The Plots Against the President by Sally Denton

bullets in maintaining law and order in these times of Depression, unemployment and hunger.”
    The fallout was swift and decisive. “Hounding men who fought for their country was not a political master stroke,” one historian wrote. “What a pitiful spectacle is that of the great American government, mightiest in the world, chasing unarmed men, women and children with army tanks,” the Washington News admonished. Newsreel audiences throughout the country hissed as they watched the U.S. Army attack the Bonus Marchers.
    At the governor’s mansion in Albany, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were appalled. Sitting up in bed in the master suite, on the morning of July 29, Roosevelt was surrounded by a sea of newspapers. Rexford Tugwell, a professor of agricultural economics and one of Roosevelt’s advisers, later recalled that the governor felt deeply ashamed for his country. Embarrassed that he had once held Hoover in high regard, he revoked that opinion, telling Tugwell, “[There] is nothing left inside the man but jelly; maybe there never had been anything.”
    To Roosevelt, Hoover’s overreaction underscored his own evolving mindfulness of how deeply divided America had become, how wide the swath was between the “haves” and the “have-nots”—as Depression-era novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described America’s divisions along lines of money and class. Hoover’s actions highlighted to Roosevelt “the deep social cleavage in the nation and the possible difficulties posed by alarmists” such as MacArthur, whom he considered “a potential Mussolini.”
    In any case, Roosevelt knew better than anyone that the episode had sealed the president’s fate, predicting, rightly, that Americans would be outraged by the events.
    â€œWell, Felix,” he said to his adviser Felix Frankfurter, “this will elect me.”

Chapter Seven
    Happy Days Are Here Again
    The Bonus Army fiasco was the final blow to an ill-fated president. The 1929 stock market crash monopolized Hoover’s first year in office; the spiraling American economy plagued his next three years. While the Depression obliterated Hoover’s standing as a forceful American leader, his antisocial personality further undermined him. “But the rout of the bonus marchers shattered the remaining credibility of his administration,” concluded one historian. “His personal reputation might have weathered some of the discontent engendered by the depression if federal troops had not attacked unarmed, hungry petitioners—victims of that depression.”
    Roosevelt was quick to capitalize on his rival’s floundering, referring to him as “Humpty Dumpty” and never missing an opportunity to highlight his failures. In what would go down in history as a particularly bitter campaign, the Republicans’ ad hominem attacks included spreading rumors that Roosevelt’s paralysis was caused by a venereal disease, which had gone to his brain and was driving him “crazy.” The Democrats held no punches either, accusing Hoover of colluding in the export of fifty thousand coolies as cheap labor to South African gold mines while he was a Chinese mining company executive.
    In any case, Americans were uninterested in political squabbles and impatient for solutions to rescue them from the hardship that was growing harder. As the campaign headed into the general election, a journalist asked British economist John Maynard Keynes whether there was a historical comparison to the Great Depression. “Yes,” Keynes replied. “It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years.” Earlier, Keynes had warned a Chicago audience of the impending collapse. “We are today in the middle of the greatest catastrophe—the greatest catastrophe due almost to entirely [sic] economic causes—of the modern world. I am told that the view is held in Moscow