The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  71. Douglas, Veterans on the March, 85–86.

  72. Waters, B.E.F., 95; Washington Post, June 7, 1932.

  73. Glassford Papers.

  74. Hennessy, “The Bonus Army,” 252.

  75. Ibid., 239–40.

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

  77. Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress.

  78. Washington Post, June 9, 1932; cited in Hennessy.

  79. Sneller, “Bonus March of 1932,” 131, 132; citing Congressional Record, 72nd cong., 1st sess., June 13, 1932, 12,910–12,935.

  80. Hennessy, “The Bonus Army,” 261.

  81. “‘America’ Sung by Veterans at News of Defeat,” Washington Post, June 18, 1932.

  82. Daniels, Bonus March, 118.

  83. Gore Vidal, Screening History.

  84. Douglas, Veterans on the March, 152.

  85. Daniels, Bonus March, citing Congressional Record, 72nd Cong., 1st sess., June 17, 1932, 1244.

  86. Daniels, Bonus March, 120.

  87. John D. Weaver, Another Such Victory.

  88. “Vote on the Bill Is 62–18,” New York Times, June 18, 1932; “Bonus Bill Loses in Senate,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 18, 1932.

  89. Waters, B.E.F., 149–50; “Glassford Makes Apology to B.E.F.,” Washington Star, June 19, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbook. Chicken-blood incident recalled in Oliver twins interview.

  90. Jorgenson, “Bonus Expeditionary Force,” 58; Lisio, President and Protest, 113.

  91. Waters, B.E.F., 150.

  92. Douglas, Veterans on the March, 156.

  93. Lisio, President and Protest, 113.

  94. “Glassford Makes Apology to B.E.F.,” Evening Star, June 19, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbook.

  Chapter 7: The Death March

  1. Washington Star, June 19, 1932; New York Times, June 18, 1932.

  2. District police undercover operatives kept Pace under surveillance and reported on speeches he and others made at Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League meetings. Most such confidential reports were filed in the District of Columbia’s central files, as noted in Sneller, “The Bonus March of 1932,” 146–48. Many others are filed under “Presidential Subject, World War Veterans—Bonus” in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library. How the White House obtained the police files is not indicated.

  3. “150,000 New Goal for Bonus Army: Many Start Home,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 19, 1932.

  4. New York Times, June 19, 1932.

  5. Waters, B.E.F., 177.

  6. In September 1914 General Joseph-Simon Gallieni, the military governor of Paris, needed troops to be transferred from a chaotic rail system to the front. When he found that the army was short of vehicles, he asked, “Why not use taxis?” Parisian taxi drivers picked up 4,000 soldiers from railroad cars and drove them to the battle that saved Paris. Georges Blond, The Marne (London: Prion, 2002).

  7. “Troop Train Plan for Bonus Exodus Evolved at Capital,” New York Times, June 20, 1932.

  8. “German Veterans Bring Food to Camp Bartlett,” Washington Post, June 20, 1932. Meisel, 12.

  9. “Bonus Army Paper, with 25,000 First Run, Edited in Nook,” Washington Star, July 13, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbook. The paper sold for 5 cents, of which the seller took 2 cents.

  10. Waters said that his official roster of 28,540 bonus marchers—“perhaps half of the total who registered”—included men from forty-seven states (all but Nebraska), along with two men from Alaska, six from Canada, and one from the Philippines. Pennsylvania, with 4,796 men, had the most of any state. Waters, B.E.F., 257–59.

  11. “News Reels Receive Order to ‘Go Easy’ on Bonus Army,” Washington Daily News, June 21, 1932.

  12. These observations are made primarily from the large collection of news photos and postcards collected by the authors during the time of their research. One of the most interesting of the photographers was Royal A. Carlock, a veteran from Indiana who settled in Washington after the war. He created a livelihood for himself reproducing and selling photographs of what he called “the art & splendor of The City Beautiful.” His black-and-white photographs were hand-colored in oils and sold in large number to tourists visiting the city during the post–World War I era. The most common subjects collectors will find are the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. His BEF photography was gritty and realistic, and he sold the pictures through the B.E.F. News at a price that allowed vets to resell them and make a profit.

  13. Ryan, Earl Browder, 51. Browder’s work as a Soviet agent did not become known publicly until the 1990s, when the National Security Agency released decrypted Soviet espionage messages, intercepted by U.S. intelligence agencies in the 1940s.

