The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  From the standpoint of most veterans, however, the U.S. Treasury had pocketed $2.39 billion of their money, which would not be released until 1945. Some, like New York Herald-Tribune columnist Walter Lippmann, tried to explain the fiscal facts of life to the vets. Lippmann pointed out that “to demand payment of the principal of a debt . . . before it is due is to demand money that is not owed at all now and to demand more money than is owed ultimately.”33

  As the year began, Hoover was steadfast in his belief that giving money to the veterans would encourage social-welfare advocates and deprive the government of funds needed for economic recovery. He had addressed the issue of legislation calling for immediate payment in speeches to the American Legion’s national convention in Detroit in September 1931 and in Boston in October 1930. Hoover followed the policies of his predecessors, declaring that payment of the bonus could not be made at that time because of the fiscal problems facing the United States.34

  The 1931 Legion convention was a split decision for Hoover. The delegates, by a vote of 902 to 507, supported him on holding off immediate cash payment of the bonus for economic reasons, but they were against him on Prohibition, opposing the law by a vote of 1,008 to 394. For the first time, the American Legion had put this to a vote, claiming it to be a veterans’ issue. Many of the delegates believed that if they went along with the president on the bonus, he would go along with them on repeal.35

  On January 6, 1932, a vast army of unemployed workers, mostly Pennsylvanians, arrived in Washington to demand jobs. They were led by Father James Cox of Pittsburgh, a Roman Catholic priest who had served as a chaplain in the war. Alarmed by the behavior of both the Communists and the Republicans, Cox had decided to organize his own march on Washington, inspired by Coxey. But unlike Coxey’s Army, Cox’s Army had cars and trucks and paved roads and grew as it moved on Washington, doubling, then more than tripling, from its initial core of 6,000, making it the largest march on Washington up to then.36

  Early on the afternoon of their departure, Cox’s Army arrived in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. They were met by Mayor Eddie McCloskey, a Democrat who had recently defeated the candidate handpicked by Bethlehem Steel. He greeted Cox and led him to a mass rally. McCloskey took the podium to denounce Bethlehem Steel’s attempts to evade payment of property taxes. Then Cox rose to lambaste Hoover and his policies: “Our president is still trying to give money to the bankers, but none to the people. If I had my way, it would go to the people, who need it badly. There is plenty of money in this country, but try and get it. I do think that our mission to Washington will have its effect. The government sent Al Capone to jail for cheating it out of $100,000, yet John D. Rockefeller is giving $4,000,000 to his son to escape the inheritance tax.”37

  Cox wanted to meet with Hoover, but the White House opposed the idea. Lawrence Richey, the president’s secretary, wrote an internal memo stating Hoover’s position: “We will not see this man. If he has a petition we will be glad to receive [it], but he cannot see the president.” Once Cox arrived in Washington on January 6, another Hoover aide contacted one of Glassford’s detectives for assistance. He wanted to know if there really were any ex-servicemen with Cox or whether this march was merely another Communist propaganda ploy. The detectives reported that 20 percent of the marchers had fought in the Great War, and 10 percent had served in the Spanish-American War. The marchers, he reported, were in large part respectable citizens who did not want to overthrow the system but rather wanted the system to give them jobs.38

  Given this positive report, Hoover invited Cox and a small delegation to the White House, where Cox lost no time in telling the president that the administration was acting “like an ostrich that sticks its head in the sand, believing that if he cannot see the hunter pursuing him or the trouble that is nearby, that the hunter or the trouble does not exist.” Hoover expressed sympathy for the unemployed and then read a terse statement contending that the Depression had nearly run its course and that his administration had a program in place to complete America’s economic recovery, and rejecting out of hand any massive federal spending on public works projects as a solution.39

  There were no incidents during Cox’s protest. Police and newspaper estimates of the crowds ranged from 12,000 to 25,000. Glassford again strengthened his reputation as a man who could control demonstrators.

