The Bonus Army
Page 29
With the issue now dead, Patman and some others, including Van Zandt, tinkered with the wording of a new bill, planning to reintroduce it at the opening of the Seventy-fourth Congress in January 1936. The growing fear among New Deal stalwarts was that FDR’s control over Congress was waning after the free ride of the First Hundred Days, of which it has been said, Congress “did not so much debate the bills . . . as salute them as they went sailing by.”
Official Washington, convinced that the issue was dead for another year, was shocked to wake up on the morning of June 27 to find a thousand veterans under the leadership of Royal Robertson, the charismatic Californian, rallying in a vacant lot on Pennsylvania Avenue, at the site of the 1932 clash. “How the group slipped into Washington without attracting attention was something of a mystery,” said the New York Times in an article headlined “New Bonus ‘March’ Surprises Capital.” The Wall Street Journal said the men were in place “before any officials were aware that another bonus march was on.”25
As early as January, in fact, Robertson had announced he was recruiting men for a new Bonus Army. He suggested that the vets avail themselves of the federal transient camps—now proliferating and well spaced along railroad lines—to house them on their way to Washington in June. Unlike other groups, this one, representing the poorest of the poor, wanted the bonus to be paid to veterans who were not paying income taxes. It called itself the Needy Veterans Bonus Association.26 Since no “needy veteran” bonus bill was introduced in Congress, many of Robertson’s followers drifted away.27 Many chose to accept a free one-way ticket to the rehab camps in Florida or South Carolina.28
Then, three weeks later, on July 17, Representative Hamilton Fish Jr. of New York, who had just submitted a new bill to pay the bonus out of a recent $4 billion New Deal public works appropriation, invited Robertson and his remaining followers to a rally on the steps of the Capitol. They were denied a permit to demonstrate, so the two hundred or so bonus seekers went to a site near where Hushka and Carlson were killed. On July 28, the third anniversary of the 1932 expulsion, about two hundred old soldiers marched across the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetery to lay wreaths at the graves of their two slain comrades.
There would be much more wreath-laying in the weeks and months ahead.
A few days after the Arlington ceremony, the New York Times sent reporter Charles McLean to the South Carolina camps to write a serial exposé of the “war veterans’ heaven” that the Roosevelt administration was alleged to have created in the fear that another “‘Hoover bonus march’ might descend on Washington.” The articles, published over the course of the second week in August, said that the veterans were living in buildings that “surpass in comfort” the housing for the Regular Army. The men were “shell-shocked, whiskey-shocked and depression-shocked.” A great proportion of the men— “perhaps 45 percent”—were “psychopathic cases and the local police report they have had to take a great number of them into custody.”
Another article described how veterans in Blaney, South Carolina, were building “an old fashioned swimming hole” with all the trimmings. The last article, headlined “200 Veterans Build FERA Golf Course for Golfless Town,” told of a project—“one of the strangest of New Deal undertakings”—using two hundred veterans to build a golf course for the town of Kingstree, which McLean described as a town of three thousand, “half of whom are negroes.” Nothing in the article reflected the headline, except for the implication that the town’s racial composition made golf there unlikely. This article also suggested that the men were disturbing the town and that twenty of them had wrecked the floor of a county jail after being arrested for drunkenness.29
Four days after the last article, the Times ran a headline, “Veterans’ Camps to Be Abandoned,” along with a line of self-congratulation: “The announcement as to the veterans’ camps followed publication in the New York Times of a series of articles revealing their existence and describing conditions in them.”30
The White House and FERA, in the person of Harry Hopkins, told the Times to announce to its readers that 3,500 people in veterans camps as well as 75,000 in the transient camps would be abandoned by the first of November, and the able-bodied would be sent to CCC camps or work-relief jobs. And what about the estimated 10 percent who would not accept the CCC or work-relief ? the Times asked.
“They are not our funeral,” Hopkins replied.
Just as the Washington Post report was refuted in the Key Veteran News, so the Times series was brought to task, this time by F. E. Simpson, representing all of the men in the Kingstree Camp. Simpson charged that McLean was so debauched on moonshine that he was not able to correctly report. The truth of this allegation will never be known, but it was clear that the rebuttal suggested that McLean had his eyes shut to the reality of the situation: the men working on the golf course were removing tree stumps by hand without the benefit of heavy equipment or dynamite (a point made in the Key Veteran News before the McLean article). Simpson invited McLean to return: “Come out to the golf course you wrote of but never saw. Grab a shovel and dig up a four-foot pine stump under a blazing South Carolina sun so you may learn how a veteran earns his dollar per day graft you spoke of. Then go home and write us a story—a story that will be inspired by your blistered hands and aching back.”31
The August 26 issue of Time magazine called the camps “playgrounds for derelicts” and upped the percentage of psychopaths from the Times’s 45 percent to a full half. By then 4,274 veterans had been sent to southern camps, including 2,724 to Florida. Now, no matter what the vets said or did, their true story would not be heard in Washington. But Albert C. Keith, editor of the Key Veteran News, launched a counteroffensive. He sent ten copies of his newspaper and a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, warning that the closing of the camps would be a “death sentence” for many of the men. To release them in November into winter, he said, would do nothing more than add to the relief rolls. He ended by inviting the First Lady to visit the Islamorada camps.32
Friday, August 30, 1935, was payday for the Keys veterans and the beginning of the long Labor Day weekend. Many took their money and headed for the watering holes of Key West, including Sloppy Joe’s Bar, the Happy Days Club, and the Bermuda Café, all of which advertised in the Key Veteran News.33 Others took off for Miami, where their baseball team would be playing its first road game on the Monday holiday.34 This was also the day that the Miami Herald gave the public the first word of a tropical storm off the Bahama Islands, bringing warnings from the Weather Bureau. Northeast storm warnings were displayed from Miami to Fort Pierce as the storm moved closer.
