by Paul Dickson
“I remember one of those interruptions very well,” Rosenman later recalled: it was Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, a man Roosevelt had never met.
“Hello, Franklin—this is the Kingfish.”
“Hello, Kingfish, how are you?”
“I’m fine and hope you are. I have a suggestion for you which will clinch the nomination.”
Roosevelt was “all attention,” according to Rosenman, as Long continued.
“I think you should issue a statement immediately, saying that you are in favor of a soldiers’ bonus to be paid as soon as you become President.”
“I am afraid I cannot do that because I am not in favor of the bonus.”
“Well, whether you believe it or not, you’d better come out for it with a strong statement, otherwise you haven’t got a chance for the nomination.”
The governor explained that he could not say he was in favor of something he was opposed to.
“Well, you are a gone goose,” said the Kingfish as he hung up.24
As night turned to morning, and as one ballot followed another, Roosevelt’s staff began to think that the Kingfish might have been right. Rosenman, a former legislator and confidant of the governor, took a pot of coffee and several hot dogs to a private dining room, where he sat down to write the missing peroration—even though the nomination was still hours from being locked up. Rosenman came out of the room with a draft of the peroration that included the line: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.” Neither Rosenman nor Roosevelt took special note of the two words intended to symbolize “bold, persistent experimentation” on behalf of “the forgotten man”—also Rosenman phrases—but within a few days, this had become one of the most powerful labels of the twentieth century.25
On July 2, the same day that Waters led his men to Capitol Hill and promised a private meeting with Roosevelt, Major George S. Patton Jr. reported for duty as executive officer of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment at Fort Myer, where secret anti-riot training had been going on for weeks. Patton shared Moseley and MacArthur’s belief in the Red Menace and had his own ideas on how to deal with defiant citizens: “If you must fire do a good job—a few casualties become martyrs, a large number an object lesson. . . . When a mob starts to move keep it on the run. . . . Use the bayonet to encourage its retreat. If they are running, a few good wounds in the buttocks will encourage them. If they resist they must be killed.”26
On the night of July 2, five hundred new vets, mostly from Michigan, showed up at Camp Bartlett on Alabama Avenue SE as plans for a great Fourth of July parade fell apart. Local veterans’ marching bands and sympathetic drum and bugle corps had been dropping out of the march for days, and now none remained. The futile trip to the Hill earlier in the day had sapped the hungry veterans of their energy. Glassford paid another $600 for food.
Glassford braced for the parade, which was to march from the Capitol to the White House. He canceled all police leaves until the parade was over. His men, he said, would carry the usual billy clubs and side arms. On the eve of the scheduled parade, President Hoover said that he would spend the Fourth at his Rapidan camp. This meant that both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would be vacant. Rain canceled the long-feared parade, and it was rescheduled for July 5, merging it into Waters’s planned demonstration at Capitol Hill when the members of Congress returned.
Next morning’s papers reported that a grave site had been donated for a four-year-old boy who had died of measles and pneumonia induced by malnutrition. He had lived with his parents and an aunt in a house near Camp Marks that sheltered fourteen other children.27 The boy’s death and the mention of malnutrition underscored the fact that the BEF could not feed itself. Making matters worse, con men found a new racket. They roamed the city and the countryside begging for food in the name of the Bonus Army and then keeping it or selling it. Two of the con men were arrested. Both were vets, but neither had anything to do with the Bonus Army.28
Waters headed to New York on the Fourth of July to take possession of 1,500 pounds of meat that had been donated by the Adam Hat Stores. While Waters was in New York, the planned parade had turned into a march on the Capitol and another rally—this one led by Foulkrod on the Senate side of Capitol Hill.
The rally, staged to protest the announced adjournment of Congress on July 16, turned into an angry, bitter tirade against Hoover, Mellon, Congress, the Red Cross, the way veterans were treated, and the absent Waters, who was attacked for his burgeoning dictatorship and the use of his MP shock troops.
