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Bonus Army Spectacle, U.S. Capital, 1932: What Really Happened
*The article below (SEMP Biot Report #635) is the second part of a two-part series. The first part is SEMP Biot Report #634: “Bonus Army Spectacle, U.S Capital, 1932: Root Causes,” available at http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=634. ****************************************************************************** The self-named “Bonus army,” also known as the “Bonus Expeditionary Force”--a play on the “American Expeditionary Force” in World War I--“was a comic adventure tinged with tragedy such as only the United States of America could produce,” declared the American Legion, a very large organization representing veterans of the Great War. (1)
A handful of unemployed veterans in Portland, Oregon, founded the Bonus army in early 1932. Many of them lived in shantytowns called “Hoovervilles,” as described elsewhere. (2) They decided to walk to Washington, D.C., in May 1932, to personally lobby for passage of congressional legislation that would pay cash for the “adjusted service certificates” in their possession since 1925, as described in SEMP Biot Report #634. Recall from Biot Report #634 that on May 19, 1924, more than five years after signing of the Armistice, the 68th U.S. Congress enacted the “World War Adjusted Compensation Act (Bonus Bill), granting World War I veterans “adjusted universal compensation.” The new law granted any veteran who served during the war compensation at the rate of a dollar a day for domestic service and an extra twenty-five cents for each day spent overseas. Most veterans were due around $600 to $1,000. Veterans entitled to $50 dollars or less were paid immediately. The rest of the veterans received certificates that they could redeem in 1945. If a veteran died before 1945, his beneficiaries could redeem the certificate for the full amount. The full text of the bill is available elsewhere. (3) The leader of the Bonus army was unemployed World War I veteran Walter W. Waters, who told his version of the story of the Bonus army to William C. White, who wrote it down and published it in 1933. (4)
The Bonus army coalesced under the leadership of 34-year-old veteran Walter W. Waters. (4) In his account of the history of the Bonus Expeditionary Force, Waters said he was born in 1898 in Oregon “of old American stock,” and grew up in Idaho. He continued, In 1916, restless, with no further “West” to conquer, I joined the [Idaho] National Guard and went to the Mexican border as a private. The regiment was later divided and one section of it was assigned to the 146th Field Artillery and sent overseas in the winter of 1917. We entered active service at the front in July, 1918. Armistice Day found us still on the firing line. After that we were ordered into Germany as a part of the Army of Occupation. We returned to the United States in June, 1919, and I was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant. Shortly after my return to civil life my health failed. I spent several months in a hospital under the care of various physicians, for which, by the way, the Government was not asked to pay. Then, like millions more, I attempted to take up the threads of my life where I had dropped them some three years before. Like many others of my age, I had no occupation or profession to resume. Everything had to be commenced for the first time, and it was a discouraging problem. In the next few years I made numerous serious attempts to get going in some profitable business or position, as a garage mechanic, an automobile salesman, a farmhand, a bakery helper. Each new venture was begun with the same high enthusiasm. Each one ended as an equally dismal failure. My inability to take root in fertile soil may have been due to the unsettling effects of the War on me. I blamed my failure on environment and felt myself daily getting more and more out of tune with my surroundings. In 1925 I made a decision which now, in retrospect seems foolish. Eager to being completely anew, I broke all family and personal ties and left Idaho for some chance-found place, to make a completely new start. Telling no one of my intentions I hitchhiked into the State of Washington and there got a job in the harvest fields. I even used my new name, “Bill Kincaid,” the first name to flash into my mind when asked, as if to break the more decisively with the past. Under that name I met and married the girl who is now my wife [Wilma Anderson]. During this time I made no particular effort to avoid meeting former acquaintances although I likewise made no effort to seek them out or to notify them of my whereabouts. I had dropped out of sight, in so far as family, home and former friends were concerned. I found a job in a cannery near Portland, Oregon, worked up to be assistant superintendent and for once I seemed to have escaped from the failure that had followed me in the past. I lost that job in December, 1930, due to the depression, and went to Portland in search of employment. There I resumed my real name and later went home, for the first time in five years. But there was no work to be found at home and, a few months later, I came back to Portland. My wife and I had a thousand dollars saved and I felt that we would get along somehow until work was obtained. Our savings vanished and the hope of work with them during the winter of 1931-1932. In the