The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  Rising in this small-scale Hooverville were the remains of four large buildings: the shell of an old National Guard armory, and three others, including a gaping, four-story concrete structure that had been a Ford automobile agency. Lee’s Undertaking Garage, still in business, shared a wall with another half-razed building.

  At Third Street and Pennsylvania Avenue was a brick-and-wood building that served as BEF headquarters and a home for about 150 veterans. It was also “condemned as a fire trap,” Henry Meisel observed. He was there one day in June when police, responding to orders from the Fire Department, told a group of veterans to evacuate the three upper floors. The veterans refused to leave, and in a tense moment a police captain confronting a BEF leader “stood up behind his desk and shouted, ‘I want you to understand the Washington police are ready for any emergency and if you fellows are looking for trouble you will find plenty of it.’”3

  The veterans at the BEF headquarters did not yield, and authorities gave up the idea of evacuating the building on fire-hazard grounds. But the incident demonstrated a phenomenon of that long, hot, wet summer: while newspaper publicity and the public’s sympathy focused on the vets who wallowed in the mud or baked in the sun of Camp Marks, the focus of official impatience and frustration was on Camp Glassford. To the administration, the veterans and their shanties were highly visible symbols of the Great Depression and did not belong in downtown Washington. There had to be a way to remove them, and an ironic reason was found: they were holding up progress by impeding a major public-works project that would ease unemployment in the District.

  Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon had been the driving force behind the 1926 Public Buildings Act, which led to the creation of the $300 million Federal Triangle, one of the nation’s biggest public building projects. Mellon had taken personal charge, and even though he was no longer running the Treasury Department in the summer of 1932, the area was still considered Treasury turf.4 And so it was that on July 20 an assistant secretary of the Treasury, Ferry K. Heath, began the process of shutting down Camp Glassford.

  Heath had given Glassford permission to use the buildings as long as occupancy was “not extended beyond the actual need.”5 Now, on July 20, in the eyes of officialdom, the veterans had had their day in Washington, and since Congress was adjourned, they no longer had a need to be there. Heath, who ran the Federal Triangle program, sent letters to Glassford and Commissioner Herbert H. Crosby asking that the veterans leave the old Ford building and the area along Pennsylvania Avenue between Third and Fourth streets by July 25. Heath also wrote to Rhine & Company, the firm that had the demolition contract, saying that the area was being cleared and the razing of the buildings could soon resume.6

  The day that Heath ordered the eviction was also the day that John Pace chose to storm the White House. Because Pace knew the police would stop any mob of veterans heading toward the White House, he told about two hundred men to approach singly or in twos and threes. Scattered groups began walking north along Fourteenth Street, and, by entering the District’s northwest quadrant, crossed the border into executive Washington. They then turned westward toward Fifteenth Street and reached the majestic, multicolumned Treasury Building, where Pennsylvania Avenue turned the corner to the White House. Here Police Inspector Albert J. Headley and forty police officers blocked their way. Headley raised his hand and said, “You may not go through.”

  “We are not marching,” Pace said. “This is not a parade. We are walking on the public streets as individuals.”

  Ignoring Pace, Headley pointed to where he stood and told his men, “Get everybody back of this line.”

  Pace’s men pressed forward. Headley grabbed Pace and shouted to a patrolman to blow his whistle—the signal for reinforcements to arrive on the double. Pace retreated and, leading a band that dwindled to about fifty, probed for another route toward the White House. He found policemen and police cars everywhere. Traffic had been cut off around the White House. The gates were chained and locked. Policemen and men of the Secret Service were stationed at thirty-foot intervals around the White House. As the New York Daily News would announce in a screaming headline, “Hoover Locks Self in White House.”

