THE UNITED STATES IN 1932 looked like a country that had just been struck by a hurricane or an earthquake, although it was the people rather than the trees or houses that had been uprooted and blown away. Factories, farms, and banks had collapsed. As in Germany, which was in the process of turning to Nazi dictatorship, a tenth of the population—between a quarter and a third of the entire workforce—had lost their jobs. Two million took to the road—“nomads of the Depression,” as former War Secretary Newton Baker called them—and found that the next town was no better off than their own. In one year, and on one railroad line alone, guards reported throwing almost 700,000 stowaways off freight trains. Fifteen million Americans were out looking for jobs. In their ranks were not only farmers and factory hands but also professionals who had thought of themselves as insulated from economic distress. People who only a couple of years before had been lawyers or civil engineers or bankers or architects wandered in a daze, hopeless and defeated, wondering where to sleep or to get food.
As with an earthquake or a hurricane, too, it was something that people could not understand. They did not know why it had happened. It had struck without warning, seemingly out of nowhere, wreaking havoc indiscriminately across the continent. This was the United States, the land of abundance; and yet from California to New York, from Wisconsin to Texas, Americans were sleeping in ditches and starving.
President Hoover withdrew into the White House. He refused to visit soup kitchens. He would not meet with deputations of the unemployed; he could not bear to look victims of the Depression in the eye. He would not admit that the disaster was happening.
Many Americans remained prosperous or wealthy. Some of them began to experience, when looking out at the teeming jobless, a sense of disdain, and with it, fear; to them, onetime friends and colleagues who had lost their jobs or homes had become “them”—troublemakers, radicals, real or potential criminals. Others chose not to notice. Behind the high walls surrounding their estates, it was possible for the rich to live through the Depression without really being aware of it. In the early 1990s an elderly lady in a Washington mansion indignantly denied that as a girl she had been unaffected by the Great Depression: “I distinctly remember that my mother told me we should cut down on my dress allowance!”
THE STORY OF THE BONUS MARCH on Washington has been recounted often; it needs no retelling in any great detail. The bonus was a bit more than $1,000 per soldier; it had been awarded to veterans of the First World War by an act of Congress in 1924, and was to become payable in 1945. When the Depression struck, the veterans petitioned for immediate payment. Over President Hoover’s veto, the Democratic Congress elected in 1930 voted to pay them half: more than $500 each.
In May 1932 an unemployed ex-sergeant named Walter W. Walters of Portland, Oregon, became leader of a group that asked immediate payment of the remaining half. Walters’s followers marched across the country to Washington, D.C., to present their case. Walters imposed strict discipline: there was to be no begging, no drinking, no incorrect behavior. By June, helped by a friendly Washington police chief, the veterans were camping peacefully in shacks and tents across the river from the capital city while Congress debated their case—and in the end, voted against it. When he heard of the congressional vote, Walters said to his followers: “I have bad news,” but “let us show them that we can take it on the chin. Let us show them that we are patriotic Americans. I call on you to sing ‘America.’ ” So the twenty or twenty-five thousand impoverished veterans joined in patriotic song.
They did not know what to do next. About 5,000 of them left. Most stayed. It was a hot summer, with the kind of weather in which any spark can ignite a riot.
A few Communist party members camped separately, led by a man named John Pace. Walters had made a point of excluding them from his ranks, not wanting to give the Hoover administration a pretext for labeling the bonus marchers Reds. Pace was hoping for a chance to seize control of the bonus movement, or at any rate to claim credit for it.
While police patrolled the grounds of the executive mansion day and night, President Hoover ordered the White House gates chained shut, banned traffic for one block all around, and erected barricades. At Fort Myer, cavalry troops and horses practiced anti-riot mob control maneuvers. Secretary of War Patrick Hurley complained that the bonus marchers were too law-abiding; if only they would provide him with an outrage, he could declare martial law and set the troops on them.
On July 21 the civic authorities ordered the police to evict veterans from vacant buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue in which some of them had been camping. The buildings were scheduled for demolition; the land on which they were situated was to be developed as a park. On July 28 the evictions began. That morning police ejected the occupants of the first of the buildings. The veterans cursed, but left peacefully. Then a group of Pace’s communists came by to provoke a riot; they threw bricks at the police, but the police chief restored order.
Two hours later the police tried to enter a second building, but the steps into it were missing. Someone had put down two planks to take their place. A policeman slipped on the planks, panicked, drew his pistol, and began firing into the crowd of veterans. Taking their cue from him, other policemen drew and fired, too. One of the two veterans killed was an out-of-work Chicago butcher who had joined the bonus march on Washington because (he had told his brother at the time) “I might as well starve there as here.”
The disturbances provided the Hoover administration with the excuse it had been seeking to use force. The President ordered Hurley to have MacArthur dispatch troops to help the police clear the Pennsylvania Avenue buildings. The chief of staff sent for infantry from Fort Washington and for cavalry from Fort Myer.
Though he did not take personal command of the operation, MacArthur decided to accompany the troops. He passed word to his mother, at their quarters in Myer, to send him his uniform. When it arrived, he changed from his white civilian suit into it. He brought Eisenhower along with him.
