The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  By the time Coxey and his group from Massillon finally made it to Washington on April 29, only about six hundred hard-core believers were in line. Many of the others ran into trouble along the way. A group out of Portland, Oregon, commandeered a Union Pacific train at Troutdale, Oregon. The U.S. Cavalry soon caught them and returned the 469 demonstrators to Portland, where they received a stern lecture from the U.S. district judge. Part of the New England army left by ship, only to run aground off Provincetown, Massachusetts.

  Two days after his men arrived in Washington, Coxey marched them down Fourteenth Street and up Pennsylvania Avenue to the steps of the Capitol for a May Day rally, where he and Browne tried to speak. Prevented from delivering his speech on the steps of the Capitol, Coxey and his followers moved off Capitol Hill. More than four hundred, along with thirty horses, relocated to a swampy, gnat-infested lot southeast of the Capitol, without adequate food or shelter.

  Coxey and Brown were later arrested for trespassing—the actual charges noting, among other things, that they “did then and there step upon certain growing plants, shrubs, and turf then and there being growing,” a charge that in countless accounts has been reported as “walking on the grass.”4 On May 21 a judge sentenced the two men to twenty days in prison and a $5 fine.

  But even in failure Coxey attracted new supporters. A small group from Harrodsburg, Kentucky, left in a balloon for Washington to support Coxey with a check for $1,000. “Coming by the Air Line” was how the Washington Post headlined the story. An English observer visiting America at the time noted that Coxey’s “petition in boots” had attracted more free advertising “than any millionaire in America ever could have afforded.”5

  A number of marchers were stopped as they tried to take trains east. Because most of the railroads were in receivership in 1894 and under the protection of federal courts, whenever a train was hijacked, the U.S. Army was sent to stop, overtake, and detain it.6 Soldiers were sent to train yards and sidings to prevent more seizures. It was estimated at the time that if Coxey’s Commonwealers had been allowed the use of the trains, sixty or seventy thousand of them would have arrived in Washington.7 More than a month after Coxey’s May Day arrival at the Capitol, industrial armies were still on the move to support him. A group from Denver, kept off the rails, took the water route; 15 followers drowned in a Platte River boat accident, and some 350 survivors were stranded.8

  By the time Coxey was finally released from prison, a major camp had appeared in suburban Maryland, and another, with about a thousand men, across the river in Rosslyn, Virginia. The Maryland group broke up after many members were jailed for stealing food from local farms. Virginia brought out the militia, which marched the men back into Washington. They settled on the grounds of the Naval Observatory until they were finally sent home by train at government expense.

  Coxey’s vast industrial armies did not make it to Washington because of the very thing that Coxey espoused—good roads. Not until World War I was the United States forced to realize how important roads were to the nation’s needs. Some 30,000 trucks were used to ferry supplies to eastern ports for shipment to France, but they traveled over bad roads, often causing delays and disruptions. In 1919 the Army decided to demonstrate how deplorable those roads were by sending a convoy of trucks from coast to coast. It took sixty-three days of determined effort for the caravan to travel 3,251 miles: fifty-three miles a day. The convoy included twenty-eight-year-old Dwight David Eisenhower, a lieutenant colonel in the Tank Corps. Ike, as everyone called him, had spent the Great War in America and in 1919 was involved in a less than heroic struggle to keep trucks and tanks out of the mud.9

  The point was made. A Good Roads Movement began as a moral, religious, and educational advancement for the nation. By 1925 the United States was spending a billion dollars a year on new roads, and the system was steadily improving. By 1931 the nation boasted 3,291,000 miles of public roads, of which 1,290,000 miles were paved.*10

  This point was not lost on Coxey when, at the age of seventy-seven, he appeared on February 4, 1931, as the witness who immediately followed Joe Angelo at the Patman hearing. Coxey’s testimony was about financing the bonus. But his presence was a reminder of his having established the new role of Washington as the place to go for the redress of grievances. Coxey was also a portent for a new invasion of the capital.

  . . .

