In 1821, future Vice President and 8th President Martin Van Buren led New York Democrats in a Constitutional Convention to amend the State Constitution. The outcome was the Second Constitution of New York. Among the amendments adopted was the abolition of the land-owning restrictions for white men to vote. Also adopted was a tightening of requirements for Black men to vote - holding property with a value of $250. They also had to prove they lived in New York State, and paid taxes, for three years prior to the election.
1821 also saw the founding of "the largest and wealthiest church of colored people in (New York City), perhaps in the country." The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church rose out of Lower Manhattan's John Street Methodist Church, (est. 1766), which engaged in discrimination and segregation against Blacks, forcing several families to meet and consider their next steps. Keeping in mind that the potter's field where the AMEZ Church buried their dead was about to get repurposed into Washington Square Park, moving was becoming a necessity.
Two of the AMEZ founders were William Hamilton and James Varick. Hamilton was one of the first abolitionists in the United States, a fine orator, and suspected to be the illegitimate son of Alexander Hamilton (his mother was a freed woman of color). Varick, a Methodist minister, had been with John Street and encouraged a split in 1796, and in 1822 became AMEZ's first bishop as a debate raged within the Methodist Church over the acceptance of Black ministers. By the end of the Civil War AMEZ had over 46,000 members and was sending missionaries to the South to help the newly-freed enslaved and establish churches. Total membership in AMEZ and its satellite congregations across the country numbered over 200,000.
As AMEZ grew, so did this neighborhood near the Upper West Side, between what would have been Seventh and Eighth Avenues and 82nd and 89th Streets. Fleeing the crowded streets of Lower Manhattan, and the racism that came with it (Manhattan was a central location of the colonial slave trade), combined with the promise of land ownership, a Black shoeshiner named Andrew Williams bought three lots. Others followed suit, and in 1825 the five-acre Seneca Village was established by a group of Free Blacks, the first community of its kind in New York City. The name is rumored to have referred to anything from "Senegal" to the Roman philosopher Seneca (who advocated for individual liberty) to an Underground Railroad code word. At the time, most of New York City's residents lived in lower Manhattan, below 14th Street, so the remote north side of Manhattan had affordable land prices which were attractive to aspiring African-American landowners. There was a natural spring at Summit Rock - the highest point in what would become Central Park - that provided fresh water. There were over 250 residents of Seneca Village, over half of them property-owning Black residents. Thanks to the 1821 Constitutional Convention and the increased restrictions on how Black men could vote, Seneca Village was politically and culturally important. On July 4, 1827 New York became the first state to pass a law totally abolishing legal slavery. Seneca Village was growing. While Seneca Village contained just 1% of New York City's Black population, by 1855 it held 20% of its Black property owners and 15% of New York City's Black voters. Among these families was the Lyons family, educators and abolitionists who ran a boarding house for Black sailors that doubled as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The Lyons' daughter, Maritcha, worked in Brooklyn schools for almost 50 years and fought alongside Ida B. Wells in anti-lynching activism.
When the potato famine hit Ireland in the 1840s as political unrest in Germany unfolded, many immigrants settled in the area. Seneca Village added another AME church as well as a Catholic church. Colored School No. 3 was one of the few integrated schools in New York City. Some of the homes in Seneca Village were two-story frame houses. There was room for gardening, sometimes even a barn. At its height Seneca Village boasted 264 residents and three churches, two cemeteries, and a school. Almost a third of Seneca Village was Irish - one of the three churches was All Angels, a racially integrated congregation in which Irish immigrants worshiped alongside Free Blacks - a picture of racial harmony often unseen.
Frederick Law Olmsted was getting ready to head to Yale when he got sumac poisoning, weakening his eyesight. He went to sea for a while, became a merchant, and then turned to journalism while he settled on the family farm on the south side of Staten Island. It was as a journalist in 1850 that Olmsted traveled to England with the expressed purpose of looking at gardens, specifically Birkenhead Park near Liverpool, which had opened three years earlier and was thought to be the first publicly-funded civic park in the world. That same year, 1850, Andrew Jackson Downing, publisher of The Horticulturist, brought English architect Calvert Vaux to help him design Matthew Vassar's "Springside" estate. Olmsted would visit Downing, who had published Olmsted's essay on his visit to Birkenhead, at his estate in Newburgh, New York - 60 miles north of Manhattan, on the Hudson River. It was there that Olmsted met Vaux. Downing died in 1852 in the sinking of the steamship Henry Clay at Riverdale in The Bronx. He was in the process of designing the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution when he died. Olmsted and Vaux carried Downing's influence with them for the rest of their careers.
