On March 21, 1933, less than three weeks after he was elected, President Roosevelt proposed the formation of the CCC; it was established by an act of law on March 31. Within a week after enactment, the first camp opened near Luray, Virginia, with an enrollment of 2,500 men.
A stated goal of the CCC was to conserve, protect, and enhance the nation’s natural resources, and it was given tasks ranging from combating soil erosion in the Dust Bowl to increasing the nation’s recreational assets by building vacation lodges and laying out mountain trails. By the time the program ended in 1942, its cadre of young men had planted nearly three billion trees, constructed more than 800 new parks, and upgraded most existing state parks. They built trails and roads in remote areas of the country, improved beaches on both coasts, and created golf courses and softball fields close to urban areas. The CCC was known far and wide—by both its admirers and detractors—as FDR’s Tree Army.2
The other goal of the CCC was to enlist young, unmarried men and get them into a disciplined environment in which they could serve the nation while helping their families. The target recruits included the unemployed, troubled city kids, and menacing young hoboes who roamed the nation and were often referred to as the “wild boys of the road,” after the title of a 1933 movie.
In order to be successful, the CCC needed the deep commitment of the leaders of the U.S. Army. It was born at a time when the image of the Army was suffering because of the recent use of Regular and National Guard troops to quell strikes and subdue other domestic disturbances. The most dramatic, distressing, and photogenic of these incidents was the Army’s role in the expulsion of the so-called Bonus Army from its camp at the Anacostia Flats in Washington, D.C., in July 1932.
Five and a half years after the armistice ending World War I, in May 1924 Congress finally reacted to the increasingly loud and public demands of veterans that the Congress fulfill its earlier promises to compensate them for their wartime service by passing a bill granting a bonus payment to those veterans that the legislation termed “adjusted service compensation.”
The intent of the bill was to make up for the vast difference between what a man in uniform was paid and what was paid to a war worker at home. A man working in a shipyard building warships could easily earn six or seven times as much as a man in uniform. The legislation was passed but only after overriding the veto of President Calvin Coolidge, who had declared in his veto message that the nation owed nothing to able-bodied veterans and “patriotism which is bought and paid for is not patriotism.”
Under the terms of the new legislation, any man who had served in the Armed Forces during the war was due compensation at the rate of $1 a day for time served in the United States and $1.25 for every day spent abroad—exactly the same basic pay given them when they were in uniform. But there was a stunning catch to this bonus: any man entitled to a bonus of $50 or less was to be paid immediately, but all the others were to be issued certificates that could not be converted to cash until 1945 when they would receive full payment. It was cynically nicknamed the “Tombstone Bonus” by disappointed veterans because the only way to get cash payment before 1945 was for the veteran to die.
Nothing happened until May 1929, when Congressman Wright Patman of Texas, a fellow veteran of the war who had suffered its privations, proposed a bill calling for the immediate cash payment of the bonus. The bill, however, did not make it out of committee, and any momentum in Congress for early payment died as the stock market crashed in October. Then came the Great Depression, and at the beginning of the bleak new year of 1932—when unemployment had reached 25 percent of the workforce and hundreds of thousands of Americans were homeless—Patman resurrected the legislation, but it again landed in committee with little hope of getting out, let alone being passed.
On March 15, 1932, Walter W. Waters, an unemployed former Army sergeant, stood up at a meeting of war veterans in Portland, Oregon, and proposed that all present join him by hopping a freight train and traveling to Washington to lobby for the money that rightfully belonged to them. Nobody took him up on his offer that night, but he kept working on the idea and by early May, when a revised version of Patman’s bill was introduced and quickly shelved in the House of Representatives, Waters had pulled together a group of about 250 followers who had to show evidence of war service, pledge to uphold the Constitution, and to submit to the discipline of Waters and other elected officers. Waters and his small band departed Portland with $300 between them, riding in empty freight cars, and headed to Washington to demand payment. These men saw themselves as lobbyists behaving in much the same manner as lobbyists for the large corporations had in demanding—and receiving—reparations for their war work.3
This defining moment of the Great Depression took shape as word of Waters’s group spread and, following their lead, some 20,000 World War I war veterans and their families converged on Washington, D.C., in May to demand that Congress and President Herbert Hoover pass legislation to allow them to immediately turn their bonus certificates into cash.
The House of Representatives passed Patman’s bonus bill by a 211–176 vote on June 15, which was cause for great rejoicing among the individuals and families in Washington whose numbers had been increasing by the thousands. The Senate was to vote two days later, and during that day more than 8,000 members of what was now known as the Bonus Army assembled in front of the Capitol. Another group of more than 10,000 headed for the Capitol from the main camp in Anacostia but were stopped by a drawbridge that the District of Columbia police had raised, anticipating trouble. Senate floor debate on the bill continued beyond dark. Finally, about nine thirty, Waters was brought inside by a Senate aide. Moments later he reappeared to deliver the bad news: the bill had gone down to defeat. At that moment, when it looked like the veterans might attack the Capitol, Elsie Robinson, a reporter for the Hearst newspaper chain, whispered something in Waters’s ear. Apparently taking her advice, Waters shouted out to his men: “Sing ‘America.’” When the song was over, the anger seemed to have become less fierce, and most of the assembled veterans headed back to their camp.4
After the Senate defeat, a large portion of the Bonus Army elected to stay and continue its struggle. Observers who visited the veterans’ main camp were impressed by the high degree of self-discipline and the good humor that prevailed among those encamped there, but what was most astonishing to those observers was that white veterans, from the Deep South as well as the rest of the country, shared rations, chores, and lodging in complete amity with the 2,000 or so black vets of the Bonus Expeditionary Force (the name the bonus marchers gave themselves). Historian Constance McLaughlin Green commented, “Not a trace of Jim Crow in the entire Bonus Army during the days of waiting, or the evening when the Senate defeated the bill, or in the weeks thereafter during which some 10,000 dejected ‘bonuseers’ stayed on in stubborn belief that Congress would still come to their rescue.”5
When it appeared that the bonus would not be paid and the marchers refused to leave, Hoover ordered the Army to evict them. Employing infantrymen of the Regular Army, tanks, tear gas, and a detachment of saber-wielding cavalrymen on horseback commanded by Major George S. Patton, Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur drove the marchers out of Washington across the Anacostia River Bridge. Later that night the Army set fire to the main camp on the Anacostia Flats, across from Capitol Hill.
Eyewitnesses, including MacArthur’s own chief of staff, Dwight D. Eisenhower, would insist that Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley, speaking for the president, had forbidden the Army to cross the river into the Anacostia camp and that Hurley had dispatched two high-ranking officers to bring this order directly to MacArthur. Eisenhower wrote later: “He said he was too busy and did not want either himself or his staff bothered by people coming down and pretending to bring orders.”*,6
Young Eisenhower escaped being tainted by the episode, as he had been the voice of reason in a chaotic situation. At first he had argued with his superior, MacArthur, that the Army should stay out of what was essentially a local police matter and later attempted to convince MacArthur not to cross the bridge into Anacostia. “The whole scene was pitiful” is how Eisenhower later described that night. It was assumed later that George Marshall considered