  14. Report 14-41, July 1, 1932, to Crime Prevention Bureau from J. Apostolides and A. E. Fredette [undercover District police officers]. “Presidential Subject, World War Veterans—Bonus” in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library.

  15. Waters, B.E.F., 154.

  16. Daily Worker, June 27, 1932.

  17. Los Angeles Times, June 30, 1932.

  18. “Waters Acts to Drill Vets into Mobile Shock Troops,” Times-Herald, June 30, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbooks.

  19. “Gen. Glassford’s Answer,” Washington Daily News, July 1, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbooks. According to Green, Secret City (371), during this period Glassford spent close to $1,000 out of his own pocket.

  20. American Veteran, July, 1932.

  21. Lamar, “I Marched,” 3.

  22. “Bonus Men Find Congress Gone,” Evening Star, July 2, 1932; “5,000 in Bonus Army Jam Capitol Steps,” New York Times, July 3, 1932. Both the Evening Star and New York Times report Waters’s claim that he had secured an interview with Roosevelt, but this was never mentioned again in the Washington papers, the New York Times, or the B.E.F. News and does not appear in his autobiography. The fact that Congress was planning to adjourn on Saturday of the Fourth of July weekend, which had appeared in the local papers and had been missed by Waters, suggests that this was not a man who had the ability to get an appointment with Roosevelt in the few hours between his nomination and his departure by plane for Chicago from Albany at 7:15 that morning. One can only imagine that Waters made this up to give a boost to morale on a bad day.

  23. New York Times, October 19, 1932. This report refers back to the April statement in Pittsburgh. Governor Roosevelt sent Nels Anderson to New York contingent on June 12 and “offered to return them to New York State and give them jobs. They refused. . . . On the whole, they are all bonafide veterans of the World War.” Letter, June 14, to Margaret A. Kerr, secretary-manager, Better America Federation, Los Angeles. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Presidential Correspondence, box 75, file 121.

  24. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1969), 69.

  25. Ibid., 70–71. Dorothy Rosenman recalled later that the vehicle that got the term launched the day after FDR first used it was a cartoon by Roland Kirby showing a plane flying from Albany to Chicago with “The New Deal” on its wings. Dorothy Rosenman’s recollections appear in Katie Louchheim, The Making of the New Deal: The Insiders Speak (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

  26. Blumenson, Patton Papers, 975, 982.

  27. “Church Helps Find Grave for Son of Bonus Veteran,” Washington Post, July 5, 1932.

  28. “Two Veterans Held for Selling Food,” Washington Post, July 4, 1932.

  29. “Bonus Veterans Will Stage Mute Parade along Avenue,” Washington Post, July 3, 1932.

  30. William B. Mead and Paul Dickson, Baseball: The President’s Game (Washington, D.C.: Farragut, 1993), 60. A sportswriter called the booing “a shocking manifestation of bad manners and lack of respect. . . . This must be the first time a president ever has been booed in public, and a ball game, of all places.”

  The booing by the vets was echoed in a sardonic letter that appeared in the July issue of American Veteran: “Why should you be concerned about food?” aske
d A. A. Van Orsdale of Houston. “Isn’t the world’s greatest food administrator, Mr. Herbert Hoover, there in Washington? Certainly, after having been able to feed Europe’s starving millions, he ought to be able to feed a few thousand of our ex-servicemen.”

  31. Hoover’s unpopularity with the vets was amplified by his long and steady support of Prohibition, which, according to a June poll of more than 10,000 Americans by Literary Digest, three out of four Americans now opposed. Despite its own support of Prohibition in the camps, the BEF was unequivocally for repeal, and vets had lobbied the Democrats for repeal. “Bonus Groups Favor Repeal in ‘Platform,’ ” Washington Post, June 20, 1932.

  32. Memo, July 5, 1932, Paul Killiam to Major Paschal, U.S. Military Intelligence, Surveillance of Radicals.

  33. A story in the Milwaukee Journal (June 28, 1932) entitled “Bonus Chief ’s Wife to Hitchhike” reported that she was prepared to “start her journey clad in boots, hiking trousers and a man’s blue shirt, carrying a red jacket and a small bundle of necessities.”

