The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  The benefit boxing night arranged by Glassford and Jimmy Lake—“the greatest array of boxing talent ever brought to Washington,” said the Post— drew a record crowd of fifteen thousand fans. They saw some fifty fights, ranging from matches between well-known professionals to bouts between amateurs. “Sitting side by side,” wrote Post sportswriter Jack Espey, “were overalled laborers and daintily clad ladies, men in tattered sweaters and young fashion plates.” A ring had been erected over the infield of Griffith Stadium’s baseball diamond, and a parade of boxers climbed in and out.

  A bout between Stanford Carrier, representing the American Legion, and Lou Jameson, representing Walter Reed Army Hospital, brought the fans to their feet. Carrier won the decision. Jimmy Lake announced the fights, each a bout of three two-minute rounds, and when he felt that he had the cheering fans in a giving mood, he asked for contributions for the BEF.

  They collected about $3,000.92

  *McLean had a mansion in Newport as well as other properties.

  *Griffith would be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.

  6

  Hooverville, D.C.

  All you here—here and there

  Pay the bonus, pay the bonus everywhere

  For the Yanks are starving,

  The Yanks are starving,

  The Yanks are starving everywhere.

  —Camp Marks song, to the tune of “Over There”

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK on Thursday morning, June 9, the District trucks rolled onto the Anacostia Flats encampment, which was within the Eleventh Precinct, under the command of Police Captain Sidney J. Marks. As a group of vets crowded around the trucks, Marks spoke in a booming voice: “If you are tired or distressed, if you want to get back to your homes, we have trucks—”

  Laughter drowned out his speech. Marks smiled and went on, “Well, I suspected that. And so far as I am concerned, I don’t want to see you leave. I hope you stay and get your bonus.”

  The applauding vets were not surprised. Marks had been a kind and accommodating cop from the beginning. His humanity had already produced a name change: from Camp Camden to Camp Marks.1 Captain Marks’s performance reflected what he saw as his chief ’s attitude toward the marchers—an attitude that was infuriating Glassford’s boss, Commissioner Crosby. Although Crosby did not publicly reprimand him, he reportedly told Glassford that the chief faced “peremptory dismissal” by President Hoover for his efforts to feed and shelter the BEF. Crosby denied the published report, but there seemed no doubt that the two men were heading toward a collision, with the vets as innocent bystanders. Complicating the situation was the fact that Glassford’s friendly public relationship with the vets cloaked private fears of disorder, as he had revealed in his secret memo to the commissioners.2

  Encouragement at this key moment came from Father James R. Cox, the priest who had led an unemployment march earlier in the year. He had flown in from Pittsburgh, along with his chauffeur, attorney, and secretary. In the uniform he had worn as a chaplain in the war, he strode to the speakers’ platform in the camp and shouted, “Stick it out! You will never get what you’re entitled to unless you stick. Men are coming from every corner of the country and if you stick it out, before this is over there will be from 500,000 to 1 million of you.

  “If they won’t give you this little bonus—offered you because your wartime pay was less than common labor—turn them out of office. Go home and organize against them. Send men here who still look after the people, not the 500 millionaires who control the national wealth.”

  Another priest came through with more than words. Father Charles E. Coughlin, the Detroit radio priest, sent the BEF cash. In a June 9 telegram he said, “Cunning Communists are dicing for the leadership of these World War Veterans, and tonight, both to cheer the hearts of the bonus army and to show that Communism is not the way out, I am donating $5,000.”3

  The men also heard from Norman Thomas, Socialist Party candidate for president, who distributed leaflets to the veterans. In vain, Thomas urged them to abandon their fight for the bonus and begin instead a crusade for a permanent government relief effort. “We address you not only as veterans of the World War but also as veterans of that larger and unending war against poverty—a war which . . . finds millions of workers facing starvation in the midst of plenty.” Thomas called for an extensive public works program and universal unemployment insurance to take care of all workers when they are “thrown upon the scrap heap by their employers.”

