The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  —Municipalities with large delegations to the BEF, based on police and news reports.

  THE THIRD CRUEL WINTER of the Great Depression faded into the spring of 1932, bringing a new season of despair for countless veterans. Like many, former sergeant Walter W. Waters was down on his luck in Portland, Oregon. He had served his country well. Born in 1898 in Burns, a town that had sprouted in the heart of Oregon’s open range, Waters moved with his family to Weiser, Idaho, on the Snake River.1 When he left school in May 1916, at the age of eighteen, he went to Boise and enlisted in the Idaho National Guard. Shortly afterward his regiment of about 1,800 men was called to federal service as reinforcements for a punitive expedition that President Wilson had sent to the Mexican border in pursuit of Francisco “Pancho” Villa.2 A revolutionary turned outlaw, Villa was on a rampage against Americans. He and his band had killed sixteen Americans on a train in Mexico and raided the Texas town of Columbus and killed another nineteen. The U.S. Army, under Major General John J. Pershing, searched for Villa for eleven months. On February 5, 1917, President Wilson ordered the troops withdrawn.3

  By then Waters’s enlistment had ended, but on the eve of war he joined the Oregon National Guard, which, with units from other northwestern states, became part of the 41st Infantry Division. Waters was in the medical detachment of the 146th Field Artillery when the division sailed to France on Christmas Eve in 1917.4

  Like most combat veterans of the Great War, Waters did not talk much about his days in France. He became a sergeant in April 1918, a good sign that he was a more than able soldier in fierce, and later storied, battles—Saint-Mihiel, Château-Thierry, Meuse-Argonne. A journal kept by Sergeant Harold Kamp, of the 146th Field Artillery, tells of artillerymen crouching “like animals of the forest” during their first gas attack, of the “stench of decaying human flesh and animals,” of German machine gunners “chained to their guns, dieing [sic] with fear portrayed on their faces,” and of Doughboys who “lived in dugouts for days, too frightened to come out of their hiding for food or drink.”5

  The 41st Division became part of the army of occupation. So Waters was not one of those Doughboys welcomed home in victory parades after the November 1918 Armistice. He did not return to the United States until June 1919. He was honorably discharged; on the line of his discharge paper labeled “Character,” an officer wrote “Excellent.”6

  Waters, back in civilian life, tried to get going in some profitable business or position, as a garage mechanic, an automobile salesman, a farmhand, a baker’s helper. Then, in 1925, as a twenty-seven-year-old drifter, he tried to change his luck by changing his name. Cutting all family and personal ties, he hitchhiked to Washington State and, as “Bill Kincaid,” got a job picking fruit in Washington’s bountiful cherry, peach, and apple orchards. He finally settled in Wenatchee, a fruit canning and shipping center at the confluence of the Columbia and Wenatchee rivers. He became a superintendent in a cannery and, still under his assumed name, married a cannery worker, Wilma Anderson.7

  The cannery became a casualty of the Depression. After it shut down, Waters headed to Portland, where he got a job at another cannery. He and Wilma rented a two-room apartment on the wrong side of the tracks; by early 1932 he was jobless again. But he had an idea: veterans should march to Washington and petition Congress for legislation that would give them the bonus immediately. He wrote out a speech and memorized it. On March 15, 1932, before several hundred veterans who had assembled in a hall in Portland, he made his speech as eloquently as he could. Essentially he told them: We should all hop a freight and head for Washington, D.C., to get the money that is rightfully ours. Waters attracted no followers, and he later conceded, “My speech fell flat.”8 George Alman, a cantankerous ex-lumberjack, remembered organizing several meetings at this time. At one, he spoke first and then asked if any other veteran wanted to come to the platform. “W. W. Waters came up,” Alman remembers, “telling a story about himself and his wife having had only fried potatoes for Christmas dinner.”9

  Walter W. Waters, a veteran from Portland, Oregon, became commander in chief of the Bonus Army, but often faced opposition. “We will stay here until 1945 if necessary to get our bonus,” he said. (Authors’ collection)

