by Paul Dickson
MacArthur’s speech to 1,326 graduates and their kin and friends was politely received in the bowl of Pitt Stadium. But in the university activities building, police hauled away three antiwar protesters, members of a group that had objected to having MacArthur as the commencement speaker.53 And even as MacArthur was warning about omnipresent communism, 400 bonus marchers—most of them led by admitted Communists—were clogging the streets of Pittsburgh; some had arrived by freight train, others in a string of trucks. John T. Pace of the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League led one group; C. B. Cowan, the firebrand Communist who had masterminded the railroad confrontation in Cleveland, led another. Pace eluded Pittsburgh police and slipped out of town, arriving in Washington on June 9. But Cowan was arrested on “suspicion.” Police cars sped around the city, herding the two groups toward McKees Rocks, a small town northwest of downtown Pittsburgh. There they were all put in the basements of the municipal building and a furniture store. Down-and-out residents, who would have been surprised at MacArthur’s allusion to the wealth of America, managed to find enough coffee and food to feed the unexpected strangers.
Many of the marchers spending the night in Pittsburgh vehemently denied that they were Communists. Among them were those in a California contingent that had mingled with the Pace group in McKees Rocks. Mrs. William Perrotta, who was called the “Joan of Arc of the West” by her companions, led the 350 Californians with her husband. They left their two sons, four and seven years old, at home. The Californians headed off on a Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad freight train and planned to change to a Baltimore & Ohio or Western Maryland freight at Connellsville, Pennsylvania. As they headed east, about 150 Pittsburgh-area veterans got ready to leave in a motorcade of six trucks supplied by area businesses, with gasoline donated by other local supporters.54 Neither the Californians nor the Pennsylvanians were Communists. But they, like so many veterans already in Washington, were being tarred with the red brush. Allegations of Communist sympathies were, to use MacArthur’s words, hanging like a mist over the entire BEF.55
. . .
Few of Washington’s civilian movers and shakers felt the kind of compassion shown by Evalyn Walsh McLean. More typical was the response of Gilbert H. Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society, who saw the veterans as a threat. On June 9 he wrote to his father, saying he was concerned that President Hoover might not be able to go to Constitution Hall, a short distance from the White House, to present the National Geographic Society Gold Medal to aviatrix Amelia Earhart. Grosvenor accepted the baseless, but widespread, canard that most of the men were not veterans, writing, “A large number of so-called veterans never saw service, or if they did, did not cross the seas. The promoters of the gathering here were Communists. The entire program was carefully prepared at Communists’ headquarters in New York.” The “invasion of Washington by the veterans may precipitate unbelievable catastrophes.”56 ( John O. La Gorce, associate editor of the National Geographic Magazine, agreed with his boss. In a letter to Hoover he complained about veterans who would accost shoppers as they came out of grocery stores and “in an insistent voice ask if they really needed all that food at home when there were hundreds of people starving.”)57
Grosvenor’s letter shows that even in early June the veterans, who were struggling for survival, were viewed by some residents as Communist-led and a threat to the city. Taking his cue from federal agencies, Police Chief Glassford quietly turned his Special Investigations and Missing Persons Squad into an undercover unit. Its officers attended Communist meetings in Washington, infiltrated suspected Communist groups, and began to assemble what became a “confidential administrative file” of 15,000 index cards and 5,000 dossiers on persons and organizations. The files even contained the license numbers of cars parked near places where Communist meetings were held.58
Two days after MacArthur’s appearance in Pittsburgh, the U.S. Army began a secret project to ferret out Reds among the marchers elsewhere. The order, undoubtedly seen by MacArthur, came from Secretary of War Hurley, who sent radiograms in secret code to the nine officers commanding troops spread across the United States in the nine corps areas: “With reference to any movements of veteran bonus marchers to Washington originating in or passing through your corps area, it is desired that a brief radio report in secret code be made to the War Department indicating the presence, if any, of communistic elements and names of leaders of any known communist leanings.”59
