Late March

The 1932 march of bonus-seeking veterans on Washington ended in an ill-tempered whiff of tear gas that embarrassed the Army's orderly Brigadier General Pelham D. Glassford, retired. Last week another indigent siege of the Capital, by 2,500 jobless WPA workers who belong to David Lasser's Workers' Alliance, produced no whiff more deadly than that of Brigadier General Hugh Johnson, retired, who editorialized in his Scripps-Howard column: "It seems to be intimidation of the Legislature by a tiny minority using the silent threat of incipient riot. Their leaders . . . just want to use a lot of hungry and desperate suckers as demonstration puppets and they are more pleased than not when the poor boobs get all bloodied up."

Leader Lasser, who habitually deals with recalcitrant State Legislatures by parking his followers in the Chamber, appeared with a few early arrivals in the Senate galleries just in time for adjournment. By the time the rest of his legions had poured into Washington in chartered busses and ramshackle autos to pitch their tents in West Potomac Park, there was no Legislature to intimidate. Lost, moreover, in the adjournment shuffle was the bill the march had been organized to support : a proposal introduced by Washington's Senator Lewis Schwellenbach providing for: 1) no further reductions in WPA rolls, 2) reinstatement of all WPAers unable to get work, 3) a "furlough status" for those finding temporary private employment.

While 30 marchers picketed the austere portals of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce with placards reading DON'T TREAD ON ME. slight, earnest Leader Lasser conferred with Harry Hopkins to ask whether the WPA rolls, having been cut from 2.085,000 to 1,527,000 since April, would be cut any more. Mr. Hopkins retorted that he was obliged to spread WPA funds evenly over the fiscal year, could make no promises. He asked, however, whether Leader Lasser's followers were not getting to think of their WPA jobs as a "career." Mr. Hopkins thought that 10 to 15% of those on the WPA rolls did.

Climax of the encampment was to have been a triumphant march along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. But as the marchers, dampened by a drizzle and closely shepherded by 500 police, approached the Emergency Hospital and were asked to stop chanting, they obeyed. When a White House car pulled up with a request to divert the march to the auditorium of the Labor Department, they obeyed again. There they cheered David Lasser's reading of a message from Secretary Marvin Mclntyre, expressing the President's regret that "it is not within our power" to reinstate all the WPA workers already discharged, the President's belief that no more need be.

Next day the campers, who had been unmolested by the authorities but were weary of West Potomac Park's leaking tents and ankle-deep mud, began to depart. Cried Leader Lasser: "We consider our march a great success. We have been victorious--although our demands have only partially been met."

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