FLOYD GIBBONS DROVE HIS STUDEBAKER out the gates of the Marine Corps barracks and headed south past the Navy Yard. He was in a wistful mood that afternoon, having just met with his old leatherneck buddies to help them plan the anniversary remembrance of Belleau Wood. He glanced at his wristwatch and swallowed hard. It was at this very hour, fourteen years ago to the day, that he had lost his eye to that ricocheting German bullet.
He parked the car on the banks overlooking Anacostia and got out to survey the surreal scene across the river. This swampy backyard, first home to the Nacotchtank Indians and later to freed slaves, had been transformed into the largest Hooverville in the nation. In just one week, twenty-three thousand veterans had swarmed into the city, and the newspapers were warning that a million more might be on the way, drawn by reports that an unemployed former medic named Walter Waters was determined to get the money owed him by the government.
Summer in this drained marshland always frayed the nerves, and he figured this June would be no different, given that it was already on track to become one of the hottest months on record. The residents here were growing more edgier as each day brought new and alarming rumors. The latest gossip was that MacArthur, fearful the veterans would storm government buildings, had ordered the hammers unscrewed from all the Enfields stored in the local armories.
He swatted at a cloud of mosquitoes as he walked toward the Anacostia Bridge. Framed by the Capitol dome to the north, the mud slicks of Camp Camden—named after the New Jersey veterans who first plotted lots there—were blanketed by a shimmering haze. Smoke trails rose from the pipe chimneys of the squat shanties, and hundreds of frayed American flags flapped from the roofs in the desultory breeze. As far as his lone eye could see, rows of tents and shacks had sprung up along unpaved streets platted in the Army style, with designated companies housed together. The trees along the river were hung with scales of washed garments, and on one corner of the encampment, gangs of veterans searched for construction materiel in a refuse dump. At the entrance, a sign had been posted: Welcome to the Bonus Expeditionary Force, the Army of No Occupation. This dense enclave of the forlorn—created piecemeal from cardboard boxes, egg crates, abandoned box springs, wrecked Model T Fords, oil drums, and mesh wire—reminded him of an American wood-and-tin version of Cairo’s City of the Dead.
And Anacostia was just the largest of the twenty homeless camps scattered throughout the District.
He shook his head at the cruelty of God’s abandonment. Many of those men down there had walked behind the Unknown Soldier’s caisson in 1921. Now they were gaunt and sickly, their leathery faces etched with despair, most appearing much older than they should. In recent months, the country’s mood had spiraled even deeper into anger. Just last weekend, during a doubleheader in Chicago, the Tigers and White Sox had cleared the dugouts with a vicious fracas that had become known as the Memorial Day Brawl. Baseball fisticuffs were commonplace, but an air of national desperation, not helped by a home plate umpire who wanted to fight the entire White Sox team, had ignited that riot. On a day reserved for enjoyment and honoring deceased ones, fans champing to lash out at Fate had tried to pour out onto the field. Reports from other ballparks confirmed that this season was marked by an uncharacteristic ugliness, on and off the diamonds. He held to the theory that baseball was the canary in the coal mine for America. After all, it hadn’t been that long after the Black Sox gambling scandal when the Wall Street shenanigans that led to the Stock Market Crash had come to light.
Yes, there was something different about this summer. He could feel it in the ache of his empty eye socket. Those priests of demagoguery, Coughlin and Cox, could feel it, too, and they were circling the rancid byways of capitalism like hawks, eager to pounce on rotting road kill everywhere.
As he walked across the drawbridge, the languorous thrum of pots swinging over fires gave way to a sudden clattering of excitement. Word was shouted down the muddy thoroughfares that the Headline Hunter had come to give witness to their plight, and the veterans lazing all around him under the shade of tents were up on their feet and buzzing like bees in a kicked hive.
“Floyd Gibbons!” cried the wife of a veteran. “Why, I’ll be! I’d sooner see you down here than St. Michael the Archangel hisself!”
Finally released from the woman’s embrace, Gibbons shook the hundreds of hands being thrust at him from the weary but hopeful veterans. “How long you folks planning on stay in our fine city?”