  At Twelfth and D streets NW Pace tried again. His vets and police collided. Policemen seized Pace and two others, then chased the rest of the men back to their billet, where there were more police.7

  On July 21, soon after Glassford told Waters about the eviction notice, the District commissioners summoned Glassford to their office and told him to clear out a larger area bounded by C and D streets SW and Twelfth and Thirteenth streets SW. Some 1,800 BEF veterans and about 500 women and children lived in that area, along with Pace’s 200 Communist followers.8 Lieutenant Colonel U. S. Grant III, director of public buildings and public parks and a Hoover confidant, extended the expulsion orders to encompass all federal land occupied by the BEF, including Camp Marks and adjoining Camp Sims in Anacostia, and Camp Meigs in far-off northeast Washington. Veterans and their families in Camp Bartlett were exempt because they were on private property, a plot of wooded land about three miles from downtown Washington.

  The commissioners told Glassford that the veterans had to be out of the Pennsylvania Avenue buildings by July 22; that the tents and rolling kitchens belonging to the District of Columbia National Guard had to be returned by noon August 1; and that Camps Marks, Sims, and Meigs had to be evacuated by August 4.9 (Coincidental with the stick came a carrot: President Hoover signed into law a bill that allowed some veterans to borrow up to half of the maturity of their bonuses at an interest rate of 3½ percent.)

  Responding to news of the eviction, Waters said, “They can issue orders, but I don’t know how they are going to enforce them. Wait until they start moving out the women and children. . . . That will make swell pictures.” Food stocks were so low that Waters ordered the feeding of women and children first. “If anything remains,” he said, “the men will eat.”10

  Robertson decided it was time for him to take his Californians out of Washington. Police lined up trucks to haul them to the Maryland line, but no one would climb in. So Robertson, with a cheery wave of his hand, got into his car and headed back to California.11

  By police count on July 21, there were 11,698 men in twenty-four separate camps in Washington. No one knew the number of women and children scattered through the camps. Glassford had a plane fly over the camps and drop leaflets about the looming eviction. After he sought a legal opinion from the District corporation counsel, the commissioners temporarily postponed the eviction while they found a legal way to do it.12

  Waters went to Camp Glassford and told his men to “stand your ground.” If “the police get rough,” he said, “I, as your commander in chief need only to raise my hand above my head and my following of 12,000 men will either fight or frolic, according to my wishes.”13

  Pace, well aware of the rising tension, decided to make another White House foray at noon on Monday, July 25. That morning Hoover, under heavy guard, had returned from a weekend at his Rapidan camp. Pace’s idea was to pick up sympathizers among lunchtime workers—most of them government employees—and stymie police. As he and about 150 followers set out, plainclothes police slipped into the group and tried to talk the would-be picketers into dispersing.14

  Again they met a phalanx of police at the Treasury Building. This time, however, police and veterans clashed in a running street battle. Walter Eicker climbed a tree and urged on the men, shouting, “Comrades! Comrades!” Two detectives started shinnying up the tree as Eicker climbed higher. “We want our bonus! To hell with Wall Street!” Eicker yelled from his perch. “This is only the beginning of the uprising of the rank and file!” While many in the crowd booed, one of the detectives grabbed Eicker. They pulled him out of the tree and into the hands of policemen who shoved him into a patrol wagon. Pace and Eicker were arrested.*

  The melee went on, police swinging nightsticks and veterans fighting back with their fists. A veteran slugged a
newspaper photographer and ran off toward a fashionable shopping district. A passerby shouted, “He grabbed a copper’s gun!” Dozens of police ran after him. Vets and policemen knocked down pedestrians; officers ripped a shirt off a veteran’s back before subduing him and several others. Another group ran off and got as far as the east gate of the White House grounds. As the few officers there stood off the mob, a squad of motorcycle police, led by Glassford, roared up and dispersed the last of the vets.

