The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  During the campaign, Hoover, heralded as the Great Engineer, proclaimed that Americans were “in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” Orphaned at nine, he was said by his supporters to know the meaning of poverty and hunger. Hoover carried forty of the forty-eight states, although this was his first campaign for public office. He had been aided by organized labor, which had campaigned against the two previous Republican presidents. Hoover, said union leader John L. Lewis, was “the foremost industrial statesman of modern times.”32

  In his March 1929 inaugural address Hoover proclaimed that the future of the country was “bright with hope.” Seven months later, the economy collapsed, and Hoover was reviled by millions of Americans for what they believed to be his ineptitude and indifference to their plight. The 1929 crash, ushering in the most severe depression in American history, made a mockery of Republican claims to be “the party of prosperity.”

  Two problems dogged Hoover’s administration: the descent into what became known as the Great Depression and the debilitating effects of Prohibition, which Hoover embraced with a renewed zeal. George Cassiday, who had been arrested in 1925 while wearing a green fedora and was henceforth known as the “the Man in the Green Hat,” was targeted by the Hoover administration. Banned from the House of Representatives after his 1925 arrest, Cassiday had become the “unofficial-official” bootlegger to the U.S. Senate from 1925 to 1930. Then, under instructions from Hoover’s vice president, Charles Curtis, and an ardent and resourceful federal prohibition agent named Roger Butts, Cassiday was arrested, convicted, and sent to jail.

  George L. Cassiday, a World War I veteran known as the “Man in the Green Hat,” became a bootlegger, selling liquor in Capitol offices. Congressional customers included legislators who voted for Prohibition. (Underwood & Underwood/Library of Congress)

  Cassiday created a major scandal when he sold his memoirs to the New York World and Washington Post. He claimed, among other things, that he had the keys to more Capitol Hill desks and offices than any person in history. In the persona of the Man in the Green Hat, Cassiday became a national symbol of Prohibition’s stunning hypocrisy and of the dilemma of the Great War veteran.33

  When Cassiday was forced to drop his profession in 1930, Congress still had many bootleggers working its halls and offices. Bootleggers operated in front of the District police headquarters, in the Justice Department itself, and across the street from the White House. When Washington Post reporter Edward T. Folliard ducked out to buy a pint of gin from his favorite bootlegger, he found the supply had just run out. He jumped into the bootlegger’s car and the two drove to the White House, where a large burlap bag was retrieved from the hedge. The bootlegger took a half-dozen bottles of gin out of the bag and told the reporter that was as safe a place as any to stash booze because nobody would expect anyone to hide liquor there. Folliard, unabashedly admitting his involvement in an illegal act, told the story in a short whimsical piece, picked up the Associated Press.34

  A criminal class was being created in Washington, D.C. In 1929, a total of 19,273 District residents were arrested for alcohol-related crimes—roughly one out of every twenty-seven Washingtonians. Since all drinking was illegal, there was no legal drinking age and so no incentive to screen out minors. Women, who had not been welcome in the old saloons, were accepted in the new speakeasies, and the local smart set hung out at places like Le Paradise on Thomas Circle and Club Mayflower on Connecticut Avenue.

  Prohibition turned the Capitol City into a place where ironies, contradictions, and hypocritical behavior were so common that it took a really rich item to attract attention. A drunken policeman was no longer news, but the fact that Evalyn Walsh McLean, the wealthy heiress to a Colorado mining fortune and owner of the famed Hope Diamond, bragged that she had her whiskey delivered to her Washington mansion by police escort was newsworthy, as were the lavish and zany parties she staged with her husband.35

  In the America beyond Washington, unemployment was soaring to 8 million in 1930, and veterans were suddenly willing to agitate for prepayment of the bonus. To an increasing number of them, an adjusted service certificate was their only asset. At the depth of the Depression, Patman became the widely acknowledged leader of a large pro-bonus coalition in Congress and a nationally known spokesman for its immediate payment, which would then have meant an overall payment of billions of dollars. He had the support of the Veterans of Foreign Wars but lacked that of the American Legion, which at this point preferred to advance the causes of the disabled vet and the dependent wives and children of men killed in the war.

