The Bonus Army
Page 40
22. William A. White, A Puritan in Babylon, 279. White calls Lodge’s action a “political death warrant.” As early as August 31, 1922, Lodge was on record as favoring the bonus when the Wall Street Journal reported that he thought that paying it would not adversely affect the nation’s economy, as many of his fellow Republicans were saying.
23. “Comment of Today’s Newspapers on the Senate Vote on Bonus Veto,” New York Times, May 20, 1924.
24. Senate, Veteran’s Relief, 72nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1932, 15–16; cited in Lawrence C. Jorgensen, “The Bonus Expeditionary Force, 1932” (master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1963). The bill provided for a few women, specifically: “Any woman who enlisted and served and was honorably discharged as yeoman in the Navy or Marine Corps.”
25. The exact conditions were these: “If the veteran dies at any time after making application, or after receiving his policy and before the 20 years expire, the full amount of the policy is paid to the beneficiary he has named in his application. If no beneficiary has been named, or if the beneficiary named has died and no new beneficiary has been named, then, on the death of the veteran, the full amount of the policy is paid to his estate, and goes to his heirs at law. The veteran may name any person he desires as his beneficiary, without regard to relationship.”
26. “Coolidge ‘Exacted’ Fee for Speech, Is Charge,” Washington Post, October 27, 1924.
27. Hines to Garrard B. Winston, under secretary of the Treasury, October 21, 1924, Secretary’s Correspondence, Soldiers’ Bonus, RG 56, Box 114, National Archives.
28. Nancy Beck Young, Wright Patman: Populism, Liberalism and the American Dream (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2000), 15.
29. “National Affairs,” Time, April 11, 1932, 10, 19.
30. Sherwood, Edwin Douglas, “Wright Patman and the Bonus Episode” (Master’s thesis, Lamar University, 1988).
31. This was Patman’s recollection at age seventy-seven as recorded in Joint Economic Committee, The Federal Reserve System: A Study Conducted by Wright Patman (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1976), 86.
32. Hoover’s optimism was unbridled: on the eve of the Crash, he said, “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poor-house is vanishing from among us.”
33. George L. Cassiday, “The Man in the Green Hat,” five-part front-page series in the Washington Post, October 23, 1930–October 27, 1930. For his part, Cassiday played the game well as a savvy political handyman to his elected friends on the Hill. As a member in good standing in the Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, and President’s Garrison of the Army and Navy League, he helped marshal the support of veterans for congressmen up for reelection. Once he traveled to the Midwest as an advance man for a dry Senator and unflinchingly defended his friend’s support of the Eighteenth Amendment. He understood the importance of constituents and always found time to take them on an impromptu tour of the Capitol or find them a quart of their favorite scotch. His liquor was poured for many a constituent in congressional offices: “Some of them got a real thrill out of having a drink under the shadow of the Capitol Dome, it was something they could tell about when they got home.”
34. Edward T. Folliard, “White House Hedge Hid Bootleg Gin,” Washington Post, December 6, 1933.
35. Sarah Booth Conroy, interview with Frederick Drum Hunt, “Prohibition? Bottoms Up!” Washington Post, October 4, 1993.
36. Raymond Moley Jr., The American Legion Story (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), 197; Donald J. Lisio, The President and Protest, 31–32.
37. Lisio, President and Protest, 31–32.
38. Ibid., 33.
39. Press conference statement, December 9, 1930, in William S. Myers, ed., The State Papers and Other Public Writings of Herbert Hoover, vol. I (New York: Doubleday), 459–60. Donald Lisio calls the December 9 statement “one of the most politically inept statements of his career,” as Hoover clearly played into the hand of his political enemies. He adds, “Because he did not specifically denounce the bonus or direct his anger at the veteran’s demands, some critics felt that Hoover had attacked all the needy who sought relief as well as the congressmen who were trying to help them.” Lisio, President and Protest, 33–34.
40. “Parade to Capitol in Plea for Bonus,” New York Times, April 9, 1932, 3.
