The Bonus Army

An American Epic

Paul Dickson, Thomas B. Allen

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780486837246
• eBook ISBN: 9780486848358
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"The account by Dickson and Allen recalls the subliminal force of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with gaunt stories of character at the limits of dignity." ― Taylor Branch, New York Review of Books

In the summer of 1932, 15,000 World War I veterans marched on Washington, D.C., demanding payment from the Herbert Hoover administration of the bonus promised to them eight years earlier for their wartime service. With the "bonus bill" defeated in the Senate, the U.S. Army, led by Army Chief of Staff Gen, Douglas MacArthur, deployed tanks in the capital to rout the protestors.
This highly praised account of the event is based on extensive research that includes interviews with the last surviving witnesses. Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen recapture the voices of former soldiers who dared to challenge the government and demand what they were denied. The authors trace the Bonus Army's history and discuss its far-reaching effects, including how it paved the way for the 1944 passage of the GI Bill of Rights, which transformed American society by creating the postwar middle class.

"A revealing and fascinating account. The book's most haunting aspect is its verbal and pictorial record of the marcher's individual experiences." ― Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"Exactly the kind of book publishers should be giving us more of ― responsible popular history, researched to the footnoted standards of the academy but written for the pleasure of general readers who are looking for a good story . . . A rewarding book." ― Kevin Coyne, Newsday

"A feat of research and analysis ― a thoughtful, strong argument that these marches were among the most important demonstrations of the 20th century." ― Bookmarks Magazine

"A lively, engaging work of history.” ― Kirkus Reviews

"A fascinating and readable book. Recommended." ― William D. Pederson, Library Journal

"As Dickson and Allen show throughout this empathetic and well-researched volume, [the Bonus Expeditionary Force] meant different things to a number of groups vying for power in the tumultuous political climate of the early '30s. Their important and moving work will appeal to both professional historians and casual readers interested in the history of America's changing attitudes toward its soldiers." ― Publishers Weekly

1

Over There

EX-SERVICE MEN DEMAND JOBS

No one knows

No one cares if I’m weary

Oh how soon they forgot Château-Thierry

—From Newsreel XLVI,
The Big Money, a volume in the USA Trilogy
by John Dos Passos

PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON and his wife rode in an open carriage from the White House to the Capitol for his second inaugural on the morning of Monday, March 5, 1917. For the first time since the Civil War, a president was given special protection on Inauguration Day. Letters threatening the president’s life had alarmed the Secret Service. Agents had inspected every building on Pennsylvania Avenue along the mile-long route. Soldiers were stationed eight feet apart on both sides of the broad avenue.¹

Wilson, running on the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war,” had been reelected by a slim margin. Now he had to speak of the nearness of war. In the inaugural address he said, “We are provincials no longer. The tragic events of the thirty months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning back.”²

Those months of turmoil traced back to June 1914, when an assassin killed a man few Americans had ever heard of—Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, slain in Sarajevo, Serbia. The murder reverberated through Europe and erupted in a war whose causes bewildered Americans; in Wilson’s words, the events “run deep into all the obscure soils of Europe.”³ Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary. Germany declared war on Russia and France and invaded Belgium. Britain declared war on Germany. Bulgaria and Turkey allied with Germany. German troops advanced into France and threatened Paris. By the end of the year, both sides were fighting from trenches along the 350-mile Western Front that extended from Switzerland to the English Channel.⁴

Wilson kept America officially neutral while U.S. factories shipped arms to Britain and France, defying German U-boats. The war seemed far away to most Americans until May 7, 1915, when a U-boat torpedoed, without warning, the British passenger liner Lusitania. Some 1,200 men, women, and children—including 128 Americans—were killed. A few days before the sinking, Americans had read about a horrible new weapon—poison gas, used by Germany for the first time on the Western Front. The sinking and the gas intensified anti-German sentiment while simultaneously producing a plea for continued neutrality from German-Americans, one of the nation’s largest and oldest immigrant groups.⁵

