by Paul Dickson
Rogers, at this point in her career, had become the epitome of toughness and determination. Her already solid reputation had begun to soar on December 13, 1932, when a deranged man entered the chamber of the House of Representatives with a loaded revolver and demanded the right to speak. While most Representatives rushed to the cloakrooms or dove underneath their desks, Rogers and Representative Melvin Maas of Minnesota calmly approached the man and got him to drop his gun. Police later found sticks of dynamite in his rented room. The two representatives were nominated for the Congressional Medal by those who ran for cover.15
Hearings on the Florida hurricane disaster were finally called on March 27, 1936, by the House Committee on World War Veterans’ Legislation, convening under the guise of an effort to provide additional aid to widows and children of the victims and survivors. In reality, the committee’s action amounted to an attempt by the Democratic majority to tidy up a mess that would not go away. The aid that the committee was supposed to be discussing was nothing more than a proposal to give the Florida vets and their families the same legal status as that already given to the younger men in the CCC and their dependents.
Chairing the committee was Mississippi Democrat John Elliott Rankin, a fifty-four-year-old veteran of the Great War, an economic liberal, and an ardent supporter of the New Deal who simultaneously and proudly championed states’ rights and white supremacy. Though mild in appearance, Rankin had a reputation as a fire-eater and resembled Wright Patman, one of the fourteen Democrats on the committee, in his fierce determination never to give political ground without a fight. The minority chair was Rogers, one of six Republicans on the committee. Her strongest ally was the lone socialist Harry Sauthoff, a member of the Progressive Party from Wisconsin.
The hearings dragged on for more than six weeks. Twenty-three witnesses were called. Rogers, trying to show that the hearings were a “whitewash,” hounded witnesses and tussled with Rankin and Patman—southern men not accustomed to tangling with a steel-willed, plainspoken Yankee Republican woman. As loyal Democrats, Rankin and Patman held steadily to the “act of God” position, often interrupting Rogers or invoking a “point of order” when she asked a question that deviated from the New Deal script. Their favorite trick was to answer for the witness whenever Rogers asked a tough question.
When Rogers tried to ask Ivan R. Tannehill, assistant chief of the Forecasting Service of the Weather Bureau at the time of the disaster, if, with his knowledge of hurricanes and the Keys, he would have selected Islamorada as a place to send the veterans for rehabilitation, Rankin invoked a point of order to stop the asking of “irrelevant questions.” He also accused her of embarrassing the witness. “He looks like he is able to take care of himself,” she replied.
Chairman Rankin said, “Yes, but the chairman of this committee is able to enforce the rules of the House. Confine yourself to the rules of the House.”16
When Rogers really pressed on a matter of fact, as she did with Aubrey Williams, the author of the “act of God” claim, Rankin interrupted to say that while the Republicans drove these men out with bayonets in 1932, the Democrats came along and gave them jobs in Florida. Rogers did not fall for his baited hook, responding: “I am trying to get the information, and I think you are also, Mr. Chairman.”17
At the very end of the hearings, Colonel John Thomas Taylor, the American Legion’s chief lobbyist, attempted to present copies of its “Murder at Matecumbe” report and to have the report entered into the record. Rankin recoiled, saying, “We could not accept conclusions drawn from another investigation such as we have conducted here.” Patman told Taylor to leave copies of the report for the committee to examine. Rankin quickly added, “Of course we are not saying that we will put it into the record.” Realizing that the introduction of the damaging report was a lost cause, Rogers asked that some of the American Legion witnesses be called before the committee. Rankin told her that this would only postpone action on the compensation bill. When she moved to call an American Legion witness, Rankin refused to bring the motion to a vote. The hearings were closed.
A few weeks later, as the final report of the committee was made public, Rankin again insisted there was no blame to be assigned for the men’s death. Rogers fired back with her own report, which asserted that “many blunders were made.”
