{"id":38,"date":"2022-01-31T21:13:08","date_gmt":"2022-01-31T21:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/?post_type=chapter&p=38"},"modified":"2022-03-11T19:24:59","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T19:24:59","slug":"the-loyalist-context-veteran-warfare","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/chapter\/the-loyalist-context-veteran-warfare\/","title":{"rendered":"The Loyalist Context: Veteran Warfare"},"content":{"raw":"One of the pri<\/span>ncipal contradictions that manifests<\/span> itself in the Cleveland May Day riots is the politically-split identity of the American veteran.\u00a0 While some veterans marched with red flags in their hands, other veterans proclaimed that flag\u2019s unpatriotic character and violently tore it away.\u00a0 Of course, drafting a massive civilian army would accrue soldiers who might hold radical or conservative viewpoints.\u00a0 The fact that they, as veterans, chose to wear uniforms for the May Day eve<\/span>nt meant that their former role<\/span> <\/span>as a soldier<\/span> was central to the identity they wished to express during the parade, either inside or outside the parade column.\u00a0 In the May Day riots, two principal narratives of the \u201cveteran\u201d on display came into conflict: the conservative vision of the veteran as a patriotic representative and the radical vision of the veteran as an exceptional category of the exploited proletariat.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe veterans of the United States\u2019 military had always been one of those deciding factors in political conflict.\u00a0 Most recently, the veterans of the Union and Confederate armies had organized into fraternal organizations.\u00a0 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.[footnote]Scott Ainsworth, \u201cElectoral Strength and the Emergence of Group Influence in the Late 1800s,\u201d American Politics Research<\/em> 23, 3, July 1995, 323[\/footnote] 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.[footnote]Alec Campbell, \u201cThe Sociopolitical Origins of the American Legion,\u201d Theory and Society<\/em>, 39, 1 (2010): 10-11[\/footnote] The composition of its founding delegates and leaders were upper-class and professionally-employed.[footnote]Ibid., 12[\/footnote] Preaching a doctrine of \u201cAmericanism,\u201d the political character of the American Legion was unmistakably anti-radical.\u00a0 During its St. Louis founding caucus on May 8, 1919, as part of the stateside response to the Paris Conference, the Legion asked \u201cthe United States Congress to pass a bill for immediately deporting every one of those Bolshevik or IWWs.\u201d\u00a0 By November of that year, it instructed local legionnaire posts to \u201corganize immediately for the purpose of meeting the insidious propaganda of Bolshevism, IWWism, radicalism, and all other anti-Americanism.\u201d\u00a0 In a 1921 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, it noted that the Legion had engaged in \u201chundreds of mobbings, kidnappings, and intimidations as well as strikebreaking\u201d and labeled it \u201cthe most active agency in intolerance and repression in the United States.\u201d[footnote]Ibid., 17[\/footnote] 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\u2019s case was anti-radicalism.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nIt 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The Bolshevik Revolution had successfully organized veterans into the Red Army to eventually win the Civil War against the Whites,[footnote]Jan Palmowski, \u201cRed Army.\u201d in the online A Dictionary of Contemporary World History<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)[\/footnote] while Germany was torn by conflicts between revolutionary Workers\u2019 and Soldiers\u2019 Councils and counter-revolutionary Freikorps, themselves an organization of demobilized German soldiers.[footnote]Mary Fulbrook, A History of Germany 1918-2008: The Divided Nation<\/em> (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 24[\/footnote] 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 \u201cpatriotic\u201d organization.\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nDistinct 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 \u201cveteran.\u201d\u00a0 Recognizing the revolutionary potential on display in Russia and elsewhere, radical socialists like those in Cleveland construed veterans as a type of proletarian.\u00a0 Specifically, soldiers were seen as victims of imperialist wars waged for capitalist interests.\u00a0 As Lenin wrote, \u201cthe present-day imperialist bourgeoisie [are] deceiving the peoples by means of \u2018national ideology\u2019 and the term \u2018defense of the fatherland\u2019 in the present war between slave-owners for fortifying and strengthening slavery.\u201d[footnote]Vladimir Lenin, Socialism and War: The Attitude of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party Towards the War.<\/em> (1915), Chapter 1; can be found in the Volume 21 of the Lenin Collected Works, available online at marxists.org[\/footnote]And as Ruthenberg said in the May 1917 speech: \u201cThis is not a war for democracy\u2026This is not a war for freedom. ... It is a war to secure the investments.\u201d[footnote]Millett, \u201cCharles Ruthenberg,\u201d 199[\/footnote] According to this viewpoint, the soldier was a proletarian mobilized by national bourgeoisie to resolve international disputes of capital, with ideas like \u201cpatriotism\u201d or Wilson\u2019s \u201cwar for democracy\u201d as mere instrumental fictions for achieving that task.\u00a0 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).\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe 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\u2019s social and political transformation after the war.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The loyalists, quite notably, burnt those flags in Public Square before the Soldiers\u2019 and Sailors\u2019 Monument.\u00a0 The Cleveland Press<\/em> later lionized those soldiers, printing their pictures in the newspaper.\u00a0 It also credited a legless Canadian veteran James Stevens, also in town for the Victory Loan campaign, for having \u201ccaused [the] May Day Riots.\u201d[footnote]Cleveland Press<\/em>, May 2, 1919[\/footnote]\u00a0 After the tumult in Public Square, Sergeant Joseph Almacey, president of the Ohio Soldiers\u2019 and Sailors\u2019 League, invited \u201cevery loyal soldier and sailor, whether he served in the states or overseas, to join the league,\u201d which they planned to make \u201ca national organization to combat Bolshevism.\u201d[footnote]Ibid.[\/footnote]\u00a0A nearly stereotypical portrayal of the figure of the loyalist soldier, however, appeared in the New York Times<\/em>: \u201cIt 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.\u201d[footnote]The New York Times<\/em>, May 3, 1919.[\/footnote] 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 \u201cTake off the uniform or throw away the flags!\u201d[footnote]Cleveland Press<\/em>, May 2, 1919[\/footnote]\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n\r\nThe 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.\u00a0 While Good Morning<\/em> and Ruthenberg may have believed unemployment and poverty would drive the veteran into following the \u201cDown with Everything\u201d 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.\u00a0 Ironically, it was this same generation of veterans who a decade later organized the \u201cBonus Army,\u201d under General Smedley Butler, to march on Washington and demand compensation from the national government in the midst of the Great Depression.[footnote]Plain Dealer<\/em>, July 29, 1932.[\/footnote]\u00a0As during the May Day riots, the U.S. army of the 1930\u2019s and future fighters of World War II used tanks to disperse that band of veterans seeking economic rectification, albeit lacking the language of socialism.\u00a0 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.\r\n\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"

