The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  An Army captain who was Purdy’s sister’s date on the cruise realized what was happening and knew he had to join the troops at Anacostia. As soon as the boat docked, all three hopped into a car and drove the short distance to Anacostia. They were stopped at the now-lowered bridge, showed identification, and got permission to drive to the camp.

  “There were continuous flames,” Purdy recalled. They saw soldiers carrying torches made of rolled-up paper. “Veterans were packing and rushing about. Tear gas, which was being used to drive them out, made it difficult to see. . . . It was like riding through the steam of a teakettle. . . . There were pregnant women and some babies. . . . They were grabbing and packing their meager belongings.” When some vets saw the captain’s uniform, they “began throwing rocks and pieces of brick at our car.” But they made it to where MacArthur stood—“I will always remember the staunch outline, the erect figure”—and dropped off the captain. Then soldiers directed them out of the “tear gas, dust, and filth.”100

  The long day ended in a press conference that lasted until past midnight. MacArthur, back at his headquarters, stood before a crowd of reporters. Oddly, there were no newsreel cameras, which had been on the scene earlier in the day. Reporters speculated that the newsreel cameras had been barred from Camp Marks’s blazing final night just as they had been barred, by gentleman’s agreement, during Camp Marks’s summer days.

  MacArthur called the veterans “insurrectionists” and declared that “if there was one man in ten in that group today who is a veteran, it would surprise me.” Reviewing his day’s work, he said, “The mob down Pennsylvania Avenue looked bad. They were animated by the spirit of revolution. The gentleness and consideration with which they had been treated had been mistaken by them as weakness and they had come to the conclusion that they were about to take over the government in an arbitrary way or by indirect methods.101

  “It is my opinion that had the President not acted today, had he permitted this thing to go on for twenty-four hours more, he would have been faced with a grave situation which would have caused a real battle. Had he let it go another week I believe that the institutions of our Government would have been very severely threatened. It can be said that he had not only reached the end of his extraordinary patience but had gone to very great lengths to avoid trouble.

  “Had the President not used force he would have been derelict indeed in his judgment regarding the safety of the country because this country is the focal point of the world today. Had he not acted with the force and vigor which he did, it would have been a bad day for the country tomorrow.

  “I have never seen greater relief on the part of the distressed populace than I saw today. . . . At least a dozen people told me, especially in the Negro section, that a regular system of tribute was being levied on them by this insurrectionist group.”102

  By the time the conference ended, the evacuation of Camp Marks was almost complete. Veterans who had cars had headed off to somewhere. Many veterans and families had got only as far as the hills that rose behind the camp, and there they huddled until morning, children coughing from tear gas. Hundreds had fled into the streets of the neighborhood and had been taken into homes. At midnight one resident found eight small children and infants lying in the doorway of a five-and-ten-cent store, their mothers putting wet cloths over their eyes.

  One fleeing family, the Meyers from Ephrata, Pennsylvania, had been taken in by another family several blocks from the camp. Some soldiers charged into the neighborhood, flinging the last of the two thousand teargas grenades used that day. One landed beside an open window. A cloud of gas wafted into the bedroom where twelve-week-old Bernard Meyer lay coughing and gasping. His parents took him to a hospital, where he died. The father said that the boy had been sick when he was gassed. The hospital said that the gas possibly aggravated the illness. Government investigators, including the chief medical officer of the Army Chemical Service, concluded that the baby died of enteritis, an inflammation of the intestines, possibly caused by bacterial diarrhea. But, a hospital spokesman said, the tear gas “didn’t do it any good.” The Army and the Justice Department investigated and found that tear gas had not killed Bernard Meyer, but to many in the BEF, he was the last casualty in what they called the Battle of Washington.103

  *Pace and Eicker were charged with inciting to riot. For Eicker, there were two extra charges: making a speech in a public park without a permit and destroying public property—specifically, breaking twigs in the tree he had climbed to make his speech.

  9

  The Long Morning After

  There was an old Hoover

  Who Lived in a Shoe.

  He had so many veterans

  He didn’t know what to do.

  So he gassed them and tanked them,

  And burned up their beds

  And then told all the people

  The vets were all Reds.

  —B.E.F. News, September 17, 1932

  ON THE MORNING of July 29, with the New York Times spread open on his bed at Hyde Park, Democratic presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt told an aide that there was no need now to campaign against Hoover. “Flames rose high over the desolate Anacostia flats at midnight tonight,” read the first sentence in the Times account, “and a pitiful stream of refugee veterans of the World War walked out of their home of the past two months, going they knew not where.”

  After studying the paper for a few more minutes, Roosevelt asked, “Why didn’t Hoover offer the men coffee and sandwiches, instead of turning . . . Doug MacArthur loose? They’re probably camping on the roads leading out of Washington. They must be in terrible shape.”

  Terrible was an apt adjective.

