Over There, Again

Image from the American Legion Weekly publication, 1921, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In fall 1927, more than 20,000 American World War I veterans sailed to France commemorating the tenth anniversary of the United States’ entry into the Great War. Calling themselves the “Second American Expeditionary Force,” most of these men were members of the American Legion, the largest veterans’ organization in the United States. Since its 1919 founding, the Legion had advocated for veterans and their families, achieving considerable legislative success by 1927.¹ But the Legion also had been an active, and sometimes violent, participant in the hysteria that targeted left-leaning political radicals, immigrants, and labor unions in the immediate aftermath of World War I.² In many ways, the Legionnaires (as members were called) had returned from World War I only to enlist in the cultural wars of the First Red Scare (roughly between 1917-1923). 

When the Legionnaires landed in France in September 1927, they did so under the shadow of a nativist reputation and violent past. Making matters worse, in August 1927, just weeks before the Legion’s expedition departed for Europe, Massachusetts had executed two Italian-born immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, for murder, which sparked international outrage over what many saw as an act of injustice against two immigrants.³ The 1927 expedition to Paris exposed the central contradiction of the early American Legion – an organization that sought to present itself as a benign custodian of memory and shared sacrifice in combat, yet one haunted by its history of vigilantism and exclusionary nationalism.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti (left), handcuffed to Nicola Sacco (right), 1923, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The American Legion developed a reputation as a staunch nativist organization almost as soon as the Great War ended. Some Legionnaires argued that foreign-born Americans had been unfairly excused from military obligations during World War I.  “Deportation is the only solution” regarding “the alien slacker,” one American veteran wrote in the American Legion’s national publication, The Legion Weekly. During the Great War, the writer continued, immigrants “whiningly stated they were not Americans and America’s troubles did not interest them.” The unnamed correspondent only signed his letter with the familiar dictum: “AMERICA FIRST.”⁴ When the war ended and labor unrest stoked fears of a Bolshevik-style revolution sparked by foreigners, American Legion branches enlisted their formations in support of defending “Americanism” on the home front.⁵

During the First Red Scare, public officials from California to Indiana deputized local American Legion posts as armed vigilante forces, ready to purge the perceived threats of labor unrest, Bolshevism, and anarchy, threats sometimes attributed to immigrant communities.⁶ The Legion Weekly highlighted accounts of Legionnaires coming to the “aid” of local authorities, who eagerly enlisted war veterans as an auxiliary police force. In cities like Omaha and East Chicago, officials commissioned Legionnaires with law enforcement powers, which they used to enforce “order” by targeting immigrants and labor unions.⁷ The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published more than two dozen accounts of Legionnaires participating in mob violence from 1919 to 1921, sometimes with the active support of local police and political figures. The “Lawless American Legion” had a record of “outrages against law and order” the ACLU declared.⁸ Through the early 1920s, the American Legion encouraged its local branches to work in their communities to “restrict the influx of undesirable immigrants” and carry out “comprehensive program[s] of Americanism.”⁹ The Legion Weekly regularly advocated for suppressing foreign language newspapers, teaching immigrant children English, and enacting health inspections for recent arrivals – all in the name of “Americanism.”¹⁰

Image from the American Legion Weekly publication, 1922, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Although a few branches of the American Legion did voice concern about the “provocative and militaristic utterances and activities” of the organization in the 1920s, its national leadership equivocated and softened the harsh messaging of what enforcing “Americanism” looked like.¹¹ Arthur Woods, chairman of the Legion’s “Americanism Commission” admitted that there had been too much of “the mistaken idea that the only way to assert one’s Americanism was to crack some Reds on the head.” Although Woods admitted that “there have been, and are, individuals in this country whose heads will bear a good deal of cracking,” this sort of violent intervention in the lives of civilians was “of doubtful value unless it strictly takes the form of working in subordination to Government officials.”¹² Nonetheless, by the middle of the 1920s, the Legion looked back on their contributions to the post-war order proudly. “The Legion destroyed the red menace to America,” The Legion Weekly recalled in 1924, and declared, “it won a victory on the battlefields of America of almost equal importance to the one it won on the battlefields of France.”¹³

As the turmoil of the Red Scare subsided in the middle 1920s, the American Legion attempted to sanitize its image by focusing on peaceful memorialization of wartime service in Europe and less on the “Red Menace” at home. This culminated in the planning for the “Second American Expeditionary Force” to Paris, which aimed to set sail for France in September 1927. The Legion Weekly called the trip a “pilgrimage” to commemorate the “thousands of comrades who sleep in the great cemeteries of France and Belgium.¹⁴ ​​Although the Legion attempted to focus on memorializing the war during the upcoming expedition to Paris, the Legion’s reputation as an aggressive enforcer of exclusionary “Americanism” almost derailed the undertaking before it started.

