Even during the Depression Washington was visited by swarms of tourists, but they did not land at Washington National Airport, through which would pass in 1970 a total of 24,000 passengers a day. Those frantic acres then lay silent under the waters of the Potomac. Air travel was rare. The labor market being what it was, airlines could require that every stewardess be a registered nurse, but passenger planes, usually trimotor Fords, never flew at night or in bad weather. There were no coast-to-coast flights. The average airliner speed was 155 mph. By changing planes, one man crossed the country in eighteen hours; his picture was in all the papers. Although Washington had a field—Hoover Airport, on the Virginia side of what is now the Fourteenth Street Bridge (then called Highway Bridge)—it was used by only 250 passengers a day. The vast majority of travelers, eleven million of them each year, arrived at Union Station. The glorious reign of the steam engine was at the height of its Indian summer. There were 20,000 locomotives snuffling across the countryside (as compared to fewer than 300 in 1970), and the long, plaintive wail of the steam whistle stirred restless young men all over America. Fifteen-year-old John F. Kennedy heard it at the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut; Lyndon Johnson, then a teacher of public speaking, heard it in Houston; and in Whittier, California, a college student named Richard M. Nixon listened in the night, wondering what lay across the eastern horizon and what Washington, D.C., was like.
What did those who came see? To begin with, they looked at the train station. Union Station had become the first mass of masonry erected under the plan for a metropolis of classical buildings, and its imperial facade together with the Capitol dominated the city. The Capitol itself stood much as it does now, facing eastward, a tribute to one architect’s belief in which direction the city would grow. Because the long expansion of presidential power had not begun, Congress was Washington’s focal point, and tourists, like the BEF, made the Hill their first stop. For some it was also the last; the White House discouraged visitors, and there weren’t many other attractions. There were the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, with its new elevator (though youngsters still felt challenged by the 898 steps up). The Botanical Gardens were open; so was the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Smithsonian Institution was popular in these months after the successful landing of Juan de la Cierva’s Autogiro, a prototype of the helicopter, on the museum’s lawn. If you liked drawbridges, there was the Arlington Memorial Bridge, which had been dedicated by President Hoover in January. Finally, there were a few—a very few—government office buildings: the Department of Agriculture on C Street, the old Interior Building on Eighteenth Street, the Civil Service Building on Seventh Street, and, bordering the Ellipse, the titanic Commerce Department Building, all of it under an eight-acre roof, erected in the 1920s by Secretary of Commerce Hoover as a shrine to American business.
What is most striking about 1932 Washington is the absence of so many landmarks which have since become familiar. There was no Jefferson Memorial, no Marine Corps Memorial, and no Supreme Court Building; the judges sat in the Capitol between the Senate and the House, almost directly under the Rotunda. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Washington Cathedral were under construction, the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in the planning stage. Constitution Avenue, as we know it, did not exist. It was merely an extension of B Street. The long, clear mall could be found only in blueprints; the ground that summer was just another Washington park, thick with trees, crisscrossed by streets, and marred here and there by temporary World War buildings which had never been removed. Except for the Commerce Building, the Federal Triangle was unbuilt. Secretary Andrew Mellon and Senator Reed Smoot were especially interested, the National Geographic reported, in a four-billion-dollar program to line “the entire south side of Pennsylvania Avenue” with “monumental structures,” and in September Hoover was scheduled to lay the cornerstone for a new Post Office Building. Meanwhile that great edifice and its neighbors—the Department of Labor, Interstate Commerce Commission, Department of Justice, National Archives, Federal Trade Commission, and National Gallery of Art—awaited the future. There were no FBI tours, no viewing of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Until recently, most of the land had been in commercial use. Some of it still was, but here and there land had been broken, and some buildings to which the Treasury Department had taken title were scheduled for razing.
Of these, the most interesting were on a Pennsylvania Avenue tract now occupied by the National Gallery, the Federal Trade Commission, and the District tennis courts. There, on the morning of July 28, 1932, stood a row of ugly old red brick buildings which had once contained warehouses, a cheap hotel, automobile showrooms, a Chinese restaurant, and an undertaking parlor. Many of the walls had been knocked out, and the buildings would have been leveled weeks ago, but on the night of June 17 members of the Bonus Expeditionary Force had quietly occupied them. The District police superintendent, a retired brigadier named Pelham D. Glassford, was reluctant to deprive the veterans of shelter, especially since so many were accompanied by their wives and children. By midsummer, however, Glassford was under a cloud; Congress had rebuked him for allowing the vets to enter the city, and the White House let it be known that Hoover had reached the end of his patience. The President was determined to evict the ragged squatters even if he had to call out the Army—which, as things turned out, is exactly what he did.