Saturday afternoon, Ernest Hemingway finished working on a short story, mixed himself a drink, and gazed at the evening paper, the Key West Citizen. He saw that the storm, still called a “tropical disturbance,” was now east of Long Island in the Bahamas and headed toward the Keys. He consulted a chart showing the paths of forty September hurricanes and concluded that this new storm could hit the Keys as early as Labor Day.
At 10:00 A.M. on Sunday, September 1, the Coast Guard station at Dinner Key near Miami received a weather forecast warning of “increasing N.E. winds probably reaching gale force over extreme south portion, and possibly of Hurricane force in the Florida Straits, tonight or Monday, with heavy Squalls in the Florida Straits.” The Coast Guard put a seaplane in the air with message blocks—blocks of buoyant wood with a long colorful streamer, a warning message, and a reminder to “pass this information on to other vessels in your vicinity.” The blocks were dropped near small boats without radio communications. The Coast Guard was also concerned about getting the warning to isolated Labor Day picnic parties on the Keys. The pilot made several trips, and when he ran out of blocks, he used paraffin-coated ice cream cartons with tape tails about two feet long. The pilot decided not to drop messages on the veterans’ camps; he did not want to frighten the vets, and he assumed that those in charge had the situation under control. It was a faulty assumption.35
When high winds finally hit Key West, Hemingway went out to check the Pilar, spent most of the night at the dock, and returned home as the winds abated. Having personally lost no more than a few trees and large branches, Hemingway was relieved; the worst of the hurricane had missed Key West.
The small hurricane, forty miles in diameter, with an eye only eight miles long, moved slowly, veering from a predicted course that would have taken it to Havana to one directed at the Florida Keys. In the forty hours it took it to travel from Andros Island in the Bahamas to its Matecumbe landfall, the winds had risen from 75 miles per hour to more than 200 miles per hour— the strongest recorded hurricane ever to hit the United States. The barometer reading it produced, 26.35 inches, was the lowest ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.37 The gusts were estimated at speeds as high as 250 miles an hour—enough to turn granules of sand into tiny missiles that blasted flesh from human faces and sanded fingerprints from human hands.
The southern end of Matecumbe Key, with the remains of the ferry that linked the forty-mile gap in the Key West Highway. Veterans’ Camp 3 is at the top of the picture. (American Red Cross)
At dawn on Labor Day, the vets remaining at Islamorada were looking forward to a day off. Many of them—perhaps 60 to 70 percent—were drunk before dusk. Some would still be drinking when the roof of the tavern blew off.38
Officials in charge of the camps knew the Keys were vulnerable to hurricanes, but as the storm strengthened, they ignored Coast Guard warnings. Because it was a holiday weekend, the work-camp trucks that might have carried the veterans north to safety were locked up. Instead of ordering a special train from Miami to evacuate the veterans early on, camp supervisors waited until they knew for certain that the hurricane would strike the Upper Keys. When Ray Shelton, assistant director of the camps and that weekend the man in charge, finally called for a train—a request passed through his superior, Fred Grant, in Jacksonville—it was too late. The train, ordered at around 2:00 P.M., was supposed to get to Matecumbe by 5:30. But a crew had to be mustered, so the train did not leave until 4:25. It reached Homestead, twenty-eight miles south of Miami, at 5:15. There it took fifteen minutes to switch the locomotive to the back of the train so that it could back south and go forward on its return trip through expected heavy weather. A thick cable that had fallen across the tracks ensnared the train for an hour and twenty minutes.
The full strength of the hurricane came ashore as the train arrived at Islamorada, shortly after 8:00 P.M. The wind and water was of such strength—two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds and an eighteen-foot storm surge—that it tossed all of the coaches and boxcars across the ground near the tracks like toys scattered by a petulant child. The only thing left standing was the locomotive, rendered useless when the surge reached five feet above the tracks and put out the fire in the firebox.