  “When the veterans of the Bonus Army first tried to escape,” wrote Malcolm Cowley in his role as a reporter for the New Republic magazine, “they found that the bridges into Virginia were barred by soldiers and the Maryland roads blocked against them by state troopers. They wandered from street to street or sat in ragged groups, the men exhausted, the women with wet handkerchiefs laid over their smarting eyes, the children waking from sleep to cough and whimper from the tear gas in their lungs. The flames behind them were climbing into the night sky. About four in the morning, as rain began to fall, they were allowed to cross the border into Maryland, on condition that they moved as rapidly as possible into another state.”1

  The dispersed were supposed to return to their homes, which most of them did not have. So when a rumor was heard that Mayor Eddie McCloskey of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, would welcome them, they took up the cry “On to Johnstown!” McCloskey, a veteran, had been a frequent weekend visitor to Camp Marks. He had even brought his daughters, who danced on the rickety stage. He had become friends with Waters and other BEF leaders, and when he made his offer, he expected no more than a few hundred. He was shocked to learn early on July 29 that something like eight thousand more were on their way to his city.2

  The day after destroying Camp Marks, soldiers posed at a shattered piano. The veterans, a witness said, were “treated like a tramp dog some man picks up in the alley, feeds, gives a bed in his house, and then shoots the next morning when he finds it has got lice.” (General Douglas MacArthur Foundation)

  Cowley, heading toward Johnstown, came upon a group of three hundred and agreed to take two of the refugees in his car. The vets picked the two by a quick informal vote. The first had been gassed in the Argonne and teargassed at Anacostia; he, Cowley said, “breathed with an effort, as if each breath would be his last.” The second man had been separated from his wife and six children during the retreat from Camp Marks and hoped to find them in Johnstown. “He talked about his service in France, his three medals, which he refused to wear, his wounds, his five years in a government hospital. ‘If they gave me a job,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t care about the bonus.’”3

  Waters emerged on the morning after the expulsion to order all remaining veterans out of the city and proclaim himself a leader in a new movement, assu
ming, in the words of the New York Times, “the role of an American Hitler.” As his BEF headed to Johnstown, Waters was setting up national headquarters in Washington for the Khaki Shirt movement to “clean out the high places of government” and return government to the masses. The men of the BEF, he told the Times, are torchbearers for the “inarticulate masses of the country.” The short-lived Khaki Shirts would soon begin a slide into fascism, which Waters would disavow. But his creation of the organization displayed the degree to which he was attempting to become a national political figure, even if it meant comparing himself to Mussolini and Hitler.4

  As for President Hoover, reporters were told that he had met with MacArthur and Hurley the night before, around 10:30 P.M., in the second-floor Lincoln Study, which Mrs. Hoover had restored as an office for her husband. By looking out the windows of the study, Hoover and his late-night visitors could see the red glow of the Camp Marks fires. The Evening Star, without giving a source, stated authoritatively that “the President and those with him went to the window and for some moments looked in the direction of the flames.”5 Then Hoover retired for the night, and MacArthur and Hurley went to the nearby State, War, and Navy Building for a press conference that MacArthur dominated.

  Whatever thoughts Hoover may have had that night,6 he knew that he had to explain the sabers and the tear gas and the flames to the nation. On July 29 he dictated a letter to Commissioner Reichelderfer. In the first draft of the letter, Hoover said, “I complied with your request for aid from the Army to the police. It is a matter of congratulation that, after the arrival of this assistance, the mobs which were defying the municipal government were dissolved without the firing of a shot or the loss of a life.” He also wrote that “most” of the members of the mobs were not veterans. In the second and final draft, “congratulation” was changed to “satisfaction” and “most” was changed to “a large part.”7 Those two changes marked the first stirrings of what would become the Hoover administration’s official stance on the expulsion of the veterans and their families: there would be no gloating, MacArthur-style statements from the White House. And the BEF would become a mob full of men who were criminals, Communists—and not veterans.

  Smoke could be seen rising from the ruins of the Bonus Army’s Anacostia camp on the morning after troops—using tear gas, bayonets, and torches—drove out the veterans and their families. “And this,” said a veteran’s wife, “because they cry for food. . . . Because they beg for work.” (General Douglas MacArthur Foundation)

  The president also issued a public statement on July 29, saying, “A challenge to the authority of the United States Government has been met, swiftly and firmly,” adding that the government could not be “coerced by mob rule.” But he sharpened his nonvet claim in a letter to an influential American Legion post in Boston, one of the largest in New England. Responding to a telegram commending him for his action, he wrote, “I would be glad if the veterans throughout the country would know the character of the men claiming to be their representatives who have been in Washington since the adjournment of Congress. It is the impression of our Government services that less than half of them ever served under the American flag.”8

  By Hoover’s accounting, most of those in Washington before adjournment were veterans, but those who lingered were dominated by non-vets. Hurley followed through on August 3 with a lengthy statement in which he estimated that only one-third of the men were veterans, adding that “many veterans themselves became more and more under the influence of the number of so-called red, radical agitators after many of the genuine veterans had left.” The government sent troops on July 28, he said, after a “definite organized attack of several thousand men was then made upon the police.” Hurley blamed the fires, including the conflagration in Anacostia, on “retreating radicals”—except for some torching by troops “in the interests of sanitation.”9

