The Plots Against the President (3 page)

Chapter Four

The Tombstone Bonus

Joseph T. Angelo, a scrawny and proud veteran who, as a World War I enlisted private, had saved the life of George S. Patton on a French battlefield, walked more than a hundred miles—from Camden, New Jersey, to Washington, D.C.—to testify before Congress. “I done it all by my feet—shoe leather,” he told the House Committee on Ways and Means on February 4, 1931. Impoverished, hungry, and unemployed, Angelo made an impassioned plea for the government to release bonuses promised eight years earlier to veterans who had served in the war. Representing 1,800 men from New Jersey, Angelo wore his medals, including the Distinguished Service Cross he was awarded after dragging a bleeding Patton into a shell hole. “They are just like myself—men out of work,” he testified. “I have got a little home back there that I built with my own two hands after I came home from France. Now, I expect to lose that little place. Why? My taxes are not paid. I have not worked for two years and a half. Last week I went to our town committee and they gave me $4 for rations.”

Vivid symbol of the ravages of the Great Depression, Angelo embodied the “forgotten man,” as he and thousands like him would soon be dubbed. Penniless and often shoeless, the unsung heroes dressed in their threadbare uniforms and went door to door throughout America begging for food. Three weeks after Angelo's stirring testimony, on February 26, 1931, President Hoover vetoed the immediate-payment bill that emerged from the House and Senate Committees, claiming that the number of veterans in need of relief had been exaggerated, and that, in any case, local communities should shoulder the burden. The soldiers' “bonus,” which had been authorized by the Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924, was not due until 1945. Early payment would have resulted in approximately $500 per soldier—cash desperately needed as the country entered its second year of economic stagnation. Given the dire situation, soldiers began calling it the “tombstone bonus,” since it seemed likely that many of them would be dead by the time the government honored its commitment.

If Hoover underestimated the plight and doggedness of the soldiers, his apparent indifference served to galvanize them. Mobilizing from coast to coast, they called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force. Thousands of them responded to the clarion calls going forth from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, and smaller, locally based veterans' groups. By the end of the year, after petitions and resolutions had fallen on deaf ears in Washington, nearly three thousand “hunger marchers,” as newspapers called them, descended on the capital, hoping for an audience with the president.

“Diamonds were the symbol of the depression. They glittered everywhere,” investigative reporters Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen wrote about the lavish White House dinners hosted by the Hoovers. For one such formal affair, the First Lady selected arrangements of pink chrysanthemums and snapdragons, said to be her favorite flowers in her favorite color, and she was praised throughout the evening for her exquisite hospitality. The sixty-eight well-heeled guests who came to honor the Hoover cabinet were serenaded by a celebrated tenor from the New York Metropolitan Opera. Political figures hobnobbed with heiresses and celebrities. Author Edna Ferber “regaled several Cabinet members with the story of how she got her nose Gentilized,” Pearson and Allen wrote.

As the White House guests dined, the army of hunger marchers was rolling into Washington in a procession of jalopies and work trucks, the unemployed men wearing crude armbands identifying them as veterans from America's numerous foreign wars and skirmishes. Composed of many avowed Communists—the
Washington Star
reported that they sang the anthem of the Bolsheviks—the ragtag group alarmed many officials and legislators, who had heard rumors of the vets' plot to take over the government. The capital's police chief arranged for his officers to keep an eye on them and for the chef of the Mayflower Hotel to oversee the preparation of hot breakfasts, lunches, and dinners to appease the raucous protesters. “Despite all the Red rhetoric,” said a history of the movement, “many marchers had been attracted to the event because they were legitimately hungry.” At least one undercover government agent infiltrated the group and determined that half were non-Communists who had joined the cause because they were starving. He reported that the group was 35 percent Jewish, 35 percent Negro, and 30 percent “miscellaneous white,” and that about a quarter of the protesters were women.