Reports trickled in for weeks: “Marchers leaving Rochester, New York; known communists among them”; “Guns and ammunition stolen from an ROTC building in Albany”; “Five admitted communists agitating recruits preceding 2,500 Los Angeles now vicinity El Paso.”60 Most corps commanders did not report seeing many Reds. The commander of the 3rd Corps Area in Baltimore, however, reported that although he knew of no Communists in the Baltimore group, he believed there was a “general feeling of unrest . . . to the general effect that some serious trouble is likely to arise at an early date.”61 Eighth Corps Area headquarters at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, reported that in the California delegations there were Jewish Communists financed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.62 And from the 9th Corps Area in San Francisco came a note about Waters’s Oregonians: “There was no evidence of Communist penetration of this group, except for one of its members, George Alman.” Even before Hurley sent his order, an intelligence officer telephoned an “unconfirmed report from a reliable source,” which said that “a detachment of Reds were concentrating in the vicinity of Herkimer [New York], that they had thirty-one machine guns and two pieces of artillery, caliber not stated.”63 J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, sent the Army’s Military Intelligence Division a report saying that some of the marchers were alleged to have “dynamite in a plan to blow up the White House.”64
Undercover operatives from the District police and MID infiltrated meetings of suspected Communists. After John Pace was released in Pittsburgh and reached Washington, the agents tailed him, once getting close enough to overhear him talking to other men about the “big show.” In a report he was quoted as saying that authorities would be “afraid to put us out” of the abandoned government-owned building they occupied, “as it would be starting something, and, that, Comrade, is what we want. Let the big guy start first, and we will finish the doings.”65
Such reports produced an air of crisis, especially in the Army. The police, MID, and Secret Service officials worked closely together. The MID, for example, routinely provided information from army records so that dossiers could be produced on BEF leaders, and copies of District police reports went to the White House.66 MacArthur began getting daily intelligence reports.67 Moseley got a tip from a reserve officer in Detroit saying that Communists from that city “planned to take forcible possession of one of the government buildings, raise a Red flag from the flag staff, and declare a government of the Soviet Union of the United States.”68
Waters boasted of the BEF’s attacks on Communists, the first of which took place on June 10, when the police were called out to protect some two hundred Communists who were evicted from the Anacostia camp. Pace’s group turned up the next morning and along with the evictees occupied a vacant building, one of many that had been bought by the federal govern- ment for demolition in connection with the Federal Building Program at Thirteenth and B streets SW.69
From this point forward, the Communists were not only shunned but also abused by the BEF. Several men found inside Camp Marks were tried by a “kangaroo court” and sentenced to fifteen lashes across the back.70 Communists told of beatings and kidnappings, and hinted that two men whose bodies were found in the Potomac had been beaten and thrown into the river.71 Two young women with Communist literature—“boudoir Bolsheviki,” Waters called them—were accosted by his MPs in Camp Marks and turned over to local police but not charged for any crimes.72
Ostracized by the BEF and under constant surveillance by the Army, Pace and his followers were han
dled differently by Glassford. “Pace had participated in the Dearborn riots and had the reputation of being a dangerous and fearless leader,” Glassford wrote in his diary. “Waters refused to supply food for Pace’s group from the central commissary which had been established, so I went over to Pace’s billet, not only to straighten out the sustenance difficulty, but also to get acquainted with Pace. I felt that the better I knew Pace the better I could anticipate his moves. . . . Much to my surprise I found him to be an affable good natured individual, with a very engaging smile.”