meantime our personal belongings, one by one, found their way to the pawn shops and by March, 1932, we were not only penniless but had nothing left except a very scanty wardrobe. There were many days that winter when we experienced actual hunger while earnestly trying to find any job that would provide just the necessities of life. (5) While looking for work, Waters said he met other ex-servicemen in similar situations. I found that a large percentage of these men in Portland were, like myself, ex-service men…Among these men there was profound discontent with conditions. There was a ravaging desire to change them but a complete and leaden ignorance of the way to do it...These men did think and talk a great deal about the so-called Bonus. The name “Bonus” is unfortunate. It is not a gift, as that word implies. It is a payment of money to compensate those men who served in the Army for the difference in pay between that of service men and non-service men in 1918. The bill, asking payment in full of the adjusted compensation for wartime service, was introduced by Representative Patman of Texas and, during the early winter of 1931, was pending in Congress. The majority of veterans were hoping that it would pass. In March 1932 a small gathering of the National Veterans Association in Portland, Oregon, had listened patiently to a speech Waters had written. Lisio wrote, Walter W. Waters’s physique was not extraordinary—slight statute, wavy blond hair, steel-blue eyes, a haggard yet still youthful appearance—but his intent expression was that of an evangelist. The ex-sergeant challenged the men he would one day command to acknowledge the miserable failure of their letters and petitions to a Congress that obviously had no intention of approving the full bonus. When big business wanted action on vital legislation, he declared, it did not content itself with merely sending letters; it sent people. Congress understood and feared determined lobbyists. Business succeeded because its lobbyists insisted that its interests be recognized. Rather than sending three hundred petitions, a band of men organized into a strictly disciplined army should march on Washington, growing along the way until, a thousand strong, it entered the national capital in a dramatic and forceful confrontation. This was Walter W. Water’s fist public speech. He had written and rewritten it with great care…His audience was clearly uninterested. Dejected, the former sergeant steeped down from the rostrum and returned to his accustomed routine, looking for a job. (6) Eventually, however, Waters’s message resonated with some 300 Portland veterans who set out across the U.S. under Waters’s leadership for the eighteen-day journey. Waters explained his reason for seeking immediate payment of the bonus, as follows: In Portland at this time there were more than eighteen hundred veterans unemployed who were the heads of families. There was an additional large number of veterans without dependents in the daily breadlines. There were thousands of unemployed people, not veterans. But the city’s charities had to care for all of them and their facilities were overtaxed…The hungry and unemployed veterans were not the only ones eager for the payment of the Bonus. Doctors, shopkeepers, druggists and landlords felt that the payment of the Bonus would relieve in part the drain on public charity and would help them to collect long overdue bills. (5) Waters said he “anxiously watched reports in the newspapers of the progress of Bonus legislation.” (7) U.S. Representative Wright Patman (D-Texas), himself a World War I veteran (though he never went overseas), was the leading spokesman for prepayment of the adjusted service certificates. The main problem with prepayment was finding the money to pay out the billions of dollars needed to redeem the certificates on mass. No problem, said Patman. “His plan was to issue unsecured paper currency to redeem the certificates, a complete departure from the gold standard which had been the basis of American money and the financial system. He argued that an additional two billions of currency in circulation would help solve the financial difficulties of the country.” (8) Committees of the 72nd Congress considered the Patman bonus bill and decided against redeeming the adjusted service certificates. On February 19, 1932, Congress did, however, vote to permit veterans to borrow up to one-half the face value of their certificates. Ninety percent of veterans did borrow one-half the face value of their certificates, knowing that the interest charged on the loan would consume almost all of the balance of the adjusted service certificate by 1945, giving the veteran at that date only a few dollars. For example, “a veteran entitled to $1500…who applied for and received half of that amount in 1931, would have coming to him less than a hundred dollars in 1945, unless is made repayment of the principal prior to that date,” explained Waters. (7) Walter Waters was disappointed with the outcome of Patman’s legislation of February 1931. Waters said, “Posts of the American Legion all over the country were going on record in favor of immediate payment, thus reversing the attitude which their delegates, at President Hoover’s request, had expressed in the National convention [of the American Legion] the previous autumn. The rank and file in the Legion were voting now, and not the leaders and the few delegates,” declared