There was a pause for nearly two hours while Glassford and MacArthur met with intermediaries from the camp to negotiate a peaceful evacuation. Meanwhile at the White House, Herbert Hoover, who had heard nothing about what was happening and was getting worried, sent a second message repeating his order for MacArthur to halt at the bridge.
That message never got through either. Instead, General Moseley again made sure the officer carrying it never arrived in time; “get lost,” he reportedly told him.50 By the time the messenger reached the Eleventh Street Bridge—after covering three miles in three hours—the troops were already moving out.
As they did, the darkness was suddenly split by bursts of yellow, red, and orange. “The whole encampment of shacks and huts just ahead began burning,” Eisenhower remembered. We now know it was the marchers who had set fire to the camp in a final gesture of defiance, torching more than 2,100 huts, tents, and lean-tos in a conflagration that filled the night with a dark red glow visible to President Hoover from his bedroom window.
Yet the myth would soon circulate that the fires had been set by the soldiers, and were even set at MacArthur’s orders. In fact, MacArthur had already pulled his men back at the entrance to the encampment and left its final clearance to Glassford’s blue-coated policemen backed by troops who were brought in by truck to assist, but under the police chief’s orders. MacArthur, Miles, and their weary troops then headed back to their barracks. MacArthur went to bed, tired but pleased that the army had carried out the president’s orders with an absolute minimum of injury to life and limb—and that his men had very possibly forestalled a revolution and the American equivalent of the storming of the Winter Palace.
Certainly when he appeared at the War Department the next morning before heading for the White House, he was expecting to be greeted by the congratulations of the entire nation. Instead, he was greeted by a very worried Major Eisenhower.
A gaggle of correspondents were waiting to talk to him, Ike warned him. “It might be the better part of wisdom, if not of valor, to avoid meeting them,” he said. Let Secretary Hurley and other civilian officials deal with the reporters; after all, the evacuation “had not been a military idea really, but a political order,” he later remembered telling MacArthur.51
MacArthur dismissed the idea at once. He wasn’t afraid of any reporters, and when they gathered around him he poured out a spirited defense of the operation, with Secretary Hurley at his side, as a forest of pencils furiously scribbled down his words.
“That mob down there was a bad-looking mob,” he firmly told the reporters. “It was animated by the essence of revolution. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, they were about to take over in some arbitrary way either the direct control of the Government or else to control it by indirect methods.”
He plunged on. “There were, in my opinion, few veteran soldiers in the group that we cleared out today; few indeed. I am not speaking by figures because I don’t know how many there were; but if there was one man in ten in that group today who is a veteran, it would surprise me.”
At last, he concluded: “I have been in many riots, but I think this is the first riot I ever was in or ever saw in which there was no real bloodshed. So far as I know, there is no man on either side who has been seriously injured.”52
Eisenhower, who knew that at least that last assertion was untrue (two veterans had died, albeit at the hands of the police, not the army), listened and shook his head. He realized that the impromptu press conference would only injure MacArthur’s reputation and encourage the public to think “General MacArthur himself had undertaken and directed the move against the veterans,” instead of at the orders of Hoover and Hurley.
Ike was proved right. If the Communist Party hadn’t been in the forefront of the Bonus Army movement, it did take the lead in describing, and embellishing far beyond the bounds of truth, its violent demise. Communist accounts described how “the soldiers charged with fixed bayonets, firing into the crowd of unarmed men, women, and children.” It spread tales of the use of tanks and poison gas; of tents being set on fire with men and women trapped inside; of cavalrymen’s sabers dripping blood from slicing off veterans’ ears, and even of a small child being bayoneted while trying to save his pet rabbit. And presiding over it all was General Douglas MacArthur, booted and spurred and even—in some accounts—on horseback, leading the final cavalry saber charge on the helpless veterans.53
Hence the birth of a new and ugly public perception of the former World War One hero and army chief of staff as the right-wing “man on horseback” who hated the poor and unemployed as much as he did radicals and Communists, and who was prepared to use the pretext of the Bonus March to declare martial law in the nation’s capital and perhaps even seize political power for himself. The truth was “there was no cavalry charge,” as MacArthur would patiently explain in his memoirs. “There was no fiery white charger. There was no saber”—except to swat recalcitrant bottoms.54 But it was that image that would grow and persist, and lead the Democratic presidential candidate that year, Franklin D. Roosevelt, when asked whom he considered the most dangerous men in America, to list first Huey Long, the demagogic governor and semi-dictator of Louisiana, and then Douglas MacArthur.
Meanwhile back at the White House, MacArthur was getting a very different reception than he expected. Hoover laid into the chief of staff for taking actions that the president considered a direct breach of his orders—orders that he did not know MacArthur had never received. The president was also furious about MacArthur’s unbridled statements to the press that would only raise more questions than they answered. MacArthur listened with growing rage. In his mind, he had only been following orders; in his mind, he had been given discretion in handling the evacuation, and he had done so with a minimum of fuss and bloodshed.
