On May 24, 1932, as contingents of the Bonus Army snaked their way across the country, MacArthur met with Moseley and the Army’s chief of intelligence (G-2) to consider the military’s response. Moseley stressed the danger of incipient revolt. He told MacArthur that the Army should be prepared to meet any emergency that might arise.58 MacArthur was not convinced. But after an evening’s reflection, he walked into Moseley’s office and put the wheels in motion. “George, you were right yesterday. Go ahead with the preparations you suggested.”59
Moseley dusted off “Plan White,” the general staff’s battle plan to defend Washington in the case of domestic insurrection.f He transferred a detachment of tanks from Fort Meade to Fort Myer, just across the Potomac from downtown Washington; augmented the trucks available at both Fort Meade and Fort Washington (some twelve miles downriver) so that those garrisons could be transported quickly into the city; and placed the 3rd Cavalry at Fort Myer and the 12th Infantry at Fort Washington on full alert. Leaves were canceled and the troops were confined to the post. Soldiers received riot control instruction and bayonet drill; horses were practiced to move against crowds.60 Command of the operation was entrusted to Brigadier General Perry L. Miles from Fort Myer. Moseley coordinated the protection of the White House and the Treasury with the Secret Service, and made arrangements “to put a small force at a moment’s notice in the White House grounds.”61
In early June, MacArthur queried the nine corps area commanders as to the presence of “communistic elements and names of leaders of any known communist leanings” among the Bonus Army units passing through their areas.62 Most corps commanders filed negative reports, although VIII Corps, headquartered at Fort Sam Houston, reported Jewish Communists financed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer among the California contingent.63 J. Edgar Hoover, leading the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (BOI), advised military intelligence that some of the marchers were alleged to have “dynamite in a plan to blow up the White House.”64 Moseley received a letter from a reserve officer in Detroit saying that Communists from that city planned to seize a government building in Washington, “raise a red flag from the flagstaff, and declare a government of the Soviet Union of the United States.”65 Such reports, based entirely on rumor and hearsay, contributed to an air of crisis in the War Department, although subsequent investigation found no evidence of Communist leadership in the Bonus Army.66
The presence of the BEF in Washington energized debate on the Patman bill. A discharge petition to pry the measure out of the Ways and Means Committee received the required 218 signatures, but under House rules the bill could not be introduced until June 13, 1932. Congress was scheduled to adjourn on June 10 so that Republican members could attend the GOP presidential nominating convention in Chicago. But Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas kept the House in session, and on June 15 the measure carried 211 to 176. Fifty-seven Republicans crossed party lines to vote in favor; 51 conservative Democrats, mostly from the South, voted against.
The Senate considered the measure on June 17. Still controlled by the GOP, it voted 44–26 to table the Patman bill, thus killing it for the remainder of the Seventy-second Congress. After the Senate vote, about half of the veterans returned home. Roughly twelve thousand remained in Washington. Some had no place to go, others waited for instructions, others hoped their continued presence would goad the government into action.
The Hoover administration viewed the continued presence of the veterans with alarm. At the War Department, Hurley, MacArthur, and Moseley convinced themselves that revolution was in the offing. Random intelligence reports fed the Army’s hysteria.g By the third week in July, the president, the District of Columbia commissioners, and the War Department were agreed that the veterans should be dispatched from Washington as soon as possible.67
There is no reason to believe that Eisenhower dissented from the War Department consensus. His subsequent report for Secretary Hurley showed little empathy for the BEF:
After it became apparent that Congress would not favorably consider the bonus project there was of course no longer any legitimate excuse for the marchers to continue endangering the health of the whole District population by their continued [presence]. From another viewpoint also the concentration in one city of so many destitute persons was exceedingly unwise and undesirable.
