The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  27. Sneller, “Bonus March of 1932,” 66.

  28. Reichelderfer, Foulkrod, and Glassford testimony quoted from Senate Committee on District of Columbia, Emergency Unemployed Relief and Care of Persons in Distress: Hearing on S. 4781, 72nd Congr. 1st sess., June 1, 1932, 6, 9, 12, 17, 18, 20.

  29. Washington Times, June 3, 1932.

  30. The Washington Daily News on June 2, 1932, reported eight “bonus armies” en route to the nation’s capital. Cities reporting veterans on the march included San Francisco, Oklahoma City, Denver, Chicago, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Cleveland, Toledo, Albany, New York, and Camden.

  31. Wide World photo, May 31, 1932.

  32. Washington Post, June 1, 1932.

  33. “Bonus Force Here Denies Red Backing,” Washington Post, June 3, 1932.

  34. Washington Post, June 1, 1932.

  35. New York Times, June 1, 1932.

  36. Time magazine, June 13, 1932.

  37. “Federal Agents Probe Communist Bonus Activities,” Washington Star, June 2, 1932.

  38. Terkel, Hard Times, 28–29.

  39. Washington Star, June 2, 1932.

  40. “‘The Bonus March of 1932: A Unique Experience in North Carolina and Political and Social Life,” North Carolina Historical Review, January 1974, 76–78.

  41. Sewilla LaMar, “I Marched with the Bonus Army,” Abbott’s Monthly 5 (September 1932): 3. Abbott’s was a monthly newsmagazine published by Robert S. Abbott of the Chicago Defender. It is a remarkable historic source that is seldom cited in works about this period. We are indebted to Tom Mann of the Library of Congress for leading us to it.

  42. Meisel recorded his trip and his days in Washington in Bonus Expeditionary Forces: The True Facts, 1932 (Clintonville, Wis.: privately printed, 1932). He distributed it himself, selling it for 65 cents.

  43. Waters, B.E.F., 13.

  44. “Bonus Plea Signed By 7 More in House,” Washington Post, June 1, 1932.

  45. Ibid. This appears in the same issue of the Post in which they were told to retreat and that their efforts were futile.

  46. “Will Rogers’ Dispatch,” Boston Globe, July 30, 1932.

  47. Walter Davenport, “But the Dead Don’t Vote,” Collier’s, June 11, 1932, 89.

  48. Arthur Leo Hennessy, “The Bonus Army: Its Roots, Growth, and Demise,” 231, quoting an interview with Joseph Dwye, a local resident of the time.

  49. Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, June 2, 1932.

  50. “Bonus Force Here Denies Red Backing,” Washington Post, June 3, 1932.

  51. “Federal Agents Probe Communist Bonus Activities,” Washington Star, June 2, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbook.

  52. Douglas, Veterans on the March, 120–21; Toledo New-Bee, June 2, 1932, June 3, 1932 (per Sneller, “Bonus March of 1932,” 110).

  53. New York Times, June 4, 1932.

  54. Pace gave this version in congressional testimony in 1951: U.S. Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities, “Communist Tactics Among Veterans Groups,” 82nd Cong., 1st session, 1951.

  55. Washington Daily News, June 3, 1932; cited in Sneller, “Bonus March of 1932.”

  56. New York Times, June 4, 1932.

  57. Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 5, 1932; cited in Sneller.

  58. Pace, in HUAC 1951, 1934–35, says that city officials faced “a pretty bad situation in Cleveland,” noting the machine guns and the fact that so many police had been drawn from their regular beats that citizens feared an outbreak of crime and were uneasy, “which made us very gleeful.”

  59. Information about Carter comes from a one-page biography (which does not mention any railroad connection) in U.S. Military Intelligence, Surveillance of Radicals.

  60. Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 6, 1932; Pittsburgh Press, June 9, 1932; both cited in Sneller, “Bonus March of 1932.” Also, Washington Star, June 9, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbook.

  61. “Federal Agents Probe.”

  62. “Federal Agents Probe.”

  63. The secret memo was not revealed until November 3, 1932; Washington Post, November 4, 1932.

  64. “3000 In Bonus Army En Route Here; 3,200 Others Plan March,” Washington Daily News, June 2, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbook. Glassford recalls setting up other smaller camps. He told the B.E.F News, July 2, 1932, that for one camp he selected a turnip patch in back of a frame shack occupied by an African-American family consisting of Mose Hawkins, his wife, and six kids. The turnip patch was overgrown. The grass was two feet high, so Glasssford got a horse-drawn power scythe and had the grass cut. The cuttings were used as stuffing for bed sacks that Glassford borrowed from the National Guard.