  President Hoover addressed the issue of immediate payment in a speech to the American Legion National Convention in Boston in October 1930. The bonus, he said, could not be paid at that time because of the fiscal problems that the United States was facing. He pointed out that the government was spending $900 million on veterans, with $600 million going to veterans of the Great War. But he did break with tradition by suggesting that once the economic crisis was over, the White House would support new veterans’ legislation, and the American Legion would be given a sympathetic ear.36

  As the convention progressed, a power struggle took place, pitting Patman’s followers against a pro-Hoover group led by the popular former Legion commander and Hoover’s minister to Canada, Hanford McNider. When the Patmanites brought to the floor their minority report calling for debate on the issue of immediate payment, McNider and other officials got it tabled.37

  Frustrated, Patman urged all of the Democratic candidates in the upcoming 1930 election to use the bonus as a campaign issue that, as he explained in a memo to the candidates, would force the Republicans to favor immediate payment. He predicted that Hoover would announce his support before the election.38

  Not only did Hoover not change his mind, but at a press conference on December 9, 1930, he lashed out at groups that had introduced bills, including the bonus, that amounted to $4.5 billion “under the guise of giving relief of some kind or another,” which if granted would require more taxes and thus slow economic recovery. He warned that prosperity could not be restored if there were raids on the U.S. Treasury by special-interest groups. Although he did not name the bonus in this outburst, that was how it was commonly interpreted.39

  The bill that Patman reintroduced in early 1931 was termed a form of federal relief, granted on a discriminatory basis. Immediate payment got its strongest boost on January 21, 1931, when somewhere between five hundred and a thousand uniformed veterans paraded along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol steps, where they were joined by Patman and a hundred or so more congressmen demonstrating for immediate payment.40

  There was strong opposition to the Patman bill in the Senate, and Hoover let it be known that he would veto it. But the idea of Patman’s bill had widespread support, generated by the Hearst newspapers and by Father Charles Coughlin, a priest who had a weekly radio show listened to by millions. Hoover faced a dilemma: the bonus was popular, but it would cost $4 billion, exceeding the income of the government, which meant that it would require a tax increase—the last thing the nation needed as the Great Depression worsened.

  The House Committee on Ways and Means began hearings on “payment of adjusted compensation certificates” on January 29, 1931. The leadoff witness was Andrew Mellon, who asserted that veterans “would not seem to be a class which, as such, is in particular need.” Life insurance executives and other businessmen joined in rejecting the idea.41 But there was much support for payment: “This is not a dole, a handout; it is an adjustment in a very small degree of the soldier’s pay while he served his country. We have adjusted all the claims of the war contractors,” said John J. Cochran, a Missouri Democrat who was one of the many congressmen in favor of payment.42

  An important moment in the hearings came when an official from General Electric, Owen D. Young, suggested that the loan basis of the bonus—the amount that could be borrowed with interest—be upped to 50 percent, giving the aver
age vet about $500 if he chose to borrow while retaining the insurance provision of the bonus. It was a compromise that would put money—albeit borrowed money—in veterans’ pockets.

  The defining moment in the hearings, however, was reserved for a veteran. On Wednesday, February 4, 1931, Joseph T. Angelo, the man who saved the life of George S. Patton on the battlefield in 1918, testified.

  At this time and place, he was an oddity—a living, breathing, appallingly thin, bona fide victim of the Depression, being given both the time and the respect to tell his story. He appeared with a comrade who was silent through the hearings. Angelo testified that the two of them left his home in Camden, New Jersey, on Sunday morning at nine o’clock and walked all the way to the Capitol. “I done it all by my feet—shoe leather. I was not picked up by any machine. I would not accept.”

  “Why?” he asked himself aloud.

