The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  Veterans from Cincinnati joined the march as the trip across Ohio began. Crowds cheered them in every town they passed through. The big, canvas-topped trucks stopped traffic on narrow streets.84 The convoy halted for the night in a park at Zanesville, about seventy miles east of Columbus. There Waters was immediately handed a telegram that had arrived from Representative Wright Patman, asking him to go to Washington ahead of his men so that he could talk to officials there. Next, he received a message from a Secret Service agent asking Waters to meet him in a Zanesville hotel.

  As Waters recalled the meeting, the agent asked him “a lot of questions” about his men and the motive for their march on Washington. Then he asked, “Is there anyone in your outfit you can’t trust?”

  “There are a few who don’t agree with my principles of organization and discipline,” Waters replied, “but I think they are all okay.”

  “Well, we’ve had you and your crowd under surveillance for some time and we’ll keep you there,” the agent said. “Personally, you have a clean sheet with us.”

  Waters showed him the telegram from Patman. The agent said, “Please don’t leave your men, even for an hour. Our job is to protect Mr. Hoover, and remember, it takes only one man to do the damage. It would be dangerous for you to leave the men out of your control for a moment, here or in Washington. You’ve got to stay with them to see that strict discipline is kept.”

  Waters wired Patman to say he had to stay with his men.

  The Portland contingent of the Bonus Army now numbered about 340, its ranks filled with members picked up along the way. In Ohio, the BEF split up for the first time, when about a hundred left the convoy near Cincinnati to hop freights or hitchhike. The rest stayed in State Highway Department trucks in what was now the familiar system for getting the marchers through each state as quickly as possible.

  State-owned trucks bearing Bonus Army members crawled through Montgomery, Ohio, on May 29. At the state line, West Virginia trucks picked up the veterans and deposited them in Maryland, the last stop before Washington. (Authors’ collection)

  They entered West Virginia near Wheeling.85 Somewhere, passing through “some very beautiful country,” Murray saw an old woman on the porch of a house. She “was crying and she kept yelling at us to bring back her boy. I expect she lost her boy in France.”

  They were taken into Pennsylvania by National Guard trucks on the National Road, America’s first federal highway, which cut diagonally across southwestern Pennsylvania. A hilly, winding, undulating, gear-grinding road through spectacular spring greenery, since the early nineteenth century it had connected Wheeling to the headwaters of the Potomac River at Cumberland, Maryland.86 Over one stretch, near the Pennsylvania-Maryland line, the veterans passed over what had been a military road hacked through the wilderness during the French and Indian War, a road that young George Washington had taken into battle in 1755.87 At the state line, the veterans were passed to Maryland National Guard trucks, which took them to Cumberland, where they slept on the floor of an old skating rink. They had traveled some three thousand miles in eighteen days.88

  Next day, the trucks would take them, not to the Maryland–District of Columbia line but right into the heart of Washington. The arrangement had been made by Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland. Pelham Glassford had a natural empathy for the veterans, but he had done whatever he could to keep the marchers from coming to the capital. He had written to governors urging them to discourage the marchers—not only the Waters group but also those forming in other parts of the country. Most governors opted to move the veterans across their states rather than try to stop them. Glassford sent letters to VFW and American Legion posts, also to no avail. On his own, he announced, “If necessary, I will enforce my edict of forty-eight hours as the limit of their stay here. If Congress wants to foot their bills, they can stay as long as they like.”89

  Waters, despite the request of the Secret Service, decided to go ahead to Washington on an early-morning train on Sunday, May 29, leaving his men behind. He felt he had to meet Glassford before the BEF arrived.90

  *When Waters’s group was a few days out of Portland a pall was cast over them as the body of the Lindbergh baby was found on May 12, partly buried and badly decomposed, about four and a half miles southeast of his home.

  *A Great War regiment had about 3,800 men.

  5

  An Army of Occupation

  In the sad aftermath that always follows a great war there is nothing sadder than the surprise of the returned soldiers when they discover that they are regarded generally as public nuisances, and not too honest.

