by Sally Denton
The “troops” marched up Pennsylvania Avenue—watched in silence by nearly a hundred thousand Washingtonians who had lined the streets—and set up camp on Anacostia Flats, an abandoned army base in the southeast corner of the city. They slept in lean-tos constructed out of cardboard boxes and shipping crates—“every kind of cockeyed makeshift shelter from the rain, scraped together out of the city dump.” Led by a Medal of Honor winner and several others who wore their Silver Stars, Croix de Guerre, and Distinguished Service Crosses, they organized in divisions and conducted military drills, sang war songs and listened to speeches by their leaders and others hoping to persuade or dissuade them in their pursuit. At least two Catholic priests sought to influence them. Father James R. Cox flew to Washington from Pittsburgh to implore the crowd to “stick it out!” He told them, “You will never get what you’re entitled to unless you stick.” Father Charles E. Coughlin—the highly controversial and nationally famous “radio priest” whose program reached millions of listeners—sent cash to help stave off starvation. “Cunning Communists are dicing for the leadership of these World War Veterans,” Coughlin wrote in a telegram, “and tonight, both to cheer the hearts of the bonus army and to show that Communism is not the way out, I am donating $5,000.” Additional contributions began to pour in from wealthy individuals, local merchants, and various organizations sympathetic to the plight of the hungry Bonus Marchers. Supporters throughout the country sent truckloads of food; one baker sent a hundred loaves of bread a day; another sent a thousand pies.
Local Marines set up a clinic staffed by volunteer physicians and dentists, which was immediately inundated by men, women, and children suffering from bronchitis, rheumatism, blisters, pleurisy, the common cold, toothaches, and “body vermin—American cousins of the ‘cooties’ of French trenches.” They bathed in the muddy Anacostia River and slept in the open air. Mosquitoes and flies swarmed in the camp, spawned by Washington’s swampy, subtropical summer heat. Described by one newspaper as a “rag-and-tin-can city,” Hooverville, D.C., was within sight of the U.S. Capitol and was the largest shantytown in the country, its population swelling daily with new recruits.
On June 17, the day the Senate was scheduled to vote on the bonus, there was a move to table the bill. Heated debate continued late into the evening, when a vote of 44 to 26 tabled the bill until the Seventy-third Congress convened in 1933. That night, the Hoover administration had genuinely feared that the veterans might turn violent. Instead, the marchers sang “America the Beautiful” and retreated quietly to their camps. While the majority of the Bonus Marchers left the city and returned to their homes, more than eight thousand remained at what was becoming a permanent camp.
On July 19, retired Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, who had been Franklin Roosevelt’s guide through Haiti fifteen years earlier, rode into the site to offer solidarity to the veterans, many of whom he had commanded in previous skirmishes in China and Latin America. Having won two Medals of Honor and been called the “ideal American soldier” by Teddy Roosevelt, the lean and controversial Butler was an outspoken critic of the military brass and a staunch advocate of the enlisted man. Butler had recently been threatened with court-martial for making accusatory remarks against the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. The charges were dropped when Butler retired as a Marine, but his tenacious support of the veterans continued. A heroic whistle-blower, Butler had run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania on a platform of exposing the grotesque war casualties being hidden in Veterans Administration hospitals. He had been slotted to become commandant of the Marine Corps for his long career dating back to the Boxer Rebellion, but President Hoover had passed him over after the offense to Mussolini.
Still, he was a soldier’s soldier, and the veterans idolized him. A roar went up when he leaped onto a crude stage to address them. “I’m here because I’ve been a soldier for thirty-five years and I can’t resist the temptation to be among soldiers,” he announced to boisterous approval. “Hang together and stick it out till the gate bars of hell freeze over … Remember, by God, you … didn’t win the war for a select class of a few financiers and high binders.” When he finished his speech, throngs surrounded him. He seated himself on the ground and listened to the men’s tales of woe until two thirty A.M. He repeatedly warned them not to “slip over into lawlessness,” for if they did so, they would “lose the sympathy of 120 million people in this nation.” The War Department had spies among the crowd, who reported to higher-ups that while Butler’s speech had been demagogic and inflaming, at least he had “carefully advised the men to obey all the laws.”
The veterans’ leaders appealed to Hoover to receive a delegation from the camp. But the president declined, claiming he was too busy; he then proceeded to clear his schedule and isolate himself in the White House. In that “desperate summer of 1932,” as Manchester described it, “Washington, D.C., resembled the besieged capital of an obscure European state … [The] penniless World War veterans had been encamped with their wives and children in District parks, dumps, abandoned warehouses, and empty stores.” Police erected barricades, chained the gates of the Executive Mansion, and patrolled its perimeter day and night. HOOVER LOCKS SELF IN WHITE HOUSE blared a newspaper headline. A veteran who had lost an arm in battle attempted to cross the line of guards at the White House, only to be brutally beaten and arrested. The incident portended the violence that was to come.