When Hoover was finished, MacArthur offered to resign on the spot—but he would make no apology for what he had done.55
Hoover didn’t accept the offer, and in his public statements he stoutly backed up the man he had upbraided in private. Later, when he had calmed down, the president came to admit that everything MacArthur had done had been within the scope of his instructions (although neither he nor MacArthur ever learned about General Moseley’s role in blocking Hoover’s cease-and-desist order from reaching MacArthur in time). As for other officials who had been on the spot, police chief Glassford and General Miles, both believed that MacArthur’s actions had been justified and that the criticism was unwarranted, as did Secretary of War Hurley.56
But the damage had been done, not just to MacArthur but especially to President Hoover. The Bonus Army debacle of July 28 marked the final doom of his presidential reelection campaign. Subsequent congressional investigations of the episode, which were timed to come before the November 1932 election, all made Hoover look like a liar as well as a monster. It certainly came as no surprise to anyone that the election result would be a Democratic landslide, with candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt carrying all but six states with 477 electoral votes to 59. The Bonus Army—and, one could argue, Douglas MacArthur—completed the destruction of Hoover’s reputation that the Great Depression had started, both then and later.
The other man whose reputation was wrecked was MacArthur. The public, and most subsequent historians, never bought his theory that the Bonus Marchers were led by thugs and Communists bent on revolution. It did little good to point out, as both Hoover and MacArthur did, that a large number of the marchers who were arrested had violent criminal records, or that those arrested on the final day of the evacuation included Pace; Emmanuel Levin, a figure in the New York Communist organization; and James Ford, American Communist Party candidate for vice president in 1928.57
Nor were there many willing to acknowledge, then or later, the fact that it had been General Miles, not MacArthur, who had been in actual command during the most violent phases of the operation; or that it was the police, not the soldiers, who actually fired on the marchers.
Instead, the im
age of MacArthur as would-be dictator and trampler of the poor and unemployed took root and spread, first from radical media organs like the Communist Daily Worker and The Nation and then to liberal newspapers and across the rest of the media. By the end of the summer, even the Columbus Dispatch could report that while MacArthur remained popular with the army, he had made too many enemies on Capitol Hill to survive as chief of staff.
His stock with veterans in particular, it seemed, was particularly low. When Josephus Daniels, former secretary of the navy, spoke at various American Legion conventions that fall, he found “the feeling against the General was very strong.” He warned that MacArthur’s reappointment as chief of staff when his term expired in 1935 would be seen as a “grave reproach” to the Legion and to other veterans.
Certainly the overwhelming consensus was that Mac would never survive as chief of staff under the new Democratic president, Franklin Roosevelt, let alone get appointed to a second term.
Yet FDR would surprise them all. Against all advice and expectation, the man who had described MacArthur as the most dangerous man in the country would spare him from the public lynching that many hoped for. Indeed, he would ultimately thrust him into a position of greater power and responsibility than MacArthur had ever held before—albeit on the other side of the world.
* * *
* It meant that the United States would never develop the kind of independent panzer divisions the Germans would deploy as part of their blitzkrieg tactics, and that the advanced tank designs Christie was developing for the U.S. Army would be sold to Soviet Russia instead—and become the basis of its T-34 tank design of World War Two.
CHAPTER 11
SAVING FDR
General Douglas MacArthur was quite literally “the man on a white horse” for FDR’s inauguration.
As the army, navy, and coast guard marched past the parade stand on March 10, 1933, it was MacArthur who led the procession, on a white steed. He wasn’t wearing the formal uniform he had worn while “breaking the back of the B.E.F.,” as he had put it. Rather he was in his full dress uniform, complete with sword and spurs. As he passed the president and the other distinguished guests on the parade stand, he saluted. Then the army’s distinguished chief of staff dismounted, handed his steed over to an aide, and strode to the podium, where he and the new president—the man who had branded him “the most dangerous man in America”—watched the rest of the parade.
They smiled and chatted, and laughed. They pointed out sights of interest as soldiers, airmen, and sailors marched by. Overhead flew the airship Akron, the pride of America’s dirigible air fleet—the one that was supposed to keep the country safe from attack on either coast. Anyone watching the pair would have assumed they were old friends, even relatives—and in fact they were both.1 MacArthur and Roosevelt had known each other since 1916, when Franklin was a hardworking assistant secretary of the navy and Douglas was an equally hardworking member of the General Staff putting together a plan for prewar mobilization.
