Free American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work by Nick Taylor

veterans staged boxing matches at Griffith Stadium (home of the Washington Senators baseball team) to raise money, wandered about, and waited, hoping that the visible evidence of their distress would finally move a majority in Congress.
    The president continued to ignore them. He said meeting with them wasn’t possible; he didn’t have the time. He had found time, however, to meet with National Geographic Society president Gilbert Grosvenor and flyer Amelia Earhart, to whom he awarded a gold medal. Meanwhile, barricades went up around the White House, impeding traffic and pedestrians alike.
    On July 11, Hoover vetoed a $2 billion public works jobs plan that might have sent the veterans home, calling it “a squandering of public money.” He signed another bill eagerly, however. This provided $100,000 in interest-free travel loans to the veterans, to be repaid when they finally got their bonuses. The bill imposed a July 15 deadline to accept the loans, so it was clearly designed to encourage them to leave the capital before Congress adjourned the following day. Those who did apply had their fingerprints taken, which the United States Bureau of Investigation, later to become the FBI, used to probe for criminal records and evidence of Communist involvement. They took their travel money, and began to trickle out of Washington by rail and road. But several thousand stayed, and new arrivals continued to roll in.
    When the final gavel fell on the congressional session, it left the veterans with no rationale for staying on. Their reservoirs of public sympathy were spent. Editorial pages that had supported them now called them ungrateful squatters thumbing their noses at authority. The administration spread suggestions that they were dominated by criminals and Communists and that the “better elements” had all gone home. Attorney General William D. Mitchell charged that they had “practically levied tribute” from small merchants. Finally, on July 28, Hoover directed that the “bonus forts” along Pennsylvania Avenue be cleared.
    It was an oppressively hot day. A pair of treasury agents appeared in the morning, ordered the veterans to leave, and went away when they refused. An hour later Glassford roared up on his big blue motorcycle and repeated the order, backed by police with nightsticks. After conferring with Waters, the veterans and their families began bundling up their clothes and cooking pots and taking down their faded flags, preparing to depart.
    When word of the evictions reached Camp Marks, some of the veterans there dashed across the 11th Street drawbridge before the police could raise it and converged on Pennsylvania Avenue and 3rd Street. Even so, the evictions proceeded peacefully for several hours. Then a new group arrived that pushed its way through police ropes and started hurling bricks and rocks pulled from the debris of the half-demolished buildings. Bricks struck Glassford, but he shook them off and headed for a vantage point on the second floor of one of the buildings, two policemen behind him. Those two were attacked with bricks, a loaded garbage can, and their own nightsticks, and at that point several policemen started shooting. One veteran fell dead and another collapsed with mortal wounds. Glassford shouted, “For God’s sake, stop shooting! Put your guns away and don’t shoot again!” His officers obeyed, but word of the clash reached the White House. Hoover ordered Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley to send in the army.
    MacArthur was ready, his troops and tanks on call at Fort Myer on the other side of the Potomac. At about four-thirty in the afternoon, the 200-man Third Cavalry, mounted and with sabers drawn, moved from the staging area at the Ellipse below the White House past the Treasury Building to Pennsylvania Avenue. Behind the cavalry came machine gun carriages and trucks carrying six small tanks, followed by some 400 infantrymen with bayonets fixed to their rifles and blue tear gas