The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  Decreeing that the Bonus Army “was ready to move forward again,” Waters obtained permission from Pocatello officials for a parade. The men marched through downtown Pocatello (to the beat of another borrowed drum) while four men walked along the sidewalk, hats in hand, collecting $20 for the BEF.

  Although federal law forbade people to ride a railroad for free, whether in a passenger car or a boxcar, railroads varied in their enforcement of that law. The Southern Pacific Railroad alone was arresting or tossing off trains as many as 683,000 would-be freeloaders a year.36 But a large number of railroad men were veterans themselves, and some found ways to wink at the railway laws, such as the fourteen empty boxcars the Northern Pacific Railway pulled into a siding in Pocatello. The men clambered aboard, more orderly now.

  During a stop at Green River, Wyoming, the men staged a short parade before a crowd of about two thousand. “The American Legion gave us about $40.00 in smokes,” Murray wrote in his diary that night, “and we took in about $25.00 in the parade. . . . We climbed into the train and went to bed as we sure were tired after all the drilling and parading.” Next stop was Rawlings, where “we were short on food, as all we got was a cup of coffee and 1 sandwich each.” There was another parade at Laramie, Wyoming. “We were all very hungry. So when mess call was blown all we got was a cup of coffee, 1 slice of bread and ½ a roll each. So we were still hungry.” Looking out on the country flashing by, Murray saw “dead cattle and horses that had died from starvation and cold.”

  The train pulled into Cheyenne, Wyoming, in early evening and stopped at a sidetrack on an army post. “Here they fed us supper and, oh boy, it was good, as we sure were hungry,” Murray wrote. They were even given seconds, “with ice cream after each helping. There were about 2,000 people here to watch this bunch of bums eat supper and, oh boy, how they stood around and watched us.” Waters and Alman both mention a crowd—five to six thousand, by Alman’s estimate. The BEF formed up for a parade, many of the men puffing in the thin mountain air.37 Then they marched back to the freight yards and climbed back into the same boxcars, which took them to Council Bluffs, Iowa.

  Here, a week after leaving Portland, they began to realize that people were welcoming them as warriors of the Depression, just as people in France had welcomed them as Yanks. Often a veterans’ group in one town would notify a similar group in the next, requesting that they have hot meals available when the vets arrived. Unlike the countless streams of vagabond men on America’s rails and highways, these were men with a purpose, men who were challenging the nation’s creed of despair. The mayor of Council Bluffs presented them the key to the city. The town authorized a parade. American Legionnaires brought food. The police talked to officials of the Wabash Railway, and their boxcars took the veterans and their supplies out of Iowa and through Missouri to Saint Louis, then across the Mississippi River to East Saint Louis, Illinois.38

  The veterans thought that the informal arrangements for boxcar transport would continue on the Wabash Railway line. But the Bonus Army was entering another province of the Depression as its men passed from the America of ranches and farms to the America of seething cities and shut-down factories. Communist-controlled hunger marches and demonstrations had shaken Detroit and touched off the bloody Ford Massacre in Dearborn, Michigan, two months earlier.39 Chicago was bankrupt, with 624,000 out of work. After witnessing an angry protest from 20,000 people clamoring for food, Chicago mayor Anton Cermak had warned the state legislature, “Call out the troops before you close the relief stations”—the bureaucratic term for breadlines and soup kitchens. The alarmed legislators did send money, but money was running out by the spring of 1932. In Saint Louis, with a workforce of 330,000, only 125,000 had jobs, and one out of every eight residents faced imminent eviction. Across the river in East Saint Louis, where unemployment had reached 60 percent, a frightened mayor had issued an order prohibiting any meetings of the jobless.40 East Saint Louis, a tough town going through tough times, did not want another 300 jobless men, even if they were veterans. At least, that was what the politicians and the railroad executives thought.