  The eviction did not occur on June 9. As more and more vets continued to pour into Washington, Waters reiterated, “We’re here for the duration.”4

  While the money from Coughlin staved off immediate starvation, the BEF had to find a way to get a dependable supply of food. Contributions came in from local merchants and well-wishers. Some groups arrived with their own rations. The people back in Camden, for instance, sent a truck full of food and pledged to support their men.5 At least four organizations promised large donations.6 They would have to be large. There were thousands of mouths to feed, and no longer could the veterans count on Glassford, the one local official who had helped them but now, under pressure, had to leave them on their own.

  Soon after the first veterans began to appear in Washington, Glassford, apparently without authority from anyone, had arranged for local Marines to set up a Bonus Clinic, staffed by physicians and medics, at the Indiana Avenue headquarters of the 6th Marine Reserve Brigade. Major Don S. Knowlton, brigade surgeon, had taken charge. Working with him were four medical officers and six naval hospital corpsmen assigned to the Marines. He sent a daily sick-call report to Glassford. On June 3, Knowlton reported, he had treated 104 men, and the dental officer extracted ten teeth, one each from ten patients; there were “no complaints or growls, morale good.” Some of the Marines’ patients had already been treated by first-aid teams at their camps. Knowlton complained about “a very incompetent crew” in the camps who were “causing a large number of iodine poisoning cases.” The ailments included colds, rheumatism, blistered feet, trench feet, pleurisy, bronchitis, acute tonsillitis, poison ivy, toothache, constipation, sprains, stomach disorders, and body vermin—American cousins of the “cooties” of French trenches. By June 11 Knowlton was treating more than three hundred men a day, and he knew he could not handle such a patient load for long. On that day General MacArthur authorized the setting up of an Army field hospital at Fort Hunt, an abandoned military site across the Potomac River and about eleven miles south of Washington.7

  The establishment of the field hospital came in the wake of a report by the District of Columbia’s chief medical officer, who feared that primitive sanitary conditions—swarms of flies, half-buried garbage, mosquito-breeding puddles, mess kits passing from hand to hand—could bring on an epidemic.8 Waters believed that a typhoid epidemic never happened because all the veterans had been inoculated when they went to war. There were no amenities. Folded newspapers served as plates for those without mess kits. Spoons and forks were rare. But, as Waters philosophized, “No landlords came daily threatening eviction. No bill collectors called. . . . the absence of gas and electricity had at least the compensating comfort that neither could be cut off for non-payment of bills.”9

  Long mess lines wound through the Bonus Army’s Anacostia camp. Food was donated by Washingtonians—including Police Chief Glassford—and by hometown supporters. Veterans usually ate only two meals a day. (Theodor Horydzak Photograph/Library of Congress)

  Rising from the vast Anacostia Flats was a hill where local residents dumped their junk. That was where the veterans of Camp Marks got most of their building supplies: cardboard and wooden boxes, egg crates, rusty bedsprings, fence stakes, bits of lumber, wrecked cars. From a car a vet could get a seat to make into a bed or a bumper that would become a shelter’s curved roof. A salvaged blackboard, with a child’s scribbles still on it, made another kind of roof. There were also roofs made of rusty bedsprings thatched with tufts of the long-stemmed grass that
sprouted here and there on the flats. One lucky junk-picker found a chicken coop that he carried off for his new home.10 A man from Ohio lived in an oil drum, another in a barrel filled with grass, another in a burial vault set on trestles, another in a piano box, with a sign, “Academy of Music.”11 Some vets had burrowed into the hill, making dugouts like the ones that had sheltered them in France.12 A family of five made their car a home.13 There were tents that Glassford had managed to wrangle from the Army and National Guard, and there were shelters made from tents and odd bits of canvas or oilcloth. Somebody planted a tiny tree and hung a sign, “We’ll have shade by 1945.”14

  Veterans used the Anacostia River as a bathtub. Some local citizens, while not “hostile to the veterans,” worried about sanitation problems and the health of men who “bathe in the polluted water below the mouth of a sewer.” (Underwood & Underwood/Library of Congress)