Patton was not in command of the Fort Myer cavalry that rushed to Washington to carry out MacArthur’s orders. But like MacArthur, he chose to come along. He did so even though he knew that a public relations disaster awaited him: journalists were aware that among the bonus marchers was Joseph Angelo, the wartime orderly who had saved his life on the field of battle in northeastern France in the autumn of 1918.§
Bayonets and sabers at the ready, the troops threw tear gas into the crowd of veterans, driving them out of their buildings and then through the crowded streets of the capital. The veterans streamed back toward their main encampment across the Anacostia River. Hurley, on behalf of the President, sent orders to MacArthur to break off the engagement and pursue no further.
Foreshadowing what he would do in Korea two decades later, MacArthur disregarded the President’s orders. Apparently it was his view that once the civilian authorities had placed him in charge of a military operation, they had no business interfering with how he carried it out. MacArthur, according to Eisenhower’s later account, refused to hear the orders from Hurley and Hoover; “he said he was too busy and did not want either himself or his staff bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders.”
Forty-five minutes before midnight, MacArthur’s troops crossed the river to attack the tents and shacks where the veterans and their families camped. “Shortly afterward,” Eisenhower later remembered, “the whole encampment of shacks and huts just ahead began burning.” He and his fellow officers claimed that their troops had not started the fire. But as the whole encampment went up in flames, they attacked, driving the already fleeing men, women, and children before them, and dispersing groups of veterans with gas. According to some accounts, Patton and the veteran who had saved his life confronted each other as Patton led troops in the attack on Angelo’s hut.
MacArthur then returned to the War Department and met the press to discuss his victory. The general told the journalists, “That mob down there was a bad-looki
ng mob. It was animated by the essence of revolution.… [T]hey were about to take over in some arbitrary way … control of the Government.…”
As Eisenhower wrote later, “I think this meeting led to the prevailing impression that General MacArthur himself had undertaken and directed the move against the veterans and that he was acting as something more than the agent of civilian authorities.” With his authoritarian personality, his bombastic rhetoric, his riding boots and glamorous uniform, the chief of staff seemed the very type of the man on horseback who was becoming dictator in one country after another.
MOST OF THE PRESS approved of what the army had done. Secretary Hurley said, “Mac did a great job. He is the man of the hour.” But these sentiments were not shared at the governor’s mansion in Albany, the capital of the state of New York.
When Eleanor Roosevelt read the newspaper accounts of these events, she was overcome, she said, by “a feeling of horror.” Her husband, the governor, asked, “Why didn’t Hoover offer the men coffee and sandwiches, instead of turning Pat Hurley and Doug MacArthur loose?”
All eyes were turned to Albany that summer, for Governor Roosevelt was running for the presidency in the autumn. He provided one alternative to Republican President Hoover, who was standing for reelection. Another was the Christian Socialist Norman Thomas, riding a wave, unique to that year, of widespread disenchantment with the American system of free enterprise.
It was a time—again, in that sense, unique—when many questioned whether the United States would continue to choose its leaders by popular election. The charismatic demagogue Huey Long, who had established one-man rule in his home state of Louisiana, was ambitious to play a role on the national scene; it was not implausible to see in him a future dictator. The other most dangerous man in the country, Roosevelt told one of his political intimates, was MacArthur.
The general saw things the other way around; in his view, he had saved constitutional government in his attack on the bonus army. To prove his point, he filed a lawsuit against the authors of More Merry-Go-Round, who turned out to be the columnists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen. Among other things, he alleged that they had portrayed him as “dictatorial” and that they had falsely claimed he had disobeyed orders from his civilian superiors.
But an attorney for Pearson and Allen indicated that he was going to call for testimony from Isabel Rosario Cooper, MacArthur’s Eurasian mistress. The general sent Eisenhower to look for her, but Ike reported back that he could not find her. The columnists, having bought MacArthur’s love letters from her, kept her in hiding.
So MacArthur withdrew his lawsuit, leaving the popular impression that he could not challenge the columnists’ portrayal of his conduct in the bonus march affair as “unwarranted, unnecessary … brutal”—and dictatorial. The general paid the columnists $15,000 (which they turned over to the girl) to keep his affair with her a secret. MacArthur and Isabel Cooper were both unmarried; thus it might have been thought that he had no reason to hush things up—especially at such a high cost, not only in cash but in the impression he gave the public that he could not defend his conduct against accusations that he was a would-be dictator. However, to those who knew him well, the explanation, though odd, was obvious. As a military colleague remarked years later in amazement, it was because there was one person MacArthur could not allow to learn about the Eurasian girl: “his mother …!”
IN THE MARGINS OF A BOOK that described how troops suppressed mobs in the dying days of the Roman Republic, Patton noted after the bonus march that “the U.S. Army is too small for foreign wars but is very useful at home.” He did not note that, in the end, the Roman armies brought down the Republic.
