The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  *The committee was cochaired by Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts and Representative Samuel Dickstein of New York. Testifying before the committee, MacGuire denied the plot, saying that he had been merely lobbying for the gold standard. What would be called the McCormack-Dickstein Committee and eventually the House Un-American Activities Committee issued a relatively mild report in November 1934.McCormack said he would return to an investigation of the plot in the future, but questions about the plot’s scope and the plotters’ identities remained unanswered. The committee turned to other matters in the wake of MacGuire’s death and a lack of interest on the part of the press and the Roosevelt White House.

  *By December 1934 the Dry Tortugas started being used as a penal colony for vets accused of “drunkenness, insubordination and theft.”

  11

  Labor Day Hurricane

  The Unknown soldier? Not at Arlington,

  But forgotten at Matecumbe Key;

  Not crosses row on row in Flanders fields,

  But bodies row on row at Matecumbe.

  Just bums you say? the flower

  Of the nation when they marched away

  The Bonus Bill? Death signed it,

  But it’s hell to pay!

  Literally, now the stench of the nation,

  Raises to high heaven!

  My God! can prosperity ever come

  To a nation so forgetful,

  So bereft of love for its native sons?

  —Last three stanzas of an unsigned poem, “To My Buddies at Matecumbe Key,” found in a scrapbook of hurricane material at the Helen Wadley Branch of the Monroe Public Library, Islamorada, Florida.

  THE GREAT DEPRESSION had forced the county containing the Florida Keys into total bankruptcy, and the man handed the job of solving the problem was Julius Stone Jr., who had run New York State’s welfare program under Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Beginning in March 1934, when he arrived in Key West, Stone planned to take the crumbling town and restore it to an earlier state of prosperity by making it a major tourist destination. The city was unable to pay police, fire, and sanitation workers; 80 percent of the local residents were on welfare, and the per capita monthly income was $7. Things had become so bad that before Stone came up with the option of tourism, there was serious talk of abandoning the place—removing the residents of the city to a place where there were jobs (Tampa was mentioned) and then closing down the local government. As late as July 1934 Key West was in such a dire state of emergency that the mayor and county commissioners turned over all their legal powers to the governor. The reason was expressed in a headline in the St. Petersburg Evening Independent of July 5, 1934: “Key West People Face Starvation, Governor Is Told.”1

  The governor immediately passed the affairs of Key West and Monroe County to FERA in the person of Stone, who was given 2 million New Deal dollars and czarlike powers to transform Key West into what he predicted would become “The Bermuda of Florida.”2

  To make the plan work, automobile traffic had to move more smoothly; the car ferries that linked the Florida Keys would have to be replaced with highway bridges. The bonus veterans who had been sent from New Deal Washington for “rehabilitation” were first sent to Jacksonville and then assigned to work camps along the Upper Keys. The greatest concentration of vets was on Lower and Upper Matecumbe Keys. The first fifty bonus vets arrived at the work sites in early November 1934, and by the beginning of 1935 there were seven hundred men in three work camps. Camp 1, the northernmost, was on Windley Key, sometimes referred to as Upper Matecumbe Key, seventy-eight miles south of Miami; Camp 5, at the northern end of Lower Matecumbe Key, was about eight miles south of Camp 1 and four miles north of Camp 3 at the end of the Key. Headquarters for all camps was at what had been the Matecumbe Hotel on Windley Key. The men were housed in tents and quickly constructed barracks, mostly at the water’s edge, that could be taken down and moved as the roadwork and bridge building progressed southward toward Key West.

  New Deal planners thought they had finally found a way to end the problem presented by the wandering remnants of the original Bonus Army. But not everyone was happy with the solution. Ernest Hemingway was particularly angry at what was happening to Key West under the directorship of Stone. Hemingway, a Republican, did not like the government, especially the New Deal under Roosevelt, whom Hemingway termed “the Paralytic Demagogue.”