Foulkrod, in charge in Waters’s absence, lashed out at everything that seemed to stand between him and the bonus. The Red Cross was cited for its failure to help with the food crisis. With Herbert Hoover as its honorary chairman, money coming in from the hated Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and a brand-new building on E Street, the Red Cross was a highly visible target for the ire of the vets, who remembered all too well paying for doughnuts and coffee at Red Cross canteens outside combat areas.* Local American Legion Post 8 had just gone on record condemning the Red Cross for its lack of concern, demanding that Red Cross workers step up and help the veterans. Foulkrod called the head of the organization, John Barton Payne, “a political parasite, and a dirty contemptible cur.”29 (Payne had gone from short-term secretary of the interior under President Wilson to Red Cross chairman in 1921.)
Hoover was derided by the demonstrators and loudly booed for not feeding them. This was an extraordinary moment, a far cry from the booing that had evolved into the less-than-angry chant “We want beer! We want beer!” that had greeted the president at the World Series the previous October.30 The veterans believed that Hoover was keeping food and beer from them—and paying thousands of agents to enforce Prohibition with money that could be used to pay the bonus.31
As Foulkrod railed on, a Military Intelligence Division officer, Major Paul Killiam, listened and later noted in his report that the “marchers could easily be swayed to action one way or another, and that if some magnetic speaker had demanded an invasion of the Capitol and violence, he would probably have gotten support with serious trouble resulting.” Killiam also revealed that the Metropolitan Police on duty had been disarmed by Glassford, creating “resentment and disgust” among police on the scene. Killiam reported that the police said Glassford had “got away with it” this time and might again, but that it was not fair to the police, Congress, or the public. The MID officer reported that Glassford had assured him that these men were not criminals, and that he was afraid that a minor disturbance could cause a policeman to lose his head, forget orders, “and shoot somebody or hit somebody in the head.”32
In New York, Waters had planned to make appeals for cash in theaters and over a major radio network. “When I went to the studio I found that pressure from higher up had canceled my appointment,” he said, adding that the same thing happened at the theaters. Waters, the promised meat, and a thousand pounds of coffee all arrived in Washington by plane on July 5, with more food to arrive later by truck. The food crisis had been given only a short-lived hiatus, for the meat would be gone by the next night and the camps would be back on short rations. “Mutiny Feared in Bonus Army,” read a Washington Daily News headline.
Wilma Waters arrived from Portland while her husband was returning from New York. As soon as they were reunited, he took her to the home of Evalyn Walsh McLean, who described her as “a little ninety-three-pounder, dressed as a man, her legs and feet in shiney boots. Her yellow hair was freshly marcelled.” The heiress had become a friend of Waters and allowed him to use her million-dollar mansion as “a sort of headquarters.” She took Wilma Waters upstairs to a bedroom that McLean’s father had designed for King Leopold of Belgium, sent for her maid to draw Wilma a bath, and told her to take a nap.
“You get undressed and while you sleep I’ll have all your things cleaned and pressed,” McLean said.
“Oh, no, not me. I’m not giving these clothes up. I might never see them again,” Wilma re
plied. Her grueling trip had begun with a hop in a plane, which had been forced down by engine trouble in the Dells of Wisconsin. For the rest of the way she had hitchhiked and ridden buses.33
Wilma threw herself on the bed fully clothed; McLean tiptoed out of the room and had a talk with Waters.
“I’m desperate,” he confessed. “Unless these men are fed, I can’t say what won’t happen in this town.”
McLean telephoned Vice President Charles Curtis, who had attended dinner parties and poker games at her mansion. She told him that she was calling for Waters, who was standing by her side: “These men are in a desperate situation,” she said, “and unless something is done for them, unless they are fed, there is bound to be a lot of trouble. They have no money nor any food.”
Curtis told her he was calling a secret meeting of senators to urge immediate passage of a bill that would send the bonus marchers back to their homes. This was hardly news, as the bill had already passed the House and was scheduled for an early vote in the Senate.
