The Plot  5
coffee, he learned that the food was running out, and veterans were
muttering about rioting against Congress if it did.  Before he left for his
home in Newtown Square, a small town outside of Philadelphia, he
warned the Bonus Marchers, “You’re all right so long as you keep your
sense of humor.  If you slip over into lawlessness of any kind, you will
lose the sympathy of a hundred twenty million people in the nation.”
 It was the government, however, that unleashed the violence.  Under
orders from President Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur led
troops in driving the Bonus Army out of Washington at bayonet point
and burning down their shacktowns.
 By August 1 rumors spreading from the last stronghold of the
veterans, an encampment at Johnstown, Virginia, indicated that the
infuriated Bonus Marchers were determined to organize a new
nonpartisan political organization of veterans and wanted General Butler
to lead it.  Reporters pressed him to comment.
 “I have heard nothing about it at all, although I was in Washington
about two weeks ago to address the veterans,” he replied with a shrug.  “I
have neither seen nor heard from Mr. Waters or any of the other leaders
of the Bonus Expeditionary Force.”
 Meanwhile he phoned the governors of a number of states and won
their agreement to provide relief for those of their veterans who wanted
to return home.  He phones Waters in Washington to urge that the
remnants of the Bonus Army break camp and start back home under this
plan, and he issued a blast at the Hoover Administration as heartless for
its treatment of the veterans and its failure to help them, their wives, and
their children return home without further humiliation.
 That November lifelong Republican Smedley Butler took the stump
for Franklin D. Roosevelt and helped turn Herbert Hoover out of the
White House.