The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  The men represented on Glassford’s map were hopping freights, driving jalopies, hitchhiking, or piling into National Guard trucks in a dozen cities, from San Francisco to Bennington, Vermont.31 More than 800 veterans from Chicago and its suburbs had reached Whiting, Indiana, where they planned to board boxcars for the rest of the journey to Washington.32 Forty veterans on their way from Evansville, Indiana, were camped in an old roadhouse in Louisville, Kentucky.33 Two hundred had left Salt Lake City, Utah.34 Some 300 had left Cincinnati in trucks.35 About 200 veterans from New Orleans had reached Opelika, Alabama, in National Guard trucks with gasoline paid for by the city of Montgomery.36 About 200 residents had taken leave from the National Soldiers Home in Johnson City, Tennessee. There were 50 in West Palm Beach, Florida, and political candidates in Wade County had sent another 50 on their way in cars. Five hundred Texans, who started each day with a prayer, passed through San Antonio, along with “Hoover’s Goat” and its companion, “Herbie,” so named because he was always kicking.37 Three hundred vets left Little Rock, Arkansas, aboard a passenger train donated by the Missouri Pacific. From Oklahoma in Rock Island boxcars came 300, many of them jobless oil-field workers. Trucks carrying 400 veterans from Camden, New Jersey, were nearing Washington; 150 had set out from Albany; about 250 had left Minneapolis and were in La Crosse, Wisconsin. A hand-painted sign on a Wisconsin truck read, “We Done a Good Job in France, Now You Do a Good Job in America.” And Portland was sending 200 men who had missed the first muster of Waters’s BEF.

  Rock Island Railway officials, without publicly admitting it, had agreed to let veterans in Texas board freight cars. In Great Falls, Montana, a railroad machinist led a group to the Great Northern yards and started them on their way. About 150 had come through Alabama in county and National Guard trucks. There were about 200 coming from Warrenville, South Carolina.38 Stories began to circulate that railroad employees were actually adding cars to their trains to accommodate the veterans. “The conductor’d want to find out how many guys were in the yard, so he would know how many empty boxcars to put on the train,” recalled a marcher named Jim Sheridan. “Of course, the railroad companies didn’t know this, but out of their sympathy, these conductors would put two or three empty boxcars on the train, so these bonus marchers could crawl into them and ride comfortable into Washington. Even the railroad detectives were very generous.” Sheridan’s recollection also includes the death of a baby from starvation in a boxcar.39

  Hundreds of veterans, split into feuding Communist and anti-Communist groups, were leaving New York City. As yet uncounted veterans were beginning to mass in Fort Worth and El Paso, Texas. In Great Falls, Montana, a railroad mechanic took charge of a group and said he would find a way to put them all on board trains of the Great Northern. Reports came in of 2,000 veterans in Nashville, Tennessee; 200 in Warrenville, South Carolina; and 300 in Oklahoma City.40

  In the North Carolina Piedmont, people of Charlotte, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem marveled at the sight of veterans, black and white, coming down from the mountains and trudging up from the south, all of them with one goal, one place to go. Fourteen Carolinians marched with a slogan—“No Whiskey or Guns, but Our Bonus or Bust”—and carried a letter attesting to their good character. An Atlanta group, most of them white-collar men out of work and all of them veterans, had their own field kitchen and supply truck. One hundred and thirty-six men were led by Arthur B. Creagh, who carried with him the medal he had received from Congress for his expedition to the South Pole with Admiral Richard Byrd, who, incidentally, opposed the bonus. About 200 white veterans and 119 black veterans from Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina got as far as Raleigh, North Carolina, where they camped near the railroad tracks, stranded by lack of food. Nick Saparilas, owner of the Hollywood Café in Raleigh, brought them coffee, and townspeople put them on their way with donations of food and money.41