  —H. L. Mencken, quoted in B.E.F. News, July 23, 1932

  IN WASHINGTON, Waters met first with Representative Wright Patman, who, Waters later said, was “very nervous lest he be credited in any way with having inspired the march.”1 Next, Waters met Glassford and found him “friendly, courteous, and above all humanly considerate.” The ex-sergeant felt it hard to believe that he was talking to a former brigadier general.2

  Glassford took Waters to a vacant downtown department store at 8th and I streets Southeast, not far from the Navy Yard, and told him that his men could be sheltered there. The store’s owner, D. J. Kaufman, had offered the place as a refuge to the marchers, in the first of many such acts of kindness performed by Washingtonians.3

  “How many veterans will come here, do you think?” Glassford asked.

  “There will be twenty thousand here within the next two weeks,” Waters answered, coming up with what would be a prophetic number. Waters had been “flooded” with telegrams from groups of veterans pledging to join him in Washington.4 And now he realized that he had launched a national movement.

  Glassford let a cop who was a veteran, Patrolman J. E. Bennett, give the veterans the rules: “You’re welcome here, but the minute you start mixing with Reds and Socialists, out you go. If you get mixed up with that gang, you’re through here. The Marine barracks are across the street, the Navy Yard is a couple of blocks away, and there’s lots of Army posts around. We don’t want to call them, and we won’t call them as long as you fellows act like gentlemen.”

  The vets agreed, and one of them said, “If we find any Red agitators, we’ll take care of them ourselves.”5

  Waters’s march had upstaged a bonus march that the U.S. Communist Party had been planning, similar to the 1931 Hunger March. U.S. intelligence sources6 had a detailed special report from an agent identified as Operative HS, who had put the start of planning at January 15.7 The organizers were leaders of the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League (WESL for short, pronounced “Weasel” by foes).8 Operative HS, without identifying them, said “five 100% Communists” had infiltrated the BEF.

  The WESL was well known to Washington officials; its members had been singled out as picketers at the White House in October 1931. The U.S. Secret Service had tightened security around President Hoover at that time,9 and the Veterans Administration had sent its own undercover man among the WESL picketers. He learned that three of them were teenage hobos, and the belief persisted that there were many nonveterans among the WESL members.10

  Ever since the Hunger March, W. H. Moran, chief of the U.S. Secret Service, had feared an assassination attempt on President Hoover and had increased the White House guard force.11 But despite his boss’s continuing alarm, Colonel Edmund W. Starling, supervisor of presidential security for the Secret Service, now had a different opinion about the bonus marchers. It was Starling who had put undercover agents into the ranks of Waters’s marchers. “Generally speaking there were few Communists,” he later reported, “and they had little effect on the men’s thinking. The veterans were Americans, down on their luck, but by no means ready to overthrow their government.”12

  Starling was in the minority in believing that the vets were not susceptible to the inflammatory language of the few radicals in the ranks of the Bonus Army. Most officials feared the radical rhetoric of Communist firebrands, especially William Z. Fost
er, who would become the Communist Party’s presidential candidate in 1932. In a book published that year, he said that the only way out of the Depression was “the overthrow of the capitalist system” and the creation of an “American Soviet Government.”13 American intelligence officials were unaware that, in fact, Earl Browder, general secretary of the U.S. Communist Party, was in trouble with the Comintern, the Soviet organization that controlled national Communist parties, because he was not doing enough to foment revolution in America.14

  Nonetheless, a WESL leader, John T. Pace, was en route to Washington when Waters’s group was nearing the capital. A slim, hard-eyed ex-Marine who spoke with an Ozark drawl,15 Pace, thirty-five years old, had joined the party about a year before and had just been made a WESL organizer when Communist officials in New York, on hearing of the BEF, ordered him to get as many followers as possible into the Bonus Army.

  At 8:00 A.M. on Sunday, May 29, in Cumberland, Maryland, Waters’s men climbed into an assortment of sixteen trucks provided by the Maryland National Guard. An American flag flew from the first truck. “We . . . rode all day until 4 P.M.,” Steve Murray wrote in his diary. “We arrived at our destination after our long trek across the continent . . . and now when we arrived here at Washington, D.C., a bigger job was before us.”

