In lieu of assistance, though, Americans resorted to extraordinary shifts. In Kentucky miners ate wild greens, violet tops, forget-me-nots and "such weeds as cows eat." In Pennsylvania they devoured roots and dandelions. Some of the unemployed availed themselves of scraps kindly donated by Princeton dining clubs. Others consumed leftovers from restaurants, as recommended by Secretary of War Patrick Hurley. In Kansas farmers burned wheat to keep warm—a bushel now fetched only around $0.3o, as compared to $3 in 192o. Corn, too, was cheaper than coal; as it blazed in stoves all over the prairies the air turned thick with blue smoke and a smell rather like that of coffee roasting. In Washington State lumberjacks started forest fires to earn money fighting them. In Arkansas families lived in caves. When the Russians advertised for 6,000 skilled workers more than too,000 applied to go to the Soviet Union. Nearly 3o states established systems of barter and in Washington State stores issued and accepted wooden currency. To prevent the school system from collapsing entirely, teachers were often boarded out with families on a rota basis. Students found ever more ingenious methods to work their way through college—at Ohio State University two young men started a "dog laundry," washing and coiffing the pets of the opulent. More radical solutions to domestic ills were much canvassed but had lit-tle effect. "People were talkin' revolution all over the place," recalled one contemporary. President Hoover himself worried that "timid people, black with despair, have lost faith in the American system" and were now advocating foreign "economic patent medicines." He warned of the "armed revolutions" that had occurred "in a score of countries" during the previ-ous two years and declared that in the United States there was no need for "revolutionary change."Many Americans disagreed. Some wanted revo-lution from above and the establishment of a "corporate state" along Fas-cist lines. The explosive General Hugh Johnson, who was to be a pioneer of Roosevelt's New Deal, called for "Musellinny, Dictator, pro tern." When a young man solicited Newton D. Baker's support for the Chicago Student Congress Against War and Fascism, the pacifist former Secretary of War responded: "Maybe it would be a good thing if we had a war. Kill off some of our unemployed."45 Others went to different extremes. Edmund Wilson was one of a num-ber of middle-class intellectuals who concluded that "Karl Marx's predic-tions are in the process of coming true." Capitalism was in crisis because of its inherent contradictions: economic competition resulted in greater industrial efficiency at the expense of the workers, so "the more cheaply and easily goods can be produced, the fewer people are able to consume them."46 By contrast, Wilson was impressed by the apparent success of Stalin's Five Year Plan, which the New York Times's Moscow correspondent in Russia, Walter Duranty, described as "a stroke of genius."47 But though some Americans agreed with the journalist Lincoln Steffens that all roads led to Moscow, few travelled that far. The Communist party numbered only 12,000 by 1932, though Representative Hamilton Fish's Congres-sional investigation conjured with figures as large as 500,000, adding that the leaders were mostly "of Jewish origin" and that their followers "speak English with an accent, if at all."48 The bourgeoisie were certainly alarmed by the Red Menace, by the prospect of barricades in the streets, the mas-sacre of property owners, the communalisation of American women and associated horrors. In Kansas the Daughters of the American Revolution made children's street-crossing guides use green flags instead of red ones in case the young should learn to accept the red flag as an emblem of authority. But there was no revolutionary rift between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Indeed, guilt-ridden middle-class liberals seeking a new faith were probably more inclined to embrace Communism than were embit-tered members of the working class, whose main concern was survival.