Eisenhower noted that after many of the veterans had returned home, “an influx of newcomers occurred, in many instances later arrivals being of radical tendencies and intent upon capitalizing on the situation to embarrass the Government.” He maintained that the aid provided to the Bonus Army by District of Columbia police was interpreted “as an indication of timidity rather than sympathy” and that some of the marchers “were ready to take advantage of this supposed weakness whenever it might become expedient to do so.”68 There is no evidence to support any of these assertions. Eisenhower wrote to justify what the Army had done. He believed the case made by his superiors was correct, and he did his utmost to support that.69
The fact is that it was not the BEF that sought a confrontation with the government, it was the government that provoked a confrontation with the BEF. Rather than allow time for the veterans to drift away, as police chief Glassford recommended, the Hoover administration chose to force the issue. On July 28, under prodding from the White House, the District of Columbia commissioners ordered Glassford to clear the abandoned buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue in which the veterans were camping. Brief resistance followed, shots rang out, and two veterans were killed. At that point the district commissioners asked the White House for federal troops to maintain order. Hoover passed the request to Hurley, who instructed MacArthur to take the appropriate action.70
At 1:40 p.m. MacArthur ordered General Miles to assemble his forces on the Ellipse, immediately south of the White House. Within the hour, troopers of the 3rd Cavalry, led by the regimental executive officer, Major George Patton, clattered across Memorial Bridge into Washington. “We moved in column of fours,” Patton wrote. “The tanks on trucks followed by themselves at [a distance of] one mile.”71 The 12th Infantry from Fort Washington came upriver by steamer and arrived about an hour later. Altogether, the troops involved numbered about eight hundred, plus two hundred horses and five Renault light tanks.
When MacArthur received the order to intervene from Hurley, he sent an orderly to Fort Myer to retrieve his uniform and instructed Ike to get into uniform as well.h In his memoirs, Eisenhower asserts that he warned MacArthur against doing so. “I told him that the matter could easily become a riot and I thought it highly inappropriate for the Chief of Staff of the Army to be involved in anything like a local or street-corner embroilment.… General MacArthur disagreed, saying that it was a question of federal authority in the District of Columbia, and because of his belief that there was ‘incipient revolution in the air’ as he called it, he paid no attention to my dissent.”72
Eisenhower’s account is self-serving, and there is little likelihood he made such a reclama to MacArthur at the time. When Ike wrote his postpresidential memoirs in 1965, it was abundantly clear that MacArthur had made a colossal mistake in taking the field that day. Eisenhower may well have believed that he warned the chief of staff against it. But memories often blend fact and fiction, and there is no evidence that Ike objected at the time.i His diary, in which he regularly confided his innermost thoughts, makes no mention of his having cautioned MacArthur. Ike was a junior officer who had been plucked from obscurity by the chief of staff and had been on the job less than five months. His affection for his boss bordered on hero worship. The vast difference in rank between the four-star MacArthur and Eisenhower, reinforced by MacArthur’s imperious style, makes it all but certain that Ike offered no rebuke. Indeed, his official report of the Bonus Army affair suggests that he was fully in sympathy with what MacArthur did. Geoffrey Perret, an earlier biographer, wrote that “the chances that Eisenhower told the Chief of Staff to his face that he was making a serious mistake are close to zero,” and
the weight of evidence supports Perret.73
A young Major Eisenhower accompanies General MacArthur to supervise the rout of the Bonus Army from downtown Washington in July 1932. (illustration credit 5.2)
At 4 p.m. General Miles reported to MacArthur that the troops were assembled and ready to move. MacArthur informed Miles that he would accompany the troops “not with a view of commanding the troops but to be on hand as things progressed, so that he could issue necessary instructions on the ground.”74 MacArthur said it was President Hoover’s idea. “I’m here to take the rap if there should be any unfavorable or critical repercussions.”75 Eisenhower and Captain T. J. Davis, MacArthur’s aide, were at his side.
