by Paul Dickson
EVALYN WALSH MCLEAN sold off her mansion, “Old Friendship,” for the government to use as a housing project on the day after Pearl Harbor. During World War II she gave lavish parties for the members of the armed forces, For the women who attended, she would distribute some of her collection of rare jewels to be worn for the party and collected afterward.23
McLean died on April 26, 1947, still in possession of the Hope Diamond, which was bought by a jewelry dealer in 1958 and given to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where it remains today. Wilma Waters, interviewed in her eighties, acknowledged that McLean not only paid for her trip to Washington but provided an apartment for the couple.
MAURY MAVERICK, who served and was wounded in World War I, was the county tax collector in 1932 when bonus marchers began appearing in San Antonio. He became the director of the War Veterans’ Relief Camp, later renamed the Diga Colony (a backward anagram for Agricultural and Industrial Democracy). The camp faded away after Roosevelt’s New Deal began providing direct federal relief. Maverick served in Congress from January 3, 1935, to January 3, 1939, and was mayor of San Antonio from 1939 to 1941. During World War II he served on the War Production Board and was chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation, a federal agency set up to help small businesses participate in war production. Writing about his experience in the New York Times Magazine on May 21, 1944, he complained about bureaucratic language, which he called “gobbledygook,” inspired by the turkey, which is “always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity.” He thus joined his grandfather, Samuel A. Maverick, in contributing a word to the American language. Sam Maverick, a prominent rancher, had so many cattle that he did not brand them; cowboys began calling them “mavericks,” and the word came to mean people who acted independently—which could certainly describe Maury Maverick. In Congress, while usually siding with Roosevelt, he sometimes opposed the leadership, leading a group of Democratic representatives who called themselves mavericks. He died in San Antonio, Texas, on June 7, 1954.24
His son, Maury Maverick Jr., was a legislator, lawyer, and freelance columnist for the San Antonio Express-News who represented conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War. “I would walk to a federal court with a boy who didn’t want to kill or be killed in Vietnam,” he wrote. “It was as if I had walked in with a mass murderer. People are frightened, including some judges, when you represent a political or religious dissenter.” He died on January 28, 2003.
GASTON B. MEANS’S money from the Lindbergh swindle was never recovered. Means claimed that he had given it to Max Hassel, a New Jersey bootlegger, to be used for a liquor deal. Hassel was killed in gang warfare in 1933, and $213,487 was found in cash in his safe-deposit box. Means claimed that McLean’s money was part of that sum, but it could not be proven, and Means was not known for telling the truth. He died in prison on December 12, 1938.25
HENRY O. MEISEL returned to Waukesha, where he became a motorcycle policeman. In 1934 he attempted to run for governor of Wisconsin as a Progressive, but conceded to Philip La Follete on the eve of the primary.26
ANDREW MELLON accepted the post of U.S. ambassador to Great Britain in February 1932, serving for one year and then retiring to private life in 1937, when he donated his art collection to the public, with funds for the erection of a building in Washington in which to house it. The building became the National Gallery of Art, which stands near the site of the eviction that led to the expulsion of the veterans on July 28, 1932. Mellon died on August 26, 1937, soon after construction of the National Gallery began.
STEVE MURRAY became a labor organizer in 1934 and was indicted and convicted of inciting to riot in what North Carolina newspapers called an “uprising” during a strike against textile mills in Kannapolis, “towel city of the nation.” National Guard troops had been called out to quell the strike. Murray’s two-year prison sentence was suspended providing he leave the state and not return for five years, but he did return and was jailed. He later became a contractor and continued playing music in religious string bands, not unlike the BEF band.
Murray died on June 3, 1978, in Asheboro, North Carolina. His daughter and son-in-law, Madeline and Bill Linebarrier, who gave us access to Murray’s diary, live in Asheboro. The license plates on their car read “B.E.F. Band,” and they now use the big iron cauldron that went to Washington with the band in 1932 as a planter.
