America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction by John Steinbeck, Susan Shillinglaw Read Free Book Online

that.
    Brigades of Bonus Marchers converged on Washington. Congress had voted the bonus money, but for later. Some of these men might have been hustlers and perhaps there were a few Communists among them, but most were ex-soldiers who had served the nation, frightened men with hungry families. The ragged hordes blocked traffic, clung like swarming bees to the steps of the Capitol. They needed their money now. They built a shack town on the edge of Washington. Many had brought their wives and children. Contemporary reports mention the orderliness and discipline of these soldiers of misfortune.
    What happened in the seats of power? It looked then and it still looks as though the Government got scared. The White House, roped off and surrounded by troops, was taken to indicate that the President was afraid of his own people. The rumor spread that Mr. Hoover had stocked his Santa Cruz Mountain estate with food for three years. It doesn’t matter whether or not it was true. People believed it. And there must have been fear in the Administration because only the frightened fall back on force. The Army got called out to disperse the hungry and tattered ex-Army.
    Four companies of infantry, four troops of cavalry, a machine-gun squadron and two tanks drove the petitioners from the streets of Washington, moved under a cloud of tear gas on the scrap-and-kindling shanty town and burned that pitiful citadel of misery. It is interesting that the commandant was General Douglas MacArthur. Of course he was under orders. They cleared the ragamuffins out.
    I speak of this phase at length because it was symptomatic of many of the positions of leadership. Business leaders panicked, banks panicked. Workers demanded that factories stay open when their products were un-salable. People on all levels began hoarding nonperishable food as though for an invasion. Voices shrill with terror continued to tell the people that what was happening couldn’t happen. The unfortunate Mr. Hoover was quoted as having said Prohibition was a noble experiment. He didn’t say that; he said noble in intent.
    The noble intention had created inner governments by gangster, little states which fought wars, committed murders, bought officials, issued patronage and sold liquor. Not only was this new aristocracy supported by any citizen who had the high price for a bottle of bad liquor, but successful gangsters were better-known, even more respected, than any other Americans save movie stars. Their lives, loves, felonies and funerals were fully reported and hungrily read. Important citizens courted their acquaintance and favor. They seemed the only people in the land who weren’t confused nor afraid.
    Then Mr. Hoover, running for reelection with a weary momentum, came up with another beauty. He said grass would grow in the streets if Roosevelt were elected. He should have looked. Grass was already growing in the streets. Farmers dumped milk, burned crops to keep prices from collapsing. Armed neighbors guarded homes against mortgage-foreclosing sheriffs. Grass was growing not only in the streets but between the rusting tracks of factory railroad sidings.
    There wasn’t much doubt of the election’s outcome. In Dizzy Dean’s immortal words, Franklin D. Roosevelt slud home.
    I guess Mr. Roosevelt was called more names and accused of more crimes than any man in history, but no one ever thought or said he was afraid. Furthermore, he spread his fearlessness about among the whole people. Much later, when business picked up and business leaders howled with rage against Government control and Mr. Roosevelt, they seemed to forget that they had laid their heads in his lap and wept, begged him to take over, to tell them what to do and how to do it, that they had marched and shouted and fought for the Blue Eagle, that symbol of Government control—but they had.
    There are whole libraries of books about the Thirties—millions of feet of films, still and