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Imagine it's July 28, 1932. You're breathing, pecos behind your gas mask. This is your first deployment and you're uneasy. You're not often Europe fighting the Kaiser like your uncle did 15 years ago. You're in Washington, D.C. Smoke obscures most of your vision. But for a second you catch sight of the Capitol dome. A head, a crowd of haggard men gathers inside a half-completed building on Pennsylvania Avenue. They all look tired and hungry. Someone yells down from the building's second floor.
A man leans on a crutch at the edge of the building's exposed second floor. One of his legs is amputated at the knee. An American flag stretches from one wall to the other. He begins yelling angrily as he hobbles down some stairs. William Hushka. His name was Hushka. He marched all the way here from St. Louis and from what? To get killed in his own country. When all he did was ask for what was rightfully his. He reaches the bottom of the stairs.
The commander made it abundantly clear not to fire your gun unless somebody shoots at you first. It was bad enough he said that MacArthur was ordering you to march on the veterans at all. So the army needed to show more discipline than the police had earlier that morning. But it looks like that discipline's already slipping. Two of your fellow soldiers are torching a plywood structure as a man and a woman both sobbing. Carry a small child away. The hobbling man approaches. You grip your rifle tighter.
You're giving me orders private? I was a sergeant. And a sergeant in a real war. I wasn't terrorizing my own people, private.
你在给我下私人命令吗?我曾经是一名中士,参加了真正的战争。我可不像你这样,狂吓自己的同胞。
Something whistles overhead and lands a hundred yards away with a rattle exploding in the plumes of milky gas. The veteran in front of you starts coughing. Gasping people scatter in every direction. And one legged veteran holds a handkerchief of his mouth, coughing, but still intent on you.
You don't understand, do you? That we're just like you. We're wearing the same uniforms. We're all part of the same country. But that country's now turning on all of us.
I'm Wondry, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers, Our History, Your Story. This is the second episode of our six-part series on the Great Depression.
After the stock market crashed in October 1929, an economic decline exploded into the worst financial calamity the world had ever seen. A year after the crash, factories shut down, banks failed, people lost their savings and their jobs. Throughout the country, people moved into Hooverville. In these shanty towns named to mock President Herbert Hoover, unemployed and houseless Americans built homes from scrap metal and discarded building supplies.
It was a tenuous, unhealthy and dirty existence, but it was the only option for thousands of people, and the sight of huge lines, weighing for soup and a loaf of bread, quickly became one of the period's most enduring images.
Nevertheless, President Hoover repeatedly refused to sign legislation meant to stimulate the economy, or to provide direct financial relief to needy Americans. Instead, he continued to assert that the crisis was temporary, and the government should keep its hands off the economy while business righted the ship. And even as public opinion begins souring toward the President, Hoover didn't adapt his position.
Instead, he lost patience with his critics. In a letter to a Secretary of Commerce in June 1930, the President bemoaned labor coalitions were manipulating public opinion by imposing on a lot of ignorant people. He wanted his administration to push back as forceable as possible, to cite statistics about how his administration had already authorized public buildings, cooperated with state and local governments, and urged utilities, railroads, and other large businesses to help alleviate unemployment.
It's a chilly afternoon in mid-October 1930. You stand on 54th Street, a few buildings away from the corner of Lexington, where you've been staked out for the past four nights. Breeze blows a few dead leaves past you, and you shiver. You blow on your fingers to warm your hands, and take a deep breath.
Two men in dapper clothes turned down 54th Street from Lex. You catch their eye.
两名穿着时尚的男士从莱克斯大街拐进54街。你引起了他们的注意。
Apples, fresh juicy apples, straight from Washington, just a nickel to keep the doctor away.
新鲜多汁的苹果,直接从华盛顿送来,只要五便士就能远离医生。
The men take a long look, but pass without stopping. You realize they're more interested in your figure than the apples. As a young woman who used to work in an office, it's embarrassing enough to stand out here with that sign behind you in big red letters, unemployed, buy apples, five cents each.
You were the first woman in your family to work for herself. You started as a galf-ride in an important office, and were picking up more responsibilities until the crash. But even after the crash, things didn't seem so bad. Work even picked up for a while. Your office was so busy sorting out clients' accounts in those first few months. But then it got quiet. Too quiet. They let you go in August.
