The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  The Princeton-Vassar plan was to establish eight regional commanders for both groups and set up chapters on all American campuses. The idea spread swiftly, thanks to the well-connected Princeton boys, who among them harbored stringers for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, and the Associated Press. Within ten days after this manifesto was released, the movement had swelled across the country, and by the end of March there were 120 college chapters from coast to coast, as well as many outside colleges, with a paid membership of over 6,000, including a number of faculty members and assorted politicians, one of them a former senator.16

  Satellite groups—such as the Chaplains of Future Wars, organized among divinity students, and the Correspondents of Future Wars, among those aspiring to become journalists—were soon paying dues and giving the official salute of the Veterans of Future Wars: the right arm held out, palm up, beggar style. The Future Correspondents, founded at City College of New York, demanded training in “the writing of atrocity stories and garbled war dispatches for patriotic purposes.” The CCNY group offered honorary membership to anyone who could come up with a motto for the next war as good as “Make the World Safe for Democracy.”17

  A like-minded group, the Future War Propagandists, formed at Rutgers, and there was a group of Future War Profiteers formed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with the motto “Getting in on the Gravy Rather Than Being Made into Gravy.” A distaff group, known as the Golddiggers of Future Wars, proposed to sit in the laps of the profiteers at champagne parties while “soldiers die for democracy” and there are “better and bigger profits for us.” The motto of the Betsy Ross Sewing Circle for Mothers was “Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy.” The Friends of the Veterans of Future Wars, initiated by a sympathetic librarian, contributed financially to the cause.

  The fledgling chapters were not content to keep their demands to themselves but took them right to the top. OKLAHOMA CHAPTER MEMBERS VETERANS OF FUTURE WARS EARNESTLY SOLICIT YOUR SUPPORT INTRODUCING BILL TO CONGRESS DEMANDING PAYMENT OF $2,000 TO EACH PROSPECTIVE WAR VETERAN, read the telegram from Norman, Oklahoma, to President Roosevelt.18

  A major force spurring this growth was the ire it provoked in its first days. A Texas Democrat, Representative William D. McFarlane, said the group “ought to be investigated,” and the VFW put out a statement “wondering what Hobey Baker and Johnny Poe, as well as other alumni of Princeton who died in France, might say to this apparent insult to their service.”19 James E. Van Zandt, head of the VFW, said they were a bunch of monkeys “too yellow to go to war” and deserved a good spanking. Democratic Representative Charles A. Fuller of Arkansas said the group was “saturated with communism, foreign influence and a total disregard for American patriotism.” The Red baiters and sputtering patriots had a field day, and the college boys loved it—Gorin insisted that Van Zandt was himself a Red and offered to debate him on national radio.20

  One of the few voices of assent was that of Representative Maury Maverick of Texas, a wounded and decorated veteran, who had spent a year in hospitals after sustaining a spine injury from a German bullet, had lost parts of five vertebrae, and was rarely free from pain. He thought the scheme was “swell,” saying that if we paid for our wars in advance, we wouldn’t have any more wars, and this was fine with him. Maverick had recently introduced legislation that would take the martial “sex” out of ROTC by mandating the reading of antiwar material.21

  Eleanor Roosevelt said, “I think it’s just as funny as it can be! And—taken lightly, as it should be—a grand pricking of lots of bubbles.” She thought the name of the Future Gold Star Mothers ill-advised, but believed that the idea of a women’s auxiliary in itself was “very amusing.”22

  As this story played out and opposition grew, it was taken more and more seriously; the mood among students was increasingly antiwar, and the Veterans of Future Wars fit into that view. A poll of Columbia University seniors, published when the Veterans of Future Wars was only a few weeks old, said that a majority would refuse to fight in a war conducted outside the United States.23

  Spring break occurred at the end of April for the Princetonians, and one of the original founders, Thomas Riggs Jr., son of the former governor of Alaska, returned to his home in Washington. On April Fool’s Day he tried to register as a lobbyist, asking for $2.5 billion for his “pre-vets.” Informed that he did not have to register, he met with a number of members of Congress and walked away with support from eight of them, including Maury Maverick,24 who said he was willing to give them $10 billion “any old day.”25

