Poppa Knows Best

VOLUME 179

NUMBER 4

APRIL, 1947

90th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

As a rule it is not safe to generalize about soldiers, but during the war their attitude toward veterans’ organizations ran pretty well to one feeling: it’s better to be a Mister than a Veteran. A few thought it would be nice to have a social club to keep war-made friendships alive; a handful thought the vet should organize for political reasons. But most guys, especially those found in areas close to the shooting war, didn’t want anything in the way of clubs, uniforms, parades, or conventions — anything that would remind them of what they had been through.

Naturally, none of these men wanted to go home and find himself rooked out of a job or a decent place to live. But wasn’t there the GI Bill of Rights? Loans, security, happiness. Even soldiers who had enough leisure to fret about the future felt secure.

Pickings looked slim for professional veteran organizers, who make careers of convincing servicemen that one day or more spent in uniform entitles a man to devote the rest of his life to bragging about it and expecting special privileges because of it. This was a citizens’ army and its members wanted only to become citizens again.

Some of the Army’s inmates felt so strongly about this, and had such a distaste for the veteran’s organizations they had seen in the past, that they got together and formed a veterans’ organization to carry out their ideas. It smacks of a vicious circle, but that’s what happened. The group called itself the American Veterans Committee and adopted a motto, “Citizens first, veterans second.” Using no uniforms, no brass bands, and no baby grand pianos to throw out of windows, the AVC jumped up to its neck in politics, on the theory that as a citizen the veteran should become active in affairs which affect the citizenry as a whole.

Today approximately fifteen million men have been discharged from America’s armed forces. The AVC claims some 100,000 of them. That’s a pretty small fraction of the total: one out of 150 — about the same percentage that one would have guessed would join organizations, after listening to countless Army discussions on the subject. What about the rest? A few have joined the halfdozen or so other young groups which sprouted at the same time as AVC. But two and one-half million have joined the American Legion. The Legion’s membership today is four and one-half million, including some 800,000 enthusiastic lady auxiliaries. In two years there has been a big change of heart.

Of course, the Legion’s recruiting methods, recreational facilities, and advertising means are far superior to those of its junior rivals. It is easier to join an established post than to form a new one. Many young men came home to find that their Legionnaire daddies had enrolled them and paid their dues in advance. But after all these have been accounted for, we still have to dig for the reasons why most men have joined the ribald old Legion. Since the war ended, the veteran has begun to feel he needs something besides pretty words. While the young organizations are realistic in their outlook on matters vital to the veteran, they lack big machinery. The Legion has plenty of it.

Copyright 1947, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

And the Legion makes no bones about its hardboiled attitude toward the relation between citizen and veteran. The Legion remembers a quarter century back when America’s worship for its heroes faded with the echoes of the last shots on the battlefields. The American Legion believes the veteran should look out for his own interests, and to hell with the next guy. The AVC believes the veteran’s first responsibility is that of a citizen. World War II veterans have had two years to choose, and a glance at the membership figures of the two organizations shows which choice they have taken so far. Why?

One instrument that in many ways has failed the young man back from the war is the GI Bill of Rights. Another great pain has been housing. While professing much sorrow over the roofless noggins of its young membership, the Legion’s high command has been strongly against every plan the government has put forth to ease the housing shortage. The organization has followed what appears to be a more or less normal urge to grow more conservative as it grows older. An indication of this may be found in the fact that the Legion’s officials condemned Senator Robert Taft as a radical because he helped write the Wagner-Ellender-Taft housing bill. The Legion joined several other groups, largely real estate, in referring to it as the “wet” bill.

The point here is that the Legion’s membership had no vote in the matter. The Legion, a great champion of Americanism, operates by the caucus system. Posts elect delegates, who in turn elect higher delegates, until finally a small group sits at the top and declares Legion policies — but they are not answerable to their electors. Occasionally posts, and often individual Legionnaires, protest top-level policies, and can throw their weight around locally, but the vibrations of dissenting voices seldom extend beyond the next county. Individual members have been chucked out of posts, and posts have had their charters revoked when they have become annoying.

