by Paul Dickson
However, Alman said Waters “slipped away . . . no one knew where.” In Waters’s absence, Alman took command of what would become a three-day stalemate while Waters quietly moved on to set up a camp in Indiana: the veterans would not let a train move without them, and the railroad would not move a train if it had veterans aboard.
By Alman’s account, the men—“with steadily increasing militancy”—decided to elect a twenty-five-man Workers’ Council that negotiated with local sheriff Jerome Munie, who seemed to be acting as a mediator between the veterans and the railroad. Newspapers said that the veterans soaped the rails, causing locomotive drive wheels to spin. This nondestructive sabotage, a sample of Waters’s passive resistance, tied up at least thirty B&O trains for nearly twelve hours. The Workers’ Council did allow a thirty-car refrigerator train, loaded with perishables, to leave.52
The veterans’ increasing militancy was apparent enough for Lieutenant Governor Fred E. Sterling (Governor Emmerson was out of state)53 to call out the Illinois National Guard. Six companies of guardsmen arrived in East Saint Louis, apparently unaware that the battleground now was Caseyville. A guard officer said that Sheriff Munie had asked for help. But Munie denied this. The guard’s adjutant general later said that the request for aid had come from B&O officials “who said their property had been threatened.”54 Officers later found the veterans in Caseyville and talked with them, but a violent confrontation, so greatly expected by the newspapers and the newsreel cameramen, never happened.
In Caseyville, Sheriff Munie was not worried about the behavior of the veterans. “When it looked like trouble at Caseyville yesterday,” he said, “it wasn’t the veterans I was concerned about, but the sympathizers. There was a crowd of several thousand along the B&O tracks, all yelling and hollering for the veterans and telling them to stay on the train. . . . And later, when the vets passed the hat, you should have seen the dollar bills fall into it.”55
The men hung on to the cars in rain and sun. Sometimes they sang a new version of their wartime song, “Mademoiselle from Armentieres”:
We’re going to ride the B&O
The Good Lord Jesus told us so.
Hinkey dinkey parlez-vous
In the temporary absence of Waters and apparently without the aid of Alman’s Workers’ Council, Sheriff Munie decided to end the stalemate. He contacted two local union officials and urged them to find cars and trucks to get the veterans onto highways, not railways. Businesses contributed more vehicles. The East Saint Louis Chamber of Commerce paid the expenses.
On the afternoon of May 24 the veterans packed themselves into eight trucks and eighteen cars, by Murray’s count. The motorcade, paced by a slow dump truck full of veterans, passed through Caseyville’s cheering crowds behind an Illinois State Police escort, sirens wailing. Rolling eastward once more, they sang a new verse based on the belief that Washington had somehow intervened against them and that Hoover was behind the hard line of the B&O.
We didn’t ride the B&O.
The good Lord Hoover told us so.