Newspapers rallied around the idea of a large, centrally-located municipal park within the limits of New York City, gardens similar to what you would find in London and Paris. In 1853 New York City officials began planning. The unofficial boundary of metropolitan New York City by the mid-1850s was 23rd Street, well south of Seneca Village, though New York City's population had quadrupled between 1821, the founding of AMEZ, and 1855. Initially, officials picked a spot known as Jones Wood, on the water on the Upper East Side, but white landowners had enough political pull to dissuade city officials from choosing it, asking for a further inland location. While this area of Manhattan was kinda-sorta vacant, there were over 1,600 New Yorkers living there, including the nuns of the Academy of St. Vincent, and Seneca Village. That Seneca Village was a growing Black community (and a chorus of thinly-veiled racist views that Seneca Village was on its way to becoming the next Five Points), and that the residents of Seneca Village didn't have the same political pull as the Upper East Siders, didn't help their cause. Seneca Village was cast as a "wasteland" inhabited by "squatters" who lived in "shanties." It was far enough away from metropolitan New York City that most New Yorkers didn't bother to run uptown and see for themselves.
The New York Commercial-Advertiser wrote:
Give us a park, be it central, or sidelong, here, there, anywhere...a real park, a large park.
City officials settled on a site On July 21, 1853 - 51 weeks after Andrew Jackson Downing's death - the Central Park Act was passed, in which the New York State Legislature set aside 778 acres of land between Fifth and Eighth Avenues and 59th and 106th Streets in central Manhattan to create the nation's first major landscaped public space (it would be extended four blocks north to 110th Street a few years later), which would be known as Central Park. The "socially-conscious" types figured that a massive park such as this would contribute to the well-being of New York society, in public health and in a progressive civil society. 17,000 potential building sites were removed from the real estate market.
Most New York City newspapers cheered the removal of "the insects" from Seneca Village. The N-Word was used. Not all were in favor, though. Social reformer Hal Guernsey wrote:
Will anyone pretend the park is not a scheme to enhance the value of uptown land, and create a splendid center for fashionable life, without regard to, and even in dereliction of, the happiness of the multitude upon whose hears and hands the expenses will fall?
Still, the City had to obtain that land legally, or at least something approaching legality. Enter Eminent Domain. The Just Compensation Clause in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides, "Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." And "Just Compensation" indicates fair market value should be paid to the landowners. This was the justification used by New York City officials in razing Seneca Village (and other, smaller neighborhoods) to build Central Park. It didn't hurt that popular opinion had been swayed by newspaper owners and editors dead set on "modernizing" New York City, even if it meant tearing down a more modern version of America: that of a successful Black neighborhood featuring landowning freemen before the Civil War.
In June 1856, New York City mayor Fernando Wood (a Tammany Hall man who was a central figure in the Gangs of New York-famous Dead Rabbits/Bowery Boys Election Day fight) initiated a contest judged by a board headed by Washington Irving. Olmsted, already the superintendent of the Park's work force, and Vaux worked together on their plan, submitted it to the board, and won, beating out 32 other proposals.. Olmsted and Vaux called it Greensward, "for their preferred landscapes of sweeping meadows and vast water bodies designed to appear limitless, while brilliantly belying the Park's long and narrow rectangle within New York City's rigid grid."
The residents of New York City that found themselves firmly within the boundary of Central Park petitioned the courts for two years to save their homes, churches, and schools. Ultimately in 1857 the 1600 residents, including all of Seneca Village, were paid (evicted) from their homes to build Central Park. One newspaper wrote that the Seneca Village police raid would "not be forgotten...as many a brilliant and stirring fight was had during the campaign. But the supremacy of the law was upheld by the policeman's bludgeons."
Olmsted wrote that Central Park was "of great importance as the first real Park made in this country - a democratic development of the highest significance." It was one of the first examples of Urban Renewal, "reinvigorating" a Black neighborhood targeted for destruction for the purpose of the betterment of the elite. There are no known records of what happened to the eternal residents of Seneca Village's two cemeteries.
Click here for an interactive map of Seneca Village.
Monday, June 22, 2020
Monday, June 8, 2020
The Adjustment Compensation Act of 1924, the Bonus Army, and a Hurricane
Five years after the Treaty of Versailles, Congress approved the Adjustment Compensation Act of 1924, in which World War 1 veterans would get a financial bonus for their service. This was a far-too-late effort by the government to thank the American Expeditionary Force, seeing as how the government did almost nothing to support returning veterans. World War I killed more people than all European wars from 1790-1914 combined. This bonus for veterans was years in the making. Congress had attempted to give veterans a bonus in 1922, but President Warren G. Harding vetoed it, saying a balanced budget took precedence over compensating veterans. This capped off a year that saw Harding's administration rocked by the Teapot Dome Scandal, the creation of the Federal Narcotics Control Board - a forerunner to the DEA - and the United Mine Workers v. Colorado Coal Co. Supreme Court case that held striking workers liable for damage inflicted (an effort to get labor unions under control). Anyway, Harding was a terrible president, and a worse husband.