  With Cox’s followers in the streets of Washington, Patman decided to legally attack Mellon, the greatest foe of prepayment, by introducing an impeachment resolution accusing him of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Patman also asserted that Mellon held his office illegally because of vast conflicts of interest between his private holdings and his role as a public servant. As early as the spring of 1931 Patman began his extraordinary campaign to impeach Mellon, claiming to represent those who believed that his acts were responsible for the Depression.40

  Bringing formal charges against the Treasury secretary was a stunning move that quickly led to public hearings. Patman stated that the secretary was the owner of stock in 300 corporations with resources of $3 billion. Patman saw an immense conflict of interest in Mellon’s engagement in “trade and commerce in every state, county and village in the United States, every country of the world, and upon the seven seas,” while he was in charge of the tariffs and taxes imposed on those same corporations.41

  The basis of the central charge of “high crimes and misdemeanors” was a 1789 statute that, among other things, prohibited any Treasury secretary from owning “in whole or in part . . . any sea vessel.” Patman listed four Norwegian, fourteen Venezuelan, and thirty-six American ships used by Gulf Oil and the Aluminum Company of America as owned by Mellon in direct violation of the statute. He recounted that Mellon was in charge of tax refunds to Mellon companies, owned bank stock, was in the whiskey business, and had an interest in the Koppers Company, which was supervising the erection of gas plants in the Soviet Union—not yet diplomatically recognized by the United States—despite charges that goods imported from that country were made by convict labor. Impeachment hearings began less than a week later, at which point Patman added another charge: that the Mellon companies were given special treatment by the Internal Revenue Service, whose employees had been intimidated by Secretary Mellon. For all communications regarding these companies, said Patman, there was a special tag that read, “This is a Mellon Company.”42

  Hoover defused the situation by offering Mellon another position, U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James in London. Ambassador Charlie Dawes had resigned on January 8. This was the perfect solution: it got Mellon out of Patman’s hot seat.43

  The delicate task of inducing Mellon to transfer from Washington to London was not made any easier by his belief that Hoover was capitulating to the demagogic congressman from Texarkana. But with his impeachment hearings under way on February 4, Mellon resigned and accepted the ambassadorial post.44

  Deprived of his nemesis, Patman was furious. He insisted that the London job amounted to a “presidential pardon” that had “saved the Republican Party from a scandalous exposure that would have rocked the pillars of our Government.” He added: “Mr. Mellon has violated more laws, caused more human suffering and illegally acquired more property to satisfy his personal greed than any other person on earth, without fear of punishment and with the sanction and approval of three chief executives of a civilized nation.”

  As soon as Mellon had been hastily confirmed as ambassador, the House Judiciary Committee withdrew from the impeachment proceedings, asserting that it was impossible to impeach a Treasury secretary who had resigned.

  On January 22, 1932, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was established by the Hoover administration. Hoover’s most ambitious effort to deal with the Depression, the RFC started off by loaning money to banks and businesses, hoping that prosperity would “trickle down” through the economy. The $1.5 to $2 billion the RFC would eventually lend—the greatest peacetime outlay by the federal government to that point in history—would not be eno
ugh to reverse the economic collapse of the nation’s banking and financial system. Patman insisted that this was nothing more than a gift to “the big boys” in New York, and he wanted to know why the same generosity could not be shown to the veterans.

  Father Charles E. Coughlin, the “radio priest” who railed against “the vested interests of wealth” to a weekly network audience of between thirty and fifty million, said, “If the Government can pay $2 billion to the bankers and railroads [through the RFC], having had no obligation toward them, why cannot it pay the $2 billion to the soldiers, already recognized as an obligation?”45 In his column of February 24, 1932, Will Rogers warned his readers that “you can’t get a room in Washington. . . . Every hotel is jammed to the doors with bankers from all over America to get their ‘hand out’ from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.” The bankers, it seemed to Rogers, “have the honor of being the first group to go on the ‘dole’ in America.”46 Now more than ever, Patman believed, the time was right to push for immediate payment.