  The BEF assembled at a depot about two miles out of Council Bluffs, where they were told to wait for empty boxcars. But what seemed to be an accomplished deal in Council Bluffs somehow evaporated under the glare of higher-ranking railroad officials with connections in higher places in Illinois. Suddenly, one of the local railroad officials mentioned interstate commerce laws that forbade railroads to give free rides. The trainmaster, who was to make up the train, said he had no empties but the veterans were welcome to ride on top of the cars—a potentially lethal way to travel. The men, wanting to move on, accepted the offer, but Waters refused because of the danger and because there would be no way to transport supplies or those veterans who were not physically able to climb to the tops of the cars.

  Waters lined up the men along the track. The train started forward, then stopped because two cars in the middle of the train had become uncoupled. Trainmen went to recouple them while members of what Waters called the Transportation Committee slipped between cars and used their skills as laid-off railroad men. They again uncoupled cars or pulled pins from air-brake hoses. The train started . . . and stopped. Again trainmen hooked up the cars. The train started up and stopped again. The exasperated engineer said that was enough. He would not attempt to move the train unless the veterans were on board.

  The angry trainmaster went to his office, accompanied by Waters, and made a long-distance phone call. “I have called the police, but they won’t come down,” Waters heard him say to someone. “. . . Yes. I did notify the sheriff, but he says that it isn’t his job to prevent persons from riding on freight trains.” The trainmaster slammed down the phone, led Waters back to the train, and pointed to four empties, telling him to load the men into them. Later that night, a few other empty cars were added and the train, fully coupled, headed for Saint Louis, Missouri.41 There, the veterans expected to cross the river to East Saint Louis, Illinois, and get into boxcars provided by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which would take them across Illinois and Indiana to Cincinnati, Ohio.

  Commander in Chief A. F. Taylor, as the advance man, had gone on to Saint Louis by car. Meanwhile, word of the BEF was spreading, and even as Waters and his men were still sprawled on the floor of the Wabash boxcars, twenty-five vets from Tennessee were circling the streets around the White House in a truck bearing the sign “We Want Our Bonus.”42

  The train rolled through suburbs and northern Saint Louis, slowing down at a complex of tracks that branched into vast switchyards. The men awoke soon after dawn to see that the train had stopped alongside a vacant lot, surrounded by police brandishing nightsticks and shotguns. Waters, stunned by the sight, ordered his bugler to sound assembly. The men climbed out of the cars, lined up for roll call, and marched into the lot. The policemen did not move. Waters did not know that the Saint Louis police had been alerted by news stories saying that the veterans had “commandeered” freight cars and “forced the crew to take the cars along.” A short while later, the chief of police arrived, looked over the quiet scene, conferred with Waters, and sent all but a half dozen officers back to their precincts. The chief gave five dollars to the veterans’ mess fund. Having seen for himself that the veterans were orderly, the police chief had reacted the way other friendly officials had ever since the veterans had left Portland.43

  Among the Bonus Army’s early arrivals in Washington were veterans from Chattanooga, Tennessee, who drove past the White House on May 18. The main contingent, formed in Portland, Oregon, was still en route. (Underwood & Underwood/Library of Congress)

  Mess sergeants set up crude field kitchens in the vacant lot and cooked a lunch of beans, salt pork, potatoes, bread, and coffee. As the men ate, Waters decided to give them a rest while he and Taylor planned the next move. The men would spend Friday, May 20, in Saint Louis, sleep in the boxcars, then march off the next morning to the B&O freight yards, which were about twelve miles away
, across the Mississippi in East Saint Louis. Taylor was to drive on and meet the marchers in Ohio.44

  But B&O officials arrived at the vacant lot and presented Waters with a court order prohibiting the Bonus Army from using that railroad’s boxcars. The B&O and the Pennsylvania Railroad had asked Illinois governor Louis L. Emmerson to use the Illinois State Highway Police to keep the veterans from breaking the no-free-riders railroad laws. The chief of the highway police, sympathizing with the veterans, said that since they were not creating a disturbance on the highways of Illinois, he had no jurisdiction over what they might do on railroad property.45

  Waters kept the men in the Wabash Railway boxcars in Saint Louis while he figured out what to do next. Rumors swept the ranks that anonymous politicians in Washington were somehow pressuring the railroads to stop the Bonus Army.46 The Bonus March was in the headlines: Saint Louis newspapers, the Associated Press, and United Press were writing about the Bonus Army, not as another bunch of down-and-outers on the road but as men carrying with them the potential for conflict and violence. There might be a deadly riot, just as there had been in Dearborn. Newsreel cameramen headed for Saint Louis.

