The Plots Against the President (4 page)

Chapter Six

Warriors of the Depression

The U.S. Army's Military Intelligence Division repeatedly warned President Hoover that the Communist Party was controlling the Bonus Army and had its sights set on overthrowing the U.S. government. At the same time, a callow and ambitious law enforcement officer named J. Edgar Hoover saw in the veterans' movement a “public enemy” that would justify the expansion of his domestic spying apparatus. Director of the Bureau of Investigation, the thirty-seven-year-old Hoover was ever on the lookout for new menaces. Obsessed with the fear that Negro and Jewish Communists were plotting to take over America—a fixation that would ultimately lead to his founding of the FBI and its scandalous legacy—J. Edgar Hoover eagerly plied President Hoover with reports of treacherous homegrown terrorists. He portrayed the World War I veterans to the president as dangerous leftists and falsely warned that the group was made up of 473,000 “trained men” who had 116 airplanes and 123 machine guns at the ready.

Whether Herbert Hoover was convinced of the existence of a Communist conspiracy and believed General MacArthur's assertions that “incipient revolution was in the air,” or was merely seeking an expedient solution, is unclear. Either way, MacArthur apparently persuaded Hoover that an armed insurrection was brewing at the Hooverville in Anacostia. In response, the president ordered the veterans' expulsion at the hands of three Army officers: MacArthur, George S. Patton, and Dwight D. Eisenhower—all destined to become famous American generals.

Dressed in full uniform—including the flamboyant regalia of his rank—MacArthur led the attack. Eisenhower, widely reported to have been a reluctant participant, strongly opposed donning military uniforms for a domestic clash. “This is political, political,” he repeatedly argued, only to be rebuffed by MacArthur. “MacArthur has decided to go into active command in the field,” the general barked, referring to himself in the third person, as he was wont to do. He ordered Eisenhower to dress for battle. Patton, who was more simpatico with MacArthur than with the measured and thoughtful Eisenhower, zealously took command of the troopers of the Third Cavalry.

At four thirty P.M. on July 28, 1932, MacArthur ordered the streets of the capital cleared. Brandishing drawn sabers, two hundred mounted cavalry pranced behind Patton from the Ellipse down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Eleventh Street drawbridge and Anacostia. Next came a machine gun detachment and helmeted soldiers from the Twelfth Infantry, Thirteenth Engineers, and Thirty-fourth Infantry carrying fixed bayonets and loaded rifles and wearing gas masks. Five tanks followed the three hundred infantrymen. In what would go down in history as the worst-timed operation in MacArthur's long military career, he began the assault at the same moment that more than twenty thousand federal employees in the District of Columbia finished work and poured into the streets, mingling with the Bonus Army. “We thought it was a parade because of all the horses,” a witness, who had been a small boy at the time, later recalled. The veterans initially thought it was a display that the U.S. Army was putting on in support of their cause, prompting them to let out a rousing cheer. But when the cavalry suddenly turned and charged the crowd of thousands, trampling the unarmed bystanders, beating them with the flat side of the sabers, prodding them with bayonets, and whooping as if in battle, mayhem ensued.

As the pedestrians and onlookers fled the scene, the Army lobbed hundreds of tear gas grenades at the crowd, sparking numerous fires. While the Arkansas native had a reputation as a ruthless military commander in foreign theaters, MacArthur's role in the assault against his fellow Americans is singular in the nation's history and marks the first time that tanks rolled through the capital, mowing down civilians. Women and children were coughing and crying while many of the veterans challenged the soldiers to dismount and fight fair and square. “Men and women were ridden down indiscriminately,” reported the
Baltimore Sun
. “Nothing like this cavalry charge has ever been witnessed in Washington. The mad dash of these armed horsemen against twenty to thirty thousand people who were guilty of nothing more atrocious than standing on private property observing the scene.” A U.S. senator from Connecticut watched as a tear gas grenade landed at his feet and fires from the explosions erupted all around him. “It was like a scene out of the 1918 no-man's land,” reported the Associated Press.

By nine P.M., the troops were crossing the bridge to Anacostia, despite presidential orders forbidding entry to the veterans' camp. MacArthur ordered his troops to pause for nearly an hour at the north side of the drawbridge to assess the situation. He knew that there were approximately seven thousand people in the camp, and that at least six hundred were women and children. While waiting, he received duplicate orders from the president that the troops should not cross the bridge or force the evacuation of the camp. Characteristically, MacArthur “was very much annoyed in having his plans interfered with in any way,” according to the messenger who carried the directive from the secretary of war to MacArthur. A belligerent MacArthur told Eisenhower that he “did not want either himself or his staff bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders.”

