The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  At 9:00 A.M. on March 29, 1937, with the Matecumbe span rebuilt, the road connecting the Keys was finally opened. The railroad was never restored to service. The remains of the old bridge were sold to the State Highway Department, which used materials from the wreckage to extend Route 1 to Key West. Drivers riding on the road today are riding on the railbed. All that remains of the veterans’ work are three finished bridge piers and several unfinished ones, which can be seen on the Gulf of Mexico side of the bridge. Jerry Wilkinson of the Upper Keys Historical Society says that it is easy to identify the three piers because they look “like three gray coffins setting on the bay water.” Wilkinson also points to a small key near the piers, formed as the vets dumped rock and debris. Now covered with vegetation, it is called Veterans’ Key.

  The odyssey of the Bonus Army ended on November 14, 1937, with the dedication of a memorial crypt just off Route 1, in Islamorada. It contained bones and ashes of what was, by the best estimates at the time, 189 hurricane victims, 128 of them veterans not interred. Depicted in relief in native stone is the tidal surge that did so much damage and the crypt itself, designed and executed by artists of the Works Progress Administration. A WPA symphony orchestra was brought in to play the overture to Verdi’s Aïda. A telegram from the president was read, and a nine-year-old survivor pulled the string to unveil the monument.38

  A few days before, President Roosevelt had warned that a “state of international anarchy” had been unleashed upon the world. Japan had invaded China, and U.S. gunboats were evacuating American diplomats from Nanking. One of the gunboats, the Panay, would be sunk on December 12. Adolf Hitler was already on the march. He had taken the Rhineland in defiance of the League of Nations. Italy had invaded Ethiopia. Another war was on the horizon. In that war, the memory of the long struggle of the Bonus Army would stir Americans, who wondered how the nation would treat a new generation of veterans. This time, those who marched off to war would come home to a new kind of bonus, won by a struggle they did not have to repeat.

  *When six Army pilots were killed within a week while carrying airmail, Rogers insisted that pilots were dying because they were not prepared for such work. When the practice was not stopped, she said the administration was guilty of murder and that more deaths “will be written in blood across the Record of this administration.” She made this accusation four days before alleging the “reign of terror.” Boston Sunday Globe, February 24, 1934.

  *The files containing the administrative records of the committee—letters, memos, and other documents— were sealed at the National Archives for fifty years. But the files were found empty, save for a copy of the bill itself, when we put in a request for them on February 21, 2002. What this means is that all of the collateral material collected by the committee and alluded to in the hearings—including a copy of the American Legion report and Abt’s report—was destroyed or removed.

  Epilogue

  The GI Bill

  Legacy of the Bonus Army

  THE 1936 BONUS had been paid only a few years before millions of Americans began to enter the military for a new world war. Initially, little thought was given to how the veterans of World War II would be treated when they returned to civilian life. But soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s declaration of war, legislation was introduced in Congress to provide benefits for the men and women in the military. More proposed laws were offered with great regularity, commonly framed in terms of a cash payout or loans.

  At the end of November 1943, with 11 million Americans in uniform, an advertisement sponsored by the Milwaukee Journal appeared in the Washington Post, fifteen other newspapers, and Newsweek magazine. It asked, “Is This His Reward?” and featured a picture of a sad-looking GI with a food tray from a soup kitchen. “This time,” the text said, “let’s not have any ‘Soldier Boy’ apple vendors . . . no more veterans’ bread lines . . . no more bonus armies.” At the bottom of the ad, in boldface, it proclaimed, “The power to act lies in Washington. It is up to you and your neighbors to create in your communities a demand for action.”1

  The article offered two free books—They Can’t Eat Medals and Wounded Soldiers Come Home . . . What Then?—based on a long series of articles that began in the summer of 1943. These were written by a veteran reporter named Frank Sinclair, a regimental sergeant major in World War I who had founded an AEF newspaper called the Cro. Sinclair filed story after story arguing for “wise and sympathetic treatment” for the veterans who would soon be coming home by the millions. The Journal took out ads in all the major newspapers, offering the free booklets and giving blanket permission to reprint Sinclair’s articles. Copies of the books—there would be four in all—were sent to every member of Congress and anyone else in a position to make policy. Hundreds of thousands were mailed to citizens.

  In July, when Sinclair filed his first article 21,828 American servicemen had been wounded and 16,696 killed, 31,579 were missing, and 21,541 were prisoners. Sinclair asked what was going to happen as those numbers climbed into the hundreds of thousands or millions. His first concern were the wounded, but he argued for college and vocational training for all veterans, Social Security credit for time in service, help in getting work, and unemployment insurance for those who could not get jobs. Sinclair warned that the nation faced gigantic problems when the war was won. Advances in medicine—such as penicillin and sulfa drugs, blood plasma and field x-ray machines—would mean more recoveries from wounds, but more powerful forms of destruction would mean that more men would be coming home with permanent disabilities.

