Read an Excerpt
On the Battlefield of Memory
The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919â"1941
By Steven Trout The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2010 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5723-8
CHAPTER 1
Custodians of Memory
The American Legion and Interwar Culture
From the point of view of the individual member, the contribution of the veterans' organization is magical. By its alchemy, the organization transforms an experience that would otherwise be most destructive into a social asset. The ex-soldier has lost his years, his youth, and he brings back the memory of nameless horrors. There is no place for him in civilian society. The veterans' organization gives him a place of honor. His fellow soldiers understand him. They value his achievements. They do not tire of listening to him so long as he is willing to listen to them. When, like all heroes of the past, he is in danger of becoming a bore, the society of his fellows saves him from this fate so much worse than death.
— Willard Waller, The Veteran Comes Back (1944)
When Willard Waller, a history professor at Columbia University, wrote the passage quoted above, as part of a study designed to help American civilians understand the millions of strangers soon to return home from Europe and the Pacific, the conditions of wartime had all but silenced criticism of the once-controversial American Legion. After noting the immense value that veterans organizations held for their members, Waller went on to praise the American Legion in particular for its contributions to local communities and to the nation as a whole. Waller conceded that "the social intelligence of [legionnaires] has not always kept pace with their good intentions," but he urged his readers to consider how much more dangerous the organization might have been if it "did not mean well." After all, the professor explained, veterans organizations feed on an "in-group feeling" that naturally produces a conservative outlook, and he pooh-poohed allegations that the legion's right-wing ideology undermined American democracy. Americans fearful of groups like the legion would do well, he suggested, to meet them halfway: "If liberals, intellectuals, labor union members and representatives of the less common shades of opinion wish to influence veterans in the next twenty-five years, their best chance will lie in joining the veterans' organizations, participating in their activities, compromising with them, and helping to form their policy in free and democratic discussion."
The unfolding realities of the Second World War (many of which confirmed the legion's predictions), combined with wartime patriotism and feelings of national unity during a time of emergency, helped shape Waller's generous and forgiving assessment of an organization that before 1941 tended to produce polarized responses from Americans. Indeed, for the American Legion's pre-World War II detractors, the organization stood for a brand of hypernationalism that was all but synonymous with fascism. Arguments that equated legionnaires with the Italian paramilitary Blackshirts were, of course, simplistic. Comprised of literally thousands of community and neighborhood posts (not all of which towed the party line), the legion seldom maintained a completely monolithic perspective on anything. Nor was the group's political agenda as consistently right- wing as its critics claimed. In the early 1920s the organization examined several of the U.S. government's wartime industrial initiatives — especially the disastrous aircraft production program (which failed to deliver more than a handful of planes to the AEF) — and demanded to know "who got the money?" Hatred of war profiteers (real or imagined) sometimes shifted this predominantly conservative, middle-class organization into a liberal muckraking mode, which even led to attacks on the short-lived World War I version of what we today call the military-industrial complex. And although the legion had to overcome internal divisions before it could maintain a consistent and coherent position on the matter of adjusted compensation (the so-called bonus that many veterans believed they deserved for lost wages during wartime), the organization hardly displayed a conservative political ethos once it started pressuring the federal government to expand veterans' entitlements. At least when it came to benefits for former soldiers, the legion was no enemy to the welfare state. Although broadly middle-class in outlook, the organization included — and frequently spoke for — working men from across the nation, especially as the Great Depression pushed so many of these veterans into the ranks of the indigent.
However, on a number of hot-button issues, located at the very core of its political identity, the American Legion stood firmly and unapologetically to the right. During the 1920s and 1930s, the organization helped expose and all but eliminate political radicalism in America (during the Red Scare, cartoons in the legion's official magazine longingly portrayed anarchists at the end of a rope), and most legionnaires would have liked nothing better than to stomp out their chief legal adversary, the American Civil Liberties Union. At the same time, educators who sought to uphold academic freedom had good reason to fear the legion: mandatory loyalty oaths for teachers and a standardized curriculum purged of any leftist leanings topped the legion's flag-wrapped agenda for the American classroom. And, finally, on the question of national defense, its true raison d'être, the organization maintained a position that was deeply at odds with the optimistic vision of international brotherhood upheld by Wilsonian progressives and pacifists. Anticipating right-wing arguments later made during the Cold War, the legion asserted that only an intimidating military buildup on the part of the United States could rescue civilization from another world war. According to this reasoning, a formidable American defense force, backed by stockpiles of the latest weapons, would cause potential aggressors to think twice, thereby serving the interests of peace. Disarmament, on the other hand, would invite hostilities, since only the United States could be expected to honor the terms of a given agreement. In one of its earliest articulations of this argument, the legion enlisted the support of none other than John J. Pershing, who in a 1922 issue of American Legion Weekly asserted that a stronger peacetime army and navy would have kept the United States out of World War I — and might even have prevented the conflict altogether. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the American Legion lobbied for preparedness measures that struck many non-legionnaires not as peace-serving deterrents but as evidence of war mongering. For example, the group called for a peacetime draft, increases in defense spending, an end to American participation in arms talks and treaties, and the guarantee of "universal service" in the event of another war (a proposal intended to equalize wartime salaries for soldiers and civilians and to minimize wartime profits, thereby removing any incentive for arms manufacturers to encourage hostilities). For better or worse, no one in Washington, DC, during the interwar period listened to any of these proposals.