The men, decked out in their ratty fedoras and suit vests in a pitiful grasp for dignity, circled round to greet him. “The commissioners are giving us forty-eight hours to get out, Floyd,” said one. “We’ve been here a week already, but they keep pushing back the deadline.”
“We ain’t going nowhere!” insisted another veteran. “Hell, the Kaiser didn’t uproot us after eighteen months. Sure as hell a bunch of politicians aren’t gonna do it in two days!”
“You see that gallows over there?” asked the bear-hugging wife.
Gibbons squinted at a raised wooden platform in the center of the camp. “You hold many executions, do you?”
The woman slapped at her thigh, entertained by his wit. “Floyd, I’ll be! You are a corker! No, that’s there’s where those Hill fat cats come to stand with their hands in their fancy silk shirts while they try to snooker us with their lies. You ever find yourself unable to sleep, just come on down here and listen to those birds chirp. They’re here night and day to offer us their wisdom in return for votes.”
“They bring the flies with them, too,” the woman’s husband added.
Gibbons sniffed the air. “I haven’t smelled a fragrance like that since the Marne. Could those be Army beans on the fire?”
A codger in a crenellated straw hat came staggering at him with a steaming pot in his gloved hands. “Try some of my mulligan stew, Floyd! This here’s the recipe that sent the Hun crawling back to Berlin!”
“He ain’t lying, Floyd! The gas that emits from Henry’s legumes made the Boche nostalgic for some good old-fashioned mustard clouds!”
Gibbons brought the ladle to his lips. Stifling a cough from the bitter taste of the gruel, he faked approval with a wide smile. “By God, that is tasty! But I think it might use a dash more leather and saltpeter!”
“Maybe Hoover’s got some salt shakers over at the White House he could loan us!” shouted a veteran. “You ask him for us next time you’re over there, will you, Floyd?”
“I’ll do more than ask.” Gibbons turned serious as he studied the veterans and their families congregated around him. “How are you folks holding up?”
The crowd grew silent, and most of the residents hung their heads in shame. A young boy in overalls lifted up his pet rabbit to him and stroked its head. “He ain’t gettin’ enough to eat, Mr. Gibbons. The nurse said he won’t make it much longer.”
Nearly undone by their plight, Gibbons needed a moment to recover his composure. “Now, listen here, folks! When some overstuffed spit hog like me comes down here and asks you good people how you’re faring, you look them straight in the eye and tell them you’re doing as well as any good American who’s got his head under the damn boot heel of those Wall Street robber barons!” When his words of encouragement brought a rousing cheer, he asked them, “You all got a tin over your head, at least?”
“Lot of us slept in the rain last night,” a veteran said. “There ain’t enough lumber and pine boards in the garbage pile to go around.”
Angered at the government’s neglect, Gibbons reached into his pocket and passed out what few bills he had on him. “Folks, that’s all I got.”
“You got a lot more than that!” shouted a voice from behind the scrum.
The crowed parted to allow a thin, blond man to approach the radioman. Several moments passed before Gibbons recognized him as the stuttering Bonus evangelist from the Portland meeting. Accompanying the BEF leader was an entourage of junior officers led by George Alford and a bodyguard that included Mickey Dolan and William Hruska. Gibbons relaxed and grinned when Waters came up to offer his hand in welcome.
“Your words are heard by millions, Mr. Gibbons,” Waters said. “Those are worth more to us than all the gold in Fort Knox.”
Gibbons was impressed by the unemployed canner’s newfound eloquence and the deference he now commanded from these veterans. “Looks like you got yourself a disciplined army here. Your militia on the bluffs up there almost arrested me for a Bosch infiltrator.”
“We do what we can with what we got.” Waters eyed him with a knowing grin. “I don’t reckon you remember me.”
“Oh, I remember you, all right. You had those boys in the Portland armory stirred up like a Kansas twister trapped in a barn.”
Waters’s grin curled wider. “Nah, I mean earlier.” Seeing the radioman scratching his head in confusion, he let him in on the secret. “I’ve sealed my lips on the matter. But if that cop in Weiser ever finds that ax, you may be looking at some jail time for cutting the town’s telephone wire.”
