The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  Waters died on April 22, 1959, at the age of sixty-one in the Walla Walla Veterans Hospital. In a 1992 interview with the Wenatachee World, Wilma Waters, then eighty-six, said, “Walt was an easy-going fellow. He had a respect for the service, was a modest man and was always writing poetry.”36

  ROY WILKINS became executive secretary of the NAACP in 1955; in 1965 the title of the position was changed to executive director, a position he held until 1977. In 1963 he helped organize the historic civil rights march on Washington, D.C. In the five minutes allotted to him at that event, he told the crowd that his old boss, W. E. B. DuBois, the man who had assigned him to cover the BEF, had died the night before in Ghana. The next speaker was Martin Luther King, who ran over his five minutes in what Roy Wilkins’s nephew, Roger Wilkins, called “a Baptist sermon.”37 Wilkins died on September 9, 1981.

  *Several MID files from the years 1939 to 1941 were withdrawn from the National Archives by the FBI on June 27, 1980. They were still missing in 2003, when the authors submitted a Freedom of Information request for the documents. They showed that Bonus March veterans were still the subject of MID and FBI reports as late as 1940. (There was no obvious reason for the withdrawal of the files in 1980.)

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. Pelham D. Glassford Papers, University of California, Los Angeles Library Special Collections RG 679, box 14, folder 2. The date of Glassford’s encounter is not given in his diary, but it is certainly sometime between May 20 and 22, with our best estimate being May 21. These notes were written by Glassford for an autobiography that was never completed.

  2. Kenneth J. Heineman, A Catholic New Deal: Religion and Reform in Depression Pittsburgh (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 23.

  3. Talcott Powell, Tattered Banners (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933), 42–3.

  4. In 1789, soon after ratification of the U.S. Constitution, Congress voted to continue the pension law passed by the Continental Congress in 1776. Veterans had to petition for their pensions, which had to be approved, first by federal judges and later by the secretary of war. Veterans of the War of 1812 were covered by laws that also gave half-pay pensions to their widows and orphans. More veterans began getting pensions after the Mexican-American War ended in 1846.

  5. Only Union veterans were eligible. The Fourteenth Amendment barred Confederate veterans from receiving federal pensions. Congress in 1958 authorized payment to the last surviving Confederate. Amy W. Knight and Robert L. Worden, The Veterans Benefits Administration: An Organizational History, 1776–1994.

  6. Arlen Specter, Passion for Truth, 10–11.

  7. Cielo Marie Dorado Lutino, “Constructing Historical Memory: The Bonus March and the Great Depression,” undergraduate thesis, Reed College, May 1994.

  Chapter 1: Over There

  1. Because Inauguration Day, March 4, fell on a Sunday in 1917, the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson to his second term was postponed to Monday. But Wilson, deciding that he must be inaugurated on the day stated in the Constitution, on Sunday morning went to an office in the Capitol and, in a private ceremony precisely at noon, was sworn in by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Next day was the public inauguration.

  2. Glenn D. Kittler, Hail to the Chief (Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965), 158–61. Inaugural text from the Avalon Project at Yale Law School, Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy.

  3. Hanson W. Baldwin, World War I (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 6, 16–18.

  4. Ibid., 19, 47; Douglas V. Johnson II and Rolfe L. Hillman, Soissons 1918 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), 1–18; Henry W. Ruoff, Book of the War (Boston: Standard Publication Company, 1918).

  5. Nancy Gentile Ford, Americans All! Foreign-born Soldiers in World War I (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 17–19.

  6. Barbara W. Tuchman, “How We Entered World War I,” New York Times Magazine, March 5, 1967, 73.

  7. Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage (New York: Random House, 1997), 616; Tuchman, “How We Entered World War I,” 75.

  8. Edmund W. Starling, Starling of the White House, 87.

  9. New York Times, April 3, 1917.

  10. Ibid.

  11. American Heritage History of World War I (New York: Bonanza Books, 1982), 205; Byrun Farwell, Over There (pub), 35; New York Times, April 3, 1917.

  12. One of the dissenting votes came from Jeannnette Rankin of Montana, the only woman in Congress. On December 8, 1941, she would cast the only vote against declaring war on Japan.