Hinkey dinkey parlez-vous56
George Kleinholz, one of Waters’s most trusted aides, later wrote, “It seems that the Chief Executive of the Nation had been reading about the March on Washington and decided to stop it. . . . Hoover had the whip hand over the officials of the B&O. They had applied to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation for a loan, and unless they did Hoover’s bidding, they would receive very little consideration from the R.F.C.”57 The B&O had, in fact, received a $7 million loan from the RFC in March and was given another for $25.5 million on May 16—a few days before the incident with the BEF.58
By the time the BEF left Caseyville on May 24, official Washington understood that the Bonus Army was much larger than the 300-plus Portland group. For days now, radio and newspaper accounts of the BEF had been prompting thousands of other veterans from all regions of the country to form groups and head for Washington. The day that the BEF left East Saint Louis, police chief Pelham Glassford began to prepare for an unprecedented human onslaught. He appealed to first Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley for funds and shelter, cots, and blankets for the bonus marchers. Hurley turned him down and told him that “the Federal government could not recognize the invasion.” Hurley, Glassford told newspaper reporters, “was very reluctant to let any of his stuff go.”59 Unfazed, Glassford was then turned down individually by the Marine Corps, the Department of the Navy, the Washington Navy Yard, the Anacostia Naval Air Station, and area Army posts, which, unknown to Glassford, were already training to confront the Bonus Army.60
Details of the East Saint Louis standoff and its resolution had quickly reached the offices of the Army General Staff in the massive, ornate edifice known as the State, War, and Navy Building, across West Executive Avenue from the White House.61 Here General Douglas MacArthur, Army Chief of Staff, presided over a shrunken peacetime Army that was continually being whittled down by Congress. Like all other officers assigned to Washington, MacArthur wore civilian clothes, presumably because his commander in chief, a Quaker, did not want the capital to have a military air.62 In a nearby office was his principal aide, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower. To summon Eisenhower, all MacArthur had to do was raise his voice.63
In another, larger adjacent office was Major General George Van Horn Moseley, Deputy Army Chief of Staff, a close friend of MacArthur and a favorite of Hurley. When Moseley entered MacArthur’s office on May 24, the departure of the Bonus Army from East Saint Louis had become a matter of urgency. Little formality prefaced Moseley’s report. He said he was convinced that the Bonus Army was growing and would be a large presence in Washington. He told MacArthur that the Army should be ready to meet any emergency that might arise. MacArthur, however, did not believe there was an imminent crisis.64
In a letter to a friend written that same day, Moseley enumerated his fears: “We pay great attention to the breeding of our hogs, our dogs, our horses, and our cattle, but we are just beginning to realize the . . . effects of absorbing objectionable blood in our breed of human beings. The pages of history give us the tragic stories of many one-time leading nations which . . . imported manpower of an inferior kind and then . . . intermarried with this inferior stock.” He added that “intensive investigations of the past months” showed that “we are harboring a very large group of drifters, dope fiends, unfortunates and degenerates of all kinds.” They have become, he said, a “distinct menace.”65
Colonel Alfred T. Smith, the Army’s chief intelligence officer, also met with MacArthur that day to discuss what he saw as potential trouble. MacArthur began to come around to Moseley’s way of thinking.
The next morning, MacArthur walked into Moseley’s office. “George,” he said, “I have thought over our conversation of yesterday, and you are right, and I want you to go ahead with all necessary arrangements to meet any possible emergency.” Although there was no evident threat from Waters’s three hundred–odd veterans heading for Washington, Moseley immediately turned to Plan White, developed in the 1920s to defend Washington from civilian attack.
Moseley had “a few tanks” secretly transferred from Fort Meade, Maryland, about fifteen miles north of Washington, to Fort Myer, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. The fort supplied the men and horses for military funerals at the adjacent Arlington National Cemetery. On the Washington social circuit, Fort Myer was better known as the source of handsome officers who turned up as the extra men at dinner parties or, in dress blues, at White House receptions. By the early spring of 1932 wandering veterans had started appearing at the enlisted men’s barracks at Fort Myer, looking for food and shelter. Sympathetic soldiers, some of them Great War veterans themselves, figured out a way to help the men and keep them from becoming beggars. Each month many soldiers chipped in a dollar apiece toward wages for veterans willing to work in mess halls or stables.
The fort was the home of the 3rd Cavalry, famous for exhibitions at society horse shows, where their specialty was acrob
atics on horseback—“monkey drills,” the troops called them. Washington society and military polo players met on Fort Myer’s perfectly groomed polo field. One of the best-known soldier-players was Major George S. Patton Jr., executive officer of the 3rd Cavalry.66
Moseley also had trucks sent to Fort Washington, a few miles down the Potomac, with orders to stand by to transport troops to Washington. In cooperation with the Secret Service, he made arrangements “to put a small force upon a moment’s notice in the White House grounds” and to “fully protect the Treasury,” next door to the White House. He ordered Brigadier General Perry L. Miles, commander of Army forces around the capital, to secretly make detailed plans “to meet any emergency whatsoever.”