Though unarmed and generally passive during its two-month occupation of the city, the Bonus Army incurred the wrath of not only Hoover but also his most ill-tempered and militant Army adviser, General Douglas MacArthur. The only four-star general in the country, MacArthur had already established a reputation for hubris, dissembling, and grandiosity. Referring derogatorily to the veterans as “Boners,” he took personal umbrage at their audacious defiance of authority. For two months he had been secretly training soldiers in riot control, and he had requisitioned three thousand gas grenades from the Aberdeen Proving Ground in nearby Maryland. Convinced that the army was mutinous, and repulsed by their ragtag appearance, MacArthur stirred Hoover to act precipitously and severely.
As it turned out, MacArthur, whom Franklin Roosevelt believed to be one of the “most dangerous men in America,” delivered the death blow to Hoover’s reelection campaign. MacArthur’s determination to rout the tattered army and blustering brutality against America’s forgotten heroes backfired with devastating consequences for Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party.
Chapter Six
Warriors of the Depression
The U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division repeatedly warned President Hoover that the Communist Party was controlling the Bonus Army and had its sights set on overthrowing the U.S. government. At the same time, a callow and ambitious law enforcement officer named J. Edgar Hoover saw in the veterans’ movement a “public enemy” that would justify the expansion of his domestic spying apparatus. Director of the Bureau of Investigation, the thirty-seven-year-old Hoover was ever on the lookout for new menaces. Obsessed with the fear that Negro and Jewish Communists were plotting to take over America—a fixation that would ultimately lead to his founding of the FBI and its scandalous legacy—J. Edgar Hoover eagerly plied President Hoover with reports of treacherous homegrown terrorists. He portrayed the World War I veterans to the president as dangerous leftists and falsely warned that the group was made up of 473,000 “trained men” who had 116 airplanes and 123 machine guns at the ready.
Whether Herbert Hoover was convinced of the existence of a Communist conspiracy and believed General MacArthur’s assertions that “incipient revolution was in the air,” or was merely seeking an expedient solution, is unclear. Either way, MacArthur apparently persuaded Hoover that an armed insurrection was brewing at the Hooverville in Anacostia. In response, the president ordered the veterans’ expulsion at the hands of three Army officers: MacArthur, George S. Patton, and Dwight D. Eisenhower—all destined to become famous American generals
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Dressed in full uniform—including the flamboyant regalia of his rank—MacArthur led the attack. Eisenhower, widely reported to have been a reluctant participant, strongly opposed donning military uniforms for a domestic clash. “This is political, political,” he repeatedly argued, only to be rebuffed by MacArthur. “MacArthur has decided to go into active command in the field,” the general barked, referring to himself in the third person, as he was wont to do. He ordered Eisenhower to dress for battle. Patton, who was more simpatico with MacArthur than with the measured and thoughtful Eisenhower, zealously took command of the troopers of the Third Cavalry.
At four thirty P.M. on July 28, 1932, MacArthur ordered the streets of the capital cleared. Brandishing drawn sabers, two hundred mounted cavalry pranced behind Patton from the Ellipse down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Eleventh Street drawbridge and Anacostia. Next came a machine gun detachment and helmeted soldiers from the Twelfth Infantry, Thirteenth Engineers, and Thirty-fourth Infantry carrying fixed bayonets and loaded rifles and wearing gas masks. Five tanks followed the three hundred infantrymen. In what would go down in history as the worst-timed operation in MacArthur’s long military career, he began the assault at the same moment that more than twenty thousand federal employees in the District of Columbia finished work and poured into the streets, mingling with the Bonus Army. “We thought it was a parade because of all the horses,” a witness, who had been a small boy at the time, later recalled. The veterans initially thought it was a display that the U.S. Army was putting on in support of their cause, prompting them to let out a rousing cheer. But when the cavalry suddenly turned and charged the crowd of thousands, trampling the unarmed bystanders, beating them with the flat side of the sabers, prodding them with bayonets, and whooping as if in battle, mayhem ensued.
As the pedestrians and onlookers fled the scene, the Army lobbed hundreds of tear gas grenades at the crowd, sparking numerous fires. While the Arkansas native had a reputation as a ruthless military commander in foreign theaters, MacArthur’s role in the assault against his fellow Americans is singular in the nation’s history and marks the first time that tanks rolled through the capital, mowing down civilians. Women and children were coughing and crying while many of the veterans challenged the soldiers to dismount and fight fair and square. “Men and women were ridden down indiscriminately,” reported the Baltimore Sun. “Nothing like this cavalry charge has ever been witnessed in Washington. The mad dash of these armed horsemen against twenty to thirty thousand people who were guilty of nothing more atrocious than standing on private property observing the scene.” A U.S. senator from Connecticut watched as a tear gas grenade landed at his feet and fires from the explosions erupted all around him. “It was like a scene out of the 1918 no-man’s land,” reported the Associated Press.
