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The Glory And The Dream
by
william manchester
BOOKS BY WILLIAM MANCHESTER
HISTORY THE DEATH OF A PRESIDENT November 20 November 25, 1963 THE ARMS OF KRUPP 1587 - 1968 THE GLORY AND THE DREAM A Narrative History of America, 1932 - 1972 BIOGRAPHY DISTURBER OF THE PEACE The Life of H. L. Mencken A ROCKEFELLER FAMILY PORTRAIT From John D. to Nelson PORTRAIT OF A PRESIDENT John F. Kennedy in Profile FICTION THE CITY OF ANGER SHADOW OF THE MONSOON THE LONG GAINER DIVERSION BEARD THE LION WILLIAM MANCHESTER THE GLORY AND THE DREAM A Narrative History of America LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY BOSTON- TORONTO COPYRIGHT 1973, 1974 BY WILLIAM MANCHESTER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. " resembled the besieged capital of an obscure European state. Since
May some twenty-five thousand penniless World War veterans had been
encamped with their wives and children in District parks, dumps,
abandoned warehouses, and empty stores. The men drilled, sang war
songs, and once, led by a Medal of Honor winner and watched by a
hundred thousand silent Washingtonians, they marched up Pennsylvania
Avenue bearing American flags of faded cotton. Most of the time,
however, they waited and brooded. The vets had come to ask their
government for relief from the Great Depression, then approaching the
end of its third year; specifically, they wanted immediate payment of the soldiers' "bonus"
authorized by the Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 but not due until
1945. If they could get cash now, the men would receive about $500 each. Headline writers had christened them "the Bonus Army," "the bonus marchers." They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force. B.E.F members had hoped in vain for congressional action. Now they appealed to President Hoover, begging him to receive a
delegation of their leaders. Instead he sent word that he was too busy and then proceeded to isolate
himself from the city. Presidential plans to visit the Senate were canceled; policemen
patrolled the White House grounds day and night. For the first time since the Armistice, the Executive Mansion gates
were chained shut. hoover locks self in white house, read a ~New York
Daily News headline. He went even further. Barricades were erected; traffic was shut down for a distance of one
block on all sides of the Mansion. A one-armed veteran, bent upon picketing, tried to penetrate the screen
of guards. He was soundly beaten and carried off to jail. In retrospect this panoply appears to have been the overreaction of a
frightened, frustrated administration. The bonus marchers were unarmed, had expelled radicals from their
ranks, and- despite their evident hunger- weren't even panhandling
openly. They seemed too weak to be a menace. Drew Pearson, a thirty-four-year-old Baltimore Sun reporter, described
them as "ragged, weary, and apathetic," with "no hope on their
faces." Increasingly, the B.E.F vigil had become an exercise in endurance. A health department inspector described the camps' sanitary conditions
as "extremely bad." Makeshift commissaries depended largely upon charity. Truckloads of food arrived from friends in Des Moines and Camden, New
Jersey; a hundred loaves of bread were being shipped each day from one
sympathetic baker; a thousand pies came from another; the Veterans of
Foreign Wars sent $500, and the bonus marchers raised another $2,500 by
staging boxing bouts among themselves in Griffith Stadium. It was all very haphazard. The administration was doing virtually nothing- Washington police had
aroused Hoover's wrath by feeding the District's uninvited guests
bread, coffee, and stew at six cents a day- and by mid-August brutal
temperatures were approaching their annual height, diminishing water
reserves and multiplying misery. In those years Washington was officially classified by the British
Foreign Office as a "sub-tropical climate." Diplomats loathed its wilting heat and dense humidity; with the
exception of a few downtown theaters which advertised themselves as
"refrigerated," there was no air-conditioning. In summer the capital was a city of awnings, screened porches, ice
wagons, summer furniture and summer rugs, and in the words of an
official guidebook it was also "a peculiarly interesting place for the
study of insects." Lacking shade or screens, the B.E.F was exposed to the full fury of the
season. When the vets' vanguard had entered the District, gardens were
flowering in their springtime glory. By July the blossoms of magnolia and azalea were long gone, and the
cherry trees were bare. Even the earth, it seemed, was pitiless. The vets had taken on the appearance of desert creatures; downtown
merchants complained that "the sight of so many down-at-the-heel men
has a depressing effect on business." That, really, was the true extent of their threat to the country. But if the B.E.F danger was illusion, Washington's obscurity on the
international scene in that era, and its dependency upon Europe, were
more substantive. Among the sixty-five independent countries then in the world, there was
but one superpower: Great Britain. The Union Jack flew serenely over one-fourth of the earth's arable
surface--in Europe, Asia, and Africa; North, Central, and South
America; Australia, Oceania, and the West Indies. The sun literally never sank upon it. Britain's Empire commanded the allegiance of 485 million people, and if
you wanted to suggest stability you said "solid as the Rock of
Gibraltar," or "safe as the Bank of England," which with the pound
sterling at $4.86 seemed the ultimate in fiscal security. Air power was the dream of a few little-known pilots and a cashiered
American general named Mitchell; what counted then was ships, and
virtually no significant world waterway was free of London's
dominion. Gibraltar, Suez, the Gulf of Aden, the Strait of Singapore, and the
Cape of Good Hope were controlled directly by the Admiralty. The Strait of Magellan was at the mercy of the British naval station in
the Falkland Islands, and even the Panama Canal lay under the watchful
eye of H. M. 。。。 | 
