The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Read online

  MacArthur’s written instructions from the Secretary of War specified that “any women and children who may be in the affected area” must be “accorded every consideration and kindness.” Given the chief of staff’s plan, it is hard to see how such distinctions could have been drawn. In anticipation of this assignment, he had requisitioned three thousand gas grenades from the Aberdeen Proving Ground and Edgewood Arsenal, and gas could not discriminate between sexes and ages. The only participants with real protection would be the general’s troops, who were now donning masks. Policemen tied handkerchiefs over their faces, storekeepers who had been warned slammed their doors and transoms, and those veterans who saw the masks spread the alarm, for they knew what was coming. But there wasn’t time to do much. The infantry came running on the heels of the horsemen, pulling the blue tear gas bombs from their belts and throwing them ahead. Suddenly the air was sharply tainted; the spectators broke and fled. A sickly-sweet haze hung over Pennsylvania Avenue, and beneath it the BEF women, blinded and choking, stumbled from the occupied buildings clutching pots, pans, and children. “It was like a scene out of the 1918 no-man’s land,” reported the Associated Press. It wasn’t quite. Washington was the capital of a nation at peace. The uneven struggle was being waged in the very shadow of Congress. Most of those present were noncombatants, and some were professionally neutral, though armed authority regarded newspapermen with suspicion. One reporter darted into a phone booth outside a filling station to call his office; a soldier tossed a bomb inside and drove him out.

  Resistance vanished. Driven by sabers, bayonets, and a rising wind—which blew the vile gas southward—the stricken BEF retreated toward the Anacostia River. It was a clumsy withdrawal. The women were carrying infants and their husbands shabby suitcases, and the retirement was harried by the puffs of fresh gas bombs. Gallinger Hospital was beginning to fill up with casualties. The evening noises were frightening: ambulance sirens, fire engines, galloping horses, tramping soldiers, newsboys hawking extras, and the clanking of the tanks, whose role was, and would continue to be, quite vague; “so far as I can recall,” Eisenhower wrote toward the end of his life, “they took no part whatever in the movements to evacuate the veterans,” although there was plenty of time for them, because the retirement “proceeded slowly.” Nevertheless, by 9 P.M. the refugees had crossed the Eleventh Street Bridge and joined the main BEF camp on the far shore. MacArthur’s force had cleared out other camps on C Street, on Maryland and Maine Avenues, along the wharves, and near the Congressional Library. Stacking arms near a gas works at about eight o’clock, the troops messed at a field kitchen while their leader contemplated his next move.

  To him the decision was obvious. His mission was the destruction of the BEF. There was no substitute for victory. His job wouldn’t be complete until he had crossed the river, invaded the vets’ sanctuary, and leveled their headquarters. General Glassford vehemently disagreed; he begged the chief of staff to abandon plans for a night attack, calling it “the height of stupidity.” MacArthur was adamant, and the outranked police superintendent turned away. A direct order from the President of the United States was something else. Commander in Chief Hoover had his own ideas about how his army should be used, and they stopped at the water’s edge. To make certain his instructions reached the general, he sent duplicate orders through General Moseley and Colonel Clement B. Wright, secretary of the General Staff. According to Eisenhower, the President “forbade any troops to cross the bridge into the largest encampment of the veterans, on open ground beyond the bridge.” That was clear enough, and another general would have submitted instantly. Not MacArthur. He was choleric at this civilian meddling. He told the astonished Moseley that his plans had to go forward; he would not brook interference. To Eisenhower the chief of staff declared emphatically that he was “too busy and did not want either himself or his staff bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders.” For the first but not the last time, the general decided to disobey a President.