Waters. (4) Waters observed that highly organized lobbies in Washington for special industries were “producing results; loans were being rated to their special interests and these lobbies seemed to justify their existence. Personal lobbying paid, regardless of the justice or injustice of the demand,” he averred. (7) In early March, 1932, he concluded that “Congress was purposely playing football with the Bonus bill and had no intention of giving it favorable consideration regardless of the demand which ex-service men were voicing through the various veterans’ organizations.” Waters also said he “read the Constitution of the United States which grants the right to American citizens to assemble and to petition Congress peacefully for a redress of grievances.” Gradually the determination to go to Washington grew on him to lobby for the Bonus bill. (7) Around March 11, 1932, Walters and about three hundred unemployed Portland, Oregon, veterans mostly thumbed their way to Washington by rail, truck or private cars. They picked up followers as they moved eastward. “Presently cities and towns were confronted with hungry crowds of marchers, and solved the problem by feeding them and providing them transport to other towns father east,” writes Jones. “As the movement gained advertising, new groups formed in other cities, the largest starting from New York. Communist agitators seized the occasions to promote marching columns.” (8) The Bonus marchers experienced various “adventures” on their hobo trip across the country, ranging from panhandling to resisting various authorities, as described by Dickson and Allen. (8) In Pennsylvania, the National Guard took the marchers in trucks to “the state line, where the veterans were passed to Maryland National Guard trucks, which took them to Cumberland, where they slept on the floor of an old skating rink. They had traveled some three thousand miles in eighteen days,” note Dickson and Allen. (9) The next day, May 29, 1932, the National Guard trucks took the 300-strong Oregon vanguard right into the heart of Washington, D.C. Official Washington had deftly turned the Bonus army problem over to the District of Columbia Police Department led by Police Commissioner Pelham Glassford, a retired Brigadier General of World War I who was sympathetic to the veterans, if not their immediate cause. By nightfall, the Bonus army had grown to a thousand from other caravans, says Jones. “The next day three thousand were camped in the Capitol city. Newspaper reports estimated the ultimate total as twenty thousand. General Frank T. Hines, Administrator of Veterans Affairs, who had dealings with a good number of them, did not believe more than ten thousand were in Washington at any one time.” (8)
Jones explained the living situation for the bonus army in Washington, as follows: The men camped here and there, most of them on the flats of the Anacostia River near its confluence with the Potomac along the eastern edge of the District of Columbia. Some took over vacant buildings near the center of the city. The hard times of 1930-1932 had left many old properties empty. On June 7 [1932] a parade was staged from near the White House to the Capitol, with about 5,000 marchers in line led by twelve men wearing war decorations for gallantry. A great public gathering lined the avenues to watch, cheering and jeering. Various lesser parades took place, with picketing attempts at the White House which police discouraged. (8)
The veterans “set up authority of their own in their camps, attempted sanitation rules, orderly distribution of food and limited policing. Glassford secured for them some National Guard tents and blankets to eke out the makeshift shacks in which they lived. Some had women and children with them.” (8) Waters and his wife, befriended by a wealthy notable, Evalyn Wash McLean, did not sleep in the Hoovervilles; rather they and some other Bonus army grandees slept in the “best hotels” and “put on old clothes by day and mixed with the ragtag forces, offering advice,” notes Jones. Dickson and Allen say McLean rented an apartment for Waters and his wife, Wilma, who said, “I could have lived in Anacostia, but things were bad there—there were always upheavals. (10)
News of the approaching Bonus army had rapidly made its way to Washington, D.C. Representative Patman “wanted no part of the Bonus Army. His desire to dissociate himself from the marchers reflected the growing fear and, in some instances, anger among congressmen over their advance on Washington.” (11) Several times, Patman urged the veterans to return home. On May 6, 1932, the House Ways and Means Committee had issued an adverse report on Wright Patman’s continued effort to pass a cash-now bill. “Ordinarily, this would have killed a bill, and Patman knew he faced a formidable parliamentary struggle. To get such a bill out of committee and onto the floor for a vote, the bill had to be formally tabled for seven meeting days. Then a petition had to be made for the invoking of a special rule. That was granted by the Rules Committee for Patman’s bill.” (12) Patman then proceeded to ask colleagues to place their names on the petition to bring the bill to the floor. The Bonus army led by Waters helped Patman with his task through their “amateur lobbying technique,” which “consisted mainly of confronting hundreds or representatives, face-to-face.” One observer recalled that within days of arriving to the District, “Walter Waters had a full-fledged lobbying operation underway. “The veterans frankly made a nuisance of themselves. A couple of veterans were always sitting in each of the Representatives’ waiting rooms. The Representatives were solicited outside the building as well.” (13) The strategy paid off. By June 4, 1932, the veterans and Patman had successfully obtained the required 145 signatures to bring the bill to the floor. The District Commissioners (Glassford’s three bosses) requested that the Bonus army evacuate the Capital. They defied his request saying they were determined to “stay until the bonus is won.” (14)