  65. U.S. Grant III, grandson of the Civil War general and president, was the director of the agency. As historian Donald J. Lisio notes (President and Protest, 73), Grant was one of President Hoover’s “almost anonymous, yet most trusted lieutenants.” Lisio believes that Grant would not have granted permission for Anacostia without Hoover’s approval.

  66. “Federal Agents Probe.”

  67. “6000 More Veterans Are Expected Here; 100 Sleep in Open,” Washington Daily News, June 3, 1932.

  68. “This is Anacostia,” Washington Post, May 8, 1965.

  69. Interview with Charles T. Greene, May 2, 2002. Green, who was eighty-three when he was interviewed, is the former director of industrial safety for the District of Columbia.

  70. Glassford Papers, RG 679, box 15, folder 5.

  71. Hennessy, “The Bonus Army,” 256–58.

  72. “Bonus Plea Signed by Seven More in House,” Washington Post, June 1, 1932.

  73. Ibid.

  74. Evalyn Walsh McLean, Father Struck It Rich, 303.

  75. Ibid., 305.

  76. Sneller, “Bonus March of 1932,” 122.

  77. “District to Truck Bonus Marchers Away from City on Next Thursday,” Washington Star, June 4, 1932.

  78. “Bonus Marchers Defiant as City Asks Leaders to Leave Thursday,” Washington Star, June 5, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbook.

  79. “Army Will Not Leave Capital,” Pittsburgh Post-Dispatch, June 9, 1932.

  80. “On to Washington,” Literary Digest, June 11, 1932, 8.

  81. “Bonus Marches Face Shrinking Hospitality,” Fort Wayne (Ind.) Journal-Gazette, June 3, 1932, 1.

  82. “‘Bonus Army’ Rallies for Parade Tonight,” New York Times, June 7, 1932.

  83. “Brooklyn March Planned,” New York Times, June 5, 1932.

  84. “Bonus Army Faces Misery in Capital,” Fort Wayne (Ind.) Journal-Gazette, June 4, 1932, 1, 2.

  85. “Bonus Army Here Ejects Six Reds,” Fort Wayne (Ind.) Journal-Gazette, June 6, 1932.

  86. “Dispatches as Bonus Army Mobilized on Wide Front,” Washington Post, June 8, 1932.

  87. Giblo, Footlights, Fistfights and Femmes: The Jimmy Lake Story. He took pride in the fact that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes came to the Gayety each week and offered him the stock observation: “Is it good and dirty this week? If it’s not, I’m not going to stay.”

  88. Ibid., 233–35.

  89. Washington Post, June 8, 1932.

  90. “100,000 View Parade of Bonus Army,” Washington Post, June 8, 1932.

  91. “Greatest Fistic Turn-Out Watches Slashing Battles for Bonus Army’s Relief,” Washington Post, June 9, 1932.

  92. Waters, B.E.F., 79.

  Chapter 6: Hooverville, D.C.

  Epigraph. Keene, Doughboys, 191.

  1. Washington Daily News, June 9, 1932; cited in Sneller, “Bonus March of 1932.” Named after Marks: Daniels, Bonus March, 110.

  2. “Crosby Tells Glassford He May Lose His Job for Activities for Veterans,” Washington Star, June 7, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbook.

  3. Washington Daily News, June 10, 1932; cited in Hennessy. Waters (B.E.F., 85) writes of $5,000 “in the treasury,” but does not mention Coughlin.

  4. “Bonus Army Asked to Leave Capital; Veterans Refuse,” New York Times, June 9, 1932.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Douglas, Veterans on the March, 76, 77.


  7. Glassford Papers for Marine information. Army field hospital: letter from Frank T. Hines, administrator of Veterans Affairs, to General MacArthur, August 18, 1932, Adjutant General Files, National Archives. Fort Hunt, originally part of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, became a fort in the late nineteenth century, when the Army decided to increase defenses of the capital in anticipation of war with Spain. The guns of Fort Hunt, never fired in anger, were removed when the Great War began. The outpost became a place the Army did not know what to do with. In 1930 Congress authorized Secretary of War Hurley to hand Fort Hunt over to the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks of the National Capital, then under control of retired major general Ulysses S. Grant III. He wanted the park as a recreational site along the George Washington Memorial Parkway, a new highway to Mount Vernon. A black ROTC corps had been given permission to bivouac at the camp during a summer training camp, but Hurley withdrew permission and placed the fort under the temporary control of Hines. He set up a hospital, which closed on August 12, 1932. (John Hammond Moore, “The Fort Hunt Saga: Guns, Bonus Marchers, U-BOATS, and Picnics,” Northern Virginia Heritage, February 1980, 3–6, 20.