An older woman approaches from down the street. I'll take one. Great. Have your pick. She opens a small purse and takes out two quarters. It's so brave of you to do this for your family, sweetheart. It's not easy for your husband to know you're out here. You're not married, and you don't have children. But she's got fifty cents in her hand.
You smile and offer her two apples. Oh no need dear. You keep the change. You're struck by the woman's generosity. But it's tinge with guilt for not telling her the truth. But that's what it takes to survive, you think. At least for another day. You got to do what you got to do.
In the fall of 1930, Apple growers in Washington state grew more fruit than they were able to sell. Face with the need to move the produce, Joseph Sikker came up with a solution that would also allow his International Appleshipers Association to get some good press.
Subsidized by a $10,000 donation from produce interests, Sikker arranged for unemployed people to buy a case of 72 apples for the price of $1.75. Benders would then claim spots on New York street corners where they sell the apples at five cents a piece. A vendor who sold every apple in a carton could net a dollar and eighty-five cents profit. The same is about twenty-eight dollars today.
Apple selling stirred mixed emotions. Benders were pleased to have the work, but selling on the street was far less dignified than the bank and factory and retail jobs many of the vendors once held. There were thousands of apples that Sikker's company needed to move, and thousands of newly unemployed people took them up on the idea. At first, pushing apples was a successful escape from poverty, but by spring there were simply too many vendors. They couldn't compete in a crowded marketplace.
Meanwhile, supply diminished, so the association eventually had to raise wholesale prices. Soon, it just didn't make sense to remain an apple vendor at all. While vending was a short-term fix for many, in the long run, resentment among the unemployed was growing. Soon the pain penetrated the cultural zeitgeist.
By 1932, the site of beggars asking for spare change was common. That same year, Lee Schubert produced the third iteration of his musical review, Americana.
For the end of the show's first act, writer J.P. McAvoy wrote a satirical piece about bread lines. It climaxed with the song, Brother, Can You Spare A Dine? The song was written by musician J.Gorny and lyricist I.Y. Yip Harberg.
The pair, so the story goes, wrote it after a panhandler, asked them the titular question while they walked together through Central Park. Gorny and Harberg had already been tapped to write a song for Americana, but they hadn't figured out the lyrics yet.
But with Brother Can You Spare A Dine, they not only had a hit lyric, but a stirring lament about the working men who built the country getting tossed aside. The song quickly became a popular anthem. Recordings of it by Bing Crosby and Rudy Valley became huge hits. It was so popular that as President Hoover sought re-election in 1932, his allies had tried to ban radios from playing it.
But the presidential election was still two years away. In the midterm election of November 1930, Democrats picked up 52 seats and a one-vote majority in the House of Representatives. They also picked up eight seats in the Senate, the Republican still controlled that body through Vice President Charles Curtis' ability to break ties.
Still, it was obvious that Hoover was losing ground. In August of 1930, perhaps with the upcoming election on his mind, he established a new committee to focus on jobs, the President's Emergency Committee for Employment. Two months later, the President announced the committee's members.
Hoover named Colonel Arthur H. Woods as the chair. Born in Boston, Woods attended Harvard, and after college, he briefly worked as a newspaper reporter in New York, and at his father's lumber business in Mexico for a few years. Then, when he returned to New York, Woods maneuvered himself into a job as head detective and deputy commissioner of the police department, where he stayed off and on until 1917.
Once the U.S. entered World War I, Woods left the police department to serve as a military propagandist. Soon afterward, he met Hoover, who was then President Warren G. Harding's Commerce Secretary. In Woods, Hoover found a bureaucrat who was savvy in public relations. Woods was also cozy with big business. He was married to financier JP Morgan's niece. He also was a lieutenant of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and ran many of his business operations.
Woods quickly became the point person for everyone who had a scheme to get the country out of its employment mess. When he introduced the particulars of the commission to the country in a full-page piece for the New York Times, he underscored the administration's belief that direct relief, what some called handouts or charity, would be a last resort.
The key stress woods had to be cooperation at all levels of society. He wrote, Personally, I have no fears as to that end. We are going to win just as we always have when facing crises such as the one we're now passing through. With the government, the state and local authorities, businesses and industry, the splendid labor organizations, the great relief organizations, all working hand and hand, we cannot lose. It is simply a matter of cooperation by everybody concerned.