  Men bathed and washed their clothes in the Anacostia River. Laundry hung from tent ropes, from clotheslines strung everywhere; clothespins were an absent luxury. They cooked their typical meal of mulligan stew (recipe: place whatever edibles available into boiling water) in large iron pots or former garbage cans or on old army wood-burning field-kitchen stoves, also produced by Glassford’s scrounging. Drinking and cooking water came from two lines of fire hoses hooked up to fire hydrants a few hundred feet away. Garbage was buried in trenches.15 There were latrines, routine facilities for a bivouac. Anacostia gas stations got used to having lines of veterans waiting to use the restrooms.16

  Many men slept in the open, chilled by rain and the fog drifting in from the rivers. A New Yorker told a reporter how he had spent the night: “It got dark and I couldn’t move around without stepping on somebody and getting cussed out. I just had to lay down and shiver. Finally I thought I couldn’t stand it any more. But I was lucky. There was one fellow with a blanket. Three of us crawled under it with him, and the four of us just hugged together all night—so it wasn’t so bad.” He wore a silver button that showed he had been wounded in combat.17

  Day after day men tramped into the hot, muddy flats. They usually arrived by freight train; most railroad detectives were not badgering vets anymore. Fifty-five Minnesotans, for instance, arrived in a car marked “Livestock” and carried with them a Pennsylvania Railroad bill of lading on which a friendly railroad man had written: “Livestock, 55 veterans.”18 Another car arrived in Washington with a sign on the side: “Cattle who escaped the slaughter—17 veterans.”19

  As Glassford had originally envisioned it, the camp was laid out in company streets. He had acquired lumber for what he called barracks, which were more like sheds without walls. But as the army rapidly grew and the food supplies just as rapidly dwindled, he stopped buying lumber and used the money to buy groceries.20 The vision of an army-style camp had to give way to the reality of a junkyard city, one of many “Hoovervilles” like it throughout the nation. At the Hooverville on the Flats, no one had an accurate count of the wives and children, but a visiting writer told of seeing many veterans arriving with their families. “The wailing of ill-nourished youngsters became common,” he wrote. “Milk was scarce.”21

  Waters’s Oregon group and early arrivals had been billeted in abandoned buildings. Then, as more and more veterans arrived, Glassford sent them, with police escort, to Anacostia. When Waters first took over the BEF, he remained in a downtown building, setting up his headquarters there and dispatching “billeting officers” to meet the new arrivals, usually at the Washington freight yard, and send them on their way, in straggling columns behind an American flag, to the Anacostia Flats. Cheers inevitably greeted them, and they found their way down the flag-bedecked company streets to their state’s area.

  They were all thin, and most were gaunt. Nearly all the men wore hats— gray fedoras with the front of the brim snapped down, or caps, or an occasional straw or overseas hat from the war. They wore long-sleeved shirts, either a white dress shirt (kept white as a matter of pride, and usually with a dark tie in a four-in-hand knot) or a blue or gray work shirt. Many wore vests and, for special occasions, suit coats. The men from farms or small towns wore bib overalls. The only sign of informality was rolled-up sleeves. Parts of old uniforms—trousers, shirts, even puttees—appeared here and there. Trousers looked as if they had had as tough a life as their wearers. Shoes were scuffed with run-down heels and thin soles, reinforced with inner strips of newspaper that blocked the dime-size hole that was an emblem of life on the road. Hardly anyone had a watch; these had long since been sold or pawned.22

  Waters chose to wear a uniform that gave him the air of an officer: polished cavalry boots and khaki jodhpurs, topped by a white shirt, black bow tie, and a military-style tunic with a whistle on a lanyard in his left breast pocket, over which he had pinned two military ribbons. He affected a walking stick and did not wear a hat. Like Glassford, Waters had envisioned an orderly, army-style encampment and a registration system that would sift out nonveterans and Communists. To enter the camp, a man had to prove that he was a veteran. Waters strictly enforced the veterans-only rule and recruited a squad of MPs to maintain order and heave out real or suspected Communists.

