The Yanks Are Coming: The American Legion in Action

I

THE American Legion had known for a year that it would hold its twentysecond annual convention in Boston on September 23, 24, 25, and 26. But the average Bostonian didn’t begin to worry about the approaching horror till a week ahead. Those thousands and thousands of people . . . They carouse all day and all night . . . The only thing to do is to get out of town and stay out . . . Who is responsible for asking them here, anyhow? . . .

Boston’s Mayor Tobin went to Los Angeles two years ago, appeared before the Legion convention and asked them to come to Boston in 1940. Last year he made the same sort of trip, this time to Chicago, and this time Glenwood J. Sherrard went with him. The mayor asked the delegates to make it Boston in ‘40, and Mr. Sherrard had in his pocket a certified check for $27,050. Sherrard represented Boston business, members of the Board of Trade, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Boston Hotel Association. Prize plum among all conventions, the Legionnaires must be guaranteed against loss and assured of an attractive concession. The mayor and the check spoke convincingly — and in September, ‘40 the Legion took over Boston.

But, murmured the average Bostonian, why? The answer is that a Legion convention is big business, and good business. The boys who were mustered out in 1918 now average forty-seven years old; their hair is thinner, their waists are thicker; wives and daughters come to conventions with them. It takes quite a lot of money to make long trips. The Legionnaires who make those trips have the money, and they spend cash. When the last Legionnaire had left Chicago last year, the Chamber of Commerce calculated that 300,000 visitors had left behind them $15,000,000. And the Legion’s membership has, this year, reached an all-time high. Total membership, 1,069,267 — the greatest fraternity and lodge and club in the world. When Poland fell, when France collapsed, men joined the Legion in thousands.

So they began to come, by train, by car, by bus, by plane — 300,000 visitors in a city of 750,000. Three million the day of the parade. . . .

The vanguard hit the town on Sunday — names of every state in the Union on their caps, medals on their uniforms, belts straining a little over middle-aged bow windows, carrying canes, and maps, and pamphlets, waving at the girls, or taking pictures of the State House, with their wives, or without them, short and tall and fat and thin, a slice of America cut right across. All the one breed, all so much the same in their faces, their walk, the tunes their bands played, that only by the states’ names on their caps and flags, or the accent they used when they asked you the way, could Boston tell one from another.

By three in the afternoon no car could move on Boston’s cowpath streets. The Legion took charge of the traffic, snarled it up, scored bull’s-eyes on the female anatomy with water pistols, rang their bells and tooted their horns, and every now and then sent some incautious passer-by into mild hysterics with a hotfoot from those innocent-looking shock boxes they carried. They held reunions and bull sessions in bars and hotel rooms, they made genial passes at good-looking girls. But they never took advantage of anybody, they paid cash, they kidded just so far and then said, ‘Well, on our way! So long, Beautiful.’ . . .

Boston found a lot of them, that bright Sunday, on the Esplanade. A band from a small Ohio post had got hold of a couple of dozen chairs and were practising under the trees — playing pretty complicated march music, not playing it very well. Earnest, interested, middle-aged Americans, blowing too loud on the brasses, scraping too thin on the strings; taking it, over and over, at the hoarse pleading of their distracted leader: ‘You’ll never win like this, boys.’

La Société des Quarante Homines et Huit Chevaux, with its deliberately pigeon-French titles, its elaborate and noisy reproductions of what someone thought, a French boxcar used to look like, is to blame for a good share of the reputation for general hell-raising that Legion conventions have acquired — and its members don’t give a damn. Their horizon-blue uniforms are always in evidence. Their wives are La Boutique des Huit Dames et Quarante Chapeaux. The commander is Chef de Chemin de Fer. They have a secret, slapstick ritual. They drive their engines the wrong way on one-way streets, bells clanging and sirens screaming. They are the ‘Hi, Toots!’ shouters, the water throwers, the singers of ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières.’

The night of La 21st Promenade National, Ville de Boston, was bedlam. The parade is a moving column of vaudeville acts and circus, and a million and a half people watched it. The Forty and Eights are out for fun, frolic, foolishness, and — philanthropy. They happen to be America’s chief source of supply for diphtheria immunization serum for small city and town hospitals. The Forty and Eights raised the devil, and the kids at the hospitals they visited were crazy about the shows they put on. They lifted nice, hard-working (pretty!) girls right off the sidewalk and carried them for blocks on their Voitures, before they set them down again three miles nearer home than they could have got through the crowds. . . . A tough, irresponsible bunch of men who are old enough to know better, really.

