by Paul Dickson
One man, his head swathed in bandages, was being held up by two companions as he walked. Spectators handed him coins and cigarettes. “It’s for my buddies,” he responded in a barely audible voice. When a reporter asked the man what outfit he was in overseas, the bandaged vet gave a spurious reply. The reporter noted that, except for such “transparent faking,” the bulk of Robertson’s men were legitimate.51
Attracted by the simple and effective drama of the march, several hundred members of the BEF joined it. Even though Waters and Robertson would not meet a second time, there was a chilly, unwritten truce between them. Waters, who saw Robertson as “a spectacular addition to the bonus seekers,” was strangely absent during the first days of the death march.52 Waters, especially as a totalitarian leader, was being upstaged by Robertson. Thomas R. Henry of the Evening Star wrote that Robertson was “one of those natural-born leaders with a confidence inspiring positiveness who arise suddenly out of obscurity in times of crisis and whom men will follow to the death.” He added, taking a clear jab at Waters, “He is a man’s man—but none of your tin-soldier sort.”53
All through Wednesday, July 13, the men shuffled in the sticky, 89-degree heat. Many had not slept for thirty-six hours. Men occasionally slumped onto the grass in front of the Library of Congress, exhausted, begging Robertson to let them sleep for a few minutes.
“Get up,” he shouted to one of the men within earshot of a reporter. Prodding him with the toe of his boot, he added, “What do you think we are, sightseers?”
When he finally realized that his men were at the breaking point, Robertson, with support from Glassford, quietly divided the marchers into two groups so that while one group snaked around the Capitol, the other slept in a vacant lot outside congressional jurisdiction.54
As the day progressed, police wreckers crisscrossed Capitol Hill, hauling away the battered cars that had crossed the Rockies to deliver Robertson’s army. More and more veterans and locals were drawn to the scene by the fortitude of Robertson and his men. By evening, the crowds watching the death march—at times it was a more animated affair that the papers called a “snake dance”—had become so large and unruly that the Capitol had to be closed. It was a tense evening, made tenser when a woman accused a policeman of pushing her. Camera flashbulbs went off everywhere, and a veteran, said to be shell-shocked, fell to the ground when one went off near him. Later pronounced fit by a doctor on the scene, he rejoined the march.55
On July 14, the anniversary of the day the mobs stormed the Bastille in the French Revolution, Vice President Curtis, vexed by the sight of even more veterans continually filing past the window of his Capitol Hill office, without precedent and without informing anyone of his decision, called out Marines from the Navy Yard to protect the Capitol. When they arrived, many by streetcar, with full equipment and fixed bayonets, the death-march vets cheered them, and according to George Kleinholz, “many struck up old acquaintances.” The marchers, imagining that the Marines were sent there to entertain them with fancy drills, dipped their soiled American flags in tribute to them.
Glassford was in a meeting with MacArthur and Crosby at the War Department when Admiral Henry V. Butler, commandant of the Navy Yard, walked in to report that sixty Marines were on the way to the Capitol.56 Glassford got Butler to recall the Marines, who were already at the Capitol.57 Speaking of Curtis, Glassford said he was “fed up with hysterical meddlers.” It was the first time since the Civil War, when the city was under attack at Fort Stephens, that the Capitol was protected militarily, and calling out the Marines was a most unpopular move. The Daily News, in an editorial entitled “The Curtis Blunder,” said that the vice president’s actions could have produced “bloody and tragic” results.58
Glassford, though chief of police of the District of Columbia, had to recognize and deal with the District’s separate power centers: Congress and the White House. Theoretically, the Capitol and the area around it—Capitol Hill—were under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Capitol Police, a patronage police force controlled by a three-man police board consisting of the sergeant at arms of the Senate, the sergeant at arms of the House, and the architect of the Capitol. All three were appointed by Congress and subject to its whims. The sergeants at arms were usually ceremonial figures but could exert power, especially through the police board. The architect of the Capitol had absolute power over architectural and landscape issues having to do with the Capitol, its utilities, and its grounds. Thus, he could make decisions about what happened on Capitol turf. (Glassford had specifically defied the architect by revoking his order banning photographs or newsreels of the marchers.) At the White House, the Secret Service controlled the security of the president and the White House. Besides dealing with the Secret Service (and its uniformed police), Glassford also had to acknowledge the authority of one of President Hoover’s chief aides, Lawrence Richey, a former Secret Service agent who now guarded Hoover’s political moves.59
