The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  Scholars Lucy G. Barber of California State Archives, Jennifer D. Keene of the University of Redlands, and Donald Lisio of Coe College were most gracious in sharing their vast knowledge respectively of marches on Washington, of World War I, and of the Bonus Army. Joy Spalding put her scholarly knowledge of the history of Portland, Oregon, to work on our behalf. Sylvia Smith of the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette combed the archives of her paper for coverage of the Bonus Army. Gail Wight of Stanford University, Edie Allen of Duke, and Jim Witte of Clemson unearthed key documents, including an elusive thesis that took months to locate. Betsy Barnett and Susan Beal contributed research time, and Andrew Dickson, who led us to their friend Cielo Marie Dorado Lutino, worked to unearth the Red files in Portland. We thank fellow writer Bob Skole for his help in sorting through the papers of Edith Nourse Rogers and Ernest Hemingway.

  To tell this story, from the beginning we sought interviews with living eyewitnesses. We found them, too. “Slug Flyweights” Nick and Joe Oliver, brought to our attention by their sister Joan Hrutkay of Scenery Hill, Pennsylvania, were seven-year-old boys when they spent the summer of 1932 at the Bonus Army’s major encampment in Anacostia.

  James G. Banks and Charles P. Greene were young men living in Anacostia in 1932, with vivid memories of that summer so long ago, and we thank them for their time. Then there is Naaman Seigle, who was in the wrong place and still retains some of his original anger over being gassed. John Taylor recalled the impact of the bonus payment in 1936, as did Ned Dolan of Garrett Park, Maryland, and Mrs. Rudolph A. Shupik of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

  One of our happiest finds was the diary of a man known as Steve Murray, whose remarkable account has been preserved as a previously unseen record. His daughter and son-in-law, Madeline and Bill Linebarrier of Asheboro, North Carolina, graciously invited us to their home, gave us a photocopy of Steve’s diary, and told us about his life beyond the Bonus Army.

  Book and memorabilia dealers who helped us locate treasures include Laurent Brocard, Craig Cassidy, Penny Daly, Jim Ludlum, Jim Mance, and Jack Waugamann.

  Then there are the fellow writers and old and new friends who helped us in many ways, including their valuable suggestions for this book: Frank Dorsey, Paul Edlund, Joseph C. Goulden, Dana Hardacker, Charles D. Hartman, Bill Hickman, Jack Kujawski, Norman Polmar, Bob Shogan, Jim Srodes, Bob Stock, Joe Thompson, and Dan Moldea, who put the two of us together for this project at one of his writers’ dinners. Members of both the Dickson and Allen families helped the cause in many ways, including bed-and-breakfast accommodations.

  Finally we would like to give special thanks to Bob Uth and Glenn Marcus, for their belief that we could bring this story to the small screen; to Gail Ross, for making that deal happen; and to Cary Winfrey of the Smithsonian magazine, who gave us a platform to debut our version of the epic of Bonus Army. Our deep thanks to agent Jonathan Dolger, who has had faith in this book from the beginning, and to everybody at Walker & Company, starting with Jackie Johnson and George Gibson, and including Marlene Tungseth, copy editor Miranda Ottewell, and Linda Johns and Chris Converse for the Web site.

  The first edition of The Bonus Army, published on February 1, 2005, immediately began rekindling memories that were passed on to us. In the process we have also been given greater insight into many characters in the book through relatives and associates of the dramatis personae. Walter W. Waters’s great-grandson, Walter Leinoner, met us for breakfast in Seattle, where he lives today. The son of Herbert Benjamin, Ernst Benjamin, identified himself at a book signing and paid us the ultimate compliment: that we were among the few writers to get his father “right.” Pelham Glassford’s great-grandson, Bruce Christy, an artist and motorcyclist, and granddaughter, Lynne Glassford Christie, shared thoughts on his positive influence on the family both as an artist and a man whose legacy included unyielding commitment to racial tolerance.

