The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  “I was around eleven years old, I guess, when the marchers came here,” says Charles T. Greene, then an eighth-grader who lived just a few blocks from the camp in 1932. “The interesting part of it was that the bonus people occupied the Anacostia Flats, a park where one side of it was for whites, the other side of it was for Negroes. And the only thing on the site of the camp (the Negro side) was a baseball diamond and four tennis courts.” Greene, who is African-American, was familiar with the Negro side of the park. He said that if one was riding a trolley across the drawbridge crossing the river, and “looked to the right, you could look right into the site they picked for the bonus camp.”70

  Veterans’ sheds, tents, and shanties sprawled across the Anacostia Flats. On the horizon to the left the three masts of the U.S.S. Constitution are visible. The ship was in the Navy yard during a bicentennial celebrating George Washington’s birth. (National Archives)

  Among the first veterans to arrive in Anacostia—in pouring rain, escorted by police on motorcycles—were men from Camden, New Jersey. They formed lines, went to a registration tent manned by a police officer, and gave name, serial number, and discharge information. They built the first bunkhouse from lumber and tar paper that Glassford had obtained, using three Army field kitchens that Glassford had found. On these stoves the veterans cooked their first hot meal since leaving home. They washed themselves in the river, washed their travel-stained clothes, and hung them on riverside trees. They spent their first night sleeping on wet ground covered with huge puddles. Next day, they went to dumps to salvage materials, brought them back to Anacostia, and began the continual expansion of what they called Camp Camden.71

  On June 6, bonus marchers from New Jersey start to build what they called Camp Camden, across the Anacostia River from downtown Washington. The site later was named Camp Marks in honor of a friendly police officer. (Authors’ collection)

  Among the visitors to the camps was Senator James Hamilton Lewis, who had recently told the veterans to go to hell. He drove out to Camp Camden and found the the Illinois delegation, which had about nine hundred men. Lewis stood up on the top of his car, identified himself, and, speaking over a chorus of booing, said that he had thought his visitors had been Communists. And now, after seeing the camp, he knew he was wrong. He asked the men to make a list of what they needed most. The booing stopped. Veterans looked at one another quizzically.

  The Illinois committee drafted a letter and sent it to Lewis. “A great number of men are without shoes,” they wrote; “there are practically no blankets; the food is not near enough; soldiers are sleeping on the ground on ticks filled with hay; we have no tents, just a barracks which leaks; . . . the rest are scattered around on the ground. . . . The boys would also like facilities for writing home and procuring tobacco for chewing and smoking.”

  Lewis, a Democrat, forwarded the letter to Assistant Secretary of War Frederick H. Payne with a request that the War Department do what it could to help the veterans at Anacostia. He was told that the War Department was not authorized by Congress to loan tents.72

  Glassford was adept at getting food donated: four 150-pound turtles were delivered for soup, and the Dixie Barbecue Company showed up with enough pork to feed dinner to the estimated 1,500 vets and family members in town on the night of June 1.73 On that same day came the first perceptible editorial anger about the hordes of uninvited guests and what they would do to the city: “Responsibility for this futile march on Washington rests squarely on the shoulders of demagogues who have led veterans to believe that if they howled loud enough Congress would pass the bonus measure,” said the Washington Post, insisting that the marchers had been duped and that “their only way to avoid further hardships . . . is to retreat homeward.”74 Some Washingtonians felt differently, including the wife of Ned McLean, owner of the Washington Post.

  The free-spirited Evalyn Walsh McLean possessed a legendary desire to help others and, according to friends, once went out into a blinding snowstorm, albeit in a chauffeured car, because she thought people out there might need help. Predictably, she felt compelled to help the bonus marchers, just as she had turned over her seventy-five-acre estate, a former monastery called Old Friendship, to the Red Cross to use as a convalescent home for sick and wounded soldiers during the war. Earlier in 1932 she had naively given Gaston B. Means, the notorious swindler and con man (who had once actually worked as an investigator for the Justice Department) $105,000 to rescue the Lindbergh baby from its kidnappers. When the baby was found dead, Means was charged, and his trial was going on during the time that the bulk of the BEF was setting up camp in the Anacostia Flats.