Officials in the White House and on Capitol Hill were jittery about July 15, Congress’s deadline for the veterans to leave Washington. Congress and the Hoover administration had done all they could. They expected that when that day dawned, the end of the Bonus Army problem would be in sight. The police board chose the deadline day to issue a statement charging that when Glassford gave permission for the “death march” on Capitol Hill, he had acted “wholly without authority” and that the veterans had been violating an 1882 act of Congress forbidding anyone “to parade, stand, or move in procession or assemblage.”60 Glassford said that the situation had been “fraught with danger,” making it “necessary for some one man to assume authority.” Glassford added that Vice President Curtis “told me in person that he did not desire violence.”61
By deadline day, Glassford had effectively taken charge of the city, including Capitol Hill—and the two dozen BEF camps scattered around the District. His biggest worry was Camp Marks. In a letter to Glassford, the Anacostia Citizens Association expressed worry about sanitation problems caused by the camp, but they added that they did not “wish to be understood as hostile to the veterans.”62
On Capitol Hill, the dominant sound was the shuffling of feet and the clinking of tin cups and canteens that hung from the belts of the death marchers. At midnight on July 15, the offer for go-home funds was due to expire. Only 1,736 had taken Congress up on the offer, and only $26,820.27 of the $100,000 allotment had been spent. Of those who had taken the money only 1,545 had actually departed—by all accounts fewer than the number of new veterans, including Robertson’s 450, who had come into the city since the offer was made. After seeing that the deadline had passed without the large numbers of expected departures, at the last minute President Hoover extended the deadline to July 25.63
At dawn on July 16 the death march was temporarily suspended to make room for the thousands of veterans assembling in front of the Capitol—5,000 by ten in the morning, up to 10,000 by the noon police count, 17,000 as the day progressed, according to Waters.64 Originally a parade had been planned for the day of adjournment. But Glassford had convinced Waters that his policemen were, in Waters’s words, “tired after a week of almost unbroken day and night duty,” so there was no parade.65
Waters reached the Capitol at 10:00 A.M. to find his men cordoned off behind lines of police that stretched across the black asphalt of the broad Congressional Plaza, where the demonstration was scheduled to take place. Glassford appeared on his blue motorcycle, to cheers from the veterans.66
Waters, standing in a corner of the plaza, made his move: “When I was ten feet from the front line I turned and without a word, but signaling with my arm, I started towards the Capitol. I heard a roar behind me and saw that the men were quickening their pace after me.”67 Waters was leading his men in a dogtrot charge on the Capitol.
Halfway across the plaza Waters stopped. Glassford, stunned by what he took to be a hostile move, ordered Waters arrested, along with Waters’s current deputy, Doak Carter, who had led a Cleveland co
ntingent to Washington. The arrests intensified the anger of the veterans.
“We want Waters!” the veterans shouted. Glassford momentarily released him, but he became so belligerent that Glassford arrested him for a second time. The police chief seemed to have lost control of the crowd.68
“It looked for a moment like stark riot ahead,” said newspaper reporter Bess Furman, who was watching the moiling scene below from a window in the Capitol, “but a quick-witted trained nurse who had been aiding bonus families and therefore was known to the leaders grabbed a megaphone and shouted: ‘Let’s all sing “America”!’”69 Sing it they did, as well as many other songs— “Hail, Hail the Gang’s All Here,” “Over There,” “The Old Gray Mare,” and many others, ending with “My Bonus Lies over the Ocean.” The woman, blond and wearing a blue-and-white nurse uniform, identified herself as Lauretta D’Arsanis, once known as the Flower of Saint Theresa. “I had a little flower shop in New York but they closed me out,” she told a reporter. “So I came down here to help out because I have dedicated my life to Saint Theresa.”70
Waters emerged during the singing, further quieting the mob, and, flanked by police, shouted to the crowd: “I have permission for you men to occupy the center steps of the Capitol. I have promised the police to keep the sidewalks in front of the building clear, so come up to the steps.” The men pressed forward, and Waters then announced that he been granted a long interview with Speaker of the House John Nance Garner and that he planned to call on President Hoover.