  Until July 22, Glassford had complete control of the day-to-day fate of the Bonus Army. Although he had endorsed the idea of the Hoover administration’s go-home payments scheme, the administration no longer trusted him. This had been true as far back as June 10, when Joel Thompson Boone, presidential physician and confidant, scribbled into his little notebook, “Pres. says Glassford has been insubordinate & that the Commissioners have had a hell of a time with him. That he will find himself out when this is over; that he seems to be another [Smedley] Butler.”15

  Like Hoover, MacArthur had been getting impatient about the way the police had been handling the BEF, which, to Army intelligence officers, was at least riddled with Reds and probably controlled by Communists. The veterans’ refusal to leave Washington, along with the Pace-led moves against the White House, convinced MacArthur that the Communists were on the brink of violence.16 By then, the Army had secretly moved two combat vehicles from a base in Aberdeen, Maryland, to nearby Fort Myer: a truck-mounted 75-millimeter gun with about 100 rounds of shrapnel ammunition and an armored car with .30 and .50 caliber machine guns and “full loads” of ammunition. The Army drivers had been ordered to avoid “the center of towns and cities, especially Washington,” and if questioned to say that these were merely experimental vehicles to be shown to “interested personnel in Washington.”17 The vehicles were American versions of the kind used by German Landesjaeger officers against urban revolutionaries.

  Besides ordering riot training at Fort Myer and secretly transferring the combat vehicles, along with tanks from Fort Meade, MacArthur and Moseley met with Major General Blanton Winship, as adjutant general the Army’s top legal authority. Winship, both a lawyer and a battle-tested officer, had won the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Star in France.18 By Winship’s interpretation, if the president called in the Army, “a mere scattering of the members of this force at the places of their present encampments, or driving them beyond the borders of the District of Columbia, would not effect a permanent dispersion of the force, so as to bring the insurrection or threat of insurrection . . . to an end.” As Winship interpreted the reality of such a presidential order, MacArthur would have to load the veterans into Army trucks and haul the prisoners, under armed guard, to state after state, potentially extending the crisis in Washington far beyond its borders.

  There was also the problem of Plan White, which required a presidential proclamation to be put into action. In MacArthur’s strategy talks, President Hoover was represented by Secretary of War Hurley. A combat veteran, Hurley had served as an adjutant general for a time after the war, and had very close ties to both MacArthur and Moseley. He had argued for MacArthur’s appointment as Army chief of staff after Hoover questioned it, and he had appointed Moseley assistant chief of staff, calling him “the most brilliant mind in the entire Army.”19

  Aware of the proclamation trigger needed for Plan White, Moseley had twice in June ghostwritten a presidential statement that presumably would do the trick. He showed the first statement, which he called a “memorandum,” to Hurley, who, Moseley recalled, said it “contained not only a good idea, but that it was good politics as well and would have a good effect.” Moseley did not disclose what happened to his second statement. There is no record of Hurley’s showing the Moseley statements to President Hoover, but Moseley says he was told (presumably by Hurley) that Hoover believed the Bonus March was “simply a temporary disease of the individuals concerned and it would have to work itself out in the normal way.” Moseley’s second statement made no mention of federal troops but has the president order the District commissioners to do what was necessary to stop “the concentration” of homeless veterans. The White House still had no interest in this milder Moseley statement.20

  There is no indication that Hoover’s White House advisers realized, as Moseley, MacArthur, and Hurley did, that the White Plan called for a presidential proclamation to launch military intervention and martial law. Although Moseley’s proposals cited the constitutional right of petition and showed the proper respect for the presidency, the Bonus Army had put him in a mutinous mood. The marchers were “Communists and Bums,” he had said in a letter. And he had called for a military coup d’état if politicians could not solve America’s problems.21 Like MacArthur, Moseley believed that Communists were a clear and present danger that politicians were ignoring, imperiling the nation.

  By July 26 both Waters and Glassford knew that they had little time to stave off disaster. Both men wanted an eviction free of bloodshed, and so both recognized the need to preserve their working relationship. Waters realized that unlawful behavior would ruin the reputation of the BEF.22 But the political drama was being overshadowed by the fact that people were starving.

