The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  Another issue had to do with how and when the troops were called in. As laid out in a packet of official papers from the White House, the process had begun when Luther Reichelderfer, chairman of the Board of Commissioners, sent a letter to President Hoover sometime on July 28. The letter said that after the morning conflict during the evictions, Glassford believed that it would “be impossible for the Police Department to maintain law and order except by the free use of firearms,” and so the commissioners requested “that they be given the assistance of Federal troops.” Next, according to the official papers, Hurley ordered MacArthur to send troops “immediately to the scene of disorder.” Hurley also ordered MacArthur to cooperate with the police and turn over “all prisoners to the civil authorities.” His men were also to show “every consideration and kindness” to all women and children, adding, “Use all humanity consistent with the due execution of this order.”

  Many accounts published after July 28, 1932, say that the troops were not summoned until the shooting of the veterans by police. But the commissioners’ letter to the president mentions only the morning fracas with police, not the shooting of the veterans in the afternoon. And the timing of the mobilizing phone calls, as stated in the official U.S. Army “Report of Operations against Bonus Marchers,” shows that MacArthur’s call for troops went out at 1:35, before the shooting.18

  The District commissioners fired off telegrams to the governors of Virginia and Maryland, telling them that “all organized bodies or groups of persons attempting to enter the District shall be prevented from doing so” unless they can prove that they “have a lawful purpose.” Leo Rover, U.S. attorney for the district, bypassing Glassford, called Inspector Ogden T. Davis of the police’s Crime Prevention Bureau and told him to join immigration officials and Secret Service agents in a raid on an abandoned church, where alleged Communists were meeting. Police arrested about thirty men, including Communist Party vice presidential candidate James W. Ford.19

  The dragnets infuriated Glassford, who questioned their legality. “I am chief of police,” he said, “and I intend to enforce the laws here to the best of my ability. By enforcement, however, I do not mean persecution.”20 Even as he spoke, he was preparing to testify before a coroner’s jury looking into the police killing of two veterans and a grand jury investigating how he and the Army had handled the ouster of the BEF.

  Early on Tuesday, August 2, Eric Carlson died from gunshot wounds he sustained when William J. Hushka was killed. Hushka was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors a few hours later. The soldiers who fired the farewell volley over his grave included men from Fort Myer whose bayonets and tear gas had driven the Bonus Army from Washington. More than two thousand people, many from local veterans’ groups, attended the ceremony, along with Hushka’s family and Walter and Wilma Waters.21

  Across the river later in the day, as Carlson’s body was being wheeled into the dingy Washington morgue, a coroner’s inquest into the killing of the two men was in progress. Patrolman George Shinault was charged with the killing of Hushka and patrolman Miles Znamenacek with the killing of Carlson. Twenty witnesses were heard. Znamenacek, in a statement read by his attorney, told of following Glassford up the steps of the abandoned building when “a crowd followed us up, shouting, ‘Get the major [Glassford].” Then, Znamenacek’s statement continued, “I spread my arms to hold the onrushing bonus marchers back, and noticed a bulge in one of the men’s shirts. I felt to see what it was. The mob rushed me and knocked me down. I got up and something hit me on the head. It felt as though my head was sailing through the air. I broke loose and drew my gun. Down at the foot of the stairway, Officer Shinault was battling with a number of men. One of them had him by the throat and was trying to strangle him. Dodging bricks, I aimed at and shot that man. I found out later it was Carlson.”

