I’m tempted to say everything has happened before, but I don’t know everything so I will refrain. However, when I read what follows about the “Battle of Anacostia Flats,” immediately I thought of Trump’s D.C. stormtroopers assigned to remove a homeless encampment for no reason whatsoever — except it gave them something to do instead of trying to look dominating as they haplessly wander around D.C.
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This moving piece of history comes from Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, And Their War, by Eric Larrabee, whose narrative throughout is so exciting, I have to calm myself down after reading it in order to get to sleep. Really. My experience with the battles for Guadalcanal was more akin to watching or being in a great movie than reading a war history.
I’ve learned so much more than I have ever known and am startled to find events that seem to presage what we’re living through right now. Which is a kind of war, although a whacked-out one befitting the condition of its leaders.
Larrabee forms his narrative with vivid biographies of the military generals who led our troops through World War II. I’ve just reached Douglas MacArthur. This section begins with a lunch in Albany in 1932, after Roosevelt had been nominated by the Democrats as its presidential candidate.
During the lunch, Huey Long called Roosevelt and yelled at him over the phone, accusing him of betrayals, etc. After Roosevelt hung up, he said to his lunch companions, “It’s all very well for us to laugh over Huey. But actually we have to remember all the time that he really is one of the two most dangerous men in the country.”
Who was the other? asked one man. Father Coughlin?
“Oh, no,” said Roosevelt. “The other is Douglas MacArthur.”
Roosevelt “felt there was a latent sense [in America] that democracy had run its course, that the totalitarians had a point, and that some measure of liberty would have to be sacrificed to strong leadership.”
“All that was lacking was the familiar figure of the man on horseback, a symbol for the Fascist-minded…to rally around, and who better qualified for this role–who came better equipped with charm, tradition, and majestic appearance–than Douglas MacArthur?”
The heartbreaking and nauseating “Battle of Anacostia Flats” had occurred two years before Roosevelt’s remark. A group of World War I veterans who called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force had come to Washington hoping to get Congress to grant them a WWI bonus earlier than when promised, 1945. With their wives and children, they built tents and rough shelters on the marshy bank of the Anacostia River.
The Great Depression reigned; Herbert Hoover was president. His Attorney General sent the police to tear down the settlement and get rid of the 15,000 or more people there. There was violence and some of the veterans were killed. Hoover had an excuse to send in the Army.
Led by Douglas MacArthur, the Army drove some unarmed veterans down Pennsylvania Avenue and past the Capitol. The Secretary of War twice warned MacArthur not to cross the Anacostia River to attack the veterans in their camp. As Larrabee tells it:
After several hours’ interlude of warning, MacArthur, in disregard of the wishes of his Commander in Chief, ordered his men to cross the river. They drove the B.E.F. from its shantytown, which caught fire and burned…while the veterans and their families fled into the night…MacArthur then…against the advice of Major Eisenhower [on MacArthur’s staff]...issued a statement to the press.
He said that no one had been seriously injured. Not strictly so: One man had his ear cut off by a cavalry saber; a seven-year-old-boy who ran back for his pet rabbit was bayoneted in the leg; two score more were hurt by bricks, clubs, bayonets, and sabers; and an eleven-week-old baby exposed to the tear gas died. MacArthur said that they were not really veterans…Not so: An extensive check of the B.E.F. by the Veterans Bureau concluded that 94 percent of them were bona fide. He said that the “mob down there was a bad-looking mob…animated by the esssence of revolution,” and that they were about to take over the government.
Larrabee sums it up with barely modified sarcasm:
If this forecast had any substance whatever, it has escaped the attention of historians…These were bewildered, hungry, unarmed men and women seeking help; the violence directed at them was wholly uncalled for, far out of proportion to any threat they posed. MacArthur magnified their hostility in order to justify his own. In his comments to reporters he could not resist a rhetorical flourish: “I have released in my day more than one community which had been held in the grip of a foreign enemy.” What communities and what foreign enemies he was referring to, his biographer has been unable to discover…