By five o’clock Army units had surrounded the buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue occupied by the veterans. Cavalrymen drew sabers and cleared the streets while the infantrymen from Fort Washington fixed bayonets and emptied the buildings. The air was saturated with tear gas. Prodded by horses and tanks, the veterans fell back to their encampment on the Anacostia Flats. As evening fell, the Army troops paused short of the bridge across the Anacostia to allow the women and children to be evacuated from the veterans’ camp. Twice that evening President Hoover sent instructions to MacArthur not to cross the Anacostia bridge. The first message was carried by General Moseley, the second by Colonel Clement B. Wright, secretary of the Army general staff.j MacArthur ignored both messages. Shortly after 9 p.m. he instructed General Miles to cross the bridge and evict the Bonus Army from its encampment. After a tear gas barrage, the cavalry swept the camp, followed by infantrymen who systematically set fire to the veterans’ tents and shanties, lest anyone return. Coughing, choking, and vomiting, the veterans and their families fled up Good Hope Road into Maryland and safety.
The Bonus Army’s encampment on the Anacostia Flats after being torched by MacArthur’s soldiers. (illustration credit 5.3)
An elated MacArthur returned to a triumphal press conference at the War Department.76 “That was a bad looking mob,” he told the assembled reporters. “It was animated by the essence of revolution. Had the President not acted today, he would have been faced with a grave situation. Had he let it go on another week, I believe the institutions of our government would have been threatened.”77
Eisenhower wrote in his after-action report that the mob “showed a surly and obstinate temper, and gave no immediate signs of retreating.” The “most efficacious of all weapons in such circumstances is the tear gas bomb. In the hands of well trained infantry, advancing with an evident determination, this harmless instrument quickly saps the will to resist of unorganized and unprepared bodies. Its small smoke cloud is visible from some distance, and its moral suasion thus extends over a far greater area than does its actual effects.”78
George Patton, who was in the thick of the action, shared the euphoria of the Army’s high command. In his diary, Patton wrote, “In spite of faulty methods the high training and discipline of the soldiers and officers secured a complete and bloodless (mostly) triumph, which by its success, prevented a war and insured the election of a Democrat.”79 Captain Lucian Truscott, who commanded the 3rd Division during the Sicily campaign and later succeeded Patton at the head of Third Army, led a troop of cavalry that day. “Cavalry training and special training for riot duty paid off,” he noted in his diary. “The unruly mob had been dispersed … with comparatively little trouble.”80
The nation’s press took a different view. Virtually without exception they lambasted Hoover and the War Department for excessive force. “What a pitiful spectacle,” said the normally Republican Washington Daily News. “The mightiest government in the world chasing unarmed men, women, and children with Army tanks. If the Army must be called out to make war on unarmed citizens, this is no longer America.”81
The Army’s treatment of the BEF was a shabby business, and in the years ahead Eisenhower tried relentlessly to separate himself from what had happened. Yet except for his own long-after-the-fact testimony, there is no evidence to substantiate any disagreement he might have had with War Department policy, or with what MacArthur did. To the contrary: As Ike saw it, it was not MacArthur but the press who were at fault. “A lot of furor has been stirred up by the incident,” he confided to his diary on August 10, 1932, “but mostly to make political capital.”
Later, when Washington journalists Drew Pearson and Robert Allen devoted a series of columns to MacArthur’s mishandling of the crisis, Eisenhower castigated their coverage. “There seems to be no logical reason for their continued outpouring of innuendo, insinuation and even falsehood against a man who has never injured them,” Ike wrote. “It appears probable that one of two theories may apply. First, that their assault is inspired [by Steve Early, press secretary in the Roosevelt White House]. The second theory is simply that the two men are innately cowards (which they are) and are giving expression to an inferiority complex by ceaseless attempts to belittle a man recognized as courageous, if nothing else.”82 k
Eisenhower did not vote in the 1932 election. “No one in the Army was voting,” said a contemporary of Ike’s. “Most of us had lost home identity, had never registered, and seldom stayed long enough anywhere to register. We seldom had the interest in local affairs which encourages registration. These were the reasons, rather than any principle. But we could generate as much nonvoting excitement as anyone else.”83 If Eisenhower generated any nonvoting excitement in 1932, there is no record of it. Three weeks after the election he noted in his diary that while he had “no definite leanings toward any political party I believe it is a good thing the Democrats won—and particularly that one party will have such overwhelming superiority in Congress.”84 (The Democrats won control of the Senate 60–35, and increased their majority in the House to 310–117.)
