The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  He shouted, “Let’s go!” and charged ahead through a torrent of machine-gun bullets. Looking around, he saw his orderly, Private Joe Angelo, and five other men. In moments, only he and Angelo still stood.

  “We are alone,” Angelo said, looking at the dead and dying.

  “Come on anyway,” Patton calmly replied. A moment later a bullet struck him, entering his left thigh and tearing through his buttock. He stumbled along for a few feet and fell.

  Angelo pulled Patton into a shell hole. “He was spouting blood,” Angelo later said. He knelt over Patton, cut open his trousers, and bandaged the wound with dressing from his first-aid kit. They could hear the German machine gunners, forty yards away, talking between bursts of fire.33

  After an hour or so, Patton’s tanks appeared. Patton ordered Angelo to sprint to the tanks and tell them where the guns were. The tanks rumbled off toward the guns. But there were about twenty-five other machine-gun nests, and as the tanks went off, some guns kept firing, pinning down Angelo and Patton.

  A little while later, a sergeant found Patton, who ordered him to look for the next in command and tell him not to try to tend to Patton until the German guns were wiped out. More tanks came along, and again Angelo ran out to point them toward the guns, which had stopped firing to hide themselves. Finally, the tanks finished off all the guns, and Patton was carried on a stretcher to an ambulance about two miles away. Angelo stayed with him in the ambulance, which Patton commandeered, ordering the driver to take him to division headquarters, where he could make a report, before bearing him to a field hospital.

  Pounding the German artillery that threatened Patton’s tanks were the guns of Battery B, 129th Field Artillery, of the 35th Division, made up of 27,000 National Guardsmen from Missouri and Kansas. The commander of the battery was a bespectacled captain named Harry S. Truman. He had been in the Missouri National Guard until 1911, when he was discharged as a corporal. In 1917, at the age of thirty-three and the sole male in his family, he would not be called up in the draft. But he rejoined the National Guard. In a custom dating to the Civil War, troops voted for their officers, and in this first election of his life, he was voted in as a first lieutenant.34

  By the time Patton lay wounded, Truman’s guns, hauled across no-man’s-land, were about 150 yards in front of Patton, in the midst of what an artilleryman called “a cemetery of unburied dead.”35

  Artillery batteries had strictly defined areas of fire. But when Truman saw German artillery just beyond his boundary line, he fired and destroyed it. Fuming at this technical disregard of orders, a colonel threatened Truman with court-martial. Next day, Truman did just what he had done the day before. He was defending the division’s infantrymen, and no sputtering, second-guessing colonel was going to stop him. Harry Truman was not court-martialed. He had used his head and gone beyond orders. And his men knew it.

  “I was censoring letters today,” he wrote his wife Bess on November 5, “when I ran across this sentence by one of my best sergeants. He said that he and the Battery had been in some very tight places and came out all right but that they had a captain that could take them to h—— and bring them all back.”

  In the four days of fighting, 1,126 men of the 35th were killed or died of wounds, and 4,877 were carried away as severely wounded. The “lightly wounded” stood and fought. The Allied offensive went on for three weeks, at the cost of 100,000 casualties, finally driving back the Germans, whose defeat led to negotiations for an armistice that took effect on November 11.

  The Great War was over, at the cost of 116,708 American lives.

  When the first waves of soldiers came back from Europe, the nation turned out to honor them with parades—New York City alone had six of them—but the bands stopped playing and the banners began to fade as they kept coming home. The men in the army of occupation, discharged long after the Armistice, returned to an indifferent society eager to forget the war. Those veterans were like Ernest Hemingway’s hero in the short story Soldier’s Home: “By the time Krebs returned to his home town in Oklahoma the greeting of heroes was over. He came back much too late.”