  Increasingly news reports listed Negro veterans moving in large numbers toward Washington, some segregated, some mixed into predominantly white groups, and a few traveling alone. One of the latter was Sewilla LaMar, a black woman who headed for Washington by foot and freight from Los Angeles. She was brutally beaten and left helpless in a boxcar outside of Fostoria, Iowa, by “the men I had sought to help.” She was robbed of her wedding ring, shoes, wristwatch, and $65 in cash by ex-convicts wearing tattered Army uniforms. “I did not mind the loss of these valuables so much but the bruises and humiliation I suffered on this mission of mercy will perhaps remain with me for the rest of my life,” she reported shortly after the incident. One of the men was captured, convicted, and sentenced to jail in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

  She stated her reason for making the dangerous trip: “I, like millions of mothers, have suffered the ravages of war. Somewhere over there lie the bodies of my husband and my brother, who gave their all in the World War. I have since remarried and my present husband, Robert Grant LaMar Jr., an enlisted man and overseas veteran, was spared the supreme sacrifice and returned to America, only after the Armistice was signed which declared that all fighting cease.”42

  Unmarked on Glassford’s map were countless loners heading to Washington on their own. One of them was Henry O. Meisel, who left Clintonville, Wisconsin, astride a 1928–29 Indian Big Chief motorcycle. Out of work with “no prospect of getting a job,” Meisel used his collection of foreign coins to finance his trip. Because his generator did not work, he could travel only in daylight.43 Along the way, “nearly everybody I came in contact with was wholly in sympathy with the veterans and wanted to help me,” he wrote. In West Virginia Meisel spotted a man who said he was a bonus marcher, too. The ex-Marine got on behind Meisel, and the motorcycle chugged on to Washington.

  Looking at the map, remembering his days as a general, Glassford saw free-formed, free-moving masses in something like a maneuver of the Great War, when men of many units, coming from every direction, were on the march or in troop trains, all heading for one objective, all aware that others like them were on the move, and no one knowing what was going to happen when, finally, they had all assembled, awaiting the call to battle.

  “Other lobbies had moved to Washington, supported by money” was how Waters put it. “We had no money, but perhaps a group, whose only support was in its numbers, might go to Congress and make some impression.”44

  The veterans under Foulkrod had a full-fledged lobbying operation under way by the end of May. Their first objective was to get the bonus bill to the full House for a vote by means of a petition that had begun circulating before their arrival. Fifty members of Congress were approached by delegations of veterans, who got seven signatures on the first day of lobbying. They now had 98 of the required 145 signatures.45 The vets pledged to return the next day for more.46 “They have the same right there as any other ‘lobbyist,’ Will Rogers would write later in the summer. “They at least were not paid, they were doing it for themselves, which placed ’em right away about 90 percent higher in public estimation than the thousands of ‘lobbyists’ who are there all the time.”47

  Congress was now hearing from many special-interest groups, thus the bonus marchers’ demand for the immediate payment of an estimated $2 billion in cash was far from the only request before it. Walter Davenport wrote in Collier’s magazine at the time that “a change of spirit is noticeable on Capitol Hill. . . . Unhappily, the party leaders have now reached a point where they haven’t the money to pay for what they are afraid to refuse.”48

  When Illinois veterans visited the office of Senator James Hamilton Lewis, himself a veteran of the Spanish-American War, he told them to “go to hell.”

  The vets kept coming, their demeanor and orderliness earning them much positive press coverage throughout the country. Every day Washingtonians looked out of their home or office windows and saw groups of men heading for their billets; those in trucks got police escorts.49 The Fort Wayne (Ind.) Journal-Gazette even called the march a “pilgrimage.”50 The BEF continually presented itself as non
violent and accommodating. Commander in Chief Waters demanded military discipline. His immutable rules: “No panhandling, no liquor, no radical talk.”