  The White House and Secret Service, meanwhile, concerned about the bitterness that seemed to be growing on many fronts, anticipated civil disorder and attempted assassination. “Crank letters, threats, and eccentric visitors reached a new high,” Edmund W. Starling, head of the White House detail, recalled. “Secret Service agents all over the country were busy checking on the people who felt an inclination to swell the White House mailbags.”47 New rules were created and the security detail beefed up to forty to fifty men per shift. No person was allowed to approach the president carrying a package. In January 1932 a confidential Secret Service memo, entitled “Riot Call Regulations,” assigned battle stations for the agents and special police who would defend the White House from mob attack.48

  Fear for the safety of public officials took a more sinister turn on March 1, 1932, when a nurse went in to check on the twenty-month-old son of Charles A. Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow, only to find the child missing. A note near the nursery window demanded $50,000. Beneath the second-floor window were muddy footprints, a wooden ladder, and a carpenter’s chisel. The case grabbed the attention of Americans like few before or since, and the fear of kidnapping—already a major concern throughout the country—was now ubiquitous.

  Then, on the cold, gray morning of March 7, 1932, approximately four thousand men and women marched from Detroit to the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn to present a list of demands to company management. A fight broke out when the marchers were denied entry to the plant. Police opened fire on the unarmed mob. A photographer for the Detroit News, Ray Pillsbury, reported, “I would guess that hundreds of shots were fired into the mob. I saw their leaders drop, writhing with their wounds, and the mob dropped back, leaving their casualties on the road. . . . [People] were pitching forward every few seconds and lying still.”49 When the smoke cleared, four men lay dead or dying in what became known as the Ford Massacre. The four bodies lay in state for four days in Workers’ Hall in Detroit under a huge red flag, a portrait of Lenin, and a banner reading “Ford Gave Bullets for Bread.” The dead were accorded a funeral procession ten thousand people long and group interment, attended by thirty thousand, in a collective grave overlooking the River Rouge plant.50

  The nation was in crisis. Fear of more violence and revolutionary unrest spread in the wake of the Ford Massacre. The anxiety was not new. It stemmed from a time soon after the Great War, when czarist Russia became Bolshevik Russia and communism came to America. The Red Scare, coupled with fear of anarchists and other radicals, had intensified in 1919 when a bomb exploded on the lawn of the Washington home of Attorney General J. Mitchell Palmer. He quickly formed an antiradical unit and put a young Department of Justice clerk, J. Edgar Hoover, in charge. Government agents arrested 6,000 aliens and deported 556.51 The Reds wrote frightening manifestos and threatened revolution. But revolution never happened. As the 1920s roared in, the Red Scare faded.

  The Depression brought new fears of menacing Reds. Communist Party officials in both America and the Soviet Union believed that unemployment and discontent had made the United States ripe for class warfare. Communists directed riots not only in Dearborn but also in New York City, Albany, Los Angeles, Akron, and Saint Louis, where rioters seized city hall and held it for several hours.52 The new Red Scare also found its way into politics, for President Hoover, like every president since Wilson, decided against recognition of the Soviet Union, whose leaders called for the overthrow of the U.S. government and financed subversive activities by members of the U.S. Communist Party.53

  The Red threat was taken very seriously by the U.S. Army, especially its Military Intelligence Division (MID), which had information that since February 1931 party leaders had been working on plans for a violent and mammoth bonus march to Washington.54

  High-ranking Army officers were so convinced of a potential Red-led revolution that they ordered a study on how tanks could be used against potential revolutionaries. This was among the topics studied by officers attending the 1932 class at the Army’s Tank School at Fort Benning, Georgia.55 The officers were told that “radical manpower” in the United States numbered more than one million and included not only the estimated 380,000 members of radical organizations but also “unorganized” groups of aliens and criminals. The cities “most likely to become the scene of violent revolutionary activities” were Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Seattle, and San Francisco; other likely sites were Boston, New Haven, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Dayton, and Baltimore. “Federal troops have been used in the suppression of domestic disturbances on more than a hundred separate occasions,” the Tank School officers were told, “and there is every reason to believe that troops will be called on again, for the same purpose.”56

