Abstract
In October 1922, representatives of the international veteran organization FIDAC resolved, at the end of their third annual meeting, to seek, among other things, world peace through the eventual disarmament of the ‘implements of war’ and the creation of an ‘international court … to outlaw war’. FIDAC’s well-known insistence on internationalism, peace and disarmament in the inter-war period made this episode part of a larger and longer trend. What is less well-known, however, is that FIDAC met in conjunction with the American Legion’s fourth annual convention, held in New Orleans during the autumn of 1922. Moreover, the legionnaires officially endorsed the resolutions coming out of the FIDAC meeting, institutionally wedding what until then had been a loose affiliation between the organizations. Alvin Owsley, the Legion national commander elected in New Orleans, explained his fledgling (if already powerful) organization’s endorsement of the FIDAC resolutions: ‘It is a vision of the future’, he added, ‘It may not result in immediate effects, but when these men grow to positions of power in their Governments t he y w i l l t r y to do what t hey ca n to me et t heir comrades of other n at ions on the footing of friendship.’ He concluded that veterans’ internationalism, as expressed in the resolutions, ‘means much for the future peace of the world’.1
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Notes
The few internationally focused exceptions to these emphases are Roscoe Baker, The American Legion and American Foreign Policy (New York: Bookman, 1954);
Brooke L. Blower, Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture Between the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and work on African-American veterans and Pan-Africanism by
Jennifer D. Keene, ‘French and American Racial Stereotypes during the First World War’, in William Chew (ed.), National Stereotypes in Perspective: Frenchmen in America: Americans in France (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001) and
Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988);
Akira Iriye, The Globalizing of America, 1913–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997);
and Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993);
Carrie A. Foster, Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989) and The Women and the Warriors: The U.S. Section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1946 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995);
and Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Since the American Legion was the largest of the veteran organizations representing the First World War cohort, and since the Legion was the American representative to FIDAC, this essay will focus primarily on it rather than other groups. On the American Legion, see Baker, The American Legion and American Foreign Policy; William Pencak, For God and Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989);
Raymond Moley Jr., The American Legion Story (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1966);
Alec Duncan Campbell, ‘The Invisible Welfare State: Class Struggles, the American Legion, and The Development of Veterans’ Benefits in the Twentieth-Century United States’ (Ph.D. Diss., UCLA, 1997);
and Thomas A. Rumer, The American Legion: An Official History, 1919–1989 (New York: M. Evans and Co., 1990).
Pencak , For God and Country, pp. 48 –77; Rumer, The American Legion, pp. 8–78 and 104–109; and Campbell, ‘The Invisible Welfare State’, pp. 262–328. For more on the Veterans of Foreign Wars as Legion rival in the 1930s, see Stephen R. Ortiz, Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill: How Veteran Politics Shaped the New Deal Era (New York: New York University Press, 2010).
On the Legion’s significant record of anti-radicalism, see Pencak, For God and Country, pp. 8–14, 144–169 and 236–321 and William Gellermann, The American Legion as Educator (New York: Bureau of Publications, Columbia University, 1938), pp. 68–134, preamble quoted, p. 71.
On Centralia, see Tom Copeland, The Centralia Tragedy of 1919: Elmer Smith and the Wobblies (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000).
Pamphlet quoted in report of Americanism Committee, Proceedings of the Ninth National Convention of the American Legion, 1927 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1928), p. 95.
Fries, quoted in Pencak, For God and Country, p. 9. For more on the spider chart and its use against pacifists and radicals, see Christine K. Erickson, ‘“So Much for the Men”: Women and National Defense in the 1920s and 1930s’, American Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 85–102.
Marquis James, A History of the American Legion (New York: William Green, 1923), p. 190 and ‘9,000,000 Veterans Pledged To Peace’.
James E. Darst, ‘True Stories of Life as a Doughboy in World War I’, found at http://www.usgennet.org/usa/mo/county/stlouis/darst/main.htm, accessed 5 June 2013.
Marcus Duffield, King Legion (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931), p. 144; ‘War Chiefs Plead for Peace at Legion Conclave’, NYT, 9 October 1928, p. 1; and Commander’s report in Proceedings of the Tenth National Convention of the American Legion, 1928 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1929), pp. 12–13. Emphasis added.
For a discussion of ‘the revisionist’ historians and popularizing writers who aided in this new atmosphere, see Warren I. Cohen, The American Revisionists: The Lessons of Intervention in World War I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 120–159; for an example,
see H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighan, Merchants of Death (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1934). For the best treatment of the populist critiques of US foreign policy in the 1930s,
see Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–1945 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).
When the peace activist veterans of Vietnam Veterans Against the War employed this idiom in the 1970s, they were savagely attacked by the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. See Andrew Hunt, The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
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Ortiz, S.R. (2013). Well-Armed Internationalism: American Veteran Organizations and the Crafting of an ‘Associated’ Veterans’ Internationalism 1919–1939. In: Eichenberg, J., Newman, J.P. (eds) The Great War and Veterans’ Internationalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137281623_4
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