The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  Tony decided to take the twins with him, leaving his wife and the six other kids at home. For two years Nick and Joe had been prizefighters, managed by their father, who set up matches in makeshift rings before small, enthusiastic audiences for whatever change landed in the hat that Tony passed around after the three-round match. Their father called them “my bread-and-butter boys,” kids who had fun while earning a little money for the family. “We really boxed, but we never got hurt,” Nick says.

  Tony would look for work in Washington—bricklaying or whatever he could get—and leave the twins in the camp. They could box there just as well as in Belle Vernon. He told his wife to go to the drugstore every Friday night at nine o’clock and stand by the telephone, awaiting his call so they could talk about the kids.

  “We started off just after school ended in May,” Joe remembers. “My father had a Model A Ford, the kind you had to crank to start. We left at daybreak.”

  They headed south on an American road that dated to the eighteenth century, the National Highway across the mountains. “Sam Ditz brought a peck of potatoes with him in a burlap bag,” Joe continues. “Every time we stopped, Sam would roast some potatoes. And we had some bread and salami.”

  Nick and Joe Oliver, seven-year-old twins, boxed in the Anacostia camp, where they lived while their veteran father went into Washington looking for work. By passing the hat after a match, they sometimes earned as much as a dollar. (Underwood & Underwood Collection/Library of Congress)

  His brother remembers that they stopped every once in a while to pick berries and snatch apples. “I guess it took us about twelve and a half hours for the 250 miles to Washington,” Nick recalls. “My father was always afraid of running out of gas. He took a ten-dollar bill and hid it under the dash and said that’s going to get us home.”

  “I remember when we saw the Capitol. My eyes popped out,” Joe says.

  The twins’ father drove them directly to Anacostia. They found the company street where the Pennsylvania vets stayed and lived in the car for a couple of nights. Then they made a shelter—“a kind of lean-to”—out of pieces of cardboard. One day, Nick says, “my dad squared off a place and said we’re going to do us an entertainment. He passed the hat around. One time, I remember, we got one dollar and thirty-seven cents in dimes, nickels, and pennies.”30

  They wandered the camp all day long while their father found work as often as he could, at about $2 a day. Their landmarks were the river and a pole with a sign that read “Pennsylvania.” Sometimes they would get lost for a while because the camp was changing every day. But there was always the Pennsylvania pole.

  They both vividly remember the absolute darkness of the night, with no flashlights or lantern to pierce it. “There were campfires here and there,” Nick says. “But all around it was pitch-black. All you could do was hit the sack.”

  Alexander S. Colevas, eleven at the time, was another Camp Marks kid: “We used to go over to the flats and put on wrestling matches with the other kids and families from SE [southeast Washington]. These vets would toss us pennies and nickels. . . . You must remember that this was Depression time, and anywhere we could make a penny, we went.”31

  Henry Meisel, the motorcycling vagabond from Wisconsin, described the camp as “a lake of mud” after a hard rain, and cracked and rutted in dry weather. But he liked the place. The Salvation Army’s big tent, which had a “goodly supply of books and magazines” and chairs and tables where he could write letters home, “tended to bring back the memories of those days served in France some fourteen years ago.”

  Anyone, he wrote, “could get a real thrill by going to the top of the bluff and looking over the entire camp below. American flags could be seen flying from every possible point of vantage so that hundreds of flags were unfurled to the breeze. Certainly these people were all good Americans, and there was no radicalism whatever.”

  Everyone was on the lookout for infiltrators. One night, Meisel wrote, “somebody began shouting: ‘Every one out. The reds are coming.’ The bugler was then ordered to blow ‘assembly’ and the veterans all rushed from their quarters armed with clubs, iron bars, bricks, etc. Men went to where the women and children were, and all approaches were guarded.” It was a false alarm and everyone went back to their bunks. “The veterans at Camp Marks were certainly far from being in sympathy with any of the radical elements in Washington.”32

  About 1,100 wives and children populated the main camp, making it, with more than 15,000 people, the largest Hooverville in the country. Hundreds— and eventually thousands—of other veterans were scattered around Washington in more than two dozen billets, most of them in deserted and half-demolished buildings.33 But Camp Marks was the heartland, where the vets set up a library and barbershop and staged vaudeville shows at which they sang such ditties as “My Bonus Lies over the Ocean.” Almost daily, Glassford visited the camp, riding his blue motorcycle.