  Evalyn Walsh McLean befriended the bonus marchers. (Harris and Ewing Collection/ Library of Congress)

  McLean was awakened to the plight of the bonus marchers when she first saw a truck rumble past her Massachusetts Avenue mansion on Embassy Row in early June: “I saw the unshaven, tired faces of the men who were riding in it standing up.” As more truckloads passed her house, she looked to the sidewalks and saw ragged hikers walking where diplomats normally strode, wearing scraps of old uniforms and using sticks to walk with that seemed “less canes than cudgels. It was not lost on me that those men, passing any one of my big houses,* would see in such rich shelters a kind of challenge—2020 [Massachusetts Avenue] was a mockery of their want.”

  That night, after 1:00 A.M., she drove down to where the veterans were, near Capitol Hill and at the Anacostia campground now being established, and came upon Chief Glassford, who knew her socially. Glassford was about to leave to buy coffee for the men. She drove with him to the all-night counter at Child’s restaurant and addressed an awestruck counterman.

  “Do you serve sandwiches?” she asked. “I want a thousand and a thousand packages of cigarettes.”

  “But, lady—”

  “I want them right away. I haven’t got a nickel with me, but you can trust me. I am Mrs. McLean.”

  Glassford got the thousand coffees (which, McLean noted, he paid for out of his own pocket), and well into the early morning the two of them fed all the hungry marchers in sight. McLean recalled later, “Nothing I had seen before in my whole life touched me as deeply as what I had seen in the faces of the Bonus Army.”75

  The next day she went to see Judge John Barton Payne, head of the Red Cross, and tried to convince him that a national crisis was unfolding, and it was the responsibility of the Red Cross to get involved. All he could offer was a little flour, “and I was glad to accept it.” Her next stop was the Salvation Army, which, she found, was already doing all that it could. She asked the commander if he could suggest how she could help the families, and he said that he would find out. He came the next day to say that they needed a big headquarters tent to serve as a welcoming point for new marchers as they arrived. She ordered the tent from Baltimore and had it delivered to Anacostia along with books, radios, and cots.

  McLean also befriended Waters, whom she invited to her home several times. One day she checked out the house that Glassford had reserved for women and children who chose not to live in the outdoor camps. She found the residents sleeping on the floor. She bought beds and later delivered castoff clothing from her own children. One day one of the women picked up a dress from McLean’s daughter and said, “I guess my child can starve in a fifty dollar dress as well as in her rags.”76

  On June 4 Glassford appeared to present an ultimatum that came not from him but from the District commissioners. George Alman was in charge because, as at the first encounter with authorities back in East Saint Louis, Waters had once again resigned and disappeared, saying he was ill. Speculation was that he was—for reasons unclear—holed up in a relative’s house in the Washington area.78 Alman relished the leadership that Waters had handed him. The tough-talking ex-lumberjack stood toe-to-toe in confrontation with Glassford.

  “The situation is becoming acute—both as respects food and money,” Glassford told Alman. “The Health Department is clamoring for us to close up t
hese places.” He said that on June 9, District of Columbia trucks would arrive at the encampments and take the veterans as far as fifty miles in the direction of their homes. At the fifty-mile mark they would be dumped back into the lives they led before they came to Washington. They would be warned that anyone who did not get into a truck would not get any shelter or food from the District of Columbia. The commissioners of the District of Columbia had, they thought, solved the problem that Glassford had created.78 Glassford promised to notify nearby governors about the plan in the hope that they would “pick you up where we leave you.”

  “You realize that by the eighth of June there will be a hell of a lot of men here, don’t you, Mr. Glassford?” Alman asked, alluding to the eve before the departure of the trucks and a day after a planned twilight rally and parade.

  “Sure I do,” Glassford replied. “But I want your cooperation and the cooperation of your men toward getting all of you out of town. If you won’t go, I’m not making any threats. I shall simply close up these quarters and discontinue furnishing food. The people of the District no longer feel they should feed your men.”