The bonus marchers produced many of the 145 signatures on Wright Patman’s petition. The bill, however, could still die, because of the calendar. Bills could be brought out by petition only on the second and fourth Monday of the month. The next time the bill could be put before the House was Monday, June 13, 1932. The U.S. House of Representatives planned to adjourn June 10, 1932 so that Republican members could attend the Republican National Convention (which nominated President Hoover for his second term). For Patman’s bill to reach the floor, the scheduled adjournment would have to be postponed. The House was not adjourned on June 10, 1932, after all. Instead, on Tuesday, June 14, 1932, Wright Patman’s cash-now bonus bill, authorizing an appropriation of $2.4 billion, finally headed toward a vote on the House floor. On Wednesday, June 15, 1932, the House passed the bonus bill by a vote of 211 to 176, with 40 not voting. An article in the Washington Post on June 16, 1932, notes: “The Democratic party shouldered almost complete responsibility for passage of the bonus bill through the House in the final vote. In fact, the pronouncement of Democrats in favor of immediate payment of the $2,300,000,000 to ex-service men through debasement of the currency was so emphatic that it may be considered a policy of that party.” (15) The veterans had successfully pushed the bill through the House of Representatives after only two weeks of lobbying. The Senate next considered the bill. On Friday, June 17, 1932, write Dickson and Allen, “more than 6,000 veterans [Waters says 8,000, p. 85] thronged Capitol Hill to maintain a vigil on the Senate, which was scheduled to vote that day on Patman’s bill…The shouts and songs of the veterans—“The Yanks are starving, the Yanks are starving”—could be heard in the Senate chamber as the debate went on. Liberal senators, conceding that the veterans’ cause was just, nevertheless said they would vote against it because the bonus bill would kill off one for unemployment relief.” (16) The Senate roundly defeated the bonus bill, 62-18, at around 9:30 p.m., that Friday night. Senate aides summoned Waters inside. He reemerged moments later to break the news to the crowd: the bill had been defeated. The senators quickly tabled the motion to reconsider the vote, 44 to 26, at least for that session of Congress. (17-20) Waters told the veterans the bad news, as follows: “The bill is beaten. We have received a temporary setback…But we are here to stay, and I have told them in there (the Capitol) that we will stick it out. We are going to get more men as fast as we can and stay here until we change the minds of these men. Take it on the chin like Americans and fight it out. We’re disappointed but we’re not discouraged. The result doesn’t alter our plan to stay here until we get results, and to get more, and more and more men to join us. Some of them are on the way now and others will come. Write to our sympathizers and urge them to defeat the senators who voted against us. We are ten times better Americans than those who voted against us.” (19-20)
Congress then gave the Bonus army veterans a deadline of July 15, 1932, to leave Washington and provided the means to do so. Police Chief Glassford obtained inexpensive rates (1 cent per mile) from two railroads to transport the veterans back to their original homes. Glassford worried that food for the veterans was becoming scarce and living conditions in the camps were deteriorating. As the midnight, July 15, 1932, deadline for departure of the Bonus army veterans approached, only 1,736 veterans had left Washington, D.C., according to one report. (23) Congress remained in session. The left wing of the Bonus army had taken up marching around and around the Capitol Plaza while awaiting the convening of Congress to beseech enactment of the payment of the bonus before the adjournment predicted for July 15, 1932. Meanwhile, a heat wave was rolling across most of the U.S., with the official temperature in Washington at 92 degrees outside and the “kiosk” reading of 102 degrees on July 15, 1932. Air conditioners did not yet exist. At least one veteran collapsed because of the heat. (24) The 72nd Congress finally adjourned near midnight on July 15, 1932, not to meet again until December 1932. Congressmen left through back doors and tunnels to avoid the veterans. Waters, unfazed by the adjournment, said there would be no move to leave. “The BEF will dig in and stay all summer and next winter, if necessary, leaders declared.” Minutes before midnight on July 15, 1932, President Hoover extended the evacuation deadline to July 25, 1932, as “mostly Communist” veterans marched up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. (Communist bonus army leader John T. Pace had also vowed to remain