The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  “But, Louis, what are you going to do?”

  “Me? I’m going to take a nap,” he said, curling up in the seat of her red roadster.

  Stepping onto the muddy road, Mrs. Roosevelt made her debut as an active-duty First Lady.36

  Mrs. Roosevelt did what Howe told her, adding her own touches, as she would do throughout her career as First Lady. She made a little speech about her own work as a volunteer in the war, had coffee with the men, and led them in a wartime favorite, “There’s a Long, Long Trail a’Winding.” There was not much to the visit itself, but it produced a grace note that summed up President Roosevelt’s masterful handling of the veterans. He did not back the bonus. He was still holding firm about the cut in veterans’ benefits. Yet, at no cost to the budget, he had won them over. As a vet said as Mrs. Roosevelt was leaving, “Hoover sent the army. Roosevelt sent his wife.”37

  Roosevelt found a way to give something to the 1933 bonus marchers while still opposing the bonus. He issued an executive order that authorized the enrollment of about 25,000 veterans of the Great War and the Spanish-American War in the CCC, waiving age and marital restrictions. There were gripes— “Not for me. It’s like selling yourself into slavery,” one vet said. And many cheered when a VEF leader shouted, “To hell with reforestation!”38 But more than 2,500 signed up immediately, crowding around tables set up for their enlistment into the Tree Army. About 700 veterans turned down the CCC job offer but accepted free transportation home, paid for out of the same French reception fund that had financed the Fort Hunt encampment.39

  In the wake of the march came a sinister and mysterious event. Eddie Gosnell died early on Memorial Day, and members of the right-wing group charged that suspicious circumstances surrounded his death. Washington police said that Gosnell’s death was a suicide by self-administered poison in a furnished room he had rented sometime before. But two veterans said that just before he was taken to a hospital, feverish and writhing in agony, they had given him a telephone message from an unidentified foe. “Tell him I’ll see him in hell,” Gosnell said. He told another friend that he feared for his life and had twice been attacked.

  A member of the right-wing group began an investigation, claiming that Gosnell had been driven to his death by unnamed persecutors. Nothing came of the private investigation, and the mystery lingered on; Gosnell’s photos and documents never surfaced. Investigators did, however, learn that Gosnell was not his name. He was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery under his real name, Edward Steinkraus, after two ex-wives approved.40*

  In Philadelphia in June 1933, the Khaki Shirts fought a street battle with local Communists. One of Art Smith’s fascists was killed; Smith staged a well-publicized funeral, claiming that he had a well-armed army of millions.

  Rumors swirled around the city that Smith planned to take over the National Guard arsenal in a plot to seize Philadelphia on Columbus Day, 1933. Police struck first, raiding Khaki Shirts headquarters and seizing a number of weapons. Eventually Smith disappeared with $25,000 in Khaki Shirts funds, but his organization lived on to become part of the Christian Front, a notorious anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi organization.

  Although it would not be declared publicly until later, General Smedley Darlington Butler, the bonus marchers’ comrade in Camp Marks days, claimed that he had been asked to lead an army of veterans in a coup d’état at this same time. The plotters, Butler said, were powerful businessmen who wanted to get rid of Roosevelt before he had a chance to run for a second term.

  It had all begun in the summer of 1933, Butler said, when he had been asked by Gerald MacGuire, a Wall Street bond trader, to speak out for the gold standard, which President Roosevelt had abandoned soon after taking office, believing that a flexible dollar, rather than one based on gold, was the key to recovery from the Depression. MacGuire, according to Butler, tied a back-to-gold campaign to the bonus, saying that his group wanted the bonus paid in gold-backed money.41

  MacGuire, Butler said, represented powerful Wall Street financiers, including Robert Sterling Clark, heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, and Grayson Murphy, a director of the Guaranty Trust Company, a wealthy stockbroker and, as an officer in the Great War, one of the founders of the American Legion. They were, MacGuire said, among the financial backers of a “superorganization” that would be unveiled shortly.