  In order to attract more tourists, Stone organized a massive force of four thousand local volunteers who were to spruce up the town, put in a sewer system, rid Key West of outhouses, renovate more than two hundred guest houses and one major hotel, and bring in theater groups and other cultural attractions. Trash disappeared as flower gardens were planted. The jobless were hired to catch stray dogs and cats, which were exterminated.3

  Stone also published a list of forty-eight local sights of interest, including, as number eighteen on the list, Hemingway’s home on Whitehead Street. This attracted gawkers who would peer in his window and—thinking it was an official attraction—occasionally walk right into the house. An infuriated Hemingway had a brick wall six feet high built around the house.4

  Stone ruled with an iron hand; as a New Deal social engineer, he was Hemingway’s antithesis. On August 26, for example, under Stone’s plan to make Key West a unique tourist experience, tipping was banned in Key West. There were fines for anyone who disobeyed. Signs were posted in all bars, restaurants, and hotels prior to Labor Day weekend.5

  Through tourism, to Hemingway’s great dismay, the inexorable climb out of decay and despondency had begun, and the place that he called the “St. Tropez of the Poor” started to see an influx of tourists—forty thousand would arrive by the end of 1935. Hemingway’s anger at Stone was mitigated to a small degree by the Bonus Army vets who came down from the Upper Keys for recreation. Hemingway drank with them at Josie Russell’s Bar, where they sat together and admired the great mural depicting General Custer and the Battle of Little Big Horn that adorned the bar.

  Hemingway himself was a veteran. Turned down by the Army because of poor eyesight, eighteen-year-old Ernest had volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver. On July 8, 1918, while he was passing out chocolate candy, postcards, and cigarettes to Italian soldiers on the Italian front, an Austrian shell loaded with steel fragments and metal junk exploded a few feet away from Hemingway, killing one soldier, amputating the legs of another, wounding a third, and leaving Hemingway temporarily unconscious. Numerous pieces of metal had torn into his lower body, with the greatest damage to the right knee and foot. Despite the wounds, he dragged at least one of the wounded Italians to the trenches and was hit by a few machine-gun bullets along the way. In a letter to his parents he said that the bullets “felt like a sharp smack on the leg with an icy snow ball.” At the hospital they tallied the number of fragments taken out of his body, and in another letter home he said, “My wounds were now hurting like 227 little devils driving nails into the raw.”6 There was talk of amputation, but Hemingway insisted instead on removing all the fragments—scaggia—some of which he excised himself with the aid of a penknife and a swig of cognac, a procedure he would describe many times, often within earshot of reporters.7

  A young Ernest Hemingway recovering from his wounds of July 8, 1918, in the Ospedale Croce Rossa Americana in Milano. This experience would not only help shape him as a writer but give him empathy for war veterans. (Hemingway Collection/ J. F. Kennedy Library)

  He talked with the bonus vets about their shared war experiences and was inspired by them, turning them into characters who would end up in his Harry Morgan stories and in the novel To Have and Have Not. One day he came into the bar and was hailed by one of the vets who had a broken leg and had seated himself on a billiard table with a pair of crutches. The drunken vet’s diversion for the day was to call a bar patron over, engage him in conversation, and then knock him out with a swift swing of a crutch. Three unsuspecting patrons had already fallen; Hemingway, forewarned, sta
yed clear of the crutch. This and scenes like it allowed Hemingway, in the words of his biographer, Carlos Baker, to “invent one of the most effective episodes in the novel.”8

  In early February 1935 the veterans in the Florida camps got paid for the first time in many weeks. Some vets drove to Key West and Miami in private automobiles. For those left in the camps, a small army of bootleggers showed up to sell illegal rotgut whiskey for $1.50 a pint, and a group of prostitutes arrived in the Showboat. The combination was deadly; in the words of the Washington Post’s Edward T. Folliard, a “booze rampage” began as the women, clutching “chunks of FERA cash,” departed. The boozing, which lasted for about three days, was topped off by a wildcat strike in Camp 3 in Lower Matecumbe. “I have been in Port Said and that is supposed to be the toughest town on earth. I have been in the Bowery in New York and on West Madison Street in Chicago,” said Bill Bevans, a veteran who arrived in the camp on the notorious payday and was Folliard’s sole source for the story. “I have seen some pretty bad brawls, but man alive, I never saw anything like I saw down here.” Folliard, who noted that 80 percent of the men in these “transplanted bonus camps” were expelled from Washington in 1932, said what they talked about “above all else” was the bonus.