  Mounting heavy machine guns on the bridge to meet any counterattack, MacArthur led a column of infantry across, with Major Eisenhower at his side. They debouched on the other side in files of two—and marched into chaos. The Anacostia camp was a jumble of packing crates, fruit crates, chicken coops, burlap-and-tarpaper shacks, tents, lean-tos, wrecked touring cars, and dun-colored, tepee-like shelters. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could have become attached to so preposterous an array of junk, but it was the only home the BEF families had. They were huddled here in the dark, praying for deliverance. What they got was another fusillade of tear gas bombs. Some fled screaming, some hid; one large group of about five hundred gathered on the edge of the camp and mocked the troops with the chant, “Yellow! Yellow! Yellow!” Veterans who had planted vegetable gardens pleaded with the infantrymen to spare their crops. The green rows were trampled anyhow. At 10:14, the Associated Press reported, soldiers put the torch to the hodgepodge of buildings. Flames leaped fifty feet in the air and spread to a nearby woods; six companies of firemen had to be summoned. From his White House window the President saw the glow in the eastern sky and demanded to know what had happened. To Eisenhower “the whole scene was pitiful. The veterans, whether or not they were mistaken in marching on Washington, were ragged, ill-fed, and felt themselves badly abused. To suddenly see the whole encampment going up in flames just added to the pity one had to feel for them.”

  The major’s compassion wasn’t universal. Seven-year-old Eugene King, a vet’s son, tried to rescue his pet rabbit from the family tent. “Get out of here, you little son-of-a-bitch,” said an infantryman, and before the boy could move, the soldier ran a bayonet through his leg. Again ambulances raced the two miles from Gallinger Hospital. There were over a hundred casualties. Two babies were dead of gas, and the angry editor of the BEF newspaper suggested the epitaph for one: “Here lies Bernard Myers, aged three months, gassed to death by order of President Hoover.” That was unfair, but the veterans were bitter. They had seen soldiers pouring gasoline on their huts while well-to-do Washingtonians in yachts cruised close to look at the show. And at 11:15 P.M. they had watched Major George S. Patton Jr. lead his cavalrymen in a final destructive charge. Among the ragged bonus marchers routed by their sabers was Joseph T. Angelino, who, on September 26, 1918, had won the Distinguished Service Cross in the Argonne Forest for saving the life of a young officer named George S. Patton Jr.

  ***

  Major Eisenhower advised his chief to avoid newspaper reporters; this operation had been more political than military, he continued to argue, and the politicians should do the talking. MacArthur shook his head. He enjoyed talking to the press. Furthermore, whether he liked it or not—it seems quite clear that he relished it—his decision to cross the Anacostia had put him squarely in the middle of presidential politics. At fifteen minutes past midnight he appeared before reporters with Secretary of War Hurley. From the outset his strategy was obvious: he disclaimed responsibility and praised Hoover for shouldering it. “Had the President not acted within twenty-four hours, he would have been faced with a very grave situation, which would have caused a real battle,” the general said. “Had he waited another week, I believe the institutions of our government would have been severely threatened.” Secretary Hurley added, “It was a great victory. Mac did a great job; he’s the man of the hour.” He paused thoughtfully and added, “But I must not make any heroes just now.”

  The real problem was the making of martyrs. Hounding men who fought for their country was not a political master stroke. Already sympathizers were offering the BEF farmland in Maryland and Virginia. Senators Hugo Black of Alabama, William Borah of Idaho, and Hiram Johnson of California were deeply shocked by the Army’s behavior, and Representative Fiorello La Guardia of New York wired the President, “Soup is cheaper than tear gas bombs and bread is better than bullets in maintaining law and order in these times of Depression, unemployment, and hunger.” General MacArthur dealt with this problem in a
n aside. The BEF were “insurrectionists,” not ex-soldiers, he said. “If there was one man in ten in that group who is a veteran it would surprise me.”

