The Hunt

three months, army veterans and their families, calling themselves the Bonus Army, had been camped in Washington, demanding a five- hundred-dollar bonus that had been voted them in 1924. Although it wasn’t due until 1945, they desperately needed it now.

Keegan was unprepared for the awesome spectacle of twenty thousand ex-soldiers and their families living in squalor around the Capitol and White House. For while this was the year of the Washington Bonus March, it was also the year the twenty- month-old son of America’s greatest living hero, Charles Lindbergh, had been kidnapped and murdered. A shy and reclusive man, the “Lone Eagle,” as he was known by everyone in America, had conquered the Atlantic Ocean alone in his single-engine plane. Lindbergh, his wife Anne and their new baby were as close to royalty as one could get in America and so the tragedy dominated the news from the night the child was stolen from his New Jersey home until his body was discovered seventy-two days later and then onward as the murder investigation intensified and became a national obsession.

Other news had also overshadowed the march. In France, President Charles Doumer was assassinated in a Paris bookstore. The relatively unknown governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was challenging Herbert Hoover for the presidency. Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weismuller had become an instant movie star grunting “Me Tarzan, you Jane” and five other lines of dialogue in Tarzan the Ape Man. A machinist named George Blaisdell invented a cigarette lighter which he called a Zippo.

Author Erskine Caldwell had shocked the country with Tobacco Road, his novel about life among sharecroppers in the Deep South and there had been threats of book banning in Boston and in the South. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World stunned everyone with its dismal science fiction view of life in the future while, on the radio, Buck Rogers was introduced, presenting a completely different vision of the future.

In Oklahoma, where years of poor farming practice had depleted the land a devastating drought finished the process, adding hundreds of thousands of farmers to the country’s 13 million unemployed. There were two thousand hunger marchers in London; New York’s Mayor Jimmy Walker resigned from office in the midst of a juicy scandal; young John Wayne was fighting for his life every Saturday afternoon in a matinee serial called The Hurricane Express; Herbert Hoover announced Prohibition a failure and encouraged state liquor laws; and Flo Ziegfeld, who had redefined the meaning of the term showgirl when he created “The Ziegfeld Girl,” died in Hollywood with his wife Billie Burke at his side. Walter Winchell, radio’s dark prince of gossip, commented in the Stork Club one night, “This. is one helluva year,” and there was no arguing the point.

Little wonder these stories and others had crowded the veterans’ march off the front page and finally out of the newspapers and off the radio altogether. Washington had become an enormous “Hooverville,” a name synonymous with the temporary, ragtag villages all over the country that housed the millions of nomadic, dispossessed, jobless people wandering the land in search of lost dreams. As the weeks dragged into months, the plight of the veterans became just another footnote in this, the worst year of the Depression so far.

The Bonus Camps were a ragtag collection of lean-tos, tents, cardboard shacks and crates, sweltering in one of the hottest summers in Washington history. Here and there, makeshift gardens struggled in the heat to produce stunted tomatoes and hard-eared corn. Women bathed their children in tubs with water from the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. The crowd was neither unruly nor threatening.

As they drove past the miserable campsites, Keegan realized how easily he might have been one of them. Jocko Nayles, who had driven him down to Washington in the Pierce Arrow, had commented, “Jesus, Frankie, these are our guys. We fought with them. Things bad as they are, why don’t they pay ‘em?”

“Haven’t you heard?” Keegan had replied. “Hoover says the Depression’s over. He wants them to go home and starve to death so he doesn’t have to look at them.”

The trouble was, most of them had no homes or jobs to go to. In this, the most dreadful summer in the nation’s history, there were thirteen million people unemployed. The suicide rate was three times normal. And the President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, continued to preach what was by then a warped and illogical litany, that the economic recovery of America was in full swing, that the greatest danger was from “Prohibition gangsters who’ve turned our streets into battlegrounds” and that the family would be the resurrection of America. Hoover, of course, wasn’t talking about the families who had lost their jobs, their homes, and their dignity in a desperate and failed economy wrought by arrogant millionaires. He was talking about the “decent families” who still had jobs, who earned a living wage, sat by their Atwater Kent radios at night listening to Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy and Li’l Orphan Annie, and who drove to church each Sunday in their Fords and Chevrolets.

Decency in the minds of Hoover and his ilk was directly related to those who worked, paid their taxes and made monthly mortgage payments, it did not relate to those forgotten men who had lost everything because of an orgy of indulgence promoted by the nation’s captains of industry and championed by Hoover’s predecessor, Calvin Coolidge, who had preached that “prosperity is permanent.” It was a lie, of course, and Coolidge, foreseeing the coming calamity, had chosen not to seek a second term in 1928, leaving Hoover to become the fall guy for the worst depression in written history. Eight months after Coolidge left office, the house of cards had collapsed.

“The country’s in a helluva mess, Jocko,” Keegan had said. “Count your blessings.”

Keegan had squirmed through dinner, listening to Brattle rave about the “Commies camped on the White House lawn” and spouting phrases like, “Why don’t they get jobs like decent people,” although he had inherited his money and had never worked more than half a day in his entire life. He had blathered on about conditions in the country in an arrogant sermon typical of the attitude of those who had actually benefited from the Depression.

“And these goddamn Bonus Marchers, they ought to get the hell out of here,” Brattle said, “go home and get a damn job. Contribute something.”

“Come on, Charlie,” Keegan said, “These aren’t malingerers. They can’t find jobs, for Christ sake. You’ve got to have a college degree to get a job as an elevator man in Macy’s. Since the first of the year, a quarter of a million people have lost their homes.”

“And five thousand banks have gone iI1to the hole because of it,” Brattle snapped back. “People don’t meet their responsibilities. Jesus, there’s eleven million farmers out there holding off the banks and insurance companies with goddamn shotguns, refusing to pay their mortgages.”

“Yeah, and they’re burning corn because it’s cheaper than coal and killing their livestock because they can’t afford to feed them,” Keegan said. “You can’t relate to any of this, you’ve never been broke. It’ll hit you one of these mornings when you wake up and wonder why you don’t have steak with your eggs.”

“Whose side are you on, anyway?” Brattle asked edgily.

“I didn’t know there were sides.”

“Hoover’s got it under control,” said one of the guests, a youngish man wearing a striped jacket and a straw boater. “Did you see the Tribune this morning? Gross National Product’s up, economy’s