JOHN T. PACE quit the Communist Party in 1935 and thereafter became a willing witness at hearings into Red subversion. In 1949, while living in Centerville, Tennessee, where he had become a farmer, a deputy sheriff, and a member of the American Legion, Pace told the Hearst newspapers that he had been instructed to foment rioting in the hopes that there would be bloodshed. Pace said that he was subject to the orders of Emanuel Levin, who kept a secret office in Washington.27
The Hearst series, published in the flagship New York Journal-American and other Hearst papers in 1949, began: “Hoping for bloodshed and violence, the Communist Party agents within the ranks of the bonus marchers used every Red Fascist trick to get President Hoover to call out the army in 1932.” When Hoover and General MacArthur managed to keep blood from being shed, the story continued, “Red Fascist wrath was directed against these two great Americans—a raging ‘smear’ campaign that has lasted for almost two decades.”28 (Pace did not have firsthand information about the expulsion because he was in jail at the time.)
Pace had secretly testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1938 and 1949, but, as historian Donald J. Lisio notes, the Hearst stories did not match Pace’s testimony, which was “confused and contradictory.” In 1938, for example, he told the committee that he had been “put on the pan” because his superiors felt that he and other Communist leaders had failed. In the 1949 testimony he said that the “Communist Party of the United States was severely criticized by the representative of the Comintern,” a Moscow-trained official who said the party was “a swivel-chair organization.”
In 1951, after President Truman fired MacArthur and Truman critics cried “smear,” Pace was recalled before HUAC, but he added little more than congratulations to the committee for its work. He was congratulated in turn.
WRIGHT PATMAN was the author of one of the most popular publications ever published by the Government Printing Office, Handbook for Servicemen and Servicewomen of World War II and Their Dependents, Including Rights and Benefits of Veterans of World War I and Their Dependents. For a new generation of veterans his name was associated with getting them their due.
Patman spent forty-seven years in the House of Representatives, always playing the role of the maverick, the outsider fighting big banks, high interest rates, and the use of tax-free foundations as tax shelters. He was a declared foe of the Ku Klux Klan and, as a Texas legislator, pushed through legislation to curb the Texas Klan. In 1972 he was the first to call for an investigation of Watergate, a move that was initially blocked by the White House.
Patman died in 1976 at age eighty-two. His Washington Post obituary noted that during his long career he never mastered the simplest procedural motions that legislators must learn to make, “but he was probably the prickliest foe of central banking since Andrew Jackson abolished the Bank of the United States in 1836.”
GEORGE S. PATTON JR., speaking to a group of officers in 1940, said, “War will be won by blood and guts alone.” From then on, that was his nickname. His combat in World War II began with the North African invasion in November 1942, when he was in command of the Western Task Force that landed in Morocco. Promoted to lieutenant general and given command of the U.S. Seventh Army, he led it in the invasion of Sicily.
Twice in August 1943 Patton lost his temper when he encountered hospitalized soldiers who, while not physically wounded, were suffering from battle fatigue, which had been called “shell shock” in World War I. He accused both soldiers of cowardice, struck one across the mouth with his glove, and threatened to have the other shot. When doctors and hospital s
taff complained, General Dwight D. Eisenhower asked Patton for an explanation and directed him to apologize if reports of the incidents were true. Patton apologized to both men, the hospital staff, and his divisions, but when the incidents became public, there were loud cries for Patton’s removal.
General Eisenhower accepted Patton’s apologies and Patton went on to lead his troops to dramatic victories in France and Germany later in the war. His most spectacular maneuver was his race to save embattled Bastogne in December 1944. He died in defeated Germany on December 21, 1945, fatally injured in an automobile accident.