  Glassford testified that he had seen Shinault being clubbed and then, from the ground, firing and killing Hushka from a range of four feet. A bystander named Armstrong testified that he had seen a man in civilian clothes with a gun in the building before the disturbance began. But a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union established that Armstrong’s testimony might have been tainted because he was “beginning to make contracts” with the Treasury Department. Several other bystanders testified that bricks were in fact being thrown at the police. After a five-minute deliberation, it was decided that the two patrolmen had used their weapons in self-defense, and they were returned to duty.22 Shinault, who had received threatening letters, was assigned to a radio patrol car, in which he would be accompanied by another officer.23

  A grand jury, empaneled by U.S. Attorney Rover, avoided looking into the killing of Hushka and Carlson. In his instructions to the jurors, District Supreme Court Judge J. Oscar R. Luhring referred to the BEF as a “mob” and said it reportedly “included few ex-servicemen, and was made up mainly of communists and other disorderly elements.” When the jurors finally did indict three men for assault to kill and assault with a dangerous weapon, all three turned out to be combat veterans, as were Hushka and Carlson, and one had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery in France.24

  Over the next few days, newspapers advertised theater newsreels that promised graphic images of fleeing veterans and their families, blazing shacks, clouds of tear gas, soldiers wielding fixed bayonets, and cavalrymen waving sabers. The ad in the Washington Post, for example, called the Pathé News’s Washington Bonus Army Riots the greatest news spectacle “you have ever seen.”25

  In movie theaters all across America the unthinkable happened: the United States Army was booed and MacArthur jeered. Evalyn McLean was in California when the expulsion took place. She recalled going to a movie and seeing the newsreel of the tanks, cavalry, and “the gasbomb throwers” running Americans out of “our” capital. “I was so raging mad I could have torn the building down,” she wrote. “They could not be allowed to stay, of course, but even so I felt myself one of them.” Apparently many other Americans thought they too were one of them. The images and the lurid words—“a day of bloodshed and riot”— contributed to a caricature of Hoover as a cold and heartless man, unable to cope with the needs of the hungry and dispossessed.

  A woman from Portland, Maine, wrote Hurley to say that when the newsreel came on the screen she heard a gasp go up from the audience. To make sure she heard right, she waited and saw the newsreel again. And again came the gasp.26

  If the expulsion needed a human face, it came in the person of not Hushka or Carlson—men at the wrong place at the wrong time—but of Joe Angelo, whose story in the New York Times, headlined “A Cavalry Major Evicts Veteran Who Saved His Life in Battle,” told of Angelo’s eviction by the man whose life he had saved in the Great War.27 The Philadelphia Public Ledger ran a Joe Angelo story, as did the Washington Daily News, among others.28

  On the morning of July 29, in the smoldering ruins of Camp Marks, Major George Patton and several other officers were sitting on bales of hay, drinking coffee from an Army field kitchen, and talking about their long day-and-night battle against the BEF. Another officer, Captain Lucian Truscott, looked up to see “a tall sergeant of the Twelfth Infantry . . . with a small civilian in tow.” The sergeant, Truscott later wrote, “asked for Major Patton, saying that the man claimed to be a friend of the major’s. When Patton saw them, his face flushed with anger. ‘Sergeant, I do not know this man. Take him away, and under no circumstances permit him to return!’ The sergeant led the downcast man away.”

  The man was Joe Angelo. As he left the group, Patton told the officers, “That man was my orderly during the war. When I was wounded, he dragged me from a shell hole under fire. I got him a decoration for it. Since the war, my mother and I have more than supported him. We have given him money. We have set him up in business several times. Can you imagine the headlines if the papers got wind of our meeting here this morning? Of course, we’ll take care of him anyway.”29

  The Joe Angelo story wa
s an exception; the newspapers had tended to look at the veterans as a large, unruly group without names or faces. Probably because of the power of the images in newsreels and newspapers, however, the mood of at least some of the press turned from applauding the Hoover administration to questioning its decision. “What a pitiful spectacle is that of the great American Government . . . chasing unarmed [veterans], women and children with army tanks,” observed the Washington Daily News.30 A growing number of editorialists and citizens, while abstractly agreeing with the need to remove the veterans from Washington, were also disturbed by images of the expulsion. In an editorial the Boston Globe invoked “the distressing picture” that had been spread in front of a nation whose “nerves and resources have already been severely strained by the struggle for economic recovery.” The paper called for a “painstaking investigation” into the expulsion.31 There were also calls for investigation in Congress, but none ever came.