The August 23, 1927 execution of Sacco and Vanzetti complicated the Legion’s efforts to focus on a shared memory of the Great War. The episode ripped open old wounds from the Red Summer of 1919 (anti-black race riots in US cities) and resonated with some French socialists, eager to challenge the Third Republic (1870-1940) during an economic crisis. One socialist newspaper in Paris proudly declared that “several hundred thousand war veterans” had already “resigned from the organizing committee responsible for welcoming the Legionnaires.”¹⁵ One French socialist publication spread misinformation that the Legion had even acted to “hasten the execution of the condemned men [Sacco and Vanzetti].”¹⁶ A week before the Legionnaires’ September arrival, rioters clashed with police in the port city of Cherbourg, France where the Americans were scheduled to land. The local “Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee” even demanded that the Legion return the ashes of the two slain men to Europe.¹⁷ French officials raised alarms that the arrival of the Americans would spark nationwide violence and even considered mobilizing the army to maintain order.¹⁸

The Stars and Stripes and the Tricolor March Side by Side Through the Arch of Triumph, Paris, Sept. 19, 1927, stereograph, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Despite these concerns, the expedition proceeded with the mission to Paris. More than 20,000 American veterans “deployed” to France, many of whom were aware of the heightened tension of the moment.¹⁹ Before departing the US, Bowman Elder, the chair of the Legion’s delegation to France, reminded the American veterans to act as “an ambassador of your country.”²⁰ Upon their arrival, the French hosts received their American guests warmly, much to the relief of many French officials who remained concerned that the Legion’s arrival would inspire a radical backlash and violent nation-wide protests.²¹ Some organized protests did occur after the Americans began pouring into Paris. In the Parisian suburb of Clichy, thousands turned out “to baptize a square by the name of Plaza Sacco-Vanzetti.” The protestors’ spokesperson denounced the “fascist, puritan, and alcoholic [American] Legion.”²² But as with most of these demonstrations throughout the country, the day ended peacefully.

Most of the week’s activities kept the Legionnaires in Paris, but some American veterans made their way to receptions and parades in Marseille and Toulon. They visited the gravesides of American and French war dead and held a massive parade in Paris without major incident. “There had been many Frenchmen who had imagined that the meetings of the Legionnaires would be solemn occasions where politics and policies and differences might arise and cause controversy,” noted a French observer. “[But] then came along that parade of laughing men and women, who indicated clearly that they had come to pay France a happy visit and have a good time doing it.” Several countries eagerly invited the Legionnaires to continue their European expedition that fall, including the governments of Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, and England. The Europeans had been pleasantly “surprised to find that these men, who had been pictured as a militaristic and Fascist organization” had spent the past month sharing an “abhorrence for war and a love for peace.”²³

The American Legion’s 1927 expedition to Paris helped rehabilitate the organization’s reputation for nativist vigilantism earned during the First Red Scare. The Legion’s commitment to preserving the memory of shared sacrifice and fraternal bonds from World War I became a powerful tool to refashion the Legion’s image as it became a pillar of American civil society in the 1930s. On the other hand, however, the Paris expedition did not seem to inspire an enduring relationship between the Legionnaires and their brothers in Europe. As fascism descended upon the continent, the American Legion, like much of American society in the 1930s, adopted an isolationist tone as European democracies faced down a new threat. 