On June 1, 1936, the bill for relief for the hurricane victims came to a vote. Rogers rose to say that she was in favor of the bill, but that the men had died through “gross negligence.” Rankin protested and asked all present to read the report of the committee. Rogers came back for one last round, saying that she would be delighted if the membership of the House read the hearings, because they had “whitewash” written all over them. She accused Rankin of refusing to call key witnesses and of keeping out of the record anything that suggested a contradiction of the administration’s three-thousand-word “act of God” conclusion. Two members of the committee—Harry Sauthoff and Charles F. Risk, a Rhode Island Republican and veteran—supported Rogers. Risk noted that Rankin had shamelessly manipulated the rules to keep the record clean of anything he did not want to hear.
Rogers wanted to establish government culpability so that the victims of the hurricane would be treated as disabled veterans and awarded the status of service-connected disability. The government, she argued, realized that it was its responsibility to get the men out safely and in time. “These responsibilities were not carried out efficiently enough to save these men from death and others from an experience that will constantly affect already shattered nervous systems and bodies,” she said. “To place them on the same basis as young boys in the C.C.C. camps is pitifully inadequate. It is ridiculous—it is a direct evasion of accepting responsibility—part of the whitewash so evident all through these hearings.”18
The relief bill passed. Rogers finally got the Kennamer report a few days later, but the matter was, for all intents and purposes, closed. Questions of guilt or innocence would be left open. Material that could have answered these questions has either disappeared over the years or was not preserved to begin with.*
For reasons never made clear, neither the Abt nor the Kennamer report was ever “leaked” or read into the Congressional Record. Nor was the fact made public that the primary recommendation of the American Legion report was that a congressional investigation be ordered “to fix the blame, if any, on the party or parties responsible for the loss of life.”
The man who knew the most about the matter was VA Investigator David W. Kennamer, who was brought on for a moment to verify the authenticity of a set of phone records but never identified as the author of the major study of the hurricane. Nor was his report alluded to during the hearings—but a copy was given to Rankin, who had exchanged several political favors with Roosevelt and was on FDR’s reelection campaign committee. Rogers did not learn about the report until the hearings were almost over, when she demanded a copy from VA Administrator Hines. Referred to Rankin, she was finally allowed to see a copy after the hearings were over.
What Rogers probably knew but could not say for fear of having the hearings closed by Rankin was that John Abt, who had been assigned to work with Rankin, was helping to engineer a whitewash based on his investigation, a secret that was not fully revealed until 1993, when Abt’s autobiography was posthumously published. His report was written for and structured to meet Rankin’s needs. Abt, a Communist, disliked Rankin and described him as one of the “worst reactionaries” in Congress. “But he was a Democrat with a political stake in the administration,” Abt recalled, “so he and I teamed up as allies to exonerate the government, in an episode of my life I look back on without pride.” He added that the best report filed on the hurricane was the one written by Ernest Hemingway.19
The original Abt report, which had disappeared without a trace, finally resurfaced in 2001 in papers held by Ray Shelton’s daughter and was revealed to author Willie Drye after publication of the first edition of his book Storm of the Century.20 The Kenn
amer report was kept from public view until sometime in the late 1980s, when it mysteriously surfaced after an earlier request by a writer was denied.
For a moment in the days before and just after payment, the press was given a holiday from the hard-luck stories of the Depression in favor of happier, more uplifting fare. For instance, three days before the bonus was paid, it was announced that the Washington Veterans Home at 2626 Pennsylvania Avenue in the District of Columbia would close its doors at the very moment of payment. The building was razed a few weeks later.
