Dwight D. Eisenhower: Douglas MacArthur’s Aide in the 1930s

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As it happened, the two men were very heavy smokers, thoroughly addicted to nicotine. They were both ideal candidates for lung cancer. Although neither ever contracted the deadly disease, Eisenhower’s years of smoking undoubtedly contributed to his later health problems.

MacArthur, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington noted, was a general in the tradition of Winfield Scott: ‘brilliant, imperious, cold, dramatic officers deriving their values and behavior from an older, aristocratic heritage and finding it difficult to subordinate themselves to civilian authorities.’ General Harold K. Johnson, U.S. Army chief of staff from 1964 to ‘68 and a survivor of the Bataan Death March, viewed MacArthur as ‘a great commander in the tradition of a Caesar. [But] I don’t think that he was the human sort of man that Eisenhower was.’

By contrast, Eisenhower was representative of ‘the friendly, folksy, easygoing soldier who reflects the ideals of a democratic and industrial civilization and who cooperates easily with his civilian superiors,’ according to historian T. Harry Williams. Whereas MacArthur seemed to relish controversy and often dashed boldly into frays, Eisenhower, ‘Speaking less and smiling more than MacArthur…appeared the embodiment of consensus rather than controversy. MacArthur was a beacon, Eisenhower a mirror.’ That two such polar opposites could survive each other without conflict occurs only in fiction. By 1932, although still officially assigned to the office of Assistant Secretary of War Frederick H. Payne, Eisenhower had long since become MacArthur’s de facto military secretary. That year he found himself involved in one of the most disgraceful incidents in American history and the most personally repugnant and controversial event of his military service under MacArthur.

In 1924, Congress had voted to award to some 3.5 million veterans what were called Adjusted Compensation Certificates–basically bonds masquerading as one thousand dollar bonuses due to mature in 1945 (or upon the death of the holder). For some it was the only asset they possessed. As America entered the 1930s, the bread line and the soup kitchen had become national symbols of the Depression, and joblessness, unrest, and privation became the catalyst for the Bonus March on Washington in the summer of 1932. The veterans believed their government had betrayed them by failing to pay the promised compensation for their World War I service. But an unsympathetic Hoover administration turned a blind eye to the plight of the former servicemen and never considered paying the bonus. When the veterans began to mount organized protests, they were stonewalled in the ill-advised belief that to react would inevitably lead to even further unrest.

More than ten thousand veterans, calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, converged on Washington to lobby Congress, some with their families, virtually all with no place to live and no money to afford food or accommodations. A few squatted in unoccupied, condemned buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue not far from the White House, but the largest contingent created an enormous shantytown in the Anacostia mud flats, unofficially known as ‘the Flats’ or ‘Hooverville.’ Violence broke out the morning of July 28, 1932, when District of Columbia police attempted to eject the squatters from downtown. Exceeding Hoover’s orders merely to clear the protesters, the War Department called out armed troops on that fateful July afternoon. Although Eisenhower attempted to dissuade him, MacArthur elected to personally direct the operation dressed in full uniform.

That evening MacArthur was alleged to have ignored a directive from Hoover that the army was not to pursue the protesters across the Anacostia River and clear the shantytown. The Bonus March ended after someone set fire to one the shanties, and as the few remaining veterans and their families fled into the night, Hooverville was consumed by flames. (Decades passed before historical evidence established beyond doubt that the controversial order for the army not to advance on Hooverville never reached MacArthur.)

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Tags: Historical Figures, People, Politics