  That last rule reflected Waters’s fears that the BEF would be infiltrated by Communists. His Oregon group was just getting settled when the first “Red” reports surfaced in Washington. Because Waters was not available, Alman responded to claims that the march had been inspired by Communists. “We are not infiltrated with any Communist group and we don’t propose to join them,” Alman said. Glassford backed Alman, but Red Menace propaganda was flowing and would taint the march. The adjutant general of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) said that Communists were “trying to create the impression that thousands of veterans are falling in behind the red flag. Nothing could be further from the truth.”51 The VFW, which backed the bonus but not the march, thus added to the Red Scare by giving the Communists more credit than their efforts deserved. Except for a Detroit contingent led by John Pace and a splintered unit from Cleveland, virtually all other groups coming to Washington were either spontaneously created in their communities or inspired by newspaper reports of Waters’s march.

  Under the banner of the WESL, there were, in fact, Communists on the move. On June 1, in a driving rain, Pace led 450 men, recruited with the help of women from the Young Communist League, to Detroit’s city hall. There the men crowded onto streetcars, shouting that they were riding as guests of the mayor, although he had not authorized free rides.52 The streetcars took them to the city limits. Then they walked a mile to the railroad yards. Pace argued with railroad officials that the veterans had protected the railoads during the war and now needed their help. They were allowed to board coal gondolas on a freight train that took them to Toledo, Ohio. There, like the marchers who had traveled with Waters, the next morning they negotiated with city and railroad officials, who were only too glad to get them on their way on ten freight cars hitched to an eastbound train headed for Cleveland.53

  In Cleveland, longtime Communist leader C. B. Cowan had set up a tent where he signed up anyone who called himself a veteran. By the time the Detroit group arrived at the Cleveland railroad yards, hundreds of Ohio marchers were already there. Among the Cowan-led marchers were some who announced that they were anti-Communist and bona fide veterans.

  Now came another railyard confrontation. But this time, with the marcher force steadily increasing and the Communist and anti-Communist groups eyeing each other suspiciously, the tough tactics of Pace and Cowan were setting up a complex conflict that was moving dangerously close to violence. Cowan ordered his men to prepare to “storm” an Erie Railroad freight heading for Pittsburgh.54 Pace egged on his men by telling them the government “had all kinds of money” to spend on the railroad during the war but veterans who fought in that war were not allowed to ride on them. So, he said, the men’s only alternative was “to ride them without permission.”55

  After railroad police prevented the men from boarding any train, they took over the roundhouse and several switch engines. Railroad workers, sympathetic to the cause, did not resist. About twenty triumphant marchers climbed on a locomotive and, overseas caps on their heads and clenched fists raised in a radical salute, posed for a defiant portrait. That news photo, far more than the earlier coverage of East Saint Louis, linked bonus marchers to Communists in the minds of intelligence officials in Washington.

  In the tense railyards, the tired, hungry men began quarreling. Fistfights broke out. Veterans from Michigan and Toledo called the Cleveland men Communists. “That’s not true,” Pace shouted. “I am not a communist. I don’t believe in it, and we’re all loyal to the government.”56 Cleveland police arrived. Frank J. Merrick, Cleveland safety director, knew he and his men stood on the threshold of violence. “If they decide to take matters into their own hands and commandeer the freight car,” he said, “we can’t shoot them down like dogs.” By now the estimates of veterans in Cleveland had reached two thousand.57

  Defiant veterans celebrated their takeover of a roundhouse in Cleveland, where railroad officials and police tried to keep them from riding boxcars eastward. The confrontation helped to alert newspapers to the Bonus Army story. (Brown Brothers)

  Next morning, June 5, Merrick herded the men into a nearby field. Suddenly someone shouted, “Are we going to get our train to Pittsburgh?” Men rushed toward a string of empty cabooses. Police on horseback charged the men. The horses crowded the men, pressing so close that vets could smell the horses’ sweaty flanks. The men were routed. They ran back across the rails, over an embankment, and returned to the field.58 Then another group, urged on by an unidentified man, charged the roundhouse. This time police on foot confronted them. Some men ran on and were clubbed. That group also retreated, and the violence ended as quickly as it had begun.59

  On June 6, the mayor of Cleveland walked into the area where the marchers were gathered and offered $100 and transportation across the Ohio line to Pittsburgh to any group that stepped forward. About a hundred men gathered around Doak E. Carter, a thirty-six-year-old veteran of both the wartime Army and the peacetime Navy. He was living in a Cleveland hotel60 and was identified by some old-timers as a former railroad detective. Carter led the men away and said he would get them to Washington.