The home had been founded in an abandoned house in the winter of 1932 when J. J. Queally, an Episcopal minister working with the poor, stumbled on a pack of 150 homeless men living on food from garbage cans. They turned out to be veterans of the Bonus Army. In the four years since it was founded, the home had sheltered and fed more than 14,000 veterans. Under the stewardship of “Mother Steed”—Mrs. J. Nathaniel Steed, a woman who had run a canteen for soldiers in France during the Great War—and an elected board of five veterans, it provided a place where veterans could deal with poverty and depression without resorting to the streets and panhandling. Many of the men used the home as a base from which they operated until they found work. The home raised money and aided penniless veterans being discharged from veterans’ hospitals, giving them a meal, a night’s lodging, and a ticket home. For her part, Mother Steed fought with the Veterans Administration for money and went to court to defend any of her charges who got into trouble with the law.21
On June 12, as the Reverend Queally delivered a tearful farewell to a group of veterans, a dog named “Bonus” lolled by his feet. One of the vets had saved it from a nearby canal. Remarkably few Washingtonians knew of this mission, which had worked quietly and without publicity. In fact, its closing ceremony marked the first time its operation was described in the newspapers.22
Employees of the Veterans Administration, the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Postal Service worked overtime to prepare bonus packets for 3,518,000 veterans, with an ultimate cash value of more than $1.9 billion. Distribution of the packets to regional and local post offices began at the U.S. Post Office headquarters in Washington at midnight on June 15. Through announcements in newspapers and on radio, veterans were told to be at home on June 16 so that they would be able to sign for the registered mail handed to them by their postmen. Each vet got an application to be filled out and taken to the local post office, where “certification officers,” after checking identification, handed over a receipt. This was converted into a U.S. Treasury check the vet could then cash at a bank or any other place that would take a government check.23
An army of postal workers leaving the main Manhattan post office at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-third Street with the first shipment of bonus bonds. (Authors’ collection)
Veteran Alfred W. Hyadd of Allston, Massachusetts, received his bonus bonds at the Chelsea Naval Hospital on June 15, 1936, eighteen years after the end of the war. (Boston Traveler Collection/ Boston Public Library)
The process worked at amazing speed. Many vets who met the postman at the door on Tuesday, June 16, had cash in their hands by Thursday. “They’re really DOUGHboys today!” the Bridgeport Post exulted on June 17, 1936, in its report on the postmen’s delivery of nearly 3,500 bonus packets. Next day, the Post reported that the city’s vets had cashed in $545,400 in checks. Like vets in other cities hard hit by the Depression, many Bridgeport bonus recipients said they would immediately spend the money to pay bills. Some said they would be buying clothes for their children. An oysterman said he would buy replacements for the tattered sails on his boat. Bridgeport banks reported scant increases in savings accounts; the cash bonus was going into cash registers. And a city official, echoing similar decisions by other cash-strapped cities and towns, said that relief aid would cease immediately for the families of bonus recipients.24
Throughout the nation, nearly half of the bonus bonds were cashed within two weeks after June 16. In a veteran’s family with a typical Depression annual income of $1,400 to $1,600, the bonus meant an overnight 30 percent in-crease in income. For the nation, the two-week June infusion of cash equaled nearly 1 percent of the gross national product.25
The promised boost to local economies was huge—more than $40 million in the Washington, D.C., area alone—and merchants anticipated a boomlet of spending, a “bonus rush.”26 The process was not without ironies and provocative sidebars. In early February the New York Times carried a small piece entitled “Sing Sing Convicts to Get $50,000 from War Bonus.”27
The payment of the bonus occasioned a moment of self-indulgence for some. “I’ve never had more than three suits of underwear in my life. Now I want twenty of ’em,” an unidentified veteran told a reporter as he made a frontal attack on a haberdashery shop in southern California on bonus day.
Because so many of the veterans had borrowed against the value of the certificates, the average payment was $583, with a maximum of $1,585—but this was a lot for veterans who reported they could weather the next few years on as little as $30 a month.