Gibbons’s lone eye rounded. “Master Pip of the Prairie!”
Waters nodded. “The way I figure it, you’re to blame for all this. If you hadn’t filled my head with all those highfalutin ideas about seeing the world, I wouldn’t have run off to join the National Guard.”
“You’ve become quite the orator since those days walking the Idaho tracks.”
“I have my moments. How about we give you a tour of the camp?”
“I’d like that.”
“First, I hope you’ll join us in our daily playing of the National Anthem.”
The veterans removed their hats and placed their hands to their hearts as a Negro veteran armed with an oboe came to the fore. Gibbons looked around and saw to his surprise that several black veterans and their families were intermingled with the whites here.
The little black man with the oboe saluted him. “Mr. Gibbons, my name’s Ozzie Taylor. I fought with the Hellfighters. It’s an honor to play for you.”
Gibbons returned the salute. “Honor’s all mine, Taylor. Looks like the first casualty inflicted by the Bonus Expeditionary Force was ol’ Jim Crow. I’m mighty glad to see he’s been cashiered and given the boot.”
“We’re all the same down here in the country’s trash heap,” Waters said. “The whites are hungry and poor. The blacks are poor and hungry.”
Not to be outdone in the introductions, a pint-sized fellow in a stovepipe hat and speechifying tails elbowed his way to the front and bowed. “Sir, I’m Charlie Lincoln, the sixth cousin of the Great Emancipator. And I am available for radio interviews at your convenience.”
“Can you recite the Gettysburg Address backwards?”
“No, sir, but I can recount from memory every speech Herbert Hoover ever gave supporting us vets. You wanna hear a recitation?”
“I may regret saying so, but sure.”
Lincoln adopted his famous rail-splitting pose, and after a minute had passed in this pantomimed silence, he doffed his stovepipe. “Now, for an encore, I’d like to sing my new radio hit song.” He cleared his throat and crooned:
“My Bonus lies over the ocean.
My Bonus lies over the sea.
My Bonus lies over the ocean.
Oh bring back my Bonus to me.”
The crowd, evidently practiced at this routine, chimed in with the chorus:
“Bring back, bring back
Bring back my Bonus to me, to me
Bring back, bring back
Bring back my Bonus to me.”
The veterans cheered as Chief Running Wolf pulled an arrow from his quiver and set it on the string of his bow. The Apache Freemason drew the bow back and let fly with the arrow, hitting a bullseye drawn over an image of President Hoover that had been painted on the side of a shack.
Bent with laughter, Gibbons clicked his fingers at Ozzie for a beat. “Private Taylor, give me a little Reese Europe with that note launcher of yours.”
Ozzie wetted his lips in preparation for strumming the reed. “Yes, sir, and let’s make the angels take observance while the Devil dances for his sins.”
“Just make sure Herbert up there in the White House can hear it, too.”
Ozzie brought the oboe to his mouth, and the men came to attention, solemn and proper. He played a soulful rendition of the National Anthem that brought dampness to the eyes of all around.
Gibbons was nearly moved to tears. Recovering his voice, he said, “You folks might be a tad shy on edibles, but you’re blessed in spirit.”
As Waters escorted the radioman through the camp, the crowds surged behind them like the multitudes at the Sermon on the Mount. One veteran led a burro by the reins with a sign hanging from its neck that said: Ask me about Hoover. When passersby posed the popular question, the burro dutifully shook its head. After walking a hundred yards or so, Gibbons stopped at an intersection of four streets where a circle of planted geraniums surrounded an iron pipe that stuck up out of a mound of freshly dug ground. A cup for donations lay nearby. Alarmed, he asked the veterans, “Somebody’s grave?”
The men lowered their heads in grief, and Waters led him to the pipe in solemn ceremony. “Mr. Gibbons, say hello to Private Angelo.”
Gibbons had on occasion in his life been known to say a few words to a gravestone, but he felt foolish speaking to a pipe that was being used for a marker. Yet the veterans seemed to hang expectantly on the ritual, so he complied with the request. “Soldier, we pray you have received your heavenly reward so due you.”
