The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  JOHN “MR. BONUS ARMY” ALFERI, as if trying to set a record, on January 3, 1937, arrived in Washington for the fifth consecutive year to declare that now that the bonus had been paid, he was on a new crusade: to secure a $60 per month pension for all veterans of the war. He would stay in Washington, he warned, until the pension was granted. He had a new slogan for this exercise in futility: “Give until it hurts, and soak the big guys who are drawing over ten grand every year.” At this moment he faded into obscurity and, in terms of the national media that had helped create him as a character, was never heard from again.4

  HERBERT BENJAMIN, the leader of the 1931 and 1932 hunger marches, was an avowed Communist and a leading organizer of dissent for two decades. He left the Communist Party in 1944 but, unlike others, did not denounce the party or renounce his beliefs. From 1953 to his retirement in 1978, he operated a crafts boutique, Pottery Fair, in Washington’s exclusive Georgetown neighborhood. He died on May 10, 1983.

  SMEDLEY DARLINGTON BUTLER, after going to Congress with his revelations about a plot against President Roosevelt, lectured frequently, donating half his fees to charity. Once he said “hell” during a radio broadcast and was cut off the air. In a small book, War Is a Racket, he looked back at his missions as a Marine officer in Latin America and wrote, “I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” From 1935 through 1937, he spoke for the left-wing League against War and Fascism, becoming increasingly antiwar at a time when America was preparing for war. He died on June 21, 1940, of what doctors called “an abdominal condition.”

  GEORGE L. CASSIDAY, the Man in the Green Hat, became a minor national celebrity with the publication of his syndicated newspaper memoirs in the fall of 1930. In the words of the Washington Post, he had “stolen first page notices right under the noses of men in the halls of Congress who would have given much to gain the front page space given to this remarkable character.” After a series of unsuccessful appeals, he went to jail for eighteen months on April 30, 1931. Because he was well-connected and respected, however, he was allowed to serve his time during the day and go home at night. He went on to become the national commander of the Irish War Veterans. In that role he was one of those who put his hand in a glass bowl to select a number in the draft of July 18, 1941, a peacetime lottery “to make America strong” on the eve of America’s entry into World War II. He died in 1967.

  FATHER CHARLES E. COUGHLIN, the “radio priest,” returned to the airwaves in the fall of 1937, but his broadcasts were discontinued for good in 1940. His periodical, Social Justice, was banned from the mails in 1941 by postal authorities because “it mirrored the Axis propaganda line.” In 1966 he broke a self-imposed silence on the fiftieth anniversary of his becoming a priest. Despite his virulent attacks on Roosevelt in the later 1930s (“a great liar and betrayer”), he was now a much mellower person, saying he thought that “submission to authority was man’s greatest virtue.”5 He died on October 27, 1979; his funeral was at the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan, where he had served as pastor from 1926 until his retirement in 1966.

  JACOB S. COXEY, the leader of Coxey’s Army, later became an advocate of public works as a remedy for unemployment and ran for president as the Farmer-Labor Party candidate in 1932, earning a mere 7,309 popular votes. He was also an ardent proponent of free-silver monetary policy and an opponent of the gold standard. Although his march failed, Coxey’s Army was a harbinger of an issue that would rise to prominence, as unemployment insurance became a key element in the future Social Security Act of 1935. On May 1, 1944, Coxey returned to Capitol Hill and completed the speech he had tried to deliver fifty years earlier. He died on May 18, 1951, at the age of ninety-seven.6

  HERBERT H. CROSBY, the District commissioner who hired Pelham Glassford, began his Army career in 1893. He submitted his resignation as commissioner on April 9, 1933, but the newly inaugurated president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, asked him to stay until a new commissioner was named in the fall of 1933. Crosby then went to San Antonio, Texas, to become president of a bank. Illness cut short his new career, and he returned to Washington, where he died in January 1936 at the age of sixty-four, after a long illness from inflammatory rheumatism.7

  VICE PRESIDENT CHARLES CURTIS was constantly chided for calling out the Marines during the remainder of the election year 1932. The day after the expulsion, he was in Las Vegas on his way to preside over the opening of the Olympic Games in California. When he was heckled about the bonus, he shouted back: “You cowards! I’m not afraid of any of you.”

