On Hallowed Ground (26 page)

Although there is little evidence that the veterans’ spontaneous march on Washington had been organized or influenced by Communists, some government leaders believed otherwise, fearing that the ragtag protesters
might spark riots and class warfare across the country, as was happening in Europe. As the first wave of the BEF drifted into
Washington, Patrick Jay Hurley, the secretary of war, sent messages to the Army’s nine regional commanders in secret code, asking them
to ferret out the Reds among protesters bound for the capital.
⁴⁰
The army’s new chief of staff, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, held similar views. He thought most of the BEF men were not veterans
at all, but imposters bent on making trouble. “There is incipient revolution in the air,” he told an aide, Maj. Dwight D.
Eisenhower, as the scruffy protesters lingered in the capital that summer.
⁴¹
MacArthur was wrong—most of the BEF were simply veterans down on their luck, looking to their government for help, just as
thousands of homeless freedmen had done a few decades before. Camping in frayed tents, packing crates, and rough-built shanties
around the Capitol, the BEF had outstayed its welcome by mid-July. When Congress recessed without resolving the bonus question
that summer, President Hoover determined that it was time for the BEF to go. At his direction, Patrick Hurley issued orders
for their eviction on July 28, 1932.
⁴²

General MacArthur, vowing to “break the back of the BEF,” took prompt action, organizing the army to march against civilians.
⁴³
At his command, more than two hundred cavalry troopers saddled up at Fort Myer, swept down through Arlington National Cemetery,
and thundered over the new Arlington Memorial Bridge, while infantrymen who usually served as tomb guards and casket bearers
took up arms, grabbed their gas masks, and climbed aboard trucks that followed the cavalry across the river. Other infantry
units were called up from nearby Fort Washington. With forces in place on the Ellipse by four thirty p.m., the cavalry clattered down Pennsylvania Avenue with sabers drawn,
followed by army trucks carrying five tanks and mounted machine guns, with some four hundred infantrymen bringing up the rear,
marching in columns, closing implacably on Capitol Hill.
⁴⁴

There the army plowed into startled BEF members and curious spectators, scattering citizens before them. Through clouds of
tear gas and cries of “Shame! Shame!” MacArthur’s men drove thousands of citizens up Pennsylvania Avenue, across the Mall,
and over the Eleventh Street Bridge toward Anacostia, where the BEF had its main encampment. Although President Hoover gave
MacArthur precise instructions not to pursue veterans beyond the bridge, the general ignored this order, stormed into the
BEF shanty town, and set the makeshift settlement aflame.
⁴⁵
The Bonus Army was broken that night. A few veterans stayed in Washington to nurse injuries from tear gas and rough handling, while most returned to their homes or settled at new camps in Pennsylvania
and New York’s Central Park. Those who stood their ground were trampled or slashed by cavalrymen.
⁴⁶

Two veterans were killed in a related police action just hours before the army’s July 28 offensive. In a scuffle with officers
along Pennsylvania Avenue, where bricks were thrown from the crowd, William Hushka, a thirty-five-year-old from Chicago, and
Eric Carlson, thirty-eight, from Oakland, California, were fatally shot by police. Hushka, a Lithuanian native and a butcher
by trade, died on the spot. Carlson clung to life a few days, dying on August 2.
⁴⁷
Both were buried at Arlington, attended by family, hundreds of fellow legionnaires, and the very soldiers called to eject
them from the capital.
⁴⁸

Despite the deaths and despite MacArthur’s disregard for orders, Patrick Hurley declared the campaign a success. “It was a
great victory,” he told a midnight press conference while the ruins of the Anacostia camp smoldered. “Mac did a great job,”
he said, crediting the general at his side.“He is the man of the hour.”
⁴⁹

The nocturnal assault temporarily relieved tensions in the capital, but as word spread of the army’s heavy-handedness at the
expense of unarmed men, women, and children, public opinion turned against President Hoover, Patrick Hurley, General MacArthur,
and others responsible for the July 28 offensive. The morning after the Washington riots, when Franklin D. Roosevelt read the
New York Times
account of the event, he told an associate that it would not be necessary to campaign against Hoover that year—the incumbent
was doing FDR’s work for him.
⁵⁰
When newsreels of MacArthur appeared in movie houses around the country following the riots, audiences booed him as well
as the Army.
⁵¹
And when Hurley walked onstage at an American Legion convention in Portland, Oregon, in September 1932, he drew jeers from
many veterans in the crowd.
⁵²
The nation’s economic decline, combined with Hoover’s mean-spirited treatment of the BEF, doomed his election that fall.
Roosevelt won by seven million votes.
⁵³