  The group that most strongly supported immediate payment of the bonus was the Veterans of Foreign Wars, whose many allies included former Brigadier General Pelham Glassford. In September 1931 Glassford drove to Washington to help the VFW stage an Armistice Day Jubilee on November 11. A year earlier, Glassford, then forty-seven, had retired from the Army to move to Arizona, where he planned to serve in the state militia and help his father raise horses. Two weeks after his arrival, his father died suddenly; deeply depressed, Glassford gave up his plans to become a rancher. But he stayed in Arizona, where he went back to his avocation of painting murals, decorative screens, and watercolors.11

  In Washington he was given a small office, immediately dubbed the Owl’s Nest, under the rafters of the House Office Building. When word got out that he was in town, he was visited by a steady stream of old comrades as well as local artists who had known him in the mid-1920s, when he was stationed at the Army War College in Washington. Glassford, who had taught painting at West Point, had been very much a part of the local arts community. He had lived in a house in Georgetown festooned with art and artifacts and known affectionately as “the Borneo Embassy.”12

  One morning in late September Glassford visited the District Building, the local version of a city hall, to make traffic and parking arrangements for the Jubilee. While there he met with Herbert H. Crosby, a retired U.S. Army major general whom Glassford had known in France. Crosby was one of the three commissioners appointed by Congress to run the District of Columbia, which had no mayor or any other elected local official. He introduced Glassford to other city officials. In the midst of reorganizing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, demoralized and debilitated by scandals and corruption—among other things, it was still reeling from the nationally syndicated 1930 tell-all of the Man in the Green Hat—Crosby wanted to recruit a new leader who could regain long-lost public trust in the police department. Five minutes after Glassford left the building, Crosby and the D.C. Corporation Counsel decided to offer him the job of chief of police.13

  The next day, Crosby visited the Owl’s Nest and through the haze of Cuban cigar smoke announced, “I have a surprise for you. You are going to be our new chief of police.” Glassford said he would have to go back to Arizona “to think this thing over and talk it out with my mother.” After that talk, Glassford decided to take the job—but only with the promise that he would have a free hand in reforming the force. Although he was an outsider with no law-enforcement experience, his conditions were met, and he took the job. “I was practically ‘drafted’ as Superintendent of Washington police,” he would later say.14

  Glassford was appointed on October 21 under the condition that he would not take office until the VFW gala was over in mid-November. The “artist who became a cop” made good newspaper copy. A muscular, six-foot-three man with a constant smile and the nickname “Happy,” he darted around town on his blue motorcycle, greeting everyone he encountered. When a reporter asked him what he knew of police work, he said, “Well, I’ve been arrested—once for driving through a red light and once for speeding on a motorcycle.”15

  But first came the Armistice Day Jubilee, which by any standard—let alone that of the Great Depression—was lavish, a production more 1920s Hollywood than 1930s Washington. Inside the cavernous Washington Auditorium was built a slice of Paris on Armistice Night, featuring a life-size replica of a section of Montmartre complete with narrow cobblestoned streets and balconied houses and a replica of the Moulin Rouge nightclub. Everyone of importance was there, including President and Mrs. Hoover, General Pershing, and General Douglas MacArthur, the younge
st chief of staff in U.S. Army history and Glassford’s friend since their days at West Point.16

  After the gala, Glassford took command of policing Washington at a time when two alien forces struggled beneath the surface of the political discourse: American Communists on the left, and American Fascists on the right. Both looked beyond U.S. shores for drastic solutions—the dictatorships in Moscow, Rome, and Berlin. The U.S. Communist Party shouted for class warfare and revolution. The Right, entranced by the rise of fascism, spoke more softly but believed that power would come, as it had in Germany and Italy, when a strong state crushed the Left in the streets.