  Reporters found many of the men sitting on a bench in front of their new home. “Steamy” Armstrong, who served in the British Army before joining the AEF in France in May 1918, had been a miner. When he joined the Bonus Army in Oregon, he had not had a job for two years. “We won’t cause you any trouble,” Steamy said, as if speaking to the people of Washington, “but we’re going to get what belongs to us.” M. M. Clark had been in the U.S. Navy. “I’ve got to have it,” he said. “There’s a wife and baby to think about.” Relatives helped him keep his house during the two years that he had had only odd jobs. “But a man doesn’t want that sort of a life. . . . All I want is what’s coming to me”—his bonus would amount to $791—“and a chance to work.” R. O. Awiswell was sitting next to Clark. Back home in Oregon, Awiswell had a five-acre farm almost paid for. A real estate company was letting him hold onto the land because it shared with him the belief that he would get his $656 bonus.16

  Lacking the Army field kitchens he had expected, Glassford enlisted cooks at the Volunteers of America. To find food, he went to the commissary at Fort Myer, where, as a retired officer, he had the right to shop, and spent $120 of his own money.17 Other shoppers would have included enlisted men and officers who had been restricted to base and were training to combat the veterans Glassford was going to feed. Glassford put one of his captains in charge of doling out the food, on a budget of seven cents per man per day. When the marchers arrived they found a meal of hot stew, bread, milk, and coffee awaiting them. The next day at 7:00 A.M. they were fed breakfast, usually a small bowl of oatmeal, a slice of bread, and a cup of coffee. At 4:00 P.M. they got their second and last meal of the day, typically a small portion of meat, a potato, a slice of bread, and a cup of coffee.18

  Since the first small groups of veterans began arriving in Washington in the latter half of May, President Hoover had remained in the White House during the week and journeyed on weekends to his hideaway, Camp Rapidan, in the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia. It was a presidential election year, and during the week he was meeting with various groups for what are now called photo opportunities. One day, for instance, he met with the representatives of the National Association of Piano Tuners, then a group of young people from Indiana on a “Prosperity Tour,” and later he stopped by at a reception for girls from private schools in the Washington area.19

  He was expected to make a public appearance on Memorial Day, May 30, a major holiday of parades and solemn oratory. On the previous Memorial Day, President Hoover had gone to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on a special train and made a speech.20 But on the holiday in 1932, Hoover remained in the White House, where, the public was told, he worked with political advisers on planks for the platform at the upcoming Republican National Convention.21

  The Secret Service had called in agents from throughout the United States and reorganized the security arrangements at the White House.22 A secret plan, “Riot Call Regulations,” had been drawn up in January 1932 in anticipation of Depression-inspired assassination attempts or civil disorder. The deployment of security men seemed to have been drawn from that plan, which set up thirteen guard positions in the White House and its grounds.23 And there was some concern about Hoover’s health. Dr. Joel Thompson Boone, who had looked after Harding and Coolidge, felt that President Hoover was not in the best of health. Boone had a little notebook in which he jotted down observations that he later typed up. On May 29, he wrote, “I have never seen P. look so tired, haggard & mottled. I am concerned not alarmed [his underlining]. I left him some allonal for bed time.”24 Allonal, a barbiturate, was a mild sedative.

  While Hoover worked on the Republican platform, Glassford fumed over the treatment he had been getting from Hurley. He fired off a telegram to the secretary of war and made sure copies went to the reporters who were nearly always at Glassford’s side: FAILURE OF THE WAR DEPARTMENT TO FURNISH ONE THOUSAND BED SACKS AS PER MY WRITTEN REQUEST OF MAY TWENTY EIGHTH RESULTED IN APPROXIMATELY FOUR HUNDRED VETERANS BEING REQUIRED TO SLEEP ON HARD FLOORS LAST NIGHT. REQUEST ISSUE OF BED SACKS TO POLICE DEPARTMENT IN THIS EMERGENCY BE EXPEDITED.