41. House Committee on Ways and Means, Payment of Adjusted-Compensation Certificates, 72d Cong., 2d sess., January 1931. Rep. John Nance Garner makes the point (275) that this was the first time in ten years “that the leading financiers of the country have been called in to advise the committee concerning an economic problem. Heretofore we have generally looked to the Treasury Department and to Secretary Mellon to express that viewpoint. I do not know whether this procedure was occasioned because of loss of confidence in the Secretary of the Treasury, by the committee, or by the Congress, or by the country.”
42. Ibid., 177. Mellon testified that the face value of the certificates outstanding totaled $3,409,304,122. To retire them at face value in 1931 would cost about $1,640,000,00 more than the actual present value, which was about $1,770,000,000.
43. Ibid., 382–83.
44. Ibid.
45. The final witness was Coxey.
46. Patton, The Pattons, 212. This is the headline that alerts the Pattons to the fact that Angelo is in Washington.
47. Ibid., 212. The primary source for Beatrice Patton’s reaction is her personal journal, to which the author of that book, as George S. Patton’s grandson, had sole access.
48. Time, March 9, 1931.
49. The presiding congressman chided Shafer on his “coarse language.” John Nance Garner said there was nothing wrong with the language. The chair withdrew the objection, and the metaphor of the celluloid cat stood.
Chapter 3: A Petition in Boots
1. “Coxey Dies at 97; Led Army of the Idle,” New York Times, May 19, 1951.
2. Ralph Thompson, “General Coxey’s Hunger Marchers,” Current History, January 1932, 550. For several generations “Coxey’s Army”—as in “you look like Coxey’s Army”—was a term of derogation, implying a general shabbiness and disorder. Coxey’s men were celebrated as tramps in song and verse.
3. “Coxey Dies at 97”; also Gerald G. Eggert, “Coxey’s March on Washington,” American History Illustrated, October 1977, 23.
4. Ibid., 552.
5. John A. Garraty, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1998), 235.
6. “On Their Weary March,” Washington Post, May 5, 1894, p. 1.
7. Eggert, “Coxey’s March,” 31.
8. “Frye’s Army Starved Out,” Washington Post, July 1, 1894.
9. Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, 155.
10. Paul Dickson and William D. Hickman, Firestone: A Legend, a Century, a Celebration, 74. In 1931, 993,000 miles were “surface” miles, a term that applies to unpaved roads. Some were dirt, some gravel, or other surfacings, but not paved as we know it today. As to whether these roads were “drivable” or not depends on a number of factors, such as weather.
11. Ada Rainey, “In the Realm of Art and Music,” Washington Post, March 8, 1925. The critic suggested that if Glassford chose to leave the Army, he could be a successful artist.
12. The first time Glassford’s name ever appeared in a feature article in the Washington Post, on March 8, 1925, it was not as a fighter but as a painter who had mounted a one-man show of decorative screens of his own design as well as others inspired by James McNeill Whistler and the fourteenth-century Chinese artist Wu Chen.
13. Washington Post, October 21, 1931.
14. “Politics Prevent Chiefs of Police from Enforcing Law, Says Glassford,” Evening Star, unpaginated clipping, Bonus Army scrapbook, MLK Library.
15. David Rankin Barbee, “The Artist Who Became a ‘Cop,’” Washington Post, November 15, 1931.
16. “Armistice of 1918 Recreated,” New York Times, Nove
mber 12, 1931; “Crowds Pack Auditorium For Gay Armistice Ball,” Washington Post, November 12, 1931. If it were not for the fact that the money raised went to the “disabled and destitute” of the Great War, the evening would have had a deeper tinge of irony to it. For instance, at one station canteen “lassies” ladled soup from a faux soup kitchen.
17. The Army more than any other group in America knew the Bolsheviks because of the 15,000 American troops sent to northern Russia beginning in the fall of 1918, including, by chance, many from Michigan drafted only a few months before; they thought they were being shipped to France. They fought an unexpected guerrilla war in a Russian winter, with the temperature dropping to 55 degrees below zero. Officially, 353 died, but at least 127 were listed as dead when, in fact, their fate was unknown. Unofficially, many were believed to have died as prisoners in the hands of the Russians, and futile talks went on between the two countries into the 1920s, hampering U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union. Mead, Doughboys, 392–94; Meirion and Susie Harries, Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917–1919 (New York: Random House, 1997), 299.