  Joe Angelo, who walked from New Jersey to Washington in February 1931 to testify about the bonus, wore his medals, including the Distinguished Service Cross, awarded for saving the life of wounded Major George S. Patton Jr. (Underwood & Underwood/Library of Congress)

  “I come to show you people that we need our bonus. . . . I represent 1,800 from New Jersey. They are just like myself—men out of work. I have got a little home back there that I built with my own two hands after I came home from France. Now, I expect to lose that little place. Why? My taxes are not paid. I have not worked for two years and a half. Last week I went to our town committee and they gave me $4 for rations.”43

  Angelo pointed out that he was not asking for the full bonus, but enough to scrape through. Although he had borrowed some, he held a certificate with a face value of $1,444 and could not reconcile the amount on the certificate with the fact that he was broke, hungry, and unable to make the kind of money he had before he joined the Army. Angelo had been working in the Dupont Powder Works at $1.25 an hour—working as many hours as he wished—when he enlisted at a dollar a day.

  “You took 10 percent of the amount you were making in civil life to take a position and go over and be shot?” asked Representative James A. Frear, a Wisconsin Republican.

  “Yes, sir; absolutely; and I was proud of it.”

  He was then asked why he had enlisted.

  Angelo said that a fellow worker had told him and some of his buddies that they were too yellow to join the Army. In response, Angelo and three others signed up the next morning. One was married with a child but claimed he was single to get in. Angelo had come close to being rejected because he weighed a mere 107 pounds. His married friend died in combat. Angelo came back with the Distinguished Service Cross.

  He retold the story of his battlefield heroism—with a few over-the-top embellishments—and showed the committee both the pocket watch he had been given by Patton’s wife and the stickpin that he had been given by Patton’s mother.44 He insisted that he had resisted the temptation of making money from bootlegging, which many other vets had resorted to, because that would be breaking the laws of the United States, which, as he put it, would not be “a fair deal.”

  “So, folks,” he addressed the committee, ending his testimony with a plea for help with the bonus, “don’t forget me for a job. That is all I care for.”45 Angelo made good newspaper copy and headlines, such as the one atop an Associated Press story: “Veteran, Wearing Medals, Jobless, Stirs Committee.”46

  Angelo repeated his testimony the next day for a Senate committee, and this time Patton’s wife and children were in the hearing room because Beatrice Patton had wanted her children to see the man who had saved their father’s life. At first she was upset because she knew that Angelo was “enlarging on the truth,” and she dismissed him as “a catspaw—a pathetic type. Too bad.” But later, when the family met with Angelo in a senator’s office, he made a better impression on her. She wrote in her journal that night that he was a much nicer man than she had expected.47

  On February 26, 1931, President Hoover vetoed the immediate-payment bill, arguing that the vets were being provided for in their local communities, that the “number of veterans in need of such relief is a minor percentage of the whole,” that the concept of economic stimulus would not work because the vets would spend their cash on “wasteful expenditure,” and finally that it would set a dangerous precedent, opening “the Federal Treasury to a thousand purposes,” each of which “breaks the barriers of self-reliance and self-support in our people.”48

  The following day, a partial victory—approval to borrow on the certificates—was achieved by Royal C. Johnson, a South Dakota Republican who, like La Guardia, had taken leave from Congress to go to war. Johnson had enlisted as an infantry private. He came out of the war as a first lieutenant who had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and France’s Croix de Guerre with gold star. As chairman of the House Committee on World War Veterans’ Legislation, Johnson enlisted the aid of three other Republicans: Representatives Hamilton Fish Jr. and Isaac Bacharach of New Jersey, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan. They crafted the Bacharach Amendment, which was hurried in and out of committee and onto the floor before the Seventy-first Congress could adjourn. On February 27, 1931, Public Law 743 sailed through both Houses—363 to 39 in the House and 72 to 12 in the Senate—and was signed by Hoover. To its supporters it looked like the ideal solution, giving the veterans cash, retaining the bonus, and stimulating the economy. The loan law allowed veterans to borrow up to 50 percent of the maturity value of their bonus certificates at 3 percent compound interest.