Harding died of a heart attack just over two years into his term, succeeded by his vice president Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge came to national prominence in 1919 when, as governor of Massachusetts, he stamped out a police strike as they tried to unionize. "Silent Cal" was sworn in to the office of the presidency in the middle of the night by his father, a justice of the peace, and then went back to bed. This is the most Calvin Coolidge thing ever. He then proceeded to try to say and do as little as possible to get in the way of the growing post-WW1 recession economy. His most famous quote is "the business of America is business," but the actual wording isn't quite right, though the sentiment is probably spot-on.
The bill to compensate WW1 veterans with a bonus was introduced by Rep. Wright Patman (D-TX, who represented an area just southwest of Texarkana), himself a WW1 veteran. With Harding out of the way, millions of people signed a petition to compensate the WW1 veterans - since their regular wages were far less than military wages, if they were able to get their jobs back - for their service. Even Congressmen who supported the bonus dismissed the petition. Rep. Walter Lineberger (R-CA) said the petition was "pageant" to "commercialize or politicize patriotism," and would require a sales tax to pay it. Coolidge vetoed it, saying, "Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism." The Republican-controlled House of Representatives overrode Silent Cal's veto.
The bonus, $1 for each day of domestic service in the military and $1.25 for each day of overseas service (on average it would be about $500 - maybe half of the average annual income), was scheduled to be payable in 1945. If the total owed was less than $50, the bonus was to be paid immediately. Veterans referred to this as the "Tombstone Bonus," as the easiest way to collect the reward for "shell-shock" (the 1920s definition of PTSD) was to simply die and let your family reap the benefits.
Fast forward five more years to October 1929 and the stock market crash. Herbert Hoover had been in office for not even eight months yet. Unfortunately for Hoover, he gave a campaign speech in which he declared:
We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.
That quote aged...poorly. The unemployment rate in 1929 was about 3.2%, then the stock market crashed. In 1930 it was 8.7%. By 1931 it was 15.9%. In 1932 it was 23.6%, and would peak in 1933 at an astonishing 24.9%. Part of Hoover's issue was that he was orphaned by Age 9 and had grown up in poverty, but overcame those obstacles to graduate from the newly-established Stanford University. Hoover became a geologist, earning a fortune in mining and consulting. He proposed by telegraph (his wife, the only female geology major at Stanford, accepted in a return cable). In World War I, Hoover oversaw the evacuation of 120,000 Americans in Europe and privately helped raise millions of dollars for Belgium. He ran the U.S. Food Administration, convincing millions of Americans to ration for the war effort. Hoover was a contender for the Republican nomination for President in 1920, but was blocked because of his support for Wilson's League of Nations. Instead he became Harding - and Coolidge's - Secretary of Commerce.
Hoover believed in what he referred to as "Rugged Individualism." In a 1928 campaign speech, Hoover:
When [WW1] closed, the most vital issues both in our country and around the world was whether government should continue their wartime ownership and operation of many [instruments] of production and distribution. We were challenged with a...choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of a diametrically opposed doctrines - doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. The acceptance of these ideas would have meant the destruction of self-government through centralization...[and] the undermining of the individual initiative and enterprise through which our people have grown to unparalleled greatness.
Essentially, the more the government is involved, the worse it is. Rugged Individualism, or a fancy way of saying "self-reliance" was what Hoover knew. What separated Europe from America, according to Hoover, was that Americans weren't coddled by their government. Relying on government programs to get by was one thing in a war, but anything else? That's a conversation-ender, for Hoover.
So when the stock market crashed, ushering in the Great Depression, and then the double-whammy of the Dust Bowl, Hoover wasn't psychologically prepared to lead a government response worthy of the crisis. If the government intervened too much, so Hoover's philosophy went, it would impede capitalism and the will of the people to incentivize work. As banks foreclosed on homes, American citizens built make-shift homes out of scrap metal and cardboard and called their neighborhoods "Hoovervilles," quite a departure from just 10 years earlier when to "Hooverize" something meant a valiant, patriotic effort to conserve goods for the greater national interest.
In his 1930 State of the Union address, given in December - a full 14 months after the stock market crash - Hoover doubled-down:
No matter how devised, an increase in taxes in the end falls upon the workers and farmers, or alternately deprives industry of that much ability to give employment and defeats the very purpose of these schemes...Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the Public Treasury...Many of these measures are being promoted by organizations and agencies outside of Congress and being pushed upon Members of Congress. Some of them are mistaken as to the results they will accomplish and they are all mistaken as to the ability of the Federal Government to undertake such burdens. Some of these outside agencies are also engaged in promoting political purposes. The American people will not be misled by such tactics.