Both had grown up with strong, domineering mothers; both were intensely ambitious; and both were consummate dramatic actors when the occasion demanded it. One was intensely liberal in the progressive Democratic tradition of Woodrow Wilson; the other conservative in the progressive Republican tradition of Theodore Roosevelt. But both also believed in a strong America, and together they would forge a strange alliance from the moment of Roosevelt’s inauguration until his death in 1945. Later MacArthur wrote, “Whatever difference arose between us, it never sullied in slightest degree the warmth of my personal friendship for him”—and he meant it. It was no autobiographical boilerplate. Especially after his experiences with first Truman and then Eisenhower, he would gaze back on the Roosevelt years, even the worst of them, with a sense of nostalgia, almost regret.2
For the first year of Roosevelt’s presidency, however, they were deeply at odds. Roosevelt considered the army chief of staff’s role during the Bonus March to be an abomination, and as a navy man he was bound to see any defense cuts aimed at balancing the budget (it was an election-year pledge) as coming from the army. MacArthur kept his views to himself. At the social festivities following the inauguration, he “shed benign charm on fellow guests,” an observer noted.3
What he was really thinking, that this “leading liberal of the age” was poised to transform America in ways that MacArthur and his fellow Republicans dreaded, was no secret. What FDR’s staff thought of MacArthur was no secret either. They regularly called him a “warmonger” and a “bellicose swashbuckler.” When MacArthur came to White House functions or meetings, most kept their cool distance. Roosevelt’s interior secretary, Harold Ickes, blasted him in his diary as “the type of man who thinks that when he gets to heaven, God will step down from the great white throne and bow him into His vacated seat.”4
Virtually everyone assumed that MacArthur would soon be put out on the street, along with the other Hoover holdovers. Josephus Daniels, a leading Democrat as well as MacArthur foe, told Roosevelt’s new secretary of war, “Get a new Chief of Staff and a new set up as soon as possible. MacArthur is a charming man, but he was put in by your predecessor and thinks he should run the Army.”5
Roosevelt’s own assessment was more nuanced, despite his “most dangerous man in America” remark. Before the inauguration he revealed his true thinking to one of his Brain Trust of economic advisors, Rex Tugwell. “I’ve known Doug for years,” he said reflectively. “You’ve never heard him talk, but I have. He has the most portentous style of anyone I know. He talks in a voice that might come from an oracle’s cave. He never doubts and never argues or suggests; he makes pronouncements. What he thinks is final.”
Still, Roosevelt was not inclined to let him go. As he told Tugwell, “He’s intelligent, a brilliant soldier like his father before him. He got to be a brigadier in France.” What worried Roosevelt was that MacArthur might one day rally political opposition to Roosevelt, and lead it against him. He was already a hero to millions for defeating the Bonus Marchers, who they had believed were Communist-led. If they really were looking for a man on a white horse, “a man of charm, tradition, and majestic appearance,” to lead, even take over, the country, “Doug MacArthur is the man.”6
So Roosevelt’s solution wasn’t to fire MacArthur but to beguile and outwit him—as he would beguile and outwit friends and foes alike, from a succession of vice presidents to GM’s Bill Knudsen and Winston Churchill. Besides, MacArthur represented the conservative forces that Roosevelt needed to cajole in order to achieve his most far-reaching plans.
“We must tame these fellows,” he concluded, “and make them useful to us.”
It was a shrewd plan, except that it turned out to be MacArthur who made FDR useful to him and the army, starting with the Civilian Conservation Corps.
—
The CCC was President Roosevelt’s pet project—he had done something like it as governor of New York. The idea was for the government to pay unemployed, unmarried men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five a basic wage to do unskilled manual labor relating to the conservation of natural resources, such as building roads and recreational spaces in national parks, planting trees (in the end the CCC would plant some 3 billion trees), and digging ditches for flood control. Roosevelt proposed the idea in a speech on March 21, 1933, with the goal of enrolling 250,000 men by July 1. It took Congress only ten days to pass the bill creating the Civilian Conservation Corps, while leaving most of the details to the executive branch to work out.
That suited MacArthur fine. When he heard that FDR’s plan included having the War Department recruit enrollees, give them a two-week conditioning course, and then ship them off to the camps where the U.S. Forest Service would take charge, his reaction was not at all like the outrage some soldiers felt at being used to further the New Deal. He was immediately enthusiastic.7 Though he was in no mood to see the army reduced to doing civilian manual labor, as some officers feared it would be, and although he was adamant that
“no military training whatsoever” would take place, in order to reassure those for whom the War Department’s involvement smacked of fascism, the idea of having a quarter million young men under canvas, with army officers training and supervising them, appealed to his imagination—as did the idea that only the army could plan, organize, and administer a national program of this size.
He realized that the army’s involvement in Roosevelt’s pet project would prove its worth to the nation, and to Roosevelt—and give hundreds of officers starved for duties something to do.
On March 24, just three days after FDR’s speech, MacArthur showed the surprised and delighted Roosevelt the army’s plans and regulations for the training camps. The next day MacArthur sent secret encoded messages to the commanders of the army’s corps areas informing them of what they were to do. The same day the bill was signed, March 31, the army was ready and waiting.8
MacArthur’s unexpected cooperation not only won him points in the White House, it also set the stage for the next big change in the program when the CCC’s director, Robert Fechner, decided in May, after seeing the General Staff’s projections, that he would never meet the needed enrollment by the July 1 deadline. He recommended that the War Department take over administration of the entire CCC. Roosevelt was willing to go along, and so while Congress was working on a bill entrusting the CCC to the army’s care, MacArthur and his staff were working even harder to pull together a comprehensive plan for the agency. It meant mobilizing 200 trains, 3,600 army trucks, supplying tens of thousands of shirts, trousers, and socks, as well as feeding hundreds of thousands of recruits—including, ironically, many army veterans—and housing them in barracks and military receiving areas, while planning it all in less than twenty-four hours.
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