Glassford found that most of Pace’s men were “colored.” He promised to get them food, and thought they were far more interested in food than in communism. When Glassford, who had gotten Pace’s police record from Detroit and found he had once been arrested for attempting to chloroform an alderman, asked him about this, Pace smiled and said, “You’re damn right. That alderman deserved to be chloroformed.”73
Rumors about Communists did not hurt the lobbying of the BEF, which produced an incredible achievement. Challenging the American Legion, one of the most powerful lobbying machines in Washington, the veterans managed to restore life to a bill that appeared to be dead. Back on May 6, the House Ways and Means Committee had voted against Wright Patman’s cash-now bill. Ordinarily, this would have killed a bill, and Patman knew he faced a formidable parliamentary struggle. To get such a bill out of committee and onto the floor for a vote, the bill had to be formally tabled for seven meeting days. Then a petition had to be made for the invoking of a special rule. That was granted by the Rules Committee for Patman’s bill.
After all this was done, Patman had begun buttonholing colleagues to get the 145 names needed to bring the bill to the floor, when the vets arrived. Their amateur lobbying technique consisted mainly of confronting hundreds of representatives, face-to-face. The well-fed, well-tailored members of Congress saw before them hungry, tattered, but unbowed men with empty pockets. The sight of those men was far more powerful than the messages from American Legion lobbyists. From those encounters, the bonus marchers produced many of those 145 signatures.74 But the bill still could die, murdered by the calendar. Because bills could be brought out by petition only on the second and fourth Monday of the month, the next time the bill could be put before the House was Monday, June 13. And the House was scheduled to adjourn on June 10 so that Republican members could attend the Republican National Convention, which was to nominate President Hoover for his second term. In order for Patman’s bill to reach the floor, the scheduled adjournment would have to be postponed. Patman put it succinctly: “a vote to adjourn is a vote against the bonus.”75
Speaker of the House John Garner saw to it that the House was not adjourned. He believed that a vote on the bonus had to be taken.76 On Tuesday, June 14, Wright Patman’s cash-now bonus bill, authorizing an appropriation of $2.4 billion, was finally headed toward a vote on the House floor. Democratic Representative Fred Vinson of Kentucky began the debate. Arguing that the bill would put billions of dollars into circulation, he said that it “goes at the basic conditions underlying our weakened economic structure.” Two other representatives, loyal to President Hoover, rose to oppose the bill. One of them called the Bonus March “a foolish trip and one which should not have been undertaken.”
Representative James Frear of Wisconsin, who had served in the Army from 1879 to 1884,77 chided his colleagues: “Those who here enjoy $30 a day or more should not denounce these wet, ragged, bedraggled men soaked for days in the rain, who only ask for a dollar a day. They ask for bread for themselves and their families. They ask it from the wealthiest country in the world, for which they fought. Among those who came back, a million or more are in dire need. They ask for bread, and Congress should not offer them a stone.” Democratic Representative Charles Crisp of Georgia, who had been in Congress since 1913, emphasized the need for maintaining fiscal integrity and did not believe the bonus was just because “the masses of the American people” would “have to pay the bill.”
Next on his feet was Edward Eslick of Tennessee, a Democratic congressman since 1925. He was going to make an important speech, and his wife was in the gallery for the occasion. So were many members of the BEF, disobeying an order from Waters, who did not want it to appear that veterans were trying to pressure Congress. “Uncle Sam,” Eslick said, “the richest government in the world, gave sixty dollars and an IOU ‘that I will pay you twenty-seven years after the armistice.’ But, Mr. Chairman, I want to divert you from the sordid. We hear nothing but dollars here. I want to go from the sordid side—”78
Eslick gasped and slumped to the floor. Representatives rushed to him and carried him to the lobby, where the House physician tried to revive him. His wife rushed to the lobby and found her husband dead of a heart attack.79
Next day, five thousand bareheaded BEF men lined the streets as Eslick’s body was taken from a funeral home to Union Station for the train home to Tennessee. Others, led by holders of the Distinguished Service Cross, marched in Eslick’s cortege.
On June 15, the House of Representatives passed the bonus bill by a vote of 211 to 176, with 40 not voting. For the bonus were 153 Democrats, a Farmer-Laborite, and 57 Republicans; opponents included 51 Democrats.80 The BEF had won a battle, but another awaited in the Senate.
