Hoover Sent MacArthur to Quell Protests. It Backfired, Badly.

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Herbert Hoover is best known for his role in worsening the Great Depression, but his fateful decision to use the military against ordinary citizens in the summer of 1932 was a self-inflicted wound that arguably marked the beginning of the end of his presidency. It’s an episode worth recalling as President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders seem hellbent on sending federal troops against protesters.

By the spring of 1932, unemployment had spiked to record highs. Among the dispossessed were veterans of World War I. As a condition of their service, these men had been promised a bonus pegged to the length of their service, but it wasn’t due to start until 1945.

Declaring themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Army, or BEF, the veterans marched on Washington to demand immediate payments. By early summer, at least 20,000 of them, along with their families, were living in shantytowns around the city.

They scored a victory when the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill releasing the bonus, but Senate Republicans blocked it. Rather than accepting defeat, thousands of protesters dug themselves in.

Hoover’s attorney general, William Mitchell, was less than sympathetic. Indeed, he claimed that the BEF was actually the “largest aggregation of criminals that had ever been assembled in the city at any one time,” including communists hellbent on overthrowing the government.

Persuaded, Hoover ordered the Army to join the Washington police in pressuring the largest encampment — across from the Navy Yard in Anacostia. The military leader given this job, Douglas MacArthur, was headstrong, impetuous and insubordinate. Though he was close to Hoover, MacArthur had a barely disguised contempt for civilian leadership. He quickly took matters into his own hands.

As Hoover announced that the troops would “put an end to rioting and defiance of civil authority,” MacArthur marshaled five tanks, a detachment of machine gunners, more than 200 mounted cavalry on horseback, and hundreds of infantrymen bearing rifles and bayonets. Several thousand additional troops waited in reserve. MacArthur’s subordinates included Dwight Eisenhower, who raised concerns about the wisdom of moving so aggressively against the protesters. Another deputy, George S. Patton, showed no misgivings.

As they moved down Pennsylvania Avenue during rush hour, the troops began clearing buildings occupied by remnants of the Bonus Army. Veterans and their families tried to evade bayonet-wielding troops and clouds of tear gas. Onlookers cried, “Shame! Shame!”

“The American flag means nothing to me after this,” a man reportedly yelled at MacArthur.

Rather than ignore the swipe, MacArthur threatened to arrest him. Then he and his troops moved across the bridge to Anacostia. Instead of following Hoover’s orders to simply surround the encampment, MacArthur led a direct assault. As tear gas rained down on the veterans, they fled in terror, wives and children in tow. The troops then trampled and burned the shantytown to the ground, driving the Bonus Army out of the nation’s capital in the middle of the night.

Hoover defended his insubordinate general despite newsreel footage that began screening in cinemas across the country. A number of politicians began expressing unease. “Use of federal troops against unarmed veterans, whether prompted by cowardice or stupidity, was an unpardonable outrage,” said Senator Bronson Cutting, a Republican from Utah.

Some newspapers put the matter more bluntly. The Washington News deplored the “pitiful spectacle” of watching “the great American Government, mightiest in the world, chasing unarmed men, women and children with army tanks.” Others, like the San Francisco Examiner, described the overwhelming — and utterly unnecessary — use of force as “without parallel in American annals.” And Franklin Roosevelt, upon hearing the news, reportedly told his advisers: “Well, this elects me.”

But public opinion did not instantly turn against Hoover. His claim that the Bonus Army was really a front for communist agitators proved convincing — until a grand jury for the District of Columbia failed to find evidence to back it up. Mitchell began drafting a deeply dishonest report to shore up the president’s case.

It backfired, spectacularly. The chief of police in Washington flatly disputed the report, and the the American Legion’s convention, a crucial gathering of veterans on the president’s re-election calendar, turned into a rebellion. Things quickly went from bad to worse after the secretary of war claimed that the soldiers had not set fire to the veterans’ makeshift shacks — despite the fact that footage showed them methodically doing so. As the New Republic observed, even a child could see through the ruse: “Mamma, the man isn’t telling the truth.”

Having lied about what happened, the administration found itself powerless against political opponents who began spinning the story in even darker directions. The Nation published a column titled “Tear-Gas, Bayonets, and Votes” that accused Hoover of attacking the Bonus Army in order to deflect the country’s attention from the Great Depression.

This may or may not have been true, but Paul Y. Anderson supplied details that were patently false: a baby hospitalized from exposure to gas; a veteran’s ear severed by a sword; a boy blinded by gas. These lurid details soon circulated widely, as did the claim, first raised by Mayor James Curley of Boston, that Hoover had ordered the troops to shoot the veterans “like dogs.” Having already squandered his credibility, Hoover was powerless. He lost control of the narrative.

Hoover probably would have lost the election regardless of how he handled the Bonus Army. But the incident became a defining moment of his presidency, one that long outlived the election of 1932. It became a staple of Democratic stump speeches, and the image of an out-of-touch Hoover sending tanks and machine guns to evict homeless veterans and their families became part of the Republican Party’s unwanted baggage for years to come.

In his memoirs written years later, Hoover complained bitterly about what happened. “A large part of the veterans believe to this day that men who served their country in war were shot down in the streets of Washington by the Regular Army at my orders.” He was dogged by these charges for the rest of his life. Our current president, so smitten with strongman tactics, might learn from Hoover’s lasting frustration: Sending in the troops against Americans is rarely as easy as it sounds.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, is a contributor to Bloomberg Opinion.

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