The Veterans Bureau was the predecessor to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Created by Congress in 1921 to provide care, rehabilitation, and vocational training to several hundred thousand wounded veterans, many of whom were blind or disfigured or missing a limb or two, the Veterans Bureau was also charged with administering disabled veterans’ War Risk Insurance claims. The insurance had been strictly optional for doughboys, and though all were urged to purchase it—General Pershing personally issued several such pleas—many did not, meaning that after the war they got nothing at all in terms of an annuity, no matter how grievous their wounds. Unfortunately, many who did purchase the insurance also got nothing at all, because the man President Warren Harding appointed to head the new Veterans Bureau, a decorated veteran (and Harding crony) named Charles Forbes, was almost unthinkably corrupt (even by Harding administration standards), and fleeced the new agency voraciously, embezzling more than $200 million from it in just two years. This meant that planned facilities were never built, a lot of medical supplies and equipment “fell off trucks” (to use the technical term), and, worst of all, many thousands of legitimate benefits claims were unjustly denied. Eventually, Forbes—who also availed himself liberally of bribes, kick- backs, and an expense account that probably wouldn’t have passed an audit—was forced to resign and face prosecution. He ended up serving less than two years in Leavenworth, and paid a fine of $10,000. I don’t imagine he had trouble coming up with it.
Needless to say, the Veterans Bureau didn’t really get to do much good in those early years. Still, it tried, at least at the most personal level, which was where Hildegarde Schan had worked. Its offices in Manhattan were on West Thirty-fourth Street, right across the street from Pennsylvania Station, whence she had departed New York for Washington some years earlier. She was a benefits administrator, meaning that she handed out money to wounded and disabled veterans. That might sound like a very easy and satisfying job; it wasn’t.
“It was very sad,” she told me. “Because we paid them there, you know every month, and you’d see them coming in with one leg or one arm . . . It was awful to see them come in, you know, and borrow. They’d borrow on their check, and then they’d have to pay it back next month, and they wouldn’t have any money then. So the poor things, it was very sad to see how they were trying to get along. These nice, good-looking men with their arm off, their leg off. Ohh.”
“A lot of the veterans who came back, they had a very hard time?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “To get a job and all, they had a very hard time.”
I asked if a lot of the men she saw at the bureau hadn’t had enough money to live. “That’s right,” she said.
“So what did they do?” I asked
“Well, they had a lot of charity,” she said. “A lot of charity. And neighbors and them helped, you know.” But even that was rarely enough, and many of the men had to borrow against their small monthly benefits check, which always seemed to lead to worse hardship down the line. “They came in, and you know, if they owed money, we’d hold the check,” she recalled. “And then they’d have to come in and we’d take the money out of that check and give them what was left. And it was very sad to have to take money from them, you know, when they were giving up so much.”
“Did you ever talk to any of them?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “They’d tell us all of their sad stories. You know, how they were very sad. And they didn’t like the way the government was treating them, you know, just bring them home and let them go on their own . . . After they’d go, I’d sit there and cry and cry, you know. I felt so sorry for them.” Mrs. Schan—she would die later that year, a few weeks before Christmas—dropped her gaze to her lap, and I looked away, too. I don’t like seeing people get sad; especially 107-year-old women.
A lot of people were more than merely saddened by the situation; they were angered. It seems impossible to us now that hundreds of thousands of men who’d taken bullets or shrapnel or gas for their country, and who had yet to fully recover—who might never fully recover—could return to a country, full of people who wanted to help, that just couldn’t seem to manage it. And they weren’t the only ones who needed help: Hundreds of thousands more, maybe even millions, had lost their livelihoods while Over There. Farms had gone to rot; businesses had been shuttered or failed for lack of attention. Many had no homes left to which they might return, much less available avenues by which they might improve their lot. In his 1932 memoir I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, Robert E. Burns writes bitterly of his homecoming from the war:
I had dreamed those happy dreams all soldiers have when lying in the mud and muck of trenches, ducking “Fritzies,” “whiz-bangs,” and “potato mashers,” and machine gun bullets. But the promises of the Y.M.C.A. secretaries and all the other “fountain-pen soldiers” who promised us so much in the name of the nation and the Government just before we’d go into action turned out to be the bunk. Just a lot of plain applesauce! I found that being an ex-service man was no recommendation for a position—rather it was a handicap. Really an ex-soldier was looked upon as a sucker. The wise guys stayed home—landed the good jobs—or grew rich on war contracts. . . .
