Biography
Walter F. Eicker was a 32-year-old former Marine, Detroit auto worker, and secretary of the Bonus Army’s rank-and-file committee. Washington police arrested him on July 21, 1932 after veterans tried to picket the White House for immediate payment of their service bonus. He was freed after two days under mass pressure, then arrested again on July 25 during another White House demonstration. The reviewed records do not establish the endpoint of the second detention.
The November 8, 1932 Kalamazoo report published November 9 identifies Eicker as a Workers Ex-Servicemen’s League organizer arrested by police commissioner Chapman and handed to a gang at midnight. It alleges that he was kicked and thrown into a creek outside the city. The Michigan veteran-organizing context matches this existing Eicker record. This is a separate Kalamazoo episode from his July Washington arrests, without an exact arrest day, a measured jail interval or an assumption that private assault time was time in prison. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1932/v09-n268-NY-nov-09-1932-DW-LOC.pdf#page=2
Page 3 lists Eicker with Levin, Pace and Johnson for an August 2 hearing on parading without a permit and disorderly conduct during the Bonus Army prosecutions. This supplies contemporaneous charge and defense context for the already recorded Washington detentions; it does not establish an additional arrest or the endpoint of the July 25 confinement. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1932/v09-n182-NY-aug-01-1932-DW-LOC.pdf#page=3
Labor Defender, August 1932, printed page 153 (PDF page 14): The Bonus Army Digs In reports rank-and-file leaders Pace, Eicker and surname-only Johnson arrested while marching to picket Hoover, and released after two days following veterans' pressure. It supplies no exact date for that episode. This undated release account does not override the separately dated later July 25 detention and subsequent continued custody, nor establish that all Bonus Army prisoners had been freed. The report of twenty-five unnamed marines punished for refusing action is explicitly a circulating story, not an identified roster. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1932/v08n08-aug-1932-LD.pdf