“It would not be the last time that MacArthur would disregard a presidential directive,” historians Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen noted in their account of the event in
Smithsonian
magazine, referring to the general's later defiance of future president Harry S. Truman. “I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch he had no business going down there,” Eisenhower said of his exchange with MacArthur.

At ten P.M. the camp commander carried a white flag of truce to the Army and requested an hour's respite for the veterans and their families to evacuate. MacArthur agreed, and widespread panic ensued as parents awakened their sleeping children with shouts: “Come on! The soldiers are going to kill us!” Tanks blocked the roads and machine guns were mounted on the drawbridge, preventing the families' exodus by vehicle. Mothers and fathers carried babies and tattered suitcases, running in the opposite direction of the bridge. A gigantic searchlight scanned the camp, eerily illuminating the disorder. As MacArthur's forces entered just before eleven P.M., hurling grenades into the shacks and tents and setting fire to anything in their path, the crowds booed, tears streaming down their faces. The tanks trampled the vegetable gardens the veterans had planted for food. Some threw rocks at the advancing U.S. Army in a pathetic gesture of defense. Within minutes the entire camp was burning, “a blaze so big that it lighted the whole sky … a nightmare come to life,” wrote a reporter who had witnessed the flames that leaped fifty feet into the air. Watching the glow from a White House window, President Hoover demanded his aides determine what had gone wrong.

The cacophony resembled a war zone, with the blaring of ambulance and fire engine sirens and the thundering of galloping hoofs and rolling tanks. The wounded began pouring into Gallinger Municipal Hospital, located two miles away in southeast Washington, suffering from bleeding wounds and respiratory distress. There were more than a hundred casualties, including at least two infants who had been killed. The tales of brutality horrified Americans, who were outraged when photographs showed four troops of cavalry and a column of infantry with drawn sabers bearing down on the defenseless mass. When a seven-year-old boy attempted to rescue his pet rabbit from the family's tent, an infantryman rammed a bayonet through his leg. Universal Newspaper Newsreel called it “the most critical situation in the Federal District since the Civil War” and “the most cataclysmic domestic event of the decade.”

At eleven fifteen P.M., Major Patton led his cavalry in the final destruction, routing out all who were left in the camp. Among them was Joseph Angelo—the man who had won a Distinguished Service Cross for saving Patton's life in the Argonnne Forest during World War I.

When it was over, the grandstanding MacArthur called a press conference shortly after midnight—despite Eisenhower's advice to evade reporters and leave details of the political operation to the politicians—and set out to rationalize the show of force, which included the use of two thousand tear gas grenades. “It is my opinion that had the President not acted today, had he permitted this thing to go on for twenty-four hours more, he would have been faced with a grave situation which would have caused a real battle … Had he let it go on another week, I believe the institutions of our Government would have been severely threatened.” Although widely reported to be livid at MacArthur's insubordination, Hoover refused to reprimand the general, which only added to the perception that the president was weak.

In the predawn hours of July 29, 1932, MacArthur set out to impugn the validity of the Bonus Marchers and to set the stage for the Hoover administration's justification for the use of force, claiming that the men were not really veterans at all but rabble-rousing insurrectionists and Communists. “If there was one man in ten in that group who is a veteran it would surprise me,” MacArthur proffered. No major news outlets bothered to obtain records from the Veterans Administration, which had recently completed a survey revealing that 94 percent of the Bonus Marchers had served in the U.S. military. A whopping 67 percent had served overseas, and 20 percent of those were disabled as a result of their Army or Navy tours of duty.

In any case, many saw MacArthur's rationale for the obfuscation that it was. Congressman Fiorello La Guardia of New York wired the president, expressing his great alarm at MacArthur's actions. “Soup is cheaper than tear gas bombs,” the plainspoken fellow Republican wrote, “and bread is better than bullets in maintaining law and order in these times of Depression, unemployment and hunger.”

The fallout was swift and decisive. “Hounding men who fought for their country was not a political master stroke,” one historian wrote. “What a pitiful spectacle is that of the great American government, mightiest in the world, chasing unarmed men, women and children with army tanks,” the
Washington News
admonished. Newsreel audiences throughout the country hissed as they watched the U.S. Army attack the Bonus Marchers.