  8. “Bonus Army Camp Called ‘Frightful’ by Health Officer,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 10, 1932.

  9. Waters, B.E.F., 106.

  10. “The Human Side of the Bonus Army,”Literary Digest, June 25, 1932, 113.

  11. Waters, Mass Violence, 105.

  12. Meisel, Bonus Expeditionary Forces, 9.

  13. “Human Side of the Bonus Army.”

  14. “Veterans Dig in for Long Stay at Anacostia Camp,” Washington Daily News, June 11, 1932.

  15. “Human Side of the Bonus Army.”

  16. Meisel, Bonus Expeditionary Forces, 8.

  17. “Human Side of the Bonus Army.”

  18. Douglas, Veterans on the March, 67.

  19. Waters, B.E.F., 68.

  20. Douglas, Veterans on the March, 74.

  21. Garner Jackson, “Unknown Soldier,” Survey 58, no. 9 (August 1, 1932): 342.

  22. Based on photographs.

  23. “Sallies Big Help to Bonus Veterans,” Washington Post, June 22, 1932, unpaginated clipping, Bonus Army scrapbooks, MLK Library.

  24. Austin Kiplinger, “Growing Up in Washington I, An Inside-Outside View,” Washington History, fall/winter 2000–2001, 11.

  25. John Dos Passos, The Best Times (New York: New American Library, 1966), 70.

  26. John Dos Passos, “The Veterans Come Home to Roost,” New Republic, June 29, 1932, 177.

  27. Thomas R. Henry, “Health Threat to ‘Army’ Grows,” Evening Star, June 12, 1932, unpaginated clipping, Bonus Army scrapbooks.

  28. Thomas R. Henry, “Bonus Camp Life Thrills Children,” Evening Star, June 14, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbooks.

  29. Charles Greene, interview by the authors, May 2, 2002. Greene was a director of industrial safety for the District of Columbia.

  30. Joseph and Nick Oliver, interview by the authors, July 14, 2003.

  31. Letter from Colevas to William Brown, March 8, 2003.

  32. Meisel, Bonus Expeditionary Forces, 10.

  33. The BEF and the police cooperated in the keeping a census. Here was the June 14 census, which uses the BEF’s regimental system:

  1st Reg. 8ths and I Sts. SE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 500

  2nd Reg. 12th and D Sts SW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 450 (11 sick)

  3rd, 4th, 5th , 6th Regiments at Camp Marks, Anacostia . . . . . . . . 13,650

  7th Reg.

  3rd & Pennsylvania Ave NW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2,350

  Camp Bartlett, 23rd and Alabama SE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,550

  Camp Meigs, 5th & Florida NE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

  202 A St. SE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

  Unattached . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,800

  Grand Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20,483

  Men on sick call . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524

  The police used a place-by-place census, conducted each day by on-the-spot inspections. By July 4, the police listed twenty-two locations besides Camp Marks, with a total of 20,876. Glassford Papers; U.S. Military Intelligence, Surveillance of Radicals.

  34. James G. Banks, interview by the authors, April 30, 2002.

  35. Frank A. Taylor, interview by the authors, April 28, 2002. In 1964 Taylor would become the founding director of the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology, now the National Museum of American History.

  36. Dos Passos, “Veterans Come Home,” 178.

  37. Henry, “Health Threat.”

  38. John A. Garraty and Eric Foner, eds. “Lynching” entry, Reader’s Companion to American History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991).

  39. Cleveland Call and Post, July 19, 1930.

  40. James D. Calder, The Origins and Development of Federal Crime Control Policy: Herbert Hoover’s Initiatives (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993), 183. The first federal anti-lynching law was not passed until 1968, when the Civil Rights Act specifically made lynching a crime.

  41. “The Secret City,” Crisis, June 1932, 185–87.

  42. “National Affairs,” Crisis, July 1932, 222; “Schools,” Crisis, August–July 1932, 272.

  43. Banks, interview.

  44. Green, interview. Green was not surprised at seeing blacks and whites together: “I was from California, and my sister and I were the only Negro kids in the schools I went to. My older sister was the only one in the high school.”

