For months he spent endless days testifying before various committees. The world was again becoming a dangerous place but following the previous war the notion of pacifism took hold among a growing number of Americans, particularly among college students and citizens in the Middle West, and this was reflected in the thinking of many in Congress. While both Japan and Russia were actively operating a policy of international expansion in the Far East, Hitler and Mussolini were beginning to make names for themselves in Europe. The great international tragedy had begun to fester and brew.
Meanwhile, American pacifists were hard at work trying to undermine the nation’s military power. In May 1931, 62 percent of nearly twenty thousand Protestant clergymen representing vast congregations throughout the land stated in a poll in the popular church magazine The World Tomorrow that they believed their churches “should now go on record as refusing to sanction or support any future war.” Passivism was not merely a state of mind; in the 1920s and ’30s it had become a powerful movement to be reckoned with. MacArthur responded in a letter to the editor, reminding him that “History teaches us that religion and patriotism have always gone hand in hand, while atheism has always been accompanied by radicalism, communism, bolshevism and other enemies of free government …” In return, he received a good deal of hate mail.
In 1931 and 1932 MacArthur visited Europe, notably France, where he told a group of French generals he had served with during World War I that “sooner or later Germany was going to try again.” As a defense against this, the French constructed the infamous Maginot Line, a succession of fortifications running from the Alps to Belgium, which the Frenchmen told him was designed to hold and pin down the German army while a mobile force of the French army swung north into Belgium to flank and destroy the German right wing.
While he was in France, MacArthur’s concubine Isabel was becoming restive. She wheedled a chauffeured limousine out of MacArthur in which she tooled around to Washington and Baltimore nightspots, according to Manchester, “seduc[ing], among others, George S. Abell, a descendant of the Baltimore Sun’s founder.” Furthermore, she coaxed “a large amount of cash” out of MacArthur, which she blew on a toot in Havana. At length, the chief of staff received word of these activities and his “ardor cooled.” For example, when she asked him to help find a job for her brother in Washington, MacArthur sent her a copy of the Help Wanted ads from the local paper. Furthermore, he mailed her a train ticket to the West Coast and passage on a liner to the Philippines, but instead she moved into a boardinghouse near his office at the State–War Department building on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was there that the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson found her and began asking questions.55
IF MACARTHUR FOUND HIS DUTY in the trial of Billy Mitchell “distasteful,” he certainly had a right to call his next assignment “disagreeable.” President Hoover and Secretary of War Patrick Hurley instructed him to evict the veterans of the aforementioned Bonus March. MacArthur had been dealing with the march’s leader, offering army tents and other camp equipment for the veterans. He had also sent a number of rolling kitchens to their encampment.a MacArthur was sure that most of the marchers were Communists, although later research has shown that the figure was probably closer to 10 or 15 percent.
When tensions heightened to the violence Patton and the Third Cavalry Regiment were also facing on July 28, MacArthur ordered a regiment of troops and a cavalry battalion—totaling about eight hundred men—to assemble on the Ellipse. Because they were located in surrounding areas in Virginia and Maryland, the various units took until about 4 p.m. to converge. At 4:30 they set out to clear about three thousand of the Bonus Marchers from the area around Third and Fourth Streets in the shadow of the Capitol building. Against the advice of MacArthur’s assistant Major Dwight Eisenhower, who was fairly close to him and had advised his boss that it was unnecessary and “highly inappropriate” for him to take the field with the evicting force, MacArthur appeared on the scene wearing what some reports described as “parade dress”—jodhpurs, high, polished cavalry boots, and a tunic bemedaled with ribbons.