Hoover believed that most of the relief should come from volunteer efforts of churches and other charitable organizations, and anyone who still might be rich. But what he wanted in regards was far too voluntary.
Anyhow, back to the wave of veterans marching towards Washington in May 1932 wanting their Congressionally-approved bonus to be paid in the middle of the Great Depression: "This country is not broke," said Will Rogers of the Tombstone Bonus, "If we owed it to some Foreign Nation you would talk about honor and then pay it."
Rep. Patman's bill caught the attention of former U.S. Army sergeant Walter W. Waters of Portland, Oregon, who found himself unemployed. As Patman's bill didn't...really gain any traction in Congress, Waters got frustrated with the realization that various special interests were getting taken care of financially, while WW1 veterans and pretty much every other group of Regular People languished.
To be fair, Hoover tried to do a few things, but it was literally too little and way too late. In early 1932 - an election year - Hoover signed into effect the Reconstruction Finance Corporation "to provide emergency financing facilities for financial institutions, to aid in financing agriculture, commerce, and industry," as well as the Banking Act of 1932 "to improve the facilities of the Federal Reserve system for the service of commerce, industry, and agriculture, to provide means for meeting the needs of member banks in exceptional circumstances."
Waters met with other unemployed Portland veterans and started to discuss the idea of meeting in person with Congress. When Patman's bill got shelved around May 11, Waters' mind was already made up. He started giving speeches in support of the early payment of the bonus, transcripts of those speeches made their way into the West Coast newspapers. On May 17, 1932 the Bonus Expeditionary Force (a nod to the American Expeditionary Force) - counting members from all over the west coast, the majority of them wearing their old khaki shirts - departed from Portland on a train bound for Washington. Rail officials loaned a freight train to the "Bonus Army." People met the trains with foodArriving in Iowa the following day, the Bonus Army hitched rides or walked the rest of the way to Washington. By June 1, there were over 1,500 men (and some families) were in Washington.
World War I veteran and novelist John Dos Passos said, "The March was a spontaneous movement of protest, arising in virtually every one of the forty-eight states."
The Bonus Army set up Hoovervilles in three major places in and around Washington: 12th Street & B Street NW (less than a mile from the White House), 3rd Street & Pennsylvania Avenue NW (less than half a mile from the U.S. Capitol building), and the largest camp was in the Anacostia Flats, and called their new home "Camp Bartlett" in honor of the former assistant postmaster general and former governor of New Hampshire John H. Bartlett, who let them stay there.
Hoover's press secretary, Theodore Joslin, said "The marchers have rapidly turned from bonus seekers to communists or bums." Over at the Bureau of Investigation, a young J. Edgar Hoover began efforts to coordinate evidence of communist activity within the Bonus Army.
Brigadier General Pelham D. Glassford was the police superintendent for Washington, D.C. He asked Congress for $75,000 to provide food for the Bonus Army. Congress said no. On June 15, the day after Rep. Edward Eslick (D-TN) died of a heart attack while speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives in favor of the bill, with the Bonus Army's numbers in Washington numbering 20,000, the Democratic-led House of Representatives voted to approve immediate payment of the bonus. The Republican-controlled Senate rejected it on June 17 (by a 62-18 vote, and the majority wasn't *that* large) and Hoover had already said he would veto the bill were it to have passed the Senate.
Glassford provided almost $800 of his own money for supplies. The camp quickly became a local attraction. Washingtonians brought sleeping bags, food, and cigarettes to the veterans. Evalyn Walsh McLean, a Washington socialite and the wife of Washington Post owner Edward McLean (and the last private owner of the Hope Diamond), went with Glassford to a diner in the middle of the night and ordered one thousand sandwiches and a thousand packs of cigarettes to give to the Bonus Army. The camp was led by Waters, who ran it like a military outpost. They had named streets, a post office, a library, a barber shop. There were educational classes for the children, a newspaper for the residents, as well as Vaudeville acts and boxing matches. Alcohol was prohibited, as were weapons, fighting, and begging. Communists weren't allowed to join in at all, so their motives couldn't be misconstrued by Congress, or Hoover, or anyone who was following along with the newspapers that their goal was simply a handout. The camps were integrated, as well, with one black Bonus Army member saying it was "the first massive integrated effort I can remember." Civil rights activist Roy Wilkins wrote, "There was one absentee [in the Bonus Army]: James Crow."
By July 1932, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was approved to loan money to state and local governments for infrastructure projects which would look remarkably like Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation. Vice President Charles Curtis was reportedly "unnerved" at the sight of the Bonus Army near his office on July 14 - the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Later that month, as the temperature soared, so did the tensions. On July 28, 1932 Hoover sent in the troops to clear out the Bonus Army from Washington. You may wonder about the recently-referred to 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the military from enforcing the law. Washington DC was exempt from this law, as DC was under direct Congressional control.