  Curtis was the model for Vice President Alexander Throttlebottom in the hit Broadway musical Of Thee I Sing, book by George S. Kaufman, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, music by George Gershwin. In the musical, which opened on December 26, 1931, and ran for 441 performances, Throttlebottom is ordered to go into hiding because vice presidents are never to be seen. Curtis, found dead on February 8, 1936, was still listed on the rolls of the Interior Department as an Indian ward of the government as a member of the Kaw tribe.

  VICE PRESIDENT CHARLES GATES DAWES won the Nobel Peace Prize for the Dawes Plan, the blueprint for German reparations after World War I. He was ambassador to Great Britain from 1929 to 1932. The song “It’s All in the Game” was an adaptation of Dawes’s composition without lyrics “Melody in A Minor.” He died on October 27, 1979.

  JOHN DOS PASSOS completed his epic USA Trilogy in 1936; it is regarded as his major work. He drew upon his experiences as an ambulance driver in World War I for One Man’s Initiation (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921). Over time, he swung from the Left to the Right politically, although he would tell interviewers that his ideas had remained constant while the world itself changed. He wrote more than fifty novels and works of nonfiction. He died in October 1970.

  DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER is quoted by a biographer, Carlo D’Este, as saying, “Probably no one had tougher fights with a senior man than I did with MacArthur. I told him time and time again: ‘Why in the hell don’t you fire me? Goddammit, you do things I don’t agree with and you know damn well I don’t.’

  “That MacArthur could have ruined his career at the stroke of a pen does not seem to have bothered Eisenhower nor, he said, did it occur to him to worry about the possible consequences,” D’Este continues. “His stormy encounters with MacArthur undoubtedly toughened Eisenhower for the enormous pressures and demands that he would face during World War II. Nevertheless, their deteriorating relations took a heavy toll on Eisenhower who, at times, wished MacArthur had actually sacked him. MacArthur, however, was too shrewd to deprive himself of Eisenhower’s services and ignored their differences.”8

  Eisenhower was appointed Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces, in December 1943 and commanded the Allied forces that began the liberation of Europe with the Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944. He announced his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination for president on June 4, 1952. He was nominated at the Republican convention in 1952, and elected on November 4, 1952. During the campaign, the Democrats published a tabloid-style newspaper that linked him to the 1932 expulsion of the Bonus Army.9 Eisenhower died on March 28, 1969, at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C.

  HAMILTON FISH JR. remained a Republican member of Congress from New York until 1944 and was an eloquent critic of President Roosevelt. Until his death Fish was a stalwart backer of the American Legion. He was one of its earliest members.10 He died on January 18, 1991, at the age of 102.

  FLOYD GIBBONS went on to cover the war in Ethiopia, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Spanish Civil War. He died on September 24, 1939, at age fifty-two, having covered nine wars and revolutions. He was preparing to head overseas to cover the war in Europe when his heart gave out.

  PELHAM D. GLASSFORD was appointed a federal conciliator in the strike of some fifteen thousand farm-workers in California’s Imperial Valley in 1933. As in Washington in 1932, he found un
warranted claims of Communist influence. “After more than two months of observation and investigation,” he was convinced “that a group of growers have exploited a communist hysteria for the advancement of their own interests . . . have welcomed labor agitation, which they could brand as ‘Red,’ as a means of sustaining supremacy by mob rule, thereby preserving what is so essential to their profits—cheap labor.”11

  In 1936, at the behest of a veterans’ group, Glassford ran unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives from Arizona. On May 12, 1938, he predicted that there would be no presidential election in 1940; by then the nation would be in the hands of a dictator because the government and private industry had been unable to cope with the Depression. During World War II he returned to Washington, serving as internal security director for the army provost marshal general, whose duties included supervision of camps for prisoners of war and relocation camps (for Japanese and Japanese-Americans) in the United States. Glassford was awarded the Legion of Merit for his work in World War II.

