The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  “Saw more dead than I’d seen in one place since the lower Piave in June of 1918,” he later wrote in a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins: “Max, you can’t imagine it, two women, naked, tossed up into trees by the water, swollen and stinking, their breasts as big as balloons, flies between their legs.” He recognized them as the two women who ran a sandwich place and filling station three miles from the ferry. “We located sixty-nine bodies where no one had been able to get in. Indian Key absolutely swept clean, not a blade of grass, and over the high center of it were scattered live conchs that came in with the sea, craw fish, and dead morays. The whole bottom of the sea blew over it.”

  Hemingway then took aim at those he thought responsible.

  “Harry Hopkins and Roosevelt who sent those poor bonus march guys down there to get rid of them got rid of them all right. Now they say they should all be buried in Arlington and no bodies to be burned or buried on the spot which meant trying to carry stuff that came apart blown so tight that they burst when you lifted them, rotten, running, putrid, decomposed, absolutely impossible to embalm, carry them out six, eight miles to a boat, on the boat for ten to twenty more to put them into boxes and the whole thing stinking to make you vomit—enroute to Arlington.”

  The recovery of corpses at Islamorada. This image, hitherto unpublished, was taken by Ernest Hemingway and was discovered with a small collection of hurricane snapshots in the Hemingway holdings at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. (Hemingway Collection/ J. F. Kennedy Library)

  When Hemingway returned to Key West on Thursday, a request was waiting for him from Joe North of the New Masses, an organ of American communism, to “do a piece for us.” North said in his assignment telegram, “We had dispatches up North here several days before the storm broke that the vets were to be moved out in sufficient time. Next thing we read most of them were wiped out. And ironically, it was only a few weeks ago that some people were beefing about these vets living on Easy Street—they were being bribed to stay away from Washington, to keep out of a threatening Bonus March, which would hurt FDR’s chance of re-election. [He was apparently referring to that suggestion, raised in one of Charles McLean’s Times articles.] Well, the hurricane did the job as well as Herbie Hoover did at Anacostia Flats a few years ago.”46

  Hemingway agreed and wrote a tough, heavily emotional piece, filed a few days later. “Things were too bad to write about,” he wrote to his friend Sara Murphy. “It was as bad as the war.”47

  Hemingway had left by the time serial cremations began. On Saturday, September 7, a priest, a rabbi, and a minister conducted back-to-back burial services on the banks of Snake Creek. After soldiers fired a volley and a Salvation Army trumpeter began playing taps, a man with a grimy face and callused hands stepped forward and set fire to the thirty-six pine boxes containing the remains of bloated, decomposing bodies. Elsewhere in the Upper Keys, other fires were set now and in the hours to come, so that at the end of the day all the recovered bodies that had not been shipped away for burial in Miami were reduced to ashes. New fires would be set for days, as more bodies were recovered. Reporters and cameramen leaving the disaster scene that night had to burn their clothes to get rid of the stench.

  On Sunday, September 8, the remains of the 112 vets shipped out of Matecumbe were buried quietly and with no public participation, at Miami’s Woodlawn Cemetery. Many of those being buried, and most of those burned in the previous twenty-four hours, were John Does, defying immediate identification because the sand had blasted away their fingerprints and other identifying characteristics.48 There was neither enough time nor money to bury the men in coffins, so wooden crates were used. There was only one flag, used to momentarily drape each box.

  At sundown 20,000 people gathered for the promised “ceremony with full military honors” in Miami’s Riverfront Park, the site where an attempt had been made on Roosevelt’s life three years earlier, to pay final tribute to the dead veterans—327 was the official number missing at this point. Navy planes flying overhead dropped rose petals. Representing Roosevelt was Colonel Ijams. The army detachment present was headed by Major General George Van Horn Moseley, whose private opinion of these men was that they were nothing more than “village bums.” Abt wrote to his mother the morning after the service, despairing of the bickering among the Red Cross, VA, FERA, the governor, the sheriff, and the National Guard as to who was in charge of what. There was a fight between the American Legion and VFW as to who should go first in honoring the victims at the service. There were more “be-medaled generals, admirals, legionnaires, boy scouts, and other uniforms than were ever assembled on a battlefield.” Two survivors tried to get into the services, but as Abt related it in a P.S. to his letter, they had “drowned the memory of the disaster in liquor” and were thrown out by the police.