  The thousand-odd refugees who first arrived at Johnstown set up camp on the grounds of the abandoned amusement park on the edge of town. They dubbed it Camp McCloskey, and it filled up at the rate of two hundred per hour. There was little food and no coffee. Local charities sustained them as the camp grew to an estimated peak population of nearly 9,000.32

  Driven from Washington, veterans and their families fled to an abandoned amusement park in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. When social workers asked where they would go next, many replied, “I do not know” or “We have no home.” (Authors’ collection)

  Pennsylvania social workers went to the park and, as they surveyed the refugees, also inadvertently refuted the administration’s view of the BEF as a gang of Reds and criminals. “Every one of the approximately 75 men I questioned specifically as to their service records, produced his service papers, showing honorable discharge,” wrote J. Prentice Murphy, a member of the state welfare committee who visited the camp. At least fifteen men he interviewed had medals for valor.

  “There were graduate physicians, nurses; a graduate pharmacist; passenger conductors; locomotive firemen; artisans, such as structural iron workers; carpenters; white collar people, such as clerks, down to the casual and irregularly employed worker. They spoke with restraint; some certainly were folks who read and liked books.”33

  Murphy found many families who had no place to go. One he cited consisted of a mother, father, and three children: “The mother is the daughter of a professor at an Indiana college. This family . . . had no particular destination.” Another family—father, mother, five children, mother pregnant—had a girl who had suffered from convulsions the night before. The father was a baker. The family had been evicted from their house in New York State and was hoping to find refuge with the wife’s relatives in Virginia. The BEF members and their families, Murphy decided, were ordinary Americans who “could tell of more sufferings and hardships during the past two years than could be told by any other group of like numbers because the BEF is pretty much a cross-section of the citizenry of the whole country.” Mrs. Helen Glenn Tyson, Pennsylvania’s assistant deputy secretary of welfare, likewise saw the refugees as representing “a cross-section of America just as truly as the army in 1917–1918. . . . There was no doubt that the majority of them were bona fide war veterans. . . . American flags were everywhere, repudiation of the ‘reds’ was violent; though the speakers often added that ‘that night in Washington was enough to make anyone a Bolshie.’”34

  The public health investigations also produced medical reports. One, reporting on a wound on a boy’s leg, added a poignant detail: the boy had been stabbed with a bayonet wielded by a soldier who had stopped him from going back to his burning shack to save a pet rabbit.

  From the beginning, McCloskey had been under intense local pressure to close down his namesake camp. Layoffs at Bethlehem Steel had made Johnstown a city full of unemployed men—and a city whose own relief system had broken down. The Salvation Army had been serving four thousand meals a day before the Bonus Army arrived. A newspaper editorial warned of the need to protect the community “from the criminal fringe of the invaders.”35 Yet the town had shown its heart as in 1889 it had shown its grit, after more than 2,200 people died in the Johnstown Flood, one of the worst disasters in American history.36 The local hospital treated dozens of refugees and posted volunteer doctors to the camp.37

  The BEF was virtually leaderless. Doak Carter, who had arrived on July 29 and set up the camp, was living in a hotel in Johnstown. Waters was on a futile search for a permanent site even as he urged his followers to go home. Mayor McCloskey organized a committee to solicit money and food, and opened an account in a local bank to handle donations and to account for expenditures on food and other necessities.38

  Finally, with some hidden assistance from Washington, Daniel Willard, the president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, offered the veterans free rides as far west as Chicago and Saint Louis in the coaches—not the boxcars—of the B&O. (They were moved at a cent-a-mile rate, which may have been paid by members of the Chamber of Commerce or by Washington sources, depending on who was explaining the exodus from Johnstown.) Those who had cars were given free fill-ups of gas and $1 each for food.

  McCloskey, an ex-prizefighter with a cauliflower ear, explained the need to leave to his erstwhile guests, one of whom he socked in the jaw for heckling: “God sent you here and I’m sending you away. . . . That’s more than Hoover did for you. . . . What do you say?” Hearing a murmur, he paused and then continued: “Then you bums can walk and I’ll see you get a damned good start. I won’t call in any troopers to massacre you. I’ll put you the hell out myself. . . . I’ll knock the teeth out of anybody who hangs around here.”