American Legion and French Guard of Honor at Grave of the Unknown Soldier, Paris, 1927, stereograph, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

1. The American Legion lobbied the U.S. Congress for the passage of legislation creating the U.S. Veterans Bureau in 1921, which became the predecessor to the Veterans Administration (VA). Congress also passed legislation in 1921 approving the creation of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery, https://www.legion.org/about/organization/history.
2. Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 155-160; Jennifer D. Keene, World War I: The American Soldier Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 181-189; Brian McAllister Linn, Real Soldiering: The U.S. Army in the Aftermath of War:1815-1980 (The University Press of Kansas, 2023), 79-80.
3. Lisa McGirr, “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Global History,” The Journal of American History 93 (4) (2007): 1085-1115, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25094597.
4. “Letters from Readers,” The American Legion Weekly, August 22, 1919, 19, https://archive.legion.org/node/1357; Justus D. Doenecke, More Precious Than Peace: A New History of America in World War I (Notre Dame University Press, 2022), 95-116; Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, (Mariner, 2022), 255-258.
5. “The Alien Slacker,” The American Legion Weekly, August 08, 1919, 10, https://archive.legion.org/node/1359; Will Irwin, “How Red is America,” The American Legion Weekly, October 1919, 14-17, https://archive.legion.org/node/1731.
6. “Legion Posts are Keeping Faith: Meet Peace Problems with War Spirit,” The American Legion Weekly, August 01, 1919, 19 https://archive.legion.org/node/1360; Michael Innis-Jiminez, Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915-1940 (New York University Press, 2013), 145.
7. “Legion Posts are Keeping Faith: Meet Peace Problems with War Spirit,” The American Legion Weekly, August 01, 1919, 19 https://archive.legion.org/node/1360; Michael Innis-Jiminez, Steel Barrio: The Great Mexican Migration to South Chicago, 1915-1940 (New York University Press, 2013), 145.
8. American Civil Liberties Union, The Lawless American Legion (American Civil Liberties Union, 1921), University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Harry E. B. Ault papers, Accession No. 0213-001, Box 1/48, https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/pioneerlife/id/8802.
9. “Department Conventions,” The American Legion Weekly, October 13, 1921, 18,  https://archive.legion.org/node/1272.
10. Parkhurst Whitney, “A Great Clacking of Strange Tongues: The Story of the Foreign Language Press in America,” The American Legion Weekly, January 12, 1923, 5-6, 28, https://archive.legion.org/node/1181; Parkhurst Witney, “By Way of Moscow and Berlin: How Great a Part Does Pure Propaganda Play in the Make Up of our Foreign Language Press,” The American Legion Weekly, January 26, 1923, 9-10, 27, https://archive.legion.org/node/1159.
11. Civic Club, “Statement of the Civic Club on the American Legion and V. F. W.” Manuscript. New York (N.Y.), May 1932. University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries Special Collections and University Archives, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b062-i027.
12. Arthur Woods, “Practical Americanism,” The American Legion Weekly, June 11,1920, https://archive.legion.org/node/1344.
13. “The Legion: What it is Doing, What it Has Done,” The American Legion Weekly, February 1, 1919, 19, https://archive.legion.org/node/1103.
14. “Present and Past Leaders Indorse the Paris Convention Pilgrimage,” The American Legion Weekly, February 5, 1926, https://archive.legion.org/node/1025.
15. “Les Anginines Combattants Français Refusent de Patronner L’American Legion,” Le Populaire (Paris), Parti socialiste SFIO (France), August 24, 1927, Accessed via Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k8190672/f1.item.r=American%20Legion.zoom.
16. “Post History – Draft,” American Legion Willard Straight Post Records, 1944 – 1971, Box 1, The New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York, New York; Willard Straight American Legion Post, Resolution, 21 August 1917, American Legion, Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/k069br48w
17. “French Sympathy Swings to Legion,” The New York Times, August 26, 1927, 1.
18. Edwin James, “A ‘Second A.E.F.’ Carries Good-Will To France,” The New York Times, August 21, 1927.
19. “On to Paris,” The American Legion Weekly, May 1927, 47, 78, https://archive.legion.org/node/1674.
20. Bowman Elder, “Importance of the Second A.E.F. Paris Convention, Indianapolis, 1927.” Joseph L. Murray Second A.E.F. Paris Trip Collection (Coll. 2874, Box 1/10), Maine Historical Society. Maine Memory Network, artifact #102333. Accessed June 29, 2024.
21. “Hearty Welcome to the Legion Assured; Red Menace Wanes,” The New York Times, September 12, 1927.
22. Othon Guerlac, “The American Legion Conquers Paris,” Current History (1916-1940) 27, (2) (1927): 283–85.
23. Othon Guerlac, “The American Legion Conquers Paris,” Current History (1916-1940) 27, (2) (1927): 285.