  For those needing rehabilitation, Sinclair reported that Washington had “unwound a new mess of red tape.” It took months to determine if the veterans were deserving of such aid. A disability could qualify only if it was service-connected and “in the line of duty,” despite an earlier promise that all men coming back would be given the treatment they needed. Under new rules uncovered by Sinclair, it would be the responsibility of the state to help those whose disabilities had not come “in the line of duty.” The Veterans Administration was taking three to four months to make a judgment, months when veterans were out of work and without income.

  Some of the returning vets, in desperation, grabbed at any job. Men with severe disabilities turned to public relief, the Red Cross, and other charities to survive. Between May 1 and July 31, 1943, in Milwaukee alone, of the 538 disabled men who returned, only 6 had unambiguous battle injuries (two had lost both legs). All the others had to have their cases adjudicated in Washington. Asked why the process was so slow, Fred Hines, still the head of the VA, said that it would take an additional ten thousand adjudicators to increase the speed.2

  Sinclair backed up his numbers with real people, including those he met in a former exclusive girls’ school in Forest Glen, Maryland, which had been converted to a hospital and rehab center for amputees. There he met Jimmy, a Coast Guardsman who had enlisted from a CCC camp. During the invasion of North Africa in November 1942, he had been shot and fallen overboard. He was taken prisoner, had his arm amputated at the shoulder, was repatriated, and was being fitted for a prosthetic arm at Forest Glen. He told Sinclair that all he needed now was a trade so that he could get work.

  Sinclair probed the VA system and found it lacking. One-third of the doctors employed as civilians in VA hospitals had left to join the Army and the Navy, so there were not enough doctors for the two thousand new cases entering the system each month. Military hospitals were already so full that men still in need of rehabilitation were being transferred to the understaffed VA hospitals.

  In the fall of 1943 Sinclair filed a story from Washington on early moves to create a World War II bonus—although most legislators were loath to use that term. Chairman Rankin of the House Committee on World War Veterans’ Legislation had worked hard and successfully to get the base pay of servicemen and servicewomen raised so there would be no need to compensate them for the discrepancy with civilian pay, the source of discontent that had
inspired the World War I bonus. Rankin wanted to prevent a repeat of history. “It took us thirteen years to get that award for the veterans of World War I,” he told Sinclair. “That fight so hurt the veterans that no veteran of the last war had been president and very few of them have been governors.”*3

  Following the lead of Canada, Roosevelt and many members of Congress favored a flat separation fee for all those leaving service so that they would not have to rely on charity. The powerful National Association of Manufacturers, an opponent of the World War I bonus, favored a plan to give each veteran up to $550 in bonus money—called “separation pay”—in six monthly payments, plus allowances for family and $100 for civilian clothing. The American Legion advocated a hands-off policy in the matter of a bonus, leaving the issue up to the veterans themselves when the war was over.

  But some legislators were already thinking that no kind of bonus would be enough. Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, who had been proposing rehabilitation bills since February 1942, argued for college training, for the disabled at least, and eventually for all who wanted it. At this point, all that Roosevelt was advocating was a year’s free tuition.

  Representative Lawrence H. Smith, a Wisconsin Republican, sponsored a bill to provide up to four years of free college or vocational education for all veterans. Smith was spurred by his own experience: his college education had been interrupted by World War I; he went to France as a first lieutenant, was wounded, and returned as a disabled vet with a wife and child. “Had it not been for the state of Wisconsin, which paid my way through college as a veteran, I may never have been able to realize my life’s ambition to become a lawyer,” he told Sinclair.

  Smith’s vision was clear: a million veterans would pour into the colleges, keeping themselves out of the labor market for a year or more while the economy converted from war to peacetime. Many of the colleges would be overloaded, but former military bases could be converted to campuses. The cost would be enormous, but Smith said it would be regarded as an element of national defense—staving off depression and the need for massive public welfare while creating a new leadership class in America.4

  At the end of 1943 there were 243 bills on veterans’ legislation pending before Congress. They ranged from a proposal to give a flat $60 for everyone on discharge (exactly the same amount as in 1919) to schemes allowing vets to buy homes or farms at low interest rates. For his part President Roosevelt, in a Fireside Chat to the nation on July 28, 1943, cleared away any memories of his opposition to veterans’ benefits. Veterans of this war, he said, “must not be demobilized into an environment of inflation and unemployment, to a place on a bread line or on a corner selling apples. . . . We must this time, have plans ready.”

  Beneath all of this was the very real fear that the nation would pay for lack of a comprehensive plan to help veterans by facing a much larger and more hostile version of the Bonus Army. Representative Hamilton Fish Jr., now a political foe of Roosevelt, agreed that veterans could not “come home and sell apples as they did after the last war, because if that is all they are offered, I believe we would have chaotic and revolutionary conditions in America.” There was also fear for the economy. The Department of Labor forecast up to 15 million unemployed once the war ended, triggering the possibility that the nation might slide back into a depression.