For every survivor there was a dramatic story. Local resident and store owner R. W. Craig and two friends watched as the store was leveled, then ran for cover, dug themselves in under railroad ties at a site fourteen feet above sea level, and hung on to the metal tracks as four tidal waves passed over them. The hours Craig spent alone—he could not see his two pals—turned into a “horrible, pain throbbing nightmare. Shivering there in the dark, holding on for dear life, alternatively praying and sobbing.” He said he understood how people can lose their minds in killer storms. “And,” he added, “as if such terror were not enough, hundreds of ugly crabs had descended upon us. While we clung fast to the vibrating steel, not daring to let go even momentarily to brush them off, the big-clawed creatures crawled over us from head to foot. They sought the protection of and warmth of our bodies, apparently, and the smaller ones worked their way inside our clothing, next to the skin.”39
First view of the relief train blown off the tracks by the Labor Day hurricane, September 2, 1935— photographed on Wednesday morning. (American Red Cross)
At first, the rest of the world knew nothing of the disaster. In Miami, by Monday evening, as the weather cleared, people congratulated one another: they were not going to get a hurricane after all. The day following the hurricane, the New York papers mentioned a “disturbance” in the vicinity of the Keys, while the Washington Post reported that the hurricane had caused only “minor damage” in Florida.
“When dawn broke,” wrote a witness named Oliver Griswold, “crushed and dying survivors, some gibbering, some stern-faced and dumb-tongued, saw the incredible horror of bodies lying in windrows, bodies rolling midst sunken boats, bodies hanging from trees, bodies protruding from the sand. Some had no clothes, save belts and shoes, and no skin. They had been literally sand-blasted to death.” Griswold’s vision of horror would be repeated by those of many other survivors, the accounts differing in detail but not in intensity, in the days and weeks ahead.
In the hours following the disaster, the Keys were cut off from the rest of the nation. The tracks of the Florida East Coast Railroad were either destroyed or unusable. The winds were so high all day Tuesday that planes could not fly. Late in the day a few boats got through to evacuate the able-bodied and injured, who told their rescuers of the horrors they were leaving behind.
The White House, in retreat in Hyde Park, got the first word from the governor of Florida late on Tuesday that there had been a disaster in the Keys. The president fired back a notice at 10:45 that night: ARMY AND NAVY ORDERED TO RENDER ALL POSSIBLE AID AND RED CROSS ALREADY AT WORK.40
On Wednesday morning, the first plane flew over the Upper Keys and came back with a report of the extent of the devastation and an idea of where boats should be dispatched to evacuate the living. By nightfall all the living, save for a few local residents who chose to stay, had been evacuated by an ad hoc armada of Coast Guard, pleasure, and fishing boats. On Thursday, crews including boys from a nearby CCC camp, FERA relief workers, Boy Scouts, and members of the Florida National Guard were sent in to remove the dead, and by Thursday night they had recovered 110 bodies, which were brought to Miami, where they would be placed into wooden coffins lined with metal. An additional 500 men were sent in Friday, so that 800 people were searching for bodies on Friday.
Outrage was growing over what had happened, particularly to the vets. On Wednesday the president received the first of many communications demanding investigations. The first telegram was from the secretary of the Miami Chamber of Commerce, demanding to know why there was a delay in “attempting to take the veterans from the Keys.”41*
Graphic images, such as this widely circulated depiction of dead veterans being dragged behind a car, fueled the anger of veterans’ groups. (Upper Keys Historical Society, Islamorada, Florida)
Veterans in government charge had died horribly. Pressure was quickly building for some kind of explanation. Harry Hopkins, director of the Work Projects Administration, which encompassed FERA, and FDR’s closest adviser, was the first to offer an explanation, stating to the Associated Press that advisories from the U.S. Weather Bureau had not been clear about the danger to the Keys. But, as Weather Bureau officials pointed out, the advisories had been accurate enough to allow others who took them seriously to safely avoid the hurricane. The retired chief of the Florida Weather Bureau sent President Roosevelt a telegram calling the Hopkins charge a “discreditable libel” on the bureau and asserted that the warnings were “timely, intelligent, definite.”42
On Friday, Hopkins sent Aubrey W. Williams, his top assis
tant, to Florida to conduct an investigation. He told reporters that Williams was going to specifically find out why the train was not sent in time and why the men had not been evacuated to begin with. Accompanying him as deputy was Colonel George E. Ijams, assistant administrator of veterans’ affairs in the Veterans Administration. The men immediately toured the disaster area by plane and then began a series of interviews. Aiding them was John J. Abt, assistant general counsel to the Works Progress Administration, assigned to FERA, who was brought as Williams’s assistant. Abt had no illusions about why they were in Florida. “We were on a political mission to defend the administration against charges of negligence,” he later wrote.43
Meanwhile, the president, who at first had wanted the men buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors, became convinced on Thursday by those on the spot that decomposition was taking place at such an accelerated rate that this option was out of the question. An alternative plan was adopted: a mass burial in Miami on Sunday, September 8, of those bodies that had already been recovered and shipped to Miami, followed later in the day by a public ceremony with full military honors. The rest of the bodies still being found would either be cremated in Matecumbe or buried in plain pine boxes where they were found.44
Ernest Hemingway rushed to the ghastly scene by boat from his home in Key West on September 4 to find that the Long Key fishing camp was completely destroyed, as were all the settlements on both Upper and Lower Matecumbe. One of the first bodies he spotted was that of Joe Lowe, whom he identified as “the original of the Rummy in that story of mine ‘One Trip Across.’”45