  The U.S. Army had already fought Communists on their native ground. America had supplied the bulk of fifteen thousand troops in a coalition sent to Russia in 1918, when they intervened in the war between czarist forces and the Bolsheviks. Hundreds of American soldiers were killed fighting the Bolsheviks.17 As Germany collapsed in 1918–19, U.S. Army observers in Berlin and other cities witnessed bloody street wars between Communists and the fascists who would put Adolf Hitler in power. The young American officers, rising in rank through the 1920s, retained as collective memory firsthand knowledge that insurrection was the ominous possibility in a nation under stress.

  In the United States in the fall of 1931, there was open talk of domestic war, especially in the coalfields and industrial slums of major cities, which were scourged by unemployment and were also first to feel the impact of the great migration of African-Americans from the South, a migration that had started as a trickle in 1916. Both the right and left saw the vast cadre of unemployed Americans as potential political soldiers.

  Glassford’s first test as chief came on December 6, 1931, when members of a Communist-controlled “hunger march” began to arrive in the city. The march attracted just three thousand participants, who, as the conservative Washington Star angrily reported, sang “The Internationale, the hymn of Red Russia.” Glassford kept close tabs on them, plying them with food and shelter, and giving them permission to march—or, more accurately, drive, as many were in trucks and cars. The one thing denied was permission for their leader, Herbert Benjamin, a Lithuanian immigrant and Communist organizer, to walk onto the floor of the U.S. Senate and present a petition. There were no arrests of demonstrators—the only one arrested was an unruly local who wanted to counterdemonstrate—and Benjamin and his lieutenants were given freedom to speak their minds.

  At the same Washington Auditorium where he had run his VFW gala, Glassford appeared for a Hunger March rally as a nonauthoritarian figure in civilian clothes, puffing on his pipe. Benjamin told the rally that the next hunger march would bring “a force superior to the thugs of the ruling class.” He also shouted to the assembled marchers, “Workers of this country must defend their fatherland, Soviet Russia, the country that has done away with unemployment.”18*

  Glassford treated hunger marchers as, to use his own word, “tourists” and served them a series of hot, huge, and hearty meals, many prepared by the chef of the Mayflower Hotel. Despite all the Red rhetoric, many marchers had been attracted to the event because they were legitimately hungry. The only marcher to be hospitalized had fainted from being malnourished.19 The Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) was at the scene in the person of Captain Charles H. Titus, an undercover agent who attended all the meetings and rallies. About half of the marchers, he reported, were non-Communists attracted to the group because they were simply “either hungry or interested in the trip.” Titus looked over the group at the main rally and estimated them to be 35 percent Jewish, 35 percent Negro, 30 percent “miscellaneous white,” and, “in all probability . . . about 25 percent women.”20

  Although he was not connected with the hunger marchers, a sympathetic Jacob Coxey, the newly elected mayor of Massillon, Ohio, showed up with the marchers and was allowed to deliver his own personal economic plan, which included currency reform and payment of the bonus, to Theodore Joslin, Hoover’s press secretary. Coxey stayed in the well-appointed Willard Hotel, a far cry from a prison cell.21

  Edward T. Folliard of the Washington Post wrote that Glassford’s policy of courtesy was “nothing short of magnificent,” especially since the marchers were hoping to be “kicked, cuffed and clubbed” by the local police. Glassford, front and center during the whole episode, directed the entire operation from the saddle of his blue motorcycle. The only person who seemed to have suffered property damage during the incident was Thomas Damery, police chief of Somerville, Massachusetts, who was in town on police business but volunteered to be on the lookout for New England Reds. While he was patrolling the streets, someone smashed the window of his car and stole his camera, valued at $175.22

  The hunger marchers left town on December 8, 1931, hurling jeers at the police escorting them, perhaps realizing that their goal of struggling against their oppressors had been foiled.23

  Simultaneously, another group moved into town: eighteen war veterans from Seattle, who brought 45,000 signatures with them in favor of the bonus. They had started out with 25,000 from the state of Washington and picked up another 20,000 signatures on their trip east.24 And before this eventful day was over, Patman reintroduced his resolution as the first of the new session: HR 1.