  13. New York Times, April 4, 1917; Gene Smith, The Shattered Dream, 33–37. Hoover served without pay in both posts. Between 1914 and his death in 1964, if Hoover had to receive a salary, he gave the money to charity.

  14. David H. Ewen, Popular American Composers from Revolutionary Times to the Present: a Biographical and Critical Guide (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1972), 43; New York Times, May 12, 1917.

  15. John Toland, No Man’s Land (Garden City: Doubleday, 1980), 204. There were also 80,446 National Guard officers and men already on the Mexican border, and about that many in state units. The U.S. Army general staff consisted of nineteen officers, too few even to plan an effective operation against Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary turned outlaw.

  16. American Heritage History, 207; Gary Mead, The Doughboys: America and the First World War (New York: Overlook Press, 2000), 4; Thomas B. Allen and Charles O. Hyman, We Americans (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1999), 379.

  17. Frank Freidel, Over There: The Story of America’s First Great Overseas Crusade (Short Hills, N.J.: Burford Books, 2003), 50; Allen and Hyman, We Americans, 380.

  18. Freidel, Over There, 50.

  19. Ford, Americans All!, 3.

  20. Mead, Doughboys (9), says 72 percent.

  21. Odom, “Under the Gun,” 100–105.

  22. Ulysses Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1966), 4.

  23. Robert H. Patton, The Pattons, 186–91. Pershing became romantically involved with a French artist commissioned to paint his portrait, and Nita eventually broke off the engagement.

  24. Patton’s military pedigree went back to an ancestor who was a general in George Washington’s Continental Army.

  25. The Hellfighters would serve 191 days in combat, including the Meuse-Argonne offensive. In the haze of battle for a while the Hellfighters advanced faster than the French troops on either flank, capturing the village of Sechault. For their work in the offensive the French awarded the regiment the Croix de Guerre, France’s highest military honor.

  In numerous bloody and uncelebrated clashes, enemies suddenly met while on patrol in no-man’s-land. One night, a German patrol of about twenty men got so close to the Hellfighter trenches that Sergeant Henry Johnson could hear the sound of German snippers cutting through barbed wire. Then German grenades began exploding around Johnson and Private Needham Roberts, who fell, grievously wounded but still firing. Johnson, emptying his French rifle’s three-shot magazine, killed several Germans. He clubbed some with his rifle butt and slashed others with a long knife the French called a sword-bayonet. As the German survivors vanished into the night, Johnson, legs and body riddled with twenty-one wounds, somehow dragged Roberts back to their trench. He was the first American soldier to receive the Croix de Guerre.

  The commander of one of the regiment’s machine-gun companies was Lieutenant James Reese Europe, who had been the leader of a celebrated New York City jazz band and a musical arranger for the dance stars Vernon and Irene Castle. Europe, as leader of the jazzed-up 369th Regimental Band, transformed one of his patrols into his ragtime song “On Patrol in No Man’s Land.” He wrote the lyrics in a French field hospital while recuperating from a poison-gas attack. He and his band toured France, introducing jazz to many French towns and giving the French the lasting image that would link jazz to black Americans.

  26. John J
. Pershing, My Experiences in the World War, vol. 2 (New York: Stokes, 1931), 244–55; Toland, No Man’s Land, 414–25.

  27. Frank B. Sibley, With the Yankee Division in France (Boston: Little, Brown, 1919).

  28. Columbia Encyclopedia, sixth ed., 2003.

  29. Martin Blumenson, The Patton Papers, 1885–1940, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 585–99.

  30. Harry H. Semmes, Portrait of Patton, 51–52.

  31. Toland, No Man’s Land, 431.

  32. Blumension, Patton Papers, 661; Martin Gilbert, Atlas of the First World War (London: Orion, 1994), 112.

  33. Patton, The Pattons, 212–13.

  34. Information courtesy of the 35th Division Association, PO Box 5004, Topeka, Kan. 66605.

  35. Transcript of D. M. Giangreco, “The Soldier from Independence: Harry S. Truman and the Great War,” U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, April 7, 2002, at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Society for Military History at the Frank Lloyd Wright Monona Terrace Convention Center, Madison, Wisconsin.