***
That Pennsylvania Avenue camp was not BEF headquarters. The veterans’ main force lay on the far side of the Anacostia River in southeast Washington, just across the Eleventh Street Bridge. But the Pennsylvania Avenue vets, living within three blocks of the Capitol, were the most conspicuous. To the administration they were an eyesore and a humiliation, and its determination to exorcise them reflected a general hardening throughout the land of the attitude of the well-fed toward the ill-fed. This was not true of those who moved among them. General Glassford liked them; so did General Billy Mitchell and Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, twice winner of the Medal of Honor. Drew Pearson wrote that the men “did not know what it was all about. They had no work, they were hungry, their families were hungry, they wanted to be paid. That was all they knew.” Will Rogers said the BEF held “the record for being the best behaved” of any “hungry men assembled anywhere in the world.”
But in the days before television newscasts it was possible to deny the obvious. Attorney General William D. Mitchell declared that the Bonus Army had been guilty of “begging and other acts.” Vice President Charles Curtis had called out two companies of marines; bristling with fixed bayonets and steel helmets, they arrived on the faithful trolley cars, whereupon Glassford, pointing out that the Vice President of the United States lacks any authority over troops, ordered them back to barracks. Still, the appeal of force grew, here and elsewhere in the country. On March 7 three thousand hungry men and women had tried to demonstrate outside Henry Ford’s plant in Dearborn, Michigan. The police had fired into their ranks, killing four and wounding a hundred others—who were then handcuffed to their hospital beds, charged with rioting. “Responsibility is not hard to fix,” the Detroit Free Press thundered. “The inciters were William Z. Foster and the other Red agitators.” Now other newspapers were egging on the President. The Washington Evening Star wondered editorially why no District policeman had “put into a healthy sock on the nose of a bonus marcher all the strength of healthy emotions,” and the New York Times reported that the marchers were veterans who were “not content with their pensions, although seven or eight times those of other countries.” Except for the disabled, there were no pensions at all, but sound men were beginning to make even more peculiar statements. One of Major Eisenhower’s friends was Brigadier General George Moseley, whom Eisenhower later described as “a brilliant” and “dynamic” officer “always delving into new ideas.” Among Moseley’s new ideas that summer was a proposal to arrest the bonus marchers and others “of inferior blood,” and then put them in concentration camps on
“one of the sparsely inhabited islands of the Hawaiian group not suitable for growing sugar.” There, he suggested, “they could stew in their own filth.” He added darkly, “We would not worry about the delays in the process of law in the settlement of their individual cases.”
Night and fog didn’t worry the Pennsylvania Avenue vets; MacArthur had promised one of their leaders that if dispossession became necessary, he would permit them to retire with dignity, and as good soldiers they accepted the word of a four-star general. Reports had reached them that the Army might be on its way; they thought it a good rumor, thought that if men in khaki appeared they would fall into one another’s arms. In their camp faded flags hung everywhere, and to them it was inconceivable that doughboys would attack the colors. Their greatest concern on that morning of Thursday, July 28, was the weather. By 9 A.M. they knew they were in for a day of extraordinary discomfort, and they talked wistfully of the new refrigerated theaters, whose current talkies featured Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in The First Year, William Powell and Kay Francis in Jewel Robbery, and Jackie Cooper and Chic Sale in When a Feller Needs a Friend. Compared to their present quarters, the thought of air-conditioning was an idyllic dream. Railroads had shipped them here free, to clear the yards; one bill of lading had read, “Livestock—Destination: Washington D.C.—55 vets,” and they had almost begun to think of themselves as livestock. The partially demolished buildings were largely reserved for women and young children, for whom straw mattresses had been provided by General Glassford. The men lay in what one reporter called a “conglomeration of tented huts made of tattered cloth fixed up on old boards with packing boxes serving as props.” Here and there handmade signs read, “God Bless Our Home.” They weren’t meant to be witty. Men with their backgrounds didn’t joke about God, home, or, if it came to that, about patriotism.
They were from the American yeomanry; if the term had been in use then, they would have been called members of the lower middle class. Five who would be in the direct line of any attack across Pennsylvania Avenue were typical. Only one, J. A. Bingham of Harlan County, Kentucky, had been an officer in the American Expeditionary Force to France, and Bingham could hardly have been thought a member of the leisure class; his most recent employment had been as a strikebreaker, making life uncomfortable for Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, and the crusade of Ivy League students who had come to Kentucky last March to protest violations of miners’ civil rights. John Olson of Sacramento, and Charles P. Ruby, whose DSC had led to his selection as the first man to wish the President Happy New Year in 1931, had both been decorated for bravery in France. Eric Carlson of Oakland had been gassed and, as they said then, “shell-shocked.” William Hrushka, whose life was to become a subject of considerable interest, had served as a private first class in the 41st Infantry. All were unemployed. Hrushka, a butcher, had been living in his brother-in-law’s windowless basement flat on Chicago’s southwest side.
Disaster wears many masks, and for these men, at 10 A.M. that oppressive morning, it was represented by two Treasury Department agents, who stood perspiring on the sidewalk and told them to leave. The veterans declined; the agents vanished. An hour passed and nothing happened except the relentless rise of the temperature. Then, shortly after eleven o’clock, General Glassford arrived on his blue motorcycle, drew up at Third and Pennsylvania, and announced that he had orders to clear the area. His men moved in, nightsticks at the ready.