Less than a week after Hoover’s humiliation at the polls, thousands of dignitaries, soldiers, and veterans staged what one
newspaper called a “monster parade” through Washington before climbing into the hills of Arlington to dedicate the new Tomb of the Unknown on November 11, 1932. Hoover avoided
the ceremonies, which had been organized by the American Legion. Instead he dispatched Patrick Hurley to represent his administration.
This gave the BEF an opportunity to even the score.
⁵⁴

When the lame-duck secretary of war arrived at the Tomb of the Unknown that morning, he found a hundred stone-faced veterans
from the American Legion’s Victory Post of Washington, D.C., standing at attention on the terrace, where they had just laid a wreath at the tomb. They made no effort to yield
their position to Hurley, whom they watched in silence as he placed his own floral tribute and retreated toward the amphitheater.
Just as he did, the commander of the Victory Post Drum Corps snapped an order to his men on the plaza: “Right by squads!”
he barked. The corps pivoted and, maintaining its columns, tromped down through the cemetery to the thump of drums and the
shrill of fifes, headed for the graves of William Hushka and Eric Carlson.
⁵⁵

In the packed amphitheater, meanwhile, spectators feared trouble as they settled into their seats, heard the distant drums
marking time for the Victory Post parade, and nervously watched Hurley take his place at the rostrum, clap on a pincenez,
and fidget with the notes for his speech.
⁵⁶

Before he got further, a few veterans scattered through the arena stood up and walked out, climbing over the knees of spectators
who remained seated. Hurley resumed speaking, and a few more men and women pointedly left, followed by more at intervals,
all synchronized to disrupt Hurley’s talk. He forged ahead, pretending not to notice.
⁵⁷

The protest had been orchestrated by Raymond Burke, commander of the Victory Post Drum Corps, who explained his group’s actions
this way.“The men in our drum corps feel that Mr. Hurley cannot express the feeling that caused the Unknown Soldier to lay
down his life for this country,” he told the
Washington Herald
. “His brutal treatment of the war veterans in Washington … clearly revealed that his sympathies are not with the men who fought overseas.
⁵⁸
Yes, we’re of the mob, but we’re gentlemen and patriots anyway. We have paid our tribute to the Unknown as sincerely and
honestly as we can. Instead of listening to Mr. Hurley, we are now going to the graves of our comrades, William Hushka and
Eric Carlson.”
⁵⁹

Some two hundred men and women followed Burke’s drum corps through the cemetery to lay wreaths for Hushka and Carlson that
day, as the local remnants of the BEF looked on. Many of them were still jobless, distinguished by their threadbare clothes
and broken shoes; some had borrowed money to buy flowers for their dead buddies at Arlington.
⁶⁰
Although many remained destitute, they remembered Hushka and Carlson on Armistice Day and on the anniversary of the Washington riots, when they returned to Arlington with flowers, talked about the old days, and hoped for better ones ahead. Congress
finally passed a veto-proof bonus bill in 1936, awarding $1.9 billion for 3.5 million veterans of the Great War, just as a
new war was about to break out.
⁶¹

10

"WE ARE ALL IN IT
—
ALL THE WAY"

The year was 1941, the battleground a four hundred–acre parcel curling around the national cemetery on bottomlands by the
Potomac River. Lying just southwest of Memorial Bridge, this stretch of ground had been worked by Lee family slaves before
the Civil War, occupied by freedmen during and after that conflict, and transferred to the Department of Agriculture when
the last of the freedmen were driven from Arlington in 1900. Since that time, scientists and researchers had used the Government
Experimental Farm, commonly known as Arlington Farm, for growing plants introduced from abroad and for improving varieties
of corn, tomatoes, sugarcane, turf, and other useful plants. By the 1930s, when farm operations were moved to suburban Maryland,
it set off a scramble for possession of this vacant quarter of Arlington.
¹

By June 1940, as France fell before German forces and the British were routed at Dunkirk, the United States began laying plans
for the new war, which promised to be global in scope and daunting in logistical complexity. Anticipating that his country
would be drawn into the conflict, President Franklin D. Roosevelt transferred the Arlington Farm in September 1940 to Fort
Myer, where additional troops would undoubtedly be needed to reinforce the capital’s defenses.
²
About the same time, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Gen. George C. Marshall, the army’s chief of staff, moved to
consolidate their burgeoning operations, which had outgrown temporary offices on the National Mall and were scattered around
a capital buzzing with new federal agencies, a rising tide of New Deal workers, and rumors of war.
³