JOHN E. RANKIN remained in Congress until his attempted reelection in 1952, when he lost his seat. He was a virulent anti-Communist who fought long and hard to get the United States out of the United Nations. His greatest crusade was his attempt to preserve segregation. He once successfully defeated the idea of a special ballot to allow soldiers to vote from overseas because he felt it could lead to the end of the poll tax, a major force in blocking black voting rights. On the other side of the ledger, he introduced the bill that led to the Tennessee Valley Authority. He died in Tupelo, Mississippi, on November 26, 1960, and was interred in Greenwood Cemetery, West Point, Mississippi. His papers have been sealed from public view by order of his family.29
ROYAL W. ROBERTSON worked the lecture circuit for a short time after his appearance at the 1935 march, then dropped from public view.
He died on January 10, 1938, in Los Angeles at the age of forty-six. His obituary in the Washington Daily News underscored his rapid return to obscurity with the headline. “This Man Has Just Died; Do You Remember Him?” over his photograph. His obituary in the Los Angeles Times identified his group as “radicals,” occasioning a letter from his father, which pointed out that the paper was confusing him with John Pace.30
EDITH NOURSE ROGERS was the first woman to have served as chairman (1950–52) of a major House committee, the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. In 1933 she was the first to speak out in Congress about Hitler’s treatment of the Jews and his comments about American women; her life was threatened by Nazi sympathizers. In the fall of 1944 she was in London and Paris when the first V-2 rockets hit those cities.
Politically, Rogers supported the anticommunism of Senator Joe McCarthy (putting her at odds with Margaret Chase Smith); she opposed initial entry into the war in Vietnam because she felt America’s real enemy was in Moscow. Fervent in her opposition to child labor, she fought for the forty-hour week and equal pay for women—but, as if to confound those who would turn her into a feminist icon, she embraced traditional views of womanhood. She never remarried. At age sixty-seven she was named in a contested divorce by the wife of a man on her staff, a charge that was later dropped.
Rogers never stopped fighting for vets and men and women in uniform, and she never seems to have bowed to pressure from the Pentagon or, for that matter, her own party. During the early days of the Korean War, outraged to find that Americans fighting in Korea were freezing to death or losing hands, feet, arms, and legs because of insufficient clothing, she charged the military with “tragic malfeasance of duty.” She was doubly furious to find that men who died of cold were not considered “battle casualties.” This led her to a campaign for a full and honest accounting of the human cost of war.31
Rogers died on September 10, 1960, in Boston after thirty-five years in the House of Representatives. During her career she introduced 1,242 bills, more than half of them dealing with veterans and the armed services. A veterans hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, was renamed in her honor.
WILL ROGERS’S biographer, Donald Day, wrote that the expulsion of the veterans in July 1932 “brought to Will’s mind ‘the trail of tears’ over which his Cherokee ancestors had been herded by Federal troops.”32 Rogers died on August 15, 1935, in the crash of a plane in Alaska piloted by the famed Wiley Post, who was also killed. A nuclear-propelled submarine was named after Rogers in 1966.
SAMUEL I. ROSENMAN continued to be one of Roosevelt’s closest advisers until the time of his death. In his memoir he claimed to have written FDR’s first and last speech. Most of Rosenman’s advising was done from his position as an associate justice of the New York Supreme Court, but he became a special counsel to the president from 1943 to 1945. Roosevelt, who had special nicknames for all those close to him, called Rosenman “Sammy the Rose.” He died in 1973.
RAY SHELTON continued to work for the WPA for several years before starting his own construction company in West Palm Beach. He died in 1952 at the age of sixty-four.
W. BRUCE SHAFER JR., the “Father of the Bonus,” continued plumping for veterans’ rights for the rest of his life. He died in 1990.
