The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  Irate commuters, unable to cross the Potomac on any bridge, complained bitterly to police. Edwards ordered the drawbridge lowered and the other bridges opened. Veterans began streaming in from Anacostia. Glassford called for the reserves to appear.90 A senator asked Waters what would happen if the bill should be defeated. “Nothing will happen,” Waters said, “unless something stupid is done to stir up the men.”91

  Debate continued into the evening. Waters had arranged for a mobile kitchen to bring the veterans a hot meal of stew and coffee. Except for some angry words directed at news photographers, the men remained calm. The U.S. Army Band, which played a concert on Capitol Hill on Friday nights in the summer, appeared, to everybody’s surprise.92 Finally, around 9:30, Senate aides summoned Waters inside. He reemerged moments later to break the news to the crowd: the bill had been defeated—a “temporary setback,” he said, promising again that the BEF would “stick it out” until 1945.93 The men roared at that, and for a moment it looked as if the veterans would attack the Capitol. Then Elsie Robinson, a nationally syndicated Hearst columnist and friend of the BEF, whispered something in Waters’s ear. He shouted to the crowd: “Sing ‘America.’” They started to sing, and the Army Band struck up the song. When the last notes drifted over the plaza, the veterans began to head back to their scattered billets and back to Camp Marks.

  While this was going on outside, on the Senate floor there was a move to reconsider the bonus and a second to table the bill. By a vote of 44 to 26 the bill was tabled, which effectively meant that the issue of the bonus would lie dormant until the Seventy-third Congress convened in 1933.

  It was finally over, Washingtonians thought the next day. Now the veterans could all go home. But before the Bonus Army could make its next move, Waters and Glassford had unfinished business. The veterans’ anger over the raising of the drawbridge seemed to be increasing by the hour, and the feeling was that the BEF had been double-crossed by Glassford. Waters asked for and got an apology. “It was a mistake to have done so and the entire Police Department recognizes it as such,” was how Glassford put it in a letter.94

  *Since so many American dead were buried in France, the U.S. government established a program to periodically allow mothers to visit the graves of their sons.

  *Despite the growing anger of the veterans on the bridge, there was a moment of levity: a pair of vets doused themselves in chicken blood and convinced an ambulance driver to take them across the bridge.

  7

  The Death March

  Four abreast they marched—

  five thousand strong. . . .

  All were down at the heel.

  All were slim and gaunt and their eyes had a light in them.

  There were empty sleeves and limping men with canes. . . .

  They did not march in the light of day. They marched in darkness. . . .

  —Floyd Gibbons, Literary Digest, June 18, 1932.

  FOLLOWING THE VETS’ SINGING of “America” and peaceful return to their camps, the Evening Star editorialized, “These men wrote a new chapter on patriotism of which their countrymen could be proud.” To which the New York Times added, “Even in the stress of the Senate debate and vote they kept the order which has been one of the most amazing qualities of this march on Washington.” Both papers also said that it was time for the veterans to admit they had made a mistake and accept defeat.1

  Nothing was further from the minds of the vast majority of the veterans occupying the city. The BEF began settling in for what looked like a long-term presence in the city, and the small band of Communists met daily to target the White House in the belief that demonstration and disruption would force President Hoover to demand a special session of Congress. For this reason, both the Army and the police had Pace’s men under constant surveillance.2

  In the days following the vote, some BEF men and their families left— 1,000 by police estimates; only 200, according to Waters, who called for new recruits: “Have 150,000 here by fall,” he said to recruiters he sent to key cities. The first recruiter was a woman from Wisconsin who went to Richmond for reinforcements and supplies. To find recruits in the Northeast, Joe Angelo was sent out with the head of the Utah delegation. Another duo was sent south. A truck left for Long Island, New York, with BACK TO WASHINGTON WITH RECRUITS chalked on its side.3

  To remove any doubt that the BEF intended to become a permanent force, Waters and his executive committee printed membership cards. Wright Patman was issued card No. 1, and Glassford, No. 2. The cards contained a pledge of allegiance to the United States and its Constitution, as well as to the BEF.4 At about this same time Waters and Glassford began talking with John Henry Bartlett, former governor of New Hampshire and former postmaster general, about setting up a plan for a “semi-permanent” colony for homeless vets on thirty acres of District land owned by Bartlett.5 The remainder of the month of June favored the BEF with new recruits, food, and countless column inches of upbeat newsprint. From New York, for instance, ninety-four cabdrivers arrived in taxis borrowed in Baltimore.