“The matter of office space for the War Department has become one of the greatest urgency,” Robert P. Patterson, undersecretary
of war, wrote Stimson in November 1940. “There is no question but that the congestion is materially retarding the National
Defense program.”
⁴
To find more space, Marshall and Stimson cast their eyes across the Potomac to Arlington Farm. Newly under Army control,
convenient to Washington, and unobstructed by traffic, it made a logical choice for the War Department expansion, envisioned as a colony of temporary,
two-story frame structures that could be razed when the emergency ended.“To be able to build our temporary office buildings
on the Arlington Farm site means everything to us,” Marshall told a congressional committee in June 1941.“We can do business
if our buildings are placed there.”
⁵

Congress was ready to give Marshall what he asked for—$6.5 million for his temporary complex at Arlington—until a fearless,
farsighted Army officer entered the discussion. Brig. Gen. Brehon B. Somervell, recently placed in charge of construction
projects for the quartermaster’s office, took one look at Marshall’s modest plan, found it lacking in imagination, and reworked
it into an audacious vision of the future. Somervell saw little reason to waste money building makeshift structures at Arlington.
Why not consolidate the War Department’s far-flung offices in one modern, efficient, permanent building that would accommodate
all employees and serve the nation for years to come? With this objective in mind, he huddled with department architects,
surveyed the Arlington site, and came up with new plans for the War Department. Breathtaking in scope, Somervell’s proposal
called for raising the world’s largest office building at Arlington, where his new facility would sprawl over four million
square feet of space, enough room for forty thousand workers. To speed construction, save money, and conserve precious steel
for the war effort, Somervell’s utilitarian building would be made of concrete, with few concessions to beauty; his initial
plan called for a four-story structure with no windows. The footprint of the Arlington site, bounded by roads, rail lines,
and training fields at Fort Myer, gave the new building a distinctive, oddball shape: it was five-sided—a pentagon, which
would in time describe not the just geometry of the building but the War Department itself,
the
Pentagon.
⁶
The price tag was estimated at $35 million, and the general was confident that construction could be rushed to completion
in a year’s time. Speed was important because the European war was escalating. Having consolidated their gains in Western
Europe, German forces invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, opening a second front.
⁷

When Somervell unrolled blueprints for the new building in July 1941, Stimson was impressed by the “practical and simple lines”
of the pentagonal design. He endorsed the plan on the spot. As the bill raced through the House, Stimson briefed President
Roosevelt on the project and won his approval with only minimal discussion.
⁸
Less than a week later, on July 28, the full House approved the project as part of an $8 billion supplemental defense bill.
Only eleven skeptics voted against the measure, which was soon on its way to the Senate. But scathing comments from those
few opponents, who questioned the size and scope of Somervell’s project, brought the matter to public attention for the first
time, giving a preview of the clash to come.
⁹

“We cannot win wars with buildings,” said Rep. August Andersen of Minnesota. “I understand that … they want these big
buildings and large facilities so we can police the world after the war is over.”
¹⁰

Rep. Adolph Sabath of Illinois wondered if local congressmen were using the threat of war to secure a pork barrel project
for Virginia. “We are giving Virginia a great deal,” Sabath said. “When this structure is built we shall have given them the
greatest building constructed anywhere by any nation.”
¹¹

Watching from the sidelines, Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s confidant and influential secretary of the interior, made some caustic
observations about the House debate. “It is easy to see how this greased pig went through the hands of Congress,” he wrote
in his diary. “Of course it had the support of Congressman Woodrum [chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Deficiencies
and Army Civil Functions] … Woodrum is all for economy except when the State of Virginia is concerned.” Ickes also discerned
a familiar pattern in White House decision making: Without thinking of the implications, Roosevelt had blithely signed off
on Somervell’s plans for Arlington. “As is so often the case, instead of seeing how vicious the plan was and what it would
do in the way of dislocating the carefully considered plan for … the protection of Washington,” Roosevelt “gave a nod of approval,” Ickes complained. On the other hand, Ickes knew from experience that FDR’s endorsement
meant little. At the right moment, one well-aimed word in the president’s ear, and Roosevelt could turn on a dime, upend his
decision, and make it look effortless. Ickes made plans to pull the president aside and scuttle Somervell’s scheme.
¹²