GEORGE W. SHINAULT’S murder had a long, difficult, and clouded solution. Many people harbored the belief that he had been assassinated in retaliation for the shooting of William Hushka. One prime suspect, William Bullock, was hunted down in various East Coast cities and captured and brought back to the district six times between 1933 and 1936. But each time he was released; in the words of the Washington Post, there had been “an error in classification of his fingerprints.” Captured for the seventh time and brought back from Newark in April 1939, after “an error in his fingerprint classification had been rectified,” he was arraigned and gave a confession, a fact that was reported in the newspapers. But three days later he pleaded not guilty and was brought to trial by jury on June 27. He was fingered as the killer by a friend who lived at the same address. Outside the hearing of the jury, Bullock insisted that he had signed the confession only because he was beaten and kicked by two investigating officers. Besides, he said, he did not know what he was signing because he could not read. The judge nonetheless admitted the confession, pointing out that he would present the jury with instructions as to what weight should be given to it. On March 13, 1940, Bullock was convicted of premeditated murder and was sentenced to die in the electric chair on July 8. The sentence was appealed, and on June 30, 1941, almost a year after he was slated to die, his conviction was overturned in the U.S. Court of Appeals by a judge who said that the “practice of extorting confessions from poor and ignorant men has been condemned by the Supreme Court,” and that such a practice cannot be used to “send any man to his death.” It was also determined that premeditation had not been proven. Bullock was reindicted in October 1941 on a new charge of killing a policeman while committing a felony, also a first-degree murder charge. A second trial was ordered, and this time he was sentenced to serve twenty years in jail.33
MARGARET CHASE SMITH, as a representative and a senator, developed a strong interest in military issues. During World War II, she secured a seat on the House Naval Affairs Committee, using the position to investigate congestion on the home front caused by the rapid war buildup. More important, she almost single-handedly won permanent status for women in the military. After four terms in the House, Smith was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948, becoming the first woman elected to both houses of Congress. She came to national attention on June 1, 1950, as the first member of the Senate to denounce the tactics used by colleague Joseph McCarthy in his anti-Communist crusade. Following her “Declaration of Conscience” speech, some pundits speculated that she might be the vice presidential candidate on the 1952 Republican ticket. She died at her home on Memorial Day, May 29, 1995.
JULIUS F. STONE JR. returned to Harvard in 1937 (where he had previously earned a Ph.D in organic chemistry) for a law degree. Back in Key West, he became so deeply in debt and in such trouble with the Internal Revenue Service that he was forced to leave the country to escape prosecution. He found refuge in Cuba, but he and his self-appointed nemesis Ernest Hemingway fled after Fidel Castro came to power. Stone died in 1967 in New South Wales, Australia.34
HARRY S. TRUMAN made Key West his vacation home as president, helping to make the island one of America’s most popular tourist destinations—fulfilling Julius Stone’s dream and fueling the nightmares of tourist-loathing Ernest Hemingway. Truman’s vote ov
erthrowing President Roosevelt’s veto of the bonus did not harm him politically. When he became president after Roosevelt’s death in 1945, he oversaw the earliest impact of the GI Bill on American society. Harry S. Truman died on December 26, 1972.
LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT wrote an eloquent memoir of life in Fort Myer (The Twilight of the U.S. Cavalry: Life in the Old Army, 1917–1942) and had a distinguished career in World War II. As a colonel he took part in a British commando raid and suggested that the U.S. Army emulate the British. From his suggestion came the U.S. Rangers. As a brigadier general he led a battle group in the November 1942 Allied invasion of North Africa. After serving as General Eisenhower’s deputy, he took command of the 3rd Infantry Division for the invasion of Sicily and Italy. He became the commander of the 5th Army in December 1944 and succeeded General Patton as commander of the 3rd Army in Germany after Patton’s death in September 1945. Truscott was the only general in the war to have successively commanded a regiment, a division, a corps, and a field army. He died on September 12, 1965, in Alexandria, Virginia.
WALTER W. WATERS returned to Washington in January 1935 to take a clerical job in the War Department, granted through the efforts of General Douglas MacArthur. Less than a month later, he resigned to form the National Soldier’s Bonus League of America, in support of the Patman bill.35 Waters later took a job as political adviser to Governor Harland of Oklahoma and lived there until the outbreak of World War II, when he joined the Navy. After the war he and Wilma moved to Nevada and then to Wenatachee, Washington, in the mid-1950s.