  Waters and his marchers were no longer anonymous men on the move. Their next steps, across the Mississippi to East Saint Louis, would take them into history.

  On Saturday, May 21, the buglers sounded the call for packing out. Waters had found a veteran with a truck who said he would take the food, field kitchens, and supplies separately to East Saint Louis if Waters would pay for the gasoline. Waters agreed, and the men began to march off.

  One of the two bridges across the Mississippi was a toll bridge. Waters chose that one. “Looking neither left nor right, the men trudged along to the entrance to the bridge,” Waters recalled. “Here they speeded their pace. The toll collector came out from his booth and, as if seeing a vision, watched the silent column pass. If he had had any thought of collecting a fee, he said nothing of it to us.”

  On the east side of the bridge, an Illinois State Highway Police officer on a motorcycle met them and escorted them through traffic and past the gawkers along Main Street, over Brooklyn Road to St. Clair Avenue and the B&O yards. On the way, Lester J. Ives, captain of F Company, staggered out of the line of march, feverish and weak. Ives, better known as Baldy, could walk no farther. A Good Samaritan in an automobile offered to take him to St. Mary’s Hospital. Mickey Dolan, the tough boxer running the military police, helped Baldy into the car and jumped in himself.

  “I don’t want to go. I’m going to Washington,” Baldy said.

  “Don’t worry, Baldy. We’ll wait for you,” Mickey said. The car headed to the hospital.47

  When the marchers reached the B&O yards, they found about two dozen railroad policemen barring their way, alongside P. J. Young, superintendent of the B&O police. He told Waters that no marcher would be allowed on railroad property and no one was to ride a B&O train who could not pay the fare.

  The men assembled in an adjacent field and began preparing their next meal while Waters negotiated with the railroad officials gathered around Young. Waters asked for eight boxcars. The request was denied. Then two coaches, for $75? The railroad men laughed, saying that the coaches would cost $5,000. There was no point in negotiating, Waters decided.

  “We’re going to Washington,” he told the railroad men. “Nothing can stop us but bullets. We haven’t bullets of our own, and we’re not afraid of anyone else’s bullets. We’re going to Washington.”

  “To Washington they may go,” Young said. “But they’re not going on the B&O. If they try to take our train like they did that Wabash freight at Council Bluffs, we’ll just sidetrack it and won’t run it at all.”

  At one point in the debate, Waters pointed to one of the American flags in the camp and said, “We’re traveling to Washington under the same flag we fought under . . . and we’ll do nothing to disgrace that flag.”48

  Waters gave a short speech to his men about the need for courage and good behavior. Then, Murray wrote, “we put up our blankets on sticks to give us a little shade, as it was very hot that day, 98 in the shade.” The men milled around, waiting for orders. Waters arranged for a parade through East Saint Louis. Most people there, suffering from catastrophic unemployment, had no love for the B&O or any other big corporation, and they liked the sight of these stubborn veterans. The mayor welcomed them and, according to Waters, said, “You can do as you please and stay as long as you like, as long as your conduct does not conflict with any of our laws.”

  Back at the yards, Young doubled his police guard. Strings of rail cars began shuffling up and down the many tracks. The savvy railroaders on the BEF Transportation Committee understood what was happening: yard workers, under orders to confuse the marchers, were playing an elaborate shell game with boxcars. Knowing that Waters had forbidden anyone to try to hop on a moving train, the workers kept as many empties as possible in motion. And, in the confusing shuttling of the boxcars, an eastbound train might suddenly move off unnoticed.