and
Most departed, but many had nowhere to go and clung to their toehold in Washington. Despite Glassford's diplomacy, frustration led to confrontation. Trouble broke out over the veterans' occupation of several buildings near the Capi-tol which were due for demolition. On the morning of 28 July 1932 a near-riot occurred when Glassford tried to evict them. In the ensuing melee police shot two veterans dead and wounded others while suffering a num-ber of injuries themselves. Amid much confusion federal intervention was called for. The flame-haired Secretary of War Patrick Hurley wanted to declare martial law but Hoover refused, giving strict instructions that the army should simply clear the disputed buildings. Tragically, the army's flamboyant Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, had no com-punction about disobeying orders he disliked. In deference to the anti-military prejudices of the time officers at the War Department wore mufti, but MacArthur now donned his individually designed uniform with its English whipcord jodhpurs and its six rows of ribbons. He also sent his aide, Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, home to change. Ike protested, partly because he thought the Chief of Staff had no business conducting opera-tions personally and partly because it was such hell getting on his boots. MacArthur, like other self-appointed men of destiny, was unmoved by such objections. He told Glassford, "We're going to break the back of the BEF. "
So, in the late afternoon of 28 July, four troops of cavalry, six whippet tanks and four companies of steel-helmeted infantry with fixed bayonets and machine-guns advanced down Pennsylvania Avenue. They were accompanied by 300 city police and squads of Secret Service and Treasury agents. Not realising the advancing troops' purpose, the old soldiers of the BEF initially cheered MacArthur's young ones. But the latter deployed and waded into veterans and bystanders alike. The infantry fired tear-gas bombs and set fire to small squatters' camps en route. The cavalry charged down the sidewalks as well as the street, beating terrified people with the flats of their sabres (though George S. Patton Jr. afterwards claimed to have cut off a veteran's ear). The crowd of onlookers, mostly shoppers and office workers on their way home, booed, hissed and harassed MacArthur's men. The BEF—astonished, furious, and demoralised—put up little resistance and retreated to Anacostia Flats. Scores of people were injured. Hoover sent MacArthur two specific orders not to follow the veterans over the river. But the General was "very much annoyed [at] having his plans interfered with in any way until they were executed completely."56 Late that evening they were carried out when, after a pause for food and rest, troops crossed the bridges. Overawed by the show of force, the veterans snatched up what tattered possessions they could carry and fled. Amid the glare of the burning shantytown they melted away, to become refugees in their own land. It was later said that the veterans set fire to their own huts as a last ges-ture of defiance. In fact MacArthur ordered the holocaust and by morning the Hooverville was gutted. The Chief of Staff himself gave a press confer-ence (against Eisenhower's advice) at which he insisted that stern measures had been necessary because the BEF was "animated by the essence of revo-lution."57 He went so far as to say that if it had remained in Washington for another week the government might have been imperilled. Journalists ridiculed the notion that a successful uprising could have been achieved by "10,000 homeless, half-starved, unarmed victims of our social disor-der!" And they accused Hoover of staging the entire episode for electoral purposes, so that he could claim to have averted revolution.58 Actually Hoover was furious and in private he rebuked MacArthur. But with a political clumsiness that seemed to have become second nature to him, the President publicly supported the General.
Despite a barrage of criticism, the President stuck to his guns. And at the end of an exhausting campaign he blurted out, "Thank God you still have a government in Washington that knows how to deal with a mob."59 With its echoes of Communist and Fascist tyranny, this remark was the final nail in Hoover's political coffin. Of course, his failure to defeat the Depression made it virtually impossible for him to win the forthcoming presidential election. But by taking responsibility for the bonus rout and by justifying it so unconvincingly, Hoover destroyed at a stroke his long-established reputation as an honest humanitarian. Instead he had become, it was commonly said, the first American president to make war on citi-zens in the streets of their own capital. Certainly Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was to run against Hoover, had every reason to be grateful to General MacArthur: Roosevelt regarded him as an embryonic Mussolini and one of the two most dangerous men in the country (the other being Huey Long). While sitting on the porch at his Hyde Park home listening to a radio report of MacArthur's famous