At this moment she wished that her drinking buddy, Warren G. Harding, was still president: “Harding would have gone among those men and talked in such a manner as to make them cheer him and cheer their flag,” she later wrote. “If Hoover had done that, I think, not even troublemakers in the swarm could have caused any harm.”34
Wilma and Walter headed for the apartment that was paid for by McLean. “I could have lived in Anacostia, but things were bad there—there were always upheavals,” Wilma Waters would later say.35
Of all that occurred on July 5, 1932, nothing was odder or more incendiary than a long radiogram, stamped SECRET, from an operative named Conrad H. Lanza to the Army’s adjutant general, who was responsible for intelligence. The message, which foretold a revolution involving veterans and active-duty personnel of the U.S. Armed Forces, was read by MacArthur and other high-ranking officials.
Lanza’s message asserted that a member of the BEF, Charles M. Bundell,36 was leading a group back to Washington from upstate New York and claimed that the BEF had machine guns and the support of some U.S. Marines—who were said to be ready to turn bridges over to the Bonus Army—and soldiers in Fort Ontario, New York. A revolution was about to begin, Lanza said.
Specifically cited was a contractor—a former commander in the U.S. Navy—who said he had been told by members of the BEF that it was their intention to occupy the Capitol permanently and that when attempts were made to oust them, blood would be shed. At this point Waters, with the assistance of gunmen from New York and Washington, would create armed conflict in the streets of Washington, signaling a Communist uprising in all the large cities, “thus initiating revolution.”
The Army now had information, passed through channels without comment, that a revolution was imminent and that “at least a part” of the Marine Corps garrison in Washington would side with the revolutionaries. It was one of the most remarkable documents ever to wind its way through the Army chain of command. If nothing else, it would go a long way to suggest why the Army would not rely on the Marine Corps in the days ahead.37
On July 7 Congress appropriated $100,000 toward getting the veterans out of town. Frank T. Hines, administrator of veterans’ affairs, was authorized to provide funds for gas and oil, together with a 75-cents-a-day “travel subsistence,” or railroad fare at one cent per mile. The appropriation further stipulated that whatever was paid “shall constitute a loan without interest which, if not repaid to the United States, shall be deducted from any amount payable to such veteran on his adjusted-service certificate.” The deadline for accepting travel funds was July 15.
The congressional vote followed, by a few hours, an outbreak in Anacostia that seemed to emphasize the need to move veterans out of town. A group of Communists had gone from their Pennsylvania Avenue billet to Anacostia to deliver speeches against the dictatorial rule of Waters (who, at WESL meetings, was now known as Mussolini Waters or simply Mussolini) and to advance the idea that more of the veterans should camp near the Capitol, as the Pace group did, instead of in the mud of Anacostia. When John Pace launched into an anti-Waters tirade, some of Waters’s shock troops closed in on him, threatening to injure him. Pace was shielded by Glassford, who said, “There is not to be a fight among the veterans. Pace has a right to speak. He is not in your camp. If you don’t want to listen, go back and play baseball.”38
The police then issued Pace and WESL a permit to demonstrate on Pennsylvania Avenue the following day. On July 8, some 2,000 members of the BEF lined the avenue, armed with bricks and cobblestones, to break up the WESL demonstration. Pace, outnumbered twenty to one, canceled the demonstration.39
With $100,000 now available for return trips, there seemed to be no valid reason for the veterans to remain. From all sides voices demanded they leave. “It is very evident that the bonus army can not remain in Washington much longer without becoming involved in serious trouble,” warned the Washington Post on the morning after the money was appropriated. Later that day the Evening Star editorialized that “to urge them to stay here is to keep them in deeper and deeper distress and perhaps to bring them to face utter disaster.” These and other editorials were quoted in a memo, written and signed by Glassford, who had copies distributed to the BEF camps. The veterans’ presence, the memo said, was “seriously effecting local relief ” by diverting contributions that would have been going to the poor people of Washington. “Congress is about to adjourn,” Glassford continued. “It is futile to expect favorable bonus legislation at this session. No political advantage can be gained by remaining longer in this city.”