In trying to find a position in society and earn a decent, honest living, I found that ex-soldiers were a drug on the market. The position I left at $50 a week was filled. But I could get a job at $.40 per hour—$17.60 a week. I thought of a few of my buddies, dead, forgotten, pushing up poppies and with nothing but a little white cross to mark the spot somewhere in France, and thought, Is this how my country rewards its volunteers—the men who were ready and willing to sacrifice life itself that democracy might not perish?
President Harding, a Republican who had succeeded Woodrow Wilson in 1921, had promised a “return to normalcy,” and though a lot of people protested that “normalcy” wasn’t a real word, he won pretty handily nonetheless, and then brought in an administration so corrupt that it didn’t accomplish much beyond making a few old pals the richest men in the penitentiary. Harding might well have landed there, too, but for the fact that he died suddenly, in August, 1923; some whispered that his wife, who would not allow an autopsy, had poisoned the president to spare him the impending ugliness. During Harding’s time, various bills had arisen in Congress to address the sort of thing Hildegarde Anderson witnessed at her job every day by extending some form of compensation to veterans, but the president had thwarted them all, claiming such a plan would be fiscally irresponsible. (I guess he didn’t want to take money out of his friends’ pockets.) When he died, proponents of the idea, including the American Legion, were hopeful that Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, might feel differently. But Coolidge was a man who didn’t care for the notion of government doing much of anything at all, and who seems to have done his best to set an example in that regard, reportedly sleeping twelve hours a night. He didn’t much care what other people thought of him, either; and when, the following May, Congress presented him with a bill called the World War Adjusted Compensation Act, which would have granted onetime monetary “bonuses” to veterans of that war, Coolidge—who had never served in the military himself—vetoed it, declaring: “Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism.”
Coolidge’s apparent callousness toward four million American World War I veterans, many of whom were in need, outraged many, including Fiorello La Guardia, who had returned from the Italian front with the rank of major and was quickly reelected to his seat in the House of Representatives. The Little Flower was (forgive me) no shrinking violet, and with characteristic vitriol he led the effort to override Coolidge’s veto. It succeeded. Veterans and millions of other Americans cheered its passage, even knowing as they did that there was a codicil to the law—first proposed by New York congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., who had served as a white officer with the Harlem Hellfighters—that postponed payments of the bonus until 1945. Fish, a Republican (as were La Guardia and Coolidge), had put it in th
ere in the hope that it might preclude Coolidge from vetoing the bill, but it stayed in even after the veto.
That seemed fine, at the time; it had been hard enough to get anything passed in any form, after all. But by the end of the decade, with the country suddenly plunged into a terrible economic depression, and millions suddenly without work, many veterans came to the conclusion that they just couldn’t wait another fifteen years for the money the government had promised them. They needed it now. (Most so-called bonuses were calculated at the rate of $1.25 per day of service overseas and $1.00 per day of service in the United States, minus the $60 bonus everyone had already received upon discharge, plus 4 percent interest; with that interest, the average payout in 1945 would have been around $1,000, or so I have read.) The new president, Herbert Hoover—who, you may remember, had saved Europe from mass starvation during the war—refused them; a deal was a deal, he said, and besides, to make the payout now would require raising taxes, and the frail economy, he asserted, couldn’t support that.
