The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  Nationally known correspondent and broadcaster Floyd Gibbons, whose eye patch bespoke his wounds in France, went to Portland because of the “war . . . on the convention floor.” Gibbons ripped into Mitchell, asking, “If these men were such dangerous criminals, why were they not arrested?” Turning to Mitchell’s list of crimes, Gibbons wrote, “As I figure it, the proportion of 829 ‘convicts’ out of forty thousand men that passed through the camps, is something like under three per cent.” President Harding’s own cabinet (in which Hoover had been secretary of Commerce) had a criminal record of at least 10 percent, Gibbons wrote: “and it wasn’t for parking in front of a fire plug either.”

  A parade opened the 1932 American Legion convention in Portland, Oregon. Here the Bonus Army began its march—and here Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley would claim that the Bonus Army was riddled with criminals and Communists. (Oregon Historical Society)

  Joining Gibbons in the refutation of the report were Elsie Robinson, who wrote for the Hearst papers and was the reporter closest to the Bonus Army, and George R. Brown, a former war correspondent and the star reporter for the Washington Herald. “Smugly satisfied, one Government official after another has risen to justify that shameful day,” Robinson wrote. “And this week the whole Administration united in an attack on the honor of American ex-soldiers which is unparalleled in heartlessness and arrogance and deliberate misinformation.”

  Brown, taking a more measured tone, pointed out that VA chief Hines had said earlier in the year that “ninety per cent of the bonus army were ex–service men.” Brown also noted that every BEF member with a public identity—from Waters to Hushka and Carlson—was a veteran with an honorable record. “This writer,” Brown continued, “has personally come into contact with certainly not less than two hundred of the men of the Bonus Army, both before and since the eviction. In nearly all cases, in the course of conversation about the war service of the men, he has been shown their discharge papers. In no instance was there any reluctance to show them.”47

  Mitchell’s report gave Pelham Glassford a chance to rebut the issue of criminal records. Of 362 arrests of bonus marchers by D.C. police, Glassford said, only twelve were for “offenses of a criminal nature.” While the BEF was in Washington, there was less crime overall in the city—and crime increased in August, after the Bonus Army had been driven out. By Glassford’s estimate, based on police censuses of billets, the “Communist camp,” meaning the one occupied by the WESL group, numbered about 150 men. The largest groups of “radicals” assembled at one time numbered 210, he said.48

  He also questioned the use of troops. “I was never apprised by the Commissioners that troops had been called,” he said in a formal statement. “Although it has been stated that the police were threatened with a mass attack, the actual encounter was halted almost instantly.”

  Having challenged the attorney general of the United States and indirectly the president, Glassford did not look forward to a long career as police chief. In what looked like a deliberately staged controversy to get rid of him, the commissioners refused to back him in his decision to demote the chief of detectives as part of a reorganization of the Detective Bureau. “I find myself . . . holding a position of great responsibility but deprived of the essential authority to discharge it without fear and without favor,” he said in his letter of resignation on October 20, 1932. He had been chief of police eleven months.49

  During the presidential election campaign, the expulsion of the Bonus Army haunted Hoover—and the Secret Service, whose chief of the White House detail, Edmund W. Starling, worried about the behavior of hostile crowds. When Hoover went to Detroit to speak on October 22, Starling later wrote, “the city was in an ugly mood. . . . For the first time in my long experience on the Detail I heard the President of the United States booed. All along the line there were bad spots, where we heard jeers and saw signs reading: DOWN WITH HOOVER; HOOVER—BALONEY AND APPLESAUCE. The President looked bewildered and stricken.”

  The presidential party got back on the train and headed for Hoover’s next appearance, in St. Paul, where he said, “Thank God we still have a government in Washington that knows how to deal with a mob.”