  Suddenly the movement, now 20,000 strong, was becoming serious enough to inspire a countermovement of sorts. The American Legion opened a “first aid station and supply depot” in Washington in late April. Staffed by veterans of the Great War, it offered diapers and rubber pants and pretended to be staffed by members of the Gimme Bita Pi fraternity. The legion met its match in the students when they were invited to an open house at the mock first-aid station and sent back a telegram: APPRECIATE KIND INVITATION STOP . . . UNFORTUNATELY PRESSURE OF REAL BUSINESS PREVENTS ACCEPTANCE OF ANY PURELY SOCIAL ENGAGEMENTS STOP WHEN WE GET OUR BONUS WE CAN PLAY TOO.26

  Less than a week later, Gorin’s book Patriotism Prepaid was published, billed in a New York Times ad as the basis for “one of the most powerful youth movements America had ever witnessed!” The reviewers seemed split on whether this book, written in pure academic style, was satire or serious social criticism.27 The Times thought it was satire, but the Wall Street Journal saw nothing less than “superb financial idealism” in Golin’s argument that the next war would be so colossally expensive that “after adding the requisite sum to the amount necessary to pay veterans of past wars, there will be nothing left in the till.”28

  On May 31, with a membership of close to 50,000, the satire was pushed aside and the Veterans of Future Wars put forth a “peace without pacifism plan” that called for no declaration of war by the United States without a popular referendum.29

  In April 1937, with graduation looming for its founders and without any advance notice, the Veterans of Future Wars was shut down and the charters of some 534 local posts revoked. The exercise was over, and Gorin and his pals announced that the group’s bank account was $44 in debt at the closing (they had actually hoped to close with a positive balance of $56, but the bank had levied a service charge at the last minute).30

  The Veterans of Future Wars was all but forgotten until November 30, 1941—eight days prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—when the Washington Post carried a feature entitled “ ‘Veterans of Future Wars’ Are Becoming Just That,” by Edward T. Folliard. It opened with the question: “Where are they now, those droll college boys who, back in 1936 organized the Veterans of Future Wars and demanded a $1,000 bonus in advance?

  “Answer: Some are in the Army and some are preparing to go into the Army—for the usual $21 a month without bonus.” Folliard talked about Tommy Riggs Jr., who was registered and ready to go overseas with the army.31

  By March 1944 six of the eight Princetonians were in uniform. Gorin, for example, was an artillery officer. A seventh was working in a key war industry. John C. Turner, the only one not in the war effort, had lost the use of both legs in an auto accident during his senior year and was working for CBS News.

  The irony, observed as the war wore down, was that peace-loving American youth were as brave and determined as the enemy. Robert T. Oliver spoke for many when he wrote in the Washington Post, “While Hitler, Mussolini and the warlords of Japan were loudly teaching the glories and virtues of war, our youth were organizing peace demonstrations and mockingly joining the ‘Veterans of Future Wars.’”32

  The final irony was that a great number of the boys and some of the girls of the Veterans of Future Wars and its affiliates would soon be in line for a more generous bonus than the one they asked for in jest in 1936.33

  Lewis Gorin went on to serve as an artillery captain in Italy, France, and Germany. He would later
write The Cannon’s Mouth, a history of field artillery in World War II, become an executive of Reynolds Metals, and run unsuccessfully for Congress in the 1950s. At his death on January 1, 1999, he was honored with an obituary by the late Robert McG. Thomas in the New York Times. According to his own obituary in Editor and Publisher, Thomas’s obituaries, known to devotees as “McG’s,” were so good that he often got fan mail. Writing of Gorin, Thomas focused on his temporary stint as head of the Veterans of Future Wars, which for a moment made him the “most famous collegian in America who did not play football”; before he went on to a “long, respectable and thoroughly obscure career as a business executive.”34