Then, in the spring of 1932, another war veteran in Congress, Texas Democrat Wright Patman, put up a bill that would pay the veterans their “bonuses” immediately. At first its prospects didn’t look very good; Hoover was sure to veto it, and he seemed to have enough Republican supporters in Congress to prevent an override. But then something unusual happened: Around the country, groups of veterans started assembling to discuss Patman’s Veterans’ Bonus Bill and what they might do to help it pass. A group in Portland, Oregon, decided to ride boxcars all the way to Washington, D.C., and present themselves at the Capitol. They started calling themselves the BEF—the Bonus Expeditionary Force. As they rode across the country, they attracted notice, and other groups of veterans decided to follow their example. Politicians and crowds greeted them as heroes; people who were themselves suffering donated food, clothing, supplies. By June, a “Bonus Army”—estimates of its size range from ten thousand to twenty thousand veterans, plus their families—had converged upon the capital. They set up camps throughout the city; the largest was in Anacostia Flats, former swampland where the BEF laid out streets, established health facilities and sanitation infrastructure, and built huts from just about anything they could salvage. Eight decades before the Occupy movement, they occu- pied D.C. And they welcomed all honorably discharged veterans: In a thoroughly segregated city, the BEF’s camps were racially integrated.
The presence of twenty thousand or so unemployed veterans congregating outdoors in the heat of summer was bound to make some people nervous; among them was Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur—the man who had led his men into battle at the Meuse-Argonne wearing a cardigan sweater—who suspected that the Bonus Army was nothing more than a mob of communists and pacifists, although he didn’t take pains to distinguish the two in his own mind. He was mistaken on both counts, though no one could convince him of that. In fact, the BEF had only one issue—benefits for veterans. And they were far from a mob. They drilled daily, even in the sweltering heat, and observed strict rules: no drinking, no begging, no radical condemnation of the government. Despite MacArthur’s view of them—and he wasn’t alone in his thinking on the matter—the Bonus Army attracted many admirers, among them politicians, policemen, socialites, and high-ranking military men. Quite a few visited the camps to offer moral support; plenty donated food, clothing, sundries, and medical supplies. They got a lot of press. Many allowed themselves to believe that their cause might prevail.
And for a while, it seemed like it actually would. On June 15, 1932, the House of Representatives passed Congressman Patman’s Veterans’ Bonus Bill by a margin of 35 votes. Thousands of veterans thronged the Capitol and held a vigil on the lawn, in anticipation of the Senate’s vote on the bill. But the Senate lacked the courage to take that vote; instead, it voted, 44 to 26, to table the bill, taking it off the agenda for the rest of the year. Everyone expected the BEF, defeated, to pack up and go home.
It didn’t. Rather, the veterans vowed to stay where they were until the Senate actually voted on the bill. More veterans flocked to the capital. More donations and supplies poured in. Despite all the support, though, morale wasn’t always high; it can be hard to remain cheerful in Washington in the summer, even if you’re not out of work and living in a Hooverville. Lloyd Brown—you might remember him as the gentleman who had an eighty-six-year-old USS New Hampshire tattoo on his arm—was working as a fireman in the city at the time, and he saw Bonus Marchers every day. He told me he was sympathetic to their cause—“I’m a World War I veteran, myself,” he reminded me—but said they “looked like people in need . . . they looked pretty rough, some of them.” They looked, he often recalled, just like hound dogs.
This went on for six weeks: the BEF unsure of what, exactly, to do next; the government unsure of what, exactly, to do about the BEF. Tensions mounted. Finally, on July 28, Hoover’s attorney general, William D. Mitchell, ordered the eviction of Bonus Marchers wherever they could be found. Police fatally shot two men while clearing out a building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Then General MacArthur literally called in the cavalry—and the infantry. As thousands of government employees watched, a phalanx of soldiers marched against the veterans, forcing them out of their camps at bayonet point. And just to make sure, tanks were deployed, too—under the command of Major George S. Patton—as well as gas. Yes, it’s true: Soldiers of the United States Army gassed veterans of World War I in the streets of the nation’s capital in the summer of 1932.