At noon, a delegation of BEF members went to the White House in an attempt to see the president but were turned down by presidential secretary Theodore Joslin, who said the president was “too occupied” at that time.71 The president, meanwhile, was preparing to go to Capitol Hill and preside over the closing of Congress.
At 12:40 Garner was presented with a petition demanding that Congress not adjourn until “some material aid” was given to the BEF. Waters then gave his men a choice: follow him back to the camps or, pointing to Robertson’s resumed death march, “join that outfit over there,” which many of them did.72
Shortly before ten o’clock that night, with Capitol Hill now under control, trouble broke out at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. About fifty men, mostly Communists, were heading toward the White House. As their approach was reported, police prepared for trouble. They closed the gates of the White House grounds and cleared Pennsylvania Avenue and adjacent streets of all pedestrian and vehicular traffic. More than four hundred policemen— the largest massing of police in one place since Washington’s 1919 race riots— were summoned to surround the Executive Mansion. A police inspector quoted President Hoover as saying that if the police could not clear the streets within a few minutes, he would call out Regular Army troops.
The police acted swiftly. As demonstrators entered Lafayette Square, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, the police drove them back and forced them to disperse in small groups. Police arrested three holdouts. One man vigorously resisted, and Glassford plunged in to aid the five policemen fighting him. He was one-armed Nathan Kalb, also known as Shorty.73
In the White House, the president’s physician, Navy Captain Joel Thompson Boone, stayed at Hoover’s side, “not knowing what services might be required of me” because he believed that demonstrators would overpower the police and attack the White House.74 At 10:30 P.M. the White House announced that President Hoover would not be taking the traditional trip to the Capitol to mark the adjournment of Congress. At 11:26 the Seventy-second Congress adjourned. Most of the congressmen left through back doors and the underground tunnels under the Capitol to avoid any confrontation with lingering groups of veterans. On hearing that adjournment had been called, Robertson turned to his men and said, “If that is the case, our work is done.”75
The next morning, a Sunday, President Hoover was whisked out of the city for a few days of vacation. Waters held drills and a military parade in which regiments of the BEF passed in review.76 Washington was beginning to get used to the idea that Congress had gone home, leaving the bulk of the BEF and Pace’s Communists behind. That evening, Pace announced a new pro- gram: he would picket the homes of congressmen living in Washington as well as city officials to compel Hoover to call Congress back into session.
Two days later, on Tuesday, July 19, amid fresh reports that new groups were forming and heading to Washington, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, a Quaker, a U.S. Marine, a veteran, and the son of a former congressman, arrived in his limousine to speak at Camp Marks. He had been invited by Waters, who rode with him into camp, to stem the tide of desertions. Some 460 veterans had asked for return funds the previous day, bringing the total to 3,056.77
Butler, the holder of two Medals of Honor for heroism in the “Banana Wars” of the 1920s—U.S. intervention in conflicts in small Caribbean nations—had a distinguished Marine career, going back to the Boxer Rebellion. Teddy Roosevelt called him “the ideal American soldier.” Butler had expected to become commandant of the Marine Corps, but President Hoover passed him over and selected an older, far less colorful general. Rough in the ways of Washington, Butler had infuriated the Italian government with a derogatory remark about fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. In the midst of formal U.S. apologies, Butler was threatened with court-martial. He got off with a reprimand, but, angry and bitter, he retired from the Marines in 1931.78 Because Butler had long fought the military hierarchy on behalf of the enlisted man and because of his ongoing campaign to keep the country aware of tragic war casualties hidden away in Veterans Administration hospitals, Waters could not have made a better choice to rally the BEF.