  Waters had become obsessed with the idea that the only way to get the bonus was to go to Washington and lobby for it. “During this time,” he says, “I was anxiously watching reports in the newspapers of the progress of Bonus legislation. . . . I noticed . . . that the highly organized lobbies in Washington for special industries were producing results; loans were being granted to their special interests and those lobbies seemed to justify their existence. Personal lobbying paid, regardless of the justice or injustice of the demand.”10

  The idea of a march was not new in Portland. In November 1931 about forty Portland veterans hopped on the freights to Washington, met with Oregon members of Congress, and returned in passenger trains, thanks to a sympathetic fellow veteran, Oregon senator Frederick Steiwer, who had been a U.S. Army lieutenant in France.11

  While Waters was in Portland talking about a march to Washington, the Veterans of Foreign Wars were planning their own march in Washington. The VFW demonstration was more a procession than a march. On April 8 more than twelve hundred veterans, with flags flying and bands playing, paraded to the broad steps of the U.S. Capitol. They presented Representative Wright Patman and other pro-bonus legislators with bundles of petitions calling for an immediate bonus payment. The VFW, which had organized the march, said there were 2,240,030 names in the bundles and packing cases of petitions that the veterans had carried to the Capitol steps.12

  Included in the ranks of the veterans were large contingents from American Legion posts, marching in defiance of the anti-bonus stand of the national commander of the legion, Henry L. Stevens Jr., a North Carolina lawyer who had been elected by acclamation at the legion convention in 1931.13 The Legion’s legislative committee had obliged President Hoover by voting to keep all bonus resolutions off the floor of the convention.14

  The impressive demonstration on the Capitol steps, along with the surge of bonus-now demands throughout the nation in the spring of 1932, produced widespread publicity. Radio personality Father Coughlin declared in congressional testimony in April that he had received some 2.5 million unsolicited letters on the bonus, which he said represented not just the vets but public opinion.15

  The petitions and resolutions, however, were not producing results in Congress. Pro-bonus legislators were fighting to keep their bills from dying in committee. War veterans in Congress, including Fiorello La Guardia and Hamilton Fish Jr., argued vigorously against the bonus in bitter debates with pro-bonus representatives.16 Watching newspaper reports and listening to radio news, Waters decided that Congress was ignoring the demands of veterans because members of Congress were seeing only signatures and pieces of paper—not hungry, jobless veterans.

  On April 23, a one-paragraph story on page 4 of a Portland newspaper told of a planned veterans’ rally a week later.17 Again Waters spoke, and again he was rebuffed. But he kept talking, feeling he was getting better with each speech, even though no one leaped up and joined his cause.

  Then, on May 1, newspapers across the nation carried an Associated Press report that the House Ways and Means Committee had voted against Patman’s latest bonus bill. The committee had also called for the return and tabling of all bonus bills to the House with unfavorable reports—a death sentence for the bonus in 1932.18 The committee had responded to reality: Hoover would veto any bonus legislation.19

  Waters seized on this news. In his next speech he told a group of jobless veterans that “there was little difference between hunger in Washington and hunger in Portland.” The men knew what he meant. By some estimates there were 4,500 jobless veterans in Portland.20 Local relief funds were running out for them and everyone else. A Portland family of five—husband, wife, two children, and one grandmother, for instance—had to get by on a welfare food allotment of $4 a wee
k.21 Waters kept talking about going to Washington, and the crowds kept growing. The last meeting before finally setting out for Washington was on May 10.22 The meeting was held outdoors in a park near city hall.23 George Kleinholz, a veteran who was glad to have a job as a salesman, was walking by and stopped to listen. When he got home he told his wife, “I’m going to Washington.”24

  Around the same time, a footloose thirty-two-year-old who called himself Steve Murray arrived in Portland. He had been wandering around the Northwest for more than two months—catching freights, hitchhiking, and, in a firm, neat hand, always writing down his adventures in an extraordinary diary that would follow the entire campaign of the Bonus Army.25 He had just received a pair of hand-me-down shoes from an American Legion post, and he decided to visit his uncle in Portland. By traveling in a boxcar and then hiking fifteen miles in his newly acquired shoes, he made it to Portland in early April and got a job painting and doing carpentry work in a hotel.