  “A ripple went through the audience and I broke into a cold sweat,” Starling continued. “After the speech a prominent Republican took me aside and said, ‘Why don’t they make him quit?’”50

  On November 8, 1932, Americans, desperate for change, elected Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt president by seven million votes. George Patton, discounting the effect of the Great Depression on voters, later said that the army’s “act[ing] against a crowd rather than against a mob” had “insured the election of a Democrat.”51 On election day, the Washington Herald published a startling photo with a headline that echoed Hoover’s campaign remark: “How to Deal with a ‘Mob.’ ” The photo showed Hushka lying on the ground outside the building where he was shot. It looks like a tableau—more than a dozen veterans gather around Hushka, who lies in the V formed by two planks that served as a stairway. Propped up on his arms, he leans his head on one of the planks. One man, who apparently stands where Shinault stood, points his right hand at Hushka, as if he were aiming Shinault’s gun. Beneath Hushka is what looks like a blot of blood. There is no blood on his white shirt, though the coroner said he had been shot through the heart.

  The same photo appeared in Waters’s book with the caption “MURDER William Hushka, freshly killed by police bullet during ‘ferocious riot.’ ‘Riot’ was so ferocious that this picture could be taken a minute after shot was fired!” The photo was credited, “By permission of Eddie Gosnell, Official Photographer, B.E.F.”

  . . .

  William Hushka, shot by a policeman during the July 28 clash, lies dying. The strange photo, by “official” Bonus Army photographer Eddie Gosnell, was published four months after the shooting, with no explanation for the delay. (B.E.F., the Whole Story of the Bonus Army)

  On November 11, J. Edgar Hoover advised Assistant Attorney General Dodds that “various marches” were about to descend on Washington.52 The Military Intelligence Division put out a call to all corps commanders for reports on marchers. From Kansas City came a secret message saying that the National Guard armory there had been broken into, and seventy-five pistols and two thousand rounds of ammunition had been stolen. “There is good reason to believe,” the report said, “that the bulk of these pistols are now in the hands of the ‘Bonus elements’ of the Bonus, Hunger, and Farm Marchers passing through and starting from the 7th Corps area.”53 Estimates of the number of marchers ran as high as 100,000. At Fort Myer, troops, using tear gas, again staged riot-control drills.54

  On December 4, about 3,000 marchers from eastern cities, including 200 women but no children, arrived on the outskirts of Washington. Police directed their motorcade to an area along New York Avenue NE, a cul-de-sac that was cordoned off. Police kept them surrounded through the night. A western unit of about 1,700 and a smaller southern group arrived later. People slept in their cars and trucks or on the cold pavement55 and next day staged a short parade that was hooted at and booed by the police, who kept the marchers under tight control. In their wake, WESL members calling themselves the Radical Bonus Marchers appeared on December 14, claiming to have nearly 500 members scattered around the city. A committee of five met with Vice President Curtis, and when one of them refused to shake his hand, he said, “Well, you can go to the devil!”

  In the final Bonus Army event of the year, Representative Louis Thomas McFadden, a Republican from Pennsylvania who had called the eviction “the greatest crime in modern history,” stood in the well of the House and began, “Mr. Speaker, I rise to a question of constitutional privilege. On my own responsibility as a member of the House of Representatives, I impeach Herbert Hoover, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors and offer the following resolution. . . .” As soon as the resolution was read, a Democratic representative moved to table it—to the cheers of the De
mocrats, who controlled the House. The tabling motion was accepted by a vote of 361 to 8. The eight nay voters included Wright Patman.56

  At the beginning of 1933, many veterans still banded together against the Depression, clinging to the hope that the bonus could be paid. On a patch of urban wilderness along the Hudson River below Riverside Drive in New York City, about eighty men struggled through the winter in shanties hammered together from crates, sheets of tin, and whatever else could be found in junk piles. They raised a flag each morning, and a bugler blew reveille and taps. These men relied on the sale of pro-bonus literature and begging to stay alive. One of the refugees from Washington became a professional panhandler and later recalled, “I had quite a few steady clients. One of them was Heywood Broun. Every time I’d put the bite on him, he’d say, ‘For Chrissake, don’t you know any other guy in the city beside me?’”57