  “Well, I don’t feel they should, either,” Alman said.

  “And you understand, I hope, that there is no feeling of antagonism on my part, that what I am telling you comes in a friendly vein.”

  “I understand your attitude and the attitude of the government so far, and I shall give you the answer of the men as soon as I can.”

  When the conversation ended, Alman talked to newspaper reporters. “We came here to stay until the bonus bill is passed,” he said. “And neither General Glassford, nor anybody else, is going to run us out of town.”79

  Waters himself reappeared as leader later that day to say, “Whenever the bonus is voted, we will be very glad to accept the police offer of free truckage out of the city.”80 A veteran who heard about the ultimatum added his reaction: “Out of here by Thursday? Huh! Kaiser Wilhelm didn’t do it in eighteen months.” A vet from Newark said, “If they don’t feed me, I’ll go on the streets and beg. Then they’ll lock me up and have to feed me.”81 Many veterans did venture into Washington neighborhoods, begging door-to-door, breaking the Waters rule prohibiting panhandling.82

  The veterans may have been cheered by the news of an ever-expanding BEF army, but every newcomer meant a cut in rations for the men already in Washington. Police, sifting through dozens of reports, counted up 3,207 veterans heading to Washington.83 These included 200 American Legionnaires from Brooklyn who were determined to keep their distance from a Communist-led New York City group.84 In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, police escorted 400 Illinois marchers who were transferring from the freight cars of one railroad line to the cars of the line they would take to Washington. In Decatur, Georgia, 137 vets from New Orleans—100 of them African-Americans—were strung along a highway, hitchhiking north.85 In Fort Wayne, Indiana, police and the Knights of Columbus fed 71 veterans from the Seattle area; a police vehicle hauled their food and footsore members to a rail yard, where they awaited the next available string of boxcars. Six members were expelled after a brief hearing determined that they were Communists.86

  Boston veterans headed for Washington to join the Bonus Army. They left on June 2, as publicity about the Bonus March spread, inspiring similar groups. By June 12, some ten thousand veterans had arrived in the nation’s capital. (Traveler Collection/Boston Public Library)

  In Los Angeles, 1,300 veterans enlisted in a California bonus brigade being organized by Royal W. Robertson, a flamboyant leader who wore a cagelike back and neck brace.87

  Glassford knew the veterans were not going to retreat before zero hour on Thursday. Running out of ways to feed them, he decided he had to raise money any way that he could. His first move was to organize a large boxing benefit to raise money for food. He recruited a Marine Corps major to set up a card of at least fifteen bouts. The boxing would be on June 8, the day following an event Washington awaited with apprehension: the twilight parade that would put thousands of veterans in a march to the Capitol.

  While there was a constant attempt to keep a tally of vets arriving and already in town, accuracy was almost impossible because they were quartered in so many odd places, perhaps the most unexpected being in a burlesque house. The colorful Jimmy Lake, raconteur and promoter of prizefights, owned the Gayety Burlesque on Ninth Street in Washington’s tenderloin. Lake was a showman who seemed to know just about everybody he felt was worth knowing. He was a good friend of Irving Berlin, had worked with W. C. Fields, and had booked the best into the Gayety: Will Rogers, Abbott and Costello, Bert Lahr, and Mickey Rooney, to name a few. He also featured the greatest striptease artists of his time: Ann Corio, Georgia Sothern, and Gypsy Rose Lee.88

  Lake got one look at the men when they first started piling into town and noted that unfortunate souls in New York’s Bowery flophouses “were in the lap of luxury compared to the human element in the Bonus March.” As the Anacostia camp was being established, he took pity on a camp forming in Potomac Park, known then in Washington as the Speedway and today as Haines Point, a spit of land jutting into the Potomac with a road around its outer edge. “It’s a delightful drive for lovers in the moonlight, but in those days there were areas of plain, unadulterated mud,” Lake later recalled. “There had been several days of rain. And it was in the mud that the men were sleeping.”