18. Edward Folliard, “When Reds Invaded Washington,” Washington Post, December 2, 1956.
19. “Marchers Quit Washington in Trucks,” New York Times, December 9, 1931.
20. “Military Intelligence Division Correspondence 1917–41,” National Archives, Record Group 165, Box 2856, File 10110-2674.
21. “General Coxey Sympathizes with Hunger Marchers,” Washington Post, December 3, 1931.
22. Edward T. Folliard, “Capitol Echoes,” Washington Post, December 13, 1931.
23. Glassford’s handling of the Hunger March, his general ability to come up with new ideas for modern policing, and his promise to make the Washington police the “finest of the fine” gave him wide, enthusiastic public support. “Writing of Movie Scenario, Glassford’s Latest Work,” said a headline in the Washington Post, December 26, 1931, alluding to his plan to make a movie teaching police how to be courteous in their dealings with citizens.
24. “Veterans Are Here to Plead for Cash,” Washington Post, December 9, 1931. In reporting on the Seattle men, the Washington Post noted that another group of petitioners had arrived earlier from Portland, Oregon with signatures—the only mention of this group that could be found—suggesting that other petitioners may have been in the city. The Seattle group drew attention because they were arrested in Alexandria, Virginia, for trespassing on railroad property. They were given suspended sentences when the judge heard of their mission.
25. “Bonus Brigade Asks Permit for Parade,” Washington Post, December 13, 1931.
26. “50 Veterans on Hike to Urge Full Bonus,” New York Times, December 15, 1931.
27. William F. Elkins, “Wright Patman and the Veteran’s Bonus Issue” (Master’s thesis, University of Arizona, 1964), 26.
28. Joint Economic Committee, Federal Reserve System, 88.
29. “Veterans Leaders Cancel 1932 Parade,” Washington Post, December 30, 1931.
30. Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, 48.
31. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted that Hoover’s name became “a prefix charged with hate”— the newspapers the homeless used to cover themselves were “Hoover blankets,” farmers called jackrabbits “Hoover hogs,” and empty pockets pulled inside out were “Hoover flags.” The origin of the term may have been a shantytown in Chicago which called itself Hooverville and had streets named Prosperity Road, Hard Times Avenue, and Easy Street. It came to national attention in 1930 (“Chicago Jobless Colonize,” New York Times, November 12, 1930).
32. The 1932nd Psalm, by R. E. Jacobs, began with the lines
Hoover is my shepherd, and I am in want,
He maketh me to lie down on the park benches,
He leadeth me beside the still factories,
He leadeth me in the paths of destruction for his party’s sake
Yea, though I walk through the valley of starvation
I do fear evil for he is against me.
His politics and the profiteers they frighten me.
He preparest a reduction of wages before me in the presence of mine enemies.
He anointest my income with taxes,
My expenses runneth over.
Surely poverty and unemployment will follow me all the days of the Hoover administration.
Powell, Tattered Banners, 245. Jacobs was active in the BEF. Another version of this appears in Robert S. McElvaine, The Depression and New Deal: A History in Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28.
33. Weaver, “Bonus March,” 19.
34. Lisio, President and Protest, 44.
35. “Legion for Rum Vote as Cash Bonus Loses; Act Approved and Hit,” Washington Post, September 25, 1931.
36. Kenneth J. Heineman, A Catholic New Deal: Religion and Reform in Depression Pittsburgh (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 20.
37. Heineman, Catholic New Deal, 20–21. Al Capone, gangster boss of Chicago, was convicted on federal charges of tax evasion in 1931 and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
38. Leo Reed, letter to Herbert Hoover, December 31, 1931; Lawrence Richey, memorandum to White House staff, January 4, 1932. Heineman, Catholic New Deal, 23.