  James G. Banks remembers that neighborhood people “took meals down to the camp. The veterans were welcomed.” Far from feeling threatened, most residents saw bonus marchers as something of a curiosity. “On Saturdays and Sundays, a lot of tourists came down here,” says Banks. The veterans and the people of Anacostia got along well, he remembers. “The guys used to come out and date girls in the neighborhood. In fact one of them married the sister of one of our friends. Sometimes they would play ball. There was a little semipro ball field up on Sumner Road where they came to see ball games.”34

  A miniature bungalow rose from the Anacostia shantytown, where many families lived. The Pennsylvania woman who inhabited it with her five children said of her makeshift shelter, “This is the only home we have.” (Underwood & Underwood/Library of Congress)

  Frank A. Taylor had just gone to work in the summer of 1932 as a junior curator in the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building. “People in Washington were quite sympathetic [to the veterans],” Taylor remembers. “They [the veterans] were very orderly and came in to use the rest room. We did ask that they not do any bathing or shaving before the museum opened.”35

  Charles T. Greene, James Banks’s pal, loved hanging out in the camps. “They would talk down there,” he recalled, “and have entertainment for the people there, plus some of that entertainment was to draw people down there who could donate money or bring things to them. I remember the time they had this fellow—a bonus marcher—who they buried alive down there. We would go down there to see how long he was going to be able to stay underground. Couple of times they had people sitting on poles to attract people.”

  Washington newspapers relished life in the camps, and their reporters produced almost daily dispatches on camp life, writing about flagpole sitters, Indian chiefs, and one bona fide relative of Abraham Lincoln. Yet they largely missed the biggest story of camp life in this more-southern-than-northern city, where schools, buses, restaurants, and movies remained segregated. John Dos Passos mentioned the fact that whites and Negroes were mixed in the large audiences that clustered around the large stage at the center of the Anacostia camp,36 and the Evening Star’s Thomas Henry was the first to mention this in print when he observed that there were “white men and colored men crowded together under the same shelters, but few others pursued the story.”37

  In the years between the Great War and the early 1930s, hundreds of thousands of African-Americans moved from the rural South to the industrial North; estimates range from 300,000 to a million. The North’s black population, drawn to such cities as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Cleveland, increased by about 20 percent between 1910 and 1930. In the early days of the great migration, race riots racked several cities.38 Proposals for a federal anti-lynching law, killed by the Senate in 1922, came up again during the Hoover administration in reaction to fifteen lynchings between December 1929 and July 1930.39 Hoover appointed African-Americans to federal commissions and urged an end to discrimination in federal agencies. But, in the face of opposition from southern legislators, he chose not to support legi
slation to stop lynchings.40

  In June 1932 W. E. B. Du Bois’s Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), carried an article entitled “The Secret City,” alluding to the fact that Washington was 27 percent black, but little was said or written about these 132,000 souls. The color line was tightly drawn, especially at the White House door, where since the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson only two blacks had been invited to regular social functions, Minister Dantes Bellegarde and Congressman Oscar De Priest.41 Negro groups were allowed to visit, but pictures were absolutely forbidden. One day in June President Hoover met with and had his picture taken with a group of motion picture engineers and members of the Yo-Yo Club of Raleigh, North Carolina. The next group through the door was the internationally acclaimed Fisk Jubilee Singers, who were given a cordial greeting but no photograph.42

  In Anacostia and in the other camps, the color line seemed to have been erased. Jim Banks, the grandson of a slave and a resident of Anacostia, looked back on the camp as “the first massive integrated effort that I could remember. . . . They [blacks and whites] were eating and cooking together. They were segregated in the Army, but they weren’t segregated here.”43 Charles Greene recalled the same thing: “You could see blacks and whites, and they were living as a unit.”44