  Today if he is remembered at all, it is as an artist. He died on August 9, 1959. A few weeks after his death a letter was published in the Washington Post from an old friend named Gardner Jackson who recalled him with great fondness and respect: “‘Hap Glassford has remained for me since those days as a symbol of the ideal approach to the necessary, day-to-day social discipline exemplified by police forces. He was a West Point graduate who never acted like one, because he did not succumb to that academy’s training and courses which discourage thinking except in military terms.”12

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY left Key West on the breakup of his marriage to Pauline Pfeifer. The remainder of his life is well documented elsewhere, but one footnote begs to be revealed. In declassified World War II OSS records, discovered while we were doing research in the Hemingway papers at the Kennedy Library in Boston, the intelligence service deals with his offer to work for his country: “Decided in the negative about Hemingway. We may be wrong, but feel that, although he undoubtedly has conspicuous abilities for this type of work, he would be too much of an individualist to work under military supervision.”13 Hemingway killed himself in Idaho on July 2, 1961.

  FRANK T. HINES, who served in the Spanish-American War and was an Army general in World War I, remained administrator of Veterans’ Affairs through World War II. A month after he resigned in 1945, President Truman appointed him ambassador to Panama, where he served for three years. Hines, who was usually referred to as General Hines, died in 1960 at the age of eighty-one.

  J. EDGAR HOOVER treated the Bonus Army march as a milestone in his career-long search for Communists. His work under President Hoover continued under President Roosevelt, who in 1935 created the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover’s 1932 relationship with the Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) continued into the prewar years. During World War II, the FBI had jurisdiction for spy-hunting.* Hoover ran the FBI until he died in his sleep on May 2, 1972, having led the FBI for forty-eight years.

  HARRY HOPKINS was named secretary of commerce in 1938, a post he held until September 1940. During World War II he became FDR’s unofficial emissary to Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin. The administrator of the wartime Lend-Lease program, he also acted as the prime behind-the-scenes adviser to Roosevelt at his Big Three conferences with Churchill and Stalin. Hopkins died in early 1946, succumbing to a long and debilitating illness.

  PATRICK J. HURLEY, who fought in World War I and rose in rank to lieutenant colonel, served as secretary of war until Franklin D. Roosevelt became president. When World War II began, he was called to active duty as a brigadier general and organized the secret transportation of supplies to MacArthur’s troops besieged in the Philippines. Later, he served as U.S. minister to New Zealand and Roosevelt’s personal representative, first to the Soviet Union and then as a fact-finder in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Ceylon, and Burma. He was promoted to major general in February 1944 and left the Army. In December 1944, Roosevelt appointed Hurley ambassador to China, plunging him into the simmering civil war between Chinese Communists under Mao Tse-tung and China’s pro-American ruler, Chiang Kai-shek. When Mao seized power in 1949, a “Who lost China?” debate began in the United States. Hurley resigned, charging that State Department career diplomats “continued to side with the Communist armed party.”14 As an ardent anti-Communist, he unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in 1946 and 1948, blaming his defeats on “smears” that included his role in the Bonus Army episode in 1932 and in China in 1944.15 He remained a voluble anti-Communist for the rest of his life. Hurley died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 30, 1963.

  GEORGE KLEINHOLZ, reminiscing about his leadership role in the Bonus Army, said in 1963 that he believed the Bonus March served useful purposes. “It got things for veterans they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten,” he said. “And it took several years. There were political implications of long duration, too.” He added that he was sure that MacArthur failed to win a presidential nomination because ‘he would never get the veteran’s vote.’”16 When asked if he would do the Bonus March over, his wife broke in to say no, but he said, “Well, yes, I think I would if I thought the cause was just.”

  As for the 1963 civil rights march, he thought it was “very foolish” but was quick to add, “Don’t get me wrong. I believe in their aims and I believe in civil rights for all, but I believe this march will have little effect on attaining those rights. I think the civil rights issue will be ironed out but I don’t think that a march of only one day is going to do any good.”