  In his spare time, Murray often joined unemployed veterans who hung around the courthouse. Most of the talk was about Wright Patman’s seemingly doomed bonus bill. Then one day he met Waters, who told him about the plan to march on Washington. Murray quit his job—“the work was about finished anyway,” he wrote—and told Waters he would join up.

  Other veterans who joined included George Alman, who had run several bonus meetings; Edgar W. White, who described himself as public relations manager; and Chester A. Hazen, an ex-sergeant whose asthma made him 10 percent disabled, by a Veterans Administration ruling. Hazen took over the march and gave himself the military title of commander in chief.26

  The Oregon veterans joined hundreds of thousands of men, women, children, and babies who were already on the move in May 1932—walking, hitchhiking, hopping freights, heading somewhere, heading nowhere, looking for a meal, a job, a place to flop. During that year, by one count, America had a floating population of 25,000 families and 2 million boys and young men on the road. As for single women and girls, statisticians seem to have averted their eyes. There were only whispered tales of girls selling their bodies or disappearing into the hobo jungles carved out of the narrow wildernesses along railroad rights-of-way.

  Kansas City counted 1,500 men and boys passing through the city every day.27 Railroads were plagued by so many illegal passengers that many railroad cops were no longer arresting them for trespass. The railroad cops would just collar the trespassers and send them shuffling into the nearest town. And some towns reacted by having their policemen escort the trespassers back to the railroad tracks and order them to hop the next freight.28 Every year at least a hundred people died under the wheels of freight trains, and hundreds of others were injured, many losing a leg.29

  By 1932 newspapers and newsreels hardly noticed the poor, the evicted, the young tramps, as they were called. The dispossessed were no longer news. The same seemed to be true in Portland when the veterans marched off, “to the beat of a borrowed drum,” as Waters described their departure. There was scant coverage in local newspapers. The men wore shiny old suits, bib overalls, or pieces of Army uniforms topped off by khaki overseas hats. They carried knapsacks or duffel bags or bedrolls, with tin cups dangling. They had $30 among them.

  The men climbed into friends’ trucks, which took them to the Union Pacific freight yards, where they waited for the night train. “We laughed and joked, like a crowd of children bound for a picnic,” Waters remembered. “Then, from afar, we heard the whistle of the train. Here we were, ready to start, and here was the train. Its headlight fired the tracks far before it. The men tightened their knapsacks—here was the train. It passed us, at fifty miles an hour.”30

  Aware of the veterans’ plans, railroad officials had ordered the train to highball through Portland too fast for anyone to hitch a ride. The veterans settled down in the freight yard, awaiting the next day’s train.

  Around 4:00 A.M., a bugler sounded reveille. Murray and the others woke up to find members of the local American Legion post passing out coffee and doughnuts. “Some of the men were so lazy,” Murray wrote, “they would not get up even when mess call was blown, so the bugler decided to blow [the call for] pay day. Then they come thinking Old Man Hoover had paid us the Bonus. How discouraged they looked when they saw they were only getting coffee and doughnut for pay.”

  Waters and four others took up “the problem that faced the Bonus Army through its whole existence”—how to feed the men and, later, many wives and children. Nearby restaurants and bakeries donated food, the veterans scrounged coffeepots, and the men were soon sitting in boxcars and eating what the newly selected mess sergeants managed to produce. Some deserted the army that day, but new recruits appeared in their place. The count stood at about 280 when railroad officials appeared. Waters recollected this dialogue:

  “We’ll run the train right through the yards again without stopping,” the officials said.

  “We’ll line up across the tracks,” some of the men said. “Then try it.”

  “That won’t do you any good. There are no empty cars on the train, and you can’t ride on the roofs. There’s a tunnel near here that will scrape you off.”

  “Put on some empties, then, or let the tunnel do its scrapin’.”

  “We can’t—and it’s suicide if you ride on top,” an official said, ending the conversation.

  The impasse continued until the train arrived. Seeing the crowd milling about, the engineer blew the whistle and slowed to a stop. Men jumped onto the boxcars’ ladders and began to climb up. The officials told the engineer to wait. Then one of them said to the vets, “If you men will climb into some empty stock cars on that track over there, we’ll hook them on the train for you. That’s the best we can do.”