One of the pri<\/span>ncipal contradictions that manifests<\/span> itself in the Cleveland May Day riots is the politically-split identity of the American veteran.\u00a0 While some veterans marched with red flags in their hands, other veterans proclaimed that flag\u2019s unpatriotic character and violently tore it away.\u00a0 Of course, drafting a massive civilian army would accrue soldiers who might hold radical or conservative viewpoints.\u00a0 The fact that they, as veterans, chose to wear uniforms for the May Day eve<\/span>nt meant that their former role<\/span> <\/span>as a soldier<\/span> was central to the identity they wished to express during the parade, either inside or outside the parade column.\u00a0 In the May Day riots, two principal narratives of the \u201cveteran\u201d on display came into conflict: the conservative vision of the veteran as a patriotic representative and the radical vision of the veteran as an exceptional category of the exploited proletariat.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The veterans of the United States\u2019 military had always been one of those deciding factors in political conflict.\u00a0 Most recently, the veterans of the Union and Confederate armies had organized into fraternal organizations.\u00a0 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]<\/sup><\/a> 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]<\/sup><\/a> The composition of its founding delegates and leaders were upper-class and professionally-employed.[3]<\/sup><\/a> Preaching a doctrine of \u201cAmericanism,\u201d the political character of the American Legion was unmistakably anti-radical.\u00a0 During its St. Louis founding caucus on May 8, 1919, as part of the stateside response to the Paris Conference, the Legion asked \u201cthe United States Congress to pass a bill for immediately deporting every one of those Bolshevik or IWWs.\u201d\u00a0 By November of that year, it instructed local legionnaire posts to \u201corganize immediately for the purpose of meeting the insidious propaganda of Bolshevism, IWWism, radicalism, and all other anti-Americanism.\u201d\u00a0 In a 1921 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, it noted that the Legion had engaged in \u201chundreds of mobbings, kidnappings, and intimidations as well as strikebreaking\u201d and labeled it \u201cthe most active agency in intolerance and repression in the United States.\u201d[4]<\/sup><\/a> 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\u2019s case was anti-radicalism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The Bolshevik Revolution had successfully organized veterans into the Red Army to eventually win the Civil War against the Whites,[5]<\/sup><\/a> while Germany was torn by conflicts between revolutionary Workers\u2019 and Soldiers\u2019 Councils and counter-revolutionary Freikorps, themselves an organization of demobilized German soldiers.[6]<\/sup><\/a> 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 \u201cpatriotic\u201d organization.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