This year in Boston the Legion policed its own members. More than a thousand Legionnaires, on the police force in other cities, were made members of the B.P.D. with right to arrest, put on special red caps, and were guardians and monitors of their own. . . . There was only one case on the police blotter in which Legionnaires figured. Two of them went into their hotel room, found a sneak thief going through their things, locked the door, and beat him up. His cries attracted the police, who broke down the door and rescued him. There was no vandalism. Breakage and damage in hotels and restaurants were less than with the convention of the American Bankers Association or the American Bar Association, — not less in proportion, less in actual dollars, — though both those conventions had brought into the city only a twentieth of the total number of people the Legion brought. Damage on the streets was under $1500 — all in unprotected plate-glass windows pushed in by the crowds.

II

The big parade started at nine on Tuesday morning, and ended somewhere around ten at night. The streets were tight-packed canyons of watching humanity. Thirty thousand people paid $2.75 apiece for seats on the reviewing stands on the Common, on Beacon Street, on the State House lawn. Folding chairs sold like popcorn. Hour after hour the Legion marched by . . . over 350 bands . . . flags . . . standards . . . fife-and-drum corps . . . Sons of the Legion . . . drum majorettes . . . women of the Auxiliary . . . women of the Ex-Service groups . . . more people than most of the spectators would ever again see in any twelve hours of their lives. People worth thinking about, worth trying to find out something about. Americans. People it would take years, and volumes of books, really to know or tabulate. But, watching from those stands, you could draw at least a few generalizations.

The essential difference between a Legion convention and a convention of a professional organization is that the Legion, lacking specific professional subject matter, reaches a more universal level of interest. Each Legionnaire in that parade knew the emotions of men who see their old battle flag carried, knew what thoughts were in parents’ hearts when the Sons of the Legion, smart in their uniforms, marched by.

No new generation comes into the Legion. The organizing group were A.E.F. officers, and pretty high up socially. The common touch came later. Leadership has passed along naturally, as time went by. Ten years ago General Harbord told the Legion that within fifteen years it would have controlling membership in both Houses, and a member in the White House. So far the Legion has not produced a leader who has fired the country; but it is too soon to say Harbord was wrong.

Bankers and business men originally undertook to finance the Legion; frequently their argument for funds was that the Legion would prove a bulwark against radicalism. But it is doubtful if the generally conservative attitude of the Legion is any more pronounced than that of any other men of their age in organized groups.

That long parade day, the Legion’s voice was unanimous, its language the only Esperanto that has ever succeeded -band music. They had marched in a lot of parades, those men, and seen a good deal of water run over the dam. They organized, after the war, so that they could do something for themselves and for their buddies. They found their organization was a weapon, and found that they needed a weapon. They used it. When they went into the army nothing was too good to say of them. Their jobs would be waiting when they got ‘back from Over There.’ A few years later nothing was too harsh to say about them; many of their jobs were not waiting for them. They had to take off their coats, roll up their sleeves, and dig in for a living. Maybe that’s why so many of them have money to spend today in convention cities. It may also be why, for twenty-two years, Veterans’ Hospitals all over the country have been living testimony to Legion finance.

In the ‘20s it was smart to laugh at the Legion. They were damned for demanding bonuses, adjusted compensation, civil-service preferment. They were bitter, and from their point of view they had a right to be. They had fought a war for an ideal that educators scoffed at. Some of their comrades were in hospitals or insane asylums. Some of them were dead. Lots of them were very poor. Then, in the boom years, the Legion was regarded as a nuisance. Legionnaires behaved like hoodlums in off hours at their conventions. In session they passed resolutions urging a more adequate national-defense program, which editorial writers, economists, college professors, and other twelve-cylinder thinkers pronounced half-witted. They warned against Communism when it was merely a new and interesting political philosophy, fit meat for academic discussion. They were reminded of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and told to mind their own business. They were Babbitts.

The public attitude toward the Legion may be changing, but the attitude of the Legion toward the public is unchanged. Within the past few years Legionnaires have grown more thoughtful, more apprehensive, grimly determined to hang on to some of that idealism they were told they were fighting for the last time.