Despite the failure of the American Legion's defense initiatives, even the group's most dismissive critics could not deny that it was a force to be reckoned with — the largest, most powerful veterans organization in American history. More than a million World War I veterans, nearly a quarter of the men inducted into the armed forces in 1917 or 1918, donned the legion's blue uniform. And even before World War II veterans flooded its ranks in 1945, the organization contained more veterans than the combined membership of the Grand Army of the Republic and the United Confederate Veterans at the peak of their popularity. Rival organizations never came close to matching the legion's numbers. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, the legion's chief competitor, failed to attract more than three hundred thousand First World War veterans, and when the head chaplain of the AEF attempted, with Pershing's blessing, to found a society for AEF veterans in 1919, he quickly abandoned the attempt. Too many soon-to-be-discharged servicemen had already flocked to the legion. Within months of its founding in Paris by a small group of maverick AEF officers, led principally by Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the organization became a coast-to-coast presence in the United States as returning veterans fanned out across the nation establishing state-level headquarters that in turn handed out charters for community legion posts (each named after a local fatality). By 1941 more than ten thousand of these posts were in place, seemingly one on every Main Street in America.
From the moment of its inception, this political and cultural juggernaut was news. Of the organizations that became prominent in what a contemporary academic called "The Cult of Nationalism," only the Ku Klux Klan inspired more controversy (or attracted more members). And when the legion wasn't making headlines through its politics, it did so through its notoriously raucous national conventions. Cities selected to host these soirees eagerly anticipated the revenue that so many thousands of comfortable, middle-class men would pour into the local economy, but from a law-and-order standpoint they dreaded the legionnaires' arrival. As Dixon Wecter cleverly put it in his 1944 study of veterans' issues, When Johnny Comes Marching Home, "every reunion turned into an auto da fé of repudiation against the hapless Eighteenth Amendment." At national meetings like the 1921 convention in Kansas City, a full-scale blowout that featured columns of veterans marching from speakeasy to speakeasy while performing a concert on trash cans, or the 1926 convention in Philadelphia, where representatives of the Colorado chapter released "mules, coyotes, and other Western beasts" onto the city streets, legionnaires behaved like soldiers on leave, which in a sense they were. As the responsibilities of family and career closed in on these men, they increasingly turned to conventions as vacations from middle-class propriety. Reunions with wartime buddies represented fleeting opportunities to reconnect with a youthful experience that became only more glamorous with the passage of time, an experience seemingly freer (despite military constraints) than the civilian routine that came afterward.
Perhaps because the American Legion has just as frequently been associated with lampshade hats and water balloons as it has with antiradicalism and veterans benefits, academics have not always grasped the organization's importance. Scholarly interest in the legion intensified during World War II as historians like Waller and Wecter braced the nation for a new round of social and economic challenges posed by demobilization, but then this interest fell into a deep decades-long slump. Over the years, scattered PhD dissertations focused on the American Legion, along with a trickle of now-forgotten academic and popular-press titles. And that was it — until the publication in 1989 of William Pencak's masterful study For God and Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941. Pencak not only provides the fullest account to date of the legion's political activities between the wars, but he also offers a still-unsurpassed analysis of the organization's ideology, as embodied in the all but indefinable term "Americanism." Subsequent monographs on the legion have followed Pencak's lead, revealing the political, social, and cultural complexities of an organization once considered largely irrelevant to the larger narratives of twentieth-century American history. For example, Jennifer Keene's treatment of the legion in Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (2001) underscores the organization's vital role in the passage of the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill. Another valuable work, Thomas B. Littlewood's Soldiers Back Home: The American Legion in Illinois, 1919–1939 (2004), offers a case study in the impact of "sectional differences" on the legion's anything but homogenous internal culture(s). Published one year after Pencak's study, Thomas A. Rumer's The American Legion: An Official History, 1919–1989 (1990), provides a dense but dependable grand narrative of the organization's history, particularly useful for fact-checking, that complements these other, more exploratory works.