Here the Legion allowed its politics (the kind which call Taft radical) to cause it to condemn a piece of legislation on principle only. If the Legion felt that its attitude toward Federal housing was for the good of its membership’s political future, then its paternal attitude is nice. But how much right does an organization have to be paternal toward several million members? Especially when the organization is a champion of the credo known as 100 per cent, rootin’, tootin’ Americanism? It is hard to believe that if ballots had been distributed, the membership, a noticeable portion of which is huddled on park benches and under culverts, would have voted against Taft’s brainstorm.

Unless his eyes are full of sand, it’s hard for a young gent not to see many faults in the old Legion. So his swing toward it must mean that he’s become pretty disillusioned in the two years since he wanted to be a Mister instead of a Veteran. Political troubles and industrial strife, which had simmered while he was away, broke out in great storms after V-J Day. If the vet was pro-labor, he was disillusioned by the behavior of some of labor’s bosses. Or maybe he had faith in his bank and was a good conservative. It was a shock to find that the bank, which sent him Christmas cards while he was overseas, had become more interested in collateral than character, and his GI Bill of Rights loan wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. Whatever form his disillusionment took, it wasn’t pleasant. He wanted a surplus truck. Maybe he had some sort of moral priority, but. unless he represented a big dealer and talked in terms of dozens, he was usually out of luck — unless he wanted to buy retail from a dealer.

He found himself being bombarded with the idea that maybe he had spent the war helping his worst enemies kill his best friends. If he praised a Russian or criticized Franco he was a Red. He found that his war record and a dime would get him on a crosstown bus. Very confusing.

2

THIS was not a new story to the Legionnaires. They had been through it a generation before. They knew that when a man is thoroughly bewildered and angry, it’s not hard to talk him into placing some of his troubles in the hands of those who promise to solve them for him. The Legion sat back and waited. The flood came.

For an organization designed to solve the veterans’ problems, the Legion has a handsome setup. Even with its comparatively small membership before World War II, the Legion was the most powerful single legislative influence in America. The organization’s big-time lobbyist is John Thomas Taylor. The members of the American Legion pay Taylor an annual salary of $10,000, and it’s very modest, considering the fact that he makes most of the highest-priced lobby-artists in Washington look like sissies.

Included among the Legion s four and one-half million members are, according to the count at the beginning of the Eightieth Congress, 195 members of the House of Representatives, 44 U.S. Senators, 5 Cabinet members, 3 Justices of the Supreme Court, the Attorney General, and Harry Truman. Also 26 state governors and countless state legislators. But this is not what makes John Thomas Taylor an important man in Washington.

Taylor made a speech at the annual National Commanders and Adjutants Conference in Indianapolis last November. His own words show what gives Taylor the strength to make legislators bend their ears. “We’re strong,” said Taylor, while discussing the Eightieth Congress, which was about to begin work, “but a lot of the new [Congress] men don’t know it yet. It’s necessary to impress them. That’s whore you fellas come in.” The roomful of men, representing fortyeight states and the territories, looked as if they had heard this before, but they enjoyed listening to Taylor, who was an engaging speaker with a long cigar for a pointer.

“ Find out for me the attitude of your new Congressman,” said Taylor. “Don’t just wire me that ‘He’s all right.’ I want to know if he’s all right where we are concerned. If you’re not sure about him, tell me and I’ll have a talk with him. If you hear from me after I see him, I expect you to put the fear of God in him. From back home. That’s where he gets his votes.

“I’m a realist about legislation [note: one of the classic understatements of our time] and I know that’s all he’s worried about — his votes. And even if he doesn’t like Washington society, his wife does. [Laughter.] After you’ve put the heat on a man, I always know, because he always comes to me and complains about it.”

Taylor repeated these sentiments several times because, he said, “The Legion is interested in 106 pieces of legislation, involving 14 billion dollars, in 1947.” This spokesman for the organization which champions, among other things, a balanced budget made a rather neat addition to his remarks: “Remember,” said he, “that it’s none of your damned business whether you agree with any piece of legislation we’re pushing. Remember it’s the Legion mandate.”