The interior secretary had a vested interest in what happened on the old Lee estate, where he had wrested control of the mansion
and surrounding acreage from the War Department in the first year of Roosevelt’s administration. That was when, much to the
consternation of the military, Ickes had persuaded the president to transfer jurisdiction of the mansion, other monuments,
reservations, and related federal assets to the National Park Service—a subsidiary of the interior department—by Executive
Order 6166. That order, dated June 10, 1933, left Arlington National Cemetery under War Department control but created what
would become a twenty-eight-acre island of park service land at the heart of the property. For the Army, which had held the
Lee estate since 1861, this loss of turf was a bitter reversal—one that Army people still grumble about. In FDR’s day, officials
from the War Department lobbied the president to reconsider the transfer. Ickes got wind of it, swooped down, and persuaded
FDR to stand by the decision, which added a prime piece of real estate to the interior secretary’s growing portfolio.
¹³

His acquisition at Arlington, small though it was, encompassed the most historically significant parts of the property, including
not only the Lee mansion, the gardens, and the hilltop grave of Pierre L’Enfant but also the best vista of Washington. The French engineer’s outlook, high above the capital, demonstrated at a glance the care and thought that generations of
architects and planners had lavished upon the city’s landscape design. If Somervell had his way—plopping his chunky colossus
at the foot of Memorial Bridge—the look of Washington would be forever altered, blocking the capital’s gateway, spoiling the cemetery’s verdant calm, and obscuring the parklike
views from both sides of the river. Even with war approaching, these aesthetic concerns would enliven the Senate debate over
Arlington that summer.
¹⁴

“We are opposed to any building what ever on that Arlington site,” he told a Senate hearing that August.
¹⁵
“It is proposed to place this ‘city’ at the very portals of the Arlington National Cemetery, thus resulting in the introduction
of thirty-five acres of ugly, flat roofs into the very foreground of the most majestic view of the National Capital that obtains
… from a point near the Tomb of Major L’Enfant.”
¹⁶

Somervell, unfazed by Clarke’s concerns, shot back. “My hope is that we can make this a city for the living and not for the
dead,” he told senators. Then he dragged the ghost of Robert E. Lee into the debate. “If there is anything inappropriate in
standing on the steps of the home of the greatest soldier we ever produced in this country and looking at the War Department,
I do not know what it is.”
¹⁷

President Roosevelt, who had blessed Somervell’s plan before controversy overtook it, was conspicuously absent from these
discussions—for good reason. Just as the appropriations bill reached the Senate that summer, the president had slipped away
for a well-earned fishing vacation in Canada; that, at least, was the cover story. In truth, FDR was secretly meeting with
Prime Minister Winston Churchill for the first time, just off the coast of Newfoundland, to discuss war plans.
¹⁸
Before Roosevelt left Washington, however, he had recognized that the dispute over Arlington was getting out of hand and moved to quell it, urging the Senate
to go forward with building on the Lee plantation but to cut the size of the project in half. This compromise offer, dangling
over the proceedings as Roosevelt stole off to Canada, did little to calm those opposed to the project. Indeed, it was becoming
obvious that for many in Washington, no War Department building, whatever its size, would be acceptable at Arlington, which had achieved an iconic place in the
capital landscape and the national conscience.
¹⁹

To preserve that status, Clarke suggested an alternative site for the new building. Why not place it on the low-lying parcel
of land less than a mile south of the Arlington Farm and adjacent to Hoover National Airport? This eighty-seven-acre property,
near Hell’s Bottom, was surrounded by pawn shops, railroads, and shabby housing, and it was already in possession of the army,
which had only recently broken ground for a new quartermaster’s depot there. Placed well downriver from Memorial Bridge and
the national cemetery, the site would be a far less intrusive venue, in Clarke’s opinion.
²⁰

The Senate rejected this idea. It endorsed the Arlington Farm building site, approving the $35 million Somervell plan as part
of the supplemental appropriations bill on August 14, 1941. With the president still abroad, the Senate also ignored Roosevelt’s
suggestion for shrinking the size of the project. Somervell made plans to begin construction, not realizing that his battle
had just begun.
²¹

Ickes, disgusted with the lack of congressional foresight, registered his objections with the Senate, the public, and the
War Department. The project, he warned, would “spoil the setting of such national symbols as the Arlington Lee Memorial and
other monuments.” He complained directly to Henry Stimson. The despoliation of Arlington, Ickes prophesied, “would be a black
mark against this Administration and a discredit to the Army. And so I, for one, protest.”
²²
Finally Ickes dashed off an angry letter to FDR, whom he begged “not to permit this rape of Washington.”
²³