  “Their sang-froid and their arrival a la mode de Gallieni at the Marne6 sent rumors through town that a battalion of New York gangsters had come armed with bombs for some desperate purposes,” reported the New York Times, adding, “but they turned out to be entirely harmless except for their vocabularies.”7 Eight former German soldiers brought a ton and a half of food from Jersey City. Now naturalized Americans, all had fought against the Americans, all had been wounded at least twice, and all had won decorations. The food was offered as “slight reparations for the shiploads of food sent to starving Germany by the United States after the war” and caused Henry O. Meisel to comment, “I never did hear of any such being done by any of the British or French veterans who were our allies during the war.”8

  A well-known local art collector and veteran auctioned off a famous bronze statuette to enhance the mess fund, and an Oregon woman, the self-styled Mother of the Bonus Army, married a forty-year-old vet in New York, where they had gone for a visit. As their permanent address they gave BEF headquarters in Washington. The first baby, “Baby Pipp,” was born to a BEF couple (Mr. and Mrs. Edmond Pippenbring of Jacksonville, Florida) who lived in Camp Marks, which now had its own comedian (Sandy “Scottie” Gibson, who convinced a local company to give the camp a new piano), and its own poet and official photographer (Eddie Gosnell). A couple (the Swartworths of Pittsburgh) hitchhiked with their children to Washington, having convinced the kids (Billy, five, Buddy, three, and Cissy, one) that they were on vacation and that Camp Marks was “a big park.”

  The BEF also had its own newspaper, the B.E.F. News, which debuted on June 25. It was created and edited by Joseph L. Heffernan, former mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, who was addressed by the title of Judge. He had come with the Ohio delegation looking for material for a series of magazine articles. Early issues were mundane, akin to a small-town weekly with poetry, camp gossip, and the odd bit of unintended irony—reporting, for instance, on vets leaving camp to do their National Guard duty back home. The paper’s first press run was 25,000, and 597 vets sold it out in eight hours.9 By the middle of July the B.E.F News claimed street sales of 50,000 and out-of-town sales of 25,000. Judge Heffernan said he was planning to line up 30,000 vets to sell it in New York and that he soon hoped to have a circulation of 1 million.

  Heffernan chronicled life in the camps, interpreting the Bonus Army for others—telling, for example, a reporter for the Star that most people did not understand its diverse composition.10 “With the Texas outfit for example, are five rodeo riders,” he said. The News became the glue that linked the camps to the local public. But if these stories received ink, they were not getting celluloid. At a time when newsreels were part of the usual program in the nation’s movie theaters, newsreel cameras rarely showed everyday Bonus Army camp life, though cameramen were told to cover any outbreaks of violence. Under orders from New York headquarters, Fox and Hearst cameramen shunned the vets, while Paramount carried o
ne short item and Pathé two.11

  The major still-photo companies did circulate images of daily life in the camps, depicting everything from a replica of the White House erected in Anacostia to images of men tending communal caldrons of stew. One image showed a family that built and lived in a scaled-down house replete with chimney and front porch; others showed Anacostia as a place with streets, albeit muddy ones, a library, a post office, and its own boxing ring. Images of the Oliver twins slugging away in that ring were sent around the country. Local photographers—including Harris and Ewing, a company known for its soft-focus portraits of Supreme Court justices and debutantes—produced high-quality photographic postcards, which were mailed from the camp post office and kept by locals as souvenirs of this unusual summer. Other, crudely printed postcards found whimsy in such subjects as a cluster of hovels created from old car bodies and fenders, a black barber shaving a white patron in an open-air barbershop, and a group of jolly men lined up in front of their packing-crate-and-tar-paper tenements. These were not images of despair and depravity, but rather portraits showing the down-at-the-heels dignity and sense of humor that made the BEF camps seem appealing, even romantic, and suggested that the ban on newsreel cameras kept them from becoming even more attractive to the American public.12