When you stop to think what happens in a Congressman’s mind after he has taken a contrary att itude toward one of the 106 bills, and is deluged with letters, wires, and angry phone calls from his home dist rict — and you remember that Taylor can precipitate this deluge in any Congressional district at any given hour, with more than 15,000 Legion posts awaiting the “mandate” — nothing more need be added to his remarks.

It’s surprising how many Legionnaires think of the outfit solely as a social group which does charitable work and swaps war stories at meetings, and they bitterly resent outside criticism of the Legion. Persons in this category would do well to acquaint themselves with John Thomas and his activities.

If the Legion confined itself solely to using its power as a crowbar to pry the lid off the Treasury on behalf of the veteran at the expense of the rest of the citizenry, the situation would be simple. But the outfit is a maze of contradictions. After announcing its intention to raid the mint, the Legion professes strongly conservative politics, and every conservative wants economy in the government.

If it used its whip in Congress only to force legislation in favor of the things the veteran needs or wants, then again the situation would be simple. But in the case of housing, the organization placed its avowedly staunch belief in unlimited free enterprise above the thing so many veterans crave — immediate housing.

Practically every speech made at important Legion functions sounds like a mixture of National Association of Manufacturers advertising and a Hearst editorial page. Article II, Section 2, of the Legion Constitution states: “The American Legion shall be absolutely non-political and shall not be used for the dissemination of partisan principles nor for the promotion of the candidacy of any person seeking public office or preferment.” Now the Legion undoubtedly has its own reasons for overlooking this part of its constitution. But the old dragon has the unmitigated brass to flay other veterans’ organizations which also take an interest in partisan politics.

3

THE American Veterans Committee has been on the receiving end of a great deal of the Legion s invective. The red paintbrush has been applied generously, and not without reason. For a long time the domestic Communists advised their friends to join the Legion and bore at its innards. But the old outfit has developed a tough shell. The top Legion leadership would remain firm if half the organization were full of carefully made holes. It must have been a shock to the Commies to find an organization as unyielding as themselves. Undemocratic.

So the AVC began inheriting some of the frustrated little men with the augers. Like all organizations which maintain a semblance of decadent democracy, the American Veterans Committee has a soft underbelly. The Communist Party turned its attention to AVC and advised eligible comrades to join AVC as well as the Legion. Squirming just slightly, like the Spartan boy with the shirtful of fox, AVC is trying to defend itself by voting against Communist members who aspire to high offices — and not by revoking their membership. Probably the Legion’s defense is more effective, but one can’t help wondering which method leaves its user in a better position to speak of such things as Americanism.

Some historians claim the Legion got off to a booming start because the high command in World War I supported the infant as a weapon against the growth of American left-wing movements. Last November I interviewed Paul Griffith, the National Commander, and asked him if this was true. Griffith, no mean Legion historian, neither confirmed nor denied it. He did say that the Legion has been conservative since the beginning, that its top officials have always been men “with solid, mature ideas,” and that the Legion has maintained a constant hostility toward the left wing. He added that he hopes this policy will continue.

I asked if the organization intended to devote as much time to fighting the good fight against those who would destroy our way of life a la Schicklgruber as it devotes to defeating the whiskery Bolsheviks. The Ku Klux Klan was mentioned. “The Ku Klux Klan,” said Griffith in his positive manner, “is dead.” I thought of a little dentist in Atlanta who will be awfully hurt if he hears of this. His name is Samuel Green, and he will not like to hear that as far as the American Legion’s Commander is concerned he is not a Grand Dragon but just another obscure croaker. “Of course, if it. were not dead it should be dead,” added Griffith, for the record. “But it’s dead.”

“The Communists,” he said, “are our only threat.” I had been privileged to hear Griffith shortly before, as he delivered a long speech at a luncheon for some Indianapolis dignitaries. The words free enterprise, Americanism, Communism, red fascism, fellow travelers, and pinks appeared at regularly spaced intervals, and it is not hard to believe that Griffith, as well as the American Legion, is fighting a noble if somewhat one-sided battle.

With the Legion’s conservatism salted away for the moment, Griffith turned to the subject of youth in the Legion. Critics who say World War II veterans have no voice in the Legion should correct their statement. The National Commander himself is a World War II veteran. Griffith served as a sergeant the first time; as a colonel this time. John Thomas Taylor, the potentate of Capitol Hill, is a World War II veteran also. Certainly as long as Taylor is around, nobody can say World War II has no voice in the Legion.

