Playgrounds for Derelicts

If President Hoover had shipped the Bonus Army of 1932 off to pleasant camps to play, putter and carouse at Government expense, the nation's Press would almost certainly have been more indignant than it was at his action in driving the luckless veterans out of Washington with tear gas and bayonets. If the conscientious New York Times had not last fortnight dispatched a man to investigate and report, the quiet but costly fashion in which President Roosevelt dissipated the threat of another Bonus Army would probably have escaped ail public notice.

Shrewd Franklin Roosevelt never let his Bonus marchers get the Washington spotlight. Quick as querulous, down-at-heel veterans began shuffling into Washington, he began shipping them off to special relief camps in the South. In eleven such camps last week--seven in Florida, four in South Carolina--some 2,500 derelicts were being housed, fed, paid $30 to $45 per month.

Near Charleston, S. C. Timesman Charles McLean found 300 whites and 145 Negroes dabbling at a road between their separate camps, mile apart. At an abandoned CCCamp near Blaney, S. C. (pop. 200) some 265 veterans were slowly turning a fish pond into a swimming pool. At Kingstree, S. C., whose 3000 residents are about half Negro, 200 campers were pulling up pine trees preparatory to laying out a golf course.

There were, wrote Reporter McLean, three kinds of campers--"shell-shocked, whiskey-shocked, depression-shocked." About half were psychopaths. Most of their pay went to liquor dealers and moonshiners. "They're hell-raisers and do no good to anybody," said Charleston police. At Blaney some 15 veterans were on the chain gang. Kingstree citizens were worried by the campers' attentions to their "brass ankle women"--mongrel white-Negro-Indian wenches who hang about the Negro settlements. At Kingstree a score of drunken campers had just wrecked the entire second floor of the town jail. Women & children were staying off the streets to avoid the rest. More nuisance than menace, however, the veterans were so broken-spirited that Kingstree's two-man police force could handle any number of them with the greatest of ease.

"Drunk? Of course they get drunk," cried Charleston's Mayor Maybank, himself a veteran. "We are rehabilitating them and it is a worth-while undertaking." But Reporter McLean found no other local supporters of the camps.

Last week, roused by the Times's carefully factual reports, Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins announced that the camps would be broken up by Nov. 1, all able-bodied veterans shunted to CCCamps or work relief jobs.

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