  FIORELLO LA GUARDIA became the very popular mayor of New York from 1933 through 1945. During World War II he served as director of the Office of Civilian Defense. In 1946 he became director general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which fed and gave shelter to millions of Europeans displaced by World War II. He died on September 21, 1947.

  JIMMY LAKE never stopped playing the role of Jimmy Lake as barkeep, burlesque impresario, and ring announcer. His most popular role came as the announcer for NBC’s immensely popular Friday-night fights in the early days of television. In his autobiography, published when he was seventy-eight years old, he proclaimed that “I’ve enjoyed every moment of my life, and that’s all a man can ask.”

  Lake died on September 15, 1967, at age eighty-seven. His Washington Post obituary noted that Edward R. Murrow had called him “one third Falstaff, one third Barry Fitzgerald and one third W. C. Fields.”17

  DOUGLAS MACARTHUR, to the surprise of many, was reappointed Army chief of staff in 1934 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, beginning an often prickly relationship that would continue through the Depression and much of World War II. When Roosevelt reappointed MacArthur in 1934, he let the general know how upset he was with the muckraking “Merry-Go-Round” column, which was highly critical of the New Deal. MacArthur took this as a hint and sued for $1.75 million, alleging that the columnists, Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, had subjected him to ridicule and contempt in a column written about him. A major element in the suit was the way Pearson and Allen had covered MacArthur and the events of July 28, when they depicted him as vain and cowardly.18 The suit was quietly dropped and the general paid the legal fees for Allen and Pearson when it appeared that an unsavory detail might come out at the trial: Pearson had obtained the cooperation of a chorus girl, the daughter of a Chinese woman and a Scottish man living in Manila, who had given him a packet of highly embarrassing letters detailing her liaison with MacArthur. Pearson gave MacArthur the letters when the suit was dropped.19

  MacArthur claimed that he dressed down Roosevelt in a discussion of the Army budget: “I spoke recklessly and said something to the general effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt. The President grew livid. ‘You must not talk that way to the President!’ he roared. He was, of course, righ
t, and . . . I told him he had my resignation as Chief of Staff. As I reached the door his voice came with that cool detachment which so reflected his extraordinary self-control, ‘Don’t be foolish, Douglas; you and the budget must get together on this.’”20

  When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, MacArthur was in the Philippines. As the Japanese drove MacArthur’s troops down the Bataan Peninsula, Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to leave so he could fight elsewhere, and later awarded MacArthur the Medal of Honor. (MacArthur’s father had received the Medal of Honor in the Civil War.) During the war, MacArthur essentially ran his own theater, as commander of the Southwest Pacific Area, while Admiral Chester Nimitz had the rest of the ocean as commander of the Central Pacific Area. He was so revered that when two men made disparaging remarks about him, the FBI arrested them and charged them with sedition; earlier, the California attorney general, future Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren, had charged them with criminal libel.21

  MacArthur’s presidential ambitions flared briefly in 1944—he would have been a general running against his commander in chief—and became serious in 1948. Among the retired generals who endorsed MacArthur in 1948 was Pelham Glassford, who said of the expulsion of the bonus marchers, “MacArthur did a splendid job and there were no casualties. He had been put in charge because it was a sensitive situation which he was best qualified to handle.”22

  In June 1950, when the Korean War began, President Truman appointed MacArthur supreme commander of United Nations forces. After UN forces crossed the 38th Parallel—the border between North Korea and South Korea—MacArthur issued a statement indicating plans to expand the war into China by heading north toward the Yalu River, the boundary between China and North Korea. MacArthur was in contact with a Republican congressman sympathetic to his plans. Truman, bristling at MacArthur’s insubordination, relieved him of command on April 11, 1951, a move that set off a political firestorm. Some of MacArthur’s supporters saw a Communist plot and traced it back to 1932, when he attacked the Reds in the Bonus Army. (Then, he disobeyed his commander in chief by crossing a river; in 1951, he did not get a chance to do that again.) The ouster of MacArthur inspired an unsuccessful attempt to get him to run for the presidency in 1952. MacArthur died at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington on April 14, 1964, at the age of eighty-four.