Among those getting a taste of military action were George O. Patton and Douglas MacArthur. The Army used tear gas and bayonets to clear out the camps. Tanks with machine guns attempted to clear out the 3rd Street camp. Patton beat the piss out of a veteran named Joe Angelo, who had actually saved Patton's life when he was but a Colonel in World War I. Asked about this, Patton said, "Undoubtedly this man saved my life, but his several accounts of the incident vary from the true facts." Fire from detonating grenades set shanties on fire, tear gas mixing with black smoke.
Active duty military tasked with clearing the vets out said, "We hate this more than they do, but they brought it on themselves." Two veterans were killed by gunfire. Douglas MacArthur burned the camp at Anacostia Flats. A 16-year old named Fred Blancher said:
Those guys got in there and they start waving their sabers, chasing these veterans out, and they sart shooting tear gas. There was just so much noise and confusion, hollering and there was smoke and haze. People couldn't breathe.
A bystander yelled at Douglas MacArthur, "The American flag means nothing to me after this!" and only piped down when MacArthur threatened him with arrest. Hoover gave a statement that read, "An examination of a large number of names discloses the fact that a considerable part of those remaining are not veterans, many are Communists and persons with criminal records." This, obviously, flew in the face of Waters' rules, regulations, and efforts to legitimize the Bonus Army from the jump. Future Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, and president, Dwight D. Eisenhower told Stephen Ambrose of MacArthur, "I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch he had no business going down there."
At 11pm that night (July 28) MacArthur gave a press conference:
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 on another week, I believe the institutions of our Government would have been severely threatened.
Hecklers disrupted Vice President Curtis' speech in Las Vegas the next day, to which Curtis replied, "You cowards! I'm not afraid of any of you!" These were the optics they chose. The Associated Press released a list of editorial reactions and found that 21 out of 30 newspapers generally supported the government's response. The Chicago Herald and Examiner dissented, referring to Hoover's actions as "Sheer stupidity...without parallel in American annals." Hoover biographer David Burner:
In the minds of most analysts, whatever doubt had remained about the outcome of the presidential election was now gone: Hoover was going to lose. The Bonus Army was his final failure, his symbolic end.
The 1932 election was a rout. Combining Hoover's lack of response to the Great Depression with that summer's tear-gassing and bayoneting of veterans that was showing in newsreels across the country, Franklin D. Roosevelt (D-NY) handily won the Electoral College 472-59.
Now what was left of the Bonus Army - about 3,000 - was FDR's issue. Eleanor Roosevelt went out to a camp that FDR had repurposed to house them, and participated in a sing-along, in the mud and rain. FDR's New Deal legislation was hiring people to go to work. Almost 2,600 Bonus Army members accepted an offer to join the Civilian Conservation Corps for $1 a day plus room & board. A number were sent to Florida, where they were put to work in the Upper Keys building bridges for a highway from Miami to Key West.
On September 2, 1935 a hurricane slammed into the Upper Keys, a direct hit on the camp, with estimated winds of 200mph. The barometer near the eye of the storm fell to almost 26.00. September 2 was Labor Day Weekend, and so trucks that could have been used to evacuate the area were locked up. The government sent a train to rescue the veterans. At first the train was delayed. The storm surge then derailed the train when it was just a couple of miles from the camp. At least 256 Bonus Army members plus a number of locals were killed for a death toll of at least 408. Key West resident Ernest Hemingway wrote, "the veterans in those camps were practically murdered."
In 1936, the House and Senate finally passed a bill to pay World War I veterans early. President Roosevelt vetoed it, twice. Roosevelt said, of the Bonus Army:
The veteran who is disabled owes his condition to the war. The healthy veteran who is unemployed owes his troubles to the Depression.
Congress overrode FDR's vetoes and the payments were distributed. $2 billion was eventually given to three million World War I veterans. By this time Walter W. Waters of Oregon had become inspired by the images of the fascist black- and brown-shirt movements in Europe, and tried to become the head of a "Khaki Shirt Movement" to deal with the emergency of the Great Depression. The newspaper published by the Bonus Army had this to say:
Inevitably such an organization brings up comparisons with the Facisti (sic) of Italy and the NAZI (sic) of Germany...for five years Hitler was lampooned and derided, but today he controls Germany. Mussolini, before the war was a tramp printer driven from Italy because of his political views. But today he is a world figure. The Khaki Shirts, however, would be essentially American.
You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to Hitler and Mussolini. Waters, referred to as "Hot Waters" and rejected by various veterans groups, enlisted in the Navy in World War 2 and died in 1959.
Determined to take better care of veterans, Congress passed (and FDR signed) the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill. Almost eight million veterans of World War II took advantage of the GI Bill to go to school, begin paid on-the-job training, buy a house or a farm, or start a business. This program did more to fuel the rise of the postwar American economy than any other.