One critical topic, however, has remained unaddressed amid this resurgence of scholarly interest in the American Legion — namely, that of memory. The organization's aggressive politics, which suggest an entirely forward-looking agenda, perhaps explain this neglect. However, while working to strengthen the America of the future and to protect the economic interests of World War I veterans, the legion was, at the same time, memory obsessed, its political outlook and overall ideology informed by a specific vision of the First World War. Two goals contained in the organization's statement of purpose, drafted in 1919, reflected its ties to the past: the legion would strive, first, "to preserve the history and incidents of our participation in the war," and, second, "to cement the ties of comradeship formed in the service." The first of these two objectives was, in part, a matter of literal preservation. Concern over the deteriorating condition of official war records in Washington, DC, prompted the legion to spearhead the congressional lobbying campaign that resulted in the establishment of the National Archives, one of the organization's lesser known but most commendable achievements. At the same time, history, as constructed from the documents that the legion so valued, played an important role in the group's internal culture. Throughout the 1920s the American Legion served as a distributor for dozens of fact-filled divisional histories, tedious works that attempted to clear away the fog of war through overly precise descriptions of troop movements and battles. The legion's own publications also reflected this historical bent. As part of a fund-raising drive for disabled veterans, the organization published a multivolume set (again, all but unreadable) titled Source Records of the Great War (1931). Containing a variety of documents, this collection purported to offer the raw material of history for the reader then to interpret. Likewise, the hundreds of legion post histories compiled between the wars reflected the group's interest in preserving a reliable body of archival material covering both the war and the legion's ongoing development. The vast holdings of the American Legion Library and Archives in Indianapolis, more material than could be digested by a hundred researchers in a hundred lifetimes, richly attest to this passion for record keeping.
However, most legionnaires were neither historical researchers nor librarians, and what American participation in the First World War meant (the territory of memory) played a far more central role in the organization than efforts to pinpoint exactly what had happened at a given moment on a given battlefield. From the start, the goal of "preserv[ing] the history and incidents" of the war took a backseat to activities designed to lend structure and coherence to shared experience. Memory, not history, shaped the nostalgic content of the legion's periodicals, spawned the organization's remembrance rituals (regularly conducted at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and at Armistice Day and Memorial Day functions across the country), and propelled legionnaires out of their posts and into their communities, where they pushed for war monuments and other forms of commemoration long after most Americans felt the desire to pay for them. Between 1919 and 1941, no remembrance organization in the United States expended more energy, raised more money, or enjoyed more success when working to maintain the Great War (especially the memory of its fallen) as a living presence in American culture.
Preserving wartime "comradeship" was also, fundamentally, a matter of formulating and perpetuating collective memory. Bonds between former soldiers required a shared vision of the past, a vision that was powerful enough to offset the natural tendency of wartime ties to weaken over time, so narrative, or storytelling, was important within the legion's internal culture. Rather surprisingly for an organization that supposedly maintained tight control of its members' opinions, the legion's official magazine (known as the American Legion Weekly until 1926 and then as the American Legion Monthly until 1938) seldom focused exclusively on the group's political agenda. Typically, just one or two feature news stories per issue, along with one or two editorials, reflected the legion's four-pronged mission of crushing radicalism, mentoring America's youth, strengthening national defense, and securing veterans' benefits. Narratives of various kinds comprise the rest of the contents, including humorous cartoon strips (some set in wartime France, others focused on the vicissitudes of middle age), brief "human interest" stories recounting the activities of various posts, historical accounts of World War I battles and campaigns, profiles in courage focused on the exploits of highly decorated soldiers, short stories, and serialized novels. War fiction, in particular, was a staple of the periodical. Well-known war writers such as Leonard H. Nason and Thomas Boyd made regular appearances in the magazine, their action-filled narratives complemented by the dramatic war scenes (painted by Harvey Dunn and Howard Chandler Christy, among others) that often decorated the front cover.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On the Battlefield of Memory by Steven Trout. Copyright © 2010 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