The veterans fled across the river to their largest camp, in the Anacostia Flats. President Hoover, starting to worry about, in more modern terminology, the “optics” of the situation, sent word to MacArthur not to pursue them any farther. MacArthur—and this was confirmed years later by one of his aides that day, a Major Dwight Eisenhower—just ignored the president and sent his men charging into the huge camp. Everyone was expelled; the camp was burned. Dozens of veterans were injured in the attack. Scores were arrested. A three-month-old infant, exposed to the gas, died.
One of the expelled veterans was an emaciated forty-three-year-old private first class from Camden, New Jersey, named Joseph T. Angelo. If that name sounds familiar, Angelo was the aide who, fourteen years earlier, had saved George Patton’s life at the Meuse-Argonne. Angelo had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism, but that didn’t spare him the ravages of the Great Depression. A year earlier, he had walked all the way from New Jersey to Washington to testify before Congress about veterans’ need to receive their bonuses immediately, and not fourteen years hence. Now, a day after the Battle of Anacostia Flats, Angelo convinced a sergeant in the 12th Infantry to take him to Patton, telling the man he was an old friend of the major’s. It’s not clear what Angelo hoped to say to Patton, because he never got the chance to speak with him; according to newspaper reports, when Patton spotted his former aide, he became enraged. “Sergeant, I do not know this man,” he spat. “Take him away, and under no circumstances permit him to return!”
And so the Bonus Army was scattered—and yet, not quite defeated. It had drawn attention to the plight of indigent veterans and the government’s indifference to them; Americans were very angry about it. And they stayed very angry: angry enough to vote President Hoover out of office three months later; angry enough to pass the GI Bill of Rights in 1944. To be fair, people had plenty of other reasons to be angry at Herbert Hoover in November, 1932, and to take a chance on New York Governor (and former Assistant Secretary of the Navy) Franklin Roosevelt. But it would also be fair to state that the GI Bill didn’t square things in a lot of people’s eyes, either, at least not right away. In the 1945 movie Pride of the Marines, there’s an eight-minute scene in which a group of men, wounded in the Pacific and convalescing at a hospital in San Diego, discuss what awaits them back home after the war is over. Many of them are afraid—as afraid as they were at Guadalcanal. One, a fellow with the clever nickname “Irish” who tells us he has “a silver plate in my head,” snarls to his buddies: “T
wice in his life my old man got his name in the papers. The first time in 1917—he was the first to enlist in Milwaukee. The second time in 1930—he was the first vet to sell unemployed apples.”
Other wounded Marines take up the cause. One speculates: “So maybe we’ll even have prosperity for two years after the war while we catch up on things. Like making diaper pins and autos—things the poor civilians did without. But what happens after two years? Answer me that!”
Al Schmid—the hero of the film, a real-life Marine who was blinded by a Japanese grenade and is portrayed by the great actor John Garfield—offers: “A bonus march!”
“I’ll put a little handwriting on the wall for you,” Irish says. “We don’t want no apples. And whoever’s running the country better read it, too—no apples, no bonus marches!”
They did read it. The Bonus Army ultimately won their quixotic battle—maybe too late for themselves, but for their children, the Greatests, and beyond.
The First World War was doughboys in trenches and flyboys in aeroplanes, gas masks and machine guns, bayonets and barbed wire, kilts and soccer balls and poetry and mud. But it was also adolescent boys drilling on a green in Sussex until they were old enough to be shipped to the trenches, young women being summoned to the War Department in the middle of the night, men fighting off cold and Cossacks from inside a Siberian boxcar, passionate congressmen being outmaneuvered by indifferent presidents, middle-aged veterans and their families being gassed in a swamp in their nation’s capital. And much more, even, than all that. A world more.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 48