The soldiers, with bayonets drawn, wearing gas masks, and tossing gas grenades, quickly cleared the streets and pushed the veterans back across the 11th Street Bridge, leading to their encampment in the Anacostia Flats, where they stood their ground in a flood of profanity and barrage of rocks and bricks, some of which damaged MacArthur’s car. Secretary of War Hurley twice sent word to MacArthur not to cross the bridge and carry the eviction to the main camp on the flats, but the chief of staff was impassive. “In neither instance,” Eisenhower said, “did General MacArthur hear these instructions. He said he was too busy,” and the messengers were sent away. He then sent word through the police chief to the veterans that he would “proceed very slowly,” and that “I would stop the command for supper so that full opportunity would be given for everyone to leave without being hurt.”56
Meantime, as darkness closed in, an army intelligence report arrived saying that “all men that have firearms were told to use them against the first troops to cross the bridge.” This apparently led MacArthur to believe that the marchers were regrouping for a “last stand” or even a counterattack. In any event, shortly afterward, the army crossed over the bridge and soon the entire veterans’ encampment was on fire. All of the infantry commanders denied setting the blaze and some believed that the marchers acted “in spite,” setting fire to the tents the government had loaned them.
Whatever the case, with unrelieved bitterness the marchers disbursed and the Bonus March was ended. MacArthur received much criticism in the press, and particularly by liberal publications, for his role in the affair.b He remained unrepentant and told the newspapers that the march might ultimately have led to “insurgency and insurrection,” and pointed out that it was the most bloodless riot he had been in.57
THAT DID NOT KEEP SYNDICATED COLUMNISTS such as Drew Pearson from maligning MacArthur for ousting the marchers in an “unwarranted, unnecessary, arbitrary, harsh, and brutal” manner. MacArthur filed a $1,750,000 libel suit against Pearson and his partner in the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column, Robert S. Allen, which featured some most interesting twists before it was done.
In those days, before the Supreme Court made libel suits almost a thing of the past, Pearson and Allen had ample reason to worry. Then a Mississippi congressman informed them that until recently a suite on his floor in a Northwest Washington, D.C., hotel had been occupied by a beautiful Eurasian girl who in the evenings frequently received the U.S. Army’s chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur. Newshound Pearson was able to locate Isabel and purchased MacArthur’s love letters from her. Then, at a pretrial hearing, Pearson’s attorneys startled the proceeding by saying that he intended to put one Isabel Cooper on the witness stand. MacArthur, thoroughly alarmed, sent Major Eisenhower to find Isabel—but Pearson had stashed her in Baltimore. Finally, MacArthur dropped the suit.
The columnists reported that no money was paid nor were apologies given. What was not reported was that Eisenhower or some other officer close to MacArthur had delivered $15,000 to Pearson’s lawyers, which was given to Isabel for her part in the scheme. Afterward she moved to the Midwest where she purchased a hairdressing shop and later to Hollywood where she became a “freelance actress”; according to her death certificate, she died following an overdose of barbiturates in 1960.58 When he heard about the affair, Admiral William Leahy remarked that MacArthur “could have won the suit. He was a bachelor at the time. He could have just said … so what?… you know why he didn’t do it? It was that old woman he lived with at Fort Myer. He didn’t want his mother to learn about that Eurasian girl!”
IN MARCH 1933 Franklin Roosevelt took office, and though MacArthur liked him personally the two men thoroughly disagreed on military policy. Roosevelt wanted to spend less on the military and more on his social programs, while MacArthur opposed him. During one spectacularly intense discussion that included the secretary of the army, Roosevelt bec
ame sarcastic when MacArthur argued that the safety of the nation was at stake. “When we lose the next war,” the chief of staff responded, “and an American boy is lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly, and an enemy foot on his dying throat, and spits out his dying curse, I want the name not to be MacArthur, but Roosevelt!”
At this, the commander in chief became livid and roared, “You must not talk that way to the president!”
MacArthur immediately realized he had been insubordinate and apologized, and then said he would resign his position. But as he reached the door, Roosevelt’s voice came with that cool detachment that so reflected his extraordinary self-control, “Don’t be foolish, Douglas; you and the budget must get together on this.”