in the District until the bonus bill was passed.) A huge show of police force, “the largest massing of policemen seen in Washington since the race riots shortly after the World War,” entirely isolated the area” around the White House and arrested three men. On Tuesday, July 19, 1932, the number of veterans that had left Washington was 3,056. On July 21, 1932, Glassford’s repeated plea to the Bonus army to depart again fell on deaf ears. (25) “By police count on July 21, 1932, there were 11,698 men in twenty-four separate camps in Washington…Glassford had a plane fly over the camps and drop leaflets about the looming eviction.” (26) Serious problems were brewing in a downtown camp, where “more than two thousand veterans, mostly southerners” had taken “over a large area, sometimes called Glassford Camp, that centered at Third Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW.” On the afternoon of July 27, 1932, Waters began to oversee a “peaceful evacuation” of the Glassford Camp the direction of the District Commissioners. Waters hoped to have all the men and their kin—about 7,000 people—off federal property and onto nearby Camp Bartlett, which was private land owned by a sympathetic donor named John Henry Bartlett. When Waters told the men to “accept the evacuation,” the men in the Glassford Camp adamantly refused. At 9:50 a.m. on July 28, 1932, Glassford notified Waters that the Treasury Department had ordered that all the veterans in the area were being (forcibly) evacuated at 10:00 a.m. Waters felt he had been double-crossed by Glassford. “The men, angry and confused, headed back into the buildings.” Dickson and Allen continue, The Rhine company had moved large cranes with wrecking balls to the area, but the cranes remained parked because the firm’s insurance company said it would not cover any work until the veterans and their families had been evacuated. At ten o’clock, six Treasury agents appeared, and Glassford put his plan into action. One of the agents announced that the Treasury Department was taking over the building--the old Armory—and handing it over to Rhine & Company. The Armory was the headquarters of the 1,600 predominantly southern men of the 6th regiment of the BEF, whose leaders said that everyone had been honorably discharged and that 85 percent had served in France. (27) The authorities, including Glassford, entered the building and the first phase of the evacuation went smoothly for some two hours. Glassford broke for lunch, intending to complete the evacuation by the end of the day. A group of men suddenly emerged from a crowd and started throwing bricks at the police officers, fracturing the skull of one. Reporter Paul V. Anderson said, “I was standing about forty feet away and it looked like an ugly mess, but the cops kept their heads and no shots were fired. Glassford dashed into the heart of the melee, smiled when a brickbat hit him in the chest, and stopped the fighting in a few seconds.” Someone had ripped off his badge from his chest. (28) When the District Commissioners learned of the melee, they realized the “situation was beyond the control of the police and that bloodshed could be averted only by the presence of Federal troops.” (29) “Attorney General William D. Mitchell, independent of the commissioners, told reporters that he ordered the evacuation of veterans from all government property, not just the buildings that Glassford had been evacuating.” Glassford and another authority returned to the evacuation scene at the old Armory, “which by now was jammed with about four thousand arriving veterans and hundreds of spectators,” at about 1 p.m.
“Shortly after 1:45 p.m., Glassford heard an uproar in front of the Ford building, about fifty yards away. Glassford and several policemen rushed to the building and ran up a makeshift outside stairway to the second floor to get a better view of a scuffle on the ground below.” (30) Two of his officers, George W. Shinault and Miles Znamenacek, tried to follow their chief up the stairway, but were shoved to the ground by veterans and struck with a nightstick and a garbage can hurled from above. “Glassford, looking down on the fallen policemen, saw Shinault draw his gun and fire two shots. Two men fell.” William Hushka, a thirty-five-year old Lithuanian immigrant and veteran from Chicago died immediately, while Eric Carlson, a thirty-eight-year-old veteran from Oakland, California, died later. The New York Times article of July 28, 1932 describes the riot this way: The veterans milled about, restless but preserving order, until shortly after 2 o’clock. The police had become less vigilant, and there was no indication of the fury that was about to break loose. Unnoticed, General Glassford had climbed to the second story of one of the buildings where the veterans remained firm in their refusal to leave. He said he had heard the men were fighting and he wanted to quiet them. Two policemen started up the outside stairway after the fight had been quelled. They were Miles Zamanezck and George Shinault. Other policemen were scattered about the area separating the building from the next structure. A number of veterans opposed their entrance to the second floor, and Zamanezck was hit in a scuffle. He was pushed down the stairway, a brick hit him and when he stepped upon the brick debris at the end a garbage can was thrown at him. Two shots rang out, apparently fired by the police, and veterans and