In December, Hoover also selected a new labor secretary after his previous one was elected to the US Senate, Hoover chose William and Doke, a former railway worker and vice president of the Brotherhood of Railway Training for the position. Together, Woods and Doke would define the administration's policies to fight unemployment on a national level, while local leaders developed their own strategies.
In Southern California, an ambitious and controversial plan was formed. To get neighbors helping neighbors in a time of need, you would end up tearing thousands of families apart.
Hi, it's Jack Hilmer. I'd like to tell you about my new audio drama series, The Lessor Dead, Available Add Free and Exclusively on Wondering Place.
嗨,我是杰克·希尔默。我想和你分享我的新音频剧系列《亡者租户》。它只在 Wondering Place 上提供无广告的独家播放。
I played Joey Peacock, an irreverent, eternally young 19-year-old vampire, lives with his unconventional family below the streets of 1978 New York City. Many driver plays our fearsome leader, Margaret McManus. She and Joey have some history.
You know, Joseph, there's nights I think you might be salvageable, and there's nights I'm convinced you're an Egypt right down to your bones. Can you guess which kind of item I have in now? I have. I don't know if it's your target.
Despite their differences, Margaret has managed to keep Joey and the rest of their group safe for decades, until one night when they find three little kid vampires, and Joey's world is turned upside down forever.
Hey, I'm Mike Corey, the host of Wondaries Against the Odds. In our next season, three friends, backcountry skiing in Alaska, disturb a hibernating bear, and she attacks. The skiers must wait for help to arrive before one of them succumbs to his injuries. Listen to Against the Odds on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.
嘿,大家好,我是迈克·科里,是节目《Wondaries Against the Odds》的主持人。在我们接下来的一个季节中,三个朋友在阿拉斯加的野外滑雪时,惊扰了一只冬眠的熊,结果它突然袭击了他们。滑雪者们必须等待救援到来,否则其中一个人将因伤势而不支。欢迎在亚马逊音乐或其他播客平台收听《Against the Odds》。
Imagine it's a sunny February afternoon in 1931. In a crowded plaza on your downtown Los Angeles, known as La Placita. This month, a new employment committee started in the city, and you're here to do your part. You're looking for someone to help you paint your house. It's not a big job, but maybe it'll make a difference to someone.
While you look around, the sound of mariachi music blends with the voices of people arguing about politics. Kids screech and giggle as they run around, vendors tout tempting snacks with enthusiastic yells. But suddenly, the plaza quiets. Men, white men, surround the plaza. Some of them seem to have batons and guns. They're blocking the exits.
There are hundreds of people here. All of them are being stopped as they attempt to exit. At least, everyone who looks like you. You see a white family walk right past one of the men, without him even taking a glance. But the next moment, he stopped to Chinese couple. Then you bureau of immigration. Are you a citizen? Yes, yes, sir. Can you prove it? Excuse me? Prove it. Yes, can you prove you're a citizen? I am. I've lived in Los Angeles my entire life. Why should I believe you? You could be lying to me. If you don't have proof, you're just going to need to come to make it.
You try to argue, but he's having none of it. And you have nothing on you to prove your citizenship. Why would you? Sure, your parents are from Mexico. But they came here before you were born. You were born not just two miles away from the spot where you now stand. This is a mistake. But you don't know how you'll sort it out.
Rage like the one in LA were the brainchild of a man named Charles P. Vizel. Vizel saw an opportunity when Herbert Hoover announced his president's emergency committee on employment. At the beginning of 1931, the city of Los Angeles established the Citizens Committee on Coordination of Unemployment Relief.
To lead the committee, city leabers tapped Vizel. Vizel took to the work quickly. Announcing the committee to the press, he urged every civic group, charity, business, and home in the city to find work that needed to be done. Whether a minor household repair or the installation of new equipment in a workshop, Vizel stressed it was crucial for local voters to find work their neighbors could do.
It wasn't a coincidence that Vizel used the word voters. In fact, he made it clear that Angelinos should give preference to employing the city's residents and to give their first consideration to local people. What Vizel didn't announce is loudly was that shortly after taking his post, he reached out to Colonel Woods in D.C. with a plan to target Los Angeles's significant Mexican immigrant community.
It was this plan that led to a series of high-profile raids by immigration agents around Los Angeles in the first half of 1931. In the crackdown in Laplacita, 400 people were stopped and questioned. Only a dozen or so were actually arrested and deported, but the raid accomplished what Vizel told Woods and others he wanted, to make the migrant community fear that raids could happen anywhere at any time.