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 \u201cveteran.\u201d\u00a0 Recognizing the revolutionary potential on display in Russia and elsewhere, radical socialists like those in Cleveland construed veterans as a type of proletarian.\u00a0 Specifically, soldiers were seen as victims of imperialist wars waged for capitalist interests.\u00a0 As Lenin wrote, \u201cthe present-day imperialist bourgeoisie [are] deceiving the peoples by means of \u2018national ideology\u2019 and the term \u2018defense of the fatherland\u2019 in the present war between slave-owners for fortifying and strengthening slavery.\u201d[7]<\/sup><\/a>And as Ruthenberg said in the May 1917 speech: \u201cThis is not a war for democracy\u2026This is not a war for freedom. … It is a war to secure the investments.\u201d[8]<\/sup><\/a> According to this viewpoint, the soldier was a proletarian mobilized by national bourgeoisie to resolve international disputes of capital, with ideas like \u201cpatriotism\u201d or Wilson\u2019s \u201cwar for democracy\u201d as mere instrumental fictions for achieving that task.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

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\u2019s social and political transformation after the war.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The loyalists, quite notably, burnt those flags in Public Square before the Soldiers\u2019 and Sailors\u2019 Monument.\u00a0 The Cleveland Press<\/em> later lionized those soldiers, printing their pictures in the newspaper.\u00a0 It also credited a legless Canadian veteran James Stevens, also in town for the Victory Loan campaign, for having \u201ccaused [the] May Day Riots.\u201d[9]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 After the tumult in Public Square, Sergeant Joseph Almacey, president of the Ohio Soldiers\u2019 and Sailors\u2019 League, invited \u201cevery loyal soldier and sailor, whether he served in the states or overseas, to join the league,\u201d which they planned to make \u201ca national organization to combat Bolshevism.\u201d[10]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0A nearly stereotypical portrayal of the figure of the loyalist soldier, however, appeared in the New York Times<\/em>: \u201cIt 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.\u201d[11]<\/sup><\/a> 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 \u201cTake off the uniform or throw away the flags!\u201d[12]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

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.\u00a0 While Good Morning<\/em> and Ruthenberg may have believed unemployment and poverty would drive the veteran into following the \u201cDown with Everything\u201d 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.\u00a0 Ironically, it was this same generation of veterans who a decade later organized the \u201cBonus Army,\u201d under General Smedley Butler, to march on Washington and demand compensation from the national government in the midst of the Great Depression.[13]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0As during the May Day riots, the U.S. army of the 1930\u2019s and future fighters of World War II used tanks to disperse that band of veterans seeking economic rectification, albeit lacking the language of socialism.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

  1. Scott Ainsworth, \u201cElectoral Strength and the Emergence of Group Influence in the Late 1800s,\u201d American Politics Research<\/em> 23, 3, July 1995, 323 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  2. Alec Campbell, \u201cThe Sociopolitical Origins of the American Legion,\u201d Theory and Society<\/em>, 39, 1 (2010): 10-11 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  3. Ibid., 12 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  4. Ibid., 17 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  5. Jan Palmowski, \u201cRed Army.\u201d in the online A Dictionary of Contemporary World History<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) ↵<\/a><\/li>
  6. Mary Fulbrook, A History of Germany 1918-2008: The Divided Nation<\/em> (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 24 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  7. Vladimir Lenin, Socialism and War: The Attitude of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party Towards the War.<\/em> (1915), Chapter 1; can be found in the Volume 21 of the Lenin Collected Works, available online at marxists.org ↵<\/a><\/li>
  8. Millett, \u201cCharles Ruthenberg,\u201d 199 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  9. Cleveland Press<\/em>, May 2, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  10. Ibid. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  11. The New York Times<\/em>, May 3, 1919. ↵<\/a><\/li>
  12. Cleveland Press<\/em>, May 2, 1919 ↵<\/a><\/li>
  13. Plain Dealer<\/em>, July 29, 1932. ↵<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"author":3,"menu_order":2,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-38","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":3,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/38\/revisions\/147"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/3"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/38\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu\/until-victory-is-achieved\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}