“Hell, I’m still waiting for my earthly reward so due me!”
Startled, Gibbons staggered back from the voice bellowing up from the pipe. He clutched his chest, as if nearly killed by the shock of the resurrection. The veterans and their families howled with laughter at his expense.
Waters threw open a pine door to reveal a glass coffin underneath. “This here’s the submerged voice of Joe Angelo from Camden, New Jersey. He had himself buried alive to protest the refusal of the president to give us our Bonus.” Waters leaned over the pipe and shouted, “How you doing in there, Joey?”
“Hoover given me my Bonus yet?”
“Not yet!” the veterans all shouted.
“Then I ain’t coming up!”
“Joey! Say hello to the Headline Hunter!”
“Hallooo, Floyd!” Angelo shouted up. “Make sure you put in your headline that I saved Colonel Patton’s life. I got the medal in here to prove it!”
Gibbons hovered his good eye over the mouth of the pipe and saw a drawn Italian face staring back up at him. “You need anything down there, soldier?”
“You got any smokes?”
Gibbons pulled a pack from his pocket and drew a couple of cigarettes out. He dropped them down the pipe, one by one. “You sure it’s wise to light up down there, considering the paucity of air?”
“I’ll save ‘em for later! Thanks, Floyd!”
The entourage next led Gibbons toward a large square stall crowned by a billowing roof of green sailcloth. There, behind low rows of shelves, female volunteers passed out donated books to the veterans and held reading and writing classes for the youngsters. Adjacent to this makeshift library stood an open-air medical clinic staffed by three women.
“Floyd!”
Gibbons did a double take to make certain his one eye was still operating properly. Behind the counter, passing out bandages and aspirin tablets, stood Evalyn Walsh McLean, one of the wealthiest socialites in the city. He had attended many a party at her mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, where she enjoyed displaying her most prized possession, the Hope Diamond. “Shouldn’t you be planning the next débutante ball, Evalyn?”
“Floyd, it’s horrible what’s happening to these people. Can’t you pester that uncaring man in the White House to do something about this?”
“Herbert doesn’t seem to listen to me.”
“Pray for him,” suggested another woman, who was clad in a blue-and-white nurse’s uniform. Coming up next to Mrs. Walsh, the nurse testified, “Prayer is much more powerful than argument, don’t you agree, sir?”
Mrs. Walsh introduced her fellow volunteer. “This is Lauretta D’Arsanis from New York. The men call her the Little Flower of St. Theresa. But watch your extremities. She likes to bite the Devil wherever she finds him.”
The Little Flower sized him up. “Do you pray, Mr. Gibbons?”
He turned away as if he hadn’t heard her, but he slipped his hands into his pockets on the off chance that Mrs. Walsh’s warning about the biting was not figurative. He noticed another nurse on the far side of the clinic, huffing in disgust at the suggestion of spiritual intervention.
Mrs. Walsh detected his distraction. “Oh, yes, and this is Anna Raber. She has come all the way from Indiana.”
He lingered on her familiar features. “Did you nurse in the war, ma’am?”
Anna continued checking the pulse of her patient in the clinic chair. “I was assigned to the hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine when you were brought in with the wounded from Belleau Wood. You were quite a handful.”
“I don’t remember much about those hours. The ether was pretty heavy.”
“I remember enough of it for the both of us,” Anna said. “You fought off the surgeon and demanded to smoke a cigar before going under the knife.”
“I’ve built up some down time in Purgatory, I fear.”
Anna tapped her patient on the shoulder in a signal that she was finished with his examination. She drew the radioman out of earshot of the others in the clinic. “What do you intend to report about these men?”
“That they are hungry, for one thing. That looks pretty evident.”
“There are forces of malice at work in this city, Mr. Gibbons.”
“From your sour reaction to that nurse’s suggestion to pray, I wouldn’t have taken you for the Bible-thumping type.”