One of the quirks of the payment was that any of the BEF men shipped home from Washington at government expense in 1932 were charged for their trips. On average, the lien was minimal—$15—but 5,160 were shown to have accepted a free ride home (or taken the ticket and sold it), and some, according to a VA source in Chicago, were taking the news of the deduction badly.28 But they were in the minority. To the vast majority, the bonus was, as many called it, manna from heaven. Payment of the bonus produced, in the words of the Literary Digest, “varied episodes of comedy, pathos, adventure, romance and a smattering of tragedy.” The Digest also said that the staff of a veterans’ hospital in Chicago reported an overnight recovery of patients who got out of their sickbeds on payment day.29
It was a gaudy ending to the long battle for payment, and the newspapers and magazines stumbled over one another to find stories laced with irony and unintended consequences—men left their wives, while others bought engagement rings; some saved their bonus, and others lost it immediately to goldbrick schemes promising instant wealth. But for most the bonus was a moment of short-lived prosperity. John Alferi, the man who had accosted the president in 1935, drew $756.32—enough to buy three suits of clothing, two pairs of shoes, and several days of fishing and swimming in Long Beach, California. He also paid off a number of debts.30
John Taylor, senior archivist at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, today remembers how excited his uncles were in anticipation of the bonus in 1936. “They were going to buy cars. Years later, I met someone who sold cars after the bonus was paid. He said he hadn’t been able to sell any for a long time.” Taylor remembered that one of his uncles bought a car for $12. “In those days five cents was hard to come by.”31 The Oliver twins who had boxed at Camp Marks recall that their father came home displaying $100 bills—they think there were eight of them—fanned out like a poker hand. It was more money than they or any of their friends had ever seen before.32
In the District of Columbia, the very men who had been forced to deal with the bonus marches of 1932–34 were in line for their own bonuses. More than a thousand public employees got paid, led by 222 members of the Metropolitan Police Force, a fact that went a long way toward explaining the respect that the vets and the police had for one another, dating back to the days of Pelham Glassford.33
The least reported story of the bonus payment in the mainstream press was its effect on black veterans who received substantial amounts of cash. The economic “disaster” predicted by Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the Treasury sixteen years earlier did not occur. And there was a boom in recorded blues songs—more than a dozen of them, including several cautionary songs, such as one by Amos Easton entitled “When I Get My Money (I Mean That Bonus).” The song opens as he hears that the veto has been overridden. Then it moves into the chorus:
When I get my bonus, I ain’t gonna throw it away,
I’m gonna save some to l
ive on, workin’ hard won’t pay.
Maybe I’ll go to the tavern, and drink a little beer,
I’m gonna buy Myrtle a souvineer.
Ain’t gonna pitch no parties, and pay the whole bill,
Thought I’d buy me a V-8 Ford, don’t believe I will.34
Easton, who performed under the name of Bumble Bee Slim, was too young to be a veteran, but like a dozen other performers, he knew a good subject when he saw one. The Myrtle in the song is his pianist, Myrtle Jenkins, and the allusion to the Ford V-8 is to the car dealer who put an ad in the African-American newspaper Chicago Defender with photos of the Ford V-8 and the Lincoln Zephyr and the come-on: “Ex-soldiers! Special bonus blanks properly filled out by experts. Notary service free. Get your new Ford V-8.”35
For those blacks and whites on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, the bonus offered the chance to move up a rung or two. For others, it was something as simple as a bus or train ticket. “My parents divorced when I was two years old and I never saw my father again until after the Veteran’s bonus was given out in 1936,” recalls Helen Barron Shupik of Bridgeport, Connecticut, today. “He sent the money to me for a trip to his home and, so, I took the bus from Fayettesville, Arkansas, to Lexington, Missouri. I will always have a fond spot in my heart for the Veteran’s Bonus of 1936.”36
In the months following payment, Father Coughlin and his National Union for Social Justice, now claiming to be 9 million in strength, made a run for the White House, as Coughlin intensified his attacks on the president, calling him “Franklin Double-Crossing Roosevelt” and a liar and betrayer. With Huey Long dead and the bonus paid, Coughlin decided not to run, even though he was the union’s most popular leader. Instead he offered William Lemke, an obscure member of Congress from North Dakota, as its presidential candidate. The ticket garnered 2 percent of the popular vote. A week after the election Coughlin announced that the party was “thoroughly discredited” and that he was “withdrawing from all radio activity in the best interests of all people.”37