victory over the BEF, Roosevelt allegedly turned to his friend Felix Frankfurter and said, "Well, Felix, this will elect me."6° By then, indeed, Herbert Hoover was the most unpopular president since Rutherford B. Hayes had occupied the White House 5o years previ-ously. He had fostered so many illusions about the imminent return of prosperity that, amid the wreckage of millions of lives, nothing was left but disillusionment. Hoover had failed to meet the greatest peacetime cri-sis in the Republic's history. He had, critics plausibly argued, secured "big-ger and better opportunities for the rich men to inherit the earth" but afforded poor men only "the right to starve while standing on [their] own feet." Whatever he felt, he had expressed no real emotion about the coun-try's plight. The writer Sherwood Anderson suggested that Hoover's long stay in China had inclined him to think of poor Americans as coolies. The Nation went so far as to accuse Hoover of "cold-blooded . . . murder."'' Yet by the end of his presidency Hoover was spending unprecedented sums on public works. They were too little and too late but the President got no credit anyway. He had ceased to carry conviction. He seemed an increasingly tragic figure, eclipsed by a catastrophe the scope of which he scarcely grasped. He talked confidently but looked grim and anxious. He lacked not only bonhomie but histrionic talents. He was a leader who shunned the limelight and scorned dramatic gestures. During the election campaign he alienated voters by his lacklustre mien and his obvious dis-like of crowds. A British journalist was struck by
the dispiriting influence of Mr. Hoover's personality, his unprepossessing exterior, his sour, puckered face of a bilious baby, his dreary, nasal monotone reading interminably, and for the most part inaudibly, from a typescript without a single inflection of a voice or gesture to relieve the tedium.62
Hoover seemed an engineer first and a human being second. His most loyal press supporter, William Allen White, said: "Politics after all is one of the minor branches of harlotry, and Hoover's frigid desire to live a virtu-ous life and not follow the Pauline maxim and be all things to all men, is one of the things that has reduced the oil in his machinery."
BY a strange congruence Hoover's Democratic opponent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was criticised precisely because he did attempt "to be all things to all men." Roosevelt seemed both weak and devious, prone to compromise, intent on popularity, a politician in every sense of the word. Walter Lippmann, doyen of American commentators, stamped his authority on this view. He lambasted Roosevelt for his "two-faced platitudes" and declared that the candidate was "an amiable man with many philanthropic impulses, but he is . . . too eager to please." Exposing "Furtive Frank's" ingratiating inconsistencies and complaisant super-ficialities, other journalists called him "the corkscrew candidate" and the "Feather Duster."" Huey Long, who scandalised Hyde Park with his loud suit, orchid shirt and pink necktie, agreed. Hardly a model of political integrity himself, he thought charm an inadequate substitute for conviction. "When I talk to [Roosevelt] he says 'Fine! Fine! Fine!' But [Sena-tor] Joe Robinson goes to see him the next day, and again he says 'Fine! Fine! Fine!' Maybe he says 'Fine!' to everybody."67 Much in Roosevelt's career suggested that this was exactly what he did. From the first he was preternaturally dutiful towards his possessive mother, Sara, an iron matriarch who regarded the Roosevelts as too grand to dine with the Vanderbilts. Franklin, born in 1882, was an only child and a distant cousin of the future President, Theodore Roosevelt—a relation-ship he never hesitated to exploit. His childhood was privileged, protected and peripatetic. At Hyde Park, where his father played the squire on his estate beside the Hudson River, Franklin enjoyed country pursuits and outdoor sports such as horseback riding and sailing. Aged 14 he was sent to Groton, where he came under another dominating influence, that of its Arnold-like headmaster the Rev. Endicott Peabody (who would vote for Hoover). At Harvard Roosevelt shone socially if not academically. But he was to describe his failure to become a member of the exclusive PorcelTian Club as the greatest disappointment of his life, a curious revelation of spiritual dilettantism. Roosevelt conformed to the point of priggishness, even to the point of mendacity—he was a fluent and plausible liar. He sought easy accommodation, avoided bruising confrontation. He seemed lazy, shallow, affable, arrogant and patrician. Perhaps it was pride of caste when, in 1905, he married his awkward, unattractive cousin Eleanor, Presi-dent Teddy's favourite niece. Or perhaps he was taking the line of least resistance. It is impossible to tell because, for all his self-confident bon-homie, Franklin was ultimately inscrutable. From his youth up he had protected his psychological privacy. He never exposed the core of his being, though he did occasionally reveal his ambitions. In 1907 he informed his