  Around ten o’clock that night, word went around that an eastbound freight train had arrived. Waters led the men in two files across the yards. At his signal, they climbed into the cars. In moments scores of men were perching on top of boxcars, on coal gondolas, and on the sides of tank cars. They even hauled up their field kitchens. Young hurried to the cars and shouted up to Waters, “I thought you promised to keep your men out of the yards.”

  “I promised that I would until an eastbound train was ready to leave,” Waters shouted back. “Then we are going with it.”

  “No train will move as long as you are on it,” Young declared.

  Someone shouted back, “No train will move unless we’re on it.”

  No train moved. The men stayed on the cars through the night. Murray recorded in his diary: “A bunch of us slept on top of a car filled with cinders while the rest was scattered around in box cars and some were on police duty to guard the train so no seals [on the car doors] were broken by any one.” At dawn, the men began climbing down, some of them falling asleep on the cross ties and cinders. They had a new name for the B&O: the Hoover Line.49

  Young appeared, and negotiations started again. He told Waters that the men were interfering with yard work and had put themselves in danger of being run over. Waters agreed to retreat to the previously occupied field— provided members of the Transportation Committee could remain. Young agreed.

  As the men reassembled in the field, more and more railroad policemen lined up at the edge of the B&O property. City police also were arriving—to handle the growing crowd of townspeople who had come to watch what Waters called “a struggle in passive resistance.” The marchers dubbed their grounds Camp Bonus. Men from local posts of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars came bearing food and other supplies. About a dozen local veterans walked into the field, showed their discharge papers, and became members of the BEF.

  Newspaper photographers and reporters now gave regular coverage of what looked like a great news story: a showdown between the veterans and the railroad. Stories about the marchers ran even when they were competing with headlines about the achievement of Amelia Earhart, who landed in Northern Ireland on May 21, becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, a feat performed by Charles Lindbergh exactly five years before.

  On Sunday, May 22, Charles Galloway, vice president and general manager of the B&O, arrived in a private railroad car. He was determined to get his trains running again. His arrival brought a new move in the confusing shuttling of boxcars in the yard. Small switching engines were pulling cars out of the yard. At first, no one paid attention. Switching engines could not pull mainline trains. Then a freight locomotive and a caboose sped out of the yard, heading east. Members of the Transportation Committee immediately realized what was happening. A full train was being made up outside the yard. They shouted: “Caseyville! Caseyville!” Men stumbled along the tracks in useless pursuit of the locomotive and caboose. Scores of
other veterans ran toward the crowd and excitedly reported the railroad’s trick. Sympathetic spectators offered to drive the veterans to Caseyville, eight miles to the east.

  The highway ran parallel to the tracks. Some drivers shouted to the men running down the tracks and stopped their cars so they could hitch a ride. More and more veterans jumped into cars, squeezing inside or leaping onto running boards for the wild ride to Caseyville.

  There they found the completed train, ready to pull out. The veterans ran from highway to railway, smashed down a fence, and sprinted to the train. Murray wrote, “We were forced to go up over a bank and across a bunch of tracks to get to the train, when the boys went over this bank and across them tracks just like going over the top in France. One yard cop tried to stop us, but he was knocked down and run over and never got a chance to get up until every one had gone by. There were a lot of people there to see us go over and they sure gave us a cheer.”

  While some men uncoupled cars or tampered with the air brakes, others climbed onto the cars and raised an American flag on the locomotive. Soon about one hundred marchers were on and around the train. It could not move. By nightfall, all the marchers were in Caseyville, where they would spend the night. But Waters had disappeared.50

  By his own account, Waters strategically withdrew after giving Young an ultimatum: Let my men on the train, or I quit. In his recollected words, he told Young, “You can take your choice of letting a responsible group ride freight on your road . . . or having three hundred individuals to deal with.” The railroad ignored the ultimatum, and Waters quit. He claimed in his memoir that the men knew he was only temporarily withdrawing as part of his strategy.51