  Butler said he soon learned that MacGuire and the financiers he claimed to represent wanted more from him than merely some lobbying for a bonus paid in gold. Butler said he was asked to lead an army of 500,000 veterans to Washington as part of a coup to take over the government. Butler warned James E. Van Zandt, national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that he would be approached. And when Butler spoke out about the plot, Van Zandt revealed that he had also met with MacGuire. Van Zandt quoted MacGuire as saying his group wanted “to get rid of this fellow in the White House.”42

  The superorganization that MacGuire had foreseen in his talks with Butler did emerge, strengthening Butler’s belief in the plot. It was the American Liberty League, whose members included Duponts, other wealthy supporters, and conservative Democrats who opposed Roosevelt.43 MacGuire had also accurately predicted that Roosevelt would soon get rid of General Hugh Johnson, head of the National Recovery Administration. MacGuire’s gift of political prophecy convinced Butler that he had inside knowledge, and, in Butler’s mind, this gave credence to the plot. Butler insisted that he objected to the plot, reporting that he had finally told MacGuire: “If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home.”44

  As with the Khaki Shirts, America’s flirtation with fascism simply faded away; by the time Butler told his story to a new congressional committee, formed to investigate Nazi activities in the United States, it had little impact.*45 The same could not be said of those demanding cash payment of the bonus, which continued to bedevil the Roosevelt administration.

  When a much smaller contingent of bonus marchers arrived in the spring of 1934, they seemed to epitomize a lost cause. Many of these men would end up in veterans’ rehabilitation camps in Florida and the Carolinas. (Authors’ collection)

  On March 16, 1934, Louis Howe wrote to the Office of the Adjutant General to say that he had information from CCC Camp 375 in Virginia that veterans there were planning a march to Washington to protest the end of their one-year enlistments. Fechner, director of the Office of Emergency Conservation Work (the official name for the administrator of the CCC), also told Army officials that members of the Communist-led Veterans National Rank and File Committee were “urging a militant action on the part of the veterans for a Bonus March.” The commanding officer of a CCC camp in Tolland, Connecticut, sent the adjutant general the names of veterans “who have been identified with agitation” and who were involved in the 1933 march.46

  A third bonus march was just over the horizon, and as in 1932, Congress was looking at a bonus bill. Wright Patman had introduced it as soon as Congress reconvened in January 1934. It was stalled in committee because, as everyone knew, if it reached the floor for a vote, anyone in favor would be defying Roosevelt—and if by some miracle it passed, he would veto it. In a “Dear Henry” letter to Speaker of the House Henry T. Rainey, Roosevelt had said he would veto any bonus bill, “and I don’t care who you tell this to.”47

  In an election year for all of them, members of Congress were well aware that a vote against the veterans could mean no votes from veterans in November. Van Zandt telegraphed the president, urging him to “make public your objections . . . in fairness to approximately three and one half million veterans who believe they have been made victims of discrimination.”48 The House voted Patman’s bill out of committee, then passed it in a wild debate and sent it to the Senate, knowing the senators would not challenge Roosevelt.49

  Bonus marchers came back on the Washington stage in the spring of 1934, joining th
ose transients who had remained in the city from previous marches. They had no more chance of getting a bonus from Roosevelt than from Hoover. When Roosevelt pushed through Congress the Economy Act, slashing veterans’ benefits, he had simultaneously offset the budget savings by getting from Congress the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), launched with $500 million from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, created by President Hoover primarily to help banks and corporations. FERA would give federal grants to states for relief to needy citizens, especially the unemployed. Harry Hopkins, a career welfare worker who had been the head of Governor Roosevelt’s New York State relief organization, was given the job of running FERA,50 and he decided to use FERA funds for the lackluster bonus march of 1934.