fellow clerks in the Wall Street law office he had joined that his goal was the White House. He would win a seat in the state assembly, secure appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and then become gover-nor of the Empire State. "Anyone who is governor of New York has a good chance to be President with any luck."" Roosevelt carried out this programme with remarkable fidelity. It is true that in 1910 he became a Democratic state senator, but otherwise he fol-lowed in his Republican cousin Teddy's footsteps. In particular he aspired to be both conservative and progressive, finding the golden political mean and drawing support from the widest possible constituency. So although he made his reputation by challenging the crooked Tammany machine, he afterwards took care to mend his fences with the New York power-brokers. In 1932 Walter Lippmann could remark that it was only through the magic of his name that Roosevelt had managed, "in spite of a working alliance with Tammany, to dissociate himself from it."69 By the same token Roosevelt maintained cordial relations with Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, while secretly undermining his boss in order to promote his own career. However, it was not in government offices where decisions were made or in smoke-filled rooms where influence was peddled that Roosevelt really shone. His genius was that of the communicator. Hav-ing overcome initial difficulties—the habitual tilt of his chin was taken for haughtiness—he established an uncanny rapport with voters. He was interested in people and sensitive to their concerns. Tall and handsome, he conveyed human warmth. "My friends . . ," he said, but unlike Ramsay MacDonald, who used the same formula, Roosevelt sounded as if he meant it. His speeches were little better than cliches. But he charged them with his own dynamism. His optimism was infectious. He radiated good cheer. Roosevelt needed all the good cheer he could muster to cope with the setbacks of middle age—the souring of his marriage as a result of his love
affair with Eleanor's social secretary, Lucy Mercer; his defeat as Demo-cratic candidate for the vice-presidency in 1920; and, worst of all, the attack of poliomyelitis which left him partially crippled the following year. Actually, in the view of Frances Perkins and others who knew Roosevelt well, this affliction transformed him from playboy politician into mature statesman. It supposedly purged him of frivolity, giving him a new humility, a sense of compassion and understanding, a spiritual serenity. Doubtless there is something in this. But the old Roosevelt was anything but defunct. The inveterate campaigner survived. He was still inclined to vanity, insincerity and occasional cruelty. His memory was as retentive as ever but his concentration span was just as short—he continued to skim rather than read. Immensely buoyant, jovial and energetic as always, he remained foxy, evasive and impenetrable. Most important of all, Roo-sevelt's charisma persisted. It was, if anything, enhanced. He proved that with his famous "Happy Warrior" speech nominating Al Smith at the Democratic convention in 1924. Boss Pendergast of Kansas City, who was powerful and cynical enough to boast that he had sent his "office boy" Harry Truman to the Senate, exclaimed after this speech that Roosevelt had "the most magnetic personality of any individual I have ever met." And one of Roosevelt's own correspondents said that, "His very crutches have helped him to the stature of the Gods."Four years later he again demonstrated his hold over the electorate. Although making every effort to regain the use of his legs, Roosevelt had kept himself in the forefront of national politics—he even claimed to be an honorary Southerner on the strength of his stays at the curative centre which he had built up at Warm Springs, Georgia. Thanks to his disability he had been able to distance himself from his party's failures and associate himself with its successes. Assisted by his political familiar, Louis Howe, an asthmatic, chain-smoking ex-journalist who looked like a "mediaeval gnome" and behaved like a modern Machiavelli, Roosevelt had main-tained contact with leading Democrats throughout the country. And, though reluctant to accept what he thought was an ill-timed draft from Al Smith, he finally agreed to run for the governorship of New York State in 1928. In his graphic way Smith dismissed doubts about the candidate's health—"A Governor does not have to be an acrobat"—and Roosevelt won by a whisker. To Al Smith's surprise he then proceeded to govern. This meant that he refused to be Smith's puppet at Albany, where he treated the governor's dingily baroque mansion as an antechamber to the White House. Roosevelt took initiatives that marked him down as a strong, progressive leader: he promoted state regulation of electric power, unemployment insurance and public works. On the other hand he conciliated bankers and conservatives. He even invited Tammany Hall to investigate itself, which was rather like asking Al Capone to assess his own taxes.
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