The last war of brothers in arms

The last great cavalry charge in the United States occurred within sight of the White House on a hot July day in 1932. It was led by saber-wielding Maj. George S. Patton Jr. under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Mounted troopers were followed by tanks, machine gunners and soldiers with fixed bayonets hurling teargas bombs. The enemy was an “army” of more than 20,000 of the poorest American civilians -- unarmed, gaunt, sometimes wounded or shellshocked veterans of World War I, their wives and children.

This so-called Bonus Army had traveled by boxcars and thumb to Washington in late spring to peacefully petition Congress for an early release of promised war service “bonus” payments of $600 each that would save many of them from starvation. Because of budget wrangling, their bonus had been deferred until 1945. President Hoover refused to see these “bums, pacifists and radicals,” and locked the White House gates against them. He ordered MacArthur to forcibly expel the vets and their families from shantytowns named “Hoovervilles” along the Anacostia River, igniting the bloody Battle of Anacostia Flats.

In cities and towns across America, most people were sympathetic to the bonus marchers and had offered handouts and dollar bills. But members of the Washington establishment, especially in the War Department, were so gripped by fear of a revolution and the radical potential of organized veterans -- as happened in fascist Germany and Italy -- that they lost their cool entirely. With the exception of some Marines, especially fiery Quantico commandant Gen. Smedley Butler, the military officer class, led by MacArthur, were prepared to kill their former comrades without scruple. Patton was especially thirsty for the blood of the “bums” he’d fought with in France, including the very soldier, by then down and out, who had saved his life. “Use the bayonets,” Patton urged his troops. “If they resist they must be killed.”

“The Bonus Army,” a haunting, compellingly written and marvelously researched book, is an important contribution to American history. Today the actions of these veterans is virtually unknown. Yet the fight on the Capitol steps is contemporary dynamite.

Co-authors Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen end on a note of triumph with passage during World War II of the GI Bill of Rights, which laid the educational and technological basis for America’s postwar prosperity. As they make clear, the GI Bill would have faced much rougher passage had it not been for memories of the defiant Bonus Army vets, who hung on in the face of negative news coverage, government propaganda and, in the end, the slashing bayonets of the U.S. Army.

Even newly elected President Roosevelt, who defeated Hoover -- in large part due to public revulsion over the attack, which left 100 injured and several dead, including a 3-month-old child -- opposed paying the bonus because it might cost too much and, in the words of one executive, “make mercenaries out of our patriotic boys.” That callous attitude lingers in the present-day bureaucracies of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Pentagon. Ask any GI returning from Iraq, especially a National Guardsman, who has tried to navigate the veterans agency’s medical red tape or obtain treatment for post-traumatic stress.

We’ve seen images of broken men shuffling in bread lines or selling apples on street corners during the Great Depression. But as Dickson and Allen illustrate, the “cruel year” of 1932 had pushed masses of Americans over the edge into rage and collective action. With a quarter of all families unemployed and banks foreclosing on homes and farms, “two million people wandered the country in a futile search for work.” But the remarkably self-disciplined, single-purpose Bonus Army “knew where they were going and why they were going there.”

Official Washington’s paranoia was not altogether misplaced. “In the United States, there was open talk of domestic war,” the authors declare. “Fear of ... revolutionary unrest spread in the wake of the Ford Massacre,” when auto company hit men fired into a crowd of strikers, killing four. “High-ranking Army officers were so convinced of a potential Red-led revolution” that they secretly studied, for immediate use, the deadly tactics of the German officers who used aircraft to machine-gun rioters in Weimar Germany.

The Bonus Army was the inspired idea of one man, Walter Waters, a former sergeant down on his luck in Portland, Ore. At first nobody listened, but as conditions worsened, he organized 250 jobless veterans -- who had only $30 among them -- to start the cross-country trek. “The Oregon veterans joined hundreds of thousands of men, women, children and babies who were already on the move ... walking, hitchhiking, hopping freights, heading somewhere, heading nowhere, looking for a meal, a job, a place to flop.”

The idea took fire. Men wearing their ragged WWI uniforms and combat medals streamed toward Washington, D.C., from all corners of the nation. They perched on “boxcars, on coal gondolas, and on the sides of tank cars” in what Waters called “a struggle in passive resistance.” They elected Workers Councils. And most extraordinary, the Bonus Army was racially integrated at a time when strict segregation was the rule elsewhere. Almost all photographs of these vets prominently show African Americans. Perhaps more than anything else, the prospect of disaffected blacks and whites uniting terrified Washington. Gen. George Van Horn Moseley, MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, called the vets “drifters, dope fiends, unfortunates and degenerates.” It also was assumed that they were Communists if they had “a Jewish name or a black face.”

Communist veterans were real enough. They had their own agenda but often marched alongside the Bonus Army in their own (much smaller) formations. They were shunned by Waters’ men, who on occasion ran them from camp. Eventually, Waters did try to organize vets into a fascist-like “Khaki Shirts” army. But most of his followers rallied under such imploring slogans as “We ask very little for what we gave.” Thanks to Hoover’s isolation from reality and Washington’s unease about being invaded by hordes of the “forgotten men” and their hungry families, confrontation was inevitable. MacArthur, in pressed jodhpurs and freshly shined boots, struck poses for the cameras while his troops torched the veterans’ Anacostia shantytowns. (He similarly ordered his closest aide, an uncomfortable-looking Maj. Dwight D. Eisenhower, to be properly tailored for the bloodbath.)

On July 28, the Army attacked, bayoneting women and children, shooting veterans, brutalizing bystanders and torching the shantytowns. A Paramount Pictures newsreel of the Anacostia atrocity was shown later in movie houses nationwide to loud boos. FDR’s election in November seemed assured.

When a second Bonus Army marched on Washington in 1933, Roosevelt shrewdly sent his wife, Eleanor, to hand out coffee and cookies and persuade the destitute vets to leave for a hastily prepared job-creation scheme in the Florida Keys. There, the biggest hurricane of the century smashed into their flimsy barracks and washed hundreds out to sea. Ernest Hemingway, a witness to the catastrophe, wrote furiously that Roosevelt “who sent those poor bonus march guys down there to get rid of them got rid of them all right.”

It wasn’t until 1935, over FDR’s veto, that a “bonus” bill was finally passed. An army of postmen -- many of them veterans themselves -- swiftly delivered checks to families close to starvation and, in some cases, suicide.

The America we know today was built on the backs -- and bodies -- of the “bums, drunkards, riffraff, and crazy men” who made up the Bonus Army. Their despair and stick-to-it-iveness created a social climate in which veterans could no longer be treated openly like dogs. *