Their generalissimo, a Lithuanian immigrant and fervent Communist named Herbert Benjamin, tried to carry a petition to the president. But when White House guards blocked his entrance at the gate, Benjamin retreated to his “troops.” A few days later, he led them noisily out of the city, all the while hurling epithets and threats that he would return with “a force superior to the thugs of the ruling class.”

The “cruelest year,” a time when America hit “rock bottom,” as historian William Manchester described 1932, began and ended with despair. The crisis that had begun three years earlier with the stock market crash had only deepened and now seemed to be not a temporary downturn but a permanent condition. The indicators were staggering: Unemployment had tripled in three years and was at sixteen million and rising; farm foreclosures exceeded half a million; more than five thousand banks had failed and eighty-six thousand businesses had closed; industrial production had been cut by more than half; with the lack of purchasing power by the unemployed, consumption was at a trickle, compared with the prosperity of the previous decade; stocks were worth 11 percent of their 1929 value. Financial capitalists had bilked millions of customers and had been “permitted to rig the market and trick the public,” said a
New Yorker
editor. As the
Nation
magazine put it: “If you steal $25, you're a thief. If you steal $250,000, you're an embezzler. If you steal $2,500,000 you're a financier.”

The human toll was stark as panic swept the nation. Millions wandered the country in search of work. Suicide rates tripled. Soup kitchens could not accommodate the masses, and men often stood all night long in unemployment lines in order to be among the first applicants in the morning. Panhandlers crowded city street corners, and children suffering from malnutrition sold pathetic scraps of food and clothes. People combed garbage dumps for usable items, often fighting over caches of kindling or other materials of value. Boxcar hoboes and disheveled migrant children haunted the newsreels. State and local governments were unable to pay their teachers. The average weekly wage of those fortunate enough to have a job was $16.21. One percent of the population possessed 59 percent of the nation's wealth. A thousand homes per day were being foreclosed in the nation's urban locales, where an estimated thirty-four million men, women, and children were without any income—a figure that did not even include the eleven million farm families who “were suffering in a rural gethsemane of their own,” wrote William Manchester. For the first time in the country's history, Americans emigrating to foreign countries exceeded foreigners immigrating to America, as skilled workers sought jobs in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. Unable to sell their crops, farmers burned their fields and killed their livestock to survive. “Babies go hungry while farmers in Iowa dump their milk trying to get the price up to where they can keep producing milk so babies won't go hungry,” one report said, capturing the inherent irony of the calamity. Hundreds of thousands of families had been evicted from their homes.

At the heart of the disaster was a deep-seated uncertainty about the role the federal government had played—and should play—in American life. There were no safety nets in place: no unemployment insurance, minimum wage, social security, Medicare, or federal bank deposit insurance to protect the life savings of millions of people.

“America was at a standstill,” historian Blanche Wiesen Cook wrote. “People spoke about gloom, despair, suicide, revolution.” The Depression reignited fears of Communism among many elements of American society and government, as unemployment and unrest swept the nation. Such fear was not unfounded; economic despair of the magnitude found in the United States was a natural breeding ground for class warfare. The “viability of the country's institutions and the stability of international relations” were at stake, according to one historian. Not surprisingly, the Red Scare found its way into national politics, and, whether real or exaggerated, the fear was elevated to historic proportions.

The depth of the Depression stirred the most extreme impulses, even paranoia, of those American conservatives who had long seen central government as a malign force. They promulgated conspiracy theories about the international gold standard, the creation of the Federal Reserve, the graduated income tax, and the machinations of the world's financiers to control the global economy. As anxiety metastasized into widespread frustration and fury, a fearful populace sought villains to blame. The very nature of American political protest changed. Movements sprang up to appropriate the revolution that seemed imminent, if not already under way. Orators and flag-waving hate mongers used inflammatory rhetoric to shake the disaffected from their malaise, inciting first fear and then rage, and focusing on the Communist, Socialist, or Fascist threats
within
the country rather than abroad.