  A number of individuals, all elderly, told us of the effect of the bonus on themselves and their families. Aris Yanibas stood at the end of a lecture on the Bonus Army at the Pritzker Military Library in Chicago and told of his father being paid the bonus and having enough money to return to Greece and bring back a wife from his native village. Yanibas was born a year later—a true bonus baby. Jim McKenna told us over lunch at the National Press Club of his severe illness as a young child growing up in a blighted area of Pittsburgh. The bonus gave his parents the money for his medical treatment and a recuperation period in Florida.

  Lois Holloway wrote to tell us that “the large man holding a club” in the photo on page 169 was her grandfather. “Standing on either side of my grandfather,” she wrote, “are my then twelve-year-old father and his fourteen-year-old brother. My grandfather, grandmother, and their seven children were early members of ‘Camp Camden.’”

  The book, she said, “has particular meaning for my family” because it showed that the Bonus March had not been communist-inspired, a false accusation that had always plagued family memories. “One direct and somewhat ironic repercussion of the Bonus March,” she said, “was that my grandfather marched my father into a Merchant Marine recruiting center when he turned seventeen, because he did not want Dad to serve in ‘MacArthur’s Army.’ As a consequence, Dad did not benefit from the GI Bill of Rights.”

  Ronald Hinton, an emeritus member of the Stanford University faculty, knew Herbert Hoover and remembered how the expulsion of the Bonus Army had changed Hoover. He was “deeply embittered” and withdrawn because he “bore the brunt of the blame.” The Bonus Army, Hinton said, showed that General Douglas MacArthur and George Patton were responsible for the rough handling of the marchers, not Hoover. But Hoover had to live with the blame. “When he became president,” Hinton said, “Stanford had given him a great sendoff. When he returned to Stanford after his presidency, the general hatred pursued him. He was the butt of crude jokes. . . . Instead of passing his last years at his beloved Stanford, he withdrew to his family hometown” in Iowa. “I was appointed to the Stanford faculty in 1941, and I believe I am the last member of the Stanford community to have known him personally. His bitterness was evident.”

  Appendix A

  The Long Shadow of

  the Bonus Army

  1932–Present: The Pet Rabbit, the White Stallion, and Other Myths

  The Bonus March inspired many myths, which began to circulate immediately after the veterans’ expulsion in 1932 and continue to this day. The earliest myth—“Two babies died of tear gas”—emerged from the shock of events on July 28. A baby did die that day, but not from tear gas. Some contemporary accounts of the July 28 events put the number of injured as high as 100—a figure that included all caught up in the melee: spectators, veterans, and their families. “More than 100 were killed, including two infants,” stated a New York Times review of the book Don’t Know Much About History in 1990.1 That figure apparently became the basis for this summary published in a newspaper in 1992: “Before MacArthur’s troops disengaged, more than 100 BEF campers had been injured or killed. Among them were two infants suffocated by gas and a 7-year-old boy who was stabbed by a bayonet while looking for his pet rabbit.”2 Then came “more than 100 casualties, including two babies who died of gas inhalation.”3

  The pet rabbit report was traced back to Johnstown, where veterans, still in shock, told their stories to Pennsylvania Health Department interviewers, who did not attempt to verify them. The interviewers were also told that two boys were fatally bayoneted.4 There is no record showing that either of these reports is true. Nor is it true, as was often alleged, that General MacArthur rode a white stallion into the fray, although he may have posed with a horse to oblige photographers, according to one reporter. Rumors persisted of courts-martial for soldiers and Marines who refused to take part in the expulsion. There is no record of any such actions.

  There is no eyewitness report of shots actually being fired by soldiers on July 28. But a version of that myth came to life in July 1949, when former First Lady Eleanor Roos
evelt, writing in McCall’s magazine, said: “I shall never forget my feeling of horror when I realized that the Army had actually been ordered to fire on the veterans.” In her erroneous recollection, she did not say any shots were fired. But Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley demanded an opportunity to respond, creating what historian Roger Daniels called “a key document in the conservative myth of the bonus march.”5

