In the days following the expulsion, newspapers, magazines, and newsreels showed graphic images of what had taken place in front of the Capitol dome, which was obscured by clouds of smoke and tear gas. Tanks rolled through a battle zone located between the White House and the Capitol as cavalrymen waved their swords at veterans, and infantrymen bearing fixed bayonets and wearing gas masks marched against them, forcing them out of downtown. “It’s war,” the voice on a newsreel narrated as images of the expulsion played across the screens in movie theaters from coast to coast, “the greatest concentration of fighting troops in Washington since 1865 . . . They are being forced out of their shacks by the troops who have been called out by the president of the United States.” Reports came back to Washington that in many of these movie houses, the Regular Army troops were booed along with MacArthur and Patton. To many Americans, those being gassed and driven from the Capitol were the heroes, not the infantrymen used to disperse them.8
Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Democratic nominee for the upcoming presidential election, was on the record stating his opposition to the immediate payment of the bonus because he felt that it would favor one specific group of Americans at a time when the whole nation was suffering. But after seeing pictures and reading the first newspaper reports of the eviction, he reportedly turned to an adviser and said, “This will elect me.” In fact, Roosevelt would win the election three months later by a landslide seven million votes. Laying aside the impact of the Depression on voters, Patton later posited that the Army’s “act[ing] against a crowd rather than against a mob” had “insured the election of a Democrat.” Hoover biographer David Burner felt that the incident “dealt a fatal blow to the re-election of the incumbent. 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.”9
The expulsion of the Bonus Army cast a long shadow over MacArthur and Hoover and helped pave the way for Roosevelt and his New Deal. When FDR took office, he began looking to reallocate funds for his new programs and initially demanded that the Army cut its budget by $50 million, or a full 33 percent. The number of infantrymen would be retained, by order of Army chief of staff MacArthur, but deep cuts would be made to normal field-training exercises, including target practice. Cuts were also proposed to flight training for the Army Air Corps, research and development, and a host of other activities deemed superfluous by the incoming administration. As part of this scheme, the number of junior officers would also be reduced substantially.10
After Congress authorized the formation of the CCC in March 1933, Roosevelt said that he wanted to enroll 250,000 men by July 1, a goal that quickly proved to be unattainable. When the CCC failed to meet Roosevelt’s early expectations, signing up only 100,000 men in its first two months, its director suggested that the War Department and MacArthur take over the program. Roosevelt and his top advisers reluctantly agreed when the president realized that the Army was his only viable option. On May 10, the CCC was placed under War Department control. After spending an initial few days on organization, MacArthur described CCC planning as “the greatest peacetime demand ever made upon the Army,” adding that it “constitutes a task of character and proportions equivalent to the emergencies of war.”11
MacArthur mobilized those under his command, despite the opposition of some military men who felt the assignment could have a bad effect on the nation’s ability to wage war. He understood that Roosevelt was fighting the effects of the Depression rather than preparing for a foreign war and realized that it gave him added leverage in holding on to his officer corps, which Roosevelt and Congress wanted to substantially reduce in size.
MacArthur did everything possible to provide the CCC with Army officers for proper supervision and administration. Officers detailed to train the National Guard, the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), and the Citizens’ Military Training Camps (CMTC) were sent back to their units to be reassigned to the CCC. Most of the Army’s schools were closed, their personnel now given teaching assignments with the CCC.
Overnight, the Army was forced to change. “We were en route to Fort Benning [from Fort Screven, Georgia] for Corps Area Maneuvers when the concentration was called off . . . because of the President’s emergency employment proposal for 250,000 men,” then major George C. Marshall wrote to an acquaintance.12
Officers had already seen a reduction in pay and travel and subsistence allowances under Hoover. But, as one historian wrote, “It was left to Franklin D. Roosevelt to bring the depression home to the soldier.” In order to reduce government expenses, Roosevelt dispensed with the reenlistment bonus for the men of the Regular Army. This amounted to a loss of $75 in the lowest pay grades and $150 above the rank of corporal. He cut the Army pay scale so that a private’s monthly pay of $21 was now cut to $17.85.13
The CCC created other challenges for the Army, not the least of which was caused by its pay grade, as a CCC enlistee would earn $30 per month. Never mind that most of the CCC recruit’s pay was sent home to help the man’s family, the difference was still dramatic, $12.15 more per month than the Army private received.14
The Tree Army felt like a slap in the face to the men of the Bonus Army and to other veterans who were told they were too old to qualify for the CCC. The veterans felt they were the first casualty in Roosevelt’s war on the Depression. During his election campaign, Roosevelt had promised a balanced budget. As soon as he became president, he started a quiet process that would achieve the balance by slicing $480 million from veterans’ benefits. He began by appointing Lewis W. Douglas as his director of the budget. A Democratic congressman from Arizona, Douglas had advocated a slash in appropriations for benefits during the Hoover administration. Millionaire heir to a Phelps-Dodge copper-mining executive, Douglas resigned from Congress to take the budget job.
Douglas had been gassed in France during World War I and decorated for bravery, and he believed, as a veteran, that service in uniform did not guarantee special privileges, especially since veterans—including those dating back to the Civil War—garnered 24 percent of the federal budget while representing only 1 percent of the population. He sought to implement the $480 million in cuts through the Economy Act of 1933, Roosevelt’s major budget proposal. The act was rushed through Congress and signed by Roosevelt so swiftly that veterans’ organizations did not have time to mount a full-scale lobbying campaign against it.15
Too late to stop it, those representing veterans flooded congressional offices with heart-wrenching stories of vets hurt by the Economy Act. Arthur Krock, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, wrote: “Down many Main Streets go armless veterans who used to get $94 a month from the Government, and now get $36.” Men who had lost two legs or two eyes would have their pensions reduced as well. Those with service-related illnesses would lose up to 80 percent of their pensions. Veterans with diseases such as tuberculosis and neurosis would lose their entire pensions if their conditions were not unequivocally connected with their service in uniform.16
“I know many, many veterans will soon be laid in there [sic] graves, death being brought on by the additional worry which is bound to come,” an Ohio official of the Disabled American Veterans organization wrote to a member of Congress, who passed the letter on to the White House.17 Death did indeed come to troubled veterans. A Philadelphia man killed himself and left a message to President Roosevelt, saying that because his benefits were gone, he had no way to provide for his family except through his death, which would give his wife the remaining $275 from his bonus. A patient in a Dayton, Ohio, veterans’ hospital killed the chief of the medical staff after being told that because he no longer got a $60 benefit check, he had to leave the hospital. Veterans sometimes owned no civilian clothes, and those who were reclassified and evicted from soldiers’ homes often ended up on the streets, wandering about in their old uniforms.18
Reports of suicides poured into congressional offices, and members of Congress began to regret their hasty endorsement of the Economy Act. Roosevelt held firm and appealed to the veterans’ patriotism in a special message. “I do not want any veteran to feel that he and his comrades