see:

To vindicate law and order

Or yield to anarchy.

Granted! – the Chiefs of Government

Cannot tolerate mobs –

But isn’t it strange you never thought

Of giving the workless jobs?

 

Only two courses were open –

When men who had fought for you

Starved in the streets of our cities,

Finding no work to do –

When in the richest of the countries

Babies wept unfed –

Strange it never occurred to you

To give the hungry bread!

 

Despite women’s strive for independence and equality in rights there are not many of them in the spheres of life where men rule. Eleanor Roosevelt was one of them. Margaret Thatcher was another. She was a controversial figure, “the longest serving Prime Minister of the twentieth century.

Her style and her views appealed to many British people who had lost confidence in the welfare state and in the direction the nation had taken. In some ways she was the first genuine leader the nation had had since Churchill, the politician on whom she consciously modeled herself. In spite of the fact that over half the nation disagreed with her policies, they were unable to vote her out of office.”

Read the text about Margaret Thatcher and decide which of these sentences suit the blanks in the text. Explain your choice.

(A) Among her first fights: a struggle against Britain's out-of-control trade unions, which had destroyed three governments in succession.

(B) Thatcher warmly encouraged Reagan to rearm and thereby bring Russia to the negotiating table.

(C) He too began to reverse the Ratchet Effect in the U.S. by effective deregulation, tax cutting and opening up wider market opportunities for free enterprise.

(D) The daughter of a Grantham shopkeeper, she studied on scholarship, worked her way to Oxford and took two degrees, in chemistry and law.

(E) By 1980, everyone knew the answer: Thatcher governs.

(F) British Steel, which lost more than a billion pounds in its final years as a state concern, became the largest steel company in Europe.

(G) Even left-oriented countries, which scorned the notion of privatization, began to reduce their public sector on the sly.

(H) The world enters the 21st century and the 3rd millennium a wiser place, owing in no small part to the daughter of a small shopkeeper, who proved that nothing is more effective than willpower allied to a few clear, simple and workable ideas.

(I) She combined a flamboyant willpower with evident femininity.

(J) Her case is awesome testimony to the importance of sheer chance in history.

 

Margaret Thatcher
Champion of free minds and markets, she helped topple the welfare state and make the world safer for capitalism
By PAUL JOHNSON

Monday, April 13, 1998
She was the catalyst who set in motion a series of interconnected events that gave a revolutionary twist to the century's last two decades and helped mankind end the millennium on a note of hope and confidence. The triumph of capitalism, the almost universal acceptance of the market as indispensable to prosperity, the collapse of Soviet imperialism, the downsizing of the state on nearly every continent and in almost every country in the world — Margaret Thatcher played a part in all those transformations, and it is not easy to see how any would have occurred without her.

Born in 1925, Margaret Hilda Roberts was an enormously industrious girl. (1) Her fascination with politics led her into Parliament at age 34, when she argued her way into one of the best Tory seats in the country, Finchley in north London. Her quick mind (and faster mouth) led her up through the Tory ranks, and by age 44 she got settled into the "statutory woman's" place in the Cabinet as Education Minister, and that looked like the summit of her career. But Thatcher was, and is, notoriously lucky. (2) In 1975 she challenged Edward Heath for the Tory leadership simply because the candidate of the party's right wing abandoned the contest at the last minute. Thatcher stepped into the breach. When she went into Heath's office to tell him her decision, he did not even bother to look up. "You'll lose," he said. "Good day to you."

But as Victor Hugo put it, nothing is so powerful as "an idea whose time has come." And by the mid-'70s enough Tories were fed up with Heath and "the Ratchet Effect" — the way in which each statist advance was accepted by the Conservatives and then became a platform for a further statist advance.