Harding died of a heart attack just over two years into his term, succeeded by his vice president Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge came to national prominence in 1919 when, as governor of Massachusetts, he stamped out a police strike as they tried to unionize. "Silent Cal" was sworn in to the office of the presidency in the middle of the night by his father, a justice of the peace, and then went back to bed. This is the most Calvin Coolidge thing ever. He then proceeded to try to say and do as little as possible to get in the way of the growing post-WW1 recession economy. His most famous quote is "the business of America is business," but the actual wording isn't quite right, though the sentiment is probably spot-on.
The bill to compensate WW1 veterans with a bonus was introduced by Rep. Wright Patman (D-TX, who represented an area just southwest of Texarkana), himself a WW1 veteran. With Harding out of the way, millions of people signed a petition to compensate the WW1 veterans - since their regular wages were far less than military wages, if they were able to get their jobs back - for their service. Even Congressmen who supported the bonus dismissed the petition. Rep. Walter Lineberger (R-CA) said the petition was "pageant" to "commercialize or politicize patriotism," and would require a sales tax to pay it. Coolidge vetoed it, saying, "Patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism." The Republican-controlled House of Representatives overrode Silent Cal's veto.
The bonus, $1 for each day of domestic service in the military and $1.25 for each day of overseas service (on average it would be about $500 - maybe half of the average annual income), was scheduled to be payable in 1945. If the total owed was less than $50, the bonus was to be paid immediately. Veterans referred to this as the "Tombstone Bonus," as the easiest way to collect the reward for "shell-shock" (the 1920s definition of PTSD) was to simply die and let your family reap the benefits.
Fast forward five more years to October 1929 and the stock market crash. Herbert Hoover had been in office for not even eight months yet. Unfortunately for Hoover, he gave a campaign speech in which he declared:
We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.
That quote aged...poorly. The unemployment rate in 1929 was about 3.2%, then the stock market crashed. In 1930 it was 8.7%. By 1931 it was 15.9%. In 1932 it was 23.6%, and would peak in 1933 at an astonishing 24.9%. Part of Hoover's issue was that he was orphaned by Age 9 and had grown up in poverty, but overcame those obstacles to graduate from the newly-established Stanford University. Hoover became a geologist, earning a fortune in mining and consulting. He proposed by telegraph (his wife, the only female geology major at Stanford, accepted in a return cable). In World War I, Hoover oversaw the evacuation of 120,000 Americans in Europe and privately helped raise millions of dollars for Belgium. He ran the U.S. Food Administration, convincing millions of Americans to ration for the war effort. Hoover was a contender for the Republican nomination for President in 1920, but was blocked because of his support for Wilson's League of Nations. Instead he became Harding - and Coolidge's - Secretary of Commerce.
Hoover believed in what he referred to as "Rugged Individualism." In a 1928 campaign speech, Hoover:
When [WW1] closed, the most vital issues both in our country and around the world was whether government should continue their wartime ownership and operation of many [instruments] of production and distribution. We were challenged with a...choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of a diametrically opposed doctrines - doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. The acceptance of these ideas would have meant the destruction of self-government through centralization...[and] the undermining of the individual initiative and enterprise through which our people have grown to unparalleled greatness.
Essentially, the more the government is involved, the worse it is. Rugged Individualism, or a fancy way of saying "self-reliance" was what Hoover knew. What separated Europe from America, according to Hoover, was that Americans weren't coddled by their government. Relying on government programs to get by was one thing in a war, but anything else? That's a conversation-ender, for Hoover.
So when the stock market crashed, ushering in the Great Depression, and then the double-whammy of the Dust Bowl, Hoover wasn't psychologically prepared to lead a government response worthy of the crisis. If the government intervened too much, so Hoover's philosophy went, it would impede capitalism and the will of the people to incentivize work. As banks foreclosed on homes, American citizens built make-shift homes out of scrap metal and cardboard and called their neighborhoods "Hoovervilles," quite a departure from just 10 years earlier when to "Hooverize" something meant a valiant, patriotic effort to conserve goods for the greater national interest.
In his 1930 State of the Union address, given in December - a full 14 months after the stock market crash - Hoover doubled-down:
No matter how devised, an increase in taxes in the end falls upon the workers and farmers, or alternately deprives industry of that much ability to give employment and defeats the very purpose of these schemes...Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the Public Treasury...Many of these measures are being promoted by organizations and agencies outside of Congress and being pushed upon Members of Congress. Some of them are mistaken as to the results they will accomplish and they are all mistaken as to the ability of the Federal Government to undertake such burdens. Some of these outside agencies are also engaged in promoting political purposes. The American people will not be misled by such tactics.
Hoover believed that most of the relief should come from volunteer efforts of churches and other charitable organizations, and anyone who still might be rich. But what he wanted in regards was far too voluntary.