  But Wright Patman and his followers were not happy—the interest charged on the loan would eat up any final payment. Immediate payment remained a major issue for Patman, and he redoubled his efforts to turn the whole bonus to cash, though the prospects were dim. Shafer, the man who started it all, had testified before the House Ways and Means Committee a few weeks before Hoover’s February 26 veto. “I am in favor of paying the certificates now and I believe a majority of our citizens are,” he had said. “However, the ex-servicemen have about as much chance of collecting in full at this time as a celluloid cat would have passing through Hades without being scorched.”49

  3

  A Petition in Boots

  Hark, hark hear the dogs bark;

  Coxey is coming to town

  In his ranks are scamps

  And growler fed tramps

  On all of whom working was frowned.

  —The Pittsburgh Press, April 1894,

  preparing for the arrival of Coxey’s Army

  FOR MANY AMERICANS in 1931, the only recollection that seemed to have any parallel was more than a generation removed. During the Depression of the 1890s unemployment was widespread, and many Americans came to the realization that even the hardest, most devoted workers were helpless when the economy turned sour—a lesson relearned by every generation living through a major economic downturn. Many Americans were starting to believe the core idea of the 1892 Populist platform: America had become a nation of two classes—millionaires and tramps. By early 1894, following the financial panic of 1893, the newspapers were filled with news of strikes, lockouts, general labor unrest, and millions of unemployed—comprising 20 to 25 percent of the nonfarm workforce. Many of the jobless had also become the homeless, wanderers looking for work.

  But if there was one specific memory of that time that had not dimmed in the public mind, it was of a man who seemed to come out of nowhere: Jacob S. Coxey, an unsuccessful Ohio politician and successful owner of limestone quarries and breeder of thoroughbred racehorses who himself had been forced to fire forty employees because of the 1893 panic. Coxey declared himself the leader of the unemployed and demanded that the government embark on a vast public works program to provide jobs for the jobless by putting them to work building roads. He wanted this to be financed by debt in the form of federally subsidized bonds and the immediate printing of $500 million in cash for road construction. He had strong support, especially among farmers, who were clamoring for better roads.1
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  Joining Coxey in this endeavor was Carl “Old Greasy” Browne, a flamboyant stump orator who had earned his nickname honestly with a head of filthy, matted hair and a belief that one should never change one’s clothes— in his case, rodeo clothes fashioned after those of Buffalo Bill Cody. Browne also believed in reincarnation and that a small portion of Jesus Christ was reborn in all humans—but he thought that a large amount of Christ returned in himself and in Coxey, whom he saw as the “Cerebrum of Christ.” An avowed agnostic, Coxey was taken by Browne’s theosophy and changed the name of his “Good Roads Association” to the “Commonweal of Christ.” Browne, who had organized parades of the unemployed in his native San Francisco, inspired Coxey to announce a march on Washington. Coxey and Browne then called on the unemployed from all over the country to join them in the Army of the Commonweal of Christ, which would have enormous power. If enough men marched on Washington, they reasoned, a large portion of the body and soul of Christ would be there, and Congress could not resist its influence.2

  Coxey announced that he and Browne would lead the main contingent from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington to present its demands to Congress on May Day. The press immediately dubbed the operation Coxey’s Army, while Coxey called it a “petition in boots.” Coxey and his family rode in a buggy drawn by Acolyte, a $40,000 thoroughbred pacer, with Browne riding a $7,000 stallion. The marchers were generally well received along the way, often fed by sympathetic farmers.3

  As Coxey’s Army left Massillon, as many as forty additional armies were assembling from all parts of the nation, each planning to join Coxey in Washington. In Los Angeles, one of Browne’s old acquaintances, Lewis Fry, organized the “United States Industrial Army” and demanded that the railroads transport him and his men east. An army in San Francisco mustered two thousand men, including writer Jack London. Upward of ten thousand unemployed workers planned to join Coxey in Washington.