  Mrs. Roosevelt’s statements, Hurley said, “do a grave injustice to former President Hoover and General MacArthur.” He went on to say, “The Democratic National Committee, as well as the Soviet Comintern* declined to accept as true facts pertaining to the marchers’ riot.” Claiming that “Communists had gained control of the bonus marchers,” he noted as proof that the biggest camp was named “Camp Marx,” as if in homage to the author of Das Kapital. In fact it was named Camp Marks, in honor of a police officer who encouraged the vets to stay in Anacostia.6

  1932–1935: At the Movies

  Another form of myth came via the movies. One of them, the 1933 film Gabriel Over the White House, has lasted far beyond the 1930s. It was repeatedly screened in 2004 by both American Movie Classics and Turner Movie Classics, giving another generation a sense of how the Bonus Army touched American society.

  Gabriel Over the White House, a fantasy based on the reality of the Depression, reveals Americans’ undercurrent fear of revolution. In the film, newly elected President Judson Hammond, played by Walter Huston, at first dismisses widespread unemployment and racketeering as “local problems” (a phrase that President Hoover used). Then President Hammond, in a coma after an automobile accident, is miraculously revived. With what seems to be divine help (Angel Gabriel), he begins to lead America out of the Depression. Congress balks at his plans, so President Hammond dissolves Congress and becomes a dictator. When his secretary of war wants to send in troops to stop a protest march, Hammond refuses and, after visiting the marchers, announces the formation of a federal “army of construction” that amazingly presaged President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Dictator Hammond ends Prohibition and, in a crackdown on gangsters, has some executed by firing squads. To show his commitment to world disarmament, he blows up two battleships.

  William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers supported the bonus, was a major financial backer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio that produced the movie. Hearst, without screen credit, wrote some of President Hammond’s speeches. A scene in which Hammond is shot at while in a car was changed because of the actual assassination attempt on President-elect Roosevelt on February 16, 1933.7

  In this movie, and in others directly or indirectly mentioning the Bonus Army, some moviemakers used the veterans as a subject and Camp Marks as a set. In the film of Washington Merry-Go-Round, the burning of the camp at Anacostia is used as an element in the plot. On June 7, 1933, a movie opened nationwide entitled Gold Diggers of 1933, which featured Joan Blondell in a split skirt leaning against a lamppost singing Al Dubin’s torchy “Remember My Forgotten Man” as an exultant parade of World War I soldiers was transformed into a despairing breadline:

  Remember my forgotten man,

  You put a rifle in his hand.

  You sent him far away,

  You shouted hip hooray,

  But look at him today.

  The movie ends with a huge Busby Berkeley production number, vividly parading hundreds of “forgotten men” across the stage. The finale was, as Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times put it, “the World War Veteran.”8 At one point, as the ballad is sung, a cop begins to arrest a tramp sleeping on the sidewalk, only to leave him alone when he finds a war medal inside the lapel of his jacket.

  The irony was hardly lost on a nation that had listened to its new president campaign, beginning on April 7, 1932, in a radio broadcast, on not losing sight of the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid”—but to FDR the forgotten man was the farmer and the worker, not the veteran. The “forgotten man” speech set the tone and the course of Roosevelt’s campaign; as one of his closest advisers put it, the speech “created a great deal of discussion at the time; in many quarters it evoked the epithet ‘demagogue’— but it kept him in the front as the outstanding liberal fighter.”9

  Hollywood’s censor, the Hays Office (named for former postmaster general Will H. Hays), developed a production code that is usually described as a reaction to explicit or suggestive sexual scenes in movies of the 1920s. But political commentary was also censored. There was, for example, concern over “dangerous material” in the Gabriel Over the White House script, such as the dismissal of Congress and the president becoming a dictator, and as a result some changes were made.10

  Movies of despair, such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Heroes for Sale (1933), used veterans as central characters who marched off to war and found themselves desperate, discarded men of the Depression. In Heroes for Sale, a veteran tries to sell his Medal of Honor to pay for drugs to satisfy the addiction he has acquired from painkillers given to him for his war wounds. Such bitter stories were prohibited by 1934, with the imposition of political censorship by the Hays Office.11