By nine P.M., the troops were crossing the bridge to Anacostia, despite presidential orders forbidding entry to the veterans’ camp. MacArthur ordered his troops to pause for nearly an hour at the north side of the drawbridge to assess the situation. He knew that there were approximately seven thousand people in the camp, and that at least six hundred were women and children. While waiting, he received duplicate orders from the president that the troops should not cross the bridge or force the evacuation of the camp. Characteristically, MacArthur “was very much annoyed in having his plans interfered with in any way,” according to the messenger who carried the directive from the secretary of war to MacArthur. A belligerent MacArthur told Eisenhower that he “did not want either himself or his staff bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders.”
“It would not be the last time that MacArthur would disregard a presidential directive,” historians Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen noted in their account of the event in Smithsonian magazine, referring to the general’s later defiance of future president Harry S. Truman. “I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch he had no business going down there,” Eisenhower said of his exchange with MacArthur.
At ten P.M. the camp commander carried a white flag of truce to the Army and requested an hour’s respite for the veterans and their families to evacuate. MacArthur agreed, and widespread panic ensued as parents awakened their sleeping children with shouts: “Come on! The soldiers are going to kill us!” Tanks blocked the roads and machine guns were mounted on the drawbridge, preventing the families’ exodus by vehicle. Mothers and fathers carried babies and tattered suitcases, running in the opposite direction of the bridge. A gigantic searchlight scanned the camp, eerily illuminating the disorder. As MacArthur’s forces entered just before eleven P.M., hurling grenades into the shacks and tents and setting fire to anything in their path, the crowds booed, tears streaming down their faces. The tanks trampled the vegetable gardens the veterans had planted for food. Some threw rocks at the advancing U.S. Army in a pathetic gesture of defense. Within minutes the entire camp was burning, “a blaze so big that it lighted the whole sky … a nightmare come to life,” wrote a reporter who had witnessed the flames that leaped fifty feet into the air. Watching the glow from a White House window, President Hoover demanded his aides determine what had gone wrong.
The cacophony resembled a war zone, with the blaring of ambulance and fire engine sirens and the thundering of galloping hoofs and rolling tanks. The wounded began pouring into Gallinger Municipal Hospital, located two miles away in southeast Washington, suffering from bleeding wounds and respiratory distress. There were more than a hundred casualties, including at least two infants who had been killed. The tales of brutality horrified Americans, who were outraged when photographs showed four troops of cavalry and a column of infantry with drawn sabers bearing down on the defenseless mass. When a seven-year-old boy attempted to rescue his pet rabbit from the family’s tent, an infantryman rammed a bayonet through his leg. Universal Newspaper Newsreel called it “the most critical situation in the Federal District since the Civil War” and “the most cataclysmic domestic event of the decade.”
At eleven fifteen P.M., Major Patton led his cavalry in the final destruction, routing out all who were left in the camp. Among them was Joseph Angelo—the man who had won a Distinguished Service Cross for saving Patton’s life in the Argonnne Forest during World War I.
When it was over, the grandstanding MacArthur called a press conference shortly after midnight—despite Eisenhower’s advice to evade reporters and leave details of the political operation to the politicians—and set out to rationalize the show of force, which included the use of two thousand tear gas grenades. “It is my opinion that had the President not acted today, had he permitted this thing to go on for twenty-four hours more, he would have been faced with a grave situation which would have caused a real battle … Had he let it go on another week, I believe the institutions of our Government would have been severely threatened.” Although widely reported to be livid at MacArthur’s insubordination, Hoover refused to reprimand the general, which only added to the perception that the president was weak.
In the predawn hours of July 29, 1932, MacArthur set out to impugn the validity of the Bonus Marchers and to set the stage for the Hoover administration’s justification for the use of force, claiming that the men were not really veterans at all but rabble-rousing insurrectionists and Communists. “If there was one man in ten in that group who is a veteran it would surprise me,” MacArthur proffered. No major news outlets bothered to obtain records from the Veterans Administration, which had recently completed a survey revealing that 94 percent of the Bonus Marchers had served in the U.S. military. A whopping 67 percent had served overseas, and 20 percent of those were disabled as a result of their Army or Navy tours of duty.
In any case, many saw MacArthur’s rationale for the obfuscation that it was. Congressman Fiorello La Guardia of New York wired the president, expressing his great alarm at MacArthur’s actions. “Soup is cheaper than tear gas bombs,” the plainspoken fellow Republican wrote, “and bread is better than bullets in maintaining law and order in these times of Depression, unem
ployment and hunger.”
The fallout was swift and decisive. “Hounding men who fought for their country was not a political master stroke,” one historian wrote. “What a pitiful spectacle is that of the great American government, mightiest in the world, chasing unarmed men, women and children with army tanks,” the Washington News admonished. Newsreel audiences throughout the country hissed as they watched the U.S. Army attack the Bonus Marchers.
At the governor’s mansion in Albany, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were appalled. Sitting up in bed in the master suite, on the morning of July 29, Roosevelt was surrounded by a sea of newspapers. Rexford Tugwell, a professor of agricultural economics and one of Roosevelt’s advisers, later recalled that the governor felt deeply ashamed for his country. Embarrassed that he had once held Hoover in high regard, he revoked that opinion, telling Tugwell, “[There] is nothing left inside the man but jelly; maybe there never had been anything.”