It was a slow business, but there was little resistance at first, and by noon the first building was cleared. Meantime, however, word of what was happening had reached the main camp on Anacostia Flats. Belatedly, and rather desperately, the police tried to raise the Eleventh Street Bridge. It was too late; BEF reinforcements were on the way; arriving, they hurled brick fragments at the policemen there. Glassford himself was struck on the side of his face, and as he staggered backward he was horrified to see one of his own men, also dazed, pointing a pistol at him. The superintendent jumped behind a pillar. He heard a hoarse voice shout, “Let’s get him!” Reappearing, Glassford saw a policeman who, in his words, had “gone wild-eyed” and was firing at a veteran. The vet—Hrushka—fell dead, a bullet in his heart. Other officers were also firing; in a moment three more vets fell, one—Carlson—mortally wounded. Glassford shouted, “Stop the shooting!” They did, but word of the incident was on its way to the White House. Attorney General Mitchell had already ordered the evacuation of all veterans from government property. Hoover learned of the shooting at lunch. After an interval, while everything was put into writing, the President told Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley to use troops, and Hurley passed the word to the chief of staff.
Now came another, embarrassing lull. The chief wasn’t in uniform. His aide didn’t think he should be. “This is political, political,” Eisenhower said again and again, arguing that it was highly inappropriate for a general to become involved in a street-corner brawl. The general disagreed. “MacArthur has decided to go into active command in the field,” MacArthur declared. “There is incipient revolution in the air.” So the soldiers, who were arriving from Fort Myer, milled around on the Ellipse, watched by Hoover from his oval office while an orderly dashed across the river to fetch the chief’s tunic, service stripes, sharpshooter medal, and English whipcord breeches. The general also ordered Eisenhower into uniform. “We’re going to break the back of the BEF,” he said, and led his staff to the limousine. At Sixth and Pennsylvania (which later became the site of Washington’s largest cut-rate liquor store) the car pulled over and began still another wait. “What’s holding us up?” someone asked. “The tanks,” MacArthur replied. He was going to use tanks. Everyone sat back and sweated—everyone, that is, except MacArthur. This is the first recorded instance of the general’s remarkable inability to perspire. He remained cool, poised, and starched. It gave him an immense psychological advantage, and there were those who bitterly resented it.
Meanwhile the White House was issuing communiqués. President Hoover announced that the troops would “put an end to rioting and defiance of civil authority.” A few minutes later the White House revealed that the men who had clashed with the police were “entirely of the Communist element.” Reporters, finding MacArthur in his car, asked him what he was going to do. “Watch me,” he replied. “Just watch me.” Instead they were watching the astonishing display of force which was arriving, at last, down Pennsylvania Avenue. Troopers of the 3rd Cavalry, led by Major Patton, pranced along brandishing naked sabers. Behind the horses marched a machine gun detachment and men from the 12th Infantry, the 13th Engineers, and the 34th Infantry, the sun glinting on their bayonets. Behind these units rolled the six tanks, the caterpillar treads methodically chewing up the soft asphalt. It was now 4:45 P.M. The operation had become the worst-timed in MacArthur’s career. Fifteen minutes earlier, the District’s civil service workers had begun pouring into the streets, their day’s work done; twenty thousand of them were massed on the sidewalks across from the bewildered, disorganized veterans. Someone was going to get hurt if the cavalry commander didn’t watch out, and Major Patton was not celebrated for his solicitude toward civilians.
The veterans, assuming that this display was a dress parade for their benefit, applauded. The spectators clapped, too, though they were the first to be disillusioned. Abruptly Patton’s troopers wheeled and charged into the crowd. “At first,” wrote J. F. Essary, veteran Washington bureau chief of the Baltimore Sun, “it seemed that this attack upon the civilian observers was merely the act of a few of the armed horsemen. But later it appeared that it was a part of a concerted movement by the cavalry officers.” Essary reported that the troopers charged “without the slightest warning” into “thousands of unoffending people”; that men and women were “ridden down indiscriminately”; and that one man who refused to move from the front of a telegraph office was beaten back into the doorway by two cavalrymen who flailed him with the flat side of their blades. Among those trampled was Senator Hir
am Bingham of Connecticut—Panama hat, Palm Beach suit, and all.
“Clear out!” the mounted men yelled, and the spectators shouted back, “Shame! Shame!” The veterans, meanwhile, had hurriedly formed a solid line across the street. Their leaders were waving flags at rallying points, and it was these colors which became the troopers’ second objective. Reforming in extended order, they bounded across Pennsylvania Avenue, converging on the faded standards. The vets were stunned, then furious. Some dared the soldiers to dismount and fight. “Jesus!” cried a graying man—“If we only had guns!”; and others demanded of cavalrymen, “Where were you in the Argonne, buddy?” By now all the bonus marchers were hooting and booing. One soldier in his late teens wrested a banner from the hands of a former AEF sergeant. “You crummy old bum!” the boy spat. A man near MacArthur called out, “The American flag means nothing to me after this.” The general snapped, “Put that man under arrest if he opens his mouth again.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 2