Since practically all the top Legion brass which boasts World War II service can also boast World War I duty, the original criticism should be reworded: youth has no voice in the Legion. True, young veterans have taken over several posts here and there, and have even started a few of their own. But when I speak of the Legion in this piece, I refer to the Legion which does the talking — not the membership at large. The wide chairs in the assembly room at National Headquarters arc still being polished by wider and more mature posteriors. One of the Legion’s high dignitaries was pretty frank about this at the San Francisco Convention last fall. “This is a billion-dollar corporation,” said he. “You don’t turn something like that over to a bunch of inexperienced kids.”

Griffith has the same attitude but he says it in a more diplomatic way. He thinks wiser heads should prevail always, and he himself spent ten years in his own post before assuming a position of even minor responsibility.

Conceding the value of age and wisdom accrued through experience, I asked the National Commander if he didn’t feel that sometimes brash youth with its radical ideas, while admittedly needing to be checked and balanced by sages, had occasional merit. In short, wouldn’t it be a good idea if the wise old Legion monster had enough young blood injected into its brain (its veins are already bubbling over with young blood) to startle it a bit — maybe jog its thinking processes?

Down came Griffith’s kind and fatherly foot. He does not go along with the theory that youth is inclined to be radical. He feels that all rightthinking young men realize that poppa knows best, and that there are just as many old crackpots as young ones. He recounted his own youthful experiences, and they were right out of Horatio Alger. He jerked himself upward by his bootstraps, and now he is a prosperous businessman, and he feels he grew up right — by listening to his elders. He probably has something there.

Paul Griffith’s statements, and the actions of the high echelon of command in the American Legion, make several facts rather obvious about the organization, particularly from a young man’s standpoint. If he is interested in having a voice in his country’s future during the next few crucial years, and hopes to make himself heard through the nation’s largest veterans’ organization, he’s out of luck. The Legion’s official policies come from the top. The individual member’s sole contribution is the fact that he is a member — one more statistic to frighten a Congressman. If he doesn’t agree with the Legion’s ideas, he is not going to change them within the next few years, because the top men have left no doubt that they know what is best for the veterans and the nation they live in.

If the young man is willing to come along quietly and let himself be indoctrinated, then in good time the reins will be placed in his hands. General Harry Vaughan, the President’s aide, made a remark which probably reflects the attitude of some of the more tolerant senior Legionnaires. “Let the old boys have their fun,” said Vaughan. “They built the Legion and it’s their baby. They’ll turn it. over to the kids eventually.” This is a touching attitude, but the sentiment is hardly in line with the Legion’s “campaign promises” when it went after young members in a big way. “Come in and take over!” they cried, not mentioning that they meant ten years from now.

The Legion’s leaders are highly conservative about domestic politics, and lean by nature toward isolationism. They were highly isolationist until 1941. Men who join the Legion add strength to those policies, and to no others.

4

DESPITE its many good deeds and intentions, the Legion is a political machine in the hands of a comparative few. The merits of a liberal policy or a conservative one are beside the point — the fact is that the Legion has maintained one extreme policy without wavering since its birth, and there is no doubt that a constantly extreme party line at the top of a large organization often works to the detriment of the membership. No extremist can be right all the time.

Of course, in view of the fact that some unwholesome characters on the real lunatic fringe of American politics are making a great play to capture the valuable commodity known as the veteran’s mind, and to turn it to their own ends, the young ex-warrior could be in worse hands than those of the John Thomas Taylors. But he could be in far better ones — his own.

One great citizen of this nation who believes the veteran should determine his own future is General Omar N. Bradley, who runs the Veterans Administration. Unquestionably he was one of the most popular field commanders of the war. His interest in his boys has always extended beyond their battlefield usefulness. That’s what set him apart from so many of his contemporary commanders and explains his wartime popularity.

