D. Roosevelt to bring the depression home to the soldier.” In order to reduce government expenses, Roosevelt dispensed with the reenlistment bonus for the men of the Regular Army. This amounted to a loss of $75 in the lowest pay grades and $150 above the rank of corporal. He cut the Army pay scale so that a private’s monthly pay of $21 was now cut to $17.85.13
The CCC created other challenges for the Army, not the least of which was caused by its pay grade, as a CCC enlistee would earn $30 per month. Never mind that most of the CCC recruit’s pay was sent home to help the man’s family, the difference was still dramatic, $12.15 more per month than the Army private received.14
The Tree Army felt like a slap in the face to the men of the Bonus Army and to other veterans who were told they were too old to qualify for the CCC. The veterans felt they were the first casualty in Roosevelt’s war on the Depression. During his election campaign, Roosevelt had promised a balanced budget. As soon as he became president, he started a quiet process that would achieve the balance by slicing $480 million from veterans’ benefits. He began by appointing Lewis W. Douglas as his director of the budget. A Democratic congressman from Arizona, Douglas had advocated a slash in appropriations for benefits during the Hoover administration. Millionaire heir to a Phelps-Dodge copper-mining executive, Douglas resigned from Congress to take the budget job.
Douglas had been gassed in France during World War I and decorated for bravery, and he believed, as a veteran, that service in uniform did not guarantee special privileges, especially since veterans—including those dating back to the Civil War—garnered 24 percent of the federal budget while representing only 1 percent of the population. He sought to implement the $480 million in cuts through the Economy Act of 1933, Roosevelt’s major budget proposal. The act was rushed through Congress and signed by Roosevelt so swiftly that veterans’ organizations did not have time to mount a full-scale lobbying campaign against it.15
Too late to stop it, those representing veterans flooded congressional offices with heart-wrenching stories of vets hurt by the Economy Act. Arthur Krock, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, wrote: “Down many Main Streets go armless veterans who used to get $94 a month from the Government, and now get $36.” Men who had lost two legs or two eyes would have their pensions reduced as well. Those with service-related illnesses would lose up to 80 percent of their pensions. Veterans with diseases such as tuberculosis and neurosis would lose their entire pensions if their conditions were not unequivocally connected with their service in uniform.16
“I know many, many veterans will soon be laid in there [sic] graves, death being brought on by the additional worry which is bound to come,” an Ohio official of the Disabled American Veterans organization wrote to a member of Congress, who passed the letter on to the White House.17 Death did indeed come to troubled veterans. A Philadelphia man killed himself and left a message to President Roosevelt, saying that because his benefits were gone, he had no way to provide for his family except through his death, which would give his wife the remaining $275 from his bonus. A patient in a Dayton, Ohio, veterans’ hospital killed the chief of the medical staff after being told that because he no longer got a $60 benefit check, he had to leave the hospital. Veterans sometimes owned no civilian clothes, and those who were reclassified and evicted from soldiers’ homes often ended up on the streets, wandering about in their old uniforms.18
Reports of suicides poured into congressional offices, and members of Congress began to regret their hasty endorsement of the Economy Act. Roosevelt held firm and appealed to the veterans’ patriotism in a special message. “I do not want any veteran to feel that he and his comrades are being singled out to make sacrifices,” he said. “On the contrary, I want them to know that the regulations issued are but an integral part of our economy program embracing every department and agency of the government to which every employee is making his or her contribution.”19
In early May 1933, a new wave of Bonus Army marchers began to show up in Washington, again demanding their bonuses but also arguing for the restoration of benefits veterans had just lost. Unlike the first Bonus Army, this group came in with a list of grievances, including the lament that they were too old to be eligible for the nascent CCC. They seemed angrier than the 1932 marchers. Hoover’s problem became Roosevelt’s, as the trickle turned into a steady stream.
Soon some 3,000 veterans had arrived and were housed in a tent city, which the new president had ordered the Army to build on the grounds of an abandoned fort near Mount Vernon, on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. In an outing arranged by the White House, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt withstood the rain and the mud to join the vets in a friendly get-together and sing-along. “Hoover sent the Army; Roosevelt sent his wife” became a new rallying cry among the vets.20
Opposed to paying the bonus, Roosevelt realized that he needed to get the marchers out of town by any means other than force. Although the Civilian Conservation Corps had been created for single young men, FDR unveiled a plan on May 11 to include war veterans, waiving age and marital requirements. Executive Order 6129 provided special camps for an initial placement of 25,000 veterans, including older men who had fought in the Spanish-American War.
About 2,500 of the vets in Washington signed up immediately; others rejected the proposal, likening the dollar-a-day wage to slavery. On May 19, about 400 of the men who had rejected the offer marched to the White House, chanting: “We want our back pay—not a dollar a day.” But the edge had been taken off the demonstrations, and many of those who rejected the CCC accepted the government’s offer of a free ride home. Eventually, 213,000 mostly middle-aged vets would spend time in the CCC during its nine years of operation.21
Under MacArthur’s direction, all Army training programs were suspended and all resources of the Regular Army were made available to the CCC. For example, all the instructors and recently graduated officers from the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, were ordered to report immediately to CCC camps throughout the country.
Ecstatic to have surpassed FDR’s goal by mobilizing close to 300,000 recruits by the July 1, 1933, deadline, MacArthur sent out a personal congratulatory message to all members of the Army in which he deemed the mobilization an exercise that boded well for the actual preparation for war. “Such splendid results,” MacArthur declared, “could have only been possible because of ‘high morale’ and ‘devotion to duty’ by the Army.”22
By embracing FDR’s plan, MacArthur had not only helped to reestablish his public reputation after the Bonus Army expulsion, but he had also gained strength in his battle to keep the Army from suffering even deeper budget cuts. Using the Army’s dedication to making the CCC a success, MacArthur was able to convince the White House and Congress to revise the originally demanded 33 percent cuts in the Army’s budget down to 11 percent. “Gen. MacA. finally won the most important phases of his fight against drastic cutting of National Defense,” Dwight Eisenhower wrote in June 1933. “We will lose no officers or men (at least at this time) and this concession was won because of the great numbers we are using on the Civilian Conservation Corps work and of Gen. MacA’s skill and determination in the fight.”23
MacArthur also saw the CCC as a windfall to the Army. Although the demands of this massive new program brought to a sudden halt the Army’s normal garrison routine, as officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) went off to establish and supervise the camps, these camps could be converted to military use and were populated with potential military recruits. The young men of the CCC were vaccinated, properly fed, subjected to basic discipline, and in many cases taught to read and write. Emergency dental care was widely given, and simple skin diseases were treated with drugs—including some that were too expensive for poor civilians. When a man left the CCC in good standing, he was given honorable discharge papers containing work experience and a health record that could be used in applying for a job.
In addition, anyone who
