The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  The bill seemed ready to be reported out of the seven-man House conference committee for final compromise with the Senate conferees, assuming a majority of House conferees agreed to do so. On June 1, Representative Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, a strong supporter of the veterans’ legislation, told her constituents that by the time they read her message the bill would be “in the hands of the President.” An ally of fellow Republican Edith Nourse Rogers, Smith was clear in asserting that the bill would “help our returning veterans adjust to civilian life again and ease as far as possible the sacrifices they have made for their war service.”11*

  Smith’s optimism was unfounded, as she had not reckoned on Rankin’s ability to sway other southerners on the conference committee. He managed to keep the bill from being sent to conference by a 4–3 vote. At the same time, Americans were totally absorbed by the invasion of Europe. Everything was on hold; even baseball games were canceled. As a result, the veterans’ drama in Washington was being played offstage.12

  Rage, however, was building against Rankin. On June 6, 1944—D-Day, when American troops were landing in Normandy—a resolution was passed by a local of the United Electrical Workers in Hartford, Connecticut, signed by its president, Ernest De Maio, and sent to the White House and to members of Congress. Its final paragraph said: “Resolved, that we condemn Congressman John E. Rankin, who is an open spokesman of race superiority and anti-Semitism in the House of Representatives, as well as an enemy of the interests of the soldiers, for his anti-labor record and especially for his stand on the G.I. Bill of Rights.”13

  Days before a scheduled June 8 vote by the House committee conferees, one of their seven members, Frank Gibson of Georgia, decided to go home. He telegrammed his proxy to Rankin so that Rankin had the authority to cast Gibson’s vote as he saw fit. However, on June 7 Gibson had a change of heart and instructed Rankin to send the bill to conference, for he now favored the full bill, including the 52-20 provision. Rankin balked and said that he would not honor this new proxy vote, thus effectively deadlocking the vote 3 to 3. At that point, it looked like the bill would have to be tabled until the next session of Congress in 1945, and six months of unrelenting work would be for naught.

  Word of Rankin’s refusal to honor Gibson’s new proxy was passed by a former VFW commander in the House, Representative Pat Kearney of New York, to the American Legion’s lobbyist. The two men decided Gibson had to be found and brought back to Washington to vote by 10 A.M. the next morning, June 8. All that was known was that he was traveling somewhere in his home state. The American Legion led the manhunt. Calls went out to radio stations asking for on-air pleas to locate him. The Georgia State Police sent search cars streaking down the highways and byways. At 11 P.M., Gibson pulled into his driveway and heard the telephone ringing inside his home. When he answered he was told that a car was on its way to whisk him to Waycross, Georgia, where an Army plane was waiting to take him to Washington. The plane, however, was found to be inoperative, and a new dash began to Jacksonville, Florida, two hundred miles away. There, a commercial Eastern Airlines DC-3 was being held for his arrival. A harrowing ride in the rain got him to the plane and he landed at Washington National Airport at 6:37 A.M. At 10 A.M. he burst into the House conference room and declared: “I’m here to lick anyone who tries to hold up the GI Bill of Rights. Americans are dying in Normandy—I’m going to expose anyone who doesn’t vote for the GI Bill.”14

  Rankin and his two cohorts were forced to retreat, lest they be castigated as the only opponents of the GI Bill. The committee’s vote was now unanimous. S.1767 headed for the floor and lightning approval with the 52-20 provision intact. On June 22, 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt, putting aside his longstanding opposition to “privileges” for veterans in the face of a bill with massive popular support, attached his signature. The GI Bill of Rights became the law of the land. The event was recorded in a photograph showing Roosevelt flanked by an effervescent Rogers, and Rankin with his arms crossed.15

  At that moment, Allied troops were liberating Europe under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. One of his commanders, Lieutenant General George S. Patton, was leading his army toward the Seine. General Douglas MacArthur was planning the liberation of the Philippines. For the three generals, glory would come in World War II, and the Bonus March would be only an embarrassing, half-forgotten incident.