States trained militias to handle mass demonstrations staged by the unemployed. Even though there were no armed insurrections, scores died in riots throughout the country, and thousands more were wounded and arrested at the hands of aggressive police forces.

Throughout 1932, from New York to California, Oregon to Florida, Nebraska to Alabama, people wondered who would become the next president of the United States. A universal feeling persisted that the promised land of America was doomed, that its glory days were in the past, that the government was in the hands of wealthy men who had abandoned the citizenry, and that the crisis had moved beyond redemption.

It was a “precarious moment,” historian David M. Kennedy said, “pregnant with danger and opportunity.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt was poised to seize that opportunity.

Chapter Five

The Forgotten Man

By the time Roosevelt was nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate in the summer of 1932, there was a worldwide depression and U.S. and foreign currency were unstable. In America, the richest nation in the world, more than sixteen million men were looking for work.

Recruiting academics to join what would be known as his “brain trust,” Roosevelt became a devotee of the Republican Wall Street lawyer Adolph Berle, who was an authority on corporations and had penned a progressive approach to the American economic system. Berle's bestselling book,
The Modern Corporation and Private Property
, helped set the stage “for the most fundamental realignment of power since abolition,” according to a twenty-first century economist, and became Roosevelt's economic bible. Though Berle was committed to the corporate system, he warned of concentrating the market in a few hundred firms and examined how senior managers of Wall Street firms had seized control from the shareholders. According to Berle, the Depression was evidence that giant, unregulated corporate monopolies inevitably failed both the stockholders and the public. Berle and Raymond Moley, a Cleveland-born Columbia University political science professor, brainstormed with Roosevelt to devise a solution.

Roosevelt called for a new “economic constitutional order” in which government would intervene to break up the concentration of corporate wealth and power. Recalling the phrase “the forgotten man” from an essay written by a Yale philosopher in the 1880s, Moley inserted the expression into one of the candidate's most famous campaign speeches: If elected, Roosevelt would rely on methods “that build from the bottom up and not the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

Republicans and old-guard Democrats alike saw this concept—that government in a civilized society had an obligation to abolish poverty, reduce unemployment, and redistribute wealth—as dangerously radical. Roosevelt was now marked as a bald-faced progressive, and his advocacy of government-financed unemployment insurance and an old-age pension alarmed many members of his patrician class.

Meanwhile, Hoover's stuffy nature and inflexible devotion to laissez-faire economics gave way to a sudden passion for winning reelection. Stunned by what he gradually realized was a “hatred” of him in the country, the president “put on his high-button shoes and celluloid collar and went to the people” to incite fear of Roosevelt, as William Manchester described it. But what Hoover found on the campaign trail was a disdain and discontent so deep that he “was lucky to come back alive.” He was hissed in Indianapolis, jeered in Cleveland, and booed in Detroit, where nearly a quarter-million people were unemployed. Hoover's jibes at Roosevelt's infirmity and implications that his rival was physically unfit for the office only solidified support for Roosevelt. That Hoover had kept Roosevelt standing for half an hour at a White House reception for the nation's governors underscored the president's insensitivity. “We've got to crack him every time he opens his mouth,” said Hoover, who directed his aides to ramp up a smear campaign against his opponent with attacks focused on Roosevelt's infirmity, physical weakness, and crazy ideas. Gambling odds were running seven to one against Hoover, who “deliberately chose the low road,” according to William Manchester, and confided to a cabinet member that the only way to win was to incite “a fear of what Roosevelt will do.”

