The Loyalist Context: Veteran Warfare

The veterans of the United States’ military had always been one of those deciding factors in political conflict.  Most recently, the veterans of the Union and Confederate armies had organized into fraternal organizations.  The Grand Army of the Republic, the main organization for Union veterans, became a politically-influential voting bloc of the Republican Party and every Republican president from Ulysses S. Grant to William McKinley was a member.^[1] And like the G.A.R. before it, the American Legion, founded in Paris in February 1919 by, among others, Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., was ostensibly founded to provide a community for all servicemen active in the war, at home and abroad.^[2] The composition of its founding delegates and leaders were upper-class and professionally-employed.^[3] Preaching a doctrine of “Americanism,” the political character of the American Legion was unmistakably anti-radical.  During its St. Louis founding caucus on May 8, 1919, as part of the stateside response to the Paris Conference, the Legion asked “the United States Congress to pass a bill for immediately deporting every one of those Bolshevik or IWWs.”  By November of that year, it instructed local legionnaire posts to “organize immediately for the purpose of meeting the insidious propaganda of Bolshevism, IWWism, radicalism, and all other anti-Americanism.”  In a 1921 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, it noted that the Legion had engaged in “hundreds of mobbings, kidnappings, and intimidations as well as strikebreaking” and labeled it “the most active agency in intolerance and repression in the United States.”^[4] From its conception, the American Legion was an elite-driven project which, similar to the G.A.R. before it, directed veteran solidarity and veteran culture into a political orientation, which in the Legion’s case was anti-radicalism.

It is not surprising that organizing American veterans into a patriotic, anti-radical force would be desirable for the particular class of officers who founded it.  During the early months of 1919, they were many contemporary and recent examples of veterans being organized into socially-transformative and chaotic political projects which graced every newspaper.  The Bolshevik Revolution had successfully organized veterans into the Red Army to eventually win the Civil War against the Whites,^[5] while Germany was torn by conflicts between revolutionary Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils and counter-revolutionary Freikorps, themselves an organization of demobilized German soldiers.^[6] The Great War soldier possessed both a revolutionary and reactionary potential; to stop such developments from occurring, it made sense to quickly induct the military population into a thoroughly “patriotic” organization.

Distinct from the loyalist role of the soldier in the American Legion, the socialist marchers embodied what might be termed a Leninist-pacifist understanding of the “veteran.”  Recognizing the revolutionary potential on display in Russia and elsewhere, radical socialists like those in Cleveland construed veterans as a type of proletarian.  Specifically, soldiers were seen as victims of imperialist wars waged for capitalist interests.  As Lenin wrote, “the present-day imperialist bourgeoisie [are] deceiving the peoples by means of ‘national ideology’ and the term ‘defense of the fatherland’ in the present war between slave-owners for fortifying and strengthening slavery.”^[7]And as Ruthenberg said in the May 1917 speech: “This is not a war for democracy…This is not a war for freedom. … It is a war to secure the investments.”^[8] According to this viewpoint, the soldier was a proletarian mobilized by national bourgeoisie to resolve international disputes of capital, with ideas like “patriotism” or Wilson’s “war for democracy” as mere instrumental fictions for achieving that task.  Socialists must have felt that the economic deprivations soldiers would experience on their return stateside would radicalize or reconfirm their socialist commitments; the left-wing satire journal Good Morning said as much on May 15, 1919 (see Figure 4).

The May Day riots, composed of fighting between veterans of opposing political ideologies, were also a struggle over what role the veteran should play in America’s social and political transformation after the war.  American veterans carrying American and red flags in the march were attacked and beaten by other veterans adhering to a patriotism opposed to the latter flag.  The loyalists, quite notably, burnt those flags in Public Square before the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument.  The Cleveland Press later lionized those soldiers, printing their pictures in the newspaper.  It also credited a legless Canadian veteran James Stevens, also in town for the Victory Loan campaign, for having “caused [the] May Day Riots.”^[9]  After the tumult in Public Square, Sergeant Joseph Almacey, president of the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ League, invited “every loyal soldier and sailor, whether he served in the states or overseas, to join the league,” which they planned to make “a national organization to combat Bolshevism.”^[10] A nearly stereotypical portrayal of the figure of the loyalist soldier, however, appeared in the New York Times: “It was in this fight [during the Cleveland Riots] that John Keller, an ex-marine who lost an arm at Chateau-Thierry, swung his remaining arm with such effect that five radicals required treatment by ambulance surgeons.”^[11] The loyalist attempt to solidify this dichotomy between the military service and leftist politics was perhaps best exemplified by Lieutenant Herbert Bergen, who initiated the fight in Public Square by yelling to two socialist soldiers “Take off the uniform or throw away the flags!”^[12]

The May Day riots confirmed that the revolutionary potential of a demobilized mass draft army was successfully channeled into patriotic societies and organizations explicitly or implicitly formed to counter leftist tendencies in the United States.  While Good Morning and Ruthenberg may have believed unemployment and poverty would drive the veteran into following the “Down with Everything” line, preemptively-devised outlets like the American Legion with its welfare policies, as well as sheer patriotism and Red Scare fervor, likely explain the continued presence of most soldiers outside the picket-line.  Ironically, it was this same generation of veterans who a decade later organized the “Bonus Army,” under General Smedley Butler, to march on Washington and demand compensation from the national government in the midst of the Great Depression.^[13] As during the May Day riots, the U.S. army of the 1930’s and future fighters of World War II used tanks to disperse that band of veterans seeking economic rectification, albeit lacking the language of socialism.  The immediate post-war era in the United States featured a violent struggle for the political identity of the Great War veteran and the May Day riots bear witness both to that conflict and signal the victory of an anti-socialist veteran culture in the form of organizations like the American Legion.