spectators scattered in all directions amid shouting and the thud of bricks. Four more shots followed quickly and then intermittently for three minutes police guns popped like firecrackers. General Glassford leaned over from his precarious footing and looked into the muzzle of a gun held by Policeman George Shinault. “For God’s sake, stop shooting!” he cried. “Put your guns away, men, and don’t shoot again!” He was forced to dodge back when another shot followed, and he said later he thought Shinault had lost his head and was shooting at him. Miles Dominick, or according to another identification William Haskka, was shot dead. Another, Eric Carlson, was shot through the pelvis, and Will R. Boyd was shot through the neck. Boyd walked to an ambulance where Carlson lay writhing in agony and seated himself. It was said afterward his condition was serious. (31) President Hoover then ordered the U.S. Army, personally led by General Douglas MacArthur, Chief of Staff, to clear the Bonus army from Washington, D.C. He used about 3000 troops. (32) The New York Times on July 28, 1932, described the operation, as follows: The Federal troops came out today and cleared Washington proper of the members of the Bonus Expeditionary Force. The cantonments, the “forts” in the unused Federal buildings, the huts that the men themselves had built, were evacuated by the veterans when they found themselves faced with tear-gas bombs, bayonets and tanks. The regulars had the equipment to do the job, the equipment that the Capitol Police had lacked and they had the orders to do it. The irregulars of the bonus army had only their stubborn sullenness in most cases and bricks, rocks and epithets in others and the fight did not last long. Down Pennsylvania Avenue at 4:30 this afternoon the regulars came, cavalry leading the way, and after them the tanks, the machine-gunners and the infantry. For them the objective was the “fort” of the BEF, in the skeletonized building at Third Street. There was a wait for maybe half an hour while the army officers talked it over with the police and the bonus marchers shouted defiance. They wanted action, and they got it. Twenty steel-helmeted soldiers led the way, with revolvers in their hands, and others advanced until about 200 were in position in front of the “bonus fort.” Then the mounted men joined. They rode down street, clearing the path with their sabers, striking those within reach with the flat of the blades. The action was precise, well executed from a military standpoint, but not pretty to the thoughtful in the crowd. There were those who resisted the troops, fought back, cursed and kicked at the horses; there were those who scrambled for safety and those who tried to rescue their meager belongings from the fort. Inch by inch, foot by foot, they were forced down Pennsylvania Avenue as the soldiers headed them toward Anacostia camp. (31)
“Through the bonus camp the rumor had been spread that the troops might refuse to march against the men who had once worn the uniform themselves, but they had found out soon enough that it wasn’t so.” (32) All policemen were called to the area and one found Glassford’s badge when he arrested a veteran charged with leading the riot. General MacArthur and his troops marched to Anacostia flats to force evacuation of the Hooverville. Supposedly, President Hoover at the last minute forbade MacArthur from crossing the bridge across the Anacostia River into the flats, but MacArthur did not hear. At about 10:00 p.m., his men crossed the bridge and torched the now-deserted tents and hovels of the shantytown. No one was hurt or killed during the evacuation.
“The long day ended in a press conference that lasted until past midnight. MacArthur, back at his headquarters, stood before a crowd of reporters…[He] called the veterans ‘insurrectionists’ and declared that ‘if there was one man in ten in that group today which is a veteran, it would surprise me.’ Reviewing his day’s work, he said, The mob down Pennsylvania Avenue looked bad. They were animated by the spirit of revolution. The gentleness and consideration with which they had been treated had been mistaken by them as weakness and they had come to the conclusion that they were about to take over the government in an arbitrary way or by indirect methods. 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 another week I believe that the institutions of our Government would have been very severely threatened. It can be said that he had not only reached the end of his extraordinary patience but had gone to very great lengths to avoid trouble. (33) Where was Walter Waters when the Bonus army riot was occurring? Waters, “accompanied by a handful of his aides, viewed from the sidewalks about the trouble-ridden area the swiftly breaking developments…Just before arrival of the troops, he went to a small restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue for a cup of coffee.” There he threw his arms up in the air, saying, “The men got completely out of control. There was nothing and is nothing I can do to control them.” He bitterly blamed the rioting on the “political interests of the administration.” (34) President Hoover summarized the event on July 29, 1932, as follows: A challenge to the authority of the United States Government has been met, swiftly and firmly. After months of patient indulgence, the Government met overt lawlessness as it always must be met if the