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armistice.’ ” While the House bill had been a victory for the Bonus Marchers, it faced stiff opposition in the Senate, prompting Walter W. Waters, an unemployed ex-sergeant from Portland, Oregon, to beseech every American veteran to hop a freight train for Washington and maintain a vigil on the U.S. Senate, which was scheduled to vote on the bill two days later on June 17. The Doughboys—as the World War I veterans were called—organized in companies and platoons and traveled by boxcar and flatcar, rattletrap and truck. Some walked or hitchhiked. “Every other interest has got lobbyists in Washington,” author John Dos Passos quoted a veteran as saying in an article for the New Republic . “It’s up to us to go to Washington and be our own lobbyists. Park benches can’t be any harder in Washington than they are back home.”
    When a group of three hundred from Portland reached Council Bluffs, Iowa, they joined thousands more veterans who had gathered from burgs and cities throughout the land. As they made their way East, sympathizers provided them with money, food, and camaraderie. A dramatic new form of protest, the movement attracted the attention of the national media, which gave the march widespread radio and newspaper coverage. Unlike the American Expeditionary Force of World War I—a segregated army that excluded nearly half a million black soldiers from its military units—the Bonus Expeditionary Force, as they called themselves, was fully integrated. In the BEF, black and white men—along with their wives and children—marched and camped together, prompting at least one journalist to depict it as a model for an integrated society. Many wore empty bean cans strapped to their belts as improvised canteens for water and carried faded Stars and Stripes. They “made for America a picture of honest men in poverty,” Waters wrote in 1933. “For Mr. Hoover had said there were no hungry men in America. Either he was wrong or these men imagined their hunger.”
    The “troops” marched up Pennsylvania Avenue—watched in silence by nearly a hundred thousand Washingtonians who had lined the streets—and set up camp on Anacostia Flats, an abandoned army base in the southeast corner of the city. They slept in lean-tos constructed out of cardboard boxes and shipping crates—“every kind of cockeyed makeshift shelter from the rain, scraped together out of the city dump.” Led by a Medal of Honor winner and several others who wore their Silver Stars, Croix de Guerre, and Distinguished Service Crosses, they organized in divisions and conducted military drills, sang war songs and listened to speeches by their leaders and others hoping to persuade or dissuade them in their pursuit. At least two Catholic priests sought to influence them. Father James R. Cox flew to Washington from Pittsburgh to implore the crowd to “stick it out!” He told them, “You will never get what you’re entitled to unless you stick.” Father Charles E. Coughlin—the highly controversial and nationally famous “radio priest” whose program reached millions of listeners—sent cash to help stave off starvation. “Cunning Communists are dicing for the leadership of these World War Veterans,” Coughlin wrote in a telegram, “and tonight, both to cheer the hearts of the bonus army and to show that Communism is not the way out, I am donating $5,000.” Additional contributions began to pour in from wealthy individuals, local merchants, and various organizations sympathetic to the plight of the hungry Bonus Marchers. Supporters throughout the country sent truckloads of food; one baker sent a hundred loaves of bread a day; another sent a thousand pies.
    Local Marines set up a clinic staffed by volunteer physicians and dentists, which was immediately inundated by men, women, and children suffering from bronchitis, rheumatism,