  Folliard’s story, read with special interest in New Deal Washington, failed to report on the reality of the miserable camps and the fact that the men had serious grievances, as shown in a telegram, dated January 9, 1935, that landed on Louis Howe’s desk: TWO HUNDRED VETERANS MEMBERS VETERANS REHABILITATION CAMP ONE, ISLAMORADA, FLORIDA WILL LEAVE FOR WASHINGTON UNLESS CONDITIONS ARE REMEDIED WITHIN OUR CAMP IMMEDIATELY. CONDITIONS DESPERATE. PETITION FOLLOWS WITH TWO HUNDRED SIGNATURES. SUGGEST DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE INVESTIGATE.

  The telegram was signed by four men in Camp 1. There is no record that it was answered. The strike that Folliard alluded to was called primarily to protest bad sanitary conditions, such as one water dipper in a camp for 425 men. The strike intensified when its leaders were driven out of camp for insubordination; it lasted for two weeks, and was quickly followed by another on February 22. Four new delegates were invited to meet with camp commanders to discuss sanitary conditions—and did not return. The vets believed their representatives had been arrested and “shanghaied” to Miami. On February 28 they presented a set of demands and told FERA to comply by 9:00 A.M. the next day, “or else.” FERA took those two words to mean violence and sabotage. The National Guard was brought in immediately. Guardsmen cut off all communications between camps and between veterans and reporters. Stone blamed the strikes on “Reds” and agitators from Baltimore, two of whom he was holding in a Key West jail.9 The men finally returned to work on March 4 after a weekend of leave.

  When Stone called on FERA in Washington for help, officials sent him the agency’s top troubleshooter, Captain William Hinchman, who improved sanitary conditions, got uniforms for the vets, created baseball and volleyball leagues, and allowed the vets to start their own newspaper—the Key Veteran News, the first issue of which lambasted the Washington Post for a garbled account of what really was going on in the camps.

  . . .

  Roosevelt, determined to block Patman’s 1935 version of the bonus bill, began his lobbying against it a month before it landed on his desk. It was a foregone conclusion that both houses would pass the bill. Now it was up to Roosevelt to veto it, and for a host of reasons—ranging from the issue of consistency to the strain the bonus would put on the Treasury—he wanted the veto to stick. This would not be easy. The 1934 congressional elections had brought a new wave of pro-bonus legislators. Of 108 new members of the House, 91 were in favor of the bonus.10

  An exchange of letters in mid-March between Democratic Representative E. W. Marland of Oklahoma and the president made it clear that Roosevelt had personal as well as fiscal reasons for opposing immediate payment. Marland argued that the bonus was a “long overdue debt” owed the men who had fought. During the war, he said, he had employed common laborers to dig ditches for $5 a day while providing them with food, lodging, and medical insurance. “Many of my employees enlisted, or were drafted, and went to France where they received only a fraction of the pay given common labor at home in less arduous and less hazardous occupations.”

  “You have given me a personal example,” Roosevelt responded. “Here is mine to counterbalance it: from my own home county hundreds of men and women moved to munitions factory towns in 1917. They worked in these towns, in many cases, under terrible conditions—long hours, bad sanitation, poor food. Many of them died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Many of them had their health seriously undermined for the rest of their lives. Their government is doing nothing for them or for their widows or dependents. They were patriotic men and women and there were millions of them.” Roosevelt then cited the 2.5 million vets who never went to France and lived a “healthy, disciplined outdoor life” at home, plus the 1 million who went to France but never got near the combat zones.11

  Roosevelt’s bonus position also encouraged the enmity of Huey Long, who had joined forces with Father Charles Coughlin, using the bonus as the key issue for Coughlin’s fledgling political party, the National Union for Social Justice, and as a plank in the platform of Long’s own Share the Wealth movement. The rhetoric of both men became more severe and their demands for the Patman legislation more uncompromising as the congressional vote and Roosevelt’s promised veto neared. Coughlin called payment “the just wage which they earned ten times over.”12