Army-backed dictatorships were taking control elsewhere, and an obvious question was: Can it happen here? But a less obvious question was raised by the first part of Patton’s comment: at a time when predatory dictatorships bent on war and conquest were on the move, could an America whose army was “too small for foreign wars” continue to go it alone in world politics?
It could be done, but only by remaining isolated from the affairs and troubles of countries outside our hemisphere. Such was the view of publisher William Randolph Hearst, who sought a Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1932 who would champion his views.
* From the autumn of 1929 to the summer of 1932, stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange lost an aggregate $74 billion in value. In 1993 dollars that would be $740 billion.
† See this page–this page.
‡ In April 1932 Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Soviet Republic in Kiangsi province declared war on Japan.
§ See this page.
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RUMORS OF WARS
Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars.… For nation shall rise against nation.
—Matthew 24:6–7
IN THE FALL OF 1931, as MacArthur paid his first visit to Europe as chief of staff and heard talk of impending war, the multimillionaire press lord William Randolph Hearst, too, visited Europe and heard the same talk. Though he had not succeeded in becoming mayor, senator, governor, or president, Hearst had come close in some cases; and he remained, as he approached his seventieth birthday, an immensely powerful figure in the United States, whose chain of newspapers and magazines swayed large segments of public opinion.
Hearst had firsthand knowledge of how the United States could be enticed into a foreign conflict: years before he had done it himself. His and other sensation-mongering newspapers had been partly responsible for starting the Spanish-American War of 1898. From the outset in 1914 he had been keenly aware of how the United States was being pulled into the world war—but had fought against it, for hatred of the British empire was a constant feature of his otherwise inconsistent politics.
Over the radio in September 1931, Hearst warned Americans that they should not repeat the mistake they had made in 1917; Europe was preparing for war, and the United States should take care not to be dragged into it.
Hearst led his newspapers into an antiwar crusade. He created a “Mothers of America” movement to campaign against war. He had financial interests in the motion picture industry, and made use of the power that gave him to propagate antiwar sentiment; for inclusion in films, he personally wrote such dialogue as: “The next war will depopulate the earth.”
WILLIAM BULLITT was another American in Europe who feared that the United States once again might be pulled into the Continent’s quarrels. In Russia in 1914 he had imagined that he could play a personal role in averting the catastrophe. But in the aftermath of the dizzying 1920s, it took time for him to regain his equilibrium and sense of mission.
The jazz age of the 1920s—“the most expensive orgy in history,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words—was over. But for those who had lived it to the fullest, even those like Bill Bullitt who had escaped financial ruin,* the crash brought about emotional and intellectual disorientations: crises of faith and of identity. It was tempting in retrospect to see the reckless living-for-the-moment of the twenties as vain and shallow, and to repent by turning back to serious matters: to works of the mind, or to public service. Such, at any rate, was Bullitt’s inclination.
Bullitt no longer was disposed to live the life of a playboy artist. Though the author of a best-selling novel, he found himself blocked; he could write nothing else. Louise Bryant, his second wife, had given up her own flourishing career as a journalist to help him; now she had contracted an incurable illness called Dercum’s disease and could not even help herself.
Always a heavy drinker, Louise began to drink before breakfast and went on drinking all day. She seems to have been taking drugs, and was going to pieces visibly. By the end of 1929 it was easy for Bullitt to show that she could no longer function effectively either as a wife or as a mother. In December 1929 Bullitt filed for a divorce, which he obtained in 1930, winning sole custody of their six-year-old daughter, Anne. Though he had committed adulteries of his own, notably with the newspaper heiress “Cissy” Patterson in an
escapade on the French Riviera, Bullitt in his lawsuit accused his wife of having run away with a lesbian lover. During the decade-long party American writers had thrown in Paris in the 1920s, Louise Bryant’s wildness had seemed attractive and fun, but in the bleak morning-after light of 1930, it did not.
In an effort to understand her psychological problems—or perhaps his own—Bullitt traveled to Vienna and consulted Dr. Sigmund Freud. An improbable friendship blossomed. It ripened into a literary partnership, as Bullitt and Freud discussed the outlines of a book they both wanted to write, but for which each had need of the other.
The book was to be a psychological portrait of Woodrow Wilson. Bullitt was to supply the personal and political data for the biography, from which Freud would construct a theory of why the President behaved as he did. They did go ahead to do the book, but decided not to publish it until it was politic to do so.†
Edward House, with whom Bullitt had kept in touch even during his artist-playboy years, had more pressing tasks in hand for him. For House once again had a candidate; two decades after finding a kindred soul in Governor Wilson of New Jersey, he had found another winner in Governor Roosevelt of New York—to whom Bullitt could be of use.
Picking up his 1914–19 life where it had left off, Bullitt traveled up and down Europe, talking to politicians and journalists of all sorts. Bullitt had a genius for friendship, and was on close terms with more European statesmen than any other American of his time. He resumed writing reports to House on current politics, much as he had during the Wilson administration. House helped Bullitt to put himself in a position to play a role again in American foreign policy if Roosevelt were to win the 1932 elections.
In the Time of the Americans Page 40