  The cold reality of the homecoming went deeper than indifference. The veterans found their jobs filled by others or their farms lost to creditors and back taxes. The new members of the growing middle class did not come from the legions of veterans but from those who had provided support for the war. “The Keys to the City had turned out only to be a pass to the flophouse,” wrote one historian.36

  The 204,002 men wounded in the war came home to some help, doled out through a federal program to train disabled vets for jobs. A veteran might learn a skill at an institution for vocational education, but many among them would never lose the blankness and the shakes of shell shock, that dreaded new word for the madness born in the trenches and no-man’s-land of France. Some men were placed in colleges and vocational schools, but only a few thousand attended.37

  Many who survived—and more than 4 million did—found happy postwar lives. Some states and municipalities provided aid to veterans through special employment bureaus and job programs, which put a million men back into the workforce. Seventeen states granted bonuses to vets, and Oregon and New York provided educational aid. California and several other states gave reclaimed land to veterans.

  But countless vets still strongly resented the fact that civilian war workers had prospered in safety, their pay increasing by an average 200 to 300 percent, while soldiers and sailors barely subsisted on military pay. The Senate Finance Committee determined that the average soldier was paid “very much less” than the lowest class of labor at home, even when two dollars a day was factored in for the soldier’s free room, board, and clothing. When they returned, many did not get their prewar jobs back, and the men without savings could not take part in the great orgy of spending that followed the war.38

  If this treatment recalled earlier wars, there was a new element to the homecoming—it was dry. On November 1, 1917, in Washington, D.C., a prohibition against the sale of all alcoholic beverages was imposed. Under the provisions of the Sheppard Act, the last of 269 legal retail liquor stores and bars within the confines of the city were shut down at the stroke of midnight. The first phase of the “Great Experiment” was under way, and began to falter within minutes as several of the just-shuttered gin mills quickly reopened with slightly inflated prohibition prices in effect.39

  Among those who felt most singled out and punished by the nation’s decision to ban alcohol were the veterans, still returning from France in great numbers as national Prohibition was passed by Congress, overriding the veto of President Woodrow Wilson, on October 28, 1919, and, after being ratified by forty-six of the forty-eight states, going into effect as the Eighteenth Amendment on January 16, 1920.

  One man who felt punished by Prohibition was an outgoing twenty-five-year-old veteran named George L. Cassiday, born in West Virginia of a teeto-taling father and a mother who was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Cassiday had his first taste of liquor in France. He was still overseas when Congress passed the bill. “I believe my attitude toward Prohibition was no different than that of most of the American boys who went overseas,” he later wrote. “We saw liquor being used in all the allied countries and when we were at the front, detailed with French troops, I received rations of cognac along with the other men.”

  Cassiday served with the 321st Light Tanks, a heavily decorated unit, which returned in late 1919 on a transport ship carrying 2,200 American troops. “We took a straw vote on Prohibition just before the ship docked in New York,” Cassiday wrote. “All but 98 of the men aboard voted against it.”40

  George Cassiday soon had larger worries than Prohibition. When he returned to his home in Washington, he tried to regain a railroad job he had held before going overseas. But he was turned down because of a disability he had incurred in France. He got married and entered the new decade without steady work. By the summer of 1920 he had become desperate in his sear
ch for a livelihood.

  Sometime during the summer of 1920 George Cassiday heard from a friend that good brand-name liquor brought top dollar from members of Congress who were no longer content with the novelty of the corn liquor or “white lightning” easily trucked in from backcountry stills of Maryland and Virginia. Cassiday’s friend insisted that somebody could make a decent living slaking the thirst of Capitol Hill. Two days later, that friend met him in a hotel lobby and introduced him to two members of the House of Representatives—both of whom had voted for Prohibition in 1919. They placed an order with him. He obtained good liquor and was soon filling many congressional orders, launching his illegal career. At the suggestion of a member of the House of Representatives, Cassiday set up a bootlegging operation inside the House Office Building. He had an office, storeroom, and lavatory—all supplied at taxpayer expense—and was soon serving scores of congressmen and their constituents, spending, as he would later brag, “more time there than most of the Congressmen.”41

  His first major source of high-quality bonded liquor was an operation on Seventh Avenue near Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan, a source he was led to by a former agent of the Treasury Department, the agency in charge of enforcing Prohibition. Cassiday’s solution was not the norm (though it was not that uncommon, either). But his experience underscored the dilemma of the many jobless, damaged vets who were trying to feed their families in the years following the war.

