HEROES: The Legion Strikes A Blow

The American Legion struck Isolationism a ruinous blow last week—a ponderous, powerhouse, meat-ax crusher. The repercussions of the Legion’s action in its 23rd annual convention would echo for many months in Congress, the press, the homes of U.S. citizens. In convention at Milwaukee the Legion:

> Agreed that the present objective of the U.S. is “the defeat of Hitler and what he stands for.”

>Gave wholehearted support to the Roosevelt foreign policy.

> Asked repeal of the “socalled” Neutrality Act.

> Asked removal of the ban on sending A.E.F. outside the Western Hemisphere.

> Approved aid to Russia.

The 50,000 Legionnaires in Milwaukee did other things: they drank thousands of barrels of free beer at the open-air bars of Schlitz, Pabst, Blatz, Miller and Gettelman breweries; lifted girls’ skirts and stamped “O.K.” on their thighs; goosed the citizenry either by hand or by newfangled mechanical devices; trickled water on feminine legs; stopped traffic by playing pinochle on streetcar tracks, in general caroused and roistered with all their old muscular humor.

But there was a difference. The annual day-long parade had more zip, more color, more of a grim military note. Men gathered in hundreds to sing God Bless America, and some of them wept. From the sidewalks they shouted “To hell with Hitler.” The spirit was the old spirit: “What son-of-a-bitch, or combination of sonsofbitches, thinks he can lick us?” World War II had wrought a great change. Legion membership rose 20,000 in 1939; 25,000 more in 1940; 30,000 more this year.

The old war horses smelled the smoke of the world afire. They marched, to the rouse and stir of quickstep-music, with their fresh-faced sons, their pretty, milk-fed daughters, high-kneeing drum majorettes in boots and shorts and shakos. In Army camps all over the country were other thousands of their draft-age sons, marched and maneuvered with a deadlier purpose.

Significant was the convention’s treatment of two men who have been Legion heroes for almost a quarter-century: Missouri’s beet-faced, belligerent Senator Bennett Champ Clark, New York’s gangling, ham-handed Representative Hamilton Fish, both airtight, waterproof, hermetically sealed Isolationists. Clark, one of the 17 Legion founders and the first permanent Legion chairman, was roundly booed. Fish, who wrote the preamble to the Legion constitution, came to town to make converts, soon gave up and left.

Washingtonians, who knew what vast power Clark and Fish wielded on the floors of Congress as representatives of Legion sentiment, could guess at the tremendous repercussions such scenes would have on Capitol Hill.

All was not apples for the Administration. One Legionnaire had fun with a version of the Pledge of Allegiance: “I pledge subservience to the present Administration, and to the public debt for which it stands; one family insufferable, with divorces and captaincies for all.” And most unanimous applause of the convention was for a resolution asking that Mme. Frances Perkins’ resignation as Secretary of Labor be tendered and accepted instanter.

But these were flyspecks: the President’s foreign policy now had a mandate, clear and clean, from the veterans of the last war, one of the most influential single mass organizations of Americans, an exact cross section of basic U.S. opinion.