Targeting immigrants wasn't a new strategy. Early in the economic crisis, President Hoover urged his State Department to cut back on issuing visas to people it thought would later need public assistance. In reality, this kept out most immigrants, including Jewish refugees fleeing the rise of Nazism in Europe, whose assets had been seized by the German government.
This restrictive immigration policy dovetailed with protectionist tariffs on foreign imports the Hoover Champion. But even before Hoover's presidency, anti-immigrant sentiment was growing. This sentiment gained renewed fervor in the wake of the stock market crash, and it was stoked by the new addition to Hoover's administration, Labor Secretary William Doke.
At this time, the Bureau of Immigration was part of the Department of Labor, and so Doke had the final authority on immigration enforcement in the country, and he made no secret of his anti-immigrant position. He believed that any job that employed immigrants should instead be given to unemployed U.S. citizens.
Two days after the Los Angeles Times announced Vizel's appointment as chair of the city's Unemployment Relief Committee, he wired Colonel Woods, the recently appointed head of the president's employment commission, to find out how local law enforcement could help expel immigrants. Vizel knew about Secretary Doke's position, and he told Woods that police and sheriff's deputies might be able to help overburden federal immigration agents based in Los Angeles.
Woods told Vizel to contact Doke directly. In a telegram he sent to Labor Secretary, Vizel described how an influx of agents from other cities might scare many thousand alien deportables out of this district. He called it the result desired.
Vizel wasn't interested so much in the numbers of arrests or deportations from the raids. Instead, he wanted to create a climate of fear for immigrants that would make remaining in Los Angeles untenable. To accomplish that, he publicized the anti-immigrant drive through press releases and photos.
In DC, Doke approved the plan and instructed the immigration bureau to send a special investigator back by several agents from other parts of the country to support Vizel's effort. Later that January, newspapers began to carry the news that a deportation drive was coming.
Vizel told the newspapers that the drive would remove an enormous number of illegal aliens. In follow-up stories, he urged illegal immigrants in the U.S. to leave peacefully so the immigration agents on their way to California wouldn't have to deport them. It was largely a theatrical threat, but it was effective.
Soon special repatriation trains began running between Los Angeles and the border cities in Arizona and Texas. The Mexican government even helped offer pay for its citizens to return to the country. However, the mood shifted as newspapers reported that immigrants would be forcibly removed. Rafael de la Colina, Mexico's consul in Los Angeles, reached out to allies at the city's chamber of commerce to find out more about Vizel's plan.
By April, Colina reported that as many as 10,000 Mexicans were leaving Southern California for Mexico every month. The deportation scheme was meant to target unemployment. But the departure of so many people to Mexico started to adversely impact businesses in LA. Emergency Association reported that businesses that relied on Mexican workers and consumers had lost 20 to 50% of their revenue. Labor shortages on farms also threatened citrus, walnut, and other crop harbests.
And the government wasn't just forcing immigrants out. They were still keeping them from coming in. By spring 1931, the administration touted that it had blocked more than 100,000 potential immigrants from securing visas. Dope proudly claimed that these efforts were protecting American citizens' struggling to find work, and he articulated his position in a statement to newspapers.
Some may say to deport these people is inhuman, but my answer is that the government should protect its own citizens against illegal invaders. This I propose to do with every weapon in my power. Law is law, and I intend to enforce it as long as I hold my office.
Migrants from all over the world were affected. Mexican immigrants drew the most scrutiny, but Chinese laborers, Japanese migrants, and arrested gangsters and criminals with connections to Italy and other European countries were all threatened with deportation. Federal agents started staking out the anjances to churches, dance halls, and shops where they expected to find immigrants.
They would wait until an event ended, then demand proof from those leaving that they were legally allowed to be in the country. This unprecedented crackdown generated palpable terror. Neighborhoods that were normally lively and boisterous became ghost towns. People fearful of being swept up in raids avoided leaving their homes.
But in late April 1931, challenges to the administration's immigration push started to appear. In one high-profile case, Guido Serio, an Italian communist, gave a speech in Pennsylvania, and was arrested on charges of advocating violence in order to be deported. The ACLU took up Serio's case. His lawyer William J. Donovan, a prominent Republican and an assistant attorney general for President Calvin Coolidge, claimed Serio's arrest was unconstitutional and deportation back to Italy, where he faced execution by the fascist government he opposed, was a death sentence.