Anyhow, back to the wave of veterans marching towards Washington in May 1932 wanting their Congressionally-approved bonus to be paid in the middle of the Great Depression: "This country is not broke," said Will Rogers of the Tombstone Bonus, "If we owed it to some Foreign Nation you would talk about honor and then pay it."
Rep. Patman's bill caught the attention of former U.S. Army sergeant Walter W. Waters of Portland, Oregon, who found himself unemployed. As Patman's bill didn't...really gain any traction in Congress, Waters got frustrated with the realization that various special interests were getting taken care of financially, while WW1 veterans and pretty much every other group of Regular People languished.
To be fair, Hoover tried to do a few things, but it was literally too little and way too late. In early 1932 - an election year - Hoover signed into effect the Reconstruction Finance Corporation "to provide emergency financing facilities for financial institutions, to aid in financing agriculture, commerce, and industry," as well as the Banking Act of 1932 "to improve the facilities of the Federal Reserve system for the service of commerce, industry, and agriculture, to provide means for meeting the needs of member banks in exceptional circumstances."
Waters met with other unemployed Portland veterans and started to discuss the idea of meeting in person with Congress. When Patman's bill got shelved around May 11, Waters' mind was already made up. He started giving speeches in support of the early payment of the bonus, transcripts of those speeches made their way into the West Coast newspapers. On May 17, 1932 the Bonus Expeditionary Force (a nod to the American Expeditionary Force) - counting members from all over the west coast, the majority of them wearing their old khaki shirts - departed from Portland on a train bound for Washington. Rail officials loaned a freight train to the "Bonus Army." People met the trains with foodArriving in Iowa the following day, the Bonus Army hitched rides or walked the rest of the way to Washington. By June 1, there were over 1,500 men (and some families) were in Washington.
World War I veteran and novelist John Dos Passos said, "The March was a spontaneous movement of protest, arising in virtually every one of the forty-eight states."
The Bonus Army set up Hoovervilles in three major places in and around Washington: 12th Street & B Street NW (less than a mile from the White House), 3rd Street & Pennsylvania Avenue NW (less than half a mile from the U.S. Capitol building), and the largest camp was in the Anacostia Flats, and called their new home "Camp Bartlett" in honor of the former assistant postmaster general and former governor of New Hampshire John H. Bartlett, who let them stay there.
Hoover's press secretary, Theodore Joslin, said "The marchers have rapidly turned from bonus seekers to communists or bums." Over at the Bureau of Investigation, a young J. Edgar Hoover began efforts to coordinate evidence of communist activity within the Bonus Army.
Brigadier General Pelham D. Glassford was the police superintendent for Washington, D.C. He asked Congress for $75,000 to provide food for the Bonus Army. Congress said no. On June 15, the day after Rep. Edward Eslick (D-TN) died of a heart attack while speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives in favor of the bill, with the Bonus Army's numbers in Washington numbering 20,000, the Democratic-led House of Representatives voted to approve immediate payment of the bonus. The Republican-controlled Senate rejected it on June 17 (by a 62-18 vote, and the majority wasn't *that* large) and Hoover had already said he would veto the bill were it to have passed the Senate.
Glassford provided almost $800 of his own money for supplies. The camp quickly became a local attraction. Washingtonians brought sleeping bags, food, and cigarettes to the veterans. Evalyn Walsh McLean, a Washington socialite and the wife of Washington Post owner Edward McLean (and the last private owner of the Hope Diamond), went with Glassford to a diner in the middle of the night and ordered one thousand sandwiches and a thousand packs of cigarettes to give to the Bonus Army. The camp was led by Waters, who ran it like a military outpost. They had named streets, a post office, a library, a barber shop. There were educational classes for the children, a newspaper for the residents, as well as Vaudeville acts and boxing matches. Alcohol was prohibited, as were weapons, fighting, and begging. Communists weren't allowed to join in at all, so their motives couldn't be misconstrued by Congress, or Hoover, or anyone who was following along with the newspapers that their goal was simply a handout. The camps were integrated, as well, with one black Bonus Army member saying it was "the first massive integrated effort I can remember." Civil rights activist Roy Wilkins wrote, "There was one absentee [in the Bonus Army]: James Crow."
By July 1932, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was approved to loan money to state and local governments for infrastructure projects which would look remarkably like Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation. Vice President Charles Curtis was reportedly "unnerved" at the sight of the Bonus Army near his office on July 14 - the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Later that month, as the temperature soared, so did the tensions. On July 28, 1932 Hoover sent in the troops to clear out the Bonus Army from Washington. You may wonder about the recently-referred to 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the military from enforcing the law. Washington DC was exempt from this law, as DC was under direct Congressional control.