Miles had been in command of the Washington Military District little more than a month when he got his orders from Moseley.67 Miles’s principal troops, stationed at Fort Meade and Fort Holabird, near Baltimore, were to be brought in to protect not only the White House and the Treasury but also the Capitol and the Bureau of Printing and Engraving.68
The military was prepared for civil unrest. Secretly, the Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) had been keeping a watch on suspected radicals. The Army divided the United States into nine corps areas. For some time, the commanding officer of each corps had been sending a monthly secret “Special Report” to MacArthur’s adjutant general, who ran the MID. The reports, called “Estimate of the Subversive Situation,” were based on newspaper articles, tips from patriotic civilians, and intelligence from undercover operatives. A typical report, from the New England corps area, noted strikes in Boston and Darien, Connecticut, and mentioned ministers who preached pacifism in Boston, citing particularly a Quaker minister who “is an agitator and is being watched by civilian authorities.” The report named several subversives and listed as “Centers of Unrest” Boston; Darien and Hartford, Connecticut; Manchester, New Hampshire; and Portland, Maine.69
The gathering of intelligence at that time was done by three agencies organized independently of one another: the MID, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), and the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation. The ONI, which mostly kept watch over maritime matters, had a reputation for bold, and often illegal, operations. In 1930, for example, an ONI operative and an ex-detective had broken into the New York City offices of the Democratic Party. The assignment had come from Lewis L. Strauss, a naval intelligence reserve officer who said that “the President is anxious to know” what damaging information the Democrats had on him. No such information was found. The same ONI officer around this time broke into the headquarters of the Communist Party of America in New York, got unspecified information, made it appear that the break-in had been the work of a rival radical group, and stole checkbooks and bankbooks “to create even more trouble.”70
Such desperate efforts to gather intelligence about Communist activities were intensified by reports of the coming of a Bonus Army riddled with Reds.
While the Army spent the day of May 25 on the first phase of the White Plan, Police Chief Glassford launched a one-day, one-man campaign to get Congress to take up bonus legislation immediately to stave off the delegations of veterans now heading to Washington from all points to join those already in town or its outskirts. In fact, Glassford, who had just returned from New York City, had encountered a group of veterans and their families on a road in New Jersey, walking to Washington to demand the bonus.
Glassford first went to the White House, thinking that if he could get Hoover to endorse his plan, it would help him when he went to Congress. He met with Walter B. Newton, a former Minnesota congressman who served as Hoover’s secretary for political matters. All Glassford got from Newton was a promise to “think the matter over.”71 Glassford next called on Senator James Watson of Indiana, the Republican floor leader, pleading for quick action on the bonus bill. He also visited Representative Henry T. Rainey, the Democratic floor leader in the House, who had been in Congress since 1903,72 and Wright Patman, who was looking for support to get his bonus bill out of committee.73 These were audacious moves: a local police chief, without consulting his superiors, the District commissioners, was attempting to tell the U.S. Congress and the White House how to proceed with legislation.
The White House reacted swiftly. Glassford got a call from a Hoover aide, who said, “You are embarrassing the administration. . . . You should not have told the press what you were here for.”74
Later in the day, Glassford called a meeting of veterans’ groups, charity organizations, social agencies, and the Community Chest to discuss his dilemma: no food or shelter for an ever-growing army of veterans. The American Legion declined to help; the Veterans of Foreign Wars later donated $500.75
Herbert H. Crosby, the D.C. commissioner in charge of police and the man who had hired Glassford, attended the meeting.76 Crosby was keenly aware that Glassford had embarrassed the commissioners by going to the White House without approval or even advance notice. Crosby broached the subject of the bonus marchers when he turned to Glassford and said, “If you feed and house them, others will come by the thousands.”
Glassford shot back, “It would be far better to have 10,000 orderly veterans under control than 5,000 hungry, desperate men breaking into stores and committing other depredations.”
“What is the police force for?” Crosby, a retired major general, snapped.