  Because the nation’s attention was fixed on the invasion of Europe, the passage of the GI Bill achieved only modest attention—except in the papers owned by William Randolph Hearst, the bill’s biggest editorial backer. Many in the military were slow to learn about it, as word filtered out with only negligible fanfare. Time and Newsweek each ran an underwhelming piece of a few hundred words about passage of the bill.16 As a result, historian Milton Greenberg, himself a beneficiary, notes, “To this day, World War II veterans cannot recall where, when or how they first heard of the GI Bill.”17

  Months after the GI Bill became law there were those who still saw the dark side of mass academic education. Writing in Collier’s magazine in December 1944, Hutchins predicted, “Colleges and universities will find themselves converted into educational hobo jungles. [E]ducation is not a device for coping with mass unemployment.” He warned that most Americans were not yet ready for “the education of a free man,” and he denounced the use of higher education “as a substitute for a dole or for a national program of public works.”18

  President Roosevelt signed the GI Bill on June 22, 1944, as Representative Edith Nourse Rogers looks over his shoulder. Behind the president stands Representative John Rankin with his arms crossed. (Veterans’ Administration)

  The response to Hutchins’s dismissive words was quick and angry. A man who had been medically discharged after two years in the South Pacific and who was then at Notre Dame rebutted him in the pages of Collier’s. He said Hutchins’s argument was both “disillusioning and fallacious” and suggested that the colleges as well as the vets needed rehabilitation after the war.

  In that same month, President Roosevelt received a disturbing report from the armed forces committee on post-war educational opportunities for service personnel. The committee fully endorsed the provisions of the GI Bill but worried that if too many veterans opted for education and then did not use that education to pursue productive and satisfying lives, a “terrible blight” would be put on academic institutions. The report pointed out that the forty to fifty thousand jobless university students in Germany between 1931 and 1935, along with the unemployed of the old German Imperial Army, spearheaded the rise of Hitler and the growth of the Nazi Party.19

  The war ended a little more than a year later when Japan surrendered on September 2, 1945. At first it was not clear if the GI Joes and Janes actually understood the provisions of the GI Bill. An article entitled “GIs Reject Education” in the Saturday Evening Post concluded that as beneficial as the GI Bill seemed to be in theory, it had one conspicuous drawback: “The guys aren’t buying it.” But once veterans understood what the GI Bill had to offer, they began to take advantage of the opportunity to go to school. The GI Bill paid tuition of up to five hundred dollars a year—enough to get veterans into Conant’s Harvard—along with textbooks and supplies and a stipend of fifty dollars a month; married vets got sixty-five dollars a month.

  By 1948 Conant was converted, having discovered that “the mature student body that filled our colleges in 1946 and 1947 was a delight to all who were teaching undergraduates.” Ten times more nonvets flunked out of universities than did veterans. “Vets didn’t cut classes,” James Brady, who went to school with many vets, wrote in 1996. “They did their homework, and many went home to their wives after school.” And they worked to stay in school. “I knew one tough sailor,” said Brady, “who got up at 4 every morning to clean a saloon’s toilets. He’d swept and swabbed for Uncle Sam, and now he was doing it for a college degree.”20

  A number of state universities and colleges were so overwhelmed with eager vets that
they quickly set up branches at deactivated military bases, like Fort Devens in Massachusetts and the Navy Pier in Chicago. Vets, who never in their wildest dreams envisioned a college education, gladly enrolled, willing to live once again in barracks and attend classes in makeshift classrooms. They were taught by dedicated professors and instructors—many of them vets themselves—who wanted to do their part for the ex-GIs.

  The colleges were, in fact, revitalized, as were the men in the ivory towers who had doubted the vets. In an article in Life magazine, Conant admitted that, “for seriousness, perceptiveness, steadiness, and all other undergraduate virtues,” the former soldiers and sailors were “the best in Harvard’s history.” At Columbia University in 1947, none of the 7,826 veterans in attendance was in serious academic difficulty. Such statistics were the norm on campuses across the country. Because of the GI Bill the doors of the colleges and universities were blown open for the middle and lower classes, setting the stage for the continued democratization of higher education. The number of conferred college degrees more than doubled between 1940 and 1950: the percentage of Americans with bachelor or advanced degrees grew from 4.6 percent in 1945 to 25 percent a half century later.