As he left the building, MacArthur vomited on the White House steps, but he noted later, “From that time on he [Roosevelt] was on our side.”59
In 1934—as MacArthur’s time as chief of staff was coming to a close—Manuel Quezon, his old friend from the Philippines, came to America looking for help in case of a Japanese incursion. He went to see MacArthur, who told him that any place was defensible if enough men, munitions, and money were available. He told the Filipino, “It would take ten years and much help from the United States.” Quezon then asked if MacArthur himself would undertake the job of supervising the raising and training of a Philippine army. MacArthur agreed.
* The Spanish influenza epidemic of 1917–19 killed nearly as many U.S. servicemen as had died in the war itself—almost 50,000 of them on both sides of the Atlantic. Marshall, of course, was charged with trying to help control the problem.
† This includes 95,000 men whose remains were never found; they had simply been blasted to nothingness by the almost constant shelling. Their names are carved on the walls of the Menin Gate and the Tyne Cot British cemetery. British deaths in Flanders alone exceeded the entire number of Americans killed in World War II.
‡ Marshall’s second wife, Katherine, would later confront Patton after some particularly boorish remark at Fort Myer. “George, you mustn’t talk like that,” she told him. “You say these outrageous things and then you look at me to see if I’m going to smile. Now you could do that as a captain or a major, but you aspire to be a general, and generals cannot talk in such a wild way.”
§ Mitchell died in 1936 before his theories could be vindicated. But when war again came the army named a bomber after him—the B-25 Mitchell that was used in Jimmy Doolittle’s famous raid on Japan in 1942—and in 1946 Congress authorized a special gold medal in his honor, and everything from mountains to roads, streets, and highways were named after him, including the eating hall at the United States Air Force Academy. In 1955 a first-rate movie, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, was released starring Gary Cooper, and in 1999 Mitchell’s portrait was put on a U.S. postage stamp.
ǁ A decorative style of opaque or milky glass made in France during the reign of Napoleon III.
a The kitchens were withdrawn after a House leader made a speech complaining that if the army agreed to feed the veterans indefinitely, it would cause the other eight and a half million out-of-work citizens to descend on Washington looking for their handouts.
b Later, prominent Communists and former Communists testified before Congress that on orders from Moscow they were instructed to foment trouble between the marchers and police, in hopes that the army would be called in. Then, it was further hoped that the army would fire on and kill some marchers, thus touching off a Communist-style revolution in America.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I AM ALL HE HAS”
When the Marshalls left the Infantry School in 1932, seventeen million Americans, nearly 20 percent of the workforce, were unemployed. The stock market crash of 1929 had precipitated the Great Depression, which was to last the remainder of the decade. People were begging in the streets of large cities and millions, unable to find work, were on the move in tent cities across the country. The army too felt the pinch; appropriations were frozen, as well as salaries, and personnel, including the officer corps, were cut back.
Into this unfortunate state of affairs plunged the newly married George C. Marshall as commanding officer of a battalion of the U.S. Eighth Infantry Regiment stationed at Tybee Island, Georgia, seventeen miles south of Savannah. It was only a four-hundred-man outfit, but Marshall was glad for the opportunity to once again have a fighting infantry command. The post was a small one so he also served as post commander, with duties that extended to the civilian community in Savannah, a lovely but sleepy town that seemed a throwback in time.
No sooner had Marshall arrived than he was notified that his unit would be responsible for training a recent creation of the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his Democratic Congress called the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The New Deal measure would employ hundreds of thousands of young men in flood and soil erosion control by planting trees and grasses, building dams, bridges, and campgrounds, and other methods to be mapped out by the U.S. Forest Service, Conservation Service, and Army Corps of Engineers. These youths had to be organized into military-style units, the better to control them and enable them to carry out their jobs. Marshall’s quota of young men to train was seventeen hundred, but soon orders from Washington directed him to oversee nineteen of the CCC camps being built from Georgia to Florida. Marshall was charged with seeing that the young men had proper barracks, food, hygienic facilities, and direction. He loved the idea and threw himself wholeheartedly into the work, visiting and inspecting the camps regularly. If there were men who could not read or write properly he arranged for their education, and he encouraged them to learn to fish and swim and play team sports.