For the remainder of his tour in Washington, Eisenhower rooted for Roosevelt to pull the country out of the Depression. Ike shared the Regular Army officers’ animosity to “socialism” (a remarkable paradox for men who usually lived in government housing, drew subsistence rations from the quartermaster, shopped at the subsidized commissary, and enjoyed free medical and dental care), but he welcomed a strong hand at the tiller. “For two years I’ve been called ‘Dictator Ike’ because I believe that virtual dictatorship must be exercised by our President,” Ike wrote on the eve of FDR’s inauguration. “Things are not going to take an upturn until more power is centered in one man’s hands. Only in that way will confidence be inspired; will it be possible to do some of the obvious things for speeding recovery, and we will be freed from the pernicious influence of noisy and selfish minorities.”85
Along with almost everyone in Washington, Eisenhower was soon caught up in the excitement of the New Deal. When Congress passed the banking bill on March 9, 1933, giving Roosevelt unprecedented authority over the nation’s banking system, Eisenhower rejoiced. “Yesterday Congress met and gave the President extraordinary power over banking. Now if they’ll just do the same with respect to law enforcement, federal expenditures, transportation systems, there will be such a revival of confidence that things will begin to move.”86
It was during this period that Ike turned increasingly to his brother Milton for advice and counsel. Milton was a holdover Republican appointee in the Department of Agriculture, but his superb performance as director of information made him indispensable to the incoming Henry Wallace and Rex Tugwell. “Ike and I seldom disagreed,” said Milton. “During this period we were together three nights a week. Since it was an intimate relationship, it was also a beautiful human relationship.”87
Eisenhower’s political education was as yet incomplete, his perspective still unformed by experience. When FDR took the United States off the gold standard, Ike deplored Roosevelt’s desire to increase foreign trade. “Seems to me that the President is definitely choosing the road toward internationalism rather than nationalism,” he wrote on April 20. “I still believe that our best way to get out of trouble is to deal within ourselves—adjust our own production to ou
r own consumption and cease worrying about foreign markets.”88
Civil libertarians would deplore Ike’s diary entry of October 29, 1933:
I believe that unity of action is essential to success in the current struggle. I believe that individual right must be subordinate to public good, and that the public good can be served only by unanimous adherence to an authoritative plan. We must conform to the President’s program regardless of the consequences. Otherwise, dissention, confusion and partisan politics will ruin us.89
Eisenhower modified these views. As he saw more of the world, as he dealt with policy issues himself, he learned to appreciate a diversity of viewpoints and to value the intrinsic individuality of Western society. His views in 1933 differed little from those of his Regular Army contemporaries. What set him apart was his ability to absorb the lessons around him and broaden his outlook.
* * *
a Eisenhower wrote superb declaratory prose, but his talent should not be confused with that of Ulysses Grant—one of the finest wordsmiths in the English language. In Eisenhower’s case, given the bureaucratic style of conventional military writing, his use of active verbs and short sentences made him a standout. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
b Moseley’s anti-Semitic views were shared by a generation of senior officers in the late twenties and early thirties, but none were as outspoken as Moseley, or as extreme. The racist theology of eugenicist Charles Davenport was a standard feature of the curriculum at the Army War College, and nations were ranked according to their Nordic homogeneity. For a thorough analysis of the prewar Army’s anti-Semitism, see Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
Eisenhower in War and Peace Page 13