  Proposals were shuffled and sorted and finally refashioned by a group at the American Legion into what would become one of the most important—and most generous—pieces of social legislation in American history. The catalyst at work was a survey conducted by Commander Warren H. Atherton on the status of disabled men and women who had returned after two years of war. It showed a “highly unsatisfactory” pattern of neglect and bureaucratic red tape. He had collected the records of 1,536 disabled vets who had been forced to wait from three to eleven months before they could get care or compensation. Many had to rely on charity while they were being processed. Atherton warned of “the wrath of eleven million veterans after this war” if something was not done.5

  The information from this survey was fed to a number of newspapers, and the Hearst chain picked up where Sinclair had left off, assigning three reporters to the job of reporting the stories of some of those 1,536 veterans. One of the vets was Marine Bill Smith, who in 1943 came back from Guadalcanal—the Japanese-held island invaded in August 1942—to a nation ill prepared to care for him. A Japanese grenade had destroyed part of his brain and left him partially paralyzed. Released from a military hospital and handed an honorable discharge, Smith suddenly was left without pay, and his mother had no monthly allotment check. At that time there was no mustering-out pay. There were benefits to be had—disability compensation of $100 a month, free hospitalization, and vocational training—but there was no one to help him through the maze of paperwork needed to get those benefits. When the paperwork was finally submitted, it took four months to process. While Smith and his mother waited, they lived on the charity of friends.6

  A special committee of the American Legion met in Washington on December 15, 1943. In five weeks, a rough version of veterans’ legislation was drafted by Henry Colmery, an Army Air Service flying instructor during World War I and the Legion’s national commander in 1936. That draft, written in longhand by Colmery on Mayflower Hotel stationery, laid the groundwork for the eventual legislation, which provided six benefits: education and training; loan guaranty for a home, farm, or business; unemployment pay of $20 a week for up to fifty-two weeks; job-finding assistance; top priority for building materials for VA hospitals; military review of dishonorable discharges. First known as the American Legion Omnibus Bill, it quickly became known as the GI Bill of Rights.7

  The legislation was opposed by leaders of America’s educational elite because they feared that the hordes of former GIs would harm academia. Powerful southern politicians did not like the idea of several million African-American vets being given $20 a week as they made the transition from military to civilian life.

  From the outset, Rankin treated certain provisions of the pending legislation as a frontal assault on white supremacy and the so-called two-tier economic system in Mississippi and in much of the old South. Under this system, black workers were paid the lowest possible wages and this, in turn, was used to keep the wages of the poor, white working class in check. So Rankin declared his own war on the equal unemployment provision of the bill, known as the “52-20 Club,” which would give each veteran twenty dollars a week for a year while he was looking for work or applying to school. Rankin said it would create “tremendous inducement to certain elements to try to get unemployment compensation.” It would, he insisted, encourage fifty thousand black servicemen from Mississippi to “remain unemployed for at least a year.”

  Edith Nourse Rogers immediately began hammering away at Rankin’s intransigence, asking for a “moratorium on procrastination” and demanding that Congress “pass the GI bill now.” By then, she noted, there were more than a million World War II veterans and for them “adequate assistance can mean the difference between a life of usefulness and one of misfortune and hopelessness.”8

  The Senate bill, S.1767, passed on March 24, 1944, by a 50 to 0 vote and was sent to the House, where Rankin continued to bottle it up in committee. When he finally allowed the bill to reach the House floor on May 18, it no longer contained the 52-20 provision, and passed 387 to 0.

  Now the Senate and House versions needed to be reconciled on several levels by a joint Senate-House conference committee consisting of seven members from each body. Rankin, a member of the House group, termed the bill “explosive” and “half-baked.” He declared that the conference committee was not going to be stampeded into getting it to the floor for a vote. The GI Bill stalled in committee once more.

  Rankin was saddled with the label “G.I. Enemy No. 1” in The Nation magazine, which said that his “animosity toward the Negro is calculated to deprive all soldiers of unemployment protection and thus insure
a large supply of labor at distress wages in the event of a post-war depression.” Rankin’s delay of the GI Bill on racial grounds, The Nation said, was “a rancorous expression of all that is most vicious in our national life.”9 The American Legion’s national commander called a press conference to let Rankin know that his organization would fight him down to the level of “every voter in the country.”

  While Rankin had his roadblock in place, educators got a chance to express their doubts about the wisdom of putting these men and women, with their overwhelmingly working-class backgrounds, into the ivy-clad towers of academia. “No man can fight in a war without being changed by that experience,” wrote Professor Willard Waller of Columbia University. “Veterans come home, but they come home angry.”10 Other objections from the educational community came from the heads of two of the nation’s most prestigious universities, Harvard and the University of Chicago. James B. Conant, president of Harvard, lamented that the GI Bill failed “to distinguish between those who can profit most from advanced education and those who cannot.” He said he feared that “we may find the least capable among the war generation . . . flooding the facilities for advanced education.” Robert M. Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, was also an opponent of the legislation, which he called a “threat to American education.”

  Conant, Hutchins, and others working to maintain the status quo at the elite schools, wanted a system by which the government gave money directly to the colleges and universities, which then would select a new elite based on their own criteria. (Conant, for example, referred to the brightest matriculating students as those who were there because of heredity and IQ.) After weeks of wrangling over the educational provision of the bill, what prevailed was a system of vouchers, which gave the individual the right to select his or her own education.