  1949: Return of the Red Menace—the Bonus Army Meets the Cold War

  Claims of Communist involvement in the Bonus Army persisted for decades. Benjamin Gitlow, Communist Party candidate for vice president in 1924 and 1928, claimed in a book published in 1949 that Soviet officials in Moscow “sharply criticized” U.S. Communists for their “failure to gain leadership and control” of the Bonus Army.35 Despite such admissions of failure from the Communists themselves, both General MacArthur and President Hoover, in their memoirs, never wavered from their 1932 views of Communist involvement. MacArthur wrote, “The American Communist Party planned a riot of such proportions that it was hoped the United States Army, in its efforts to maintain peace, would have to fire on the marchers. In this way, the Communists hoped to incite revolutionary action. Red organizers infiltrated the veteran groups and presently took command from their unwitting leaders.”36

  Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley went further. In his authorized biography, the author notes, “General MacArthur, having received information from Army Intelligence sources working among the bonus marchers that the Communists were in virtually complete control of the bonus army and that some elements within the camps were armed (they said several machine guns were found concealed in the camps), refused to merely move the rioters from the seized buildings back to their camps across the river and then keep his troops camped on the city side of the river overnight. He said bluntly, ‘I will not permit my men to bivouac under the guns of traitors.’”37 (No machine guns were found in the camps.)

  Hoover, in his 1952 memoir, referred back to his attorney general’s report on the marchers and estimated that nine hundred of the Bonus Marchers “were ex-convicts and Communists.” He had wanted to “surround the camps and determine more accurately the number of Communists and ex-convicts among the marchers,” but, as he tactfully put it, “Certain of my directions to the Secretary of War, however, were not carried out.” Communism came up again when Hoover remarked upon “the activities of the Communists in opposing my election in 1932.”38

  The resurrection of the Communist-control claim can be traced to the earliest phase of the Cold War, when ex-Communists charged that a Red underground had infiltrated the federal government. John Pace, a leader of the Workers Ex-Servicemen’s League, made headlines in the Hearst press with his claims of Communist infiltration, which he later presented in congressional testimony.

  1963: Marching on Washington—Reincarnation of the Bonus Army

  For years to come memories of the Bonus Army seemed to be stirred by any march on Washington. In 1963, when the nonviolent March on Washington was planned by A. Philip Randolph, longtime head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, it was compared to the Bonus Army. The Wall Street Journal used the failure of the Bonus Army to underscore its editorial belief that Randolph’s proposed march amounted to a waste of time—“no marchers have ever stampeded Congress into action”—and some feared that the march could end the same way.39 It did not. Instead, it became a signal moment in American history when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

  When King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) planned their Poor People’s March in 1968, the Bonus Army’s march was seen as a model for the nonviolent occupation of Washington. Stanley Levison,* a lawyer and businessman, initiated the idea, suggesting the Bonus Army model. (He was the only King adviser old enough to remember the 1932 event.) Levison’s “idea of a camp of poor squatters illegally bivouacked on the Mall was a public relations gambit, proposed largely to attract press attention to the campaign in its early stages,” according to Gerald D. McKnight in The Last Crusade: Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI, and the Poor People’s Campaign. On the eve of the Washington campaign, McKnight says, presidential assistant Matt Nimetz began circulating excerpts from The Crisis of the Old Order, by New Deal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., which described the eviction of the Bonus Army and its disastrous impact on the political future of Herbert Hoover. Drawing on that lesson, Nimetz urged that the White House “deal with the Poor People’s Campaign in a civilized manner.”40