  A Washington dairy had been donating forty quarts of milk a day to Camp Marks. One of the vets went to the dairy to fetch the milk, which was doled out to children.23 There was not enough to go around. Mrs. George Hogan, a mother in Camp Marks, had a three-year-old and a ten-month-old. They needed three quarts of milk a day, she said, and now she was lucky to get one.24

  The eviction orders mentioned men, not women and children. Both Glassford and Waters knew that these nonveterans were the wards of whatever fate descended upon the BEF. Waters had a new ally, Herbert S. Ward, a local attorney who had volunteered to work for the BEF. Ward had met with Secretary of the Treasury Ogden Mills, stressed the need to care for 500 women and children, and got the deadline extended to midnight, July 26, on humanitarian grounds.25 Waters followed through by trying to get help from unlikely sources. He called on Judge John Barton Payne, head of the American Red Cross, who reiterated what he had told Evalyn Walsh McLean: the Red Cross would not get involved with the BEF. But Payne did call MacArthur, who in turn sent Waters on to Hurley. Waters, accompanied by Ward and Doak Carter, the BEF chief of staff, met with Hurley in his office in the State, War, and Navy Building near the White House. As Waters recalled, during the five-hour meeting General MacArthur “never once stopped his ceaseless tread around the room.”26

  Waters wanted tents to temporarily house the evacuated men, women, and children on the private land at Camp Bartlett while the vets built barracks there. Camp Bartlett had become a Valhalla vision for Waters, who hoped to ensconce his veterans and their families there and become a permanent Washington presence. Waters, however, had not yet made any arrangements. Since May, Glassford had been thinking of Camp Bartlett as a fine site for the BEF after eviction. By July, Camp Bartlett housed about 1,200 vets, including some thirty families in regulation army squad tents. The camp had electric lights, two kitchens (one general and one used by the units from Detroit), and even a baby grand piano.27 Glassford had been talking to the owner, John Henry Bartlett, but nothing had yet been worked out.

  When Waters asked Hurley for tents, the secretary of war turned to MacArthur and asked, “Is there any tentage available?”

  “No,” said MacArthur.

  Hurley turned back to Waters and said, “Waters, the War Department has no tentage available, and if it did have we certainly would not place it at your disposal. . . . We are interested only in getting you out of the District. At the first sign of disorder or bloodshed in the BEF, you will all get out. And we have plenty of troops to put you out.”

  The conversation between Hurley and Waters dragged on while MacArthur continued silently pacing. Finally, as Waters and his associates were about to leave, Waters directly addressed MacArthur. “If the troops should be called out against us, will the BEF be given the opportunit
y to form in columns, salvage their belongings, and retreat in orderly fashion?”

  Waters later recalled that MacArthur replied, “Yes, my friend, of course.”28

  On the afternoon of July 27,Waters summoned 182 men he had designated as BEF officers and told them that he believed that a peaceful evacuation of the Pennsylvania Avenue area might be imminent. He asked them to try to keep the men of Camp Marks and other billets away from the evacuation area. As he was completing that meeting, Glassford called him and asked him to come to the office of the District commissioners. Waters, who had never met the commissioners, was taken to a waiting room and told by Glassford, “The commissioners have sent for you to discuss orderly plans of evacuation.”

  Waters did not meet the commissioners face-to-face. In shuttle-diplomacy fashion, Glassford went into one room to talk to them, then came back to Waters’s room to tell him what the commissioners were proposing. After a series of messages, Glassford came back to say he had a plan. According to Waters, Glassford said, “I promise to evacuate two hundred men by six o’clock tomorrow morning. Thereafter I will evacuate groups of forty or larger each day until I have the area completely cleared within the next two weeks.”

  Waters accepted the plan. But Glassford came back to say that the commissioners, while agreeing to the two-hundred-man evacuation the next day, would only give Glassford until Monday, August 1, to completely clear the area. Waters reluctantly agreed to that plan as the best he could do; it gave him a little time, but it did not involve federal troops.29 That same afternoon, Doak Carter informed Bartlett that Waters wanted to move the entire BEF to Camp Bartlett. Bartlett was told that an unidentified donor had promised funds for the purchase of lumber for a barracks. Bartlett said he would cooperate only if Glassford approved the plan. Bartlett reached Glassford on the morning of Thursday, July 28, and learned that the chief not only approved but said he hoped that by Monday he would have all the men and their kin—about 7,000 people, he estimated—out of federal property and into Camp Bartlett.30