  While the ceremonies were taking place in Miami, Huey Long died from wounds received when he was gunned down as he walked into the capitol building in Baton Rouge for a special meeting of the state legislature. Among the many things on the evening’s agenda was a bill to gerrymander the district of one of Long’s political enemies, Judge Benjamin Pavy. Pavy’s son-in-law, Dr. Carl Weiss, a Baton Rouge physician, shot Long once at close range in the abdomen. As he stumbled down the corridor, Weiss was killed by the senator’s bodyguards in a hail of bullets. Long was rushed to Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium, where he whispered, “I wonder why he shot me.” Long died two days later.*49

  The report of FERA assistant administrator Aubrey Williams was also given to the president on this eventful Sunday—a “preliminary report,” created in a little more than twenty-four hours. Written by Abt, it exonerated FERA and thus the Roosevelt administration. Williams, sitting on a bed in a room he shared with Abt in the McAllister Hotel, called Hyde Park and read it to Roosevelt, then turned the report over to a stenographer. The report concluded that the disaster was beyond any “human factors” and that there was neither negligence nor mistaken judgment at work. The principal killer was said to be an unpredictable “tidal wave” estimated at eighteen feet.†

  The conclusion, rendered after sixteen interviews—not one of which was with a surviving vet—determined that the weather advisories did not suggest an evacuation before 1:30 P.M. on Monday and that the men in charge “had a right to assume” that the train they ordered at 2:00 P.M. would arrive in ample time to pick up the men waiting at the Islamorada station. The last line of the fourteen-page report stated, “To our mind the catastrophe must be characterized ‘as an act of God’ and was by its very nature beyond the power of man or instruments at his disposal to foresee sufficiently far enough in advance to permit the taking of adequate precautions capable of preventing the death and desolation which occurred.”50

  But warnings had been given, and they had saved lives. A few days after the hurricane, twenty members of a picnic party on Indian Key, warned by a message block dropped in their midst, came to the Coast Guard Air Station to thank the men for saving their lives. All those on Indian Key had immediately departed, with the exception of two men who refused to be alarmed by the message. The storm swept Indian Key bare of vegetation, and the two men were lost.

  The full three-thousand-word “act of God” report was released officially to the press the next day; many newspapers carried the full text. From this point forward, the administration and its allies held steadfastly to this defense, no matter who suggested otherwise. To Abt’s “amazement and chagrin,” the report that he thought was intended for Roosevelt alone lost the qualifier “preliminary.” It became the final word.51

  The report itself created an immediate backlash, much of it stemming from its glib and quick dismissal of blame. The ministers of Miami may have been the first to react, alleging that the only people interviewed were the officials in charge of the camps and that the final report was “incomplete, misleading and untrue to facts.”52 Roosevelt’s political advisers were becoming uneasier by the hour, as they read editorials, such as one in the
Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, which commented that “in the still unsettled question of why the evacuation of the veterans was delayed, there was the possibility of a national scandal.” The Miami Herald predicted that the government’s failure to protect the vets “may become a vital issue in next year’s presidential election” and the Akron Beacon Journal titled its editorial on the morning after release of the Williams and Ijams report “Who Sent Them There?” The editorial said there were possible “political repercussions from the tragic experiment equal to those which blasted the Hoover campaign following the ghastly eviction of the bonus marchers from Pennsylvania Av. and Anacostia in 1932.” The Akron editorial also said that demand was “sweeping the nation” for a real investigation.53 The head of the VFW, James E. Van Zandt, called on Roosevelt to reject the report, labeling it “a whitewash as wide as the breadth of the combined white crosses that cover America’s heroic dead buried in France.”54

  On September 10 came the first demand from Congress to the White House for an investigation. The demand produced a “joint” investigation by John Abt, representing FERA, and by the VA. The fieldwork was led by a crack investigator named David Kennamer who immediately contacted Abt. However, Abt said he was reluctant to work with Kennamer and insisted that it would be a “terrible mistake” to go back to the original witnesses for more information. The first man Kennamer interviewed was the Islamorada postmaster, John A. Russell, who said unequivocally that “those in charge of the camps” were responsible for the veterans’ deaths because there was ample evidence that they should be moved out as early as Sunday.55 At about this time Abt returned to Florida to gather information for an exculpatory report, which would be used to defend the administration.