“Are you making a suggestion or issuing an order?”
“In the Army, it has been my experience that suggestion is obeyed the same as an order.”
“We’re not in the Army now,” said Glassford. “This emergency places a tremendous responsibility for preserving law and order, perhaps protecting life and property, squarely on my shoulders. I cannot follow suggestions. If you desire to take the responsibility yourself for such a policy, all you have to do is to issue written orders and they will be carried out. In the absence of such orders, I shall take what I consider the correct course.”
Crosby backed off, but he had lost confidence in Glassford’s judgment.
Glassford had invited a member of Congress, Paul J. Kvale of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, to the meeting with Crosby. Glassford trusted Kvale, who had been a sergeant in a machine-gun corps in the war, and he looked to him for guidance about the ways of Congress. Bringing the obscure Minnesotan to the meeting showed Glassford’s lack of knowledge about the power structure of Congress. Still, Kvale did try to help. On the floor of the House he called on the leaders of what he called the “bonus brigades” to return home. A supporter of the bonus, Kvale said he spoke for the “hastily formed citizens committee” that Glassford had convened. These, said Kvale, were Washingtonians concerned “over the prospect of wholesale suffering and misery” that would arrive with the veterans.77
At the end of this long, frustrating day, Glassford realized he was on his own.78 He now had a logistical headache of monumental proportions. Although he had found two abandoned buildings in which to house the first small groups of vets, he was suddenly hard-pressed for food, money, and shelter. And the day was not yet over.
That night he decided to attend an open-air meeting of about a hundred newly arrived veterans who had gathered to plan their next moves. The meeting was at Judiciary Square, which symbolically stood about midway between the Capitol and the White House.79 By the time the meeting ended, Glassford had made two speeches, had been cheered, and had even been chosen secretary-treasurer of the group, which had a small mess fund. The veterans, taking the name from news reports of Waters’s Oregon marchers, called their outfit the Bonus Expeditionary Force. They voted to institute military discipline, outlaw liquor, respect laws, and suppress panhandling. “I saw before me,” said Glassford, “a group of poorly dressed men, many of them with medals, wound stripes and decorations for bravery.”80
Earlier that evening, on his network radio broadcast, Lowell Thomas told his listeners, “The march of the Bonus Army on Washington, D.C., becomes more promising of excitement every day.”<
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As the bonus marchers traveled across Illinois, people turned out to cheer them on. In Salem, a crossroads town in south-central Illinois, townspeople rounded up a band, struck up “Over There,” and invited the veterans to parade through the business section. Flora, another crossroads town, came up with two bands and a parade.81 Two young men, eager to meet war veterans, took Murray and a buddy to a café, bought them “a swell lunch,” and gave them each a pack of cigarettes.
The motorcade was to leave Illinois by crossing the Wabash River at Vincennes, Indiana. Waters went ahead by car to a prearranged campsite in Washington, Indiana, about twenty-five miles east. When the Illinois motorcade stopped at the state line, an Indiana policeman beckoned the vehicles into his state. He escorted them to the Washington site. They arrived there at about four o’clock in the morning and tumbled to the ground, exhausted. The men fell asleep on the grass while the trucks and cars headed back to East Saint Louis.82 For their noonday meal the city provided large portions of slumgullion—“slum” to the vets—a meat stew made with all available vegetables.83 In early afternoon, tired and disheveled, the veterans shuffled in a ragged parade through Washington. Other veterans, walking along the sidewalks and asking for donations, collected a little over $32.
Next morning, the vets filled up trucks belonging to the Indiana National Guard that had been provided by the governor. The trucks rolled slowly along the hilly highways of southern Indiana and made an overnight stop at a city park in Seymour, a town about fifty-five miles south of Indianapolis. The governor of Ohio, aware that the motorcade would soon cross into his state near Lawrenceburg, Indiana, ordered up his own convoy of National Guard and State Highway Department trucks. On the first truck was a banner: “Veterans Bonus March. On to Washington.”