Bradley has made his feelings about the citizenveteran quite plain: “He can think of himself primarily as a citizen and he can employ his veterans’ benefits for his own best interests and those of the nation. Or he can think of himself primarily as a veteran and . . . employ his numerical strength for special privilege at the expense of the nation.”

Of professional veterans Bradley says, “Anyone, whether he be the spokesman of veterans or any other group of American citizens, is morally guilty of betrayal when he puts special interests before the welfare of this nation.”

Also, “I feel it my duty as an American citizen to remind veterans that their future lies in honest opportunity rather than special privilege. We dare not benefit one group of the American people at the expense of another.”

General Bradley’s views about the veteran as a citizen were not popular with the high echelons of Legion command last year. Griffith’s predecessor as National Commander, an Illinois politician named John Stelle, opened up on the General several times with the Legion’s heavy artillery. Once he used for ammunition the fact that Bradley had supported a bill designed to cut government allowances to vets — involved in the Veterans Administration’s “on-the-job” training program — whose incomes exceeded an arbitrary ceiling set by the bill. Because of widely varied costs of living in areas where the program was being used, this had an adverse effect on many men who lived in more expensive parts of the country, and even caused some of them to give up the training. It was a very complex and controversial thing, with good arguments on both sides.

Seeing in this controversy a chance to crack at Bradley and show the boys the Legion was out to make as much for them as possible, Stelle made it sound like a national emergency. He accused Bradley of everything from inefficiency to “breaking faith with the veterans” This controversy was the climax to several attacks Stelle had made on the General. The first had been when Bradley had refused to build a VA hospital in Decatur, Illinois — a project in which the Illinois politician Stelle had been quite interested.

While Bradley’s universal popularity makes it unlikely that even top dogs in the Legion really put their hearts into this matter, nevertheless Stelle had spoken for the Legion, and the organization’s bigwigs and house organs went along. Many individual posts and countless Legion members wrote Bradley to tell him that this was Stelle’s show, not theirs. But the high command had spoken. The National Legionnaire proceeded to “prove” Bradley’s inefficiency by editorials. No matter if nine out of every ten Legionnaires loved Bradley, the Legion hated him.

One of the many things for which Bradley is noted is his easygoing disposition. But like all kindly men, he burns with a blue flame when he’s aroused. He went to the Legion’s National Convention at San Francisco last October. He sat quietly at the speakers’ table while the usual convention paunches shook before the mike and emitted the usual platitudes about the Legion’s glorious destiny and the other paunches present. Bradley didn’t bother wrapping himself in a flag. He was already warm enough. Said he: “There are among the ranks of the high-salaried professional veterans those who forget that the veteran has paid, and is paying, for all that he gets. . . . More dangerous than the German Army is the demagoguery that deceives the veteran today by promising him something for nothing.”

Bradley made the rather startling revelation that not once had Stelle, during his term as National Commander of the country’s largest veterans’ organization, come into Bradley’s office to make any offers of help or cooperation. In fact, said Bradley, “My host, your National Commander, has deliberately obstructed [the VA’s] efforts. He has impaired our progress by misrepresenting our objectives.”

The General repeated his sentiments about veterans being primarily citizens. From the stony silence which greeted his speech, and the remarks which followed from other speakers, one would have thought the General had recommended the use of veterans for vivisection.

The American Legion is usually pretty wise about its public relations. It maintains a large staff of experts for this job. But evidently it wasn’t listening to the experts in this matter, because it didn’t expect the repercussions which followed the “Battle of Bradley” in San Francisco. Newspapers and public figures representing every shade of American politics and opinion (including many who had been staunch Legion supporters) wrote editorials and made statements giving Bradley their unanimous endorsement. Former soldiers who knew at first hand of Bradley’s decency and integrity, as well as people who knew about him only through Ernie Pyle’s columns, wrote bushels of mail tolling the General they were all for him. In many cases his supporters were vague about, the details of the controversy, but if the General was having troubles they wanted him to know they loved him.

So the American Legion officially loves him too, now. Paul Griffith has posed with Bradley for news photos. Below one of the photos was a joint statement of love and future cooperation which sounded as if the two were off to Niagara for a honeymoon. Because Bradley is still impartial and willing to play ball with any organization which will help in his work, it’s certain that he was quite sincere in posing for the pictures and writing the statement.