  W. Bruce Shafer Jr., a wealthy Virginia farmer, had worked to prevent wartime food shortages by promoting the use of potatoes as a substitute for wheat and other grains, which gave a much lower yield per acre. Thanks to his efforts, there was a nationwide doubling of the planting of potatoes, preventing the expected shortages. As the war was winding down, Shafer’s father held a dinner for local boys in the Army and Navy. The younger Shafer found that many were making a dollar a day. “I thought it was a darn shame that these fellows didn’t have enough money to take a girl to the moving pictures,” he later recalled. A few days later, Shafer went to Washington to lobby for a doubling of the servicemen’s daily pay rate. But while he was in Washington, the Armistice was declared. Shafer then started pushing for one year’s extra pay: a bonus. As he put it, “They won the war that everyone thought was going to take twice as long.”42

  Shafer recruited congressional support and began printing and mailing twenty thousand circulars a day to promote the bonus. In a few months more than a million appeals had been mailed, and more than a hundred bills introduced in Congress and state legislatures. The bonus idea soon evolved into a plan to readjust the pay of the men who had served in the military. The American Legion, from the day it was founded in 1919, lobbied the Congress for passage of a bill that would correct the low pay the servicemen had received during the war. Congress took up the question, and after weeks of debate passed a stopgap measure in which the government granted an extra $60— two months’ base pay—to any serviceman mustering out, regardless of grade. The name given to the stipend appeared in the page-one headline over a story in the March 7, 1919, Paris edition of Stars and Stripes: “Sixty Dollar Bonus for A.E.F. on Discharge.” The term and concept were thereby implanted in the mind and vocabulary of the soldier and the new veteran.43

  The $60 was an acknowledgment of the problem rather than a solution to it, and the process started all over again after the payment was authorized.44 The Veterans of Foreign Wars lobbied Congress for a package of adjusted compensation—a dollar a day for each month of service plus an additional one-time payment of $100 for overseas service, along with help in buying a house or farm with a federal mortgage not to exceed $1,000. The American Legion pushed a plan that would offer every vet the chance to pick one of four options: a piece of land, substantial help in buying a home, free vocational training, or a dollar a day in adjusted compensation. Other veterans’ groups either favored a dollar a day or, in the case of the Private Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Legion, a lump cash payment to each vet.45

  By early May 1920 no fewer than seventy-five bonus bills were pending in Congress, and states, meanwhile, were creating their own bonuses. Voters in New York State were asked to vote on a $45 million bond to support a state bonus in 1920. In the weeks before the November 2 election, veterans demonstrated for the state bonus. On October 16, at least 50,000 veterans by police estimates—75,000, according to the parade’s organizers—marched up Fifth Avenue in New York City, taking nearly four hours to pass the reviewing stand at Forty-second Street. They were cheered on by more than 100,000 spectators. Some five hundred vehicles carried about 2,000 wounded vets in a special section of the march, including, according to the New York Times, five Indian chieftains wounded in France. A large cannon, a replica of the famous French 75s, fired pro-bonus literature with the help of compressed air. There were sixty-two brass bands and “acres of drum and bugle corps.” The signage tended to plead rather than demand: WE ASK VERY LITTLE FOR WHAT WE GAVE and BELIEVE US, OUR NUMEROUS UNITED STATES SOLDIERS CAN USE IT. Marchers were encouraged to show up at polling places on election day and let voters know how they felt about the bonus. It passed by a large majority. Although the parade was primarily a local event, it attracted the attention of the nation because of its size and the fact that it appeared in newsreels.46

  The proposals in Congress ranged from flat lump-sum payments to government-financed loans. However, Shafer and his many followers insisted on a cash bonus granted to the veteran at the rate of a dollar a day for service at home and an additional twenty-five cents for each day overseas.47

