The Bonus Army

by Paul Dickson

  8. Washington Post, July 1, 1933.

  9. Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 2, The Year of Crisis (New York: Russell & Russell, 1933), 99.

  10. Clipping from unidentified newspaper, dated April 30, 1933, MID 10110 files, RG 165, Military Intelligence Division Correspondence 1917–1941, box 2855, declassified in 1974.

  11. Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.) 90; the incident is credited from Kenneth S. Davis, Invincible Summer (New York: Athenian, 1974), 107–8.

  12. New York Times, April 28, 1932.

  13. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal, 21. The quotation about revolution appears on page 5.

  14. For Hoover, like Howe and Eleanor Roosevelt, the second bonus march was the occasion for a debut. Hoover had had an uneasy interregnum. Roosevelt had selected as attorney general—and Hoover’s boss—Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana, who had said he would reorganize the Department of Justice “with an almost completely new personnel,” presumably including J. Edgar Hoover. Walsh, a confirmed bachelor since the death of his wife in 1917, remarried five days before the Inauguration. On March 3, on a train taking him and his bride to the Inauguration, he died; the cause of death was listed as “unknown, possibly coronary thrombosis.” Roosevelt chose Homer S. Cummings of Connecticut as attorney general, and Hoover immediately ingratiated himself with Cummings, deluging the White House with letters from supporters and working to win over Louis Howe, a fan of detective stories, by sending him inside information on Bureau of Investigation cases. On July 30, 1933, Cummings announced that Hoover had been appointed director of a “new Division of Investigation.” Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: Norton, 1991), 154–158.

  15. J. Edgar Hoover, Memorandum for the Attorney General, April 28, 1933; FBI “Bonus March” files, released in August 2000.

  16. J. Edgar Hoover to Ernest W. Brown, February 12 and February 20, 1932; FBI “Bonus March” files.

  17. Douglas, Veterans on the March, 305–7.

  18. Ibid., 309.

  19. Washington Post, May 9, 1933.

  20. Washington Evening Star, May 10, 1933.

  21. Washington Post, May 9, 1933.

  22. An indication of debate in the White House can be found in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library’s files for the period. While there was no memo about Howe’s decision, there was a heavily underlined clipping of the New York Times’ April 10 story about “Communists, loafers and tramps” coming to Washington. Among the underlined paragraphs was one quoting Doak Carter, who had been a BEF leader in 1932: “This movement can be killed off while it’s young. But there is no time to lose.”

  23. Washington Star, May 5, 1933; Washington Herald, May 9, 1933.

  24. Newspapers referred to Howe as “Colonel Howe,” implying that he had been an Army officer. The “colonel” was an honorary title bestowed upon politicians and celebrities by the state of Kentucky.

  25. Washington Herald, May 3, 1933.

  26. Washington Post, May 2, 1933; New York Times,May 9, 1933; Washington Star,May 9, 1933.

  27. Washington Herald, May 9, 1933; Douglas, Veterans on the March, 317; Washington Post, May 14, 1933.

  28. Washington Post,May 11, 1933; New York Times, May 12, 1933.

  29. New York Times, May 12, 1933.

  30. Douglas, Veterans on the March, 303.

  31. Washington Star, May 14, 1933, says “about 25 irreconcilables” refused to go to Fort Hunt; other sources put the number at fifty. By May 14 the total number of men at the fort was about 1,200.

  32. Washington Post, May 31, 1933.

  33. Washington Post, May 14, 1933; Washington Herald, May 13, 1933.

  34. Henry O. Meisel, The Second “Bonus Army,” 1–12.

  35. Ibid., 9.

  36. The conversation is taken from Lela Stiles, The Man behind Roosevelt: The Story of Louis McHenry Howe (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1954), 264–65.

  37. New York Times, May 17, 1933; Douglas, 324.

  38. Washington Post, May 17, 1933; Literary Digest, June 3, 1933.

  39. Washington Daily News,May 22, 1933.

  40. Washington Post,May 31, 1933; June 4, 1933.

  41. Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House (New York: Hawthorn, 1973), 6–13.

  42. Ibid., 176.

  43. Garraty and Foner, Reader’s Companion.

  44. “Committee Calm Over Butler ‘Plot,’ ” New York Times, November 26, 1934.