During the trial he presented a commitment from the Soviet Union to pay for Serio to be sent there instead of Italy. The judge in the case recommended that solution, but Dauke in D.C. refused, stalling in court for a year before finally relenting and allowing Serio to travel to the Soviet Union. Another case involved Lillian Larsch, a mother of four who had been born in the United States, but when she married a Canadian, as a woman, Larsch lost her citizenship. After her husband William died, she and her youngest daughter, who had been born in the US, were deported.
If Lillian Larsch had been the foreigner and her husband the citizen, this deportation wouldn't have happened. Moreover, these gender-based rules had been revoked before Larsch's case arose, but Dauke's office refused to apply the new rules to her. Larsch's case wasn't unique, but it generated enough public outrage that New York Congressman Samuel Dixstein used it to denounce the Labor Department's deportation mania as lawless and anachronistic. More criticism appeared all summer.
Despite Los Angeles, hinted at the coordination between Vizel, Woods, and Dauke, and accried the campaigns precisely timed psychological strokes. But the most notable scrutiny came out of D.C. The Wicker-Sham Commission, set by President Hoover to investigate law enforcement, found that when it came to immigration, there was poor administration and great disregard for the fundamental rights secured by the Constitution to all persons, including even aliens.
The Commission's report described federal agents use of coercion and questionable methods, and immigration proceedings that took place outside the normal legal system. In response, the Commission recommended better training of immigration agents and that an open independent board of judges oversee immigration proceedings. But even before the report was made public, Dauke was denouncing his detractors as un-American. He tried to quash the report and continued to defend his immigration and unemployment strategies, even as the economy continued to struggle.
The Hoover administration continued to focus on perceived threats from foreigners inside and outside the country. But a new challenge came from the American citizens who had given to this country the most. Veterans.
The Washington Post Imagine its late April, 1932. It's a typical gloomy and wet spring day in Portland, Oregon, as you and your fellow veteran walled trudge east. You've got nothing to do today, again. You want wanted to see how the boys that couldn't afford a hotel were doing in the gulch. Walking over the Burnside Bridge, you turn north at grand.
You think you're really going to go through with it, Walt? Marching all the way to Washington, demanding our bonuses? Well, why not? What other choice do we have? Wilman Eye can't feed our kids on packing fruit only half the year, standing in shop windows at Meyer and Frank to demonstrate razors and cigarette rolling machines and whatever else. Inside the government owes us. We won that war for them.
That we did. But I can't do it alone. To win this war, we're going to need to find an army of our own. You reach the edge of Sullivan's gulch and walk a mile or so east of the Willamette River. Beneath you spreads a city of tents. Campfire smoke hangs between the canyon walls. Everything seems splattered with mud, including the faces you see as you approach, telling you both misery and brotherhood.
It reminds you of the argon for a moment. You stop and turn to Walt. Here's your army. One of the darkest moments in the Great Depression began with tremendous hope. It might even have begun with one person's dream. Born in Eastern Oregon and raised in Idaho, Walter W. Waters thought he would be a teacher when he grew up.
Instead, he left school, joined the Idaho National Guard, and served on the U.S. Mexico border, assisting attempts to capture revolutionary Mexican general Pancho Vía, after Vía's incursion to New Mexico. Five weeks after he returned from the border, the U.S. entered the World War. Waters joined the army and shipped to France, where he fought as part of an artillery company. After his discharge, Waters tried a variety of occupations.
Just he opened a general store, then he started a Chevrolet dealership in Southern Oregon, and the second one in Indiana. There, he met and married Wilma Albertson. In 1928, Walt and Wilma moved to the Pacific Northwest, where they worked as itinerant fruit canners. Eventually, a stable job as supervisor opened up at a cannery in Wenachee, Washington. Waters was successful enough in Wenachee that he and Wilma bought a car and a house. Soon they had two children, that even saved some money.
But then in December 1930, the cannery closed. To survive, Waters dipped into his nest egg. When that rain out, he pond his watch, then Wilma pond hers. I sold everything we had, and still there was no job. Waters told a newspaper reporter, so there is nothing left but to set up an organized movement to appeal to Uncle Sam for the bonus he owes us.