  By the cutoff date of July 25, 1956 (which encompassed the Korean War), 2,232,000 veterans had enrolled in college using the GI Bill. The education produced 450,000 engineers, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 22,000 dentists, and more than a million other college-trained men and women. Nearly 8 million veterans took advantage of the GI Bill, some opting for a few weeks in the 52-20 Club, then college on the GI Bill, and then a VA loan to buy a first house.

  Eleven million of the thirteen million houses built in the 1950s were financed with GI Bill loans. The GI Bill helped to create a well-educated, well-housed, new American middle class whose consumption patterns fueled the postwar economy. In Post-Capitalist Society, Peter Drucker wrote: “The GI Bill of Rights—and the enthusiastic response to it on the part of America’s veterans—signaled the shift to the knowledge society. Future historians may consider it the most important event of the 20th century.” Tom Brokaw, in his book The Greatest Generation, called it “a brilliant and enduring commitment to the nation’s future.”21 Perhaps the most stunning conclusion was made by Michael J. Bennett, the primary historian of the GI Bill, who said, “After World War I, virtually every belligerent nation other than Britain and the United States had its government overthrown by its veterans. That didn’t happen after World War II, largely because of the Marshall Plan, but there wouldn’t have been such a plan if America’s 16 million veterans—more than one fourth of the civilian work force—hadn’t successfully readjusted to civilian life thanks to the GI Bill.”

  The enduring legacy of the Bonus Army goes well beyond the GI Bill. In the years following World War I, many Americans fearfully looked across the Atlantic at what happened when Russian and German veterans manned the barricades in revolutions of the Left and the Right. The veterans of the Bonus Army taught an American lesson to those who fretted over revolution: If you have a grievance, take it to Washington, and if you want to be heard, bring a lot of people with you.

  John Henry Bartlett was there as a witness in 1932 and he saw the bonus marchers shrugging off the agitators who came from the Left and the Right, saw them peacefully petition their government—and then be driven from their capital by bayonets and tear gas. He looked beyond them and saw more: “Starvation, gaunt and hideous, was stalking over the land, and revolution was feared ready to break.” In The Bonus and the New Deal, published in 1937 while the memories were still fresh, he observed that thanks to the Bonus Army “we may have been saved from a threatened insurrection.”

  By the time the GI Bill became a reality, America was looking at a new threat. In the mid-1940s and into the 1950s, communism became as feared as revolution was in the 1930s. Americans looked back and saw more Communists in the Bonus Army than had really been there. Ex-Reds, as they were called, came forth and exaggerated their influence over the Bonus Army. Ironically, their distorted, self-serving testimony did what their frustrated efforts in 1932 could not. Though they had been unsuccessful at infiltrating the real Bonus Army, they successfully infiltrated its memory.

  American history is punctuated by moments and incidents that become prisms through which larger events are better understood—the Boston Tea Party, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the Alamo, John Brown’s Raid. The march of the Bonus Army belongs in such company. But its significance has been obscured by time, even to its direct beneficiaries—the millions of later veterans whose bonus would be the GI Bill and the benefits that have followed to the present day. And, its legacy is everlasting. The First Amendment of the Constitution grants Americans the right “to petition the government for redress of grievances.” Millions of Americans have since peacefully marched on Washington in support of various causes, their way paved by the veterans of 1932.

  *Harry S. Truman would prove him wrong when he became president on April 12, 1945.

  *In 1945, Rogers and Smith were the first women authors of an equal rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As had seven previous attempts, their effort failed.

  Acknowledgments

  We wish to thank these people and institutions for the help they gave us.

  Many of the pages of this book exist because they contain information discovered with the assistance of the skill, dedication, and wisdom of the people in that great American treasure, the Library of Congress. We wish to particularly thank the library’s Dave Kelly, Tom Mann, and Abby Yochelson for their moral support. They were our chaplains. Thanks also to David Robinson of the Rare Books staff, for helping to sort out the three periodicals all named the B.E.F. News.

  We were also given special guidance and assistance by the Historical Society of Washington, District of Columbia, and wish to especially thank Shireen L. Dodson, Barbara Franco, Susan Schreiber, Mychalene Giampaoli, Jill Connors Joyner, Gail Redmann, and Laura Schiavo.

