Mapas de Empatía

In March, 1932, Detroit was seething with labor unrest, much of it directed against the Ford Motor Company. On March 6, a crowd of three to five thousand unemployed workmen organized by the Communist Party, marched from downtown Detroit to the Ford plant in Dearborn. They intended to ask for jobs for all laid-off Ford workers, immediate payment of fifty percent of their wages, a seven-hour day, the end of the production-line speed-up, two fifteen-minute rest periods, equal hiring rights for Negroes, and free medical care at the Ford hospital. The Mayor of Dearborn, a cousin of Henry Ford's, ordered the Chief of Police, a former detective on Ford's payroll, to halt the marchers at Dearborn line. The marchers ignored the order to halt, and managed to reach the Ford plant; there firehouses, pistols, and a machine gun were used to drive them off. Four were killed and a score or more injured. On March 12 the murdered men were laid in coffins under a huge picture of Lenin, and a banner proclaiming that "Ford gave Bullets for Bread."

Over thirty thousand people attended the funeral. Sid the Detroit Times: "The killing of innocent workmen … is a blow directed at the very heart of American institutions."

"Nearly 3,000 of Detroit's unemployed with Communists in their midst, took part in a riot today at the gates of Ford Motor Company's plant in Dearborn. Their demonstration culminated in a furious fight in which four men were killed and at least fifty others were injured.

The demonstration by the unemployed, who had planned to ask Ford Company officials, through a committee to give them work, started quietly, but before it was over Dearborn pavements were stained with blood, streets littered with broken glass and the wreckage of bullet-ridden automobiles and nearly every window in the Ford plant's employment building had been broken. … The march, plans for which were competed on Sunday evening, according to one of the wounded demonstrators, was orderly at the start."126

4.2.2.Bonus Army, 1932

In 1924 Congress authorized a bonus for World War I veterans, to be paid away years later. In the depths of the Depression, when local and state measures to combat unemployment and hunger were proving futile, veterans' groups began to demand immediate of jobless men, most of them veterans, went to Washington to demonstrate for immediate payment. The Bonus Expeditionary Force, as it came to be called, eventually numbered over 20,000, and included many veterans' families.

The Washington Police Department, under the sympathetic leadership of Chief Pelham D. Glassford, helped them to build a community of shacks on Anacostia Flats. On June 15, the House passed a Bonus

Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, editors, American violence, a documentary history (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p.357-358.

- 60 -

Bill, but on June 17, as 12,000 men waited outside the Capitol, the Senate overwhelmingly rejected it. Disappointment, the men went peacefully back their shacks, but refused to leave Washington. President Hoover persuaded Congress to authorize loans to pay for transportation back home, but only a few men left. Weeks passed, and Hoover became increasingly uneasy; he seems to have feared a Communist-led insurrection.

His anxiety was increased by the War Department, Army Intelligence insisted that a veterans' riot would be the "signal for a Communist uprising in all large cities, thus initiating a revolution." Only July 28 Hoover ordered troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthus to clear the riot area and return the veterans to their camps.

There, under Army guard, they would be investigated to identify the Communists. Hoover assumed was responsible for the disorder. MacArthur, however, ignored the President's order, and told Glassford "We are going to break the back of B.E.F." Assisted by Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton, MacArthur led a force of four troops of cavalry, four companied of steel-helmeted infantry with fixed bayonets, and six tanks to the Bonus Camps. They used tear gas to force the men out, and burned the camps to the ground. A baby of eleven weeks died, an eight-year-old was partially blinded by the gas, and several people were wounded by bayonets or sabers.

Hoover was angered and dismayed but decided to accept full responsibility for MacArthur's actions, and insisted publicly that many of the marchers were Communists and criminals. MacArther issued his own statement, declaring that the mob "was animated by the essence of revolution." If the Administration had waited another week, "the institutions of our Government would have been severely threatened." The press thought otherwise. Many who had visited the camp said rather that the men had been crushed by the Depression and joined the march to flee from the realities of hunger. MauritzHallgren found no spirit of revolt, "no fire, and not even smoldering resentment." Communist Party leaders had organized a front group, the Workers Ex-Service Men's' League, which had tried to convert the march into a revolutionary striking force; but the leaders of the Bonus Army, particularly Walter W. Waters, who were vehemently anti-communist, organized squads of veterans to beat up the radicals. The radicals did have an impact on some sum handout to demands for unemployment insurance, and toward a deeper questioning of the roots of Depression.127

Following the suppression of the spring 1932 Bonus Army march in Washington D.C., Hoover urged the executive branch to heighten its anti-radical operations. Hoover was convinced that the Bonus Army march-an attempt by veterans of World War I to shame the U.S. government into paying them a promised bonus-heralded a new strain of subversion, which threatened the national security of the United States. His efforts were supported by the new President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who believed

- 61 -

that his duties as commander-in-chief of the armed forces required his to investigate all organizations that might be disseminating any information or teachings contrary to the democratic ideals of the United States. In 1934, Roosevelt authorized Hoover to investigate the activities of Nazi sympathizers; two years later, he broadened Hoover's power to investigate any subversive activities, particularly those Communists and fascists. In response, Hoover immediately ordered all FBI field offices to "obtain from all possible sources information concerning subversive activities." In November 1938, Roosevelt approved the widened scope of activities of the FBI's General Intelligence Section.128