  Hurley responded through an Army officer, who called Glassford and told him that two thousand bed sacks were ready for pickup at Fort Myer. Then, in a bureaucratic move that added to Glassford’s frustration, the War Department issued a memo stating that the District commissioners had to cover the loan of the bed sacks with a bond. The commissioners said they did not have the authority to give such a bond, so Glassford accepted the responsibility. Undoubtedly, President Hoover could have stopped the loaning of the supply but chose to allow it to happen.25

  Glassford did not mention his forty-eight-hour ultimatum again. He decided that the ever-growing army of occupation needed a general, and on May 31 he issued to the press a handwritten notice: “W.W. Waters accepted appointment as Comdr. in Chief Veterans Bonus expeditionary Force to organize all units arriving same as Oregon group—This accepted upon a strict diciplinary [sic] agreement—including the elimination of radicals.” Waters never mentioned this “appointment” in his account. As he reported his rise to power, he said that on May 30 he was “approached by representatives” from groups that had already arrived and they “asked me to be the commander of a united force.” He said that he would take the command “only if these other units were willing to abide by the same strict measures of discipline as had the men from Oregon and agree to the use of passive resistance only.” Next day, Waters said, he “accepted the position of ‘Commander’” and named George Alman as his principal aide.26

  Washington police chief, Pelham D. Glassford, on his blue motorcycle, routinely inspected the BEF camp in Anacostia. Glassford, a general during the war, designed the camp with Army-style company streets. (Underwood & Underwood/Library of Congress)

  To feed and house the BEF, Glassford again turned to Congress, publicly appealing for aid. Democratic senator Edward P. Costigan promptly introduced a bill that would add $75,000 to the $600,000 that Congress was giving the District of Columbia for relief work. At a hearing on June 1, Commissioner Luther H. Reichelderfer, a retired physician who had been a lieutenant colonel in France,27 said the District desperately needed the $600,000. But he turned down the $75,000 for the veterans, saying that “thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands” of men would come to Washington if they were “assured of food and lodging,” as the Costigan bill would guarantee.

  The spokesman for the veterans at the hearing was Harold B. Foulkrod, who described himself as “chairman of the legislative committee of the BEF,” although at that point he had no known connection with Waters. Foulkrod had been arrested in Philadelphia on April 7, 1932, on charges of unlawful assembly, inciting to riot, and
making slanderous comments against the government.28 The committee apparently did not then know about that recent arrest—or about Foulkrod’s erratic life.

  As Reichelderfer was speaking about the veterans’ plan to petition Congress, Foulkrod interrupted him, saying, “These men are . . . here to compel the Congress of the United States of America to give consideration to the bonus bill, and get it on the floor, so that we can vote against these men in November.”

  “I notice you use the word ‘compel.’ I hope that will go into the record,” Reichelderfer said.

  Undaunted, Foulkrod talked on: “They have absolutely no other purpose in coming here but to see that House Bill No. 1 is acted upon; and they know, as we all know, there is a lot of shadow boxing going on, and these gentlemen [in Congress] do not care to place themselves on record. . . . we are the men who fought in France, and we are the men who gave everything we had—our bodies.”

  Foulkrod passionately continued, “I had a few hundred dollars, but the sheriff took my house in Philadelphia, and the household loan and finance company came along and took my furniture, and charged me 48 per cent interest. . . . I have nothing, and these men have not anything that they can call their own; all we have is poverty.”

  Glassford’s testimony came next. The residents of the District of Columbia, he said, “would be very willing to give donations and accept the responsibility for hospitality up to a certain extent. This I am working on now, but I know full well that there is a point beyond which the residents of the District would not care to go, and that time may come within the next few days.”29

  On a wall in his office at police headquarters, Glassford put up a map of the United States and began to pin on it pieces of paper, each one indicating a group of veterans on their way to Washington. By the beginning of June there were twenty-two pieces of paper on the map.30 Glassford, who had based his planning on newspaper stories and intelligence reports, expected that the total number of veterans in the capital would reach at least four thousand. Now, after talking to Waters, he looked at the map and wondered whether he was seeing twenty thousand.