  The Army’s plan of action benefited from lessons learned from Communist uprisings in Germany, beginning as the Great War was ending. Humiliated and hopeless in defeat, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers deserted and turned into revolutionaries of the Left and Right. Communists, fomenting riots and rebellion, seized power in dozens of cities. As a beleaguered Germany emerged from the war, former officers formed a Landesjaeger Corps—“national hunters”—who volunteered to fight the Communists, using machine guns, mortars, armored cars, and even aircraft against lightly armed, disorganized rebels, killing an estimated 15,000 of them.57 U.S. military observers gathered detailed information on the Landesjaeger tactics, and the observers’ reports made their way into Army files, including the Tank School document.58 In a typical operation, Landesjaeger aircraft machine-gunned rioters on roofs and at the barricades, paving the way for armored cars and troops with machine guns and hand grenades. Sections of the city were cordoned off, and mortars lobbed shells into the areas.

  The Landesjaeger’s methods, according to the Tank School document, “merit rather close study because of the success achieved within a minimum of time, and with small damage to life and property.” Tanks, the officers were told, should be used by U.S. Army troops only against “a major domestic disturbance which is well organized and led.” Other weapons would include machine guns, hand grenades, mortars, artillery, and aircraft. “As a rule, firearms should not be used against a crowd if other weapons are available,” such as tear gas.

  “In the attack of a city controlled by radical elements,” officers were advised,

  an attempt should be made to obtain possession of as much of its territory as possible. . . . There will be many parts of the city where no resistance will be encountered and other parts where the rioters are strongly prepared to offer resistance. . . . [It] has been found advantageous to attack a mob on one flank, depending upon the direction it is desired to drive it, and in the rear, while being held in front. It may happen that those in front would like to retreat, but because of pressure from behind, are unable to do so. . . .

  A house occupied by rioters may be avoided if it is occupied only as a refuge. . . . If its occupancy menaces the . . . troops, or threatens thei
r rear, it may become necessary to reduce it at once. Tanks are especially adapted for such attacks and can quickly reduce it to shambles.

  The U.S. Army plans at that time were code-named in colors that labeled potential enemies, both domestic and foreign. War Plan Orange, for example, involved war against Japan.59 White was assigned to the plan to defend Washington, D.C., against insurrection or serious riot.

  *Many years later, as president of the United States, Eisenhower wrote to Harvey Firestone Jr., the son of the founder of the company that bears his name. He had met Firestone along the army route in 1919, and in his letter Eisenhower noted that the caravan had “started him thinking” about the value of good roads and that it had planted in his mind the seed of an idea for an extensive system of highways. It bloomed thirty-seven years later, when Eisenhower as president led the legislative crusade for the Interstate Highway System we know today.

  *While this was going on, John Dos Passos, writing for the New Republic, noted that in another part of the auditorium a dance marathon was in its nineteenth hour and a man had fallen asleep on his partner’s shoulder, prompting Dos Passos to mark the moment with the declaration “the jazz age is dead.” New Republic, “Red Day on Capitol Hill,” December 23, 1931, 153–54.

  4

  Mobilizing a Bonus Army

  Akron, Augusta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Bridgeport, Buffalo, Camden, Canton, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Council Bluffs, Denver, Des Moines, Detroit, East Saint Louis, Erie, Fort Wayne, Hartford, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Lancaster, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Newark, Omaha, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Portland, Raleigh, Reno, Richmond, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Springfield (Illinois and Massachusetts), Stockton, Tampa, Wheeling, Wichita, Worcester, Youngstown.