  At the White House, which had announced that the President was staying up “until a late hour getting bulletins from the Bonus Army front,” discrediting the BEF became the official line. Later Hoover would have private words of reproach for his insubordinate general, but now he declared that the bonus marchers were “not veterans,” that they were “Communists and persons with criminal records.” The percentage of nonveterans varied from spokesman to spokesman. MacArthur had put it at 90 percent. Hurley thought it was about 33 percent. Then Hoover wrote an American Legion post in Boston that it was his “impression” that “less than half of them ever served under the American flag.” General Glassford protested that this was untrue, thereby assuring his early retirement in October. Some of the dirt was bound to stick. In an extraordinary charge to a Washington grand jury the day after the rioting, a member of the District Court said, “It is reported that the mob guilty of actual violence included few ex-service men and was made up mainly of Communists and other disorderly elements. I hope you will find that it is so and that few men who have worn the nation’s uniform engaged in this violent attack upon law and order.”

  Unfortunately for the Hoover administration’s place in history, no one thought to check with the Veterans Administration. Before the BEF attacked law and order by becoming the targets of a gas attack, the VA had completed an exhaustive survey of its membership. According to the VA figures, 94 percent of the bonus marchers had Army or Navy records, 67 percent had served overseas, and 20 percent had been disabled. Glassford and the ragged men he had championed were vindicated. It cannot be said that it did them much good. Remarkably few newspapers reprinted the survey, and most of those that did ignored it on their editorial pages. The New York Times described the veterans as “ordinary trespassers” whose “insubordination” had “led to a violent outbreak, almost amounting to insurrection.” The Boston Herald declared: “The people… have had enough of holdups by the undeserving.” The New York Herald Tribune ventured that the BEF cause now found “not a shred of sympathy left anywhere.” To the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “camping on the Capitol grounds” was “cheap heroics,” and although Time was critical of the administration, Fortune concluded that MacArthur, by realizing that “bayonets and an overwhelming show of strength were the only means of preventing fatalities” (the fact that there were fatalities was overlooked) had earned the nation’s gratitude for having “skillfully executed” a difficult task.

  On the morning after the disorders, the general feeling in comfortable American homes was that the government had thwarted men bent upon violent revolution. There were exceptions. Noting that during the BEF’s period of greatest frustration the chief executive had received a heavyweight wrestling champion, members of the Eta Upsilon Gamma sorority, and the winners of a high school essay contest, Walter Lippmann wrote, “Mr. Hoover does not shrink from holding conferences and issuing statements. How can he justify the fact that he never took the trouble to confer with the Bonus marchers?”

  At the executive mansion in Albany, New York, the atmosphere was funereal. Eleanor Roosevelt read the papers with what she later called “a feeling of horror.” Her husband seemed even more deeply affected. Professor Rexford Tugwell of Columbia, a house guest, was summoned to the master bedroom, where his host lay surrounded by clouds of newsprint. As Tugwell entered, Governor Roosevelt covered photographs of the rioting with his hands, as though in shame for his country. The governor recalled that in 1920 he had proposed Hoover as a presidential candidate. He apologized for that now. “There is nothing inside the man but jelly,” Roosevelt said angrily. “Maybe there never was anything else. Why didn’t Hoover offer the men coffee and sandwiches, instead of turning Pat Hurley and Doug MacArthur loose?” It was characteristic of Franklin Roosevelt that he saw the incident not in terms of principles or high policy, but as a human calamity. He might feel sorry for the President, he told Tugwell, if he weren’t moved by a greater sorrow for the veterans and their families. “They’re probably camping on the roads leading out of Washington,” he said in anguish. “They must be in terrible shape.”

  ***

  They were in terrible shape, but they weren’t bivouacked on those roads. The Democratic governors of Virginia and Maryland had seen to that. About two hundred veterans slipped into Arlington County before Sheriff Howard Fields blocked off the Potomac bridges; he told them that unless they left Virginia soil within twenty-four hours, Governor Pollard would call out the militia. Governor Ritchie’s orders to the Maryland State Police were: “Make them go by the main highway toward Baltimore or don’t let them enter Maryland.” It was impossible to keep them out altogether, so motorcycle policemen met the exhausted bonus marchers at the District line and escorted them through sleeping Baltimore to the Pennsylvania line. In Pennsylvania a few found temporary sanctuary in Johnstown’s Ideal Park. Most, however, were herded by the state police there to the Ohio line, where another uniformed escort waited. And so it went. Some, finding sympathy along the way, turned to begging. One railroad put together a special train to carry those bound for the plains states; Kansas City civic leaders raised $1,500 to keep it from stopping there, and the boxcars hurtled onward like Lenin’s sealed car. There is no record of its eventual destination. All that is known is that by autumn most of the BEF had merged into the enormous transient population which roamed the land in 1932.