  This image of a “southern-style” barbershop was on one of the many postcards depicting camp life in Anacostia. Veterans could make money selling postcards on the streets of Washington. (Authors’ collection)

  During this time, Moscow, in the form of the Comintern, was urging Communists in the United States and other countries to rise in global revolution. From Moscow, the BEF looked like the best possible source of insurrection in America. Earl Browder, head of the U.S. Communist Party (and a spy for the Soviets), was being pressured to mobilize the unemployed. In a desperate move, he went to Camp Marks, even though he had been a draft dodger, spending most of the Great War in jail for refusing to register for the draft and for opposing the war. He did not make much of an impression at Camp Marks. But in a dispatch to the Communist Daily Worker he said that, come the revolution, the marchers would be the “shock troops” of America’s unemployed masses.13

  Washington police undercover operatives, along with informers for both the police and Army intelligence, kept meetings of left-wing vets under surveillance. Secret reports carried a heavy dose of stereotyping, one describing a participant as having a “Jewish nose and appearance” and a “negro” with “dark colored skin.”14

  At the same time, leadership of the BEF was in flux. After the Senate vote against the bonus bill, Waters found himself in the midst of a power struggle exacerbated by his own petulance and desire for more and more power. Reports from the BEF “secret service” informed him that his camp commanders and a self-appointed executive committee were holding secret meetings in hotel rooms around town.15 Finally, on June 25, he decided to force a showdown by again resigning. For several days the BEF was leaderless and confused. The Communist Daily Worker jumped into the void, suggesting that this was a revolt staged by the rank and file because Waters had cut off the food supply to the WESL; the Worker confidently predicted that Pace would be swept in as the new leader.16

  Early on the morning of June 29, following Waters’s third resignation in three weeks, his secretary, Owen W. Lucas, reported to police that a shot had been fired at a car Waters usually rode in during his rounds of the camps. “I am positive that the shot was intended for Waters,” Lucas said. The car was passing down East Capitol Street, near Capitol Hill, when the shot was fired, Lucas said.17

  Hours later, at a tumultuous meeting at Camp Marks attended by 10,000, Waters climbed to the roof of a shed and spoke, saying that he would return but only if given “complete dictatorial powers.” As he jumped down, the cry went up, “Let’s vote now! Waters again!” By the acclaim of those present, Waters was reinstated as leader of the BEF. But this time he demanded—and was given—broad, total control over the veterans. Within minutes of his ascendancy he pledged that he would immediately abandon all committees and ban his rivals from any office. He ordered morning military drills for everyone and declared that he would build a force of five hundred “shock troops” to maintain discipline in a new BEF, which he termed “a mobile military machine” that would be ready to serve the country in any “national emergency,” refusing to say what emergency he had in mind. “I’m going to be hard-boiled with the B.E.F.,” he said. “If any man refuses to carry out my orders, he will be dragged out of Washington by the military police. To hell with civil law and General Glassford. I’m going to have my orders carried out!”18 At this point Waters was openly flirting with fascism, imagining himself a leader of millions rather than thousands. In the days that followed a name would be given to this movement: the Khaki Shirts, an American adaptation of Italy’s fascist Black Shirts and Germany’s Nazi Brown Shirts.