  While Kennamer was developing his investigation, the September 17 issue of New Masses appeared with a scathing report on the disaster by Ernest Hemingway—an on-the-spot description of the hurricane horror that would become a classic in reporting history. Hemingway had titled the piece “Panic,” but, unknown to him, it was retitled by North, the editor, “Who Killed the Vets?” On the eve of the article’s publication, North wrote to Hemingway to tell him how thrilled he was with the final copy and noted the article’s relevance: “Everybody still remembers Anacostia Flats, and it’s near election time.” North noted that reports were appearing that the bodies of the vets had been burned en masse, a development he saw as “chock full of dynamite, so symbolic of the plow-under program of Washington.”* He understood that some of “the boys down Florida” were saying, “Hoover burned the vets out of Anacostia; Roosevelt drowns them.”56 North added that New Masses was trying to give the vets a hand in their fight for the bonus, and if we can “get them moving nationally as a result of the Key West exposure it will be a good thing.”

  Writing one of the angriest pieces he ever composed, Hemingway opened the article with these words: “Whom did they annoy and to whom was their possible presence a political danger? Who sent them down to the Florida Keys and left them there in hurricane months? Who is responsible for their deaths?”57 He then noted that wealthy people, yachtsmen, “fishermen such as President Hoover and President Roosevelt, do not come to the Florida Keys in hurricane months. Hurricane months are August, September and October, and in those months you see no yachts along the Keys. You do not see them because yacht owners know there would be great danger, unescapable danger, to their property if a storm should come.”58

  While he did not accuse Roosevelt of killing the vets, that was his clear implication. “I hope he reads this,” he wrote toward the end of the article, “—and how does he feel? He will die too, himself, perhaps even without a hurricane warning, but maybe it will be an easy death, that’s the best you get, so that you don’t have to hang onto something until you can’t hang on, until your fingers won’t hold on, and it is dark.” His finale was pure rage: “I would like to make whoever sent them there carry one out through the mangroves, or turn one over that lay in the sun along the fill, or tie five together so they won’t float out, or smell that smell you thought you’d never smell again, with luck when rich bastards make a war. . . . Who left you there? And what’s the punishment for manslaughter now?”59

  For Hemingway, the New Masses article was a free pass from the Left and the reformers. Lincoln Steffens in the Pacific Weekly said that Hemingway now was writing for “the real people of the real publications.”60 The mainstream media, including Time and Newsweek, admired his indignation. The New York Daily News, on the other hand, was far less tolerant, calling Hemingway an unusually able writer who in their opinion had gone “nuts” in this instance: “Mr. Hemingway doesn’t say so in so many words, but he leaves the clear inference that the democratic party in general and President Roosevelt and James A. Farley in particular murdered the veterans when the latest hurricane raked the Keys. This seems to us about the limit in the line of ridiculous accusations, but we haven’t heard nothing yet.” The News said that the gist of Hemingway’s argument was that FDR was negligent in his inability to predict the landfall of a hurricane. “Hurricanes are twisty and erratic things. We do think the President ought to be excused exactly in advance: ought to be excused even by Reds who are sore because the President didn’t leave a bunch of poor vets roosting outside Washington as raw material for the Reds to work on.”61

  North was pleased with the News editorial, which he saw as evidence of the beginning of a New Deal “whitewash.” He sent it to Hemingway in a telegram asking for more on the subject. Hemingway, who had objected to the changed title of his New Masses article, fired back a message to North saying that the title “Who Murdered the Vets?” laid North open to the kind of editorial run by the News: HAVE NEVER ANSWERED ATTACKS ON ME WHETHER IN NEW MASSES, NEW REPUBLIC OR DAILY NEWS. STOP. MEN ARE DEAD NOW AND MORE WRITING BY ME WON’T BRING THEM ALIVE. STOP.