At the governor's mansion in Albany, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were appalled. Sitting up in bed in the master suite, on the morning of July 29, Roosevelt was surrounded by a sea of newspapers. Rexford Tugwell, a professor of agricultural economics and one of Roosevelt's advisers, later recalled that the governor felt deeply ashamed for his country. Embarrassed that he had once held Hoover in high regard, he revoked that opinion, telling Tugwell, “[There] is nothing left inside the man but jelly; maybe there never had been anything.”

To Roosevelt, Hoover's overreaction underscored his own evolving mindfulness of how deeply divided America had become, how wide the swath was between the “haves” and the “have-nots”—as Depression-era novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described America's divisions along lines of money and class. Hoover's actions highlighted to Roosevelt “the deep social cleavage in the nation and the possible difficulties posed by alarmists” such as MacArthur, whom he considered “a potential Mussolini.”

In any case, Roosevelt knew better than anyone that the episode had sealed the president's fate, predicting, rightly, that Americans would be outraged by the events.

“Well, Felix,” he said to his adviser Felix Frankfurter, “this will elect me.”

Chapter Seven

Happy Days Are Here Again

The Bonus Army fiasco was the final blow to an ill-fated president. The 1929 stock market crash monopolized Hoover's first year in office; the spiraling American economy plagued his next three years. While the Depression obliterated Hoover's standing as a forceful American leader, his antisocial personality further undermined him. “But the rout of the bonus marchers shattered the remaining credibility of his administration,” concluded one historian. “His personal reputation might have weathered some of the discontent engendered by the depression if federal troops had not attacked unarmed, hungry petitioners—victims of that depression.”

Roosevelt was quick to capitalize on his rival's floundering, referring to him as “Humpty Dumpty” and never missing an opportunity to highlight his failures. In what would go down in history as a particularly bitter campaign, the Republicans' ad hominem attacks included spreading rumors that Roosevelt's paralysis was caused by a venereal disease, which had gone to his brain and was driving him “crazy.” The Democrats held no punches either, accusing Hoover of colluding in the export of fifty thousand coolies as cheap labor to South African gold mines while he was a Chinese mining company executive.

In any case, Americans were uninterested in political squabbles and impatient for solutions to rescue them from the hardship that was growing harder. As the campaign headed into the general election, a journalist asked British economist John Maynard Keynes whether there was a historical comparison to the Great Depression. “Yes,” Keynes replied. “It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years.” Earlier, Keynes had warned a Chicago audience of the impending collapse. “We are today in the middle of the greatest catastrophe—the greatest catastrophe due almost to entirely [sic] economic causes—of the modern world. I am told that the view is held in Moscow that this is the last, the culminating crisis of capitalism, and that our existing order of society will not survive it.”

It was this sense of fear and hopelessness that sent citizens in search of a messiah. Nearly fifty years old, the broad-shouldered and spirited Roosevelt had matured into a seasoned politician with governing experience and an eloquent speaker with an apparent grasp of the problems facing the nation. Still, the populace was fed up with Washington, with government, and with both parties, and while Roosevelt's charismatic personality enchanted many, others remained skeptical. “The way most people feel, they would like to vote against all of them if possible,” social commentator and comedian Will Rogers quipped, though he would later become a friend of Roosevelt's. Third parties and “crank candidates” cropped up, spawned by the collective anxiety. Considered progressive, Roosevelt predictably aroused opposition from the Right, which alternately called him a Socialist, Fascist, or Communist—with no apparent comprehension of the contradictions. The fact that he was a die-hard capitalist and far more centrist than liberal was not lost on the Left, which saw him as an unreconstructed scion of America's elite. Walter Lippmann—“although subjected to massive doses of FDR's celebrated charm”—had not modified his assessment of the man, writing that “his mind is not very clear, his purposes are not simple, and his methods are not direct.”
Time
magazine dismissed him as “a vigorous well-intentioned gentleman of good birth and breeding” who “lacked crusading convictions.”

In the early stages of the 1932 presidential campaign, both the Right and Left were disaffected and disenchanted with the choice, seeing little difference between either Hoover and Roosevelt or the Republicans and the Democrats. Both candidates pledged to balance the budget and cut tariffs. Both promised to revitalize the economy. Both believed in the gold standard and unregulated corporate competition. Beyond platitudes, however, it was difficult to get a fix on Roosevelt's platform for the presidency. Though his speeches were generally ambiguous and noncontroversial, an outbreak of infectious optimism began to surround him. By early fall, audiences seemed less interested in shallow bromides than in the character of the man. Roosevelt's persistent smile and sparkling eyes, his indefatigable optimism and genteel manner, and his easygoing confidence and friendly nature implied that he could be the hero that all Americans subconsciously sought. “What they saw was a magnificent leader,” William Manchester wrote. “His leonine head thrown back, his eyes flashing, his cigarette holder tilted at the sky, his navy boat cloak falling gracefully from his great shoulders. He was the image of zest, warmth, and dignity.” Suddenly, the differences between the two candidates could not have been starker.