  The flaming shacks had made spectacular newspaper photographs, particularly a nationally published photo showing a soldier lighting a shanty with a torch. The Army did its best to explain that the torching was a misunderstanding: a lieutenant at the beginning of the action downtown, seeing that many of the shacks around him were already afire, believed that an order to burn them had been given. Then several policemen approached him, handed him matches, and said, “Those shacks should be burned also.” The lieutenant accepted the suggestion—and the matches—and gave the order to set the fires. This order, the army said, was then passed down the line. (In fact, Army reports about actions downtown frequently tell of the destruction of shacks as part of the military operations.) The Army claimed that the vets, not the soldiers, had burned the camp in Anacostia, insisting that the occupants did the burning. Witnesses said that the troops in Anacostia had set fires for illumination. What seems to have happened next is that when the vets saw those fires, they believed that the soldiers were going to set the whole camp afire and decided to finish the job.10

  While the remnants of the Bonus Army trudged to Johnstown, the U.S. Army began cleaning up in Washington in the early hours of Friday, July 29. One of the troops’ missions was the eviction of women and children from an old government-owned redbrick house that had been used as a BEF shelter. On the street outside the house, charity workers found ninety children and many mothers and reported, “Babies, with uncovered heads, no shade, no care or food, were held in the laps of their shocked, suffering mothers.”11

  On July 30 John Henry Bartlett witnessed a roundup of park sitters and homeless people by the police. “Many who had not been identified with the bonus army were caught in the drive,” he said. “Police patrols and commandeered taxis ran, in a steady stream, to Judiciary Square, which a police cordon had transformed into a human corral. There all who could not establish definite means of support were reloaded into cars and taken to the district line, where they were again transferred into trucks and whisked away and dumped. A police count showed 502 poor people, none criminals, had been evicted.”12 Bartlett also watched as the Army set fire to huts that had been missed the first night. Again soldiers used sabers, bayonets, and tear gas to move veterans, spectators, and jeering schoolchildren, who were chased by mounted cavalry. “An old man laboring along with two sacks of potatoes did not step lively enough to please a cavalryman. I saw he was cut, his hand bleeding by a sabre thrust,” Bartlett said. A longtime African-American resident of Washington— and not a bonus marcher—was put in a truck and wound up in Indianapolis, along with another man who said he had been on his way home from a dance when soldiers and police forced him into a truck.13

  On the day after the expulsion of the Bonus Army, a U.S. Army sergeant—with a tear-gas grenade still dangling from his belt—checked passengers on a Washington bus in search of veterans who might have been lurking in the city. (General Douglas MacArthur Foundation)

  The Army drove out the 1,500 veterans and their families who believed they were safe at Camp Bartlett. Vets at Camp Sims left before any soldiers arrived, as did about 250 veterans in small waterfront camps along the Washington Channel. In the afternoon, soldiers hurled tear-gas grenades to drive off a score of veterans who had returned to Pennsylvania Avenue, probably to search for belongings that had survived the fires.

  Army trucks carrying machine guns stood ready during the eviction. No shots were fired, but Police Chief Glassford saw “brutality,” not by the Army but by “the Hoover Administration’s attempt to make political capital out of hunger, misery and despair.” (General Douglas MacArthur Foundation)

  About two hundred veterans from Texas, California, and Missouri got across the Potomac to Virginia but were driven back by Virginia police. The veterans then headed up Wisconsin Avenue to Maryland, whose governor was providing trucks that would take them to the Pennsylvania line.14 A policeman on a motorcycle led a procession of other vets, many carrying American flags, to the Maryland line for further expulsion. Thousands of vets were transported out of Maryland. State after state then provided trucks to ship the BEF remna
nts westward, using the same technique of border-to-border vet-passing that had moved the Bonus Army into Washington back in May and June. Countless veterans and their families had melted into the Depression underworld of the District, living on the street, among residents who took them in, or in missions and other charity residences.

  Three BEF families were officially allowed to remain in Washington, at least for a little while. They had ill children in hospitals or private residences and under the care of the Red Cross, which considered them emergency cases and thus acceptable under guidelines that had kept the Red Cross out of the BEF camps.15 On August 1, one of the children, two-month-old Gertrude Mann, died in a hospital; her death was attributed to intestinal disorders. Again, authorities ruled that tear gas had not played any role in her death.16

  That same day, a meeting was held in the office of Assistant Attorney General Nugent Dodds. Attending were J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Bureau of Investigation, along with representatives of the Secret Service, the Army’s Military Intelligence Division, the Veterans Administration, the Immigration Service, and the District police. The Veterans Administration agreed to provide veterans’ names to Hoover, who would then search his fingerprint files to see if any of them had been arrested. Those statistics would provide the foundation for the administration’s claim that the BEF was riddled with criminals, but since the VA fingerprints would also prove that the men were veterans, it would be difficult to use the VA’s names to prove the nonveteran charge. Nevertheless, the VA and J. Edgar Hoover began the task.17