Still, as the state banners, the troop colors, the Forty ‘n’ Eights, the costumed kids, roared by those stands, it was more like a party — a circus party—than a crusade. People ate sandwiches and took a swig out of their flasks, and wondered how in the world they were ever going to get home through all that mob. The Edison Legion Post swung by, singing:

III

Maybe they hadn’t, but 30,000 of Boston’s visitors were women, most of them Legion Auxiliary members. One Legionnaire in ten had his wife along. The American Legion Auxiliary is the most democratic woman’s club in America. There are a half-million members, whose policies complement and interweave the Legion’s work. By and large they are quiet, home-keeping folks in middle-class circumstances, who spin a cocoon of home and community interests and rarely get outside it. They share an emotional unity born of war stress which few other groups can rival. The sole membership qualification is blood or marriage relationship to a United States soldier in the first World War. Race, color, creed, have no significance.

The bone of contention within the Auxiliary is uniforms. The Ex-Service women objected to the blue capes and overseas caps which were fast becoming the ‘ uniform ‘ of all the Auxiliary women. They wanted to monopolize this distinctive— and flattering — costume. Last year in Chicago they forced through a resolution confining the caps to ExService women. And the Auxiliary resented it. They think that a woman who struggled along at home, alone, on a soldier’s pay, with a houseful of little children, did ‘her bit’ quite as realistically as the unmarried girl who fought the battle of Paris in a custom-tailored uniform. They don’t resent war nurses. But hundreds of Auxiliary members had already bought cape, cap, insignia, and white marching shoes to the tune of about fifty dollars. To the chagrin of being denied a becoming, all-round useful costume was added the vexation of having wasted money.

They don’t like the drum majorettes much, either. Brazen little hussies, they say — the sort of folderol a person never heard of until a few years ago. Mostly, the drum majorettes are not relatives of Legionnaires, but ‘ringers,’ who make a profession of band music. But bear in mind that it takes a professional to toedance on city pavements for four straight parade hours, as one of the girls did in Boston, or, like another, to turn continuous cartwheels wearing an Indian headdress that weighed fifteen pounds. That’s not the sort of thing dear little Minny Jones can just pick up during the high-school gym period. The great majority of the band gals are hardworking professionals, with professional trainers and managers who ‘protect their virtue’ for the good of the profession. The most the Legionnaires, or anybody else, gets from them is an eyeful.

So actually the Auxiliary ladies don’t worry much. They are loyal enough members to keep the miaow-miaow of feminine fight in the family. In their community projects they present a hundred per cent solid front to the nation. Every month, in nearly 10,000 communities from Maine to California, Auxiliary meetings are held. They are not social meetings, but purposeful business conferences which have educated all classes of women in Robert’s Rules of Order, and resulted in inestimable progress in community enterprises. Officially, the Auxiliary initiates no policies of its own. It adopts and fights for the ones the Legion endorses.

The Auxiliary endorses the Dies Committee. Its annual $4000 scholarship was won this year by a boy from the Middle West who lambasted the American Youth Congress and Communism. The Auxiliary is immune to partisan politics because any administration has to recognize its strength and its demands. The only thing it fears is Communism or Totalitarianism, either of which might wipe out the prestige built up around volunteer military service. If it ever became as glorious for a machinist or bus driver to serve the state as for a man in uniform, the whole Legion theory would be done for.

The Auxiliary came along with the men, to sight-see, to take a vacation, to shop in unfamiliar stores, and to talk over in a pretty shrewd way the Legion enterprises its members run, and can run, and will run. Few grocers sell bad berries to Auxiliary members.

The score on Wednesday morning was that 530 street, cleaners, 54 city trucks, six motorized and two horse-drawn street sweepers, had removed 210 truckloads of paper and rubbish, 400 truckloads of bottles, boxes, peachbaskets, and suchlike improvised seats. The police had taken care of a hundred lost children. One man had died watching the parade. One drummer had appendicitis. Fifty women fainted. One boy fell out of a tree.

IV

The last two days, crammed with committee meetings, with elections, with resolution passing, were the ones in which the Legion signposts for the coming year were lettered and set up.