Waters moved to Portland. There he found a room at the low-rent Earl Hotel, where he befriended a number of other tenants over games of P-Nuckle. Their conversation frequently turned to the cash bonus veterans had been promised in 1924. Congress had overridden, then President Coolidge's veto, to pass a bill granting veterans up to $1,000, nearly $15,000 in today's terms, for their service in the war. However, the government wouldn't pay the bonus until 1945. It may as well have been an eternity for the veterans, and Waters repeatedly said as much.
He and other veterans had suffered intense trauma fighting the war. Now they felt like they were simply being discarded by their country. Disabled, and sickened by the machine guns and fetid conditions of the conflict's trench warfare, many returning veterans missed out on the rush of the roaring 20s. For them, employment opportunities were scant, even before the stock market crashed. Wilma eventually came to Portland to join Walter after he found another canary job. But that fizzled also, and the two struggled to make ends meet. Walter began talking about demanding his bonus be paid early.
And in Washington, D.C., a Texas Congressman named Wright Patman was working on a bill that, if passed, would grant veterans their bonuses early. He first introduced it in 1929, but it didn't make it out of committee. Two years later, he tried again. That time it passed, but President Hoover vetoed it. As Waters faltered in Portland, he wondered whether Congressman Patman could be convinced to try it again.
Waters began speaking to small groups of veterans about the bonus. Many agreed that it should be paid immediately. Their anger was raw, and Waters, a gifted public speaker, was able to stoke it. Why not march on Washington, one of his friends at the Earl Hotel Joke? Instead of dismissing him, though, Waters realized this might be his only option. He started sharing this idea with other veterans he was meeting, and soon he had persuaded nearly 300 people to march with him all the way to the nation's capital.
The group left Portland on May 12th. They called themselves the bonus expeditionary force, or BEF. The name was a play on American expeditionary forces, their deployment during the World War. During American flags, singing songs, bugling and hoisting posters, wearing medals and other decorations, they traveled nearly 300 miles a day, some packed into old cars, other hopped rail box cars, some hitchhiked. Occasionally, sympathetic truck drivers picked them up. Newspaper reporters quickly caught wind of their journey and spread news of the pilgrimage.
Other veterans started expeditions of their own, causing the march to swell as different contingents met up. Everywhere the march went, support followed. Mothers of soldiers brought cups of coffee, mayors organized food drives and hosted parades, and Indiana, after Baltimore and Ohio railroad officials refused to move trains at the border where the marchers were camped. Governor Harry Leslie ordered the National Guard to send trucks to bring the marchers across his state. And on May 29th, 1932, Memorial Day, or Decoration Day as it was known then, 16 truckloads of marchers arrived in Washington, D.C. What had begun as a few hundred Portlanders had grown into an army of thousands.
They arrived in torn, soiled and sometimes ill-fitting uniforms, worn over amputated limbs and emaciated bodies. As they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, the veterans smiled and waved at onlookers. Waters had gone ahead of the group to smooth their arrival with the local police superintendent, Helen Glasford, and to meet with Congressman Patman. Congressman Tenden Glasford told Waters the army could only stay for 48 hours. After that, they may have to leave. Waters knew what to say and reply. We will camp in Washington until the bonus is paid.
Camp they did. The BEF settled in parks all the way from the capital to the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue. Some occupied vacant buildings. There were so many people that the BEF built a massive sprawling tent city on a flood plane next to the Anacostia River. Dwarfing even the largest Hooverville, the camp was well organized and teaming with activity.
It was filled with American flags, signs announcing various state regiments and protest placards with slogans like, everyone benefited from the war but those who won it. And I voted for Hoover too, remember November. Waters recognized that his message could be muddled if it wasn't properly managed. If the marchers wanted to convince Congress to take up Patman's bill again, they needed to be disciplined.
So to tame the army, Waters and other leaders of the group established strict rules. No drinking, no panhandling, and crucially, no radicalism. They developed a military-style hierarchy to run the camp, topped by Waters and two other Portlanders, as well as a fourth man from Salt Lake City. They set up a headquarters and a mess, and they established cooking details to make meals for the army in huge cookpots. The Oregon delegation was split into 40 person contingents led by three officers each.
Buglers played taps at 11 each night and reveille at six every morning. Military police force enforced the camp's rules. Meanwhile, back in Portland, Wilma Waters grew impatient waiting for her husband. It was clear from newspaper reports, phone calls, and letters that the march wouldn't be over quickly.