“Forces don’t have to be spiritual to be evil,” she said. “These men and their families cling desperately to what little hope is offered. They see only what they want to see. But I have seen the looks of disdain on the faces of this city’s residents when these men have their backs turned to them. The more fortunate view this camp as a zoo. They come down here on weekends to ogle the strange animals. But they’re afraid that the beast might get loose and soil their lawns.”
He nodded grimly. “The real zoo is up on Capitol Hill.”
“People around here say you have influence in high places.”
“I tell the truth as I see it. What little influence I have comes from that paramount rule of my life.”
She looked hard into his unpatched eye. “You have the gift of seeing what others cannot, Mr. Gibbons. I beg you, before it is too late. Help us protect these men and their families from—”
A great roar interrupted her plea, and Gibbons, hidden behind the scrum of men, turned in time to see the throngs abandon him to rush toward a rider entering the camp on a coughing motorcycle. The men swarmed Chief Glassford as he dismounted Blue Bessie and stood observing the shantytown that was growing by the hour. A dirty-faced girl in a calico dress came running up and read a poem to Glassford that she had written in a class being conducted by the Salvation Army:
“A Modern General Washington.
Build him a monument thousands feet high,
Let it tower toward the pale blue sky,
In years to come and generations too,
The story will be told as if it was new,
Of the heroic part that General Glassford played,
As treating all men as humans in the Bonus parade.”
Embarrassed by the clinging adulation, Glassford patted the girl on the head as he walked to the small, outdoor BEF library, which was nothing more than a few planks set up in a hollow square and shaded by tins. Catching sight of the Indiana nurse, he reached into his coat pocket and, withdrawing two books, handed them to her. “I’m afraid these are overdue.”
Anna tested him with a sideways smile. “That side of beef brought to us this morning. You wouldn’t have had anything to do with that, would you?”
Glassford affected surprise. “Was there a delivery? I wasn’t informed.”
Her eyes narrowed to belie that fib. “There’s a rumor around the camp that you paid for it out of your own pocket. I guess we can overlook the library fine this one time.” She found another book in the stacks. “Here, you might try Thucydides for your next reading, General …Washington, is it?”
“Thucydides. Didn’t he write about bullies trying to beat up on poor helpless men?”
“I find his first lesson of history quite instructive.”
“And what might that be?”
“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.”
Glassford glanced over his shoulder at the crowd’s adoration, taking in her veiled implication. He stared at her, a bit too long for courtesy. Then, to change the subject, he asked her, “Have you ever been painted?”
“Only by the Dutch masters,” she said sarcastically.
“I wonder if you might allow me to repay the kindness of the loan?”
“I’d rather not adorn the walls of speakeasies.”
Thrown on his heels, Glassford was about to ask how she had come by that piece of surveillance when a man behind him tapped an admonishing finger on the overdue books.
“You start letting people get by with flouting the law, pretty soon everybody is doing it,” Gibbons said. “At least, that’s what I read in the papers.”
Unaware that his old reporter friend was in the camp, let alone eavesdropping on his conversation, Glassford called out, “Waters!”
The long-legged BEF commander came bounding up. “Yes, sir.”
Glassford angled his head toward Gibbons. “What’d I tell you about letting lowlifes invade your perimeter?”
“To be honest, General,” Waters admitted, “sometimes it’s kind of hard to tell the lowlifes from the residents.”
Glassford, laughing, turned from the crude library counter and raised his hands for silence. He quizzed the veterans, “What are the regulations here?”
“No panhandling!” responded hundreds of gravelly voices in military unison. “No liquor! No radical talk!”
Praising their memory with a sharp salute, Glassford walked through the camp on inspection with Waters and Gibbons. He firmed an affectionate grip on the BEF commander’s shoulder. “There’s another load of lumber heading down from Annapolis this afternoon. Why don’t you make sure there’s a team to unload it at the entrance while I deal with this pestering news hawker here.”
“I’m on it, General.” Waters lingered, grinning and casting significant looks back at the small library, where Anna was still watching them.
“You got something else on your mind?” Glassford asked him.
Waters smirked. “You ain’t contracted the calico fever for our Anna, now have you, General? If you have, your courting manner is about as successful as a man scratching his ear with his elbow.”
