"Bummers"

Across St. Louis's twisty Free Bridge last week went a rag-tag troupe of some 300 men clad in odds & ends of martial raiment--an old overseas cap here, a dirty olive drab tunic there. A few carried pails in which to make coffee and stews, a few carried clubs. The latter served as "military police." They were supposed to suppress vandalism, prevent radical speechmaking, see that none of the company begged or got drunk. One man carried clippings to show that before the Depression he was an Omaha broker who was ordered to pay $45,000 alimony. All were War veterans with honorable discharge papers, all were jobless. By appropriating rides on freight trains most of them had come from as far as Portland, Ore. They hoped to get to Washington and demand an immediate cash settlement of the Bonus.

First important set-back of the pilgrimage occurred when the veterans stepped off the Free Bridge in East St. Louis, Ill., and started to climb on an eastbound Baltimore & Ohio freight train. B. & O. officials, apprehensive lest the men wreck the train or kill themselves, ordered the train not to leave the yards. Then the marchers tried strategy. They deployed to Caseyville, eight miles away, waited until a string of 30 cars started to climb a steep grade there. Soaped rails and a cut air hose stalled the train, of which the marchers took informal possession. Ice melted from valuable perishable freight while railroad and county police argued with the determined mob. After 24 hours during which the railroad not only did not move 'its stranded cars but virtually ceased freight operations eastward over the line, the militia was called out. Ugliness and perhaps bloodshed were avoided by East St. Louis merchants and ex-service men who provided 200 Ib. of sausage meat and free truck transportation to Washington, Ind., thus shifting an unpleasant situation into the lap of a neighbor State.

Forewarned, Governor Harry Guyer Leslie of Indiana ordered 24 militia lorries to carry the men speedily across his territory, admonishing them not to come back his way. The marchers, now commanded by councils since the abdication of their leader, one Walter W. Waters, had again threatened that they "would ride the B. & 0. and make them like it." The Governors of Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland followed Governor Leslie's suit, shipped the contingent on to Washington, D. C.

Meantime General Pelham Glassford, superintendent of the District of Columbia's police, was concerned as to how he was to handle an invasion of jobless veterans. From San Francisco, Sacramento, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Evansville, Ind. came reports that independent contingents had set out for the capital. A detachment of 30 passed through Chicago from Utah. General Glassford had heard that from 70,000 to a million veterans would be in Washington by June 6. Together with Daniel Willard Jr., son of B. & O.'s kindly president, General Glassford called on Secretary of War Hurley to decide how the city and railroad were to be protected, how the marchers could be sheltered out of the dwindling D. C. community chest. The first contingent to arrive last week he billeted in a vacant department store.

Commented the superpatriotic Chicago Tribune: "They will be a disturbance wherever they go if not a potential danger. . . . The bummers were said to be in good humor, but there was the nucleus of a destructive mob. ... If this is a lark, what's a riot?"

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