Roosevelt's speeches began to foreshadow the New Deal as he lashed out at Hoover's failed economic policy. He began to advocate for regulating banks and security firms and for reforming agriculture and private utilities—“to prevent extortion against the public.” At the heart of his emerging ideology was the forging of a new partnership between the government and the citizenry—for “the development of an economic declaration of rights,” as he told the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 23, 1932. In one of his most powerful and revealing campaign speeches, Roosevelt spoke movingly of the birth of American democracy and its evolution to the modern day:

A glance at the situation today only too clearly indicates that equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists. Our industrial plant is built; the problem just now is whether under existing conditions it is not overbuilt. Our last frontier has long since been reached, and there is practically no more free land. More than half of our people do not live on their own property. There is no safety valve in the form of a Western prairie to which those thrown out of work by the Eastern economic machines can go for a new start. We are not able to invite the immigration from Europe to share our endless plenty. We are now providing a drab living for our own people … The independent business man is running a losing race … If the process of concentration goes on at the same rate, at the end of another century we shall have all American industry controlled by a dozen corporations, and run by perhaps a hundred men. But plainly, we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already.

Roosevelt made clear that it was time for a revolutionary reassessment of what democracy in America should look like in the twentieth century. “Every man has a right to live, and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living. He may … decline to exercise that right; but it may not be denied him.” Hinting darkly of speculators, manipulators, and financiers, his words—written by Adolph Berle—left little doubt that he favored some kind of wealth redistribution. This concept of the sanctity of individualism, this championing of personal rights over property rights, this plea for relief to the masses, was a shot heard throughout the nation. That an American aristocrat had sounded the clarion call made it all the more poignant and uplifting—and, to members of Roosevelt's class, terrifying. “It was a real shocker for those who simply assumed that free competition was no more to be questioned than home and mother,” recalled Rexford Guy Tugwell, who saw the speech as the turning point that launched Franklin Roosevelt into the realm of legend, which he would occupy into the next century.

Early returns on November 8, 1932, confirmed that the Roosevelt forces had accurately gauged the mood of the nation. No other Democrat had ever won such a large margin of the popular vote. Roosevelt had carried forty-two states, winning by 7 million popular votes and 472 electoral votes, compared with Hoover's 59. Democrats took over the Senate and the House as well, guaranteeing an opportunity for Roosevelt to manifest his vision for a New Deal. Listening to the results in a suite at New York City's Biltmore Hotel, surrounded by family and friends, the candidate was strangely somber.

Louis Howe refused to leave his own headquarters across the street, until victory was certain so as not to jinx the good luck. One of the guests described him as a “well of pessimism, overflowing now and then with dire predictions.” Not until Hoover conceded shortly after midnight did Howe break out a twenty-year-old bottle of sherry he had been saving for the day his protégé was elected president.

Sitting in a corner of the suite, Eleanor broke into tears, lamenting her new role as First Lady. “Now I will have no identity,” she said quietly to a cousin, unable to mask what she later described as the “turmoil” in her heart.

The couple returned to their town house at 49 East Sixty-fifth Street, where an exuberant Sara Delano Roosevelt was waiting. “This is the greatest moment of my life,” she said, embracing her son.

For his part, Roosevelt was suddenly and uncharacteristically overcome with doubt and trepidation about the burden he was facing—a challenge equal to that of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln as the Great Depression entered its fourth year. Despite the Roosevelt theme song, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” which was struck up throughout the country, “there was no excitement … no petty sense of impending personal triumph,” Raymond Moley wrote years later of the election victory. The “gathering economic storm clouds—the tumbling prices, the mounting unemployment,” he said, could not be shaken, even for a moment.

When his twenty-five-year-old son lifted him into his bed that night, Roosevelt uttered a heartfelt admission. “You know, Jimmy, all my life I have been afraid of only one thing—fire. Tonight, I think I'm afraid of something else.”

“Afraid of what?” Jimmy asked, surprised.

“I'm just afraid that I may not have the strength to do this job,” he said. “After you leave me tonight, Jimmy, I'm going to pray. I am going to pray that God will help me, that He will give me the strength and the guidance to do this job and to do it right. I hope you will pray for me too, Jimmy.”