  He assembled the men and got them to march from the park in two platoons, one for night and one for day. From then on, the two platoons alternated sleeping in the balcony at the Gayety. “The theater seated 1,550, so I just closed up the balcony to the public,” said Lake. “Although quartering the men in the theater was a violation of sanitary laws, it was no time to think like that. Suffering humanity was more important than law.”

  The men slept and snored in shifts and provided background noises so loud that the strippers and vaudevillians started rumors that the place was haunted. Lake kept what he was doing secret because he feared that the vets would be out in the mud again if the authorities found out.

  Shortly, he was summoned by the police to headquarters to speak with the chief. Fearing he was in trouble and in for a hefty fine or worse, he told the men to stay away from the theater until they heard from him.

  Ushered into Glassford’s inner sanctum, he was greeted with a powerful voice.

  “Jimmy Lake?”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied meekly.

  “For God’s sake, what can we do to get some smokes for the mob you are quartering in your theater?”

  “Let’s give a benefit performance!”

  Without any fanfare or advertisement, Lake staged a “quickie” performance at the Gayety, netting enough money to buy cigarettes in abundance from several tobacco companies at heavily discounted prices. Lake then wanted to do more, so he went to see Clark Griffith, an imaginative baseball player, manager, and then owner of the Washington Senators and the proprietor of Griffith Stadium.*

  “Clark, how would you like to have the opportunity to sell 50,000 bottles of pop, 50,000 bags of peanuts, as many packages of Cracker Jacks, and probably 10,000 cups of coffee? And cigars and cigarettes, too?”

  “Out with it, Jimmy, what do you want?”

  Lake wanted to stage a mammoth benefit boxing match—the one Glassford had envisioned a few days earlier—and the night of June 8 was set for the big event, the day after the twilight parade.89

  More than 100,000 Washingtonians lined the streets to see what the Post called the “strangest military parade the Capital has ever witnessed.” The BEF was marching in full force: 8,000 men, and if there were any secret Reds among them, they were there under rules that said the parade was open to any man who showed an honorable discharge from the armed forces. About 100 admitted Communists were in the ranks of the marchers, each one known and watched by BEF stalwarts.90

  George Alman, calling himself commander, led the parade. Also up front was Harold Foulkrod, the eloquent lobbyist with the murky past, now a contender
for leadership in the BEF. The lobbying had worked. There now were 145 names on the petition. The bonus bill would reach the floor of the House to be voted on.

  Waters had hoped that the parade would pass the White House, but Glassford ordered a route he could control: from Seventeenth and Constitution Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue and down the great ceremonial boulevard to the Peace Monument at the foot of Capitol Hill.91 Police lined the street, watching for the rumored Communist disruption that never happened.

  Marching behind the leaders were heroes of the Great War, led by a man who had been awarded the Medal of Honor. Others wore the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the French Croix de Guerre. Among the heroes was an African-American from Washington, William A. Butler, who wore a Distinguished Service Cross and the Croix de Guerre and served as a symbol of the unpublicized integration of the BEF.

  The parade stepped off at twilight to the music of a local American Legion band, its members in black-plumed hats and golden capes, marching in defiance of the Legion’s opposition to the bonus and to the Bonus March. Disabled veterans rode in open trucks and drew the heartiest cheers from the crowd.

  The men marched by state, beginning with Oregon, just as the Bonus March had begun, and every unit followed an American flag. Many flags were tattered, worn out like so many of the men who walked behind them. Sprinkled through the parade were men carrying signs: “Here We Stay Til the Bonus They Pay,” “Georgia Vets Rebels-Yanks United We Stand,” “Millions for War Not One Cent for the Hungry Vet,” “Who Won the War? We Haven’t Won Anything,” “Cheered in ’17. Jeered in ’32.”

  The parade was a triumph for the vets, who showed that they were not a menace to the city. But most of the veterans now knew, as Waters and Glassford certainly did, that the city, in the person of the District commissioners, did not want them there any longer. They were about to be politely invited out, and the commissioners would provide the trucks.