  Roughly two million Americans—over a quarter-million of them between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one—were on the road that year. Fortune called them the Depression’s “wandering population.” In convoying the veterans from border to border, state policemen were following a ritual which had been established early in the Depression by county sheriffs. Every local government had more welfare cases than it could handle; impoverished strangers were charged with vagrancy and dumped across the nearest county line. A few cities, like East St. Louis, were famous for their compassionate Salvation Army stations. Most communities cultivated inhospitable reputations. California first set up forced labor camps and then posted guards on highways entering the state, to turn back the poor. In Atlanta shabby outsiders were sentenced to thirty days on the Fulton County chain gang. Eric Sevareid, who was one of the twenty-year-old wanderers in the early 1930s, later recalled that “cities were judged and rated on the basis of their citizens’ generosity with handouts and the temperament of the railway ‘deeks’ who guard the freight yards. You did not, for example, attempt to travel through Cheyenne, Wyoming, if you had any alternative. You were apt to be chased from the yards there not only with clubs, which was fairly common, but with revolver shots, and it was a long walk to the next station.”

  Who were the vagabonds? There was a hard core of seasoned hoboes, whose “jungles” provided squalid havens for the others, but most Americans on the road were new to it. They were dispossessed sharecroppers, foreclosed farmers abandoning farmland parched by three summers of drought, ragged bands of youths who had graduated from school and could not find jobs—members of what was called the “locked-out” generation. Sevareid was a banker’s son, and the percentage with middle-class backgrounds was very high. Mobility was in the American tradition; “’Scuse our dust,” they had been fond of saying, and “You’ve got to be a go-getter if you want to get ahead,” and “I’m on my way,” and “Your Uncle Dudley’s going places.” Often an unemployed man would pile his family into the old car, head off in any direction optimistically looking for work, and wind up destitute and far from home.

  “They are the people whom our post offices label ‘address unknown,’ and whom we call transients,” Newton D. Baker wrote in the New York Times that year. “Every group in society is represented in their ranks, from the college graduate to the child who has never seen the inside of the schoolhouse. Expectant mothers, sick babies, young childless couples, grim-faced middle-aged dislodged from
lifetime jobs—on they go, an index of insecurity in a country used to the unexpected. We think of nomads of the desert—now we have nomads of the Depression.” It was true; in every city breadline there were sprinklings of chesterfields and homburgs, and magistrates never knew who would appear before them on vagrancy charges. One Brooklyn defendant, who pleaded guilty to sleeping in a vacant lot for forty-six days, was an alumnus of the University of Colorado and had served the governments of Panama, China, Chile, and Venezuela as a civil engineer. Another was one of the most famous chefs of the Twenties; he had been living in a condemned attic and tormenting himself reading his old menus.

  The descent from the middle class was rapid and sickening. Among the unskilled laborers building a California reservoir were farmers, ministers, engineers, a school principal, and the former president of a Missouri bank. In Chicago two hundred women were sleeping nightly in Grant and Lincoln parks. They had no shelter, no blankets, no protection of any kind; when night fell they lay on the cold ground and shivered until dawn. In Babylon, New York, Long Island policemen found a registered nurse starving in a maple grove on a private estate where for two weeks she had slept in a bundle of old rags and papers. In Oskaloosa, Iowa, an unemployed teacher and her two children were preparing to spend their second winter in a tented hole in the ground. As Cabell Phillips of the New York Times observed, the man who knocked on your door at night “might be the same fellow who a few months or a year ago had cheerfully O.K.’d your loan at the bank or had written the editorials in your newspaper or had been the vice president of a leading real estate company.”