  Hopkins directed what was essentially a replay of 1933: an encampment at Fort Hunt and a convention, where veterans could talk and pass resolutions. Back for another visit was John Alferi, the self-proclaimed “one-man bonus army” who urged the 1934 marchers to be orderly lest they be seen as “a bunch of bums and troublemakers.”51 Alferi, who in 1933 had praised ex-president Hoover, changed his mind and now believed that if President Roosevelt “keeps up his good work, he will be reelected for twenty years more.”52

  This time the WESL claimed a membership of only 127 of the 1,500 veterans accommodated at Fort Hunt. But the left wing dominated the convention. Levin and Hickerson were back, and they invited Communist Party candidate James W. Ford. “Keep away from the CCC camps. They are the forerunner of Fascism,” Ford had advised the delegates. Fort Hunt was, in fact, a CCC camp. In 1933 many of the first veterans had begun their Tree Army stints there, and Fort Hunt had been officially handed over to the CCC.53 This time, nearly 600 men signed up for the CCC, but only about half were accepted, probably because recruiters knew about Robert Fechner’s attitude toward vets in the CCC.

  In a letter to Louis Howe, Fechner had said, “It is my opinion that a feeling generally prevails among War Veterans throughout the country that if a sufficient number of them congregate in Washington they can get almost anything they demand so far as the CCC is concerned.”54 Fechner obviously disliked the idea of mixing worn-out veterans in their forties with the energetic youngsters who were making the CCC one of the administration’s most popular creations. In the glowing official accounts of CCC accomplishments, the veterans were hardly mentioned.

  Hopkins apparently shared Fechner’s sentiments, for he seems to have decided that there would never again be a bonus march. He had set up FERA transient camps in nearly every state to handle the swarms of men, women, and children wandering America’s highways and railways. Hopkins’s Federal Transient Bureau in 1933 estimated that there were between 1 and 1.25 million transient and homeless persons in the United States. Other, unofficial estimates put the total as high as 5 million.55

  Many of the transient camps were at the bases of the U.S. Army, which, suffering from Depression budget cuts, welcomed the chance to find a use for its vacant buildings. Fort Eustis, Virginia, near Norfolk, for example, housed more than 3,600 men in 1933. They worked a five-and-a-half-hour day, with half of Saturday and all day Sunday free. Among the jobs was setting traps for animals with marketable pelts and growing cabbage, which was made into sauerkraut for other camps. Besides getting food and shelter, they got work clothes and $1 a week.

  White and black campers were segregated, which was typical in transient camps,56 as it was in CCC camps. Segregation in CCC camps and the failure to promote black enrollees led to complaints from African-Americans, particularly officials of the NAACP. In one case the NAACP intervened to obtain an honorable discharge for a Harlem youth who was dishonorably discharged after refusing to fan flies away from a white Army officer at a CCC in New Jersey.57 Roosevelt himself, in a handwritten note to Fechner, said, “In the CCC Camps, where the boys are colored, in the Park Service work, please try to put in colored foremen, not of course in technical work but in the ordinary manual work.”58

  Writing to Senator Robert J. Bulkley of Ohio in 1936, Fechner said, “Whether we like it or not, we cannot close our eyes to the fact that there are communities and States that do not want and will not accept a Negro Civilian Conservation Corps company.” In one place, “When the citizens of the community learned that a Negro company was to be sent to the camp, they absolutely refused to permit the company to occupy the camp and we were forced to completely abandon the project. I therefore adopted the policy of having our representatives consult with the Governor of the State before attempting to assign a Negro Company to any locality.”59

  The transient camps solved a larger problem of homelessness, but did not specifically address the pesky issue of the veterans still showing up in Washington to submit their bonus demands. Many found themselves at a house at 2626 Pennsylvania Avenue, where they could get a free meal, a place to sleep, and, if needed, legal advice.

  For the leaders of the New Deal, this small group—most of whom had been driven out in 1932—was a constant reminder that the very men who had served in the defeat of Herbert Hoover were now in a position to create great damage to an administration that would be seeking a second term one year later.