  When the death toll was tallied, it was below an early estimate by Hemingway of 700 to 1,000; the toll would settle in at over 400 bodies found (408 is the number used to this day by the National Hurricane Service). Recovered veterans amounted to 259, with as many as 10 more who were never identified.62 As late as 1965 construction workers dredging a rock quarry pulled in an automobile with 1935 plates and five skeletons inside.63

  For his part, Hemingway revealed a rare side of himself when he wrote the New Masses piece. “It showed plainly that the Keys had become ingrained in his system,” son and biographer Gregory H. Hemingway later observed. “He had become part of them literally and figuratively. The hurricane disaster made such an impression on him that, although he had become the acknowledged master of controlled prose, for once he dropped his literary guard.”64

  The questions posed by Hemingway were echoed elsewhere. A letter to FERA from West Palm Beach promised that the people of South Florida would not drop the issue “until the persons clearly guilty of criminal negligence or incompetency, or both, be brought to account before the bar of justice as well as held up to the public as the criminals they are.”65

  The anger was palpable at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in New Orleans on September 17, the issue date of the magazine containing Hemingway’s article. One of the speakers, Smedley D. Butler told the VFW delegates to forget about the presidential race, which Roosevelt would win, but stick to the bonus and the truth of Florida deaths. Butler felt that Washington had decided that it was “a damned clever scheme” to gather the veterans every night from the streets of Washington to be sent to Florida to be drowned.

  Butler, who shared the platform with Patman and Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia—the man bidding to wear Long’s robes—demanded a full investigation of the Florida deaths: “Find out why they were sent down there; why they were not treated like civilians; why their bodies were burned.”

  The “Florida business,” as Butler called it, helped embolden veterans to make themselves heard as loudly as possible on the bonus, which was now being paid to the wives and families of the men who perished in the hurricane. Patman followed with a pre
diction that the bonus would pass in January and the vets would have their money “in a short time thereafter.”66

  The next morning, eight more families became eligible for posthumous payment as eleven more bodies—eight veterans and three civilians—were retrieved from mudflats twenty-six miles north of Islamorada. One of the men found here had still been alive when washed ashore. It was not a good day. A group of about a hundred “negro workers,” sent to help with the recovery of the dead by the Florida Emergency Relief Administration, were dismissed for staging a “mutiny” over complaints about mosquitoes that settled over them at night. The commander of the Florida National Guard appointed a panel to hold hearings on charges of general misconduct. Neither the mutiny nor the charges against the guardsmen amounted to anything. But the fact that they were made in the first place underscored the confusion, anger, and frustration that were rampant.67

  The White House stood firm as leaders of the American Legion announced at its annual convention that it would conduct its own investigation, which began on October 12 in Key West under the direction of Major Quimby Melton, editor and publisher of the Griffin (Ga.) Daily News.

  Washington was caught by surprise when individual veterans and smaller veterans’ groups decided to launch their own investigations and then feed their findings to the American Legion team. On the first day of the Legion hearings, a survivor of Camp 3 from New York told about the trucks that sat idle when they could have been used to save lives. George D. Kennedy, a meteorologist-observer from Key West, said that he had called and warned the second in command of the camps, “It looks pretty bad,” fifteen hours before the storm hit.68

  On October 14, the American Legion panel, meeting in Miami, took the testimony of A. J. Wheeler, adjutant of the Miami Spanish-American War Veterans post. He said that he had conducted his own investigation and determined that “the officers deserted when the storm approached and left the men to their fate.” He also said that the “lost” evacuation train “had steam up” on Sunday afternoon, the day before the storm, but had to wait a full day before official authority to move was granted. Paul Pugh, who was injured in the storm, testified from his hospital bed that Ray Shelton, the FERA official in charge of the three low-lying oceanfront camps, looked up from a card game on the night before the hurricane struck and said, “There is nothing to worry about.”