  On Sunday, May 12, 1935, from the pulpit, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, the highly influential pastor of the Marble Collegiate Reformed Church in Manhattan, “solemnly warned” America that “unless something is done to stop it, this country will become a dictatorship as sure as there is a law that lifts the tides. The dictator will be either Coughlin, or Long or a combination of the two.” He called Coughlin “half mad with lust for power.”13

  Later that same Sunday, Coughlin held a gigantic rally in Detroit, calling for Roosevelt to sign the Patman bonus bill in the name of his growing number of followers—the “greatest lobby the people ever established.” He said he would stage a mass meeting on May 22 in New York’s Madison Square Garden.14

  In early May, during a cruise on the presidential yacht Sequoia, Roosevelt asked Samuel Rosenman to help prepare the veto message for the bonus bill.15 The two worked on the speech on the night of May 18.16

  Roosevelt chose to deliver his veto message in person to a joint session of Congress on May 22, 1935. A personal veto to a joint session was unprecedented. The speech was nationally broadcast on the two major radio networks.

  “Two days ago,” Roosevelt said, launching into a speech fifty-five paragraphs long, “a number of gentlemen from the House of Representatives called upon me and with complete propriety presented their reasons for asking me to approve the House of Representatives bill providing for the immediate payment of adjusted service certificates. In the same spirit of courtesy I am returning this bill today to the House of Representatives.”17

  His main argument dealt with the veterans who were not disabled:

  Some veterans are on the relief rolls, though relatively not nearly so many as is the case with non-veterans. Assume, however, that such a veteran served in the United States or overseas during the war; that he came through in fine physical shape as most of them did; that he received an honorable discharge; that he is today 38 years old and in full possession of his faculties and health; that like several million other Americans he is receiving from his Government relief and assistance in one of many forms. I hold that able-bodied citizen should be accorded no treatment different from that accorded to other citizens who did not wear a uniform during the World War. . . . The veteran who is disabled owes his condition to the war. The healthy veteran who is unemployed owes his troubles to the depression.

  Finally, he said that the complete failure of the Congress to provide additional taxes for an expenditure of this magnitude would in itself and by itself alone warr
ant disapproval of this measure.18 FDR then put pen to paper and vetoed the bill on the spot.19

  That evening, 23,000 howling, booing followers of Father Coughlin packed Madison Square Garden for an attack on Roosevelt cued to the veto. Coughlin called the veto “a money changers argument” from a man who at his inauguration had promised to “drive the money changers from the temple.”20 At Coughlin’s side was James Van Zandt, national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who called for a barrage of telegrams and telephone calls to senators demanding that the veto be overturned.21

  For the fifth time since 1922, the House overrode a bonus veto by an overwhelming majority of 322 to 98. The Senate, by a vote of 54 to 40—a margin of 8 votes—sustained the veto. The bonus was dead until the next session. It was a great disappointment, especially to the many vets who had stayed out of Washington, responding to pleas from the VFW and other bonus advocates.22

  Some of Roosevelt’s strongest supporters were disappointed, especially in the wake of his earlier actions on veterans’ benefits. “My boy VOLUNTEERED for service in the world war when he was only 17 years old; was given intensive training in the aviation field, and hurried across and spent 18 months with the A.E.F. in France. We were so proud of him,” wrote Robert L. Bell, a Presbyterian minister from Tuskegee, Alabama, after the veto. “But he came back a nervous wreck, and he was granted a small pension of $20 a month, and when you went into office, you stopped that, and now you refuse to give him the bonus.” This from a man who, in the same letter, said that he had “the highest esteem and love for you.”23

  Among the people who admired him most for the veto were those with influence, power, and money. A note from polar explorer Admiral Richard Byrd commended him for his courage and added that his veto would “never be forgotten as long as the country lasts.” James R. Atk, the president of Yale University, said, “History will permanently recall the superb courage and wisdom you displayed” in staving off one of the “most pernicious measures ever” offered in response to the pressure of a “shameless lobby.”24