The Hoover administration was facing certain defeat at the hands of an invigorated Democratic Party and an agitated public. Then, in late July 1932, its calamitous handling of the forty-five thousand Bonus Army soldiers who marched on Washington was the final blow. A month earlier, on June 15, 1932, the U.S. House of Representatives had passed yet another bill authorizing immediate payment of the veterans' bonuses, a $2.4 billion appropriation that had been ushered out of committee and to a floor vote by Speaker of the House John Garner. The vote of 211 to 176, with 40 abstaining, had come after a heated debate in which Democrats had overwhelmingly supported the bill and Hoover loyalists had opposed it. One Democratic congressman, Edward Eslick of Tennessee, had been so passionate in his support of the legislation that he had dropped dead of a heart attack in the midst of his speech: “Uncle Sam, the richest government in the world, gave sixty dollars and an IOU ‘that I will pay you twenty-seven years after the armistice.' ” While the House bill had been a victory for the Bonus Marchers, it faced stiff opposition in the Senate, prompting Walter W. Waters, an unemployed ex-sergeant from Portland, Oregon, to beseech every American veteran to hop a freight train for Washington and maintain a vigil on the U.S. Senate, which was scheduled to vote on the bill two days later on June 17. The Doughboys—as the World War I veterans were called—organized in companies and platoons and traveled by boxcar and flatcar, rattletrap and truck. Some walked or hitchhiked. “Every other interest has got lobbyists in Washington,” author John Dos Passos quoted a veteran as saying in an article for the
New Republic
. “It's up to us to go to Washington and be our own lobbyists. Park benches can't be any harder in Washington than they are back home.”

When a group of three hundred from Portland reached Council Bluffs, Iowa, they joined thousands more veterans who had gathered from burgs and cities throughout the land. As they made their way East, sympathizers provided them with money, food, and camaraderie. A dramatic new form of protest, the movement attracted the attention of the national media, which gave the march widespread radio and newspaper coverage. Unlike the American Expeditionary Force of World War I—a segregated army that excluded nearly half a million black soldiers from its military units—the Bonus Expeditionary Force, as they called themselves, was fully integrated. In the BEF, black and white men—along with their wives and children—marched and camped together, prompting at least one journalist to depict it as a model for an integrated society. Many wore empty bean cans strapped to their belts as improvised canteens for water and carried faded Stars and Stripes. They “made for America a picture of honest men in poverty,” Waters wrote in 1933. “For Mr. Hoover had said there were no hungry men in America. Either he was wrong or these men imagined their hunger.”

The “troops” marched up Pennsylvania Avenue—watched in silence by nearly a hundred thousand Washingtonians who had lined the streets—and set up camp on Anacostia Flats, an abandoned army base in the southeast corner of the city. They slept in lean-tos constructed out of cardboard boxes and shipping crates—“every kind of cockeyed makeshift shelter from the rain, scraped together out of the city dump.” Led by a Medal of Honor winner and several others who wore their Silver Stars, Croix de Guerre, and Distinguished Service Crosses, they organized in divisions and conducted military drills, sang war songs and listened to speeches by their leaders and others hoping to persuade or dissuade them in their pursuit. At least two Catholic priests sought to influence them. Father James R. Cox flew to Washington from Pittsburgh to implore the crowd to “stick it out!” He told them, “You will never get what you're entitled to unless you stick.” Father Charles E. Coughlin—the highly controversial and nationally famous “radio priest” whose program reached millions of listeners—sent cash to help stave off starvation. “Cunning Communists are dicing for the leadership of these World War Veterans,” Coughlin wrote in a telegram, “and tonight, both to cheer the hearts of the bonus army and to show that Communism is not the way out, I am donating $5,000.” Additional contributions began to pour in from wealthy individuals, local merchants, and various organizations sympathetic to the plight of the hungry Bonus Marchers. Supporters throughout the country sent truckloads of food; one baker sent a hundred loaves of bread a day; another sent a thousand pies.

Local Marines set up a clinic staffed by volunteer physicians and dentists, which was immediately inundated by men, women, and children suffering from bronchitis, rheumatism, blisters, pleurisy, the common cold, toothaches, and “body vermin—American cousins of the ‘cooties' of French trenches.” They bathed in the muddy Anacostia River and slept in the open air. Mosquitoes and flies swarmed in the camp, spawned by Washington's swampy, subtropical summer heat. Described by one newspaper as a “rag-and-tin-can city,” Hooverville, D.C., was within sight of the U.S. Capitol and was the largest shantytown in the country, its population swelling daily with new recruits.