  36. Dixon Wecter, When Johnny Comes Marching Home (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1944).

  37. Oscar Theodore Barck Jr. and Manfred B. Nelson, Since 1900: A History of the United States in Our Times (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 270. Barck and Nelson call it “a great disappointment.”

  38. 67th Cong., 1st sess., S. Rep. 133.

  39. A few months later there were twice as many illegal establishments operating inside the District as there had been legal ones before the act was passed. (The act was named for Texas senator Morris Sheppard, on whose farm an illegal 130-gallon still was discovered during Prohibition. The fact that the farm was in Jollyville, Texas, gave some the idea that the story was apocryphal, but it was true.) During Washington’s three-year head start on the rest of the nation, local residents learned how to spot a speakeasy, connect with a reliable bootlegger, and brew beer or fabricate gin at home. To the average middle-class Washingtonian, the cocktail hour was infused with new meaning and celebrated as a point of honor. “Folks seemed to imagine that if they didn’t serve cocktails, other folks would think they were obeying the law, and such a thought, to a liberty loving people, was naturally unbearable. So people served cocktails under prohibition who had never dreamed of serving them in their own homes before,” the Washington Herald recalled of the early days of the Sheppard era. “The grand fiasco of the prohibition experiment was already becoming apparent” (“When and How Prohibition Came to Washington,” Washington Herald, December 7, 1931). In 1931 there were more than two thousand illegal operations in the city.

  40. George L. Cassiday, “Cassiday, Capitol Bootlegger, Got First Rum Order from Dry,” Washington Post, October 25, 1930. Cassiday seems to have gotten along as well with those who voted “dry” as with those on the “wet” side.

  41. “‘The Man in the Green Hat’ Uncovers,” Literary Digest, November 22, 1930, 10.

  42. W. Bruce Shafer, interview by James Sweeney, February 16, 1977, Old Dominion University, 3–6. Available on the Old Dominion Web site: lib.odu.

  43. The men in France knew of the concept even before the $60 bonus. “Why are the States going through all the expense of welcoming homecoming soldiers?” one man from the 33rd Division asked in a letter to Stars and Stripes (February 21, 1919). “Why not let the soldiers be discharged immediately upon their discharge in the United States and the States and Government give the soldiers who have done their bit, for democracy a bonus.” He suggested that millions were being spent on these celebrations that would be better appreciated in cash. The term bonus was also one that the troops were familiar with because of the bonuses then being paid to baseball players, as in this Stars and Stripes headline of March 8, 1918: “Yanks and Athletics Still on Lookout for Material—Herzog after Bonus.”

  The earliest headline containing the word bonus that we could find was in the Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch for February 1, 1919: “Bonus Agreed upon for Veterans of War.” The headline is misleading because agreement was still weeks away. At this point the bonus was a mere $50.

  44. Congressional Record 65, pt. 5: 4439.

  45. R. C. Leffingwell, “The Soldier and His Bonus,” Saturday Evening Post, May 15, 1930. Leffingwell was assistant secretary of the Treasury.

  46. “Thousands March in Bonus Parade,” New York Times, October 17, 1920; “Soldier Bonus Wins by 400,000 Here,” New York Times, November 6, 1920.

  47. Roger Daniels, The Bonus March: An Episode of the Great Depression, 22–23, points out that there was a faction in Congress that argued that the government had done enough, maintaining that it was up to private enterprise to provide a transition from war to peace by providing the vets with good jobs.

  48. World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924, HR 14157, 66th Cong., 2nd sess., Congressional Record 63, daily ed. (May 29, 1920).

  49. Here is the letter in its entirety with the “letter box” section of the newspaper:

  Cleveland, Ohio

  May 20, 1920

  Editor The Advocate:—

  For many months the bonus question has been see-sawing in our seat of government. It seems that the only opposition against it is the labor question—speaking more directly, Negro Labor. It has been argued pro and con that if bill is passed all the Negroes, especially those of the South, will leave their occupations.

  It is said that their leaving would cause a great catastrophe in the present labor crisis. Why should the Negro cause such a breach in labor? When the war came the Negro was taken from the field and factory and placed in line to help fight for Democracy. Records show that he achieved success in that line. When the call for men was made the Negro responded nobly.