  The men scrambled down and ran toward cattle cars reeking of dung. (“We searched for a shovel and cleaned it all out,” Murray noted.) The cars were coupled on, and the train headed east. Veterans who had ridden to battle in French “40 and 8” boxcars—meant to carry either forty men or eight horses—insisted that an American cattle car smelled better.

  They were going east, but not according to plan. Chester Hazen and his buddies, who were supposed to drive ahead and solicit donations to buy food, failed at their mission. For three days and nights the men had to rely on handouts from fellow veterans and others as the train stopped or paused for short periods at little towns along the way through Oregon. Some locals rallied to help the vets: townspeople served them lunch in The Dalles, there were donations of food and a quick parade at La Grande, and then only a sandwich apiece and a little coffee at Huntington. “Please take note,” Murray wrote in his diary, “how far apart our meals were and the amount we had to eat at each meal. The men would be just as hungry after eating as before.” On a typical day, the veterans had only two meals.*

  At Pocatello, Idaho, in the western foothills of the Rockies, the men piled out of the boxcars and gathered in a windswept vacant lot, looking in vain for Hazen, who was supposed to meet them there. Local policemen and others found food for them. They huddled together through the night. By now they were calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, BEF for short. And they found themselves calling outsiders “civilians.” They said they were in an army, the Bonus Army. But it was more of a disorganized, demoralized crowd than an army.

  Commander in Chief Hazen appeared the next day, smiling assuredly but without food or money. George Alman and Hazen’s other company commanders began to sharply question him about what had happened to the money he had collected: “We knew that not all the money so collected was going into food but some was going into his racketeering pockets.”31 According to Alman, Hazen tried to talk his way out of the confrontation, and when he threatened to pull a gun, local lawmen stepped in, disarmed him, and sent him back to Portland.32

  Like so many incidents in the BEF trek, this one has more than one recollected version. Murray’s diary entry for that day says that after a dinner of “good old Army bean stew,” the bugler blew “as
sembly,” a meeting was held, and “Hazen was found guilty of carrying a weapon on himself and tried to hold up our secretary, Mr. Taylor, the night before. What his idea was in trying to hold Taylor up I don’t know, as it was only about $25 in our treasury. But at least he tried it and was disqualified and was kicked out of our outfit and turned loose. I heard later that he went back to Portland and started another bunch to go to Washington D.C. and he collected . . . $200.00 for expense money on their way. . . . He left the bunch stranded at La Grande, Ore., and he was gone.”

  The incident shattered the unity of the BEF. Some men huddled in small groups, muttering about the way Hazen had chiseled them and griping about having to take orders from anyone. Others slipped off to find likely places for panhandling. “Instead of becoming an army, under discipline, we were almost a completely disorganized mob,” Waters recalled. His old sergeant’s instincts took hold. He climbed to the top of a boxcar and started haranguing, using language that he declined to include in his restrained memoir. Whatever the words were, the men listened to them, and an election of officers was held on the spot.

  Waters was elected regimental commander—not army commander—because he apparently thought of the marchers as a regiment on the move, perhaps with other regiments someday following.* The secretary mentioned by Murray was A. F. Taylor, a stocky, well-liked man with a gift of gab who was elected the new commander in chief.33 Like Hazen, Taylor was to go ahead of the marchers as an advance man. Waters, as second in command, created companies of forty men each, led by a captain with one lieutenant and one sergeant, all elected. Each company also was supposed to have a bugler and a first-aid squad. Alman became a captain, as did Murray. Recruits trickled in, but there were deserters, too. The Bonus Army’s strength held at about 300.34 Murray later tells of passing out potatoes to 350 men, by his count.

  Orders from Waters—no drinking, no panhandling, no antigovernment talk—went directly to the captains. Waters also demanded that each man again show his discharge papers.35 To enforce his rules, he appointed six military policemen, led by Mickey Dolan, a former West Coast prizefighter. Waters also appointed Jim Foley, a wartime supply sergeant, as regimental supply officer. Foley was to take charge “of all foodstuffs, tobacco, money, and supplies donated to us en route and to issue them proportionately to all the men.”