  The following day, Glassford responded. He declared that Waters would not be allowed to exercise unlawful powers and that nobody was going to be dragged out of D.C. by Waters’s shock troops. Glassford followed up by refilling the BEF’s larder with 3,000 pounds of meat, 500 pounds of sugar, 4,000 loaves of bread, and much more. He paid the $773.40 bill out of his own pocket.19

  That night Glassford told a conference on emergency unemployment relief that even if Congress voted to offer money for the veterans to return home, he did not expect many of them to take the offer. A large number had no homes or came from places where the unemployment problem was so severe that they were not wanted. “Thousands of these veterans will stay here until something is done to break them up,” he said. He ended by stating that more veterans would come and that tolerance had to be shown to them. “They are no longer young,” he reminded his audience. “They gave their best to their country and are doing their best to act creditably while here.”

  As June turned into July, several hundred bonus marchers returned to their homes, but several hundred new men replaced them, perhaps enticed by Waters’s declaration that he and others intended “to stay here until 1945 if necessary to get our bonus.” The police estimate of veterans in Washington on the first of July was 21,100, with more on the way. The cooler-than-normal summer days were characterized by an almost continual alternation between drizzle and downpour, creating, as a veterans’ magazine put it, the “same slimy soup of mud to wade through, eat and sleep in” that had plagued the men in France. The mud and body lice, along with the general worsening of sanitary conditions and the dwindling supply of food, began to wear heavily on the men, women, and children of Anacostia.20

  President Herbert Hoover and aviatrix Amelia Earhart are flanked by Gilbert H. Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society, and his wife at the presentation of Earhart’s gold medal on June 28. Hoover had feared the veterans would prevent him from attending this event. (Library of Congress)

  On the first of July, Glassford dug into his pocket for the second time in a few days to provide food—this time spending $600. Late that night, word came that twenty tons of meat was on its way from New York, a gift from the city’s meatpackers. Hunger had become an issue that overrode all others. “Through sheer force of personality, I talked with men high in national affairs at Washington and was told that the government was absolutely unable to pay the bonus now, no matter what happened,” said Sewilla LaMar, by now a BEF leader. “And I believed them. I went back to the men and told them. My words were scoffed at, and I was greeted with derision. I found out for the first time that hunger knew no reasoning.”21

  Waters led a group of five thousand to the Capitol on Saturday, July 2, to protest the planned adjournment, scheduled to take place in two weeks— before the date that the bonus bill was to come onto the floor for debate. Once Congress shut down, it would not reconvene until December, after the elections. The men arrived only to find Congress had gone home for the long holiday weekend. Waters, who had led his men on an apparent wild-goose chase, promised to return on Tuesday, July 5, when the
House reconvened. Waters’s rally moved ahead anyhow, droning on for four hours. Foulkrod reported on his futile trip to Chicago, the site of both presidential conventions where he had tried and failed to get the two parties to insert a pro-bonus plank in their respective platforms. Waters, flanked by four MPs and dressed in riding breeches, boots, and a khaki shirt, celebrated the good news that Franklin D. Roosevelt had received the nomination of the Democratic Party hours earlier, and said that he had already secured an audience with Roosevelt on the issue of the bonus payment. It would take place sometime in the next week, “and when I see him,” he told the cheering crowd, “I will get a statement which I will bring back to you and repeat word for word.”22 It was no secret that Roosevelt was on record opposing the bonus, and Waters had no reason to suspect otherwise. In April Roosevelt had released a statement: “I do not see how, as a practical business sense, a government running behind two billion dollars annually can consider the anticipation of the bonus payment until it has a balanced budget, not only on paper but with a surplus of cash in the Treasury.”23

  Bonus Army commander Walter W. Waters, in his officer-style uniform, led five thousand veterans who gathered at the Capitol on July 2 to protest the decision to adjourn Congress without taking action on the bonus bill. (General Douglas MacArthur Foundation)

  On the eve of his nomination, sitting with Samuel I. Rosenman and several other members of his “brain trust” in the governor’s mansion in Albany, Franklin D. Roosevelt was preparing the final, rhetorical flourish for his acceptance speech—what traditional orators and politicians refer to as the peroration—even though the nomination was not yet sewed up. But the direct-line telephone kept ringing as people called in from the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the summary lines were not getting written.