  It is not the way of the Negro to get a few pennies ahead and then stop work. He is as much at home with five dollars as with fifty cents. He too had much to lose in giving himself to that great army whose one object was to elevate humanity. He would give himself more freely to labor if he were given a little money to start himself again on life’s pathway.

  If the bill should be passed approximately three million American soldiers not including Negroes, will be benefited.

  Money will never pay for the agony, pain and sacrifice that these, our soldiers, suffered when they made the world safe for democracy.

  SAMUEL V.PERRY

  Pres. Y. M S. C.

  2248 East 46th St.

  50. Miller, Pretty Bubbles, 142; New York Times, July 28, 1919.

  51. The Ohio Historical Society is the repository for the Advocate through its “African-American Experience in Ohio.”

  52. Advocate, January 17, 1920.

  53. Ibid., May 8, 1920.

  54. Leffingwell, “Soldier and His Bonus,” 6, 60.

  55. “Senate Prepares to Shelve Bonus,” Washington Post, June 1, 1920.

  Chapter 2: The Tombstone Bonus

  1. Shafer interview, 6–7. McLean’s drunkenness eventually drove him into such a state of madness that he ended his life in a mental hospital, convinced that he was a French secret service operative assigned to kill Ned McLean. Once elected, Harding spent time with McLean despite—or perhaps because of—his outrageous drunken behavior. In his book Who Killed Society? (New York: Harper, 1960), Cleveland Amory talks about the coolness of Mrs. Harding when McLean “urinated in the fireplace in the East Room (as well as down the leg of the Belgian Ambassador).”

  2. Daniels, Bonus March, 36.

  3. Will Rogers, The Autobiography of Will Rogers, ed. Donald Day (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 88. He also wrote, “I think the best Insurance in the World against another War is to take care of the Boys who fought in the last one. YOU MAY WANT TO USE THEM AGAIN.”

  4. “Harding Says Bonus Now Would Imperil Country,” Wall Street Journal, July 13, 1921.

  5. Eugene P. Trani and David L. Wilson, The Presidency of Warren G. Harding (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 65.

  6. “Edison at 75 Still a Two-Shift Man,” New York Times, February 12, 1922; “Bonus Is D
emanded by Veteran Throngs,” New York Times, March 6, 1922.

  7. “Votes Bonus, 333–70,” Washington Post,March 24, 1922.

  8. “Soldiers’ Adjusted Compensation: Message of the President Returning without Approval the Bill H.R. 10874,” 67th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1922.

  9. Ibid., 5.

  10. Daniels, Bonus March, 33.

  11. National Industrial Conference Board, New York, Special Report no. 24, 46.

  12. Barck and Nelson, Since 1900, 302.

  13. “Bonus to Soldiers Paid in 19 States,” New York Times, December 28, 1923. The New York State constitution had a provision prohibiting the borrowing of funds from the state for individuals, so the 1920 bonus law was declared unconstitutional. After a delay of four years a constitutional amendment allowing for the bonus was passed.

  14. “Attacks on Bonus Resented at White House and Capitol,” Washington Post, February 20, 1924.

  15. “New Bonus Bill Based on Insurance Scheme,” Washington Post, February 26, 1924.

  16. “Veterans March in Bonus Parade,” New York Times, March 2, 1924.

  17. “Bonus Bill Passed by Senate 67–17,” New York Times, April 24, 1934. A version offering immediate payment of the bonus in the Senate was defeated 47–38.

  18. Donald R. McCoy, Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet President (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 233.

  19. Arthur Mann, La Guardia: A Fighter against His Times, 1882–1933.

  20. “Proceeding of Congress and Committees in Brief,” Washington Post, May 20, 1924.

  21. Frederick M. Kerby, in his widely distributed leaflet, The Veterans’ Bonus Law, underscored the essential point of compensation: “The theory underlying the law is that men and women who served in the armed forces of the U. S. during the World War thereby sacrificed the opportunity of making more money during the period of their service, and that they should therefore receive an Adjusted Credit for the period of their service that will in some measure equalize what they would have made and what they actually received in Army or Navy pay.”