Among those getting a taste of military action were George O. Patton and Douglas MacArthur. The Army used tear gas and bayonets to clear out the camps. Tanks with machine guns attempted to clear out the 3rd Street camp. Patton beat the piss out of a veteran named Joe Angelo, who had actually saved Patton's life when he was but a Colonel in World War I. Asked about this, Patton said, "Undoubtedly this man saved my life, but his several accounts of the incident vary from the true facts." Fire from detonating grenades set shanties on fire, tear gas mixing with black smoke.
Active duty military tasked with clearing the vets out said, "We hate this more than they do, but they brought it on themselves." Two veterans were killed by gunfire. Douglas MacArthur burned the camp at Anacostia Flats. A 16-year old named Fred Blancher said:
Those guys got in there and they start waving their sabers, chasing these veterans out, and they sart shooting tear gas. There was just so much noise and confusion, hollering and there was smoke and haze. People couldn't breathe.
A bystander yelled at Douglas MacArthur, "The American flag means nothing to me after this!" and only piped down when MacArthur threatened him with arrest. Hoover gave a statement that read, "An examination of a large number of names discloses the fact that a considerable part of those remaining are not veterans, many are Communists and persons with criminal records." This, obviously, flew in the face of Waters' rules, regulations, and efforts to legitimize the Bonus Army from the jump. Future Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, and president, Dwight D. Eisenhower told Stephen Ambrose of MacArthur, "I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch he had no business going down there."
At 11pm that night (July 28) MacArthur gave a press conference:
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 on another week, I believe the institutions of our Government would have been severely threatened.
Hecklers disrupted Vice President Curtis' speech in Las Vegas the next day, to which Curtis replied, "You cowards! I'm not afraid of any of you!" These were the optics they chose. The Associated Press released a list of editorial reactions and found that 21 out of 30 newspapers generally supported the government's response. The Chicago Herald and Examiner dissented, referring to Hoover's actions as "Sheer stupidity...without parallel in American annals." Hoover biographer David Burner:
In the minds of most analysts, whatever doubt had remained about the outcome of the presidential election was now gone: Hoover was going to lose. The Bonus Army was his final failure, his symbolic end.
The 1932 election was a rout. Combining Hoover's lack of response to the Great Depression with that summer's tear-gassing and bayoneting of veterans that was showing in newsreels across the country, Franklin D. Roosevelt (D-NY) handily won the Electoral College 472-59.
Now what was left of the Bonus Army - about 3,000 - was FDR's issue. Eleanor Roosevelt went out to a camp that FDR had repurposed to house them, and participated in a sing-along, in the mud and rain. FDR's New Deal legislation was hiring people to go to work. Almost 2,600 Bonus Army members accepted an offer to join the Civilian Conservation Corps for $1 a day plus room & board. A number were sent to Florida, where they were put to work in the Upper Keys building bridges for a highway from Miami to Key West.
On September 2, 1935 a hurricane slammed into the Upper Keys, a direct hit on the camp, with estimated winds of 200mph. The barometer near the eye of the storm fell to almost 26.00. September 2 was Labor Day Weekend, and so trucks that could have been used to evacuate the area were locked up. The government sent a train to rescue the veterans. At first the train was delayed. The storm surge then derailed the train when it was just a couple of miles from the camp. At least 256 Bonus Army members plus a number of locals were killed for a death toll of at least 408. Key West resident Ernest Hemingway wrote, "the veterans in those camps were practically murdered."
In 1936, the House and Senate finally passed a bill to pay World War I veterans early. President Roosevelt vetoed it, twice. Roosevelt said, of the Bonus Army:
The veteran who is disabled owes his condition to the war. The healthy veteran who is unemployed owes his troubles to the Depression.
Congress overrode FDR's vetoes and the payments were distributed. $2 billion was eventually given to three million World War I veterans. By this time Walter W. Waters of Oregon had become inspired by the images of the fascist black- and brown-shirt movements in Europe, and tried to become the head of a "Khaki Shirt Movement" to deal with the emergency of the Great Depression. The newspaper published by the Bonus Army had this to say:
Inevitably such an organization brings up comparisons with the Facisti (sic) of Italy and the NAZI (sic) of Germany...for five years Hitler was lampooned and derided, but today he controls Germany. Mussolini, before the war was a tramp printer driven from Italy because of his political views. But today he is a world figure. The Khaki Shirts, however, would be essentially American.
You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to Hitler and Mussolini. Waters, referred to as "Hot Waters" and rejected by various veterans groups, enlisted in the Navy in World War 2 and died in 1959.
Determined to take better care of veterans, Congress passed (and FDR signed) the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill. Almost eight million veterans of World War II took advantage of the GI Bill to go to school, begin paid on-the-job training, buy a house or a farm, or start a business. This program did more to fuel the rise of the postwar American economy than any other.
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