  Sewilla LaMar said, “It was Jim Crow ships that took our boys over there, and under the Hoover administration, it was Jim Crow ships that took the Gold Star mothers to the graves of their sons who were left in Flanders’ Fields. Jim Crow, it seemed, stood out above all else. It was only the denial of the bonus plea which affected both black and white veterans alike.” And she added, describing the camps, “There was no Jim Crow there.”*

  Roy Wilkins, a rookie reporter for the Crisis, suggested that the NAACP monthly move away from its lofty “ebony tower” approach to issues and report them firsthand rather than write essays about them. Putting words into action, he headed from New York by train to Washington’s Union Station and then to the teeming Camp Marks in Anacostia for a few days and nights in June. “There I found black toes and white toes sticking out side by side from a ramshackle town of pup tents, packing crates, and tar-paper shacks. Black men and white men, veterans of the segregated army that had fought in World War I, lined up equally, perspired in sick bays side by side. For years the U.S. Army had argued that General Jim Crow was its proper commander, but the Bonus Marchers gave lie to the notion that black and white soldiers— ex-soldiers in their case—couldn’t live together.”45

  At Camp Marks, he noted, “there was one absentee, James Crow.” If the bonus marchers could unite across racial lines, Wilkins asked, why couldn’t the entire fabric of American life be desegregated? He hunted for several days and nights to find an example of segregation and finally found one at Anacostia, where a small group of “colored bonuseers” from New Orleans and other towns in Louisiana had erected a section of shacks for themselves, insisting on their own mess kitchen.

  He was also taken by many other things: the organization of the camps, the discipline (enforced by black and white MPs), the ingenuity employed to turn junk into shelter, and mostly the music. “Over in one corner a white vet was playing a ukelele and singing what could have been the theme song of the camp: ‘In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town.’ On a Sunday afternoon the camp piano was played alternately by a brown lad with a New York accent and a red-necked white boy from Florida, while a few rods away Elder Micheaux’s visiting choir was giving voice, in stop-time, to a hymn, ‘God’s Tomorrow Will Be Brighter Than Today’; and whites availed themselves of the free choice of patting their feet either outdoors to the piano or in the gospel tent to the choir.”46

  Roy Wilkins, a writer for the Crisis, the magazine published by the NAACP, shown in 1932. He visited the bonus marchers and found no Jim Crow in the Anacostia camp— despite, he wrote, many U.S. Army officials claiming that “whites and blacks could not function together.” (NAACP Collection/Library of Congress)

  Wilkins’s article was accompanied by an editorial box stating that the integration of the Bonus Army was evaded “gracefully” by the white press, which would go no further than to indicate that “a Negro was present” at a given event. One of the only white reporters to pick up on the “polyglot army in which Negroes and whites mingle without restriction” was Gardner Jackson of Survey magazine, who saw something else there: “The men . . . indeed, practiced the first large scale attempt to mimic Mahatma Gandhi’s passive resistance.” He added in parentheses, “I might be thrown out as a red if I told them that in person.” These men and their families were characterized with many labels, including, now, “nonviolent.”47

  Native Washingtonians who visited Anacostia on the weekends were, to use the words of Constance McLaughlin Green in her history of race relations in Washington, “astonished” to discover white veterans from Alabama and Mississippi as well as northern and western states sharing billets, rations, and chores with Negro veterans. Like Wilkins, Green could find no evidence of Jim Crowism among the vets.48 Another phenomenon recalled by both Banks and Green was that individuals and families of the Bonus Army broke through the color line in the Anacostia neighborhood. Greene recalls that near his house in a black neighborhood, a white family moved in. Girls in that family became friends with his sister.