As Butler stepped out of his limousine, men who had been under his command greeted him. Then Butler leaped to the rickety stage and addressed five thousand veterans: “Men, I ran for the Senate in Pennsylvania on a bonus ticket. I got hell beaten out of me. But I haven’t changed my mind a damned bit.” The vets roared their approval. “I’m here because I’ve been a soldier for thirty-five years and I can’t resist the temptation to be among soldiers.”
He next addressed the theme of the evening: “Hang together and stick it out till the gate bars of hell freeze over; if you don’t, you are no damn good. . . . Remember, by God, you . . . didn’t win the war for a select class of a few financiers and high binders.” A lifelong Republican, he told the veterans to go to the polls in November and change things. He ended with an admonition: “Don’t break any laws and allow people to say bad things about you.”
He was followed by a twelve-year-old girl dressed as Uncle Sam, who sang patriotic songs. The great pep rally came to a close with the singing of “Sweet Adeline,” a Butler favorite. He was mobbed by those who wanted to speak with him, and he sat on the ground until 2:30 A.M. listening to their stories. He slept for three hours and, after a spartan breakfast of coffee, potatoes, and hard bread with the men, took the stage again to warn them: “If you slip over into lawlessness of any kind you will lose the sympathy of 120 million people in this nation.”79
His warning came as Glassford, MacArthur, and men close to the president were all reading secret intelligence reports that told of Communist hopes to bring violence to the streets of Washington. At the same time, Waters was openly embracing fascism. The B.E.F. News published his plans in a front-page article headlined “Khaki Shirts—W. W. Waters Imagines One Million—Waters Outlines Road Ahead for New Organization.” The article said, “Inevitably such an organization brings up comparisons with the Facisti of Italy and the NAZI of Germany. . . . For five years Hitler was lampooned and derided, but today he controls Germany. Mussolini, before the war was a tramp printer driven from Italy because of his political views. But today he is a world figure. . . . The Khaki Shirts, however, would be essentially American.”80
With Congress adjourned until December, and Waters and Pace both vowing to stay until the bonus was paid, Washington was increasingly worried about violence or an epidemic breaking out in the veterans’ camps
.81 Most anxiety focused on sprawling Camp Marks in Anacostia. Even as the Washington Post was reporting that Camp Marks appeared to be growing,82 however, official concern suddenly shifted to a Bonus Army shantytown closer to the heart of federal Washington. Ever since the first veterans had begun arriving in Washington, many had been occupying dilapidated, government-owned buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue.
President Hoover told the commissioners that he wanted those downtown veterans evicted. The commissioners set the ouster for July 22.
*Few realized that this modest fee for food was imposed on the Red Cross by the Army, which had listened to the complaints of local merchants who claimed they were losing business.
*Robertson’s Hollywood career consisted of mostly minor roles, which included a disabled French soldier in The Four Horsemen, starring Rudolph Valentino.
8
Tanks in the Streets
When I marched off to war in 1917, I remember a Civil War veteran, over seventy years old, telling me, “Son, you are all heroes now. But some day they’ll treat you like dogs.”
—Benjamin B. Shepherd of the BEF
ALONG A STRETCH of Pennsylvania Avenue, about half a mile east of the White House and three blocks west of Capitol Hill, stood half-demolished buildings, their outer walls ripped away and their rooms open to view. Other buildings already had been torn down, leaving behind cellars and vacant lots full of bricks and rubble. When the first wave of bonus marchers arrived in Washington, Glassford had billeted many of them in the deserted buildings. The old structures, some dating to the Civil War, were owned by the U.S. government and were being razed to clear the way for a complex of massive government buildings that would become known as the Federal Triangle.1 As more and more veterans poured into Washington, they were sent off to Camp Marks, but many chose to move into the downtown camp. When the buildings filled up, the vets who shunned Camp Marks built shacks and lean-tos and pitched ragged tents beyond the buildings designated by Glassford, taking over a large area that centered at Third Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. More than two thousand veterans, mostly southerners, lived on this site, sometimes called Pennsylvania Avenue Camp and also known as Camp Glassford.2 A few blocks away, at Thirteenth and B streets SW, John Pace and his Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League men were billeted.