cherished processes of self-government are to be preserved. We cannot tolerate the abuse of Constitutional rights by those who would destroy all government, no matter who they may be. Government cannot be coerced by mob rule. The Department of Justice is pressing its investigation into the violence which forced the call for Army detachments, and it is my sincere hope that those agitators who inspired yesterday’s attack upon the Federal authority may be brought speedily to trial in the civil courts. There can be no safe harbor in the United States of America for violence. Order and civil tranquility are the first requisites in the great task of economic reconstruction to which our whole people now are devoting their heroic and noble energies. This national effort must not be retarded in even the slightest degree by organized lawlessness. The first obligation of my office is to uphold and defend the Constitution and the authority of the law. This I propose always to do. (35)
The Bonus army incident occurred in a presidential election year. Indeed, “[o]n the morning of July 29, with the New York Times spread open on his bed at Hyde Park, Democratic presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt [FDR] told an aide that there was no need now to campaign against Hoover.” (35) “‘Flames rose high over the desolate Anacostia flats at midnight tonight,’ read the first sentence in Times account, ‘and a pitiful stream of refugee veterans of the World War walked out of their home of the past two months, going they knew not where.’” (36) The Bonus army veterans trying to flee the District of Columbia found bridges into Virginia barred by soldiers and Maryland roads blocked by state troopers, according to Dickson and Allen. (36) Eventually, Maryland authorities permitted the Bonus army veterans to cross Maryland on condition they moved as rapidly as possible into another state.
Mayor Eddie McCloskey of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, welcomed them at a defunct amusement park outside of town. On August 4, 1932, Waters ordered the veterans to go home and Mayor McCloskey, told them they were no longer welcome in Johnstown. (37) “Vowing vengeance on President Hoover at the polls next November and planning vaguely for a march on Washington, next December, two-thirds of the nondescript horde of bonus marchers were riding the cushions homeward tonight,” said a New York Times article dated August 5, 1932. (38) A newsreel of the U.S. Army eviction of the Bonus army circulated in movie theaters across the nation, causing some people in the audiences to boo the U.S. Army and jeer General MacArthur. The images contributed to “a caricature of Hoover as a cold and heartless man, unable to cope with the needs of the hungry and dispossessed,” write Dickson and Allen. Hoover lost the election to Franklin Roosevelt on November 8, 1932. One veteran, speaking for many others, wrote to Hoover on May 8, 1933, noting that 4,000,000 veterans had found happy postwar lives. They had not besieged Washington, D.C. and they wanted Hoover back as their President. The New York Times on July 30, 1932, published editorials gathered by the Associated Press from major newspapers around the country, which expressed support for President Hoover’s difficult decision to expel the Bonus army from Washington, D.C. (39) In early 1934, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Patman bill once more. “The Senate defeated it. Representative Fred M. Vinson, of Kentucky, a Legionnaire, submitted a simple prepayment bill without the currency inflation clauses of the Patman measure. The committee favored it. Patman had his bill substituted, by 202 votes to 191. In the Senate the opponents of any payment flocked to support the Patman Bill, adopting it 52 to 35. (38) President Roosevelt meanwhile read his veto of the bill at a joint session of Congress, reiterating the rationales against the bonus noted by former Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The House overrode the President’s veto, 322-98. The Senate sustained it 54-50.
Vinson tried his prepayment bill again. On January 10, 1936, “the Vinson bill passed the House. The Senate rewrote it. Senators Byrnes, Clark, Harrison and Steiwer drew up the final measure, providing payment by bonds which could be cashed at once or held to mature in 1945 with accruing interest. The Senate passed this by 74 to 16. The House agreed to the bill. On January 24, Mr. Roosevelt sent down a brief veto message, merely referring to his veto of the year below. He knew the fight was over, and before the final vote had been taken he had instructed the Veterans Administration to get ready application blanks for payment. The veto lost by 325-61 in the House, 76-19 in the Senate. Application blanks were rushed to field offices. The actual bonds were ready for distribution June 16 [1936]. By June 27 half of them had been cashed. The others came into the treasury steadily, only a small percentage being held until they matured in 1945.” (40) The Bonus army spectacle involved “sound sense on both sides of the whole bonus question.” However, “much also was said that was not entirely sensible, calm or reasonable,” notes Jones. “The whole affair reflected legislative procedure, executive problems, and public opinion as they operated in a land of free thought, free speech and a free press.” (41) Notes:
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