In 1933, Marshall was promoted to full colonel and sent to command the Eighth Infantry Regiment at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, near Charleston. As the Depression deepened it took a harsh toll on the enlisted personnel, especially if they had families. Marshall arranged for the mess to fix lunch boxes with hot meals that the men could take home to their families for ten cents a day. He and Katherine also ate these midday dinners “until the custom was well-established,” she said. “It saved the wives endless toil and was a godsend to the married enlisted personnel.”1 He also continued his work with the CCC camps, which he called “the greatest social experiment outside of Russia.”*
No sooner, it seemed, had the Marshalls settled in at Fort Moultrie than the new bird colonel received a severe blow from the War Department. He was to leave immediately for Chicago, and there become chief instructor for the 33rd Division—a National Guard outfit. Marshall saw it as a demotion and a dead end and asked Pershing to write Douglas MacArthur, who was then chief of staff of the army. MacArthur affirmed the orders. What Marshall didn’t know was that MacArthur had in fact handpicked Marshall for the duty, which he knew was somewhat onerous. As Marshall might have—and should have—expected, politics was involved.
It seems that the 33rd Division’s commander, Major General Roy D. Keehn, a prominent Democrat and lawyer for William Randolph Hearst, was smarting from accusations in “Colonel” Robert R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune that the division was in such a poor state of affairs it would be incapable of dealing with anticipated labor strikes and civil disorders in Illinois. McCormick was, of course, a prominent Republican and his paper made a point of attacking the Roosevelt administration. At Keehn’s request MacArthur had specifically selected George Marshall to shape up the 33rd and end McCormick’s attacks.
Unaware of all this, Marshall became despondent. Katherine wrote: “George had a gray, drawn look which I had never seen before, and have seldom seen since.” He told visiting Rose Page, who had asked when Marshall would become a general and then chief of staff, “Rosie, it looks now as if I never will. If I don’t make brigadier general soon, I’ll be so far behind in seniority I won’t even be in the running.”2
Chicago was a dull, dingy Depression-era city with half its working population unemployed. Marshall as usual worked hard—and successfull
y—to bring the 33rd Division up to par, while Katherine shopped at antiques auctions, of which there were many given the state of economic affairs. Worried that time was running out on him because of age, Marshall implored his old friend Pershing to write a letter to the War Department urging his promotion. Instead, Pershing did him one better—he went personally to the president of the United States.
On May 24, 1935, Secretary of War George Dern received a note from the White House.
General Pershing asks very strongly that Colonel George C. Marshall (Infantry) shall be promoted to brigadier.
Can we put him on the list of next promotions? He is fifty-four years old.
F.D.R.
On October 1, 1936, Marshall at last got his star and was assigned to command the Fifth Infantry Brigade at Vancouver Barracks, Washington. It was the deep boondocks but Marshall didn’t care. He had a fighting command once more.
AFTER FOURTEEN YEARS AS A MAJOR, George Patton was at last promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1934. That same year, his daughter Bee was married to Lieutenant John Knight Waters, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and future four-star general. Patton had taken her to West Point five years earlier, for his twentieth reunion, and asked the authorities to provide a suitable escort and the authorities had produced Waters, whom they considered “the most outstanding cadet at the Academy.”
The wedding, which took place in the same church where Patton and Beatrice were married twenty-four years earlier, was a great social event. Bee wore the same wedding dress her mother had worn in 1910 (and the one her grandmother had first worn in 1884). Patton too looked dazzling, sporting his dress blues bedecked with medals. Photographs in the society sections of the newspapers show him smiling contentedly, although daughter Ruth Ellen had a different take. She would never forget her father’s face, she said, as he walked Bee down the aisle. “He looked just like a child who is having his favorite toy taken away. All his determination to remain forever young was being undermined by having a daughter getting married. He was forty-nine years old and he had still not won a war or kept his part of the bargain with Grandfer Ayer about winning glory. He looked stricken to the heart.”