On June 17, more than 6,000 veterans81 thronged Capitol Hill to maintain a vigil on the Senate, which was scheduled to vote that day on Patman’s bill.82 One of the senators was Senator Thomas P. Gore, a populist from Oklahoma—the state’s first senator and the first blind senator. He was driven to Capitol Hill by his black driver. Next to Gore sat his grandson, seven-year-old Gore Vidal. All summer the boy had been hearing about the “Boners,” as some Washingtonians called the Bonus Army. Grown-ups talked about the rumors sweeping Washington: the Boners had attacked the White House, torched the Capitol, were looting stores. Vidal, as he later wrote, “thought that the Boners were just that—white skeletons like those jointed cardboard ones displayed at Halloween. Bony figures filled my nightmares until it was explained to me that these Boners were not from slaughterhouses but from poorhouses.”
As the car approached the Capitol, “I stared out the open window, looking for Boners. Instead I saw only shabby-looking men holding up signs and shouting at occasional cars. At the Senate side of the Capitol there was a line of policemen. Before we could pass through the line, Senator Gore was recognized. There were shouts; then a stone came through the window of the car and landed with a crash on the floor between us. My grandfather’s memorable words were ‘Shut the window,’ which I did.”83
The shouts and songs of the veterans—“The Yanks are starving, the Yanks are starving”84—could be heard in the Senate chamber as the debate went on. Liberal senators, conceding that the veterans’ cause was just, nevertheless said they would vote against it because the bonus bill would kill off one for unemployment relief. Democratic Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, who would vote for the bonus bill, told the Senate that whatever the vote, the Bonus Army “would commence immediately to make their plans for evacuation” of Washington.85
More than six thousand bonus marchers took over Capitol Hill on June 17, awaiting the Senate vote on the bonus bill, which the House had passed. To the tune of “The Yanks Are Coming,” veterans sang, “The Yanks are starving, the Yanks are starving.” (Underwood & Underwood/Library of Congress)
Veterans sprawled across the Capitol Plaza and the lawn. Others filled the Senate gallery, listening to every word. Senator Hiram Johnson, a California Republican, did not feel threatened, he wrote his son, but he felt the veterans’ presence ominous: “If the farmers of this Nation who are suffering united, as these men have united, and with the same abandon, started a march upon the Capitol, and joined ranks with those of the city whose souls have been seared with misery during the past few years, it would not be difficult for a real revolution to start in this country.”86
Some thirteen thousand men in Camp Marks were preparing to join their comrades
on Capitol Hill. Assistant Superintendent L. I. H. Edwards—a rival for the job Glassford was given in 1931—panicked when he realized the Camp Marks vets were ready to march. On what a local paper called “the tensest day in the capital since the War,” Edwards ordered the Eleventh Street drawbridge raised. John D. Weaver described the scene in the novel he based on his summer with the Bonus Army: “The policemen, standing shoulder to shoulder, formed a blue picket fence in front of the raised drawbridge, thrust up into the darkening sky like a giant hand. Police cars were parked along both sides of the street, and Lorry [a character in the book] could see their tommy-guns.”87
Scores of police blocked the other two bridges. Edwards’s move stopped the flow of veterans to Capitol Hill but also increased the smoldering anger in Camp Marks.88
On Capitol Hill, neither Waters nor Glassford was immediately aware of what had happened. Waters had ordered all men in Camp Marks to come to the Capitol. “I noticed very few additions to our numbers as it grew dark,” he recalled. “Suddenly one of my aides rushed through the crowd, to where I was sitting on the Capitol steps with the men.” The aide told him that the drawbridge had been raised. Waters, stunned, wondered what would happen if the thousands of men around him heard about their penned-in comrades.89*
Glassford had given standing orders that the drawbridge could be raised and the other bridges sealed only if any demonstrations broke out in Anacos-tia or on the Hill, where he had hidden police reserves in the belowground labyrinth of the Capitol. The Marine Barracks had been put on alert.