“There’s an old saying in Arizona, Waters. Tossing your rope before tying a loop won’t catch a calf.” He waved the BEF leader off to his assigned task.
Alone now with Gibbons, Glassford glanced back and caught Anna looking away quickly. He winked at Gibbons and, with Scrapper following them, led the radioman toward a quiet, shady spot near the river.
“You’ve got quite a military operation going here,” Gibbons said sarcastically. “I haven’t seen such an impressive display of discipline since Pershing and Patton lost half their horses chasing Villa in Mexico.”
Glassford’s grin evaporated. “Off the record?”
Gibbons nodded his agreement to the condition for the interview.
“I’m sitting on a powder keg here,” Glassford said. “I’ve managed to scrounge up enough food to keep the vets content so far. But each day, more of them arrive, and that means less rations to go around. I’m running out of donations. If these men and their families are forced to go more than a day without a meal, I don’t know what will happen.”
“Your old classmate Mac has plenty of field kitchens and cans of stewed tomatoes rusting away in the Army storehouses. Why don’t you ask him to help you out?”
“I have. He won’t do it.”
“Has he even been down here to visit these men?” Receiving a shake of the head, Gibbons bit his lower lip in anger. “That rank-climbing sonofabitch won’t stand up for those who put him where he is today.”
“I’m sure the General has a good reason.”
“What about Hoover and Congress?”
Glassford shrugged. “I haven’t got a clue what the President is thinking. Hurley won’t let me in the White House to speak to him. I finally managed to convince the Senate to appropriate an emergency bill for seventy-five thousand dollars, but the commissioners refused to accept the money.”
“Politicians turning down free money? The End Times must be near.”
“Crosby told the Appropriations Committee that it would only bring more homeless vets to the city.”
“Be careful, Hap. I’ve seen how these fluttering peacocks operate in a clench. They’d hang their own mothers to save their hides.”
“It’ll all blow over soon. Once these boys get to make their point on the Hill, they’ll go back home.”
Gibbons looked skeptical about that expressed hope. “I don’t know. They seem pretty staked in for the long haul. What happens if those congressional blowhards don’t pass the Bonus bill?”
Glassford listened to a distant accordion playing a melancholic rendition of Misere. “I’ll deal with that when the time comes. Right now, I’ve got more pressing problems.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
Glassford pinned him with a calculating eye. “I need to raise money for camp food, and quickly. This fellow Pace and his Weasel Communists from Detroit are trying to stir the pot and cause trouble about the lack of rations.”
“One thing’s for certain. You’ve got those starched shirts in the White House circling the wagons. They’ve turned the grounds over there into an armed fortress. Hoover won’t even risk stepping outside to escape to Camp Rapidan. They all think the city is rife with assassins.”
“We both saw what happened in Germany when a man is forced to go more than a couple of days on an empty stomach. Bolshevism and fascism start to look a lot more inviting than capitalism.”
“I could give a few speeches,” Gibbons said. “But that won’t rake in much.”
“You know Jimmy Lake over at the Gayety Theatre?”
“Carnation Jimmy? Yeah, he’s an old Marine major.”
“I hear he’s the man in town to stage a big promotion.”
Gibbons nodded. “Jimmy knows the right people, all right. What do you have in mind?”
“A fifteen-bout card for a fight night. We’ll sell tickets and bring in the best boxers in the Army and Marines, along with some of the men here in this camp.”
“I always figured your carny-barking would come in handy one day. But are you sure a boxing match is such good idea?”
Glassford took a long draw on his pipe. “Waters has been hankering to hold a parade past the White House. I’m going to let him do it to blow off some steam. I was thinking a boxing benefit on the night after might bond the regular Army boys and the vets, bring them a little closer.”
Gibbons playfully tapped Glassford’s boot heel with his cane. “Then again, it might start a war. Of course, on the positive side of the ledger, old Mac will have a fit when he finds out the Marines are helping sponsor it.”
Glassford shook his old friend’s hand in gratitude. “Grease the wheels over at the barracks on this, will you, Gib? Do that for me, and I might overlook that Studebaker parked next to the fire hydrant up there.”