  Special thanks go to Gretchen Howard, of Garrett Park, Maryland, who helped let us know that we were on the right track. She heard about the project and said that she was already using the story of the Bonus Army in her classroom. The Great Depression had become a dull abstraction—margin calls, bank failures, and the ubiquitous photo of that man in a slouch hat selling apples for 5¢—and therefore hard to teach. The story of the Bonus Army, coupled with old newsreel footage from the summer of 1932, with its images of tanks and teargassed war veterans driven from the streets of Washington, brought the Depression alive and gave her a chance to talk about the government’s obligation to those who serve.

  Aaron D. Jaffe did extraordinary work during the summer of 2002 when he was assigned to us as an intern on loan from the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. He made many contributions, including his painstaking research into the precise location of the two dozen Bonus Army camps in Washington during the summer of 1932.

  We thank Willie Drye, of Plymouth, North Carolina, author of the The Storm of the Century, for his generosity in sharing documentation of the Florida work camps, including the Key Veteran News and camp reports, and Jerry Wilkinson of the Upper Keys Historical Society, Islamorada, Florida, who gave up a day to show us where the tragic events of Labor Day, 1936, unfolded. Also thanks to Bill Mead for his generous contribution of books on the Florida hurricane, and Theodore F. Watts, for access to his remarkable collection of Coxey’s Army and Bonus Army memorabilia and his knowledge of the era.

  And thanks to these organizations and their people: the Association of the Oldest Inhabitants of D.C. (William N. Brown, Alex S. Coleves, the late Dr. Philip Ogilve, Sidney Hais, Nelson F. Rimensnyder, and Sherwood Smith); Boston Public Library (Aaron Schmidt); Bridgeport, Connecticut, Historical Society and Bridgeport Public Library (Mary K. Witkowski and Roseanne Mansfield); Burns Times-Herald, Burns, Oregon (Pauline Braymen, managing editor); Cleveland Public Library (Margaret Baughman, Amy Dawson); Federal Highway Administration (Richard Weingroff
); Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library (Raymond Teichman and Karen Anson); General Douglas MacArthur Foundation, Norfolk, Virginia (James W. Zobel, Edward J. Boone, Jr.); Helen Wadley Library, Islamorada Library, Florida (Jim Clupper); Herbert Hoover Presidential Library (Brad Bauer, Jim Detlefsen, Spencer Howard, Matt Schaefer, and Lynn Smith).

  Historic Preservation Office, Government of the District of Columbia (Nancy Kassner); John F. Kennedy Presidential Library (Allan B. Goodrich, James B. Hill, and James Roth); Margaret Chase Smith Library, Skowhegan, Maine (Angela N. Stockwell); Martin Luther King Library, Washingtoniana Division (Faye Haskins, Susan Malbin); Massachusetts National Guard Military Museum and Archives (Colonel Leonid Kondratiuk, U.S. Army [Ret.]); Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, D.C. (Sergeant Nicholas Breul); National Archives (Larry MacDonald, Heather Saffer, Kate Snodgrass, John Taylor, John Vernon, and Mitchell Yockelson); National Park Service (Frank T. Faragasso and Mike Ryan); Portland, Oregon, Archives (Diana Banning, Brian Johnson); Portland Tribune (Joseph Gallivan).

  Sinclair Lewis Society (Sally E. Perry); U.S. Army Armor School Research Library, Fort Knox, Kentucky (Lorraine M. Allen); Veterans Administration (Daniel C. Devine and Susan C. McHugh); Veteran’s Administration Library (Cindy Rock, Joyce Zarrommahad); Wisconsin Historical Society (Nancy Mulhern); U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York (Sheila Biles); University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Special Collections, Powell Library (Charlotte B. Brown and Dennis Bitterlich).

  We would like to thank the following individuals who supported us in our attempts to get grants for the project. Not all of these attempts met with success, but it is with deepest appreciation that we name those who wrote recommendations on our behalf: William Allen of the National Geographic Magazine; former secretary of defense William S. Cohen; Donald M. Goldstein of the University of Pittsburgh; Dave Kelly of the Library of Congress; Joe Miller of the University of Virginia; Peter Gibbon of Harvard University and Boston University; Carol Schwalbe of Arizona State University; and John Vernon of the National Archives.