  45. Walter Goodman, The Committee (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 10. As Goodman notes (19), Dickstein worked hard to back a proposal by Representative Martin Dies for the establishment of a House Un-American Activities Committee. John Rankin of Mississippi opposed the creation of what would be known as the Dies Committee and, later, HUAC, until he found “it would be headed by the Texan, Dies, and not by the Jew, Dickstein.” Under Dies, HUAC shifted from looking for Nazis to looking for Communists. Dickstein was a Soviet spy who escaped detection. His secret life was not known until U.S. intelligence officials, in a program code-named Venona, decrypted intercepted messages between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1940s. The Venona intercepts began to be officially released in 1995. Dickstein, who spied for money rather than ideology, was given the code name Crook by his Soviet intelligence handlers. According to Spy Book, Polmar and Allen, Dickstein spied from 1937 to 1940. He remained in Congress until 1945, when he became a New York State Supreme Court Justice. He remained on the bench until his death in 1954.

  46. Records of Office of the Adjutant General, RG 407, Central Files 1926–39, Bonus 249 (3–4-36 to 5–28–32), box 1180.

  47. Franklin D. Roosevelt to Rainey, February 26, 1934, FDR Library. In the file is also a letter chiding him for not saying “whom” and another saying his grammar was backed up by the Oxford Dictionary.

  48. Telegram, March 10, 1934, from Van Zandt, FDR Library.

  49. Daniels, Bonus March, 229.

  50. Jeff Singleton, The American Dole: Unemployment Relief and the Welfare State in the Great Depression (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), 146.

  51. Washington Post, May 2, 1934.

  52. Letter to the editor, Washington Post, April 27, 1934, 8.

  53. Because of the camp’s proximity to Washington, it became a show camp for such distinguished visitors as the king and queen of Great Britain. During World War II, the fort was a secret intelligence facility for the interrogation of selected German prisoners of war. Their cells were bugged. A declassified, translated transcript reveals that in one conversation a POW touched upon an issue that annoyed New Dealers: critics’ comparison of CCC camps to Nazi Germany work camps. One officer tells another that he remembered Fort Hunt from happier days, when he used to bring his American girlfriends there. Then he adds: “It used to be a CCC camp.” When his cellmate asks what the CCC is, the other replies: “It’s something like the German Arbeitsdienst,” the Nazi Work Service. The site is now Fort Hunt Park. National Park Service, “Fort Hunt—the Forgotten Story,” published at http://www.nps.gov/gwmp/fohu/forgotten.htm.

  54. Daniels, Bonus March, 232.

  55. Carol L. M. Caton, Homeless in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 10.

  56. Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 13, 1935.

  57. Norfolk Journal and Guide, January 13, 1934.

  58. Franklin D. Roosevelt to Robert Fechner, September 27, 1935, “CCC Negro Foremen,” box 700, General Correspondence of the Director, Record Group 35, National Archives.

  59. Robert Fechner to Robert J. Buckley, 4 June 1936; “CCC Negro Foremen,” National Archives.

  60. “Veterans Will Work on Road,” Florida Times-Union, October 19, 1934; in Willie Drye scrapbook on the 1935 hurricane and events leading up to it, 97.

  61. “‘One-Man Bonus Army’ Risked Death to Challenge Roosevelt,” Washington Star, January 5, 1935.

  62. Alferi h
ad actually announced in a letter published in the Washington Post (November 18, 1934) that he was coming and that thousands of veterans were mobilizing for the trip.

  63. “Text of President’s Letter Regarding the Bonus.” New York Times, January 1, 1935, Bonus Army scrapbook.

  Chapter 11: Labor Day Hurricane

  1. Drye scrapbook, 54.

  2. St. Augustine Evening Record, July 5, 1934; Drye scrapbook, 53.

  3. Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Thirties, 188–89.

