Table Of ContentThe 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.
"s Caribbean squadron. As a consequence of all this, the United States
was shielded by the Royal Navy as surely as any crown colony. Lloyd's
of London offered 500-to-1 against any invasion of the U.S. And when
Fortune assured its readers that the Atlantic and Pacific were " still
a protection and will forever remain so, no matter how fast ships may
sail or airplanes may fly," the magazine was assuming that the British
fleet, which had ruled the waves throughout American history, would go
right on ruling them.
Washington made the same assumption; the country lacked the status, the
pretensions, and most of the apparatus of a great power.
The capital was a slumbering village in summer, largely forgotten the
rest of the year.
In size it ranked fourteenth among American cities.
Most big national problems were decided in New York, where the money
was;
when federal action was required, Manhattan's big corporation lawyers
-men like Charles Evans Hughes, Henry L. Stimson, and Elihu Root -came
down to guide their Republican proteges.
President Coolidge had usually finished his official day by
lunchtime.
Hoover created a stir by becoming the first chief executive to have a
telephone on his desk.
He also employed five secretaries- no previous President had required
more than one- and summoned them by an elaborate buzzer system.
Foggy Bottom, the site of the present State Department Building, was a
Negro slum.
The land now occupied by the Pentagon was an agricultural experimental
station and thus typical of Washington's outskirts;
"large areas close to the very heart of the nation's lawmaking," the
Saturday Evening Post observed, "are still in farm hands."
The government employed fewer than two thousand foreign service
officers.
It is an astonishing fact that the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy
were all under one mansard roof, across the street from the White House
in that ugly, smug mass of balusters, cupolas, and pillared porticoes
known today as the Executive Office Building.
Indeed, after a fire gutted the President's oval office in 1929, he and
his staff had moved in with them and no one had felt crowded.
There was little pomp.
The East Wing of the White House, which would later house military
attaches and social secretaries, hadn't been built.
The Secret Service had not yet closed West Executive Avenue to the
public;
it was just another city street, and on a normal day you could park
there within an easy stone's throw of the oval office.
If you called on the Secretary of State, he sometimes met you at the
door.
Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, on the same floor of the
Executive Office Building, was separated from his sole aide by a single
slatted door.
When the general wanted help he called "Major Eisenhower," and Ike came
scurrying. 6 PROLOGUE
It was a Fortune writer, fortunately anonymous, who described the
general as "shy and genuinely unsympathetic to publicity."
That was nonsense.
MacArthur, even then, spoke of himself in the third person, flourished
a long cigarette holder as he talked, and had heightened his image by
installing a fifteen-foot-high mahogany mirror behind him.
As Eisenhower later recalled, when MacArthur felt slighted he was
capable of expressing himself in "an explosive denunciation of
politics, bad manners, bad judgment, broken promises, arrogance, un
constitutionality insensitivity, and the way the world had gone to
hell."
He can hardly be blamed.
Those were dog days for professional soldiers.
Up through the rank of colonel, promotion was by seniority only, and by
the early Thirties it took twenty-two years to climb from captain to
major.
There wasn't much to do except watch the calendar.
Sheer boredom nearly drove Eisenhower to the point of resigning his
commission, and it was in these years that he developed the habit of
reading Street & Smith pulps: Two-Gun Western, Western Story, Thrilling
Western, and Cowboy Short Stories.
Across the Potomac at Fort Myer, George S. Patton Jr.-who had been a
major since 1919, could be observed playing polo Wednesdays and
Saturdays at 4 p.m. Riding his own horses he had collected four hundred
ribbons and two hundred cups; already known for his pearl-handled
revolvers, he also pursued steeple chasing fox hunting, skeet shooting,
and flying.
But Major Patton, unlike Major Eisenhower, was rich.
Perhaps nothing is more illustrative of American provincialism four
decades ago than a brief glance at the military establishment; it
requires no more.
The U.S. had the sixteenth largest army in the world, putting it
behind, among others, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Spain, Romania, and
Poland.
When every $17.85-a-month private had suited up, there were 132,069
Americans in uniform.
On paper they could have put up a stiff fight against' Yugoslavia
(138,934), but in reality they would have been torn to pieces, because
most of MacArthur's men were committed to desk work, patrolling the
Mexican border, and protecting U.S. possessions overseas.
The chief of staff was left with 30,000 troops- fewer than the force
King George sent to tame his rebellious American colonies in 1776.
Moreover, the quality of the Army was appalling.
It cost roughly a quarter of one percent of today's military
juggernaut, and looked it.
Fortune called it the "worst equipped" of the world's armed forces; no
one disputed the judgment.
In a crisis MacArthur could have fielded 1,000 tanks, all obsolete;
1,509 aircraft, the fastest of which could fly 234 mph; and a single
mechanized regiment, which had been organized at Fort Knox that spring,
and which was led by cavalrymen on horses which wore mustard-gas-proof
boots.
The United States Army, one writer reported, "forever walks the wide
land in the image of a gaping-mouthed private with an ill-fitting
uniform carrying an obsolete rifle at an ungraceful angle."
MacArthur was the only four-star general in the country- and there were
no three-star generals.
As chief of staff he received $10,400 a year, a home at Fort Myer, and
the exclusive use of the Army's only limousine.
To his aide he seemed to occupy a distant pinnacle.
Major Eisenhower's annual salary was $3,000.
Because he doubled as the military's congressional lobbyist, he
frequently went up to Capitol Hill.
But his employer never loaned him the limousine.
Nor was the major given taxi fare; in all of official Washington, there
was no such thing as a petty cash fund.
Instead, as he liked to recall in later life, Eisenhower would walk
down the hall and fill out a form, in exchange for which he received
two streetcar tokens.