  The racially integrated camps were a challenge to the status quo, and their very existence flew in the face of the conventions of 1932, a year that would end with W. E. B. DuBois creating a list of Hoover’s offenses against blacks. One of them had to do with the Gold Star mothers. In DuBois’s indictment, Hoover ordered “colored Gold Star Mothers on separate ships with inferior accommodations” to France.49

  Wilkins in his article in the Crisis hurled a major challenge at the military, which, he said, had been diligently spreading the doctrine that whites and blacks were unable to work together in uniform: “Why can’t the United States army with its equipment and its discipline enlist Negroes and whites together in all branches of the service?” he asked. “It can, but it will not. The army is concerned with refined democracy, with tabus, with the maintenance of poses. The B. E. F. is concerned with raw democracy and with reality. But hereafter the army will have to hide behind its self-erected tradition, for the B. E. F. has demonstrated, right under the August army nose, that the thing can be done.”

  At the very end of his visit Wilkins stood on a little rise of land overlooking Camp Marks and observed, “Men and women can live, eat, play and work together be they black or white, just as the B. E. F. demonstrated. Countless thousands of people know it, but they go on pretending, building their paper fences and their cardboard arguments. Back home in Waycross, Miami, Pulaski, Waxahachie, Pine Bluff, Cairo, Petersburg, Des Moines, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Kansas City and St. Louis, they go on pretending, glaring, jabbing, insulting, fighting.”50

  When Roy Wilkins made his visit to Anacostia, he did not see or meet all of the Negroes in the Bonus Army because a number of them had already been driven out as Communists; some were, some were not. Plainclothes police and federal undercover agents considered two things sure indicators that a person was a Communist: a Jewish name or a black face. And there were plenty of each there, stirred into the vast human melting pot seasoned with equal parts of despair and goodwill. By early June, the Communist label on the bonus marchers was gaining credibility—despite Waters’s clearly anti-Communist remarks and his insistent demand that no Communists be admitted into the BEF. Rumors about Communist revolutionaries swirled through the city.

  Meanwhile, anti-riot training was under way at nearby Fort Myer, where the continued arrival of bonus seekers created mounting apprehension. “There was a feeling of unease in official circles, and a restless, troubled feeling throughout the city,” Lucian K. Truscott Jr., a young lieutenant at Fort Myer, sensed. “No one knew what to expect.”51

  Officers and enlisted men at Fort Myer restricted to base, conducted secret training on how to quell riots
or armed rebellion. Troops took turns playing rioters and riot controllers. Some stood behind a corral fence, flailing pick handles, beating sticks, yelling, and flapping slickers or blankets. Troopers on horses charged the fence, conditioning the horses to stay calm in a maelstrom of noise and violence.

  At edgy Fort Myer, communism became a trespasser. Although the garrison troops and officers were confined to base, the gates remained open, and through them came civilians who saw the riot training. Soon Communist-published handbills were being found in barracks and stables. Similar handbills were distributed in the Marine barracks in Washington. One read:

  SOLDIERS AND MARINES: The higher Army and Navy authorities, acting for the Wall Street–Hoover government are taking steps to use you against the Ex-servicemen who are now in Washington. Your officers expect you, if the government considers it necessary to club or shoot down the Veterans to protect them from carrying on their struggle and getting the bonus. . . .

  Soldiers! Marines! You are workers! No real red-blooded American soldier will allow himself to be used to shoot down fellow workers—his war-time buddies—his father or brothers who are unemployed.52

  The handbills infuriated Truscott and most of the other officers and men, leading them—along with the Army’s Military Intelligence Division—to believe that the Bonus Army was full of Communists, or even Communist-controlled.

  Communism was very much on the mind of General Douglas MacArthur on June 8, when he was in Pittsburgh making the commencement speech to the largest class ever graduated by the University of Pittsburgh. “Pacifism and its bedfellow, communism, are all around us,” he said. “In the theatre, newspapers and magazines, pulpits and lecture halls, schools and colleges, it hangs like a mist before the face of America, organizing the forces of unrest and undermining the morale of the working man. Day by day this canker eats deeper into the body politic. . . . We should be at all times prepared to defend ourselves. . . . It is undefended riches which provoke war. The wealth of the United States presents a tempting spectacle which may ultimately lead to another world war.”