  Congress wanted to present some kind of money bill to the veterans in 1920, an election year. On March 11, in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, President Wilson’s secretary of the Treasury, David F. Houston, said that “to float bonds in the amount of $2,000,000,000 or to meet such an additional expenditure out of taxes would present grave problems and might result in disaster.” Despite this dire prediction, the committee forwarded an “adjusted compensation” bill to the full Congress in May 1920. The bill called for compensation for the veterans, not to exceed $500 for home service and $625 for overseas service, to be paid immediately.48

  But two intertwined issues stood in the path of the bonus, the first economic, the second racial. The economic issue was familiar: Congress, still saddled with the cost of pensions from previous wars, did not want to authorize the additional burden of the bonus. By 1932, the amount paid to Civil War veterans and their survivors amounted to twice the cost of the war.

  The other issue was something new. A letter to the Cleveland Advocate, an African-American newspaper, went right to the point: “For many months the bonus question has been see-sawing in our seat of government. It seems that the only opposition against it is the labor question—speaking more directly, Negro Labor.”49

  Many of the hundreds of thousands of Negro soldiers who came back to a white society in the previous two years were seen as a threat, competing for jobs and standing in employment lines that had long excluded them. Lynchings increased—from thirty-seven in 1917 to eighty-three in 1919— and in Washington, D.C., eight months before the May 1920 bonus hearings and a few blocks from the Capitol, roving mobs of white soldiers, sailors, and Marines attacked blacks in the wake of lurid rumors of blacks attacking white women. Armed blacks fought back in the shadow of the Capitol dome. By the end of the summer the rioting had spread to twenty-five cities, including Chicago, where a white mob stoned black youths who were swimming on the wrong side of a segregated beach. One was drowned. For those wondering why all of this was happening, the New York Times suggested that it was “Bolshevik agitation which had been extended, especially to those in the South.”50

  Although Houston’s comment was little noticed at the time in the mainstream media, it was front-page news in the Cleveland Advocate. The African-American newspaper was affiliated with the Republican Party and owned by Ormand A. Forte, who saw to it that his paper covered racial discrimination and lynchings as well as church ne
ws. Forte’s connection to the bonus and black veterans was strong, and linking the bonus to the word disaster was ominously newsworthy. One of the Advocate’s contributing editors was Ralph W. Tyler, the only black correspondent given overseas accreditation during the war. He had been assigned directly to General Pershing’s staff and was well versed in the contributions and sacrifices made by black soldiers.51

  Earlier in 1920, Tyler had testified against General Pershing before a congressional committee looking into the deaths of soldiers of the Negro 92nd division who died on the first Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. He joined two officers of the 92nd who accused General Pershing of sending men to their deaths needlessly: “Every soldier who fell between 7 o’clock Sunday morning, November 10, and Monday morning, November 11, was needlessly slaughtered.” The 92nd lost 498 men between the ninth and the eleventh, adding up to a total of 960 since October 8.52

  Weeks later, the Advocate noted that the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce at its Atlantic City convention had entertained a resolution against the bonus for the reason that “the half million Negroes in the South, who probably would receive $500 or $600 each, would immediately quit work until the money was spent.”

  The Advocate responded editorially, “But the United States Chamber of Commerce, or at least those who sponsored that resolution, need not be solicitous about the Colored veteran quitting work until their bonus is spent. They need not fear any ‘orgy of spending’ simply because some half million loyal citizen soldiers may receive $500 or $600 each.”

  The paper took note of the fact that millions of acres of farmland were then owned and cultivated by a people little more than fifty years removed from slavery who were not prone to quitting work—and even if some of the bonus money was spent recklessly, white merchants would benefit. The Advocate was stunned that those who denied one Negro veteran his bonus would deprive four whites their payment, concluding that the resolution was “an insult to the race, and a most reprehensible injustice to the white world war veteran.”53