  King was assassinated on April 4, but the Poor People’s March went on without him and was dedicated to him. When the first contingent of welfare mothers and clergymen arrived on April 22, they occupied one of the spots near the Capitol that bonus marchers had occupied thirty-six years earlier. Like the BEF, the 1968 marchers lobbied Congress and erected a tent city; theirs was on the National Mall and was called Resurrection City. As tension rose in Washington about the encampment, and the population grew to upward of 15,000, the New York Times, in an editorial titled “ ‘Shanty Town’ on the Potomac,” declared that some members of Congress and some members of the march were acting as if they wanted Washington to become the scene of an encounter “as dismaying” as the expulsion of the Bonus Army.41 The House Rules Committee later approved (6–3) legislation calling for the forced closing of the encampment—over the objection of committee members who said a forced removal would be a repeat of the 1932 expulsion and bring on rioting.42 Mindful of the violent eviction of the Bonus Army, the police and National Guard troops closed down the Poor People’s tent city carefully and peacefully.43

  The Bonus Army was also recalled when antiwar protesters began arriving in Washington in late April 1971. As thousands of protesters assembled on the National Mall, including an angry vet named John Kerry, Attorney General John Mitchell asked President Richard M. Nixon what should be done.

  “Leave them there,” Nixon said in one of his secretly recorded tapes. The verbatim transcript says: “I don’t wanna, uh, like the Bonus March ’n’ all that stuff. You recall poor old Hoover and MacArthur, you know.”

  Nixon, backed up by a memo from Pat Buchanan, asserted that Americans never forgave MacArthur for evicting the Bonus Army.44 Ten days later, seven thousand Mayday protestors were arrested in a single day—the largest number of citizens arrested in a single action in American history. Critics faulted the government for not basing the mass arrests on any formal declaration; they noted that President Hoover had acted only after he had received a written request from the D.C. commissioners.45

  Ron Kovic, a disabled Vietnam vet arrested in 1974 with three other vets for occupying the Washington Monument and a White House restroom, claimed he acted under the banner of the American Veterans Movement Bonus March Coalition.46 Kovic had envisioned a “Nixonville,” where ten thousand new bonus marchers would camp and demand veterans’ benefits.47

  There were other attempts to mobilize a new Bonus Army in 1992, 1994, and 1998, but none attracted more than momentary attention. One, though, did not lack poignancy: in 1994, after Veterans’ Affairs secretary Jesse Brown announced that as many as 250,000 Vietnam vets were homeless, a group of them gathered across the street from the White House to demand government help.48

  *The Comintern, or Communist International, was established by the Soviet Union in 1919, ostensibly to guide national Communist parties throughout the world toward common objectives. Secretly, it enlisted local Communists into espionage activities.

  *In June 1965, the United States confirmed for the first time that Americans were being given combat assignments in South Vietnam.

  *Levison, a Communist Party financial backer in the 1930s, was under FBI surveillance when he
began advising King. Thus the FBI secretly obtained information about King. Notified by the Department of Justice that Levison was a Communist, King broke off contact with him.

  Appendix B

  What Became of Them

  JOHN J. ABT, who played a brief part in the Roosevelt administration’s handling of the 1935 hurricane deaths of veterans in Florida, became the longtime chief counsel to the Communist Party of the United States, establishing precedents and making sure that being a Communist was not illegal. He was Sidney Hillman’s counsel in the labor movement and a top aide in the 1948 presidential campaign of former vice president Henry Wallace. Abt seemed to have a Zelig-like ability to pop up at newsworthy moments. In 1924 he testified in the trial of two college fraternity brothers, Nathan Leopold and Dicky Loeb. In a famous trial the two young men were convicted of kidnapping and murdering fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. Abt had been brought in to testify as to the “mental sickness” of the two men.1

  John Abt was the man Lee Harvey Oswald tried unsuccessfully to contact between the time he was arrested for killing President Kennedy and shot by Jack Ruby in 1963. Abt, questioned by Lee J. Rankin, general counsel to the Warren Commission, told him that he had never heard Oswald’s name before he heard it on the radio after the assassination.2 In the days following the assassination, Abt turned over to J. Edgar Hoover his file on Oswald, including six handwritten letters from Oswald to the Communist Party in which he describes his activities in New Orleans and Dallas, requests a job on the Daily Worker, and solicits advice on his role in “the struggle for progress and freedom.”3 Abt died on August 10, 1991.