  The rest of the men left the yards and walked south about eight miles to New Bedford, Ohio. They then moved by vehicle and foot to Pittsburgh. There on June 9 police arrested Cowan on a general charge of suspicion, based on his known criminal record. Pace managed to slip out of town and continue on to Washington.61

  WESL claimed the march as its own inspiration, disregarding Waters and all other leaders. The initial claim of Communist inspiration was made by Joseph Singer, an official of WESL, and it was repeated by Emanuel Levin, who called himself chairman of the National Bonus Army Committee of the WESL. The same day that Pace left Detroit, Levin, an energetic Communist from New York, arrived in Washington, D.C., casually claiming that the Communists had in fact created the bonus march and were planning to stage a mass rally and parade on June 8. Immediately police chief Glassford let it be known that he wanted to “get in touch” with Levin for questioning.62 June 8 was also the day of a planned BEF parade, which Levin claimed would become “a red letter day.” Agents from J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation now began their search for Communists in the Bonus Army.63

  J. Edgar Hoover, as he appeared at the time of the Bonus Army, was director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation—forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—which he would head for forty-eight years. (Underwood & Underwood/ Library of Congress)

  Glassford knew that conflict between Communists and non-Communists could touch off street warfare and the kind of uprising the Communists were hoping for. Worried, he secretly sent a memo to the District commissioners recommending that they be prepared to “declare an emergency,” possibly order the use of military force, and even invoke the White Plan to quell widespread rioting. Maintaining a confident demeanor, he expressed private fears in the memo:

  Although no disorders have occurred, the plan of the Police Department is to assemble all disaffected groups at Anacostia Park and should emergency arise to hold the Eleventh Street Bridge against a riotous invasion across the Anacostia River. Plans and preparations are being made to this end, including plans for the use of tear gas; at the same time a force of police will be held in readiness on the east side of Anacostia River in order to localize any riot that may occur, and to prevent access to the bridges further north.

  As soon as funds available have been exhausted and no more food can be furnished by this department we believe that an emergency situation will exist. Such a situation may develop as early as noon tomorrow.

  Recommendation: That preparations be made by the Commissioners to declare an emergency, and to provide for the use of the National Guard, or to place in effect “the White Plan.”

  Glassford said he was working to split the vets into two groups: “one comprised of b
onafide veterans who have elected a commander and call their organization The Bonus Expeditionary Force—the other a group . . . believed under communist control.”64

  Glassford publicly announced his plans for Anacostia on June 2, merely mentioning the site and not his strategy involving the convenient drawbridge.65 He said he had received permission from the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks to use a large expanse of Anacostia for the camp he was planning.66 The camp was to be a tent city to shelter the 4,000 vets reportedly en route, 1,200 of whom were expected that night to augment the 2,000 already in town.67 The billet at Eighth and I streets was jammed, as was a second billet at Seventh and L streets SW.68 Although veterans would continue to find places to stay in downtown Washington, Anacostia would become the principal camp and the center of Bonus March activities.

  The site picked by Glassford, across the Anacostia River but a few blocks from the Capitol, was on riverside land that had once been a village of the Nacotchtank Indians—anglicized to Anacostan and the place to Anacostia— then, as now, one of the neighborhoods of Washington little known to outsiders. The opening of the Washington Navy Yard in 1799 across the river from the flats spurred residential growth, which was again given a boost in 1867 when the Freedman’s Bureau settled freed slaves and their families on the James D. Barry Farm, a neighborhood of single-family houses. Eventually 500 families built houses here. Just to the north of the black area was Uniontown, a planned community that barred any “Negro, mulatto or person of African blood.” Understandably, the streets of Anacostia in 1932 were mixed—a black grocer on one corner and a white grocer on the next—but not integrated.69