Between the time of the election and his inauguration in March 1917, German submarines shattered Wilson’s hope of ending the war through mediation, a noble idea he called “peace without victory.”⁶ No country was interested. Germany declared a U-boat blockade of Great Britain and in a note to the United States warned that any ship entering the embargo zone would be sunk without warning. Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. Then Wilson obtained from British sources a copy of a telegram sent by German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German ambassador in Mexico, instructing him to offer Mexico an alliance with Germany with the promise of “an understanding” that Mexico would reconquer and keep Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. British code breakers had decrypted the telegram. Wilson arranged for the telegram to be released on March 1 by the Associated Press. The German plan to ally with Mexico stunned and infuriated Americans.⁷

On the evening of Monday, April 2,Wilson again traveled up Pennsylvania Avenue to address a joint session of Congress, this time in a car escorted by a squad of cavalry, sabers drawn. The cavalrymen, ceremonial troops from Fort Myer, across the Potomac, routinely rode out for funerals and occasions of state. As the car turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue, the dome of the Capitol could be seen ahead, glowing, illuminated for the first time by a new system of indirect lighting.⁸

At eight-thirty, in a light spring rain, cavalrymen eased their horses into the silent crowd on the Capitol Plaza, opening a path for Wilson’s car. He got out and, alone, walked up broad stairs that had been cleared of picketing pacifists. The building and grounds were guarded by cavalry troopers, U.S. Marines, Secret Service agents, postal inspectors, and uniformed police.

Senators marched into the House carrying little American flags. The galleries were packed with people who had been issued special passes by jittery security men. Justices of the Supreme Court sat before the Speaker’s platform. Foreign diplomats, in formal evening attire, sat to the side, invited to a joint session for the first time in memory.⁹

As Wilson walked down the aisle, the justices rose and led the Senators and representatives in applause, cheering and yelling for two minutes and giving Wilson the kind of reception he had never received before. Holding the speech he had typed himself, at first not looking up, Wilson began describing Germany’s “warfare against mankind.” He spoke to silence until he said, “There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making; we will not choose the path of submission.”

Chief Justice Edward White, who had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, suddenly rose, dropped his hat, raised his hands above his head, and clapped them once. Then from the Congress, a reporter wrote, came “a cheer so deep and so intense and so much from the heart that it sounded like a shouted prayer.” More cheers came when Wilson said, “Neutrality is no longer feasible. . . . The world must be made safe for democracy.”¹⁰

When Wilson finished his thirty-six-minute speech, he slowly walked out of the chamber to more cheers, more flag-waving. Back in the White House, he said to his secretary, “Think of what it was they were applauding. My message of today was a message of death for our young men.” Then, by one account, he put his head down on a table and sobbed.¹¹

Early in the morning of April 6, following an 82 to 6 vote in the Senate, the House voted 373 to 50 to declare war.¹²Wilson received a similarly overwhelming response in letters and telegrams, including a congratulatory message from London signed by forty-year-old Herbert C. Hoover, chairman of the American Commission for Relief in Belgium. Hoover, a millionaire mining engineer, had taken over the task of feeding the Belgians, whose food supplies had been sharply curtailed after German troops invaded the small kingdom in 1914. He directed a mammoth effort that saved Belgium from starvation. When America entered the war, Hoover returned home, and Wilson immediately made him U.S. food administrator, increasing his reputation and bringing his name into everyday use: housewives who aided the war effort by serving nonwasteful meals said they were “Hooverizing.”¹³

When a song-and-dance man named George M. Cohan read the “war declared” headlines, he was on a train heading for New York City from suburban New Rochelle—only “forty-five minutes from Broadway,” according to one of his songs. He began humming a tune, and by the time his trip ended, he had written a song that would echo the cocky patriotism of the nation. That night Cohan telephoned Nora Baye, a star of vaudeville, and on May 12 she sang the song for the first time to a cheering audience.¹⁴ Most Americans heard it on their Victrolas or gathered around their pianos, reading the words from a song sheet with a cover by Norman Rockwell, then twenty-four years old. He would soon be in the U.S. Navy.

Over there, over there

Send the word,

Send the word over there

That the Yanks are coming,

The Yanks are coming,

The drums rum-tumming Ev’rywhere. . . .