  34. McLean, Father Struck It Rich, 304–5.

  35. Wilma Waters, interview by Sheila Graves, Wenatachee World, February 20, 1992, 9. Wilma also said that McLean gave money to pay for milk for the children of the BEF. Nowhere in this interview or elsewhere are there references to the two daughters whom Waters claimed he had in early interviews. This interview does say that the Waterses met in the cannery in Wenatachee, where they both worked and were married in 1930.

  36. In an earlier secret message on “subversive activities,” dated July 2, 1932, Lanza described Bundell as a recruiter who was signing up new BEF members in upstate New York. Lanza reported that Bundell and other speakers said that “the Bonus Army was in Washington to stay.” Lanza added, “My general impression is that the Bonus Army is better organized than might be expected.” U.S. Military Intelligence, Surveillance of Radicals.

  37. NARA, AGO 240—June 10, 1932. Declassified in 1991, this memo was reproduced by authority of NARA on August 11, 2002, by the authors. The extraordinary nature of this item begs that it be reproduced here in its entirety as one of the “smoking guns” of the events leading up to the actions of July 28. The original shows that it was only seen by the Army and never got to the Navy, Congress, the Marines, or the White House. At one point in the memo it is stated that Camp Marks lies across “an unfordable stream” from Washington and that this would be a problem for the attackers but would be corrected:

  a. by defections from troops or Marines guarding bridges, thereby placing the bridges in possession of the Bonus Army. . . .

  b. by attacking with machine guns, stated to be already in the hands of the Bonus Army.

  38. Military Intelligence Division, July 7, 1932, Report 14–28–13.

  39. Pace later revealed that he had to call off several earlier parades of his followers because he feared attacks from the BEF—a fact confirmed by military intelligence reports. He also said that anytime he or other Communists tried to address the BEF, they needed police protection. House of Representatives, Hearings Before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, 75th Cong., 3d sess., 1938, 2285–86. Pace also said that the party had been criticized as a “swivel-chair organization” for not exploiting the opportunity for revolution that the marchers presented. Pace also said that Browder and another high-ranking American Communist were later summoned to Moscow and dressed down for their failure in Anacostia.

  40. Gene Smith, The Shattered Dream, 148.

  41. Glassford Papers, RG 679, box, 15 folder 7. A copy of Walker’s memo putting forward the scheme appears in Hoover papers.

  42. “Hines Urges Speed in B.E.F. Rail Loans,” Washington Post, July 11, 1932.

  43. “Veteran ‘Buried’ Alive for Smokes, ‘Exhumed.’ ” Times-Herald, July 11, 1932, unpaginated clipping, Bonus Army scrapbook, MLK Library.

  44. Washington Post, July 12, 1932, unpaginated clipping, Bonus Army scrapbook, MLK Library.

  45. Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1932.

  46. Army intelligence reports include a detailed message from headquarters of the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, to assistant chief of staff for G-2 (intelligence) in Fort Sam Houston, June 22, 1932; cited in Sneller, “Bonus March of 1932,” 155–58.

  47. “500 California Bonus Marchers at El Paso,” Washington Post, June 21, 1932.

  48. “700 Veterans Make Beds on Capitol Lawn,” Washington Post, July 13, 1932.

  49. Waters, B.E.F., 165. There were variations on this line quoted elsewhere—”We didn’t come here to eat soup and sleep in the jungle over at Anacostia” (Time)—but they all amounted to a brush-off.

  50. Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1932.

  51. Powell, Tattered Banners, 234–35. Powell notes in this 1933 book on veterans: “His bandaged head was merely a repetition of the ‘soldier’s maund’ of Elizabethan days. The term was slang and it referred to self-inflicted wounds used by indigent veterans. Some poulticed their arms with a mixture of rust, soap and unslaked lime. When a blister appeared, they applied a linen cloth waiting until it stuck and then plucked it off. The result was a sore giving all the appearance of a gunshot wound” (39).

  52. Ibid. Waters was not above a line or two of disparagement in his book, including quoting a California man who knew him: “Robertson? Hell I never saw him wearin’ that brace when he was shootin’ craps.” Nothing else suggests that Robertson did not have serious spinal injury received while in the Navy, where he fell out of a shipboard hammock, and one must conclude that this amounts to a slur by Waters.

  53. “A March of Death,” Evening Star, July 14, 1932, unpaginated clipping, Bonus Army scrapbook, MLK Library.

