American Legion

Since its establishment in 1919, the American Legion has been the largest and one of the most influential veterans organization in American history. Only the Grand Army of the Republic, which enrolled half of all surviving Union veterans of the Civil War by 1890, has had comparable impact and success in obtaining benefits and pensions for veterans and promoting patriotism. The Legion, in turn, helped shape conservative nationalism, the dominant American ideology of the 20th century, by reinforcing this ideology in local communities and lobbying local and state governments. The organization, which selected For God and Country as its motto, fought radicalism and appealed to the public's sense that U.S. wars have been fought not by professionals but primarily by citizen–soldiers who deserve to be rewarded for their sacrifices. The Legion also promoted a vision of “100 percent” as opposed to “hyphenated” Americans; that is, it argued that minorities should conform to traditional American cultural norms. With its reverence for religious and national symbols, the Legion has had a powerful impact on the nation.

Unlike the similar Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), which only enrolls individuals who served in combat theaters, the American Legion enrolls any veteran who served anywhere in the world at a time U.S. forces were engaged in combat. It has admitted veterans from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Grenada invasion of 1983, the Gulf War of 1991, and the Iraq War. By 1920, approximately 843,000 of the nearly four million demobilized veterans of the American Expeditionary Force [Page 34](AEF) in World War I had joined the American Legion. Its membership rose briefly to 3.5 million after World War II, stabilizing around 2.5 million since the 1960s.

Three powerful forces led to the Legion's formation after World War I. First, most American soldiers in the war experienced a comparatively short and painless tour of duty. Of the four million men who were mobilized, less than half reached the battlefield in France and of those only about half saw combat. For three-quarters of the AEF, many traveling far from home for the first time, war was a great adventure that had been abruptly curtailed; they cherished the camaraderie among soldiers and escape from ordinary life and wanted to “Keep the spirit of the great war alive,” as Legion promotional literature stressed. The quarter of the AEF who had seen battle hoped that the American government and public would remember their deeds and reward them for their sacrifices.

Second, those Americans who did see combat suffered casualties at least comparable to those of the other powers in the same amount of time: 50,000 dead and 300,000 wounded out of slightly more than one million men, most of whom served less than six months. Because the United States had to scramble to create the requisite bureaucracy to run a war, no attention had been paid to veterans’ postwar care and adjustment.

Third, the world, including the United States, seemed to be on the verge of revolution inspired by the 1917 overthrow of Russia's imperial government and the Bolshevik's creation of the Soviet Union. The fear of communist activity within the United States (the Red Scare) reached its peak under Att. Gen. A. Mitchell Palmer. One-fifth of the nation's workforce went on strike in 1919, and left wing organizations such as the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World—both of which had attacked the war and thus the value of the veterans’ participation—increased their activity. A great many veterans believed that having saved the nation during war, they needed to do so again in peacetime.

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