When Congress declared war, the Regular Army had 127,588 officers and men to send into a war of attrition, where in a single month 300,000 British soldiers had been killed, wounded, or gassed.¹⁵

At first, people believed that the army sent off to fight the Germans, like the army raised for the Spanish-American War, would be made up of volunteers. Teddy Roosevelt offered to lead a volunteer force, as he had done in that “splendid little war.”¹⁶ But this war needed men by the millions, and the only way to get them was by a draft. Pacifists, radicals, and patriots found themselves on the same side in opposition to the draft. Anarchist Emma Goldman, later jailed and deported for her opposition to conscription, predicted the draft would bring civil war. Speaker of the House Champ Clark, advocate of an all-volunteer army, declared that in his state of Missouri there was “precious little difference between a conscript and a convict.”¹⁷ Conscription was given a soothing label—Selective Service—and the act passed. President Wilson signed it on May 18, and it would be the basis for conscription in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

The act outlawed the Civil War practice of buying one’s way out of the draft. During the Civil War, wealthy men could legally duck the draft for three hundred dollars—this at a time when a typical laborer was making less than five hundred dollars a year. That inequity had touched off the New York City draft riots of 1863, in which as many as two thousand may have died, and similar, less deadly riots in other cities.

More than nine million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one registered on June 5, 1917, and placed their fate in the hands of local, governor-appointed “boards of responsible citizens.” Each draft board had a set of numbers to bestow on the selectees (a term that vied with draftee). On July 20, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, himself a pacifist,¹⁸ was blindfolded as he stood next to a large glass bowl. He pulled from it a small piece of paper bearing the number 258. The drawing kept up throughout the day until more than 10,000 numbers had been drawn. For American young men, a life of chance had begun. “Your number came up” entered the language.

They began their military lives in hastily built training camps that sprouted in twenty-three states—white men and black men who had never been on a train before, college boys, farmers’ sons, and slum dwellers. About 18 percent of them were immigrants of forty-six nationalities, many of them unable to speak English.¹⁹ By the beginning of October, more than 500,000 men were in the camps, which were mostly in the South. Regulations said that the men, about 70 percent of them draftees, were to be turned into soldiers in four months of seventeen-hour days.²⁰Many of the recruits had only wooden guns, and many would go to the front without ever having aimed or fired a rifle.²¹

Most of the junior officers were either National Guardsmen or recent college graduates given a few weeks of training in officer candidate schools. The senior officers were of a different type—Regular Army officers who had learned their soldiering on the parade grounds of West Point, men who had gone to war against Spain in Cuba in 1898, or chased Pancho Villa across the Mexican border, or fought guerrillas in the Philippines.

The Regular Army had four Negro regiments, which traced their lineage to the freed slaves of the Civil War. They boasted a legacy that included the Indian-fighting “Buffalo Soldiers” of the Old West and the 10,000 black troops who fought in the Spanish-American War, some under Captain John J. Pershing, giving him his nickname Black Jack. Some African-American leaders believed that service in the Great War would do nothing to advance black civil rights. But in 1918 William E. B. DuBois, editor of the Crisis, official organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote, “first your Country, then your Rights!” His belief was that loyalty and courage in wartime France would inevitably produce equal rights and opportunity in peacetime America.²²

During World War I, Major George S. Patton Jr. commanded the 1st U.S. Tank Brigade in France. He stands before one of his French-built tanks, predecessor to those he would lead in World War II. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)

Men of the American Expeditionary Force, the AEF, first reached France in May 1917, a short time after the triumphant arrival of General Pershing and his stirring salutation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Dover Edition
• Prologue
• 1 Over There
• 2 The Tombstone Bonus
• 3 A Petition in Boots
• 4 Mobilizing a Bonus Army
• 5 An Army of Occupation
• 6 Hooverville, D.C.
• 7 The Death March
• 8 Tanks in the Streets
• 9 The Long Morning After
• 10 The Return of the Bonus Army
• 11 Labor Day Hurricane
• 12 V Day for the Veterans
• Epilogue: The GI Bill—Legacy of the Bonus Army
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: The Long Shadow of the Bonus Army
• Appendix B: What Became of Them
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index