  Hopkins came up with a plan, based on the model of the transient camps but totally separate from them. As veterans straggled into their Washington refuge, a mere eight blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, they were given passage to special Veterans Rehabilitation Camps, where they could be put to work as FERA employees at a dollar a day. From the outset these camps would be entirely separated from the CCC camps now being filled by much younger men. President Roosevelt approved the plan, and on October 12, 1934, the first veterans were shipped south.

  Some of the vets in Washington agreed to be shipped to camps in South Carolina. Others accepted shipment to Florida, where they would go into a period of “conditioning” at a FERA transient camp and then to Fort Jefferson, once the prison for Lincoln assassination conspirators, on the remote island of Dry Tortugas, south of the Florida Keys. The fort, said to be badly in need of repair, would give the vets work far from Washington. The first three hundred bonus marchers were sent to the Jacksonville camp awaiting shipment to Dry Tortugas, but the transfer of responsibility for Fort Jefferson from the Navy to the Interior Department was taking longer than expected.* Then, on October 18, 1934, their mission was changed. They would be sent to camps in Florida’s Upper Keys, where they would work on a road construction project that would link the Upper Keys to Key West.60

  On January 4, 1935, President Roosevelt alighted from his car and began entering the U.S. Capitol by way of a passage cleared in the crowd waiting to greet him. He was to deliver his opening message to the Seventy-fourth Congress. A large man with heavy black stubble, dressed in a ragged coat and a muffler made from a blanket, jumped out in front of Roosevelt, his right arm raised in a gesture that a reporter on the scene said “might have appeared violent but was meant to be arresting.”

  In a deep, heavily accented voice, the man bellowed, “Hol’ on there— waita that min, Mr. President! How about the bonus?”

  In the instant between his statement and what would have been certain death from the guns of the Secret Service and police, he identified himself as John Alferi, the head of the 1931 bonus march. This was his fourth trip to Washington to demand his bonus. He was well known to the police as a “sore thumb,” a persistent but harmless pest. Alferi, forty-five years old, was quickly wrestled to the ground and dragged away to a room in the Capitol. When he was searched, all that was found was a ragged honorable discharge, some news clipping from his previous trips, his bonus certificate, and a pass for the opening of Congress and the president’s message. The pass had been given to him by Senator Huey Long’s office, but the guards had refused to seat him, presumably because he had made such a pest of himself lobbying individual members of Congress, and it was feared that he would disrupt the president’s speech.61

  Deemed not to be a threat by the authorities, Alferi was discharged a
nd told to go home; but he and the five men he brought with him—all veterans of the 1932 march—demonstrated that the bonus was still a very live issue and that, in the person of a veteran willing to risk his life to confront the president, it was now Roosevelt’s issue.62 A week before the Alferi confrontation, the president had replied to the head of an American Legion post in Henderson, Texas, who had asked him to support immediate payment. Roosevelt stated in a letter, released to the press for publication on New Year’s Day, that he opposed the bonus for a host of reasons, including his belief that the bonus was the only life insurance that many of the veterans had and that, of the 3,500,000 veterans who had been issued certificates, 3,038,500 of them had borrowed against them from the U.S. Treasury.63

  Suddenly, the bonus had little to do with Republicans—Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, or Mellon. Now it was an old albatross hanging from the neck of the New Deal. The now familiar Patman Bill demanding immediate payment of the bonus, resubmitted for the sixth time in January 1935, sailed through the House. The vote brought renewed hope to veterans—especially those in the rehab camps in the Carolinas and the Florida Keys, where there had been reports of recent trouble.

  *Hoover Field, located near the present-day site of the Pentagon, was the capital’s first major air terminal. In 1930 it merged with Washington Airport.

  *A year later the final words were published on Gosnell’s death with the publication of Jack Douglas’s Veterans on the March: “Still another mystery was the killing a year later, of Eddie Gosnell . . . who had gotten a picture of Hushka just after the murder and other ‘intimate’ pictures many of which later disappeared. He died after drinking acid. It was said he took it by mistake while drinking. Intimate friends of Gosnell’s said he never drank intoxicants of any kind” (235).