But he still believes the veteran is primarily a citizen, and it is obvious that the Legion hasn’t changed any of its views, so there must be special reasons for this new-found harmony. One of the reasons, of course, is that Bradley is too popular for the Legion to attack him openly. But the main reason is that Bradley will not be in the Veterans Administration much longer: he’s going back into Army duty. The Legion can see no point in burning its fingers again by fighting him, when all it has to do is wait for him to leave, and concent rate on his successor.

5

THE American Legion had a good friend in General Frank Hines, who preceded Bradley. In view of the loud noises the old dragon made when Bradley committed one small act which may be construed as an error, it seems strange that the Legion never had a bad word for Hines during the many years he ran the Administration, when it made some of Washington’s most notorious bureaus look like well-oiled precision machinery in comparison. An official history of the Legion, written recently by Richard Jones, a former Legion public relations man, even defends and praises the handling of the VA under Hines.

Many executive jobs in the Administration were held by duds who had long records of chronic incompetence, but who happened to belong to the Legion. The hospital system under Hines was scandalous. Physicians and nurses found themselves spending valuable time filling out forms and disentangling themselves from red tape, when they should have been taking care of patients. A complaining letter from a VA doctor, which was released by the American Veterans Committee in 1945, before Bradley became VA head, said:'—

“Blame can be spread everywhere, but many of us feel that the veterans’ service organizations are largely at fault. . . . I have often heard the veterans’ organizations clamor for more monetary benefits and I have seen them maneuver for special privilege, but I never saw them exert themselves to raise the VA’s standards of medical treatment. How come? . . . The organizations are constantly appealing cases for higher ratings and trying to force into the hospital their members and prospects. . . . They have most use for docile physicians and executives. Such men have been rewarded with leading positions. . . . Many good men have resigned in disgust.”

No doubt Hines inherited many of his troubles from his predecessor, a man who went to Leavenworth for his practices in the VA. Probably the worst that can be said about Hines is that he was one of the docile people referred to in the indignant doctor’s letter. Hospitals were built with other considerations in mind besides convenience for the staff and comfort for the patients.

Another physician, a man of prominence, said, “The Veterans Administration hospitals are in the backwaters of American medicine, where doctors stagnate and where patients who deserve the best must often be satisfied with second-rate treatment.” Men stayed in VA hospitals for years, in some cases, without real effort being made to cure them. Applications for disability compensations piled up unopened in VA offices, while crippled veterans had to suffer if they had no funds of their own.

As the nation’s largest society of veterans, and one with immense influence in the government, the Legion made little effort to agitate for improvement in these conditions. Instead, the organization often exploited the situation for its own benefit. This is one of the blackest indictments against the American Legion.

Omar Bradley was asked to take the job of VA boss at the end of World War II because it was obvious that one hell of a mess would result if millions of new veterans returned and added their

problems to those still unsolved by the VA. The conscientious Bradley agreed, but asked to be relieved of the job in a year or two. He felt that if he could make any progress in streamlining the VA, it would be far enough along by that time so that a successor could take over and continue the improvement. Not only did he feel that his profession was soldiering, but he undoubtedly had an aversion to wading through political slop and dodging floating pork barrels all his life.

The job proved far more complex than Bradley’s former task as commander of the ground forces which cleaned up Europe. And there are still many things which don’t function perfectly in an organization which receives hundreds of thousands of fresh problems every week. But with many times the troubles of the Legion-approved Hines, Bradley has made the VA operate with many times its former efficiency. His first major improvements affected the hospitals. There the men who truly suffered great loss, and to whom t he nation owes a tremendous debt, found that the average hospitalization time per patient had been cut from 42 to 20 days within the first year of Bradley’s administration. The General asked deans of seventy-seven leading medical colleges to cooperate with him in working out a system whereby young doctors are used as resident physicians by the VA while completing three years of specialist training. This and several other schemes arc going a long way to improve and increase hospital staffs and cut down the number of sick guys who, in the past, languished in wards for long periods without much being done for them. Bradley has refused to knuckle under to high-pressure artists who think of hospitals as community assets rather than establishments to cure unlucky warriors. 6

THE brain-boys in the Legion have been reasonably successful in implying that last year’s fight with Bradley was a “clash of personalities” between Stelle and the General. Stelle’s behavior makes it easy to hang the rap on him alone. But it is impossible for the Legion to unprint articles and editorials which appeared in official house organs when the “mandate” said Omar oughta be spanked. And it is difficult to gloss over the fact that the powerful Legion organization not only refused to help Bradley to clean up the VA, but actually impeded and insulted him.