With her cannery wages and the few bucks she earned by demonstrating cigarette rolling machines in department store windows, Wilma began her own journey. She started out hitchhiking across the United States and quickly discovered that she was far from alone. In addition to still more thousands of veterans crossing the country to join the bonus army, tens of thousands of veterans' wives, mothers, and children also converged on Washington.
The encampment on the Anacostia grew to 43,000 people. They marched around the Capitol building and crowded its steps. Soon the House of Representatives agreed to take up Patman's Bill, passing it to 111-176. It still needed Senate approval though. After two days of debate with crowds surrounding the Senate, the body rejected Patman's Bill, 62 votes to 18.
Marchers were stunned, but instead of exploding in rage, they dispersed back to their encampments. Hoover thought the Bill's failure meant the end of the episode. He urged Congress to find the money to buy boss and train tickets to send the marchers back home. Congress did appropriate the money, but few veterans accepted the tickets. Instead, the BEF remained in its encampment. However, discontent grew.
It ran low, and people started to get sick, in fighting began, and Waters was voted out and then back into leadership. He became angrier and more dictatorial. He also grew more combative with the police. And all the while, the BEF continued to march on the Capitol. Finally, on the morning of July 28th, Washington police surrounded the marchers with orders to evict them from abandoned buildings on the pretense that the Treasury Department, which owned the buildings, planned to reclaim them.
And the veterans refused to vacate, police tried to forcefully evict them. Word spread among the thousands of veterans camped elsewhere, and soon they came to their fellow marchers' aid. A standoff began. Someone threw a brick, and the situation ignited. Police and veterans fought in the abandoned buildings and streets. The police swung batons, the bonus marchers armed themselves with bits of scrap iron and concrete. Suddenly, six gunshots rang out.
William Hushka, a Lithuanian-born veteran who joined the march in St. Louis, was killed instantly. He would later be buried with full honors in Arlington National Cemetery. Another, Eric Carlson, of Oakland, died later of his wounds. Two police officers also reportedly died of injuries suffered in the fighting.
The melee was justification enough for Herbert Hoover to order the military to evict the bonus army from its encampment. He summoned the army chief of staff, a young general Douglas MacArthur, to clear the marchers. MacArthur, who would rise to prominence during World War II, commanded cavalry, tanks, and a thousand foot soldiers wearing gas masks and carrying bayonet-tip rifles. MacArthur's second command was Dwight D. Eisenhower, then a colonel, and leading the cavalry was then major George Patton.
During tear gas and sabers, troops pushed the bonus army veterans out of the encampments, crushing their makeshift houses and setting fire to them as they did. By nightfall, the encampment was incinders, and the bonus army in disarray. Bernard Mayer, a 12-week-old baby, died after inhaling tear gas.
In the weeks that followed, Walter Waters and another Portlander, George Kleinholz, tried to transform the B.E.F. into a political organization, but the bonus army was defeated that night. Waters channeled the pain and resentment of a generation into a peaceful, but angry political movement. Now there was a body count, but the veterans wouldn't be the only victims of the violence in Washington.
A torrent of dis-satisfied voters will direct their ire at industrialists, at financiers, and at President Hoover. On the next episode of American History Tellers, as Hoover presides over the worst market crash in history, the 1932 election is the Democrats to lose. A New York governor, distantly related to a past president, sweeps into office promising a seismic shift in the size and scope of the federal government, and a flurry of new government programs begin, putting thousands back to work while reshaping the American political landscape.
From wondering, this is American History Tellers. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you're listening on a smartphone, tap or swipe over the cover art of this podcast. You'll find the episode notes, including some details you may have missed.
我是American History Tellers,希望你喜欢这一集。如果你在智能手机上听,请轻轻点击或滑动此播客的封面图像。你会找到本集的笔记,包括你可能错过的一些细节。
One of the best ways to show your appreciation is to give us a five-star rating and leave a review. You can also find us and me on Twitter and Facebook. Follow the show at AH Tellers, and I'm at Lindsay A. Graham. And thank you.
American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsay Graham for airship, sound designed by Derek Barons. This episode is written by Bill Lasher, edited by Dorian Marina, edited and produced by Jenny Lauer Beckman, produced by George Lavender. Our executive producer is Marshall Lui, created by her non-lopes for wondering.