  Life at Camp Marks was enhanced by the Salvation Army, which maintained “The Hut,” a gigantic green sailcloth tent near the entrance to the camp. It was staffed by female workers, known affectionately as “Sallies,” who provided small comforts: a lending library, a place to write and send letters, and tables at which to play checkers. Periodically there would be a distribution of playing cards, tobacco, magazines, and clothes.23

  For their part, Washingtonians saw the camps as an attraction: a place to visit on the weekends. Austin Kiplinger, son of journalist and publisher W. M. Kiplinger, recalled being taken downtown as a child by his father to walk among the bonus marchers on Pennsylvania Avenue; they would move across the river to see others in their makeshift shelters—“tin huts in the mud of the Anacostia Flats.”24

  Veterans lined up for books at a camp library run by the Salvation Army. Also distributed here were writing paper and envelopes. Veterans could then mail their letters at an official post office set up at the camp. (Underwood & Underwood Collection/Library of Congress)

  Writers passed through Camp Marks and wrote articles that began to put a positive, human face on the BEF for the public. On June 10 John Dos Passos, then at work on The Big Money, came and compared them to the army of 1917–18. Dos Passos had worked in an American hospital in France and driven an ambulance in France and Italy. The horrors he saw there would inform his writing for the rest of his life. After the American offensive at Château-Thierry, he recalled in his memoir, the wounded were being evacuated directly to Paris, and an urgent call was sent out for Americans on leave or on duty in the city to volunteer for hospital service: “The night I particularly remember it was my job to carry off buckets full of amputated arms and hands and legs from the operating room.”25

  Now in 1932 he looked at the men anew: “There is the same goulash of faces and dialects, foreigners’ pidgin English, lingoes from industrial towns and farming towns, East, Northeast, Middle West, Southwest, South.” But he saw them as older—“sunken eyes, hollow cheeks off breadlines”—and they reminded him of how quickly the lean years consume the fat ones.

  Dos Passos, like so many others covering the camps, reserved the highest praise for Glassford (“the perfect host”) and his men (“The cops and the ex-service men play baseball games in the afternoon; they are buddies together”). He was most taken by the centerpiece of the Anacostia camp: “a big platform with a wooden object sticking up from one end that looks like an old fashioned gallows. Speaking goes on from this platform all morning and afternoon.”26

  Thomas R. Henry, writing for the Evening Star, was constantly surprised by the speed with which this “rag-and-tin-can city” was growing, seeming to have doubled overnight between the Friday and Saturday nights of June 10 and 11: “New streets with their nicely aligned junk-pile shelters appeared as
if by magic as more and more veterans seemed to get the knack of making themselves comfortable.” Henry saw this as “a remarkable achievement of self-discipline,” a place where there was “no crime, no dissension, no rebellion.”27

  He seemed most fascinated with the children of the Bonus Army, whom he characterized as “having the time of their young lives in this muddy junk pile jungle where there are no school bells, where the best of everything is reserved for them and where they are welcome in any hovel.”28

  “We used to watch them build their shanties,” says Charles T. Greene, an eighth-grader living a few blocks from Camp Marks in 1932.

  They had their own MPs and officers in charge, and flag-raising ceremonies, complete with a fellow playing bugle. We envied the youngsters because they weren’t in school. Then some of the parents set up classrooms.

  You had another set of the bonus marchers who didn’t want to be identified with those people who camped out there on the Flats. They tried to impersonate just normal citizens. My mother had a very large house—we had a very large family—and she rented a room to a bonus marcher. I didn’t realize that he was a bonus marcher because I knew he had a job pressing in the cleaners. I didn’t know he was a bonus marcher until I started in the Cadet Corps in high school and he’s going to teach me the Manual of Arms. So, that’s when I found he was a bonus marcher.29

  Besides the neighborhood kids who visited the camp, there were many kids who lived there. Nick and Joe Oliver, seven-year-old twins, had finished school in Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, when their father said he was going to take them to Washington. Their father had gone to war as Antonio Oliverio, an Italian immigrant in a Doughboy’s uniform. He fought in a tank battalion, was promoted to corporal, and was gassed. After the war he changed his name to Anthony Oliver, found a job as a bricklayer, got married, started a family, and became a charter member of American Legion Post 669. In the spring of 1932 the post endorsed the bonus and asked Tony and another veteran, Sam Ditz, to represent the post in the Bonus Army.