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blisters, pleurisy, the common cold, toothaches, and “body vermin—American cousins of the ‘cooties’ of French trenches.” They bathed in the muddy Anacostia River and slept in the open air. Mosquitoes and flies swarmed in the camp, spawned by Washington’s swampy, subtropical summer heat. Described by one newspaper as a “rag-and-tin-can city,” Hooverville, D.C., was within sight of the U.S. Capitol and was the largest shantytown in the country, its population swelling daily with new recruits.
    On June 17, the day the Senate was scheduled to vote on the bonus, there was a move to table the bill. Heated debate continued late into the evening, when a vote of 44 to 26 tabled the bill until the Seventy-third Congress convened in 1933. That night, the Hoover administration had genuinely feared that the veterans might turn violent. Instead, the marchers sang “America the Beautiful” and retreated quietly to their camps. While the majority of the Bonus Marchers left the city and returned to their homes, more than eight thousand remained at what was becoming a permanent camp.
    On July 19, retired Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, who had been Franklin Roosevelt’s guide through Haiti fifteen years earlier, rode into the site to offer solidarity to the veterans, many of whom he had commanded in previous skirmishes in China and Latin America. Having won two Medals of Honor and been called the “ideal American soldier” by Teddy Roosevelt, the lean and controversial Butler was an outspoken critic of the military brass and a staunch advocate of the enlisted man. Butler had recently been threatened with court-martial for making accusatory remarks against the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. The charges were dropped when Butler retired as a Marine, but his tenacious support of the veterans continued. A heroic whistle-blower, Butler had run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania on a platform of exposing the grotesque war casualties being hidden in Veterans Administration hospitals. He had been slotted to become commandant of the Marine Corps for his long career dating back to the Boxer Rebellion, but President Hoover had passed him over after the offense to Mussolini.
    Still, he was a soldier’s soldier, and the veterans idolized him. A roar went up when he leaped onto a crude stage to address them. “I’m here because I’ve been a soldier for thirty-five years and I can’t resist the temptation to be among soldiers,” he announced to boisterous approval. “Hang together and stick it out till the gate bars of hell freeze over … Remember, by God, you … didn’t win the war for a select class of a few financiers and high binders.” When he finished his speech, throngs surrounded him. He seated himself on the ground and listened to the men’s tales of woe until two thirty A.M. He repeatedly warned them not to “slip over into lawlessness,” for if they did so, they would “lose the sympathy of 120 million people in this nation.” The War Department had spies among the crowd, who reported to higher-ups that while Butler’s speech had been demagogic and inflaming, at least he had “carefully advised the men to obey all the laws.”
    The veterans’ leaders appealed to Hoover to receive a delegation from the camp. But the president declined, claiming he was too busy; he then proceeded to clear his schedule and isolate himself in the White House. In that “desperate summer of 1932,” as Manchester described it, “Washington, D.C., resembled the besieged capital of an obscure European state … [The] penniless World War veterans had been encamped with their wives and children in District parks, dumps, abandoned warehouses, and empty stores.” Police erected barricades, chained the gates of the Executive Mansion, and patrolled its perimeter day and night. HOOVER LOCKS