On June 17, the day the Senate was scheduled to vote on the bonus, there was a move to table the bill. Heated debate continued late into the evening, when a vote of 44 to 26 tabled the bill until the Seventy-third Congress convened in 1933. That night, the Hoover administration had genuinely feared that the veterans might turn violent. Instead, the marchers sang “America the Beautiful” and retreated quietly to their camps. While the majority of the Bonus Marchers left the city and returned to their homes, more than eight thousand remained at what was becoming a permanent camp.

On July 19, retired Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, who had been Franklin Roosevelt's guide through Haiti fifteen years earlier, rode into the site to offer solidarity to the veterans, many of whom he had commanded in previous skirmishes in China and Latin America. Having won two Medals of Honor and been called the “ideal American soldier” by Teddy Roosevelt, the lean and controversial Butler was an outspoken critic of the military brass and a staunch advocate of the enlisted man. Butler had recently been threatened with court-martial for making accusatory remarks against the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. The charges were dropped when Butler retired as a Marine, but his tenacious support of the veterans continued. A heroic whistle-blower, Butler had run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania on a platform of exposing the grotesque war casualties being hidden in Veterans Administration hospitals. He had been slotted to become commandant of the Marine Corps for his long career dating back to the Boxer Rebellion, but President Hoover had passed him over after the offense to Mussolini.

Still, he was a soldier's soldier, and the veterans idolized him. A roar went up when he leaped onto a crude stage to address them. “I'm here because I've been a soldier for thirty-five years and I can't resist the temptation to be among soldiers,” he announced to boisterous approval. “Hang together and stick it out till the gate bars of hell freeze over … Remember, by God, you … didn't win the war for a select class of a few financiers and high binders.” When he finished his speech, throngs surrounded him. He seated himself on the ground and listened to the men's tales of woe until two thirty A.M. He repeatedly warned them not to “slip over into lawlessness,” for if they did so, they would “lose the sympathy of 120 million people in this nation.” The War Department had spies among the crowd, who reported to higher-ups that while Butler's speech had been demagogic and inflaming, at least he had “carefully advised the men to obey all the laws.”

The veterans' leaders appealed to Hoover to receive a delegation from the camp. But the president declined, claiming he was too busy; he then proceeded to clear his schedule and isolate himself in the White House. In that “desperate summer of 1932,” as Manchester described it, “Washington, D.C., resembled the besieged capital of an obscure European state … [The] penniless World War veterans had been encamped with their wives and children in District parks, dumps, abandoned warehouses, and empty stores.” Police erected barricades, chained the gates of the Executive Mansion, and patrolled its perimeter day and night. HOOVER LOCKS SELF IN WHITE HOUSE blared a newspaper headline. A veteran who had lost an arm in battle attempted to cross the line of guards at the White House, only to be brutally beaten and arrested. The incident portended the violence that was to come.

Though unarmed and generally passive during its two-month occupation of the city, the Bonus Army incurred the wrath of not only Hoover but also his most ill-tempered and militant Army adviser, General Douglas MacArthur. The only four-star general in the country, MacArthur had already established a reputation for hubris, dissembling, and grandiosity. Referring derogatorily to the veterans as “Boners,” he took personal umbrage at their audacious defiance of authority. For two months he had been secretly training soldiers in riot control, and he had requisitioned three thousand gas grenades from the Aberdeen Proving Ground in nearby Maryland. Convinced that the army was mutinous, and repulsed by their ragtag appearance, MacArthur stirred Hoover to act precipitously and severely.

As it turned out, MacArthur, whom Franklin Roosevelt believed to be one of the “most dangerous men in America,” delivered the death blow to Hoover's reelection campaign. MacArthur's determination to rout the tattered army and blustering brutality against America's forgotten heroes backfired with devastating consequences for Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party.