  4. Stuart B. McIver, Hemingway’s Key West (Sarasota, Fla.: Pineapple Press, 1995), 66–67.

  5. Florida Times Union, August 27, 1934; Drye scrapbook, 89.

  6. Hemingway’s wounds and experience were detailed in a series of clippings in a scrapbook kept by his grandparents in the Hemingway collection at the JFK Library in Boston, notably an article from the Oak Parker, October 5, 1918, entitled “Wounded 227 Times,” containing a letter to his parents of August 18, and other Oak Parker articles, November 16, 1918, and February 1, 1919, when he comes back with two medals and much bravado, calling the war “great sport.” This final article is written by a smitten reporter named Roselle Dean who calls him “handsome as Apollo” and ends her piece with this: “No story is quite complete without a thread of romance, and we are inclined to believe that somewhere in sunny Italy there is a dark-eyed, olive-skinned beauty, whose heart beats for one—and only one—‘Americano’ soldier.”

  The moment that Hemingway is wounded is replayed fictionally in A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner, 1995; original edition, 1929), 54: “I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back.” There is another description that has gained a presence on the Internet, but it is always given without attribution and may be apocryphal: “ ‘There was one of those big noises you sometimes hear at the front,” he later wrote. “I died then. I felt my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew all around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead any more.” The source of this may be an undocumented site called lostgeneration.com.

  7. Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 48–49.

  8. Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 207–8.

  9. UP, “FERA Workers at Matecumbe Make Trouble,” in Drye scrapbook, 83.

  10. 74th Cong., 1st sess., 1935, Congressional Record 79, pt. 10:10649. There were those in Roosevelt’s inner circle who saw a logic in the veto: “At Cabinet meeting this afternoon the Vice President said that the best thing that could happen on the pending bonus legislation would be for the Patman bill to go through, the President to veto this bill, and then to have the bill passed over the President’s veto. He said that practically all of the Republicans in the House had voted for the Patman bill and that the Republicans in the Senate would do likewise. They would vote to pass it over the President’s veto so that the President would have no responsibility for the legislation. If this should happen, the bonus would be taken out of next year’s campaign.” Harold Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes: The First Thousand Days, 1933–1935 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), 356.

  11. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, President’s personal file #95-C. The Marland letter was dated March 13, FDR’s reply was dated March 15, and Marland replied in a letter dated March 17 that he still must vote for the bonus: “The very fact that you would trouble to write such a letter has ‘sold me’ more than anything else on the value of your leadership, and has convinced me of your sympathetic understanding of the bonus problem.”

  12. “Coughlin Rejects Third Party Move,” New York Times, May 6, 1935.

  13. “Dr. Peale Attacks Father Coughlin,” New York Times, May 13, 1935.

  14. “Coughlin’s Bonus Plea,” New York Times, May 13, 1935.

  15. Ibid., 94.

  16. “Roosevelt Cruises Leisurely on Sequoia; Will Fish a Bit Before Returning Tonight,” New York Times, May 19, 1935.

  17. FDR addresses the novelty of an in-person veto, “As to the right and propriety of the President in addressing the Congress in person, I am very certain that I have never in the past disagreed, and will never in the future disagree, with the Senate or the House of Representatives as to the constitutionality of the procedure. With your permission, I should like to continue from time to time to act as my own messenger.”

  18. Public Papers of Roosevelt, vol. 4, 182–93.

  19. FDR, according to Ickes, Secret Diary (525), worked on the veto speech until early in the morning before its delivery. The president had asked his press secretary to prepare two press releases, one favoring the bill and the other vetoing it, and later told Ickes that he had “put it over” on his staff. Ickes was appalled by his “playful attitude on such an important measure.”

  20. “23,000 Here Cheer Coughlin Attack on the President,” New York Times, May 23, 1935.

  21. Ibid.

  22. “Patmanites Fight New Bonus March,” New York Times, May 16, 1935.

  23. Bonus Veto B, FDR Library.

  24. Bonus Veto B, Bonus Veto A, FDR Library.

  25. “New Bonus ‘March’ Surprises Capital,” New York Times, June 23, 1935; Wall Street Journal, June 30, 1935.

  26. “‘Chain Bulletins’ to Raise Bonus Army to Be Launched,” Washington Star, January 29, 1935, Bonus Army scrapbook. Ironically this item appears in the same issue of the Star as a photo and an announcement that Walter Waters was now working for the War Department in a job that had been obtained for him by General MacArthur.