  There were other vets, and some families, in shantytowns in Omaha, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland. Most shantytowns had no name, but Chicago’s was called Camp Hushka, and near San Antonio, Texas, there was Camp Diga (for Agricultural and Industrial Democracy, spelled backward). Diga was the idea of former first lieutenant and future congressman Maury Maverick, who set it up in an abandoned oil plant. The camp was run as a cooperative with a population of about 160, including wives and children. Families lived in boxcars donated by Missouri Pacific Lines, and meals were cooked on army field stoves salvaged from the trash at Fort Sam Houston.58

  The year 1933 was only seven days old when Washingtonians learned that the Bonus Army was mustering again. Veterans were already reported assembling in Philadelphia for what appeared to be an advance guard of the march. About two hundred gaunt men did begin the 136-mile walk from Philadelphia, but only six were left when a Washington newspaper reporter found them in Elkridge, Maryland, thirty miles from the capital. Five were sitting on a curb, having a lunch of bread and water, while the sixth stood, clutching a pole on which was hung an American flag. If they ever did reach Washington, their arrival was not noted. Presumably they joined other down-and-outers who were sleeping in Washington flophouses and eating in missions, awaiting the deliverance that the New Deal was expected to bring.59

  But the news of another Bonus Army was hardly heard over the steady drumbeat that marked time for the coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The nation waited impatiently for his inauguration on March 4, the date decreed by the U.S. Constitution.60

  During the long interregnum, Hoover spent his borrowed time quietly wrangling with Roosevelt, offering his economic ideas to the next president, who politely ignored them while working on how he would produce his New Deal. Adding to the tension of this period was an assassination attempt on President-elect Roosevelt. He had been on a cruise aboard the yacht of his friend Vincent Astor. After the yacht docked in Miami on February 15, Roosevelt headed for Bayfront Park, where he was to make a speech. A short man standing on a wooden chair about twenty-five feet from Roosevelt aimed a .32 caliber pistol he had bought in a Miami pawnshop. As he fired five shots, a woman pushed him. He missed Roosevelt, but his bullets struck five people, including Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who died two weeks later.61

  Few Americans noticed and few cared that the bonus marchers might descend again on Washington.62 Intelligence operatives in the Army and the Department of Justice, however, were gravely concerned; this time the leaders of the veterans were known “radicals,” the catchall word that once included Bolsheviks, Communists, and anarchists and now sometimes was extended to American fascists.

  The Khaki Shirts, the fascist group that Waters had espoused in Washington in 1932, now had followers in other cities, although Waters was no longer active in the organization.* Art J. Smith, head of a California group that came to Washington, had become the commander in chief of the Khaki Shirts, modeled on Hitler’s Black Shirts, Mussolini’s Brown Shirts, and the Silver Shirt Legion, founded by William Dudley Pelley of Massachusetts. The Khaki Shirts were driven by their leader’s belief that fascism was the only way out of the Depression. However, the Khaki Shirts had a streak of the Left, giving as its mission the waging of “relentless war on economic crime, political graft, and judicial corruption,” with a special interest in building “the strongest army, navy and air corps in the world” (with the air corps to be a separate service).63 Smith had founded his version of the Khaki Shirts in Philadelphia, beginning with veterans from that city who had been in the BEF. To show his Khakis’ true colors, he also called his organization the U.S. Fascists and at first centered his activities among Philadelphia’s Italian immigrants, who idolized Mussolini.64

  Meanwhile, the Left took hold of plans for the 1933 march through the Veterans National Liaison Committee, which claimed that it had no political affiliations but was a Communist-front organization. One of its members was James Ford, the U.S. Communist Party’s candidate for vice president in the 1932 election. (He and presidential candidate William Z. Foster received 103,253 votes.) Other members belonged to the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League.

  The Veterans National Liaison Committee had enough financial backing, from undisclosed sources, to rent an office in a building on Capitol Hill. Members included George Dewey Brady of Newark, New Jersey, who had been the registration officer of the BEF, and delegates from the Khaki Shirts, giving the committee at least the appearance of a broad-based group and not a Communist front.