The reason was simply that Bradley believed the VA should operate independently of groups which have axes to grind and prestige to keep up. He is willing to work with them but not for them, and he would prefer to fill his organization with efficient men, not pad it with favorite characters. The Legion didn’t, exactly approve of Hines’s omissions — it was simply ready to forgive him under certain conditions. The organization doesn’t dislike Bradley for his worthy efforts; it just puts other interests above the welfare of the Veterans Administration.

Legion brass hats can afford to wait a little while until Bradley leaves. If the job, which is filled by Presidential appointment, is given to a Legion-sponsored man (and it would be naive to think the organization isn’t working overtime to influence the appointment), then the Legion can use the VA to its own advantage in far greater measure than before.

Rival organizations which have incurred Legion enmity for any reason, including partisan politics, would quickly expire if the VA chose to cease its policy of extending recognition and coöperation to all veterans’ groups on a fair basis. This would give the Legion a monopoly in veterans’ affairs. It would absorb a large part, of the membership of extinct groups, thereby adding considerably to its strength. But these would be small potatoes compared with the members the Legion could draw simply by dropping the hint that since it has strong influence in the VA, any man who depends upon that agency for benefits would do well to join the “club.”

The “club” has made its position on the veteran versus the citizen quite plain. It regards the veteran as a separate and privileged part of society, regardless of the extent of his contribution to the war effort. The “club” has already attained a size and power which has a direct influence on our national affairs, and it is imperative for every American, veteran or otherwise, to look it over and decide what he thinks of it.

It is not important for the citizen to decide whether he approves or dislikes the American Legion’s policies regarding everything from the atomic bomb to which textbooks shall be studied in our schools. It is important for him to acquaint himself with the fact that the policies of a group containing nearly five million members, and exerting the greatest single legislative influence in the country, are made at the top and not by the votes of its individual members. The men who sit in its national headquarters are no longer representative of its membership, and their power grows with every recruit.

Perhaps also it would be good if the non-veteran citizen in America would reflect on the reasons why millions of men who just wanted to be Misters are joining an organization which speaks for them without asking them what they’d like to say. It is quite a commentary on the disillusionment and apathy which has seized so many men in such a short time.

Those who would make us a generation of professional veterans are not altogether villainous characters. The American Legion once had some stars in its eyes, too. One of its very first resolutions in its infancy was directed against the idea of a bonus, on the theory that what is taken out of the Treasury must be put back in taxes. Many of its old members came home wanting to be Misters, too. Their reconversion made them into cynics, and now they believe it is necessary for the veteran to protect himself against society. That is their ‘sales talk for new memberships. But in the process of growing older, they have even forgotten to carry out that idea in many ways. The old Legion’s selfish interests caused it to condone an inefficient Veterans Administration. Its current motto might well be, “Policy first, veterans second, citizens third.”

The American Legion is in a large sense the product of America’s behavior toward its erstwhile heroes. If the non-veteran citizens do not exert a little more effort to help ex-servicemen, and bear in mind that help does not mean charity and simple cash handouts, but constructive aid so that the veteran can regain his place in the society he was forced to leave, then the citizen must expect the consequences. There is a tendency among civilians to judge both service and exservice men by the chiselers, whiners, and gold bricks which are bound to show up in any group of people. And there is a similar trend among veterans to judge all non-veterans by the landlord who chisels, the grocer who cheats, and the woman who didn’t wait.

The gap between citizen and veteran has widened in many ways. Nobody can afford to ignore men like Bradley, who have given simple and clear warnings of the danger in the situation. Demagogues have winning ways, especially for the man who has no one else to whom he can turn in his troubles.