  45. Roy Wilkins, “Up in Harlem Down in the Delta,” 119.

  46. Roy Wilkins, “The Bonuseers Ban Jim Crow,” Crisis, October 1932.

  47. Jackson, “Unknown Soldier,” 344. Not really the subject of this book, but this would appear to be a link between the NAACP and the concept of nonviolent resistance.

  48. Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capitol, 220.

  49. Crisis, December 1932, 362.

  50. From Wilkins, “Bonuseers Ban Jim Crow,” 316.

  51. Ibid., 124.

  52. Truscott, Twilight, 124–126.

  53. “Police Curb Students Opposed to M’Arthur,” New York Times, June 9, 1932, 16. Many later accounts say that MacArthur (spelled McArthur in the Times) was “jeered” during the speech. But the police detention of the three antiwar demonstrators was clearly taking place in another part of the campus. The demonstrators, two students and a former student, were later released without charges.

  54. “Bonus ‘Armies’ Still on Move in This Area,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 10, 1932.

  55. “Record Senior Class at Pitt Given Degrees,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 9, 1932; “‘Army’ of Veterans Rests in Camp at McKees Rocks,” same issue.

  56. Letter from Gilbert H. Grosvenor to Edwin A. Grosvenor, June 9, 1932. President Hoover did award the gold medal to Amelia Earhart Putnam on June 28 at Constitution Hall. Earlier that day Grosvenor and his wife had tea with the Hoovers and the Patmans and others. Decorations, as described in the official White House diary, were pink roses, pink larkspur, baby’s breath, and ferns. Collection of Ike Hoover, White House usher, Library of Congress.

  57. La Gorce to President Hoover, August 2, 1932, “World War Veterans—Bonus Correspondence,” 1932, box 373; cited in Keene, Doughboys.

  58. The Washington Post revealed the files on January 28, 1949, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities was investigating Communist subversion. The Post noted that the committee frequently consulted the files, as did federal investigative agencies.

  59. Hurley to all area corps commanders, radiogram in secret code, June 10, 1932, Adjutant General’s File, RG 94,
Box 1181, National Archives. See also U.S. Military Intelligence, Surveillance of Radicals. The Army had a superb cryptography unit assigned to the Signal Corps. One of the major missions at the time was the cracking of sophisticated codes used by rumrunners. Elizabeth Friedman, an Army cryptanalyst, was pitted against a retired Royal Navy officer who ran the codes for a major rumrunning ring whose ships were tracked by the Prohibition fleet of the U.S. Coast Guard. She not only cracked the codes but testified at the trial that sent the rumrunners to jail. Elizabeth was the wife of William Friedman, the “father of American cryptology” and the developer of the unbreakable secret codes used by the Army in the 1930s and throughout World War II. National Security Agency’s Center for Cryptologic History, “Cryptology, Elizabeth Friedman and the United States Coast Guard Thwart the Rumrunners.”

  60. Decoded reports from area corps officers, U.S. Military Intelligence, Surveillance of Radicals.

  61. Communication from Commanding General, 3rd Corps Area, to the Adjutant General, July 5, 1932, AG 240 Bonus Section 1, RG 94, National Archives.

  62. Joan M. Jensen, Army Surveillance in America, 1775–1980 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 203.

  63. Memo of telephone call from G-2 2nd C.A. (Intelligence Officer, Second Corps Area) to Military Intelligence Division, Office of the Chief of Staff, June 3, 1932. U.S. Military Intelligence, Surveillance of Radicals.

  64. J. Edgar Hoover to Colonel William H. Wilson, General Staff, Chief, Operative Branch, Military Intelligence Division, July 11, 1932. U.S. Military Intelligence, Surveillance of Radicals.

  65. Report to Pelham Glassford from Private (patrolman) J. E. Bennett, June 20, 1932. U.S. Military Intelligence, Surveillance of Radicals.

  66. District police reports area found in MID files; White House records, filed as Bonus March reports, contain copies of many of these police reports. Herbert Hoover Library; U.S. Military Intelligence, Surveillance of Radicals.

  67. Jensen, Army Surveillance, 203.

  68. Letter from Harry C. Lar to Major General George Van Horn Moseley, June 4, 1932. U.S. Military Intelligence, Surveillance of Radicals.

  69. Glassford Papers.

  70. Waters, B.E.F., 95–96.