  The committee called the march a “national veterans convention” that would demand the bonus, fight any attempts to cut disability benefits, and seek immediate relief for farmers and the unemployed. The convention was to be held in Washington from May 12 to May 15, which the committee declared “Veterans Justice Day.” Notices were sent out to “rank and file” members of the American Legion and other veteran groups.65

  An Army intelligence report named ninety-six alleged Communists from nineteen states and the District of Columbia who had been given instructions about the planned march. The WESL was no longer a renegade outcast of a Bonus Army. Looking very much in charge, it was raising money for the march by selling five-cent pamphlets, Veterans, Close Ranks, which, the report said, called for “payment of the bonus, at the expense of the rich.”66

  While the left-wing group planned the march, John Alferi, the man who carried the title of the first bonus marcher because of his 1931 trip, once more arrived in Washington, but not for another march. He came out against the 1933 march, while praising the 1932 actions of President Hoover and General MacArthur. (He had written Hoover on May 8, saying, “I want you to know that 4,000,000 Veterans would like to have you back as our President.”67) Alferi, though, was still demanding immediate payment of the bonus.68

  *Since the exodus of the Bonus Army from Johnstown, little had been heard from Commander in Chief Waters, who had gone into seclusion in Florida. In January 1933, when plans for a new march were reported, he denounced the idea of a return of his army to Washington.

  10

  The Return of the Bonus Army

  CAN THERE BE A MORE WORTHY CAUSE?

  Let your conscience make the answer

  Then we know there’l be no pause.

  Help them in their time of trouble

  Hear their earnest pleading cry

  While others you are aiding

  DO NOT PASS THE VETERANS BY.

  —Last stanza of a poem sent to Franklin D. Roosevelt

  on January 6, 1935, by Nelson E. Lund, USMC 1917–1919

  ON MARCH 9, 1933, five days after his inauguration, President Roosevelt called several members of his cabinet and other officials to a White House meeting to discuss an idea he had to put 500,000 young men to work on conservation projects. He said he wanted his idea transformed into the draft of a bill, and he wanted the draft submitted to him that night. At 9:00 P.M. he had the draft. On March 31 the law creating what became known as the Civil Conservation Corps, the CCC, went into effect.

  Members of what became known as Roosevelt’s Tree Army had to be single men between the
ages of eighteen and twenty-five, and willing to go off to work in the woods. They were to be paid $30 a month and had to allot at least $22 to their families; more than 75 percent of them would send home $25 or more. The U.S. Army would run the CCC camps under a civilian administrator. Roosevelt, responding to organized labor’s complaints about the $1-a-day pay, gave the administrative job to a union official: Robert Fechner, a vice president of the International Association of Machinists. Fechner, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, had a blue-collar background, unlike most of Roosevelt’s “brain trust” advisers. “Most of my clerks are better educated than I am,” he said.1

  The Tree Army was created for young men and felt like a slap in the face to the men of the Bonus Army; obviously too old to qualify, they became the first victims of Roosevelt’s war against the Depression.

  During his election campaign Roosevelt had promised a balanced budget, and as soon as he became president, he started a process that would eventually produce the balance by slicing $480 million from veterans’ benefits. The director of the budget was a Democratic Arizona congressman, Lewis W. Douglas, who had advocated a slash in appropriations for benefits during the Hoover administration. Douglas, millionaire heir of the Phelps Dodge copper mining fortune, resigned from Congress to take the budget post.

  Douglas, who had been gassed and decorated for bravery in France, believed, as a veteran, that service in uniform did not guarantee special privileges, especially since veterans garnered 24 percent of the budget while representing only 1 percent of the population. He went to work on Roosevelt’s major proposal to Congress, the Economy Act, fashioning the $480 million cut.2 The act was rushed through Congress and signed by Roosevelt so swiftly that veterans’ organizations did not have time to mount a full-scale lobbying campaign against it. Even if they had, Roosevelt’s momentum and popularity undoubtedly would have overcome the veterans’ lobby. And the national commander of the American Legion, Louis Johnson, backed Roosevelt, saying, “The Legion wants nothing more than to be of service to America in this situation, as our members were in 1917–1918.”3 Johnson, a Washington insider with back channels to the White House, would become assistant secretary of war in 1937.4