She chose her issues carefully — and, it emerged, luckily. The legal duels she took on early in her tenure as Prime Minister sounded the themes that made her an enduring leader: open markets, vigorous debate and loyal alliances. (3)Thatcher turned the nation's anti-union feeling into a handsome parliamentary majority and a mandate to restrict union privileges by a series of laws that effectively ended Britain's trade-union problem once and for all. "Who governs Britain?" she famously asked as unions struggled for power. (4)

Once the union citadel had been stormed, Thatcher quickly discovered that every area of the economy was open to judicious reform. Even as the rest of Europe toyed with socialism and state ownership, she set about privatizing the nationalized industries, which had been hitherto sacrosanct, no matter how inefficient. It worked. British Airways, an embarrassingly slovenly national carrier that very seldom showed a profit, was privatized and transformed into one of the world's best and most profitable airlines. (5)

By the mid-1980s, privatization was a new term in world government, and by the end of the decade more than 50 countries, on almost every continent, had set in motion privatization programs, floating loss-making public companies on the stock markets and in most cases transforming them into successful private-enterprise firms. (6) Governments sent administrative and legal teams to Britain to study how it was done. It was perhaps Britain's biggest contribution to practical economics in the world since J.M. Keynes invented "Keynesianism," or even Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations.

But Thatcher became a world figure for more than just her politics. (7) It attracted universal attention, especially after she led Britain to a spectacular military victory over Argentina in 1982. She understood that politicians had to give military people clear orders about ends, then leave them to get on with the means. Still, she could not bear to lose men, ships or planes. "That's why we have extra ships and planes," the admirals had to tell her, "to make good the losses." Fidelity, like courage, loyalty and perseverance, were cardinal virtues to her, which she possessed in the highest degree. People from all over the world began to look at her methods and achievements closely, and to seek to imitate them.

One of her earliest admirers was Ronald Reagan, who achieved power 18 months after she did. (8) Reagan liked to listen to Thatcher's various lectures on the virtues of the market or the minimal state. "I'll remember that, Margaret," he said. She listened carefully to his jokes, tried to get the point and laughed in the right places.

They turned their mutual affection into a potent foreign policy partnership. With Reagan and Thatcher in power, the application of judicious pressure on the Soviet state to encourage it to reform or abolish itself, or to implode, became an admissible policy. (9) She shared his view that Moscow ruled an "evil empire," and the sooner it was dismantled the better. Together with Reagan she pushed Mikhail Gorbachev to pursue his perestroika policy to its limits and so fatally to undermine the self-confidence of the Soviet elite.

Historians will argue hotly about the precise role played by the various actors who brought about the end of Soviet communism. But it is already clear that Thatcher has an important place in this huge event.

It was the beginning of a new historical epoch. All the forces that had made the 20th century such a violent disappointment to idealists--totalitarianism, the gigantic state, the crushing of individual choice and initiative--were publicly and spectacularly defeated. Ascendant instead were the values that Thatcher had supported in the face of sometimes spectacular opposition: free markets and free minds. (10)

Vocabulary:

set in motion – приводить в действие

indispensable - необходимый

downsizing - уменьшение

fascination – увлечение политикой

statutory - законный

summit of smb’s career – вершина, предел карьеры

she was notoriously lucky – Ей незаслуженно повезло

awesome testimony – удивительное доказательство

sheer chance – абсолютная случайность

step into the breach – занять чье-либо место

be fed up with smth. – быть сытым по горло чем-либо

emerge - появляться

tenure – пребывание в должности

vigorous debate – оживленное обсуждение

loyal alliances – надежные союзы

mandate – наказ избирателей

to toy with smth. – забавляться с чем-либо

hitherto – до сих пор

sacrosanct - неприкосновенный

slovenly - небрежный

float a company on the stock market – пускать компанию на продажу на фондовой бирже

on the sly - тайком

Keynesianism - кейнсианство (философские, идеологические и аналитические взгляды большинства американских экономистов, а также разделяемые ими теории занятости и практических путей стабилизации экономики)

flamboyant - яркий

willpower – сила воли

to make good the losses – покрыть потери

fidelity – верность

perseverance – настойчивость, упорство

to implode – взрывать(-ся)

admissible – допустимый, приемлемый

to rearm – перевооружать

to dismantle – разоружать

to undermine – подрывать

ascendant – господствующий