  The most notorious censorship of movies associated with fears of fascism involved Sinclair Lewis and his book It Can’t Happen Here, published in 1935, five years after Lewis became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the novel, a demagogic senator is elected president and declares himself dictator of America. Huey Long, who was believed to be the model for the president, was assassinated as Lewis wrote the novel, rushing to finish it in time for the 1936 presidential election. Another character, Bishop Peter Paul Prang, a radio preacher, was an obvious fictional version of Father Charles E. Coughlin. The book became a best-seller, its sales catapulted by the public’s perception of the chilling possibility of revolution. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the movie rights. But as shooting was about to begin, MGM halted production because, Lewis said, the film dealt with political controversies that would result in boycotts by other countries—presumably dictator-ruled Germany and Italy. He blamed Hays and Samuel Goldwyn, who later denied this motivation for scrapping the film. Undaunted, Lewis arranged for the Federal Theater Project, part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, to put it on stage in eighteen cities in October 1936, in time to be seen by presidential voters.12

  Fears of dictatorship from the Left or Right, a fallout from the Bonus Army experience, began to fade as the New Deal entered its second term. But modern film critics still turn to the Bonus Army to explain 1930s anxieties. One critic even found the vets in King Kong (1933), writing, “The defeat of the desire-driven ape by the military clearly comments on the 1932 dispersal by the U.S. Army of the Bonus Expeditionary Force.”13

  1935: The Veterans of Future Wars—Satire or Antiwar Movement?

  As the twentieth century wore on and Americans looked back at the 1930s, the mood and nature of the college experience was commonly depicted by what was visually appealing in newsreel footage—stuffing phone booths with students, goldfish swallowing, and a general goofiness. The reality was often more political and to the point. The nation’s youth in the middle to latter part of the Depression decade were often leery of authority and willing to challenge it in meaningful ways.

  When, for example, Massachusetts mandated that all its teachers and professors take a loyalty oath— swearing to uphold the constitutions of the United States and the Commonwealth—students bristled. In November 1935 the issue came to a head when the chief of police in Williamstown herded the faculty of Williams College into the university chapel for a public swearing of allegiance in front of a notary public. Seeing this spectacle as an example of American fascism and academic cowardice, the students—including the grandson of an undisclosed U.S. president—mocked their timid elders with a display of swastikas, goose-stepping, and Nazi salutes.14

  Hypocrisy was put on trial by these college boys and girls, who would later be known as members of “the Greatest Generation.” Realizing
that a war was in their future, they wanted, at least, to know what they would be fighting for. Would it be for acts of freedom—the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Massacre, Shea’s Rebellion—or for acts of repression—Sacco and Vanzetti, book censorship by Boston’s Watch and Ward Society, the Lawrence strike, and now the forced Williamstown oath?

  Seeing future war as inevitable, why not treat it as a future folly? On the night of March 16, 1935, Lewis J. Gorin Jr. of Louisville, Kentucky, and seven friends at Princeton University’s Terrace Club founded the Veterans of Future Wars and issued a manifesto that read in part:

  Whereas it is inevitable that this country will be engaged in war within the next thirty years, and whereas it is by all accounts likely that every man of military age will have a part in this war, we therefore demand that the government make known its intention to pay an adjusted service compensation, sometimes called a bonus, of $1,000 to every male citizen between the ages of 18 and 36, said bonus to be payable the first of June 1965. Furthermore, we believe a study of history demonstrates that it is customary to pay all bonuses before they are due. Therefore, we demand immediate cash payment, plus 3 per cent interest compounded annually and retroactively from the first of June 1965, to the first of June 1935. It is but common right that this bonus be paid now, for many will be killed and wounded in the next war, and hence they, the most deserving, will not otherwise get the full benefit of their country’s gratitude.15*

  That same night at all-female Vassar College, the Association of Gold Star Mothers of Veterans of Future Wars was chartered to gain support for sending young women to Europe to view the graves of their future sons—a parody on the practice of sending boatloads of real Gold Star mothers to Europe to visit the burial grounds of their fallen sons. The name was so offensive to so many that it was changed almost immediately to Home Fire Division of Veterans of Future Wars.