The business sessions were held in a hall with a Capacity of only 2600 — which suggests pretty plainly how small a part of the visitors are official voting delegates. The 1451 voting delegates represent, for the most part, a similar core of ‘professional Legionnaires’ in their local posts. Most of them are consistent yearly conventiongoers. The rest of the boys see the town and have a good time; but the delegates come with their resolutions, their candidates, their various understandings with other groups, all set to control policy and elections. The boys elect, them because they know the ropes and do the work, and because, to a considerable extent, they control the organization.

This clique of close-up workers makes an essential backbone for the Legion, a nucleus of policy formers, and is the means of projecting the organization’s views into the arena of public life. The way the Legion is organized, by departments, with permanent central officials and differentiated state and local powers, makes it about as hard for the rank and file of members to be felt with any force by the inner hierarchy as it is for the rank-and-file voters in political parties. As a matter of fact, the electioneering at a Legion convention is pretty much like that at a national political convention — and so are the trappings, the massed standards, the state roll calls, the platform operations, the abracadabra of the Resolutions Committee, and the rest of it. The Legion has proved a natural nursery for politicians. The same qualities win in a post election as in a public election, and once Legion preferment is won, it is a powerful push for any politician to have behind him.

The Legion’s most effective national political activities have been in its own interest. It finally won the bonus. It has increased veterans’ compensation and relaxed the rules for compensation eligibility, so that the Veterans’ Bureau is now a vast bureaucracy, dispensing dizzily incalculable sums. It secured the Veterans’ Preference Acts — which means a virtual monopoly on great areas of public office holding. It can lay a million and a half votes on the line.

In some ways public opinion has caught up with the Legion. For twenty years it has been urging selective draft, and ‘draft industry’ was always a component of its draft plan. But in its resolution to extend the fullest coöperation to England and China the Legion was catching up with public opinion. Last year the Legion was for complete neutrality; this year it called neutrality ‘mealy-mouthed appeasement.’ This reversal, incidentally, was one instance when the inner hierarchy failed to hold its customary control. It intended to stick to last year’s neutrality stand. But some of the original influential Legionnaires are now prime movers in that new and potent force for shaping American opinion, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. These men got a professional organization for testing public opinion to poll the general Legion sentiment before the convention, were satisfied with what they found out, and notified the national Legion leaders that attempts to pass isolationist resolutions would be fought from the convention floor.

The Legion has often let itself be fooled by sensation-mongers and reactionaries. Its most intolerant phase was before 1936, when it issued blanket accusations of radicalism against schools, teachers, and textbook writers. However, it has now made a gesture of joining hands with the National Education Association, whose president addressed the Boston Convention, though he was compelled to take a largely defensive attitude and led off from an article in the Convention issue of the American Legion Magazine, ‘Treason in the Textbooks,’which he described as ‘casting suspicion on 1,000,000 American teachers.’ A couple of years ago the Legion produced a school history book which was to be the perfect answer to the textbooks it condemned. But unfortunately it never caught on. To be exact, it was a flop.

Nor has the Legion always been as acute a prophet as it has proved itself in its stand on military preparedness. In its great attack on ‘un-Americanism,’ the book Isms, published in 1939, gave 252 pages to Communism, just sixteen to Naziism, and one and a half pages to Fascism. Rather an overwhelming demonstration of the ability to look in the wrong direction for major menaces.

The American Legion is the United States of America. These men and women gathered for four days in Boston and separated to translate into action a program they had formulated. Among these thousands there was not a trace of racial discrimination or racial hatred. Negro Legionnaires rubbed shoulders with white Southern Legionnaires, and if the whites resented it they did not show it. The date of the Legion convention is always calculated not to interfere with Yom Kippur; Jewish Legionnaires were fellow committeemen with Catholic and Protestant Legionnaires. No one even remarked on any of these things, or bothered to point them out as a boast.

As life grows tougher — and it seems very likely to — the Legion’s stubborn hardness may be a brand of Americanism we have needed, and lost, in our century of isolationism.

By Thursday night they had pretty well all left Boston. . . . The Kansas car with the sign reading ‘Please drive carefully: we have lived through drought, dust storms, prohibition, and the New Deal, and we want to see what happens next,’had turned its nose west again. The Voiture from Mississippi rumbled back south (Hi, Toots!). Boston prepared to heave the sigh of relief it had been looking forward to for weeks. Those people . . . all those thousands and thousands of people! . . . Boston heaved the sigh, but there was in it a curious, indefinable wistfulness. It isn’t every day you get a chance to see a slice of America, cut right across.