39. Ibid., 24.
40. An odd and rarely reported connection between Cox and the Mellons appears in Heineman, A Catholic New Deal: “The Republicans implied that either the Vatican, or Democratic supporters of Al Smith, had funded the entire operation. Hoover’s well-publicized investigation of Cox backfired. He had been correct in one sense: a shadowy figure did provide assistance to the priest’s caravan. Unfortunately, the figure in question was [Secretary of the Treasury] Andrew Mellon, who had quietly ordered his Gulf Oil service stations to dispense gasoline without charge” (27).
41. 72nd Cong., 1st sess., 1932, Congressional Record, 75, pt. 2:1400–1401.
42. New York Times, January 15, 1932.
43. Harvey O’Connor, Mellon’s Millions: The Biography of a Fortune; The Life and Times of Andrew W. Mellon, 321. If there was any American public official most unlike Mellon, it was Charley Dawes. He had become absolutely fed up with his job—the excessive formality, the numbing politeness, the omnipresent aristocracy. Dawes, a forthright man given to forthright talk, tried to make the best of what he considered exile, spending his own money, for example, to hire American comedians to spill liquor down the necks of the British nobility. But even this could not make him happy. He quit on January 8, 1932, determined to return to the rough-and-tumble of American political life. Hoover now had a place where he could send Mellon that was not beneath the dignity of a former secretary of the Treasury. Dawes’s odd nickname, “Hell and Maria,” came from some words uttered before a congressional committee investigating charges of waste and extravagance in the conduct of the war. When a member of the committee asked Dawes if it was true that excessive prices were paid for mules in France, he shouted, “Helen Maria, I’d have paid horse prices for sheep if the sheep could have pulled artillery to the front!”
44. Mellon would serve for one year and then retire to private life. He served as secretary of the Treasury from March 4, 1921, to February 12, 1932, when he assumed his duties as ambassador to Great Britain.
45. Robert S. Gallagher, “Before the Colors Fade: The Radio Priest,” American Heritage, October 1972, 38.
46. Donald Day, Will Rogers: A Biography, 285.
47. Edmund Starling, Starling, 289.
48. William Seale, The President’s House: A History, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 1986), 903.
49. “Turning Points in Detroit History,” Michigan History Magazine, November/December 2000, 14.
50. Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 33–34. At least fifty others were wounded. Calling this the Ford Massacre had a double edge. As Irving Bernstein points out in The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1
933–1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), “These policemen were hardly free agents. Clyde M. Ford, the mayor of Dearborn, was a distant cousin of Henry’s and owned a Ford agency; Carl Brooks, the chief of police, was a former Ford detective” (433).
51. Allen and Hyman, eds., We Americans, 213–14.
52. Eugene H. Methvin, The Riot Makers: Technology of Social Demolition, 154.
53. John D. Hicks, Republican Ascendancy, 134. The legal name was Communist Party of the United States of America, but it was usually called the U.S. Communist Party.
54. U.S. Military Intelligence, Surveillance of Radicals in the U.S., 1917–1941, microfilm 86/236, reels 21 and 22, Library of Congress.
55. The school moved in 1932 from Fort Meade, Maryland. Students there included Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton Jr.
56. W. H. Jones Jr., “The Use of Tanks in Quelling Civil Disturbances,” Tank Studies (US Army Tank School), 1932, 166–77. This is a truly difficult document to find. We obtained a copy through the lilbrary of the USA Armor School Research Library, Fort Knox, Kentucky, with the help of librarian Lorraine M. Allen and fellow Bonus Army researcher Dana Hardaker.
57. Tim Kirk and Anthony McElliott, eds., Opposing Fascism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 12–32.
58. The descriptions are unattributed, but they appear to come from reports of U.S. Army observers in Germany.
59. Thomas B. Allen, War Games (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 121.
Chapter 4: Mobilizing a Bonus Army
1. Named after Sergeant Peter Weiser of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the place where baseball Hall of Famer Walter Johnson was discovered by a scout and quickly shipped off to the Washington Senators.
2. “Idaho 2nd Infantry Expedition to Mexico, 1916,” photographic collection, Utah State Universities Libraries, P0030, Special Collections and Archives.
3. T. Harry Williams, Richard N. Current, and Frank Freidel, A History of the United States since 1865 (New York: Knopf, 1965), 383; Calvin L. Christman, ed., America at War (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 236.