Many of the men who took the tickets—600 of them on the first day— walked to Union Station, sold them to travelers at cut-rate prices, and then returned to camp.40 Reports quickly circulated that some of the men leaving Washington were actually recruiters, sent home to bring back fresh troops. There also were incidents of veterans claiming to be from far-off places to get railroad fares, as no documentary proof was required. Cunning drivers claimed they had a carful of returnees heading for the West Coast, collected all their stipends, and headed back to Anacostia.
As the plan to send the vets home began to reveal its shortcomings, odd schemes were hatched to lure the veterans out of their camps and back to their home states. At the suggestion of Randolph Walker, associate editor of Pathé News, Glassford had an electric power line run out to the baseball diamond at Camp Marks and set up a movie projector and screen. On the night of July 10 he showed five thousand vets an eight-minute newsreel of placer gold mining in western states, “to get the men’s minds on some other line of activity.”41
While the film was being shown, Joe Angelo had himself buried alive four feet below the ground at the corner of Thirteenth and D streets SW. He pledged to stay there until the bonus bill was signed. But the night superintendent of police ordered him disinterred.42 The custom of live burial was a common stunt at Camp Marks. A coffin was built large enough to give the “corpse” enough room to sit up. It was fitted with a stovepipe so that the person inside could breathe, and spectators who were willing to contribute twenty-five cents could see inside.43
By July 11, Hines was able to tell the president that 1,100 had taken advantage of the get-out-of-town offer.44 But as those vets departed, others were arriving. Besides the 350 Californians led by the “Joan of Arc of the West,” another, larger group was on its way from California. Ever since June 10, when the large new band of bonus marchers left Los Angeles with a motorcade parade and a city hall sendoff by the mayor,45 coded Army intelligence reports, tracing the Californians’ movement, had been transmitted to Washington. The California group, which originally numbered 2,600, had quickly and literally begun to run out of gas, leaving 1,500 of their number stuck in Tucson with empty gas tanks.46
A veteran at Camp Marks demonstrated for the “Tombstone Bonus” by living in a coffin. Someone else charged viewers to look at a veteran lying in a buried coffin and breathing through a funnel. (Underwood & Underwo
od/ Library of Congress)
The California army had dwindled to 450 by the time it arrived in Washington on July 12 under the leadership of Royal W. Robertson, a rail-thin man whose neck was encased in a steel brace attached to his head with a leather strap under his chin.47 He was immediately favored by the news media for his cool leadership qualities, projected with the skill of a Hollywood actor— which he was, when he could get work.*
Robertson and his men set up camp on Capitol Hill, immediately presented petitions to Vice President Curtis and Speaker of the House John Nance Garner, and then announced that they would occupy the Capitol grounds until the adjournment of Congress. If the bonus was not paid by then, they would go home and work to defeat anti-bonus politicians in the November election. This new group became an immediate attraction for Washingtonians who had never seen Capitol Hill under siege before. By the end of the day, police estimated that 10,000 automobiles and trucks packed with sightseers had passed the Capitol to see the encampment.48 That night, the Californians lay down on the grass around the Capitol to sleep. Glassford’s men looked the other way.
Robertson was less than cordial to Waters, who asked him if he would like to join the BEF and move to its camps. “Well, I’m going to wait a few days until I see what it is all about,” Robertson replied. “We came to Washington to petition Congress, not to picnic.”49
The following night the U.S. Capitol Police turned on the sprinklers. Glassford, acting independently from the Capitol police, told Robertson that his men would have to keep moving if they wanted to remain on the Hill. Robertson, immediately realizing the publicity advantage to this order, decided to have his men march back and forth around the Capitol, single file, in a slow, solemn shuffle. This was almost immediately dubbed “the death march,” and Robertson played the idea for all it was worth. “When you get just so sleepy you can sleep standing up, “Robertson said. “Many of the fellows did it in France and they can do it again.”50