  Less than a week later, Glassford received a letter from John Alferi of Philadelphia informing him that he was about to lead a group of a thousand veterans to the Capitol for a one-day march down Pennsylvania Avenue on Friday, December 18. Alferi’s group was known as the Veterans’ Bonus Brigade.25 By the time Alferi left Philadelphia on December 14, he had only fifty marchers, and their issues had broadened to include repeal of Prohibition, which now more than ever was seen as a veterans’ issue. “We are not Balsheviki [sic],” he declared before the departure.26 Although the march had little impact at the time, the idea of a bonus march had been invented, and Alferi would lay claim to the title of “Mr. Bonus Army.”

  At the end of 1931, Wright Patman had both a cause and a foe to square off against—setting up, as one scholar saw it, a manifestation of the classic battle between “the debtor and creditor class.”27 Patman’s personal nemesis was Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who for the last ten years had served three presidents in that capacity, working diligently to reduce the tax burden of the wealthy and keep the government out of the business of business. During the early years of the Depression, Mellon’s oft-stated position was that no government action was called for to counter the economic calamity affecting the nation. Mellon made an ideal target for Patman and other Populists during the Depression. An art collector with the deepest of pockets, he had made his most spectacular purchases in 1930–31, when he acquired twenty-one paintings from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, including two Raphaels and five Rembrandts.

  During the summer of 1931 Mellon had visited Europe on an economic mission, which resulted in the suspension of all remaining European war debts. Intended to soften the effects of the worldwide depression, the move angered pro-bonus forces and also helped mobilize them. Patman fumed, asking why, if there was enough money in the American economy to let Europe off the hook, there wasn’t enough to pay the bonus.28

  In support of the new attempt at legislation, another bonus demonstration was announced for February 6, 1932. This one was sponsored by the Army and Navy Union, a group founded in 1841 “to alleviate suffering and need among returning soldiers and sailors.” Glassford, Vice President Charles Curtis, and Speaker of the House John Nance Garner had all given permission for the demonstration, which started out with organizers expecting to draw 8,000 veterans. Suddenly, though, there were signs that it might attract 100,000. After the legislative chairman of the Army and Navy Union, John H. Fahey, conferred with President Hoover and General Frank T. Hines, head of the Veterans Administration, the organizers decided to call off the event. Fahey told the Washington Post that the march would tax the city too greatly and that there could be friction with more “hunger marchers” who were talking about being in the city on the same dat
e.29

  At the beginning of 1932 the nation was in the nadir of the Great Depression; it would later be termed the “cruelest year” by both Frederick Louis Allen and William Manchester. Exactly 2,998 banks had failed in 1931, and they were still closing at an alarming rate. Foreclosures had become so routine and feared that in many communities bands of citizens set up armed roadblocks to prevent outsiders from coming in and buying up farms and homes. “Nobody is actually starving,” President Hoover told reporters. But newspapers were publishing reports on starvation in San Francisco and New York City, where welfare officials reported that 110 people—mostly children—were dead of malnutrition.30

  As more and more Americans settled in teeming communities of squalid tar-paper shacks known derisively as Hoovervilles, whatever levity could be found came in small doses and usually at the expense of the Hoover administration, which was vilified in song and verse.31 One anonymous bit of doggerel, which began making the rounds in early 1932, seemed to sum it up for many Americans:

  Mellon pulled the whistle,

  Hoover rang the bell.

  Wall Street gave the signal,

  And the country went to hell.32

  As for the veterans of the World War, many now in their forties, by 1932 a total of $896 million had been paid into the bonus fund; accrued interest added $95 million, bringing the fund’s total to $991 million. The compensation certificates could be used as collateral for loans, at first up to 22.5 percent of their face value, then, under the terms of the 1931 legislation, up to 50 percent of face value, but at 4.5 percent interest. Those who took advantage of this new loan provision, in effect, cut their bonuses in half. No veteran who needed the money in loan form could conceive of being able to pay the loan back. Payments on the loan were deducted from the remainder of their bonus. By 1945 the cumulative interest would have entirely consumed the other half of their expected funds.