  In a calmer moment, McCloskey said, “We of Johnstown have now partly paid our debt to those who sent us help” at the time of the great flood. The last stragglers out of Camp McCloskey burned Hoover and Mellon in effigy before leaving.39

  On the morning of Monday, August 15, Washingtonians awoke to read in their morning newspapers that Officer George Shinault, who had fatally shot William Hushka of the BEF, had been killed when he went to a house to investigate a domestic disturbance at 39 F Street SW. Shot twice as he entered the house, he died almost instantly. According to his partner, a fight was going on in the house between “a colored man and woman,” and it was the man who shot Shinault and then escaped. The killer was alleged to be Willie Bullock, and within two days two black men with that name were in custody—neither the right one.40

  The Hoover administration continued its campaign to get out its own version of the evacuation. On September 12 the White House released a report from Attorney General William D. Mitchell, who accused the Bonus Army of bringing to Washington “the largest aggregation of criminals that had ever assembled in the city at one time.” The report, based on J. Edgar Hoover’s analysis of BEF fingerprints, said that “a very much larger proportion of the Bonus Army than was realized at the time consisted of ex-convicts, persons with criminal records, radicals, and non-servicemen.”41

  The report bristled with statistics stemming from the Veterans Administration’s list of 4,723 veterans who had been given transportation home. Although these were veterans and were presumably not in Washington on July 28, Mitchell still used them as his models, noting that when those names were checked against J. Edgar Hoover’s fingerprint and criminal records, 829 (or 17.4 percent) were shown to have been “convicted criminals.” Mitchell supported his “aggregation of criminals” charge by claiming that if there were that many criminals in this VA sample, then the same percentage probably held for the entire Bonus Army.

  To arrive at his claim that a large number of BEF members were not veterans, Mitchell used a list that Glassford had compiled. In the beginning of the Bonus Army invasion, Glassford had police register the veterans as they arrived. The practice stopped after June 12 because the police were overwhelmed; by that time the names totaled 3,656. Of those men, 877 did not identify themselves as veterans. Frank Hines, the head of the VA, said
in a letter about this list, “It is possible that some of the 877 were ex-servicemen and could not be identified because of meager information, but the bulk of them were evidently imposters.”42 Hines later contradicted himself when he said that he believed the overwhelming majority of the men were veterans.

  Many vets who were on the road or hopping trains did not carry documentation. (One of those was Steve Murray, who lost his papers in a scuffle involving a railroad cop.43) Other vets, lacking papers, went to the VA’s Washington office, got their credentials, and probably did not get their identities corrected. When Waters was running the BEF, he demanded identification before issuing passes to the camps. He later said that he had roster sheets listing the names of 28,540 veterans.44

  Among the crimes listed in the Mitchell report were both military offenses, such as unauthorized absences, and civilian crimes, many of them minor but exaggerated, such as “offenses against the family and children,” which turned out to be nonpayment of support. There were also arrests for drunkenness, for violating the notoriously unenforceable Prohibition laws, for gambling, and for an all-inclusive police charge called “suspicion and investigation.” Most of the dispositions of the arrests were not known, but the attorney general treated all arrested men as having been convicted.

  Refutation of Mitchell’s charges came swiftly and massively—just in time for an important date on presidential candidate Hoover’s campaign calendar: the American Legion convention in the city where the Bonus Army began, Portland, Oregon. Secretary of War Hurley volunteered to speak to the legionnaires and lay out the administration’s line on the expulsion. In a dinner address to past national commanders, he specifically denied the deliberate firing of the veterans’ camps. “I say to you upon my honor,” he said, “that those billets were set on fire first by the people who occupied them.”45 But newspapers had already printed the damning photo of a soldier setting fires and had obtained an affidavit from him attesting to his actions.46