  54. “Extended Limit on B.E.F. Loans Granted by House,” Evening Star, July 14, 1932, unpaginated clipping, Bonus Army scrapbook, MLK Library.

  55. “Bonus Seekers in Night March around Capitol,” Washington Post, July 14, 1932.

  56. Daniels, Bonus March, 132.

  57. “Marines Called, Leave Capitol; March Goes On,”Washington Post, July 15, 1932.

  58. “The Curtis Blunder,” Washington Daily News, July 16, 1932, unpaginated clipping, Bonus Army scrapbook, MLK Library.

  59. According to the Office of the Architect, the architect of the capitol “is responsible to the United States Congress for the maintenance, operation, development, and preservation of the United States Capitol Complex, which includes the Capitol, the congressional office buildings, the Library of Congress buildings, the Supreme Court building, the U.S. Botanic Garden, the Capitol Power Plant, and other facilities.” Reference to Richey, Starling of the White House, p. 283. Richey was appointed a Secret Service operative in 1901 at the age of sixteen, was briefly assigned to the Oyster Bay estate of President Theodore Roosevelt, and resigned in 1908, according to presidential physician Joel Boone, who quotes a Washington Sunday Star article of March 1929, headlined “President’s Mystery Man.” Boone Papers, chap. 22, Hoover Administration, 36–43.

  60. Statement of Police Board of the Capitol, July 15, 1932. Glassford Papers, RG 679, box 15, folder 10.

  61. Statement of Pelham Glassford, July 15, 1932, Glassford Papers, RG 679, box 15, folder 10.

  62. Glassford Papers, box 15, file 7.

  63. “Extended Limit on B.E.F. Loans Granted By House,” Evening Star, July 14, 1932, unpaginated clipping, Bonus Army scrapbook, MLK Library.

  64. Waters said the total number of veterans in Washington on July 16 was 22, 574. Waters, B.E.F., 174.

  65. “Near Riot Threatens as Bonus Leader and Aides are Arrested,” Evening Star, June 16, 1932.

  66. Sneller, “Bonus March of 1932,” 167.

  67. Waters, B.E.F., 168.

  68. New York Times, July 17, 1932.

  69. Bess Furman, Washington By-Line, 122–23.

  70. Thomas R. Henry, “Lone Woman Saves Day,” Evening Star, July 17, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbooks.

  71. “Near Riot Threatens as Bonus Leader and Aides Are Arrested,” Evening Star, June 16,
1932.

  72. “Wide Area around Executive Mansion Blocked Off to Balk Picketing Plan,” Washington Post, July 17, 1932.

  73. Washington Evening Star, July 17, 1932.

  74. Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, Boone Papers, 1112.

  75. Sneller, “Bonus March of 1932,” 174, quoting New York Times, July 17, 1932.

  76. “B.E.F. Heads Agree to Drop Picket Idea,” Washington Post, July 18, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbooks.

  77. “460 Veterans More Request Return Funds,” Washington Post, July 19, 1932.

  78. Butler’s Marine career began at the age of sixteen (he lied about his age with his mother’s permission). He served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and later in China, the Philippines, Honduras, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, where his bravery won him a Medal of Honor, and Haiti, where he became one of the few heroes ever to be awarded a second Medal of Honor. His men—they called him “Old Gimlet Eye”—loved him, but most politicians did not. Given a leave of absence to become Philadelphia’s commissioner of public safety, he smashed up speakeasies and tried to clean up a corrupt police force. But he had been given little real power. As a hero with a magnificent record and as the senior major general of the corps, after his resignation from the Marine Corps, he became interested in politics, a career move aided by the publicity he gained for his outspoken support of the Bonus Army. J. Robert Moskin, The U.S. Marine Corps Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 208–9; Marching to a Different Drummer: Unrecognized Heroes of American History (Robin Kadison Berson, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 20.

  79. “Butler Tells Bonus Vets to Stick it Out,” Times-Herald, July 20, 1932, Bonus Army scrapbook. The first thesis that we were able to find on the Bonus Army was Stuart G. Cross’s 1948 Stanford University master’s thesis, “The Bonus Army in Washington, May 27–July 29, 1932.”

  80. B.E.F. News, July 23, 1932.

  81. “B.E.F. Ignores Plea to Leave By Glassford,” Washington Post, July 21, 1932.

  82. Ibid.

  Chapter 8: Tanks in the Streets

  Epigraph. Douglas, Veterans on the March, 139.