  27. “New Bonus ‘March’,” Bonus Army scrapbook.

  28. Daniels, Bonus March, 240.

  29. New York Times, August 11, 1935. Pictures run with the golfless article showed men in the camps playing checkers and reading in the camp library along with a picture of the camp itself. Over the pictures was the caption “Where Government Is Housing War Veterans to Keep Them from Capitol.” The veterans’ project evolved into the Swamp Fox Golf Course in Kingstree, North Carolina. Toby Welch, a golfer and unofficial historian of the course, told the authors that when the vets built it there were no golfers in Kingstree.

  30. “Veteran’s Camps to Be Abandoned,” New York Times, August 16, 1935.

  31. Key Veteran News, August 31, 1935. This will be the last issue of the newspaper.

  Copies of the Key Veteran News exist but are extremely rare. The xeroxed copies used for this work are from Willie Drye, who copied them from Jerry Wilkinson of the Upper Keys Historical Society. Wilkinson has spent many years assembling a full set.

  32. Selected Records Relating to the 1935 Florida Hurricane, 55861, NARA, Record Group 69 006. 1 Works Progress Administration.

  33. House Committee on World War Veterans’ Legislation, Florida Hurricane Disaster (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1936).

  34. Drye, The Storm of the Century, 71.

  35. Drye, Storm, 102; Coast Guard report.

  36. Drye, Storm, 72–3.

  37. “Horrific Labor Day Storm of ’35 Swept Away All but Memories,” USA Today, June 8, 1999. The only other Category 5 was Camille, which went ashore in Mississippi and Louisiana in 1969, killing 256. Deadliest U.S. Hurricanes since 1900, according to the National Hurricane Center: (1) 1900, Galveston, Texas, Category 4, killed more than 8,000. (2) 1928, Lake Okeechobee, Florida, Category 4, killed at least 1,800. (3) 1919, Florida Keys, south Texas, Category 4, killed 600, mostly lost on ships at sea. (4) 1938, New England, Category 3, killed 600. (5) 1935, Florida Keys, Category 5, killed at least 408.

  The official definition of a Category 5 storm is: “Winds greater than 155 mph. Complete roof failure on many residences and
industrial buildings. Some complete building failures with small utility buildings blown over or away. Major damage to lower floors of all structures located less than 15 feet ASL and within 500 yards of the shoreline. Massive evacuation of residential areas on low ground within 5 to 10 miles of the shoreline may be required.”

  38. Testimony of Richard Lawrence Bow, an engineer working on the bridge at the time of the hurricane, September 1935, on file at the Islamorada Library.

  39. R.W. Craig as told to George X. Sand, Adventure Magazine, November 1956, 51. This account of the hurricane and others like it can be found in the Monroe County Library, Helen Wadley Branch, Islamorada, Florida. The building is directly across the street from the memorial to the victims of the storm, and contains the best collection of records on the storm, including all of the reports of the investigations into the government response to the hurricane.

  40. Memo from Stephen T. Early, September 3, 1935, FDR Library.

  41. Telegram from B. R. Kessler to FDR, September 4, 1935, FDR Library.

  42. Memo of September 6, 1936, from acting chief of Weather Bureau to FDR, FDR Library.

  43. John Abt, Advocate and Activist: Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer, 48.

  44. Memorandum to president, September 6, 1935, FDR Library.

  45. Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981), 423. “One Trip Across” appeared in Cosmopolitan, April 1934.

  46. Joseph North to Ernest Hemingway, September 5, 1935; Hemingway Collection correspondence file, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston. To this day it is often assumed that Hemingway went to the New Masses because he had been turned down elsewhere. Even John Dos Passos, who tells him in a letter of September 20 that it was a damn fine piece in the Daily Worker, asks him: “Did Gingrich [editor at Esquire] fade out on the Hurricane piece?” Townsend Ludington, “The Fourteen Chronicle,” Gambit, 1973, 482.

  47. Honoria Murphy Donnelly, Sara and Gerald, with Richard N. Billings (New York: Times Books, 1982), 170.

  48. Drye, Storm, 231.

  49. “Coughlin Mourns Death of Senator,” New York Times, September 11, 1935.